My Beliefs- GDR

This is wrong.What we call morality is an emotion; it's an instinct an autonomous, neurological reaction. We have no control over it because it's not a cognitive event, it's more like a knee jerk.What we do in response to the feeling is a cognative decision.The best analagy that I can think of is holding you hand above a candle - the pain response is automatic and can't be ignored. But it is possible to hold your hand over the flame if you're motivated enough or you're a James Bond villain that feels no pain.There is a difference though - and it's one that you keep missing. Morality is not absolute like pain - it varies between societies and over time and most importantly it's learned.Children learn right from wrong - or not - from their parents. Abused children have a different sense of fairness - a basic element of morality - than 'normal' children. Sociopaths and psychopaths are missing the empathy emotion, their brains don't light up when scanned with fMRI like normal people but they have learned society's rules. They can act nomally because they know that otherwise they would be punished but they don't know or believe their actions to be wrong. (ie they lack the emotion but they have the cognitive capability.)You want morality to be cognitive - it isn't, it's emotive and autonomous and also - crucially developmental; it can be programmed and reprogrammed by society. It's true that our intellect can be used to overcome our emotions to some degree, but it's harder for some than others and it depends when and where you're born whether you need to or not. It's not the Tom given absolute you want it to be.

You;re welcome, though I'm puzzled by the fact that you straight-up ignored most of it.Of particular interest is the fact that your "rebuttal" of my point that cognition is solely a function of the brain and that thoughts are brain activity was to simply disregard it, and in later posts to pretend that those points do not exist.The relationship is exceedingly clear.I'm sure you've been drunk and/or affected by other psychoactive substances before. You may have noticed (or perhaps you simply weren;t paying attention) that the way you think alters with some chemical interactions. The is also the basis of essentially all of psychiatric medicine - a person can be made to [i]think differently[i] through chemical influences. If your core bing, your sense of identity and self, your moral core, your intuition, are all at least partially driven by a nonphysical component of an undefined type with an undefined relationship to the physical brain, medication and alcohol and other purely physical chemical influences should not change our cognitive processes. Yet they do. Your hypothesis is strongly contraindicated. So strongly that I would call it outright falsification.Brain damage is a similar case. Brain damage has been observed to completely change a person;s personality. Brain damage has been shown to cause memory loss, and the loss of other cognitive abilities. Not simply operator/machine interface problems; if the brain worked like a person driving a car with the driver representing a nonphysical element with the controls representing the brain and the body being the car, we would expect brain damage to cause steering problems - that is, brain damage should cause physical impairment of the ability to speak or walk and so on, but should not impair the ability to think, to understand words if they're being heard, to change where the driver wants to go as opposed to simply limiting his ability to steer. What we actually see is that cognitive function itself, from personality to memory to identity and more is all affected by brain damage.There is a certain rare disorder that will cause a man, upon seeing his mother, to accuse his mother of being an imposter. He will understand that the person looks identical to his mother, and is in fact an excellent duplication, but will insist nonetheless that she is a fake.The cause has been identified as damage to a specific part of the brain. If this part of the brain is damaged, a person can lose their ability to associate a specific sensory input with emotional weight. The effect is that the visual stimulus of his mother's image will no longer connect to the emotional reactions normally associated with his mother, and he will truly and honestly feel in his heart of hearts that the person in front of him is an imposter.Have her leave the room and simply call to him, and he'll easily identify her as his mother - the link between auditory stimulus and emotion is handled elsewhere and remains unimpaired.Note that such individuals are perfectly capable in terms of vision, cognition, and hearing. They are not deficient in any other way. They understand that the situation is extremely confusing, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot associate the person with their mother.We can see this damage in high-resolution MRI scans. We can compare it to normal brain scans, and we can see the broken connection. We can see the emotional import of a person in the activity in specific portions of the brain. We can see the processing of visual data, the linkage to memory, the linkage to emotion.If such functions were handled by a nonphysical component, something that does not reside in the brain, something that causes brain activity in such a way that appropriate correlations are observed, then we should not see a causal link in the physical realm.And yet we do.The hypothesis that some part of cognition, of human thought and identity, of morality or emotion or memory, is controlled by a nonphysical component is wholly falsified. If that hypothesis were true we would expect certain observations that we do not observe - if your disembodied soul can process language without any brain at all, you should be able to go right on talking and understanding language right up until death or the loss of all sensory input. Similarly, if that hypothesis were true we would expect not to observe things like personality changes or the inability to connect a person to your emotional core as effects of brain damage.You;re simply wrong, GDR. Your entire model of human cognition is factually incorrect, not as a matter of opinion, but as a simple matter of evidence. No matter how much you'd like the world to work that way, it simply doesn't. No amount of faith or belief or wishful thinking will make it so. And ignoring the evidence simply means that you're deluding yourself.

