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

Great Debates
61

I think that an atheist who believes that both humans and dogs are simply animals with no souls would be more likely to value dogs closer to humans than a Christian who believes dogs have no soul but humans do.

Where is this focus on “complexity” coming from?
Where is it written that more complex stuff are more valuable, in a moral sense?

Well, I’m not an atheist and I’m not a practising Christian, but here’s a thought:

To an atheist, we are but a tiny mass on planet Earth which is in turn a tiny speck in a Universe filled with trillions and trillions of stars. How significant can our life be, in the overall scheme of things? How significant can a few electrons going around in your head be in the vast expanses of the Universe?

To a Christian, we are beings created by the Creator of All That Is, and he loves us, each and every one of us. And what we do in this life will affect how we spend the rest of eternity. So, it’s easy to see how a Christian might feel he is important and his life is important.

In general though, I don’t want to turn this into a Christian-vs-atheist treatment of life and death.

I’m curious how 100% atheists deal with questions of life and death.

If you’re curious how Christians deal with these questions, you can start a thread about it.

62

Isn’t this essentially what religious people believe? Just substitute God for cameras.

63

So? What point are you trying to make?

64

Could be, but as you so cogently argued to a previous point, so what? The fact is that we do have empathy and do not live on a planet in which empathy is so explicitly coerced.

Here we do tend to act to minimize the suffering of others. This is, however a malleable trait, and people can be pushed by circumstance or design to harm others and to kill others. I’m thinking of the example of the Germans of the early 20th century, the Rwandans of the last decade, my impression of life in different, less civilized eras, and many other examples. As a hypothetical, if you’re floating outside a four person lifeboat, I’m sorry pally, but I’m not kicking anyone in my family out to save your life. Simply because for the most part we don’t generally physically harm or kill others does not mean that God must exist. Empathy is not an all or nothing proposition.

If God were driving us to avoid killing, or avoid harming others, why are we right now typing on an internet discussion board rather than out irrigating African fields and opening our doors to homeless people who may freeze during the winter? We, in America anyway, can be seen as indirectly killing or harming others on a daily basis. Why does our God-given empathy allow this to happen?

I reiterate what so many others have tried to explain previously. Just because we have some wisp of an understanding of how the human brain works, does not mean that it can be relegated to the status of meat. Knowing why I have passions does not end the passions I feel. Having an understanding of the source of empathy will not end the empathy.

Why do we feel less moved by the deaths of 100 dogs? Because we are not dogs. Why do we in America feel less moved by the deaths of 100 Armenians? Why does your local news hype the involvement of someone from your town in any news story? Our emotional response is stronger when we are more clearly linked or involved. We are selfishly interested in others. Why does my God-given empathy make me sit up and take notice more closely when someone from Pittsburgh was involved in a plane crash than someone from Lima?

65

Why are you bringing God into this discussion?

This discussion is about people who take a mechanistic view of the world and are convinced humans have no soul, and what their views are on the subject of other humans dying.

Don’t have a knee-jerk reaction and bring God into any discussion you think fits your pre-conceived idea of what the OP is “really” about.

You must have not read my replies to all those who tried.

I said above that it doesn’t matter if we know how the brain works. What matters for this discussion is that some people are convinced that all human behavior and feelings arise from within the human body, and that there is no external soul.

So, I don’t care why or how you have passions. I care whether those passions arise from within you and affect only the meat that you are made of, as opposed to, say, if they affected the soul of which you are an avatar.

66

Hmm. I apologize for conflating concepts of the soul with concepts of God, to the degree that they are distinct and to the degree that it makes a whit of difference in this discussion. And of course, I apologize for the fact that you brought God into the discussion in the OP, when clearly you didn’t wish to.

I admit that you have displayed a dizzying intellect, and that many of your responses have been beyond my ken. Still, I tried.

There is no soul, yet I have passions. Therefore, it is my belief that the substance I consist of produces and experiences passions.

As to your express questions of the OP, I would redirect you to my last post, in which I discussed my thoughts as to how people’s empathy is activated in a more personal and less societal way.

67

So what if they are only from within? Lets make this more personal. Think about your own passions and experience of life. Would you have any second thoughts about just offing yourself on a whim? If not, why not? Surely you’re just a meat machine? Yet there is something stopping you from casually stepping onto the interstate. What is it? I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves by starting with other people. Lets start with the self, get a good handle on why in general we feel suicide is a bad idea. Then we can look at why we extend this to other people.

