If anyone is having a good time, then it’s not the worst possible misery for everyone.
I’m not sure that I agree with the evolutionary portion of his argument either, but it’s very minor and not necessary for the argument as a whole to be valid. He makes some very cogent points I feel, to summarize:
An ancient book full of all sorts of nonsense is not a reasonable basis for a moral system.
Belief in God is unnecessary for a moral system, and in fact can create problems.
Misery is objectively bad and people understand this. Conversely, well-being is objectively good.
Morality and human values can be understood through science. Science itself is underpinned by values that are similar to moral values.
A system of morality can be grounded in axiomatic assumptions, like other fields of science.
We can speak objectively about subjective facts. It is possible for people to value the wrong things.
Honest inquiry is all that is needed to understand moral concepts.
Finley often notes that amoral, “evil” people exist in abundance, but I don’t see how this affects either the atheist or theistic arguments. Moral judgments which we achieve by consensus don’t require everyone to agree or everyone to buy in, the same as moral judgments from a book. Moral values don’t seem to me to be either an evolutionary imperative or something which has been imprinted upon us by a benevolent deity.
We differ from other animals in our ability to make assessments about reality and the results of our actions. Our consciousness gives us the ability to make objective moral judgments based on what we experience in reality. Your average person can discern how his actions will potentially achieve good or harm others. That’s all it takes to reach a moral system based on consensus. There will always be people who are more or less moral than the average–people aren’t robots.
Nope, if mind is an illusion then misery is just an illusion, just a meaningless false appearance, in the end completely meaningless.
It merely appears to you that well-being produces further human flourishing. But this is false. What is actually happening is biological processes are functioning in a particular sequence giving those series of appearances.
So, in the end, what any half-sophisticated christian etc means by “religion gives us morality” is not the words written on the pages but rather the assertion that persons are more than just flesh. Well-being is not just a false appearance it is a functioning thing of its right
If mind is an illusion? What do you mean by that?
I am arguing that well-being is a desirable state. For example, is it better to live or to die? I didn’t say it necessarily produces “human flourishing” (not that it would seem to hurt.) I don’t see the relevance of any biological processes functioning in any sequence.
You’d have to demonstrate to me why you believe that people are “more than just flesh.” The mind is far more complex than our muscles, but consciousness is purely a product of the mind.
As I said mind (subject awareness) is just a false appearance. It seems to exist, but it doesn’t actually. What actually exists is just moving particles. The same way that a stick with one end on fire exists, but a circle of fire does not it is just a stick with one end on fire being spun very quickly.
As such all mental states, including the qualia of well-being and the qualia of suffering, are false appearances. They do not actually exist, they do not actually function, they’re just a fire circle. “Well-being” is just a name for a sequence of moving particles (can be examined from physics pov, biological pov, etc)
Therefore there is ZERO distinction between well-being, ripping all the skin off the faces of young children for fun, and living and dying, outside of pointing to each and saying “in this case the particles are moving this way, and in this case the particles are moving that way”. There’s no morality present, there’s no goodness or badness about movements and arrangements of particles.
Harris always appeals to the common notion that we know one is bad and one is good, but these notions are illusions.
Mathematically speaking, in the limit where misery tends to infinity, that’s close enough. Alternatively, we could take the North Korean definition of “everyone”, ie., 99% of the population.
I picked on that bit because it’s the only statement that can be subjected to scientific inquiry. And it’s not ‘minor’, because he wants us to accept a ‘natural morality’ on that basis.
It is if it produces results that a lot of people agree upon as desirable.
True enough. All I’m suggesting here is that it’s one possible way to get to a moral system. Belief in God is your starting axiom, the premise from which a moral system descends, not the moral system itself. A religion, in contrast, may include a fully-formed moral system constructed in that manner.
Religious people are not more or less rational than anyone else: it’s just that the axioms from which they start their reasoning are different from (say) the atheist or agnostic. If I view God as the Christian God, who is illustrated as a God who loves his creation, wants us to be happy, and look after each other, there’s only one way I could create a nightmarish morality from that: I ignore the axiom, or I deploy flawed logic. This absolutely does happen - witness the Inquisition - but I would suggest that’s the less likely outcome.
Absolutely and demonstrably not true, which is why I keep banging on about it. Misery is subjectively bad - it’s something that nice well-adjusted people like Sam Harris find to be “obviously” good, and which people in the world’s backward shitholes either take as “obviously” normal or as something inflicted on others for entertainment. Your definition of “people” is “people who share my views”.
