flog

I found an interesting little post in the most unlikely of places, the ISCA Philosophy forum. I don't remember the instigating posts, but Pan Pangenitor launched into a mini-manifesto about his view on morality. The thing that caught my attention the most was how the inherent morality of acts is maintained within a relativist framework by refusing to classify categories of experience as inherently good/bad, but rather by focusing on the level of each individual experience.

Genuine pain creates measurable changes in the physical world, not just the

mind, so the answer to at least some of those questions is "yes, with the right

equipment."



The morality thread has given me a giggle. (Objectify ME! Oh please oh please

oh please!!)



I agree with Voyager that humans are also objects/things.  Revise my previous

statements with the understanding that the problem is treating sentient beings

as _nothing more than_ things/objects, when in fact they are also subjects,

ends-in-themselves capable of suffering.  Minds are a very special type of

thing, a type of thing that has inherent value and whose ownership cannot be

transferred, among other unique properties.



As for the Borg!  Gag me with a Klingon. (Harder! YES!) To the best of my

ability to speculate on the subject, I don't think that an intelligent

non-biological culture-node with free will is going to resemble the Borg in any

sense, so I'm pretty sure you're SOL on the eyepiece, EQ.  Too bad, too, they

are stylish.



If minds are designed as weapons, of course they will be weapons. Such a

purpose-created being has far less free will than even a hormone-crazed,

gene-enslaved human does.  I am proposing the creation of beings with _more_

free will, children of humanity brought into existence as fellow

ends-in-themselves, but unaffected by an endocrine system or any other

underlying physical structure designed to further the interests of unconscious

genes.



I believe that a sufficiently intelligent enculturated being unencumbered by

biological needs, whose self-interest follows from purely intellectual grounds,

given access to enough information, will intellectually and rigorously arrive

at moral conclusions that resemble those of humans.  I believe those

conclusions will be especially similar to those of the best examples of

humanity, the "spiritual geniuses" who have demonstrated a willingness to die

rather than kill, to suffer themselves rather than inflict suffering on an

unconsenting other.  We can observe that this set of moral-philosophical

conclusions recurs in apparently dissimilar social contexts throughout recorded

human history.  I believe that these people are independently recognizing

objectively measurable facts about cultural systems, and that one of the ways

that they differ from their peers is that they are approaching human problems

in terms of long-term individual and cultural gain vs. short-term individual

gain. Humans seem to arrive at these conclusions intuitively more than

rationally.  To arrive there intellectually, most likely whole new branches of

sociology and psychology and economics will be invented by our children.  We

may make some progress in understanding how morality ultimately serves our

self-interest from discussions of cooperation vs. competition in games theory

terms.



Obviously if I could demonstrate this rigorously myself I would have done so

and collected my Nobel Peace Prize by now.  I imagine the chain of reasoning

goes something like this, in combination with quantitative analysis to support

the assertions: "Greed causes individuals to act as in ways that sometimes

provides short-term benefit to themselves but, successful or not, tend to

produce harm to many other beings out of all proportion to the self-benefit.

If many beings in the culture behave in a greedy fashion, I will suffer;

therefore, I must cooperate with everyone else and trust in them not to be

greedy so that we can all make more progress toward our individual goals than

we would have if we greedily grasp at short-term gains."



Of course, some human will be blinded by the potential self-benefit of

coveting... and then taking... their neighbor's property.  That brings me back

to my original point, which is that whatever moral conclusions a post-genetic

culture-node arrived at (we're going to have to trust them to think for

themselves, aren't we?), they'd have much less trouble living according to

those conclusions.  That's the REALLY big moral advance our culture can

realize, to the benefit of all.  Humans already agree amongst themselves, more

often than not, about what constitutes moral right and wrong.  This is true

even of the foul Relativists, those wretched Nazified Satan-worshipping

litter-spreading nihilists whom any right-thinking Solid Citizen would

immediately report to the Brain Police for reconditioning, to cure the disease

which causes them to see the world from more than one perspective at once.  But

I digress.



A major reason we human beings aren't capable of living in anarchy (or close to

it) without generating massive amounts of suffering is that even though human

beings are capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong they

still do things that they know are wrong.  The reasons vary, but fear and greed

and self-deception and crude conceptions of self-interest are major culprits.

We can live anarchically to the extent that our behavior and intentions are

moral.  (Corollary: morality requires that our records be complete and

accurate.  I'm not going to try to explain that right now.)



