Premise:
- A “bad state” is a state that an organism would want to change.
- A “good state” is a state that an organism seeks to achieve.
Therefore:
- A “bad action” is causing an organism to enter a state that they would want to change.
- A “good action” is helping an organism achieve a state that they don’t want to change.
Unfortunately, sometimes the good state of one organism depends on the bad state of another (or of the same organism at a different time). So for any organism (and we are probably the only ones on this planet at this time) with the capacity to weigh up actions on the basis of cui bono? (and when?), there will be frequent tension between competing claims. I suggest that our methodology for resolving these claims are what constitutes what we call our “morality”, and that our methods of agreeing on this methodology are what constitutes our justice systems. I also suggest that both arise directly from of our capacity to weigh up alternative courses of action on the basis of competing claims to the right to a “good state”, and need have nothing to do with whether or not there is a God or gods who care either.
Man of all creatures
Is superlative
(Away melancholy)
He of all creatures alone
Raiseth a stone
(Away melancholy)
Into the stone, the god
Pours what he knows of good
Calling, good, God.
Away melancholy, let it go.Speak not to me of tears,
Tyranny, pox, wars,
Saying, Can God
Stone of man’s thoughts, be good?
Say rather it is enough
That the stuffed
Stone of man’s good, growing,
By man’s called God.
Away, melancholy, let it goStevie Smith, “Away Melancholy“
Although of course, if there is such a God, and that God is good, she might care very deeply.
List some.
I think I read recently of a state constitution that prohibits atheists from holding office. That would be sort of like not allowing atheist admins at TSZ. Hmmm…
To borrow one from your own recent posts, child abuse.
I didn’t deny the existence of objective moral values. I said that there is probably an optimal set of behaviors for a gregarious species that evolved in small tribes, and that the values implied by those behaviors are biologically built-in, though the exact applications can vary.
So that general pattern of behavior can be said to be objective in the sense that it works better than alternatives for helping such a species thrive. I think the term I’m looking for is “satisficing”.
keiths:
Mung:
Of course not. Think, Mung.
Go for it. What do you consider abusive that is accepted by all cultures everywhere. (Not necessarily every individual)
I spent a number of years testifying as an expert witness in child abuse cases, so I’ve heard a lot.
Why?
keiths, to Mung:
Mung:
I do. I thought you were a Christian, but your knowledge of Christianity seems to be as poor as your knowledge of the Bible.
Obedience to God is extremely important in Christianity. Haven’t you figured that out?
keiths:
Neil:
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!
Earlier, I wrote :
petrushka,
What implied equivalency? Who are you thinking of?
In other words, you’re talking about state changes.
Who does?
petrushka,
They aren’t the same. A tennis serve is a pattern of behavior, but the brain is in a different state at the moment of the toss than it is at the moment the racket hits the ball.
Flint,
I would hesitate to say that each social species has its own species-unique kind of morality. That seems to underestimate both how moral norms function in establishing cooperation in human societies, and also the uniqueness of cooperation in human beings. There’s a growing body of evidence that the ability to cooperate spontaneously with strangers is unique to human beings (see “Why Humans Run the World” and “Cooperation is What Makes Us Human“).
While prosocial behavior is found in chimps and other primates, it seems to be limited to conspecifics that are already a known quantity. Helping out a complete stranger is a different thing. We humans can even do things like figure out within seconds that a complete stranger doing the same thing that we are — such as driving a car — has the same intentions as we do — arrive at a destination and avoid an accident — and make a split-second decision as to how these goals are best achieved — such as allowing the other person to make their turn or be assertive — and then communicate one’s intention, as by flashing one’s headlights.
I’m not saying that cooperation is all there is to morality — far from it! — but I am saying that we can understand a lot about what morality is by thinking about it terms of systems of norms that tend to facilitate better cooperation over the long-term.
This is a meaningless statement. Or, more precisely, it adds no additional meaning.
Brain state adds a pseudo technical explanation or description without adding any useful information.
There are some possible uses for the term. There’s a term “state dependent learning” which means that things learned under the influence of drugs may not be recalled unless the drugs are present.
There are states of fear, anxiety, anger and so forth.
Lots of possible meanings, but no clear technical meaning.
But I mostly object to the term when it is used by creationists to imply that qualia cannot be attributed to brain states. Or something like that. We would be better off not having the term.
“Brain states are groups of neurons firing at the same time in the same frequency”
What is a Brain State (academia page for the paper)
Go for what? If you don’t think child abuse is morally wrong why do you appeal to it as a prime example of what not to do? When you testified at child abuse trials why on earth did you testify?
I am not being allowed to download that. But it seems rather nebulous. And the synchronicity sounds more like a seizure than normal brain function.
Now that just hurts. Ouch. I want my mommy. keiths is being mean.
petrushka,
In this context I took it to mean the current configuration of the neurons in the brain, including action potentials. Is there a problem with using the term in that sense that I’m not seeing?
NOTE_ Alan, How the fuck do you allow any shit that comes out of this braindead moron’s skull to continue, but arbitrarily move my posts which are a REPLY to the shit he posts to be removed-AND THEN CLAIM that the site is here for all to discuss? This is the whole problem with Lizzies, “This site is more conducive to conversation, but we don’t censor claim.”
