Hi GDR,
You have what I'd
like to call extraordinary misconceptions about the nature of evidence and the difference between fact and opinion. Unfortunately your misconceptions are entirely ordinary.
By your definition then every opinion that can’t be supported scientifically is made up.
"Supported scientifically" is a semantic trap. It means different things to different people, and so additional precision is required. "Opinion" is similar. So let's detail the nature of "belief," "opinion," "fact," and "evidence," with as much brevity as I can muster.
We are faced with uncertainty every day. No person is omniscient, and even the species as a whole is far from all-knowing. Yet we still create models of the world we observe in our heads, and we realize that not all uncertainties are equivalent. There are degrees of confidence with which we associate our internal models of reality.
In some cases, we have extremely high confidence in part of the model. For instance, I am extremely confident that the sky is blue. When our confidence approaches actual certainty (though we can never actually reach certainty), closely enough to be identical for all
practical considerations, we identify that model as a "fact." It is a fact that the sky is blue.
In other cases we have more uncertainty. We might have some good supporting evidence, but we aren't sufficiently close to certainty to rule out some similar but alternative hypotheses. We wouldn't call those parts of the model "facts." Still, there are infinite degrees of certainty in this region; in any given situation we could present examples where we are less or more certain of one idea than another.
In yet other cases we have no supporting evidnece because the question is itself not testable by any means. I don;t simply mean that information is not available, I mean that it would be logically impossible to increase or decrease our certainty on the matter even if we attained omniscience. For example, if I say that "blue is better than red," this is not a testable claim. It's not even much of a claim at all - I've simply stated some
personal preference for blue over red. Even an omniscient being would ony be able to confirm that yes, I prefer blue over red; there could never be any actual confirmation that blue really is
better than red, not unless the statement is modified to include a specific purpose for which the performance of two colors could be compared (for example, blue really
is better than red when it comes to writing data onto optical media, because its smaller wavelength allows for increased data density; this is why blue-ray discs contain more information than DVDs).
In all cases we have multiple competing hypotheses, alternative models by which the real would could actually work. The sky
could be purple, or there could be no sky at all. Yet we are more confident in the accuracy of some models than others. Why?
The answer is "evidence." We don't usually think about it, of course. But evidence is the determining factor for
rational, logically consistent determination of which hypotheses should be associated with what degree of confidence. Evidence is any observation which adjusts the likelihood that one or more hypotheses accurately reflect the real world. My consistent observation that the cloudless daytime sky is blue, combined with independent verification from others that they too consistently observe that the daytime cloudless sky is blue leads me to attach extremely high confidence that the sky really is blue.
The
false answer is "faith." Faith is what we call attaching confidence to a hypothesis that is not justified by any evidence. A non sequitur, like your reasoning that moral behavior is strong evidence for a nonphysical component of people, is not
necessarily an example of faith, but it's one of the consequences of faith. You have faith that there is a nonphysical component to the human self, and so you draw unfounded conclusions based on that unfounded premise.
Each of us has a set of "opinions," and this word has different meanings depending on context. In one context, the degree of confidence I attach to a hypothesis is my "opinion." My belief that the sky is blue is indeed my "opinion" on the matter of the sky's color. This opinion is not unfounded - it's based on evidence. One person's opinion in this context may be more or less valid than another person's opinion, depending on the evidence available to each person and their relative abilities to consistently update their beliefs based on new evidence. My opinion that the sky is blue is significantly more valid than the opinion of someone who believes the sky is red with yellow and green polkadots.
But another context for "opinion" is that of the unprovable non-assertion, the statement of utterly subjective preference as in the "blue is better than red" example above. In this case, all opinions are equally valid - personal preference is personal preference and has nothing to do with statements about the nature of the real world.
Your belief in Tom is not a valid opinion, GDR. You have the absolute right to hold it, of course, but you have a
preference, not a hypothesis supported by observational evidence. All of the evidence you've proposed so far is either not evidence at all (it doesn't actually adjust the probability of any of the related hypotheses one way or the other), or it actually turns out upon even cursory examination that the evidence
weakens the probability of your Tom hypothesis, even as you claim that your belief is strengthened.
And let us not forget Occam's Razor, the Principle of Parsimony. All things being equal (that is, in the absence of evidence that shifts the probabilities one way or the other), the simplest explanation, the equation with the
fewest terms, is to be preferred. If there is no evidence suggesting that there is actually an intangible invisible silent dragon in my garage, then there is likely
not such a dragon, even in the absence of evidence
against its existence.
