We are all agents of the Matrix

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Crackmonster wrote:

Ultimately, we have no choice, but it is the illusion of choice that is the driving force in creating personality, it is the thing which is oh so hard to define about humans and other beings different from what we would like to consider inanimate matter. We have something that makes us attempt to find meaning of life and our position in it, and that is what drives us to create a subjective reality. Also, for all practical purposes you do have a choice, it is only backwards reasoned that you do not - and therefore entirely irrelevant.

Mostly false.

1. Morality is based upon the premise that actors choose between choices with varying distance from the optimal. Determinism destroys this choice, and thus destroys The concepts of good and evil. You say you believe in good and evil; this is a contradiction.

The correct strategy is to vehemently oppose determinism. If determinism is false, it muddies the water between good and evil by trying to make them indistinguishable from each other; it is therefore a weapon of the apologists of evil. If determinism is true, then there is no morality due to lack of choice, and one cannot be held accountable for claiming that a true determinism is false.

2. Subjective means "based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions." What you sense — see, hear, etc — is personal, but this evidence is not based on feelings, tastes, or opinions; it isn't subjective. It is only after inductive reasoning is applied, which is based on the choice to believe or not, that subjectivity enters into the formulation of one's personal construct of reality.

In other words, reality within consciousness is like a massive, difficult jigsaw puzzle. The pieces (evidence) are objective, but no person gets all of the pieces — and often rely on others to tell them what their pieces look like. It's certainly possible to combine pieces in an incorrect way, and it's possible there's only one correct answer. Since the pieces themselves are objective and the completed puzzle is beyond our reckoning, it seems at best woefully premature to say that reality is subjective.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

My point in all this is it's impossible to weigh the goodness or badness of any set of actions no matter how obvious it appears

Well, if you want to predict the future implications of actions, you have to limit yourself to some frame of observation or interval. I do agree that an action cannot be described just as "good" or "evil" (binary logic), only degrees of good & evil (fuzzy logic). But events can be weighted, compared and estimated.

I wasn't talking from our human perspective, but from an universal perspective. Technological intelligent life is a lot more rare, because the conditions for it to exist are a lot more rare. Bacterial life is vastly more abundant and therefore less valuable, from an universal pov of scarcity, potential & entropy. So strictly speaking, destroying humans is more evil (or more wasteful) than destroying bacteria.

If substance A can be easily obtained everywhere with little energy (eg. hydrogen - the most abundant substance in the universe) and substance B is a lot more scarce & requires more energy input to obtain (eg. Plutonium), then A is less valuable than B, regardless of why you'd need them in a specific case.

I can say that the Holocaust was more evil (more wasteful, more disastrous), for a certain "frame of reference", than the Rwandan genocide, because more talented people were lost in the Holocaust (scientists, artists, etc..), than in the tribalistic genocide of Rwanda. Might sound horrible, but not all people have the same (potential) value.

The Holocaust didn't "just happen", it happened and it was 'really bad', because a lot of value & potential was lost, never to return. Expressed with fuzzy logic, you could say that this event was really close to 100% bad, say 99.9% bad and only 0.1% good, not only from our human perspective, but from an universal one.

If universally nothing can be valued or weighted, then it would be easy to say that my life or your life is equaly valuable as a glass of water. Or that existence is just the same as non-existence, aka both are "irrelevant in the grand scheme" (grand scheme being nothing, so it is also irrelevant and worthless).

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Crackmonster wrote:

I see what you are saying even before reading your example and cannot disagree, but what applies to choice, unpredictability and reality applies to good and evil as well. While it is true that it is not there as an ultimate quality and is instead a relative concept, it is completely irrelevant to anything actual, and it is essential in life to be able to distinguish between right and wrong(and any practical application(which is 100% of uses) is relative).

It is a slippery slope to say there is no right or wrong, no good or evil and leads to moral decay, even if it is right.

Maybe you have not considered that just like reality, good and evil are already subjective therefore to speak of it it's already embedded in the word and need not be double defined.

I think you're conflating assessing the value of a set of actions that could occur (your 'practical application') versus judging actions that already occurred.

Obviously people should act in a way that best serves their self interest as well as the group without overly emphasizing either and in that way 'good' things generally happen. The opposite, nihilism, that slippery slope you spoke of isn't what I'm on about. I'm simply stating judging the results of those actions, regardless of what they end up being, as to whether they are 'good' or 'bad' is unknowable.