If you want to claim an objective reality, you must be able to point to some feature of the physical universe that defines human (or animal) misery as bad. Harris realizes this, and the best that he can come up with is a hand-waving argument about evolution, which is easily dismissed by evidence.
Come to think of it, there are plenty of nice, well-adjusted people who don’t think animal misery is bad, and they’ll give you a whole load of convoluted “logic” to explain why. Whether you fall into the “animal misery is bad” or the “animal misery is of no consequence” camp depends only on your prejudices. If that were not so, everyone would think the same way.
Triceratopes said more-or-less the same thing just there.
Not can be. Must be. The point is that you can pick your axioms at random. You can decide that God is a vengeful psychopath who wants everyone to be miserable (bits of the Muslim world seem to believe this). You can decide that God wants to minimize misery (a fairly common conception). Or you can decide that there is no God at all and make up absolutely any rules you like; there are no meta-rules to guide your selection of rules, which is where it all turns to crap for the secular moralist.
That works only if people start from the view (as Harris does) that a system of morality should be based on maximizing the common good. You misunderstand my point about evil people. I’m not talking about ‘less moral’ people, or statistical outliers. I’m talking about entire communities of outright evil people: people who worship the four horsemen, whose moral system is constructed around the assumption that evil is good. I can’t tell if you simply haven’t encountered this phenomenon or if you’re denying that it exists.
[quote=“triceratopses”]
As I said mind (subject awareness) is just a false appearance. It seems to exist, but it doesn’t actually. What actually exists is just moving particles. The same way that a stick with one end on fire exists, but a circle of fire does not it is just a stick with one end on fire being spun very quickly.
As such all mental states, including the qualia of well-being and the qualia of suffering, are false appearances. They do not actually exist, they do not actually function, they’re just a fire circle. “Well-being” is just a name for a sequence of moving particles (can be examined from physics pov, biological pov, etc)[/quote]
I find that entirely irrelevant. What matters is the awareness in itself. Sure, it’s just a factor of chemical reactions in our brain. So what? My mind works–it’s done so time and time again in testable and predictable ways–and the same can be said for people in general. You’re taking something very simple–people have minds that work–and making it unnecessarily complicated for reasons that I won’t pretend to understand.
[quote]Therefore there is ZERO distinction between well-being, ripping all the skin off the faces of young children for fun, and living and dying, outside of pointing to each and saying “in this case the particles are moving this way, and in this case the particles are moving that way”. There’s no morality present, there’s no goodness or badness about movements and arrangements of particles.
Harris always appeals to the common notion that we know one is bad and one is good, but these notions are illusions.[/quote]
I’ll stick with Harris. I don’t think for a second that thought is an illusion, but I don’t care if it is. If my pain is an illusion, do I still not feel pain? Is death an illusion? I asked you a question but you did not answer: is it better to live or to die?
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I don’t know why you’re having so much trouble with this. An atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in God or gods. It is not a claim there is no God, that is an entirely separate issue with different words attached to it. Atheism is quite simply just a rejection of a god claim.
If you tell me that you have an invisible baby fire breathing dragon in your hand, I will likely reject that claim based on bad evidence. I will not believe you until you could provide adequate proof. Would you then be tempted to say that it’s my FAITH that I’m anti invisible baby fire breathing dragon because I rejected your claim?
Atheism is simply, AND ONLY a lack of belief in God or gods.
On the aggregate when balancing all subjects and the totality of a persons life, of course they aren’t. There’s plenty of religious people who in many other areas of their life are very rational and intelligent.
On the specific subject of God, absolutely they are less rational. A belief in God requires rationality to be set aside. It requires a person to suspend all normal levels of acceptance of evidence that they use in all other walks of life.
Of course you could create a nightmarish morality from it. All that’s required for that is to read the book as it’s written and follow it. Read it, absorb it, follow it. In the case of Christianity and Islam, that would necessarily lead to human misery and suffering which I would think qualifies as nightmarish morality. You make it sound like there was no scriptural basis for the inquisition.
A smashed and non functional brain is worse than a perfectly functional one, just like a smashed and broken computer is at a lower functional state than a brand new one. So bashing someones head in with a bat is “bad.” It is not subjective to say that it’s immoral to smash someones brain to pieces with a bat, and it doesn’t require people to share my views on that. If they don’t share them, they are immoral, objectively.
