For people who are convinced we are meat-machines: why is killing bad?

[marshmallow]

RE: OP

Because I have a conscience in my meat head.

[Polerius]

@Walton Firm

Your thoughts and feelings can be explained in terms of chemicals and electrical signals, but that doesn’t mean they are not real.

What do you mean by “real”?

Anyway, if we accept that God exists and that people have immortal souls, why does that suddenly make murder wrong if it otherwise isn’t? After all, a human body is “just” the meat vehicle that a soul inhabits for a while, right?

Don’t worry, I have a lot of questions for people who are 100% convinced that there is a God and we have an immortal soul, but that’s the topic of another debate

But briefly, it seems to me that if you are 100% convinced about the immortal soul, you can at least think “this immortal soul exists in another plane of existence about which I know nothing about, and so I have no idea how souls are impacted by pain and death of their mortal shells, so I’d better not risk it.”

I’m not saying this is what they say, but in theory, it is at least one possible response.

Just because something can be broken up into parts, that does not mean that it does not exist or that it is just an illusion. Would you say that cars do not really exist because they can be broken down into engine, transmission, wheels etc?

I’m not an expert on this subject, but I don’t think it is simply related to “breaking the self into parts”. Here is a quote from “Being No One : The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity” by Thomas Metzinger :

According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a “transparent self-model.” In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger’s central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.

Axiom is pretty close to the truth, I guess. Upbringing, social conditioning and evolutionary instincts certainly play a part. That doesn’t make it irrational. If you keep asking “why?” long enough, you’ll always run into axioms. As long as following those axioms leads to a society that is pleasant to live in, it is rational to follow them.

This makes sense, at least concerning how we ought to behave within society.

But it doesn’t explain why we should feel bad about someone dying, if we believe there is no soul and we look at it from a strictly rational point of view.

(Again, if someone believes that there is a soul, it is still hard to see why they should feel bad about someone dying, but, as I mentioned above, that is not the subject of this debate)

[Polerius]

@mstay

RE: OP

Because I have a conscience in my meat head.

1. What is “conscience”?
2. So what?

[cosmosdan]

@uglybeech

With the exception of the braindead, they do, except for the one where I said “likely”

I’m not so sure.

@uglybeech

We’re not mere meat machines. We’re unbelievably complex, subtle, thinking, feeling, perceiving, creating beings. We are products of billions of years of evolution and decades of nurturing, teaching and training from parents, friends, family and community, and inheritors of the accumulated culture and understanding of many millenia of human history. We are each utterly unique in our thoughts, experiences, and gifts.

so far so good

And each of us is staggeringly lucky to be here and has only a short window of time to offer our contributions, and enjoy and understand ourselves and our universe.

Yet some have considerably less time than others. A lifetime is short enough but for many the opportunity to ebjoy and understand or make a contribution is extremly limited.

Each of us is deeply enmeshed in a wide network of friends, family, and social connections and is utterly irreplacable in that role.

No each of us is not. Many, most, almost all, perhaps, but a smal percentage which would still be a significant number of people, don’t have this.

The loss of any one of us will likely cause grief and despair in at least a few others (perhaps many) and will have a ripple effect in our community. We are all that - and when we are gone, we will never return.

Especially if we ride on the MTA, or so I’ve heard.

[Blalron]

@Polerius

1. What is “conscience”?
2. So what?

Conscience is ones own innate sense of right and wrong. We likely have evolved to have a conscience because it is evolutionarily advantageous. Those who don’t have a conscience are sociopaths and are removed from circulation by society as soon as their lack of conscience becomes obvious through their criminal activity.

Perhaps some sociopaths are kept in line by fear of an invisible man who will punish them after they die. In that case, I suppose religion does some good.

[Polerius]

@Der Trihs

A few points. First, you’re confusing understanding with sociopathy. Just because we understand something about how the brain works does not make feelings imaginary; just because I have some knowledge about how someone else’s brain works on a biological level doesn’t mean they are expendable.

This debate is not about knowing how the brain works. It is about being 100% convinced that all the behavior that we observe from people emanates solely from within their material body, i.e. it is not the result of a soul that exists external to the body.

So, if one is indeed 100% convinced of the above, that has an impact on how we view other people. Because, from a strictly scientific point of view, we cannot prove that other people even have a consciousness. This is what we assume, but (I think) it can never be proven.

If souls existed, what makes you think they would be any less mechanistic anyway ?

Good point.

Though I would say that if someone was 100% convinced that souls exist, he would at least be wary of messing with them or their mortal shells, since he most likely wouldn’t know anything about these souls and how they operate.