That would make is like saying that Einstein made up relativity until the time he could prove is scientifically. He made it up and was ultimately proven to be correct.
Absolutely inaccurate. Einsteins theory was based upon mathematical extrapolation of observational evidence. He didn't come up with it out of whole cloth. It had a greater-than-50% probability of being accurate before we had the ability to test it so rigorously.
Certainly all of our thoughts including morality cause brain activity. The brain activity is a product of the thought. It isn’t the thought or idea itself. It’s like a computer. There has to be an entry made into the computer and then we can observe the resultant activity within the computer.
Again inaccurate. Thoughts are brain activity. You cannot separate the two. When the brain is damaged, thoughts are altered. If thoughts caused brain activity, then thoughts would not be affected by brain damage or medication or inebriation. Since they are, we know that the causal diagram flows in the opposite direction - brain activity causes thoughts, and brain activity is subject to brain damage and chemical influences.
You also don't understand computers very well. Computers pass input and output between each other all the time, literally faster than you can think, without human interaction. Some
programs specifically wait for user input; others just run and respond to non-human stimuli. And the input and output
are both computer activity. Every time you strike a key you're connecting circuits. The representations on the screen of this text
are simply transistors in on/off states. The behavior of this webserver
is the activity in its memory and processor.
That is your opinion. The one you made up.
I'd like to direct you back to Occam's Razor. The null hypothesis is never "made up." It's the most likely hypothesis given no evidence to shift it. If I have a hundred absolutely unevidenced claims, the most likely hypothesis is that none of those claims is accurate. It's really that simple.
We certainly see animals co-operating for the benefit of themselves and their tribe and I do agree that animals do have some degree of morality. However, morality isn’t even something that we can directly observe in either humans or animals. Morality is a heart thing.
This is both semantically
and objectively wrong. For the semantic bit, the heart performs no computation; it doesn't think. It's a pump. One might as well say that driving is an engine thing, or more precisely a fuel-pump thing.
But more objectively, morality is absolutely brain-based. We can detect emotions like love using MRI imaging. We can identify the electrochemical processes, we can watch living brains feel empathy, make decisions, recall memories, etc. Brain imaging has progressed to the point where we can watch live brains as they form new connections on the cellular level, that of a single neuron.
Every decision you make is a thought. Every thought you have is an electrochemical action in your brain. Every moral choice you make is a decision. If a=b and a=c, then b=c. Morality is a brain thing. We're not conscious of all of our moral weights, we tend to flinch away from uncomfortable possible future decisions until the moment of required action, and in the moment we often make snap judgements without thinking them through...but it's all still in the brain. Nowhere else.
You claim that there is a nonphysical element guiding the process, but you cannot show that such an element is required, what form it would take, how or why it would affect moral action, or any related question. You have no idea how you know this thing you think you know, you just think that it's good to believe it, and so you do, regardless of evidence - whether that be a lack of evidence or indeed even evidence to the contrary.
We can observe actions that appear to be moral but we really don’t know what the motivation was for those actions. If it is simply something done because of an advantage to the individual or the tribe then it isn’t really a moral response. Morality is something done in which there is an evolutionary disadvantage for the individual or the tribe.
You're shifting the goalposts, and I have no confidence that you understand morality, cognition, or evolution in any but the most abstract and flimsy sense.
We cannot know the actual motivation for the actions of another (someday we may, as brain imaging continues to improve...), and therefore by your standard we can never know whether the actions of anyone other than ourselves are actually moral. And yet you feel perfectly comfortable making moral judgements about actions other than your own - unless you'd say that you cannot judge the morality of the actions of Hitler because you cannot possibly know his true motivations.
Therefore it is impossible for you to know the thing you claim to know. This means you should question that belief, as it is likely wrong.
The morality of an act is not inherent in its motivation, but rather its effects. If I sacrifice one man to save a dozen, I have performed a moral act, even if I really didn't like the guy I sacrificed anyway. If I help a homeless man get a job and a home and become a productive member of society, it doesn't matter whether my real motivation was just to not have to deal with him begging every time I walked past him to work - I've still performed a morally praiseworthy act.
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995...
"Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends." - Gandalf, J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord Of the Rings
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