In high school? [whew] Well, someone took advantage of their AP opportunities…
That was in discussion of why the passenger pigeon went extinct when it seemed to be so successful. In hindsight, this debate is beginning to veer OT yet again… so ixnay the amplesexay.
Re: harmless mutations: Acknowledged. These mutations are often extremely important to long-term survival. Populations with large amounts of such diversity are, in general, more likely to survive major shifts in their environment, as they’ve widened their genome enough for evolution to be able to shift them over to a new focus. This is an incredibly valuable resource, and one that’s often overlooked.
Again: yes, human beings have many different moral systems. That does not conflict with any part of my claims. What’s important to understand is that the universe has only one. In a manner of speaking.
The survival of the particular pattern manifesting the principle. Its “best interests” may include the survival of other patterns as well. Whose interests do your white blood cells serve?
From an atemporal perspective, the universe is static and uncaused. Please understand that I do not mean this lightly.
It’s ultimately arbitrary whether you consider the Tree or not; after all, all valid models must give the same result. But I would advise not discarding conceptions merely because they don’t immediately seem useful.
Heh, we had a great math program for a public school. We covered first and second year college calculus my senior year, and I was lucky enough to have an excellent teacher. Eleventh grade was pre-calc/ analysis and that was a real wake-up call, mathematically. I went from pulling As and Bs without even trying to busting my ass to get a D in pre-calc the first quarter. The conceptual leap was quite large. But I ended up getting an A in the class and went on to maintain a 98% average in calculus. Unfortunately we never went beyond growth and decay problems, I had to teach myself first order linear differential equations on my own. My thirst for knowledge is nothing new!
But enough of that.
Fair enough; I think I was crabby last night when I dismissed the example, FWIW. Your most recent post has locked some things up for me that have been irritating me under the surface. I think it serves as a breakthrough in debate, but we’ll see how that actually plays out.
Yes, but relativism doesn’t overlook it. It embraces it. See the plurality here? And at any time t, do we have a way to select among these pluralities?
Well it isn’t that I haven’t realized this is your overall point. But we clearly have different ends in mind when we’re tackling the OP’s second point about privileged systems. To forgoe general explanation and focus on the idea you’ve presented here, the second point is attempting to illustrate something about what humans can justify, or know. Because the reason humans discuss morality is to decide what to do. Whether or not the universe will yield only one moral system in the end is irrelevant until (and unless) we’re at the end. Until such time, we still have moral decisions to make. Now, to me, survival is just a context (one of many), and it is what motivates decisions (ie we make them because we have to), but this isn’t necessarily at odds with you. What is important is that to make decisions we need to, well, decide among various alternatives. what relativism wants to say is important (when we’re discussing it, of course) is that how we decide also has alternatives.
Here you keep wanting to jump to your atemporal perspective to lash out against relativism, but it doesn’t care about that. It cares that at any time t our studies are incomplete and allow multiple theories for selections which are exclusive and incompatible. The atemporal perspective is outside our scope and we still need to make decisions.
It is also hard for me to try and keep focus because you’ve managed to reduce morality to a matter of simply studying natural existence. The quasi-division that distinguishes ethics from epistemology is absent for you, so we keep slipping back into various pursuits. That’s fine, but I think our argument in fact stems from this, I’m trying to get you to keep the focus where it needs to be for humans to address morality. True, there exists a shortest distance between two points in n-dimensional space, but this fact does not immediately guarantee us that we will find it, or in the case of various topologies that there will be only one.
We are, as moral agents, concerned with what we should do, and we do that without the aid of God’s persective (that is a philosophical shorthand, not an assertion of a being). That such a perspective exists by assumption will frame the way we discuss questions, but will not necessarily guarantee uniqueness.
This is a great point, and one I was hoping to get to eventually. The interplay of moral codes raises interesting issues with your criterion. For example, is it moral for me to be a murderer so long as most people think it is immoral for me to be one? They will imprison me and lock me up and (assuming no death penalty) we will all survive. So TVAA asserts, “We’ve all survived, so this is the ‘right’ way to deal with it [temporally/for now etc]”. Here I want you to look at the finger and not the moon, because I’m trying to teach you how to point. Here I want you to be able to answer the question, what principle allows us to lock him up? One man in his position couldn’t kill everyone, and eventually he would die by accident or physiological design. So long as we don’t all become murderers, wasn’t it just as good to leave him free as to lock him up?
Your typical response to issues so far has been, “We will see what the universe selects”, but can you at least see that this isn’t good enough to actually guide actions we need to make? Forget the moon, we can’t get there (perhaps yet, perhaps ever).
I believe you do feel this way, and in this thread I have very little to say on the matter, except how it impacts your conception of morality. And I think it leaves questions we, in our temporal perspective, have to answer, if we are ever to approach or arrive at the atemporal perspective. I hope this helps set straight many of the comments I’ve made so far.
No, no, no! This was the point about the Shadows and the Vorlons. This is the point about “my survival or ours”. This is the point about the interplay between methods. They don’t give the same answer. Whether the Vorlons or the Shadows survive is a genuinely different answer.
