Seasons

Clerk, If you define religion as a means of transforming the mundane into the sacred, then atheism is not a religion. If you define it as a opinion as to the existence or non existence of god(s) it might be. Theology, like all claims of the supernatural and like evil, relies on faith or some other way of knowing and cannot be tested scientifically in the same way physics can. This distinction is very important.

What I mean is that atheism requires a leap of faith just as much as theism does. You can't prove or disprove God's existence. (I know, "you can't prove a negative." But you can't.) I don't mean to say that atheists all get together Tuesdays and worship nothing.

Why do I think Theology and Physics go together? Because once you get back to the Big Bang or whatever we're onto now (okay, I'm a Medievalist, not a Physicist), there's still the question of where did that stuff (energy and/or matter) come from? In any proof, there always has to be a given to start with, and if you keep going back and back and back, eventually you hit a wall. You have to assume one thing or another. In other words, you have to have faith. The two Physicists I actually know agree. And the younger of the two was raised by two very good, sweet and intelligent atheists. But he's doing post doc work at Los Alamos and RTP* and has independently come down to God -- not a religious man per se, but a theist nonetheless.

*In NC, Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill

Any theists out there, if you want to channel some energy (as in pray, I guess) that my partner Kaye gets through a five-hour cancer surgery today with flying colors, I would be grateful. Duke has done studies suggesting that prayer helps even when the person doesn't know they're being prayed for and the pray-er doesn't know the pray-ee. So I'm rambling now before we head out to the hospital because I'm nervous as hell.

My prayers will be with you both.

Bev:

Well, I'm sure that is true 'for you'. But 'for me', starfish have five legs and it is wrong to torture babies just for fun.

Bev:

You wrote:

If we are asking a question about ethics, it is impossible to escape the subjective nature of morality at the base of any postulate asserted.


You have said this a number of times, but can you present any evidence in favor of it?
You have argued from the diversity of ethical opinions, but if that argument were any good, it would also show that science is purely subjective, since people have had various different opinions on scientific questions. For example, Newton thought that light was a stream of particles, while Huyghens thought it was a wave.

Do you have any other evidence in favor of the view that ethics is irreducibly subjective, or is it just a matter of faith with you?

Interzone:

I think your claim that evil is an emergent property is very profound, and in fact true.

When people look at fundamental Physics, they see reference to charge, mass, momentum, and various quantum numbers such as strangeness, but they don't see any reference to good or evil. They conclude that according to Physics, there is no such thing. Fallacy!

Clerk, I am very sorry to hear that. My thoughts are with you and I hope all works out well for both of you.

Best wishes, the Clerk!

At any rate, if moral rightness were a physical property (which it is), then Bev's dualism would be untenable.

I will therefore argue that moral rightness is a physical property. As a first step, I will argue that goodness and badness are physical properties. Then I will define moral obligation in terms of goodness and badness.

Let us imagine a bunch of very intelligent and knowledgable alien scientists. They don't happen to be familiar with Earth, but they have a profound understanding of the natural sciences, including an understanding of zoology on various planets quite similar to Earth.

One day someone sends them a terrestrial mouse, preserved in a stasis field so that they can study it. They study it in great detail, right down to the atomic level. They infer that it is a foraging animal from a certain type of climate and ecosystem. In fact, IMHO, they would be able to explain the function of its various organs, and infer the general properties of the biosphere from which it came.

Bev writes:

The starfish is the same whether we say it has five legs or many legs. The starfish doesn't care.

Exactly! That's precisely why the number of legs on a starfish is an objective fact -- it doesn't depend in any way upon how people describe the starfish, or on whether people describe it at all. Long before there were any humans at all, starfish had 5 legs. They didn't have to wait until we appeared, to have 5 legs! If we all adopted that Brazilian language, starfish would still have 5 legs, just as they do now. We would have to use long drawn-out expressions to say so, but that would make no difference to the starfish. If we all died, starfish would still have 5 legs.

Language does not create or transform the world (except in special cases). You may find a tribe that believes that the world is flat, but it's still round. you may find a million tribes who can't count the number of legs on a starfish, but as you say, the starfish don't care. If every person on Earth thought that starfish had 17 legs, they would still have 5 legs.

Do you think that the poor creatures had no definite number of legs until human beings appeared?