Edit: Maybe a better way to put what I'm trying to say is say for example you have a set of three choices to make, obviously 1 of those three is the best course of action but that value determining the best course of action is not related to and is completely independent from the 'value' of whether or not that action is 'good' or 'evil', which I argue is unknowable.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

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morbo wrote:

The extermination of millions of humans is more evil / more wrong than the extermination of millions of ants.

That's true from our perspective but not the ants. Assuming the ants at least have the desire to survive.

Again I go back to the zen master's quote, "We'll see." There's no way to judge what's more wrong or more evil. For example you could say if the choice is millions of ants vs millions of humans then from our perspective sure the ants go but what if a disease that's going to kill billions is ravaging humanity and if we didn't kill those ants we could have concocted a cure from them to save billions, millions die now to save billions later.

My point in all this is it's impossible to weigh the goodness or badness of any set of actions no matter how obvious it appears and a person seeking wider awareness and consciousness like the OP would at least consider these other avenues of contemplation rather than prematurely stopping analysis after only considering a limited perspective.

Incorrect; that was not your point and you are shifting goalposts. Your explicit point earlier was, and I quote directly, "There is no right or wrong or good or evil." Your argument supporting this disproves your original claim, because it relies on measuring the difference in morality of an action after difficult-to-predict evidence from a future time is made evident.

Even after the goalpost shifts, it's still poorly worded. Weighing the morality is still possible; weighing it with absolute certainty and absolute precision might not be, but is normally not required. The tape measure sees a lot more use than precision calipers. Your perfect is the enemy of the good here.

You miss the point Scrotie. And this answer also answers you Georg in why the viewpoint that it is unknowable is irrelevant, although i agree with you in that it is unknowable in full, and i move forward with what is meaningful.

What i write completely supports "determinism", however determinism is always irrelevant to everything, whereas the other is needed to function healthily. That is my point. You can then argue all you want that our minds reality is wrong, but that will always be irrelevant to living life and getting along in the world, just like you need to understand what we perceive as chaos in the world to live optimally in it besides it never truly being unpredictable.

According to determinism, a person cannot be moral, a person cannot be conscious. All the concepts that lead to anyone finding their higher being are then pure nonsense according to determinism. At least in the way you are arguing, but it isn't fully like that. Anyway, Hitler was no more evil than mother Theresa and so forth, right?. We need these mental constructs to understand and interact with the world in healthy ways, and we have them, our minds create them, that makes them real to us as well. Determinism says more clearly in backwards reasoning that if you believe in morality, it happened because of your past that led you to believe(not know, but believe like faith) in morality.

Now recall when I said:

"

Ultimately, we have no choice, but it is the illusion of choice that is the driving force in creating personality, it is the thing which is oh so hard to define about humans and other beings different from what we would like to consider inanimate matter. We have something that makes us attempt to find meaning of life and our position in it, and that is what drives us to create a subjective reality.

Notice i never changed my stance in saying determinism is ultimately right, but i said the illusion is important, and it arrises from us creating a subjective reality. It is a neat little trick our mind, or whatever else we could call it, can do and it serves us greatly.

Determinism is right ultimately. However, it is always irrelevant because in any applied use the words are always subjective and when you understand enough you will see that is just what they are which solves the complexity mystery with no further complications or need to argue. When i ask you what is the reality of anything you give me your subjective understanding based on what you have experienced - you will never know and will never give me the complete "absolute reality". - the only other answer is always "I don't know", in which case you see sticking to determinism narrowly is worthless in life as then we would answer all questions with "I don't know".

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Crackmonster wrote:

According to determinism, a person cannot be moral, a person cannot be conscious. All the concepts that lead to anyone finding their higher being are then pure nonsense according to determinism. At least in the way you are arguing, but it isn't fully like that. Anyway, Hitler was no more evil than mother Theresa and so forth, right?. We need these mental constructs to understand and interact with the world in healthy ways, and we have them, our minds create them, that makes them real to us as well. Determinism says more clearly in backwards reasoning that if you believe in morality, it happened because of your past that led you to believe(not know, but believe like faith) in morality.

Faith. Exactly.

