On the nature of Consciousness

[joncash]

The following is a part of something I've written. I thought I'd open it to you guys for debate:

Within each being who has ever lived exists a Divine nature responsible for morality which has gone mostly misunderstood and misinterpreted by unconscious beings who have seen parts but have never seen the whole. The consequences of this lack of understanding are painfully evident in our history of atrocities.

To understand the source of our insanity, you must also understand the inner-workings of Consciousness, the Divine nature at the core of every sentient being. It is this property of life that is solely responsible for morality as we know it. The reason many argue a subjective morality is that to live in sin, you must also live in delusion and denial. It is a sad state of denial they are in. When we sin, the moral law weighs down upon us so heavily that we cannot bear to face it, so we dont. To modify our moral code from its true, perfect state, we too must also fall from our true, perfect state.

Evil is not in action. We face the action associated with evil, thinking we have faced the sin itself, but we have not. The evil is in the selfish motive, and this horror is one no living being can face. We push these motives into an area of our minds we will no longer look at: an area commonly referred to as the subconscious. This is where the collective insanity that plagues all life comes from. We must shatter our Consciousness into pieces to bear living under the weight of the moral law in sin. We create a new, false self to take the place of Consciousness called the ego.

The ego has been misunderstood by psychology as a necessary part of a persons mind. I am saying different. We create our egos to hide our evil selfish motives from us. The price we pay for this is more than anyone could ever know while stuck in egoic thinking because its more than just our past motives we must deny. Future actions are also looked at through this new warped view that hides our motives from us. Gone is our ability to judge between what is wise and unwise, because motives are exactly that. Only by seeing our own motives with clarity can we see the difference between good and evil. The ego is morally blind.

The tool the ego uses to hide our motives from ourselves is fear. What exactly do I speak of when I speak of fear? I am talking about anxiety. Anxiety in its most basic form occurs when you perform action selfishly with attachment to the results. If one is instead selfless, this one becomes fearless as well. Without attachment to cloud ones vision, fear dissolves, because fear is, in itself, an attachment.

Selflessness is what love is, and is good. Selfishness is what fear hides behind, and is evil. Selflessness and love are inherently rational. All selfishness and fear are inherently irrational. Always.

[Adamoriens]

Hi Adamoriens,

Regardless of however you classify my belief system, you still combine two incompatible belief systems and seemingly stand in willful denial of it. You cannot ascribe to moral realism and believe that naturalistic means have created morality at the same time. If you truly ascribe to moral realism, you have to understand that naturalistic means cannot create something that has always been there. Naturalistic means is limited to attempting to discover a morality that was already there.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of scientists ascribe to scientific realism. This is why scientists don't create science, but rather attempt to describe a science that has existed as long as this universe. We do not say Einstein created relativity. In light of scientific realism, that would make no sense.

Is my point becoming any more obvious?

Hi joncash,

Your earlier thesis, if I understood you correctly, was that one cannot be both a moral realist and an atheist. I've demonstrated that this is false by definition viz. that you were conflating atheism with naturalism. For your claim to succeed, you would have to show that there is something unique about theism such that only it could conceivably ground moral facts. So far you have not.

In the OP, you seem to be positing an original Divine nature within humans that has been corrupted by selfish motives, which has prompted the creation of an ego that projects an self-image more congruent with the moral law and consigns our darker desires to the unconscious. I'm guessing that our originally pure natures were somehow totally receptive to the moral law, such that we could "sense" the law and act accordingly without interference from selfish motives. What exactly is the moral law? Is it a necessarily-existing set of non-natural facts, like the Forms of Platonic realism? If so, then objective morality depends in no way on a supreme person called God.

I'm not sure what to make of your repeated insinuations that I'm intellectually dishonest or in wilful denial. I suspect (this might sound familiar) I have a different concept than you're used to.

With regard to evolutionary explanations of morality, you should realize that these naturalistic accounts are purely historical; they seek to show why we have the moral beliefs we in fact have. They have little metaphysical bearing, which is to say that these accounts do not show anything about what does or does not exist. If theyre completely successful in explaining all of our moral beliefs, such that we cannot ascribe them to any other cause, then it means that our moral beliefs have not been caused by our sensing or intuition of real moral facts. But that doesnt actually entail that moral facts dont exist, merely that they have not played any role in the development of morality in humans. But even that latter assurance is not guaranteed by modern science, provisional as it is.

I should also mention that there are ways to be a naturalistic moral realist, so your overall point might well be false as well. This is something to think about.

[Janx]

Hey Johncash,

If you truly ascribe to moral realism, you have to understand that naturalistic means cannot create something that has always been there. Naturalistic means is limited to attempting to discover a morality that was already there.

Indeed, thus naturalistic means do not create morality. This means that morality can be an objective concept which is understood through naturalistic means.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of scientists ascribe to scientific realism. This is why scientists don't create science, but rather attempt to describe a science that has existed as long as this universe. We do not say Einstein created relativity. In light of scientific realism, that would make no sense.

This is obvious. No one would argue that science is anything other than an attempt to understand our universe. Yet the universe exists.