False. eg.

Except for the last sentence I agree with all of that. Absolutely our cultures influence our individual view of morality. However, just because a particular culture views slavery for example as moral, does not make it a moral action. Eventually, just as in the case of Alan Turing the culture changed and we would agree that the change was for the better as has been the case in all of the instances that you stated.How though do we judge the situation in those instances as having been improved? If there is no universal standard or plumb line to measure the changes against they are simply changes that reflect the view of our societies today. If that is the case then it would just be another change, neither for better or worse if 100 years from now our descendants decided that slavery actual is more efficient and is therefore moral.

So is there anything that doesn't qualify as evidence of Tom's existence? Because the human mind and human cultures are adaptable and varied and not not consistent in the way that toenails are. It's our brains that give us the our key survival ability. The ability to adapt. So you wouldn't expect such an adaptive organ to produce results as consistent as toenails would you? But why does that matter in terms of attributing Bigfoot or Tom as the cause of observable phenomena? I'm afraid that, like it or not, Tom is in the same class as ghosts and fairies and the Immaterial Pink Unicorn and Bigfoot and all those other fantasy figures when it comes to ascribing causes to observable phenomena. Right. Selfish genes can result in altruistic individuals. I'm not sure where you think I and Dawkins are differing on this? Because they promote the survival of the genes that we carry. This is true of morality. This is true of the human proclivity to ascribe agency. Can you explain exactly why you think evolution cannot produce morality given all the evidence that it has done exactly that?

As I said to Rahvin I agree that the human view of morality varies in cultures. One of the points I made at the beginning that leads me to believe that Tom is good is that over time civilization has become kinder and more just. But any time that we say something like that we have to ask kinder and more just as compared to what. In order to come to that conclusion there has to be some standard to be able to come to that conclusion.Your point is essentially the same as Rahvin’s so you might want to read that as well.

I apologise. I only have so much time to spend on this. I am having to answer a lot of posts so I try and pick out the most salient points and reply to them. Also many of the posts overlap and I wind up repeating the same points to different posters. If I miss something please just re-post it. Thanks. I’ve agreed previously that drugs or mental illness can and do drastically alter moral behaviour and other thought processes. I disagree that if what I say is correct that we shouldn’t expect that to happen. Drugs or brain damage affects all cognition. Certainly when we are making a decision as to how we will respond to a moral situation there is a thought process. All our thoughts are impaired including our ability to reason out our actions. My experience with alcohol was that it gave me a sense of so what, this isn’t smart or right but I’m going to do it anyway just because I want to. (It’s actually amazing I’m still alive. Being young and male is a bad combination. ) I don’t pretend to know how our consciousness functions in conjunction with our brain. I know that when I look out the window my brain interprets what I see. But what am I actually seeing? You can do a brain scan and observe impulses in the brain but where is the screen with the picture? Where is the physical image? I hear a bird singing but you can put a stethoscope up to my head and I imagine all you hear is blood pumping through. I can be calculating my bank balance in my head and once again you can see electrical pulses but you have no idea of what calculations I’m making. The activity that can be observed in the brain isn’t what my mind perceives. The activity in the brain makes my thoughts and perceptions possible but they aren’t the thought or perceptions themselves. So yes, when the brain malfunctions my thoughts and perceptions are skewed. In order to have something skewed you need to have the real thing in the first place.I don’t pretend to know how this all works but I think it is clear that our consciousness is dependent on the brain to function but at the same time is somehow distinct from the brain.

Yet you offer no evidence for that. You cherry pick your own pleasant Western situation as the general and infer that things are getting better for the world. You ignore what we say about recent world wars, starving masses in Africa, meglamanic dictators in North Korea, coflicts in the Middle East, terrorism and potential future global disasters and so on.But even in those places where things are getting better, it is only very recently - since the enlightenment in fact. And ALL the improvements that have occurred come from our successful creation of secular institutions - banks (sic), law, schools, hospitals, police, infrastructure (road, rail, power, drainage, networks), stable economics etc etc.In fact, the further a society moves away from its primitive beliefs in their various Toms and spend their energy creating fairer societies for themselves the better off they become. This is why ALL the parts of the world which you think are getting 'nicer' are also secularising quickly and belief in established religion is plummeting. Why? When we say today is warm or cold we are comparing it to yesterday or the day before. What I call a warm day is not the same as what a chap from Syria thinks is warm. Morality, as we've shown over and over, is relative and changeable.