Our minds are not “just” electrochemical impulses; they are a massive, ultracomplex system of impulses.

Second ,saying people are “just” meat machines is kind of silly; we can’t build one, after all. Our bodies may be machines, but they are more sophisticated machines than we can build. Our brains may computers, but they are more complex than any we can make.

I don’t see why it is important that we are complex, or that we currently can’t make anything more complex than ourselves.

If, one day, humans can create computers that are vastly more complex than ourselves, that would invalidate your whole second point, because I would think that you would still think humans are valuable and should not be killed. That is, current state-of-the-art in technology should have no bearing on how we value humans.

And in general, why is it important that we are complex? If they had the choice between destroying a very complex supercomputer and a small beautiful sculpture, many people would choose to destroy the supercomputer and not the sculpture. So, the complexity of our meat computer has nothing to do with human value.

Third, when you closely enough at anything, it loses it’s larger context and overarching structure. All the studies of consciousness you mention show is that there is no “consciousness center” in the brain; since the mind is distributed throughout the brain and since it’s internal impulses/processing isn’t all that fast, a close enough look at any mental process will cause it to vanish. If the self/consciousness level of the mind takes, say, 1 second to perform an operation, a .1 second-scale analysis of the brain’s processes will make it appear to vanish.

Is this what is being described in books like “Being No One : The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity” by Thomas Metzinger? (I provided a quote above)

[BlackKnight]

Turn the question around: For those who think we have a soul, why is killing bad?

It’s a non-sequitor to say that “we have a soul; therefore, killing is bad”. Likewise, it’s a non-sequitor to say that, “we do not have a soul; therefore, killing isn’t bad”.

Unless you make a convincing argument that the right or wrong of killing has anything whatsoever to do with the existence of God or souls, then for me the question is like asking, “For people who don’t believe that fire is magic, why is killing bad?”

What I’m trying to say is that, regardless of why killing is wrong (which could be the subject of dozens of threads itself), I can see no reason whatsoever why the existence of souls or a god would affect that justification.

[Polerius]

@BlackKnight

What I’m trying to say is that, regardless of why killing is wrong (which could be the subject of dozens of threads itself), I can see no reason whatsoever why the existence of souls or a god would affect that justification.

See my “Total Recall” example above for one possible scenario where it would affect that justification.

[Walton_Firm]

@Polerius

What do you mean by “real”?

Existing in this world, so far as I am able to determine. I have experienced pain an sadness, so I know that they exist; the fact that they may be only emergent properties of electrochemical signals in my brain does not make them less real. And I have observed behaviour in other people which suggest to me that they can also feel pain and sadness, and that they don’t like it anymore than I do, so until I see proof of the opposite I am going to try and avoid causing such feelings in them.

I’m not saying this is what they say, but in theory, it is at least one possible response.

I have an even better reason for not causing pain in others: I know that it exists in this world and that it is unpleasant, so I don’t have to guess at it.

I’m not an expert on this subject, but I don’t think it is simply related to “breaking the self into parts”. Here is a quote from “Being No One : The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity” by Thomas Metzinger :

He’s talking about emergent processes. Consciousness exists as a system of interconnected parts, and most of the interesting stuff is not found in the individual parts but in the pattern of how they are interconnected. So it’s a bit more complex than a car, and more like the concept of a market (as in capitalism), or a society, or a flock of geese. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that doesn’t mean that there’s something mystical going on, or that markets and societies don’t really exist.

But it doesn’t explain why we should feel bad about someone dying, if we believe there is no soul and we look at it from a strictly rational point of view.

Well, if by “strictly rational” you mean that there should be no room for emotions, then there’s no reason to feel bad about anything. But I would advise against walking up to the dead man’s widow and consoling her with the fact that her husband was just a moving slab of meat with some electrical signals running through it.

[AHunter3]

@Polerius

From the replies in this thread, it seems many on this board are convinced that we are just meat machines and when we die that is the end of it.

If that is the case, then why is it bad to kill someone? They will just cease to exist, but so what? Who cares?

It is just one more meat machine that stopped working.