Similarly, morality is our attempt to categorize behavior; yet the behavior and motive exist. We do not create morality by studying it's mechanics any more than we create the universe by studying it's mechanics; morality is a function of the human mind that is already there. Understanding morality simply allows us to enhance the mechanism thus making it more effective.

I don't see how this changes the possibility of objective moral truths.

[joncash]

Hi Adamoriens,

I wish we could travel back in time to a place where I never told you any of my beliefs which you use as a very cheap excuse to dismiss my logic. I reasoned that you can't simultaneously ascribe to moral realism and also say morality is created by natural forces. Coexisting conflicting views in the same philosophy is the very definition of paradox. This is common sense, independent of my beliefs. Your reply is basically that this paradox doesn't matter when I point it out because of my beliefs. This is utter fallacy.

Let's travel even further back in time to the instant after the universe came into existence. What state of flux do you believe the physical laws of the universe were at this point? If you ascribe to scientific realism, you, like me, must believe that all scientific laws are essential axioms for necessary existence. Scientific laws don't form. They just are.

It would be completely irrational for a physicist to suggest that physical laws came to be through naturalistic means sometime after the universe came to exist because such an idea runs completely contrary to scientific realism. Physicists believe scientific laws have existed as long as the universe. To simultaneously claim to ascribe to scientific realism and at the same time claim that scientific laws could have any need to be created by natural means is contradictory.

It is no less contradictory to claim to ascribe to moral realism and at the same time claim that moral law was created by a vague natural force sometime after the birth of the universe. To ascribe to moral realism is to believe that moral law is one of these axioms for necessary existence just like scientific law. To ascribe to moral realism is to say that morality is built into the fabric of the universe from the very start. Moral law simply just is.

[Flail]

Hi Adamoriens,

I wish we could travel back in time to a place where I never told you any of my beliefs which you use as a very cheap excuse to dismiss my logic. I reasoned that you can't simultaneously ascribe to moral realism and also say morality is created by natural forces. Coexisting conflicting views in the same philosophy is the very definition of paradox. This is common sense, independent of my beliefs. Your reply is basically that this paradox doesn't matter when I point it out because of my beliefs. This is utter fallacy.

Let's travel even further back in time to the instant after the universe came into existence. What state of flux do you believe the physical laws of the universe were at this point? If you ascribe to scientific realism, you, like me, must believe that all scientific laws are essential axioms for necessary existence. Scientific laws don't form. They just are.

It would be completely irrational for a physicist to suggest that physical laws came to be through naturalistic means sometime after the universe came to exist because such an idea runs completely contrary to scientific realism. Physicists believe scientific laws have existed as long as the universe. To simultaneously claim to ascribe to scientific realism and at the same time claim that scientific laws could have any need to be created by natural means is contradictory.

It is no less contradictory to claim to ascribe to moral realism and at the same time claim that moral law was created by a vague natural force sometime after the birth of the universe. To ascribe to moral realism is to believe that moral law is one of these axioms for necessary existence just like scientific law. To ascribe to moral realism is to say that morality is built into the fabric of the universe from the very start. Moral law simply just is.

Your argument is 'apples and oranges'. Human beings with the capacity for reason and logic and the will to survive have evolved systems of government and society wherein it serves the communal interests to engage social contracts implied in fact wherein ethical reciprocities become moral fabric. I can imagine cave men eventually realizing as their minds evolved that perhaps more hunting time would be available if they didn't have to guard their fires and their women from their neighbors. So they tacitly agreed to: I won't steal from you if you don't steal from me. To make such rules more enforceable for some they may have even put a 'God' with it and made it a Commandment, hard to tell. But morals are subjective and conceptual, not absolute or pre-existing. I can find no evidence that morality exists apart from the human mind the way gravity exists apart from the human mind.

[Adamoriens]

Hi joncash,

This is all a tragic misunderstanding. At no point during this discussion have I said that moral facts are true in virtue of being the result of evolution, or even that moral facts are natural ones. In fact, I agree that the idea of a moral fact is probably incompatible with its emerging contingently through evolution.

We might distinguish between moral beliefs and moral knowledge. Moral knowledge could be thought of as a subset of moral beliefs; those that are both true and are causally connected to moral facts. There might be other conditions, but these are enough for my point. According to a totally successful evolutionary explanation, our moral beliefs are not connected causally to moral facts; they are connected causally to evolutionary forces. Therefore those beliefs would not be knowledge, even if they happened to be true. To have moral knowledge, we would have to somehow "sense" moral facts, even unconsciously, or they would have to be self-evident, or they could be revealed to us by someone who knows about them etc. But notice that our having no moral knowledge does not entail that there are no moral facts, hence the mistake of thinking that the success of sociobiology entails that there are no moral facts. It simply doesn't follow.

My takeaway point is that this all occurs irrespective of religious belief. There is a logical compatibility between atheism and moral realism, and, for that matter, theism and moral subjectivism.