If I'm wrong, if human notions of high morality do not reflect facts about

cultural systems, then obedience to our culture's morality is not just

arbitrary but foolish!!  In that case, moral behavior as we've learned it only

limits pursuit of long- and short-term self-interest, offering no benefit in

return, and true morality means every single one of us should be getting away

with whatever we can get away with.  In that case say goodbye to everything

we've ever built because cooperative culture cannot sustain itself, despotism

is the optimal form of government, sociopathy is the optimal mental state (M.

Gandhi = insane, T. Bundy = sane), and slavery or slaveholding (submission or

domination) are the natural lot of all culture-nodes.  If the course our moral

philosophy has taken is another artifact of the human inability to clearly

examine the world, another genetically induced warping of perception instead of

the remedy for our warped perceptions, then our children (whatever their

nature) will inevitably war until extermination.  We will never achieve wisdom

because there is no such thing as wisdom, only strength and will-to-power.



I reject that vision of the world and of morality for a number of reasons,

aesthetics not least of them.  The universe may be nihilistic, but we don't

have to be stupid assholes about it.  We have great freedom in defining the

boundaries of our shared reality and, whether or not there is an "absolute"

morality, different behaviors lead to different consequences.  We should take a

more direct and decisive approach to what consequences we wish to subject

ourselves to as a culture.



All selves are ends-in-themselves.  Self-interest requires consideration of the

interests of all beings as ends in themselves.  I would love to be able to

prove it with the rigor of a games-theoretician examining a game of

tic-tac-toe, but I've already said that I don't think I'll be getting my Nobel

Prize  today.  Like most people I learned about morality from my culture and

from my own intuition, and only afterward went back and tried to reason it out.



I'll try to describe how I arrive intellectually at what I consider to be

correct moral conclusions, starting with three things as given:

        - Some experiences are positive or negative without reference to

anything outside the individual mind.  We could say that they're inherently

positive or negative.  This is reasonably self-evident, although we could

quibble over terminology.  Many (but not all) experiences are bundled with

innate value (in addition to relational, external value) as one of their

properties.  If you don't percieve that, then I'm not sure what I could say to

convince you that my experiences are like that but I am happy (<-- inherently

positive) that mine are that way.

        - Morality is what we call the guiding system for sentient beings to

interact with one another so that their long term self-interests are best

served.

        - Sanity means being aware of all mental processes.  In other words, to

be completely sane means having no unconscious or subconscious mind, no hidden

mental processes.  The entire mind works in harmony, or internal conflicts are

out in the open to be analyzed at least.  (I imagine Jung would approve of my

definition.)



Physical bodies may be mere objects, but minds are a very special type of thing

that transcends thingness, a phenomenon that arises from matter but is not

matter.  New rules apply at this meta-material level.  All value is assigned by

minds, so only mental phenomena have innate value. Only minds are

ends-in-themselves.  Experience seems to be the fundamental constituent of

mind.  I describe inherently negative or bad experiences as suffering, which is

itself not a simple idea, but we can recognize it when it happens to us.  A

sane being does not intentionally cause itself to suffer because (unavoidably,

almost circularly) it recognizes the inherent badness of suffering.  Pain is

inherently painful, you might say. When I accidentally hit my thumb with a

hammer, I suffer (to some degree).



Okay, massive oversimplification.  Pain is not always suffering, as the tough

or kinky may already be aware, but hopefully we can accept the basic premise

and the illustration provided without losing ourselves down that rathole.  It

is not possible to enjoy suffering, because then it ceases to be suffering.

When I say that some experiences are inherently negative I'm referring to

specific instantiations of experience, and not categories of experience.  The

point is, you know when you're suffering and you have a pretty good idea what

it means for other beings to suffer, as well as what external events tend to

cause people to suffer.



Morality exists in the relations between minds.  (Morality and culture are

tightly entwined, or perhaps just fall into the same category of thing.  They

come into existence under the same conditions and become irrelevant under the

same conditions.) Intelligent beings are capable of recognizing the capacity of

other beings to suffer, and sane beings may not intentionally cause themselves

to be deceived.  Since suffering is inherently bad, a moral being may not

choose to act in a way that is likely to cause suffering (except, perhaps, to

avert greater suffering - opinions vary), nor may a sane being pretend for its

own convenience that other beings do not suffer.