I don’t think so. The far greater part of his argument is entirely independent of any consideration of evolution.
[quote]It is if it produces results that a lot of people agree upon as desirable.
[/quote]
How does it produce those results though? Who decides what’s good in it?
True enough. All I’m suggesting here is that it’s one possible way to get to a moral system. Belief in God is your starting axiom, the premise from which a moral system descends, not the moral system itself. A religion, in contrast, may include a fully-formed moral system constructed in that manner.
Religious people are not more or less rational than anyone else: it’s just that the axioms from which they start their reasoning are different from (say) the atheist or agnostic. If I view God as the Christian God, who is illustrated as a God who loves his creation, wants us to be happy, and look after each other, there’s only one way I could create a nightmarish morality from that: I ignore the axiom, or I deploy flawed logic. This absolutely does happen - witness the Inquisition - but I would suggest that’s the less likely outcome.[/quote]
That’s another question, but I wonder. I have no problem with a system based on positive ideas, but who decides what’s positive? Such conceptions change over time for one thing. Humanity has input into decisions about moral values, independent of anything any god might have said 2000 years ago.
I believe that we can make objective determinations about such questions based on our subjective view of reality. Certainly different societies have different standards based on different conditions, but what does that say? Which shithole do people want to suffer in. If people live in a society where suffering is a more of a daily reality than in our more fortunate societies, then they will become inured to it, with deleterious moral effects. But they still know the difference between suffering and well-being. Go up to someone in one of those places and offer them a piece of fruit, or smack them in the face, and see the reaction you get. I see this as part an parcel of the human condition, which has been constantly changing over the history of humanity. When survival is at a premium, other considerations start to take second place. Yet, enough people live in fortunate circumstances in our day that we have made moral progress.
I’m not saying it’s an objective reality. I’m saying that we can make objective judgments about concepts with regards to their effect on human misery or well-being.
This is more of a complicated question from the point of view of our species.
Not can be. Must be. The point is that you can pick your axioms at random. You can decide that God is a vengeful psychopath who wants everyone to be miserable (bits of the Muslim world seem to believe this). You can decide that God wants to minimize misery (a fairly common conception). Or you can decide that there is no God at all and make up absolutely any rules you like; there are no meta-rules to guide your selection of rules, which is where it all turns to crap for the secular moralist.[/quote]
Or you can work from simple ideas about human well-being. Why is that crap? And what are these “meta-rules” that apparently exist?
[quote]
That works only if people start from the view (as Harris does) that a system of morality should be based on maximizing the common good. You misunderstand my point about evil people. I’m not talking about ‘less moral’ people, or statistical outliers. I’m talking about entire communities of outright evil people: people who worship the four horsemen, whose moral system is constructed around the assumption that evil is good. I can’t tell if you simply haven’t encountered this phenomenon or if you’re denying that it exists.[/quote]
I won’t deny that people have to share ideas about moral concepts, if they are going to achieve such a system. Moral systems in human history have always been based on shared values. Where do you mean?
No, because you do have pretty solid proof that I don’t have a fire-eating dragon in my hand, viz., my hand hasn’t been incinerated and you can’t hear anything flapping around. Besides, while atheism does involve the rejection of a claim of God, it almost always involves the substitution of other beliefs - say, other explanations for observations about the existence of the universe and its properties. I don’t know why you’re having so much trouble with this.
Here’s a more realistic example: dogs exhibit all the appearances of emotions - joy, pain, fear, etc - and I might tell you that, on the basis of my observations, I believe they experience emotions which are qualitatively similar to human ones. A fashionable atheist explanation is: oh, that’s nothing but [instinctive reactions/conditioning/neurosomethingsomething].
Well, my hypothesis explains the observations just fine. In fact it explains them much better than the “nothing buttery” hypothesis, and is more theoretically sound (there isn’t a huge difference between a dog’s brain and genome, and a human’s, so we would expect their biochemistry to be very similar). However, some people have a personal preference for the latter explanation. They often justify it as more ‘rational’ but it isn’t, because its an inferior explanation for empirical facts and doesn’t generate useful predictions. Their preference basically boils down to belief, or prejudice, or a need to justify some behaviour.
Note: I’m not suggesting all atheists are horrible to animals.
Of course it doesn’t. You probably disagree with me on this, but the word ‘rational’ only applies to a chain of logic, not to the selection of predicates. If your conclusions - say, your personal moral rules - follow logically from your personal conception of God, then you are rational.
