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techstepgenr8tion
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21 May 2017, 12:23 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:
You don't think there are laws of morale and of nature? Why is it a bad thing to say?

Because you left your description of absolutes so wide open that you could have meant absolutely anything by that statement.

My only absolute - time fixes the arrangement of objects and events in such a way that metaphysics, degrees of complexity, etc.. have no bearing. That's the only black and white detail. After that everything can arise from incredibly complex (thus gray) derivations from fundamental natural laws (I made no arguments against their existence) and all of those are fixed in time and space. To be fixed in time and space is causal determinism. It doesn't matter if that cause is a previous cause from the big bang the way a Newtonian would suggest, some quantum wave of causality looping around in odd way, background noise or static in the system (get your Julia sets out), or the sylphs, salamanders, undines, and gnomes of Franz Bardon and Rudolph Steiner. If its happening in time and space it has no freedom because its always dependent on, and really inheriting its identity from, something that came 'before it' either horizontally, vertically through some degree of supervenience, or even more obliquely through less understood loops of effect whether quantum or 'occult'.


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friedmacguffins
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21 May 2017, 12:36 pm

Do you believe in such a thing as absolutes, ever.



techstepgenr8tion
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21 May 2017, 12:48 pm

Ask a question that makes sense. Even better ask a question I haven't already answered within the scope of the topics in this thread.

Also if you believe strongly in certain absolutes and we need to talk about them - have the courage to state what they are so we aren't all trying to guess what you mean.


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friedmacguffins
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21 May 2017, 1:03 pm

Some people called moral relativists, believe that no such thing exists.



techstepgenr8tion
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21 May 2017, 1:21 pm

There's another term for people like that - postmodernists.

I think it's pretty clear that if we have any barometer for moral measurements available to us it's pain and suffering. Anyone who would tell someone whose suffering 'yeah but what you're feeling won't matter in 1,000,000 years' has no idea what they're talking about.

To that end I find myself really fascinating by and agreeing a lot with Jordan Peterson on all kinds of things - not just pain as a great barometer of evil but all of the things that lead to great pain such as totalitarian states and any place in time where people who hate life itself and want to see the world burn, people like Stalin, Hitler, etc.. I also fully agree with him that we get to that point by not accounting for reality. In that the full protection of free speech, whether that speech hurts someone's feelings or their own sacred sow. You really have the choice of either putting people on the killing fields or putting your ideas and everything you might hold sacred out there to live or die instead. The later method keeps the war mental rather than physical and it gets the same thing done - ie. human progress and the eradication of that which is ultimately false in the scope it was suggested (such as society-wide utopian 'isms' based on suggesting that one dynamic of reality is the stand-alone cause of all) - without the mass destruction, suffering, and loss of life. The other part of this - dogmatic education, whether theocratic religious jibberish or far-left pseodoscience and pseudophilosophy, equally terrify me because I see them as equal roads to the same mistakes we should have already learned from in history.

To that end IMHO moral relativism is really a lazy excuse to not think, not tow one's own responsibility as a member of a society that's (at least reliably) composed of nothing other than individuals like themselves who can either make a more responsible choice than they did and stand for something, if nothing else, pragmatically helpful to the human condition vs. the scenario where everyone agrees that it's not their responsibility and we walk hand in hand into another dark age.


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21 May 2017, 1:22 pm

On a side note - can I ask what moral relativism has to do with free will or any lack of it?


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21 May 2017, 1:26 pm

Some people believe that free will must be completely unencumbered by rules of any kind.

Do you believe that pain and suffering are ever justifiable, on moral grounds? Is there an objective reason, for it to exist?



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21 May 2017, 1:42 pm

I have an idea forming that to the extent that people need to apply conclusions based on evidence which they can't understand, they have to accept those conclusions as axioms. That's how we get into the kind of debate we read in this thread. It's probably already been done, though. :lol:


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21 May 2017, 1:45 pm

Is that always true?



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21 May 2017, 1:47 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
On a side note - can I ask what moral relativism has to do with free will or any lack of it?

I suspect that the moral absolutist side feels protective of their certainty, and threatened by the research. From their perspective, we're just muddying the waters.


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21 May 2017, 1:48 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:
Some people believe that free will must be completely unencumbered by rules of any kind.

Do you believe that pain and suffering are ever justifiable, on moral grounds? Is there an objective reason, for it to exist?


I have no idea if my way of thinking about this is The Right Way (TM) but, personally, I tend toward a modified utilitarian approach to this. On the most blunt level - the calculus with the least amount of pain and maximum pursuit of happiness and truth wins. Certain democratic numbers trade offs, such as leaving a majority well off and leaving a minority in exquisite agony isn't acceptable. Similarly the dumb-AI answer to put all of humanity in chemically-induced comas on morphine drip is equally the wrong answer and I'd class it as a type of human extermnism, which - true - would be an answer to all human suffering and whole planetary exterminism would also mean that a gazelle would never have to be eaten by a lion again nor another caterpillar be stung into paralysis and loaded up with wasp larvae for the Aliens food source experience. At the same time if a person has a contraption set to kill 100 people and torturing that person is the only way to assure that those people live - I don't think there's a particularly sound objection not to utterly invade any degree of that person's autonomy and take it apart, if not by weaponized psychology and administration of drugs also adding in things like sleep deprivation, shock treatment, etc.