I beg to differ with your point about not explaining things with evolution. Just because there exists one example of a situation where we can rationalize “against” a gene does not logically conclude that all situations are examples where we can rationalize against a gene. The answer may very be that natural selection found that people who formed societies with this empathy did better then those without. (And there may very well be examples of people who rationalize away this characteristic).

68

My point was that when you brough this up:

who were you arguing with?

Because I did not claim that

“because for the most part we don’t generally physically harm or kill others, this means that God must exist.”

or

“God is driving us to avoid killing”

or

“We have God-given empathy”

Do you simply like to build strawmen?

I may or may not have a dizzying intellect, but I did reply to the question “so what if we know how it works” by saying that knowing how it works is not relevant to the discussion at hand.

OK, good, we’re back to the OP.

Let’s see:

Some good examples of when people go against the empathy directive, but I don’t see this as relevant to the question of why people, for the most part, feel empathy and don’t harm others.

Yes, but even though you are less moved, you are still moved. Why are you moved? What is it about those 100 Armenians, who are just some sentient automata experiencing passions, that moves you when they die?

69

First, I don’t know for certain that I am just a meat machine.

Second, I do in fact think along the lines that you mention above. For example, when I’m boarding a plane and I think that there is a possibility that it might go down I think:

  1. If we are just made up of matter and everything ends when we die, then I will just cease to exist. So what? I have lots more to do in this life, but if it ends, so be it, c’est la vie!

  2. If there is something more than this material world, something after death, then, hey, I get to find out.

I think, as Cecil nicely put it in one of his columns: “the fear of flaming death”.
This, like the empathy response, has been programmed into us through evolution.
We may try to rationalize death (as in the plane example above), but most of us fear it at some deep visceral level.

Here’s an example:
Johnny: “Why did you do that?”
Tommy: “Because mom told me to do it”
Johhny: “But mom told you yesterday to take the garbage out and you argued that kids shouldn’t have to do that kind of thing, and ended up not doing it. So “mom told me to” can’t be used as an excuse”

70

I do not understand this example and why it was relevent to my statement.

71

Why is that relevant? I’m wondering about the point of this exercise. Is it to demonstrate that to move between two points, you have to move halfway, so you will never reach the other point? I mean, really - if you grasped that my point was that we are moved by things we feel to be close to us, why would you have any trouble grasping that the suffering of humans will touch us at some level, if not to the same degree as the suffering of our own child? We have the ability to put ourselves in others shoes, even if we don’t break down weeping when we hear about a tragedy in Turkmenistan.

There are humans who can kill others without remorse or regret. It is hard, I would imagine, to construct some explanation for why their meat is different than our meat.

Killing is a behavior in many ways similar to many others. There are many things we typically avoid doing because it would be hurtful to others, and the normative response to that is to feel pain and remorse. I’m not seeing the compelling argument for adding in any construct to help explain what can be explained with meat.

I’m sorry - I guess I shouldn’t have jumped in without understanding what the point is.

72

No. One does not care about a machine (or a piece of meat for that matter) unless its loss creates some kind of inconvenience or financial loss. That is why your OP is disingenuous. You are intentionally choosing language that paints humans as mechanical automatons and then asks why destroying such a thing would be bad. Even if you don’t believe in a God or a soul, the fact remains that humans are thinking, feeling creatures. The mechanism that produces those thoughts and feelings, however, are certainly debateable. IMHO, it is morally wrong to destroy something that is sentient and intelligent (except for dangerous or delicious animals).
Maybe you could define what you mean by “bad”:
-Why does the loss of someone we care about make us feel sad?
-Why is killing morally wrong?
-Why do we fear death?

73

BlackKnight has a very good point:

Likewise, I see your interpretation of your computer game avatar example as a red herring. To me, it isn’t wrong to kill the avatar because there’s someone (or something) behind it on another plane. It’s wrong to kill it because doing so would cause suffering, and it’s only wrong if it would cause suffering. If the sequence of 0’s and 1’s becomes sufficiently complex to be able to feel pain or sorrow, it would be wrong to kill it. If your friend doesn’t mind if her avatar dies, it’s not wrong to kill it.