Well, this is where it gets complicated, and why I try to maintain a distinction between ‘belief in God’ and ‘religion’.
If you take any scriptural text, you can probably fish around and find justifications for bad behaviour. Or failing that, you can invent some. The theocrats who gave birth to the Inquisition got around the relative lack of violent exhortations in the New Testament by keeping the bible in a dead language, threatening people death and torture if they tried to read it for themselves or translated it, and kept the population in a state of fear, poverty and ignorance. This, I suggest, falls under the category of “ignoring your axioms” or “deploying faulty logic”, since nowhere does Jesus suggest it’s a good idea to burn people at the stake.
A personal belief in God need not have that outcome, although, as I said earlier, it depends who and what you conceive God to be. There absolutely are societies that believe God wants misery and suffering, and they set out - quite rationally - to make “his” wish come true.
Sez you, I’m afraid. Show me something about the universe - some evidence - that supports your view that smashing somebody’s brain with a baseball bat is bad. Just because it results in a smashed brain doesn’t make it bad, since that (one would assume) is the desired outcome, at least from the point of view of the bat-wielder.
It does not matter how many different ways you can butcher the meaning of the word, it simply does not mean what you say it does.
Atheism is the lack of belief in God or gods, the end.
There are atheists who believe in the big bang, and there are atheists who have never passed a science class.
There are atheists who are feminists, and atheists who are confused when they see a woman outside the kitchen.
There are atheists who vote democrat, and atheists who think Ted Cruz should be President.
There are atheists who donate to charity and feed the homeless, and atheists who rape and murder people.
I don’t know why you think the word says anything more about a person other than whether they accept or reject God claims… We have plenty of words in the English language to attach in addition to atheism that would encompass what you want it to.
Why isn’t your hand burned? —> because it’s just sitting there acting cute, not breathing fire yet
how come I can’t hear it? —> It’s wings don’t disrupt the surrounding air.
Why can’t I see it? —> It’s invisible
When I waive my hand over yours, why can’t I feel it? —> It’s phased out, unaffected by your merely human hand touching it.
But I’ve measured all the space and particles surrounding your hand and all are accounted for. There’s no dragon there. —> It exists outside of time and space
Sound familiar? We can keep backing up to the birth of the universe if you want. I still can’t prove there’s no dragon there, and I can’t prove there is no God. But I have a brain, and I have 2000+ years of the smartest minds to have come and gone and not a single one of them has produced a shred of evidence for it.
The track record for trying to prove the existence of god is so poor, so statistically close to zero percent, that I’m totally comfortable saying in all practical sense of the words God doesn’t exist (and you don’t have a dragon in your hand). Maybe he does, who knows, but it requires a complete suspension of all logic and reason and rationality to believe he does.
A total lack of proof of a claim is also evidence. So yes, I have plenty.
As Matt Dillahunty said in that clip, there’s more proof for Santa Claus than for God. At least with Santa, we can prove there are reindeers. We can prove that a well built craft can fly. We can prove there are fat men with white beards. We can prove that presents do appear on Christmas morning in many homes around the world. In some cases, we can even prove the milk and cookies that were there the night before are no longer there in the morning. A lot of that story is scientifically provable. A lot more of it than the Bible story.
But ok finley, I’ll bite. You say morality doesn’t come from evolution, it’s not a function of a forwarding of the species, and science has nothing to say about it. So, where does morality come from?
Well said, atheism indeed is simply the absence of belief in a god or gods. I’ll go as far as to say that I believe there are no gods such as people have put forward–I can’t prove conclusively that there aren’t. But as has been alluded to, the list of things that can’t be proven don’t exist is infinite. It’s certainly not a form of faith, much less a religion–those ideas get bandied about a lot. If you’re going to assert that something exists then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it exists. Don’t try to push off your inability (much less the inability or unwillingness of the “god”) to do so conclusively on me.
Precisely. We can easily see that a smashed head is bad. I don’t want one, and I don’t want to live in a world where people go around smashing each other’s heads with a bat. Who does? Outside of the truly insane, even the most amoral people understand this. They may be willing to use violence to achieve ends to a much greater degree than I am for example, but they still understand that such violence harms others, and they don’t want it to happen to them or those they particularly care about. If there were an entire society of such people, I believe that they would quickly perish. They would harm each other at a dangerous rate, and other societies would take morally correct action against them.