That and if you're of the persuasion that life and consciousness are eternal commodities and that you might have to go on living after whatever happens here you very quickly realize that everything you do right now sets you on a future course that death won't abate. When you take that into account you really have to think carefully not only how you want to live the rest of your life, feel about yourself for the rest of your life, etc.. but you also want to think carefully of what sort of place you really want to go when you die, how you'd want to be incarnated again - as a baby and then child who has no hope of sorting out reality and is utterly dominated or aided by the quality of their surroundings whether that be good parenting or the depths of abuse, gaslighting, and utter twisting of reality the way you might find in a pedophile coven or in some place in the world where totalitarian fundamentalist religious beliefs are agreed upon without a second thought.

To that end, for lack of a better term, you shape where you're going in this life by the quality of your own reflections and subsequent actions on those reflections. I think it's quite possible as well that once you die you loose the training wheels and it's a bit like an astronaut letting go of the support beam on space station - they'll be floating on whatever trajectory that they let themselves on, the subconscious constructs they built through life will all they have left to rely on, and that could take them on a wonderful course, on a mediocre or mixed course, or a really awful course where their physical and or emotional suffering is greatly heightened as everything in them chafes against the fundamental structures of the universe and they get born in a body and into surroundings reflective of that chafing. True, in that case you technically didn't 'do it to yourself' because technically you didn't have a self to be other than what you became, just that if you can wrap your head around consequences like that and assuming that they do come to pass you may have truly and radically received an inject that changes the course of your future radically for the better.

In the course of determinism information and understanding are even more important because they can be the difference between futures that are qualitatively worlds apart.


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techstepgenr8tion
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21 May 2017, 1:52 pm

jrjones9933 wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
On a side note - can I ask what moral relativism has to do with free will or any lack of it?

I suspect that the moral absolutist side feels protective of their certainty, and threatened by the research. From their perspective, we're just muddying the waters.


It seems kind of clear to me - certain actions and cultural patterns make the world better, certain actions and patterns make the world worse. That's true whether recommendations to fix those patterns are in revealed books and stone tablets or whether they're arrived at by philosophic inquiry. I think one of the bigger challenges the religious do bring up is that yes - we're apes, and a lot of people are told that there's no Zeus to throw thunderbolts at them for failing morally but that it's just civically the right thing to do will tell the predominant culture to go screw and they'll leap down the rabbit hole of doing whatever they want to do. It's a real problem, just that I think it's a problem we should look to deal with while pursuing truth rather than phoning Pope Francis and telling him that we've come to the conclusion that Europe, the Americas, and Aus/NZ need to be placed under papal authority to solve our problems.


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21 May 2017, 2:04 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I tend toward a modified utilitarian approach to this. On the most blunt level - the calculus with the least amount of pain and maximum pursuit of happiness and truth wins.

It's been called hedonism.

jrjones9933 wrote:
I suspect that the moral absolutist side feels protective of their certainty, and threatened by the research.


Moral absolutism associates pain with evil, and research assumes a level of certainty.



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21 May 2017, 2:09 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
I tend toward a modified utilitarian approach to this. On the most blunt level - the calculus with the least amount of pain and maximum pursuit of happiness and truth wins.

It's been called hedonism.

That doesn't actually mean anything unless you unpack it.


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21 May 2017, 2:18 pm

There's a whole other issue I didn't get to mention in my earlier post - distress and eustress.

The pain of a Navy Seal in training or a future or returning Olympic athlete in training, or a future medical doctor or engineer racking their brain on the books, is significantly different from the pain of a political dissident in a totalitarian gulag, a starving child whose of a particular local warlord's out-group and doesn't get food, or a child unlucky enough to be brought deep into the underground world of pedantry.

If a rustic believer in simple god-given revelation would say 'That's hedonism!', their criticism is 'if it feels good do it' and that's, by the biblical definition, the sinful life. The 'sinful life' is destructive to cultures because it's a woefully incomplete idea that would suggest that if heroin feels great - do it! Marquis de Sade and all that. Since that objection is so obvious and is completely obvious in its problems without even needing to pick up religious scripture we can say that it's a non-starter because a pain-based morality of any proper depth would measure short term vs. long term tradeoffs, compare a whole network of moral goods and evils, etc..


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Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 21 May 2017, 2:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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21 May 2017, 2:19 pm

Quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism

Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that pleasure and happiness are the primary or most important intrinsic goods and the proper aim of human life. A hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure (pleasure minus pain), but when having finally gained that pleasure, either through intrinsic or extrinsic goods, happiness remains stationary.