I think that if one of those Brazilians finds a starfish, and places his thumb on one leg, and places the finger adjacent to his thumb on another leg, and so on, until all his fingers are so engaged, he will find that each finger is on exactly one distinct leg, and that there are no legs left over. I'm trying to understand what you think would happen.

Is it a count against the truth of Relativity Theory that very few people understand it, or that it contradicts the fundamental intuitions of most people about space and time? I don't think so.

Irina,

I'll go over it one more time before we move on. I am not sure how many times I can say there is a difference between abstract concepts that we created and physcical nature.

"You have said this a number of times, but can you present any evidence in favor of it?
You have argued from the diversity of ethical opinions,"

My evidence evil is an abstract concept and does not exist in the physical world. It is merely a quality we attribute to certain things in the physical world. If you are going to assert it does exist physically or as a property of nature, the burden is on you to show evidence. I don't mean give me examples of things you think are evil, I mean evidence as to why your particular definition of evil is the one that is true.

Several times I have asked you to provide a way we can generate hypothesis about evil and test it's truth or find for a null hypothesis. YOu have not done so. Why not?

"You have argued from the diversity of ethical opinions,"

That's only part of my argument. The main idea is that evil is an abstract concept, and a poorly defined one at that. Diversity of opinions just shows there is no evidential basis for showing one definition of evil is more accurate than the next, nor any way or scientifically choosing between the competing ideas of what is evil. If you have a scientific way of choosing one definition and testing it in a way where it could be shown to be false, please do let me know.

In my world starfish have 5 legs too. It's just that we created counting and numbers and 5. The starfish is the starfish and starfish shaped regardless. It's just that the human mind can not bring all the stimulus into conscious awareness with filtering and reassembling it at the subconscious level, recreating reality, categorizing it, quantifying, abstracting, and making conclusions and generalizations. It's what our brains do. By the time it hits our awareness (our conscious mind) quite a lot of work has gone on under the hood. There is a difference between our perceptions, our created conscious mental tools such as language and math, our abstract concepts such as evil, justice and honor, and the physical world.

I can give you evidence that the human nervous system filters stimulus and recreates the outer world as you perceive it. Three examples off the top of my head are blind spots, filtering out background noise, and conformity.There are more but 3 will take me long enough to explain. Just keep in mind there is a difference between saying reality is perceived and human s can never totally escape subjectivity and saying there is no reality and all things are equally true. You have a habit of misstating my position on that matter.

Blinds pots are cause by the way mammalian eyes work. There is an optic nerve at the back of the eye that connect it to our brains. This blocks the photo receptors at the back of our retinas. You can test for your own blind spot and see evidence of it by following the directions here: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chvision.html. When both eyes our open, the brain can cover up the blind spots by taking information from both eyes and reassembling it. If we saw only the stimulus actually received by our eyes and carried through the optic nerves "as is" we would have all sorts of dots and little floaty bits in our vision. Our brain essentially "Photoshops" what we see for us before we see it. "Projections from the retina to the brain generate retinotopic maps...Defined groups of neurons in the primary visual cortex process different aspects of visual information. This can lead to all sorts of interesting optical illusions but I won't paste those urls here. The fact is what you think you see is limited by your abilty to pick up stimulus, processed and essentially resembled so it looks whole. Without even getting to abstract thought and higher cognition, your perception is biased and your view necessarily subjective. I will have to give my next two bits of evidence in another post as RL calls now.

Several attributes of visual information go to the primary visual cortex: motion, form or shape, and color. These aspects of the visual scene travel to different modules or groups of cortical cells (some are given names such as "columns" or "blobs.") In order for us to perceive and interpret these kinds of visual information, other brain areas beyond the primary visual cortex must process the signals and put the visual scene back together." http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/eyetr.html

Bev writes:

I am not sure how many times I can say there is a difference between abstract concepts that we created and physcical nature.

But that's just my point. I don't want you to say the same thing again. I want you to give evidence for what you said.

I will add, though, that I consider our concepts to be part of physical nature.

I have never disagreed that, e.g., a concept of a wombat is not a wombat. Most concepts are different from the objects they refer to or describe. But I can't see how this commits one to subjectivism. On the contrary, it fits in smoothly with the idea that most of reality si what it is quite independently of what we think about it.