I wasn’t doing that. Look at the animal-consciousness example. I postulate that animals have a subjective experience of consciousness and emotional states similar to that of humans. You cannot, even in theory, disprove this (I think - if it were possible, I’m sure it would have been done by now). It’s also immune to proof in the same way that most things are - logically speaking - immune to proof. It is nothing more than an opinion.
Nevertheless, I can use that opinion - I’m going to call it a hypothesis, even though it’s not subject to scientific falsification - to make predictions about an animal’s behaviour under any circumstances you care to name. This is a critical test of a scientific hypothesis. Furthermore, I can use it to explain any given observation about that animal. My hypothesis fits all known and future facts about animal behaviour.
The competing hypothesis - that animals don’t experience emotional states but only give the appearance of one - does not offer any improvement over mine. If you go further and suggest that animal responses are “nothing but” conditioned responses etc., your explanations for common observations start getting really convoluted (for example, it’s hard to explain why a dog bounces around “happily” when its owner comes home - this behaviour has no obvious purpose). I reject that hypothesis based on its inferior utility, not on its relative likelihood.
I suggest you can treat the “God hypothesis” similarly. It offers satisfactory explanations for various human quandaries of the “why?” variety, and it doesn’t involve (as BG asserts) inventing nonsensical workarounds on-the-fly. The atheist has hypotheses about metaphysical questions which are boring at best, and unsatisfactory or nonexistent at worst. If you’re happy with that scenario, well, each to his own.
No TG, they really don’t. That’s the meaning of “amoral”. You’ve led an awfully sheltered life.
You can believe that if you want, but in reality, neither one happens. I suspect this is simply because humans are limited creatures: there’s only so much mayhem we can create in one day, at least in a society which is at caveman level and therefore doesn’t have much technology of mass destruction. Consider a country being progressively depopulated by murder: as more and more people are killed, it becomes increasingly hard work to find targets.
There are any number of examples of this. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a prime example of what sociologists call “moral inversion”. It’s been that way for decades. It exists in the “worst of all possible worlds” state that Harris describes as purely theoretical. I’m amazed he hasn’t bothered to study the place in detail. Murder, rape, and the whole gamut of depravity are completely normal. Life expectancy is <50 years. No constraint is attempted because of (a) learned helplessness in the face of a relentless onslaught and (b) broad and deep corruption of moral values, such that evil acts simply don’t outrage public consciousness.
Similar (although somewhat less extreme) conditions prevail in (e.g.) British council estates. If you don’t believe that, I suggest you try living on one for a few years.
I’ll try to answer BGs post later. But I will again ask you both: “why is it bad to bash people’s brains out?”. Your only response so far is: “it’s obvious”, and “I wouldn’t like it”. The latter demands that we all adopt a “do unto others…” morality, but I can still ask “why should I, if bashing people’s heads in gets me what I want?”. From where I’m sitting, your stance looks a lot like faith 
[quote=“finley”]
I suggest you can treat the “God hypothesis” similarly. It offers satisfactory explanations for various human quandaries of the “why?” variety, and it doesn’t involve (as BG asserts) inventing nonsensical workarounds on-the-fly. The atheist has hypotheses about metaphysical questions which are boring at best, and unsatisfactory or nonexistent at worst. If you’re happy with that scenario, well, each to his own.[/quote]
I disagree with you totally. In fact, I have little idea what animal consciousness has to do with it at all, what satisfactory explanations you propose, what the human quandaries are, what nonsensical workarounds are involved, what boring hypotheses I’m supposed to have or don’t have, and I am indeed very happy with it 
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what “atheists”–as if we were some kind of solid bloc–think about various issues. As you say, however, to each their own.
I disagree. Indeed, I come from a middle-class background, and have happily tried to stay out of trouble’s way in my life. I reject the idea that as a result I somehow don’t understand what people are capable of, however. I do, and I don’t agree with your conception of that situation.
That’s not what Harris was talking about, plain and simple. Even in such a situation, which I have already conceded can exist, simple moral truths are still simple moral truths. You’re completely overstating what occurs in such a situation. What do you think people go around and bash each other at random in such places because they have no idea what negative results there are going to be? Call me sheltered if you like, but I think that’s totally naive. Why do you think such places exist, anyway? Why does such a situation exist in the Congo and not other places? I have a vague idea but I’m not sure exactly what mechanism you’re proposing to explain this, or for the existence of human morality in general. I believe BG has asked this as well, so I look forward to your response to him.