I am not an atheist (nor am I a Christian for that matter) but it seems to me that if there were any category of people more likely to have a cavalier attitude towards killing people, it would be those who hold a conventional-Christian-style belief about life after death: “Well, OK, so we killed some people, but they’ll go to heaven unless they were evil people who deserved killing anyhow. And gee, I dunno if I did something bad when I killed them, but if I did, I’m sorry God, forgive me of my sins. That probably makes me OK on the killing thing, 'cuz we aren’t perfect, just forgiven, and I’m serious about being sorry, God… but, if not, I reckon God will punish me as I deserve to be punished after I did, so meanwhile life goes on”. Meanwhile, for the atheist: “I just killed some people. They don’t exist any more. That’s permanent and irrevocable. Unless they did something to deserve killing, and/or unless there was an appropriate reason such as immediate self-defense that justifies me killing them, I now deserve to be killed as a proven danger to my species”

I understand that societies had to instill in people the idea of “good” and “bad” (and things like, e.g., killing were “bad”) for their own survival. I also understand that, through evolution, we might have acquired traits like empathy that make it less likely for us to kill someone.

However, for the rational, thinking people of this board who are convinced we are mere meat machines, what is the reasoning behind thinking that killing someone is bad?

As with the people who put the full weight of their belief-system behind the concept of the necessary rule of law (even if they disagree with any given law), many (probably most) rational thinking people (especially on this board) seem to believe that each person has an ethical duty to hold themselves to the same standard that they would wish others held to. If you do something you’d consider wrong if someone else did it, it’s wrong when you do it.

FTR, I’m not convinced either way on whether we are simply meat machines.

Not entirely sure what a “meat machine” is, but I had a visceral dream/nightmare while sorting out religion and spirituality for myself, and it was more akin to being self-replicating shit machines. I suppose if we mean nothing to each other, if we do not weave good experiences for each other and have a good time being alive and find a true and authentic (i.e., not arbitrary or socially constructed or otherwise dismissable) purpose in our emotion-driven notions of what is right and wrong, then all we are accomplishing in being alive is slowly consuming animals and vegetables and turning them into shit. Charming, no?

I don’t need a Bible or the conventional Christian (or, for that matter, Muslim or Jewish or Zoroastrian) God, i.e., a separate Divine Entity handing down commandments and promising me life after death, in order to not be a meat machine or a shit machine. I do believe in life after death but that would be life of the self after death of the individual self, which in turn implies transcending identity as an individual and understanding self to be more than that.

[Polerius]

@Walton Firm

Existing in this world, so far as I am able to determine. I have experienced pain an sadness, so I know that they exist; the fact that they may be only emergent properties of electrochemical signals in my brain does not make them less real. And I have observed behaviour in other people which suggest to me that they can also feel pain and sadness, and that they don’t like it anymore than I do, so until I see proof of the opposite I am going to try and avoid causing such feelings in them.

When you dream, you experience sadness and fear, correct?

There are other characters in your dreams, and from their behavior you might also assume that they experience sadness and fear.

But, when you wake up in the morning you realize that the “pain” that “Joe” felt in the dream you saw last night never really happened because “Joe” was just a character in your dream.

So, there is nothing to feel sad about.

Of course, dreaming and the real world are two different things, but what I’m trying to point out is that there are scenarios in which what we perceive as pain being experienced by other sentient beings is not what it appears to be.

Overall though, maybe we’ve focused too much on the pain angle, and we all abhor pain.

Let me try to bring up another angle.

Assume you hear on the news that someone was shot in the head (without previously knowing there was a gun pointing at him) and that he instantly died. Or we hear about someone who died from a heart attack while sleeping. Or someone who died on the operating table while under general anesthesia.

Our common reaction is to feel bad for the guy, to feel sad that he died.

But, strictly speaking, it is just a very complex machine that stopped working.

Why should we care more if a human computer stopped working than, say, if a non-human computer stopped working?

I know we do care more (becaue of evolution and social upbringing), but, to me, it doesn’t make sense that we do.

[Der_Trihs]

@Polerius

I don’t see why it is important that we are complex, or that we currently can’t make anything more complex than ourselves.

If, one day, humans can create computers that are vastly more complex than ourselves, that would invalidate your whole second point, because I would think that you would still think humans are valuable and should not be killed. That is, current state-of-the-art in technology should have no bearing on how we value humans.

Complexity is important because uncomplex things are just…simple, inert objects. If they have worth, it’s in relation to more complex things, like us.

If we create things more complex than ourselves, they may be more valuable than us on some hypothetical objective scale; that doesn’t we are any less valuable. For example, animals suffered pain for millions of years before we evolved; when we emerged, their pain didn’t suddenly lesson. The existence or non-existence of superhumans does not change the moral status of humans.

@Polerius

And in general, why is it important that we are complex? If they had the choice between destroying a very complex supercomputer and a small beautiful sculpture, many people would choose to destroy the supercomputer and not the sculpture. So, the complexity of our meat computer has nothing to do with human value.