[Adamoriens]

Your argument is 'apples and oranges'. Human beings with the capacity for reason and logic and the will to survive have evolved systems of government and society wherein it serves the communal interests to engage social contracts implied in fact wherein ethical reciprocities become moral fabric. I can imagine cave men eventually realizing as their minds evolved that perhaps more hunting time would be available if they didn't have to guard their fires and their women from their neighbors. So they tacitly agreed to: I won't steal from you if you don't steal from me. To make such rules more enforceable for some they may have even put a 'God' with it and made it a Commandment, hard to tell. But morals are subjective and conceptual, not absolute or pre-existing. I can find no evidence that morality exists apart from the human mind the way gravity exists apart from the human mind.

I'm not well-read enough to make a case for moral realism. However, it might be the case that the presumption is in favour of moral realism, such that it's reasonable to believe it without meeting some standard of evidence. This might work something like the presumption that the physical world exists, or that mathematics reflects reality. Perhaps believing that certain things are morally right and wrong is simply a basic belief with no further line of support. In this case it wouldn't be irrational to accept it, just as one might accept the axiom that we ought to only believe those things we have evidence for.

[catalyst]

I have not read the entire thread because basically, my comments relate to the OP first and foremost.

Joncash,

I don't necessarily believe that morality as such is "divine" by nature. That said, I do believe that all human beings (and many other animals too) are hard-wired for compassion and altruistic behaviour. There is a huge difference as compassion and altruism sometimes fly in the face of what capital G god or other god models, teach. It is the taught bollocks though, interestingly based on what are considered moral behaviours, that throws what IS hard-wired, out of kilter. In other words, God concepts screw up what should be, a natural flow.

No one really needs to be taught fundamentals to their existence. Unfortunately though, many rely on the taught "stuff", and as such, make claims that they are morally superior because they follow the taught "stuff". All that dodgy information does is create things like hatred, bigotry, racism, ego and irrational fear and that "stuff" smothers the hard-wired to "JUST KNOW" things.

IMO, the intrinsic; being the hard-wired compassion and altruism, has ZERO to do with ANY god; whether it be yours with a capital G or any other. If anything, it fights against what IS naturally within us all.

Cat.

[Adamoriens]

I have not read the entire thread because basically, my comments relate to the OP first and foremost.

Joncash,

I don't necessarily believe that morality as such is "divine" by nature. That said, I do believe that all human beings (and many other animals too) are hard-wired for compassion and altruistic behaviour. There is a huge difference as compassion and altruism sometimes fly in the face of what capital G god or other god models, teach. It is the taught bollocks though, interestingly based on what are considered moral behaviours, that throws what IS hard-wired, out of kilter. In other words, God concepts screw up what should be, a natural flow.

No one really needs to be taught fundamentals to their existence. Unfortunately though, many rely on the taught "stuff", and as such, make claims that they are morally superior because they follow the taught "stuff". All that dodgy information does is create things like hatred, bigotry, racism, ego and irrational fear and that "stuff" smothers the hard-wired to "JUST KNOW" things.

IMO, the intrinsic; being the hard-wired compassion and altruism, has ZERO to do with ANY god; whether it be yours with a capital G or any other. If anything, it fights against what IS naturally within us all.

Cat.

Hi Catalyst,

This seems like an implausible story to me. Hatred, bigotry and irrational fears seem to be innate as well, not simply cultural. Evolution favours cooperation with in-group members and competition with out-group members.

[joncash]

Hello cat,

Okay, let's leave divinity out of this to begin at least. You agree with me that many beings are hardwired for altruistic behavior. My claim is that all sentient beings possess this hardwiring and the reason for this is that moral realism is true.

To ascribe to moral realism is to believe that moral law is an axiom for necessary existence. Moral law simply just is.

To ascribe to moral realism is to say that morality is built into the universe from the very start. Suddenly, you have this very mystical idea arising out of knowing that there is true good and true evil. The next rational question for the mind that truly wishes to know the Truth is: How did that moral fabric get there (and why)? Believing in morality gives you the start of a perfectly rational God concept.

[Janx]

Hello cat,

Okay, let's leave divinity out of this to begin at least. You agree with me that many beings are hardwired for altruistic behavior. My claim is that all sentient beings possess this hardwiring and the reason for this is that moral realism is true.

If altruistic behavior is hardwired then it is not a choice. Isn't choice the linchpin of morality? If not then automated bomb disposal robots can be defined as "moral"

To ascribe to moral realism is to believe that moral law is an axiom for necessary existence. Moral law simply just is.

To ascribe to moral realism is to say that morality is built into the universe from the very start. Suddenly, you have this very mystical idea arising out of knowing that there is true good and true evil. The next rational question for the mind that truly wishes to know the Truth is: How did that moral fabric get there (and why)? Believing in morality gives you the start of a perfectly rational God concept.

Not really. Moral realism at it's core is simply the belief that moral statements can be true.

I don't see your your moral concept is rational. Having a God does nothing to answer our questions regarding morality. Belief systems can only tell us WHAT is immoral not WHY it is immoral. Saying something is immoral by God's design simply makes a moral statement God's OPINION rather than our opinion. Thus we are still left with the question of why something is deemed moral/immoral. This is simply passing the buck.