It’s bad because it causes harm to people. I understand that I wouldn’t like to be harmed, and the damage it does to others. I suggest that when you ask the latter question, you understand this fully, but are knowingly engaging in amoral behavior for gain.
It has nothing to do with it. I was trying to give an example of an unproveable, touchy-feely, “irrational” hypothesis which nonetheless has human value.
I can give you a different one, more directly relevant: the Gaia hypothesis, or equivalently the creation myth. If you consider the earth to be the thoughtful creation of an intelligent being, you might be more inclined to treat it with respect. If you consider it to be a gift to humanity from a God who wants us to succeed, you might approach practical problems from that viewpoint.
Farmers seem to be genuinely surprised when they spray toxins everywhere to kill animals and plants they disapprove of, and as a consequence see their profits dwindle away and their land destroyed. Personally I view ‘weeds’ and ‘pests’ as part of an ecosystem that are there to help me succeed. In my conception of the planet, they can’t be anything else. This turns out surprisingly well - not just for me, but for thousands of other farmers who take a similar approach.
The failure of the “scientific” view of the world on practical application is as close as you can get to disproof of the former. The relative success of farming based on some nonsense written 4000 years ago doesn’t prove that said nonsense is true. It just means that the nonsense works.
Coming back to the subject of morality, I would argue that a person who believes in a (non-existent?) benevolent God is more likely to construct a benevolent moral code than someone who believes in nothing at all, since the latter leaves every other possibility open.
You appear not to know why they are capable of it: that is, the reasons they themselves present. If you don’t have direct experience of heroin addicts and teenage psychopaths, watch some documentaries. You might change your mind. Those who aren’t intellectually subnormal are all rational in the context of their own moral framework, which reveres evil and rejects (or has no conception of) of “good”.
Then his theory is incomplete, and of no real practical value. A theory of morality needs to explain all moral systems that exist, not just the white-middle-class-American system.
It doesn’t matter what the mechanism is. It is a data point, an empirical observation. It is simply one of many possible moral systems in an amoral universe. Places like this exist because there is no “natural morality” or “universal moral truths”. They have developed a moral code, by consensus, that embraces head-bashing as a valid way of life. You might find this completely incredible, but it is nevertheless so.
You probably know I spend a lot of time in the Philippines. I would say a good 50% of Filipinos would score high on the PCL-R. This doesn’t mean they go around knifing each other all the time. Mostly they do whatever ordinary people do. Except when they don’t: they’ll knife someone if it seems like a good idea at the time, or (less drastically) fuck someone over, steal from them, lie, cheat or manipulate simply as routine parts of their behavioural repertoire. Just last month I heard that an acquaintance - a perfectly ordinary guy - had shot one of his acquaintances because he offended him in some trivial way. They will show no remorse if arrested (or challenged by the community) and may even blame the victim for being stupid, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Interestingly, aforementioned teenage psychopaths on British housing estates do exactly the same thing. Broadly speaking, they view other human beings (and animals) as cardboard cutouts on the chessboard of life. You will no doubt ascribe this to poverty or some other environmental issue. The cause is irrelevant. The fact remains that this system of morality exists, and Harris can’t explain its existence; nor can he explain - since it clearly does not maximise general welfare - why it doesn’t get optimised away.
So you dismiss as impossible the construction of a moral framework around the idea that The Other does not matter in the slightest, even though you concede that this actually happens?
At least the theist can say: “because God doesn’t want us to harm each other”.
To show that there are universal moral truths, you still need to explain why the universe-at-large agrees with you.
I’m with Tempo Gain on this one.
I really think you don’t understand Sam Harris and his worst-possible-misery-for-everyone argument (WPME from now on).
You’ve been to the Philippines . . . me too . . . multiple times. I like it. I’ve also been to the Congo . . . by choice . . . went from south to north overland . . . spent two months there as part of my first one-year trip in Africa. It’s not a well-functioning country by any measure, but I met many people, had nothing stolen, wasn’t physically threatened, and I’m glad I visited.
[b][u]
THAT"S NOT THE WPME!
[/u][/b]
For me, being burned alive would be miserable. Seeing all of my family and friends being burned alive would be miserable. Have you read the New Testament? That version of hell that never ever ever ever ends would be miserable.