I play plenty of board games, roleplaying games, and live action roleplaying games where I do my damned best to harm the avatars of other people. It’s OK because it doesn’t cause suffering. Quite the opposite: If I didn’t try to attack the provinces of my husband and my friends (and enslave their subjects whenever there’s a victory point in it), the excellent game of Vinci would be pointless and our game evening ruined.

I operate under the axiom that causing suffering is bad. Whether a suffering individual is a meat machine, a silicone machine, or an incorporeal being on some other plane is irrelevant.

74

Because we might see similarities between them and the things we do feel empathy towards, such as some convincing (to us) “desire” (whatever that is) not to be destroyed, just as we ought to feel queasy trepidation when driving so fast. Note that this is more than just current computer game pixels, which are not yet convincing enough to pass any Turing tests.

And, of course, I might see similarities where you see important differences. We can only communicate to each other what our lobes and cortices output.

I hate that word “mere”, or “just”, or “only”. I suggest that we are, amazingly, upliftingly, wondrously, meat machines - that is why killing one is such a tragedy. And yes, a psychopath can consider them “mere”. I will then put in place reasonable conditions which deter or restrain those who don’t go along with that empathy.

I disagree, actually. The point I made in that (or others, maybe we’re not thinking of the same one) is that temporal lobe epilepsy might have had some benefit to some individuals, since their ‘cosmic eccentricity’ made them the shaman or holy guy, supplied with food by others in fear of losing their hotline to the divine. I think you’re talking about a God meme, not a God gene, and memes are far more flexible in this way than innate instinctive reactions.

Even if “reason” evolved too? And is the social contract not “reason”?

Read that again. If something evolves, be it an eye, stomach or brain, evolution is the reason for that eye, stomach or brain, yes? If some specific feature of that eye, stomach or brain evolves, then evolution is the reason for that, too. We have, somehow, developed an innate empathic response to our fellow humans (and arguably animals, and even property - we wince when we see our car smashed up!). Our frontal lobes then accommodate that response into our reasoning. There is no inherent reason for anything, if reasoning only takes place in brains.

75

More I read the dope, more I can agree with the latter, but as for the former, I’m not so sure. Humanity in the abstract, perhaps, especially if disadvantaged in some way, and they can be “helped”. Individuals we meet, I don’t think so. Most certainly, not innate. No evidence for that.

76

And how would you explain universal experiences like missing someone, or that the murder rate in countries of millions and millions of people is so low that it literally gets on the news? In fact, the psychiatric test for empathy-absence is simply to show people pictures of strangers in horrific distress and measure their blink and galvanic skin responses. Psychopaths don’t flinch. Normal people do. Explanation?

77

Yes, but I think pure reasoning should not involve feelings.

For example, if we were talking to a sentient and intelligent robot that has no feelings and no empathy towards humans , then what arguments might we use to convince it to value and protect consciousness in any form?

I assume the arguments have to be based on pure logic, since the robot won’t be swayed by sentimental arguments. What are those arguments? (if they exist)

So, I take it that you’re saying that the arguments mentioned above don’t exist.
The only way for the robot to value and protect consciousness is for it to be one of the axioms upon which its intelligence is based.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe “it is a bad thing when a consciousness suffers” is just an axiom and as such has no proof.

78

We would have to treat it like we treat human psychopaths, enforcing deterrence in terms of an IF-THEN consequence which impacts upon their own ‘desires’, such as they are. If it ultimately has no objection to being turned off, such that there is no consequence which would deter it from harming others, well then, why not turn him off?

Yes, I suggest so. One could perhaps point to some kind of inductive logical step (I don’t like suffering, so I’ll try to minimise the probability of any one human suffering since it might be me- the social contract again, really), but one might just as well point to our neuropsychology and leave it at that.

79

One could also, I suppose, argue that if one values reason, then one must value the apparatus in which it takes place. If reason is so important, then returning to that 13 billion year state of no reason is surely something best avoided?

80

Polerius, do you believe that the human experience of emotions arises from a different source than the human experience of logical thought?

It just seems that frequently your counterargument involves an effort or request that we set aside emotions and explain why killing is wrong. Is this what you are seeking? It seems a specifically academic activity, since we are in reality meat machines which experience emotions and logic as a matter of course.

At the same time, you attempted to preclude societal explanations in your OP, so you are looking, apparently, for a logic-based person-specific explanation for why killing is bad. No?