There you go again - desperate to fill the holes of your (and our) ignorance with the metaphysical. If the activity of thinking, seeing, hearing, calculating, moral processing and so on can be seen in the brain how can it be distinct from the brain?Where else is it occurring?

You have quoted Robert Wright a couple of times. Here is a quote of his for you to consider:

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Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice -- all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis.

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Robert Wright in 'The Moral Animal'

You;re making the very simple mistake of attributing your current moral outlook to some universal constant (even if, as you would say, you're only reaching for it), when what's really happening is that you're simply comparing the moral standards of other cultures past and present to that of your culture. There is no logical reason to extrapolate a universal constant morality from what you observe.This is the result of a normal cognitive defect in human beings.Let's say you observe a man angrily kicking his desk. You might think "wow, that guy is an angry person." But the man himself just found out that a tree fell on his car and his insurance won;t pay for it, and anyone would feel frustrated at that.Within ourselves we can see the chain of events that make our own actions and moral judgements make sense - we have access to the context.But when we observe others, we don't see their entire personal history. We only see them in the moment.And so the flaw in human thinking is the tendency toward attributing the behavior of others to permanent, enduring traits, when those behaviors would be better explained by environmental circumstance.You are attributing the moral standards of various cultures to a permanent, enduring universal standard, when those moral standards are better explained by cultural differences alone.We see that morality is becoming more uniform because cultures are becoming less distinct over time with the advent of increased global communication. 200 years ago American culture wouldn't have much of an effect on Japan; yet now Japanese and American culture affect each other very strongly. Objectively, that's true. We would say that such a shift would be for the worse, but only because we're using our own moral standards as the basis for comparison.There is no objective standard for comparison.Certainly I would not be terribly surprised if humanity will someday face another moral challenge similar to slavery, as artificial intelligence eventually gains sapience. And certainly there are areas even today where slavery is practiced and nobody thinks twice.Remember, to those who burn witches, those of us who do not burn witches are terribly immoral and have shifted our morality for the worse. They expect that our protection of witches will lead to disaster, even as we judge that their killing of witches is a disaster.Who is right Who has the better morality?The correct answer is neither. But I know which society I would rather live in.

You;re setting up a contradiction, GDR. If cognition is a function of the brain, then physical changes in the brain should affect cognition. THis is what we observe. Conversely, if cognition is a function of some nonphysical element that simply causes brain activity as a side effect, then physical changes to the brain should not actually affect cognition. This is not what we see.You can't have it both ways, GDR. Either cognition, including emotions, thoughts, memories, and so on, are a function of the physical brain or they are not. The evidence to tell which world we live in is readily available, and you claim to accept it...and yet you irrationally hold to the contraindicated hypothesis. Yet you are claiming exactly that when you claim that there are nonphysical elements involved in cognition. If you don;t know, then you have to say "I don't know." You can't say "I don't know, but this is what it is." That's not a logically consistent chain of statements. Read this.

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UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

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Your brain is you. What your brain processes, you see. Your brain activity is your thoughts are you. That;s not at all clear. In fact the opposite is clear, and you're making an unfounded logical leap.GDR, you're behaving precisely as if you actually believe that cognition is a purely physical function opf the physical brain, but clinging to a contradictory belief anyway.I;ve brought up this comparison many times in other threads, but it's useful here as well. You;re telling me that there is a dragon in your garage. When I ask to see it, you tell me that it's invisible. When I ask to touch it, you tell me it's intangible. When I ask if I can hear it, you say it's silent. And so on - in every case, you can predict in advance the outcome of any experimental test, and it just so happens that you're predicting precisely the observations that would be made if your claim were completely false, and you're making rationalized excuses to retain your belief. This is "belief in belief," as I explained in an earlier post.You claim that there are nonphysical elements to cognition. Yet when I challenge that claim by pointing out the effects of brain damage and medication, you say "yes, when the brain is impaired cognition is impaired, but there are still other nonphysical elements distinct from the brain." You've tried to use the mystery of cognition as your excuse to retain belief, pointing out that we cannot yet read thoughts directly from the brain...and yet, as I've just shown to a degree we can do exactly that.In other responses I;ve brought up specific brain injuries that would seem to very strongly contraindicate any kind of nonphysical processing of emotions, such as with the case of the man who accuses his mother of being an imposter. You ignored that response.GDR, your position is utterly untenable. It's irrational. You;re not being logically consistent. You're violating Occam's Razor, you're playing God of the Gaps, and you're flat out ignoring evidence that utterly falsifies your hypothesis.