Now imagine that God covered the entire earth with gasoline instead of water this time. And picture everyone (including Noah, his 7 relatives, and every animal) “missing the ark” this time. And envisage, if you can, that instead of rain for 40 days and 40 nights, God kept pouring gas on the earth forever.
Now imagine something worse than that. That’s bad. Will you grant me (and Sam Harris) that?
Guys, I think you’re missing the point.
Of course Sam Harris’s WPME scenario is “bad”, and nobody would like it if it happened.
And yet it does happen. If you want to nitpick that the world doesn’t meet your exacting standards of absolute horribleness (you seem to imply that unless the planet is aflame in a nuclear holocaust, it ain’t that bad) you must surely acknowledge that human society can tend towards the WPME just as easily as it can tend towards enlightenment. If you count up the number of failed countries compared to the pleasant ones, I think you’ll find it’s about 50-50, which is entirely what you would expect if moral codes can be picked from an infinite subset of possibilities.
Furthermore, the universe at large wouldn’t care if the WPME came to pass. Nor, as long as it affected humans only, would the rest of the earth’s biome.
If Harris wants his theory to be accepted as “scientific”, it needs to (a) explain current observations and (b) make useful predictions. It does neither.
There is no difference in being alive and being dead as far as the human experience goes. “Alive” is just a word for a particular type of cell reproduction.
Your actual subjective experience of being alive is an illusion ie. it doesn’t exist. Subjective awarenesses (qualias) do not exist.
Harris negates the existence of the things he relies on to support his reasonings. Not good.
In case it wasn’t clear Tempo, yes, your suffering is just an illusion. As Searle the father of modern materialism says, mind and all of its states are a problem of semantics. They are akin to digestion. There is no actual entity called digestion there merely appears to be one. What is actually taking places can be reduced down to base physical function each working in concert to form an illusion of digestion. Likewise your suffering is utterly unreal and meaningless, ENTIRELY AN ILLUSION. What is actually taking places can be reduced down to base physical function each working in concert to form an illusion of mind (subjective awareness).
You guys are completely missing Sam’s points here. He’s not saying that bad things don’t happen, or that there aren’t societies that exist that are violent, and I’m sure he’s just as aware of what’s going on in the Congo and Philippines as you are. He’s simply trying to identify some objective moral truths and using science to do it. Every example you guys have been giving about bad things here and people getting killed there are totally irrelevant to his points. He’s talking about what is and isn’t moral, objectively. Not what does and doesn’t happen. People do immoral shit all the time, that says nothing to disprove his point.
As far as being able to say that a smashed brain is bad, it’s not bad because “it’s obvious” as you put it. It’s because we can scientifically prove that a smashed brain doesn’t work as well as a healthy brain. Since it’s someone else’s and they didn’t choose to get it smashed, it doesn’t seem a stretch to me that Sam has proven scientifically that smashing someone else’s brain with a bat to the point where it no longer functions is immoral. He’s not saying it doesn’t happen, or that people don’t do it because they do. He’s simply saying that smashing someones brain with a bat is objectively immoral.
Science doesn’t have much to say about whether working on Sunday is immoral, or stoning your wife for adultery is immoral. But it certainly can say that a smashed brain is in a worse functional state than a healthy one. Ethics and morality are real things that affect real people in the real world. All the philosophical things like, oh did we really experience that, do we really feel, are we even really here? Nonsense. A smashed brain doesn’t work anymore and a dead person is in a lower functional state than a living one, so smashing someones brain is immoral, objectively.
That about sums up the difference. For many people in this world it does seem like the Christian God story offers “satisfactory” explanations of why. To each his own. For others like myself, simply saying God done it says absolutely nothing about anything and it’s the furthest thing from a satisfactory explanation.
Why are we here? Because God made us in his own image and loves us and wants to spend eternity with us.
He loves us? Then why did he create parasites that’s life cycle involves eating eyeballs? God is mysterious
Does he love all of us? What about people born in India? He loves them too and will be happy to let them live in a warm climate for all of eternity.
Why did he take so long to create us? Many billions of years have gone by with no people, that’s weird. Yeah, he’s very patient
If we didn’t evolve from other animals, where did we come from? God made a man… there was a rib… and a snake… an apple… woman can’t be trusted… sin and… that’s how
How did the universe begin? God done it
Who created God? He didn’t have a creator
Surely a being complex enough to create an unbelievably complex universe also required a first cause? Nope
Why? cause I said so
I don’t feel satisfied