You can science forever, collect heaps of data supporting a hypothesis, but science never proves anything. "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." — Albert Einstein. The distance between hypothesis and theory might be narrowed by evidence, but like the infinite halving of a distance evidence never quite gets there; the remainder of that distance is always closed by a leap of faith.

Faith is always a choice. The amount of evidence necessary for a leap of faith in inductive reasoning is not fixed. Some people require much less evidence than others. Each person has their own epistemological ethics they use to determine under which conditions they convince themselves, and under which conditions they remain unconvinced.

The only things we know with full certainty are the things we sense (hear, see, etc) — but not necessarily why we sense them — and deductive reasoning... and even then, remembering we knew such things can be a challenge. The whole of inductive reasoning — including the Matrix-challenged notion of "the world we perceive is real" — is rooted in faith.

Therefore, it is false that if you believe in morality, it happened because of your past that led you to believe in morality. It is widely considered epistemologically ethical to believe in a thing on the basis of evidence, and for good reason, but no evidence is technically required for belief. Each person's epistemological ethics are their own, and they could believe differently given the exact same inputs as another. It is choice, not determinism.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Crackmonster wrote:

According to determinism, a person cannot be moral, a person cannot be conscious. All the concepts that lead to anyone finding their higher being are then pure nonsense according to determinism. At least in the way you are arguing, but it isn't fully like that. Anyway, Hitler was no more evil than mother Theresa and so forth, right?. We need these mental constructs to understand and interact with the world in healthy ways, and we have them, our minds create them, that makes them real to us as well. Determinism says more clearly in backwards reasoning that if you believe in morality, it happened because of your past that led you to believe(not know, but believe like faith) in morality.

Faith. Exactly.

You can science forever, collect heaps of data supporting a hypothesis, but science never proves anything. "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." — Albert Einstein. The distance between hypothesis and theory might be narrowed by evidence, but like the infinite halving of a distance evidence never quite gets there; the remainder of that distance is always closed by a leap of faith.

Faith is always a choice. The amount of evidence necessary for a leap of faith in inductive reasoning is not fixed. Some people require much less evidence than others. Each person has their own epistemological ethics they use to determine under which conditions they convince themselves, and under which conditions they remain unconvinced.

The only things we know with full certainty are the things we sense (hear, see, etc) — but not necessarily why we sense them — and deductive reasoning... and even then, remembering we knew such things can be a challenge. The whole of inductive reasoning — including the Matrix-challenged notion of "the world we perceive is real" — is rooted in faith.

Therefore, it is false that if you believe in morality, it happened because of your past that led you to believe in morality. It is widely considered epistemologically ethical to believe in a thing on the basis of evidence, and for good reason, but no evidence is technically required for belief. Each person's epistemological ethics are their own, and they could believe differently given the exact same inputs as another. It is choice, not determinism.

Attempt to answer the question; "Where did that idea/faith/belief etc come from?", you invariably uncover some web of causality that leads back to determinism.

Having gaps in our reasoning resulting from generalizations of Godel's Incompletness theorems etc does not mean the causal chain breaks down. It might require your belief but even that requirement could be described by determinism.

Edit: A better way to say that might be: Just because something is unprovable and thus someone has to 'choose' for themselves to believe in the truth of that something for it to be true to them at least subjectively does not mean they didn't arrive at that choice through a causal chain sufficient to describe determinism.

Due to the complexity of the causal chain in such circumstances it's impossible define the statement 'they could believe differently given the exact same inputs as another' as true. Ironically this statement itself requires the kind of 'faith' you're describing for it to be considered either true or false, which I think then we could logically conclude its meaninglessness.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Legit lolled.

OT worthy post.

Peace,

-Boem-

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鬼殺し wrote:

The bullshitsu

Is that a new art form i am unaware of? It has a catchy new-age-trend ring to it.

I enjoyed some scenes from the movie and some music they used and it's a good conversation starter if your sixteen and have all that youth "imma change the world" vibe going on.

Peace,

-Boem-

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鬼殺し wrote:

The bullshitsu of The Matrix was stupid then, and it's stupid now. It was a good way to get mocked mercilessly in undergrad philosophy classes. Those movies aged so badly.

I kinda liked 'em. Still do. But they were entertainment first and foremost, not a philosophical treatise. I wonder what precisely you were mocking in those undergrad philosophy classes.