I’m not wedded to the argument, but my point was only that if one is going to justify Tom by asking the question why is there something instead of nothing then I guess everything is evidence of Tom. As far as I know the human brain hasn’t evolved much during the period of recorded history, (like the toenail), but socially and culturally we have adapted anyway. Our thoughts have changed considerably but our brains have remained constant. Don’t be too sure. BigfootBigfoot is of course material which was my only point. However I could also compare believing that conscious life exists because everything just happened to fall into place is like saying that my car just happened for the same reason. It is a similar argument. Just because the IPC doesn’t exist tells us nothing about whether or not Tom exists. The part where he says this:

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I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.
Critics have occasionally misunderstood The Selfish Gene to be advocating selfishness as a principle by which we should live! Others, perhaps because they read the book by title only or never made it past the first two pages, have thought that I was saying that, whether we like it or not, selfishness and other nasty ways are an inescapable part of our nature. This error is easy to fall into if you think, as many people unaccountably seem to, that genetic СdeterminationТ is for keeps Ч absolute and irreversible. In fact genes СdetermineТ behaviour only in a statistical sense (see also pp. 37-40). A good analogy is the widely conceded generalization that СA red sky at night is the shepherd's delightТ. It may be a statistical fact that a good red sunset portends a fine day on the morrow, but we would not bet a large sum on it. We know perfectly well that the weather is influenced in very complex ways by many factors. Any weather forecast is subject to error. It is a statistical forecast only. We don't see red sunsets as irrevocably determining fine weather the next day, and no more should we think of genes as irrevocably {268} determining anything. There is no reason why the influence of genes cannot easily be reversed by other influences. For a full discussion of Сgenetic determinismТ, and why misunderstandings have arisen, see chapter 2 of The Extended Phenotype, and my paper СSociobiology: The New Storm in a TeacupТ. I've even been accused of claiming that human beings are fundamentally all Chicago gangsters! But the essential point of my Chicago gangster analogy (p. 2) was, of course, that:
knowledge about the kind of world in which a man has prospered tells you something about that man. It had nothing to do with the particular qualities of Chicago gangsters. I could just as well have used the analogy of a man who had risen to the top of the Church of England, or been elected to the Athenaeum. In any case it was not people but genes that were the subject of my analogy.
I have discussed this, and other over-literal misunderstandings, in my paper СIn defence of selfish genesТ, from which the above quotation is taken.

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It is where he says things like There is no reason why the influence of genes cannot easily be reversed by other influences. Genes don’t have the final say. I just suggest that you are placing way too much emphasis on our genealogy on not enough on other factors that form our moral codes. Morality can work against the survival of the genes we carry. Morality often calls for us to sacrifice for the good of another whom is part of a very different gene pool.Maybe the fact that there is the human proclivity to ascribe agency is an indication that there actually is agency. Where has evolution produced morality? I agree that constant socialization through cultural genes if you like has caused morality to evolve, but would we be able to notice any difference between a 5000 year old brain and one today?

So you've answered you own question. What has that got to do with anything? Our societies have evolved - that's the difference between then and now; our knowledge has increased along with our technology which has allowed us to have easier, longer lives. It's purely developmental progress.The stuff you're struggling with - the strong emotions of morality - probably evolved millions of year earlier and probably only started to make large leaps when language developed.

I may have picked my own pleasant western situation but that takes in a pretty reasonable chunk of the planet. However just compare modern western societies to the Roman societies less than 2000 years ago that saw crucifixion as the normal way to treat political enemies and saw human sacrifice as entertainment. That was the most advanced society at the time.Yes we have the enlightenment. Yes we have institutions. I have you noticed that the enlightenment took hold in countries with a Judaeo-Christian heritage with the same going for the institutions.I see your last point as not being germane and we can probably both find statistics that will give varying results but here are a couple on interesting articles on the New Atheists’ form the UK.Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus | Glenn Greenwald | The Guardianhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/.../8885481/after-the-new-atheismI’m not suggesting that these articles make my case but they do show how atheism itself is evolving in the same way that established religions evolve. Climates have all sorts of standards including various scales. The collective morality of societies and the individuals in them varies but morality itself is a constant and the Golden Rule is as close as we are likely to get in expressing it.