Complexity is valuable because it represents an investment of one sort or another; it is also often unique and/or difficult to reproduce. I should have mentioned the uniqueness of each individual being another reason they are valuable; that ties in with your sculpture example. If that sculpture is unique or rare, it makes sense to rescue it before the computer;; if it’s mass produced, then it wouldn’t. Also, the sculpture is important to the people who want it - who are complex, among other things. In essence, a sculpture is less valuable by itself; in context with the minds of those who create/appreciate it, it can be very valuable. Really, it’s another example of what I said about how looking too close can ruin your perspective; if you look at Michaelangelo’s David at the level of pure materialism, it’s just a funny shaped rock. It’s only in context with the minds and societies of humans that it achieves value as an artwork.

@Polerius

Is this what is being described in books like “Being No One : The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity” by Thomas Metzinger? (I provided a quote above)

I’m not quite sure what he is trying to say, but I think he’s wrong. We do have selves; it’s pretty much all we know for sure. We may be wrong about what they are, but we have them. OTOH, If he’s just saying that our selves are not some indivisible thing in our heads, I think he’s quite right.

[BlackKnight]

@Polerius

See my “Total Recall” example above for one possible scenario where it would affect that justification.

That’s an interesting thought experiment, but I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with it. Nowhere does it mention souls or gods.

I’m going to try to paraphrase what I think you’re getting at. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, so if what I’m about to say isn’t what you are saying, let me know.

(1) You believe that a “soul” is a coherent, logical possibility. (Note: For the moment, I’m not arguing with this. I’m just trying to err on the side of clarity.)
(2) You believe that one can, at least sometimes, tell when some matter (say, for example, a human body) has or does not have a soul.
(3) You believe that matter that has a soul “attached” is in a different category of moral consideration than matter which does not have a soul attached.
(4) You believe that a “string of 1’s and 0’s” (which at some level are electrical pulses) either does not have a soul, or perhaps even cannot have a soul.

I think what you’re saying with the thought experiment is that I would agree that “killing” some string of 1’s and 0’s would not be morally wrong. You appear also to be saying that I would or should agree to this because I would agree that the string of 1’s and 0’s does not or could not have a soul.

Is this at least close to what you’re getting at?

[SentientMeat]

There is no inherent reason for anything. If a meat computer, for whatever evolutionary neuropsychological reason, outputs some aversion towards killing which can be characterised as “empathy”, then that is just what it outputs. If another meat computer’s cognitive modules are such that its empathy is absent, and therefore that it does output no reason not to kill others, then that is just its outputs also. The former computers, being the majority, would then seek to identify these “psychopathic” computers and put in place deterring ot restraining conditions to prevent them killing.

“Reason” is really just a kind of language (or linguistic structure) in which axioms are combined in order to yield conclusions, and IMO itself evolved along with our incredible computers. Reasonable conclusions depend solely on what axioms were first accepted. “Killing is bad” is just one such axiom, accepted by most people because their empathic cognitive modules are not absent or functioning differently.

[Walton_Firm]

Given your username, I think we can consider you an authority on this subject.

[SentientMeat]

@Walton Firm

Given your username, I think we can consider you an authority on this subject.

Heh heh. Actually, I don’t consider myself an authority at all - rather just one six billionth of humanity putting symbols on the monitors of fellow six-billionths. For some “reason”, this tickles my cognitive modules!

[FlyingRamenMonster]

I don’t think this has been mentioned before - I feel my humanity is inescapable. Realising we are simply meat machines does not undo the years of evolution and social conditioning that has brought me to this point. Inconsequential or not, I don’t think I could live with myself if I were to kill someone else.

[Ms2001]

@Polerius

Though I would say that if someone was 100% convinced that souls exist, he would at least be wary of messing with them or their mortal shells, since he most likely wouldn’t know anything about these souls and how they operate.

So, let’s say we discover one day that souls really exist, and after many years of research, we learn as much about them as we already know about the human body. Would you then say it’s OK to kill people?

[DSeid]

Can one have values without either a belief in God or in the soul? Obviously yes. And one can even believe in “an objective morality” without believing in the soul. (And BTW, not doing something because you fear the conseqences in an afterlife is not much different morally than not doing it because you fear consequences in the here and now.)

Which came first, essential human values, like don’t murder, or the religious systems that justify them? My suspicion is that we had values long before we had any concepts about God or the soul.

Simple meat machines? Complex biological entities that have emergent properties like sentience and consciousness and values and love. To paraphrase Pratchett in “Wee Free Men”: “Just because you understand how something works doesn’t mean it isn’t still magic.”

[Shodan]

It can’t be justified rationally; it is an act of faith. All morality is the same.

Regards,
Shodan