Perhaps you will say, “It makes no difference to the universe which one lives or dies”. And I will say: tell that to your white blood cells. You assert that evolutionary models create goals out of whole cloth, but yet want to deny that they have any relavence, even though it is these very goals which help define what good means, and which the universe will eventually select between. This is very tortured reasoning to me. I believe relativism will set this straight.
I want to make it clear that, as far as this thread is concerned, I have little qualm with your metaphysics. Your faith (and understand I do not mean this lightly ;)) that there exists this absolute methodology doesn’t actually address relativism. In this I must admit my OP was partially incomplete. The assertion of an absolute perspective does not undermine relativism as a matter of course. Many supposed paradoxes of relativism (ie ones that say relativism is self-defeating or assumes realism or etc) fail to take this into account by only focusing on specific instances of relativism but then demanding generality. Imagine it like saying only one finger can only ever point at the moon because there is only one moon! As a matter of course, that is, in your terminology, temporally, relativism is not undermined by assumption. It must be defeated in practice.
By the way: fatalism isn’t actually the belief that the future is determined. It’s the belief that the future is set. More precisely, certain events are destined to occur at specific times, and no matter what circumstances lead to that moment, the event will occur then.
For example, in WWI some soldiers developed a belief that they were either destined to be killed, or not, and it didn’t matter what they did in the meantime. So they stopped wearing their helmets, as they were uncomfortable and encumbering.
A determinist would conclude that he would be shot or not depending on factors he couldn’t evaluate, but his decision to wear a helmet would be part of what determined the eventual outcome. From an omniscient perspective, whether the event would occur or not would be a certainty, but a limited perspective could only consider probability.
Fatalists lack an understanding of causality. They view fate as arbitrary, unchanging, and random. Determinists view fate as non-arbitrary, unchanging, and impossible to determine from limited data.
** I don’t see how relativism embraces it. Those traits are arbitrary – organisms can have them or not because it doesn’t make any difference whether they have them or not.
** I agree with this. Nevertheless, there’s still a privileged system. We’ll never be able to find, and know we’ve found, the Grand Unified Theory. It would take infinite observations to determine that our theory was actually correct, and even then we wouldn’t be able to rule out inaccuracies and limitations in our ability to observe.
The universe still operates. Eppure si muove.
** We select among the alternatives we perceive. Ultimately the nature of the selections, and the selectors, is determined by the universe. Human perceptions are to evolution what modern art criticism is to string theory, only more so.
**
– paraphrase of Miles Vorkosigan, A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold.
As an aside, I highly recommend you read a few of her works. Bujold loves to hide profound philosophical treatises on logic, ethics, and humanity in what look like adventure novels.
** Isn’t studying the world all they need to do? In this conclusion, I’m somewhat like the early Taoist sages. Much like the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers, they almost invented science.
** There doesn’t need to be only one, as long as we find the shortest path(s). The defining criterion here is “shortest path”.
** I don’t understand why you it needs to, or why you think I think it needs to.
** Are you willing to run the risk that he’ll kill someone you want to live? Can we determine whether your wants are ethically correct? Can your society survive if its members perceive that anyone might kill anyone else at will? Is your society worth preserving?
It’s as if you asked me, “Okay, you have this ‘science’, so how does the world work?” That’s an incredibly complicated question, and I don’t know how to answer it at once.
** It doesn’t really matter if it’s not good enough. It’s all there will ever be.
Life is like that, sometimes.
** Huh.
** Faith? Faith?!
Where’s my brick cleverly hidden inside a white glove?!
Okay. Then I’m not at all certain what you mean by “relativism”, the preceding explanations notwithstanding.
I’m glad that you don’t seem to hate me anymore. That’s progress of a sort.
Gee, by TVAA’s reasoning it exists and so therefore must be worth preserving. But oh, these murderers exist, too, and so must be worth preserving. Whatever shall we do? We can’t appeal to anything but the fact we all exist right now to know, so I guess we’ll just wait and see if we all die or not because there’s no way to know until after the fact.
I wonder if I should duck. Too bad I’ll never know. ho hum, the universe will do as it wills.
Just irritated, I’ve never hated you. Yet? Well, if I do, we’ll know it isn’t really me that hates you but the universe.
So, in fact, from the perspective of people that actually need to make claims and decisions, there will be pluralities. Huh. I wonder if that is a useful thing for them to discuss, then?
I can’t help it, I have no choice but to deny it. I’d love to see the reason you show me but I’m just a tool, really. Don’t take it personally since you’re only having the feelings and arguments the laws of physics demand you have. The meaning you seek is also an illusion, true and good only mean exactly what the laws of physics have made you say they mean, there need be no correspondence to the facts.
Now, to possibly bring this thread closer to its natural end:
If you really want to know how I think people should behave, go out and read three books: the Tao Te Ching, Peter Pan, and The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. Peter and the Childlike Empress are perfect Taoists.
“Should” behave? What does “should” have to do with morality? Morality is, after all, naught but a description of how we act according to natural laws…