Its why she claims she left UD. So now you get to decide which ad hominen bullshit gets to stay and which doesn’t. wtf.
And now, as more evidence why Barry was right to ban Lizzie, because he believed she wasn’t arguing in good faith, I present the case here. Lizzie went on a long speech about how do we know if a God is good. I asked Lizzie to explain what she meant by good. Her only reply was that she is good, when she does good things….a nonanswer.
I asked her to clarify that non-answer, which included her saying something about giving food to someone who was hungry but she couldn’t even say if it was good for her to give the food or not good for her to give the food, because then she might be hungry….so now WE STILL don’t have any answer as to what Lizzie means by good, and then she just pretends the conversation never happened.
Barry was absolutely right, that is NOT discussing in good faith, something that is supposed to be against the rules here!
Guano has to go.
Does it mean anything? Can a brain state be recorded or transferred or even analyzed?
There are pathological brain states where most of the chaotic behavior is missing, that is the neurons are firing synchronously. The degree of regularity is higher in the alligator brain, the older parts.
But I think in general, that the term implies — unjustifiably — the impression that we know what is going on. Dare I mention that when this came up yesterday, Lizzie agreed. Is there anyone here more qualified to have an opinion?
Mung,
That would be great if they did it with ALL guano, only that is not what happens. Only the RESPONSE to the guano goes. Its why Barry was right.
petrushka,
In theory, sure. In practice, no. I do read a lot of science fiction and am hopeful, though.
Not as far as I know. My view is simply that at any given point in time what we call a brain is a physical state of matter. That’s what I mean by brain state. Whether or not that is useful depends on the context.
Posts do not get sent to Guano for moral reasons. But you apparently used some “bad words.” I’ve asked for clarification.
Guano needs to go because it’s a farce and the rules that allegedly justify the sending of posts to Guano are ill defined and not enforceable.
The use of the term “brain state” implies a deterministic system, such that transitions from one state to another are predictable and reversible. Until we know that this is the case with the brain, the term “brain state” is unjustified and probably even misleading.
But hey, our models have to start somewhere, even if they are completely wrong.
That’s science!
Mung:
No. Both deterministic and non-deterministic systems have states.
petrushka,
The concept of ‘state’ is ubiquitous and tremendously useful in science and engineering. (It shows up in math, too.)
It’s just as natural and appropriate to talk about brain states as it is to talk about the states of other physical systems.
‘State’ can have a range of technical meanings depending on context and on the relevant details at the desired level of observation and analysis. Consider computers, for example. A high-level programmer may only care about program state: the value of all variables and the current locus of execution in his or her program. An assembly language programmer will care about architectural state (the value of all software-visible registers) and memory state (the value of each memory location in the cache and memory subsystem). A logic designer will care about digital state: the value of each flip-flop and memory element in the system. There are even more varieties of state as the level of abstraction decreases, until we arrive at the full physical state. At that level of (non-)abstraction any object, whether computer, brain, or bowling ball, has a state consisting of all the physical details of the system.
I’ll be interested to hear Lizzie’s and KN’s reasons for wanting to jettison such a useful concept.
Mung,
Yes, well, in principle I kind of agree with the guano. I only decided, after nothing was done about Richards vacuous diarrhea ( and I asked for something to be done about it) that Ok, if they aren’t going to do anything, about him, then he will get it back.
There is a lot of complaining about how UD banned some posters. I don’t really agree with that, but if this site is going to complain about that, and then just use another way of censoring some people and not others (calling some posts off topic, moving some to guano and not others, putting some posters in “moderation” que), well, then as I have said before, I will take honesty over hypocrisy.
Richard is the biggest troll on this site, and his worthless droll is always allowed to continue.
Also a not-what-I-said answer. If you are going to quote my “reply”, please quote what I actually said which was to specify those good things..
There is no reality in which Banny was right.
Re brain states: I’m not saying that it is always wrong to talk about “brain states” – I use the term myself. It’s that my experience of conversations in which the term is bandied about is that it usually isn’t helpful.
I think it’s much more useful to think of the brain in terms of dynamic processes than as a series of states. For instance, in some of the MEG work we are doing at the moment, we are looking at the differences in the time course of neural oscillations following a relevant, versus an identical irrelevant, visual stimulus. They start off very similar, but one goes one way and one goes another; one “ignites” as it were, while the other “goes out”. You could see it as a series of brain states (indeed you can model it as a chaotic system in which the state of the system at any one snapshot determines the state at the next) but that level of analysis doesn’t really capture what is of interest, which is the dynamic pattern.
In other words I don’t think the state is that useful a level of analysis. The relevant emergent property is 4D, not 3D.
Can the moderation discussion go to the moderation thread, please? It’s both a distraction from the topic of this thread, and a useless place to put it. If I’m going to look at these suggestions it would be helpful to have them in one sensible place.
But I’ll make one comment about the rules: the rules do not require members to post in good faith; they to make the assumption that the other person is arguing in good faith. Whether they are or not.
Mung,
What keiths said, but also the criterion of reversibility. Entropy increase is locally reversible (statistical mechanics) but has a directional arrow above small-scale fluctuation. Microstates and macrostates. Ditto selective allele frequency change.
I wonder, when a biological automaton sees the Light, does it gain a soul?*** Or is its current … er … brain-state partially imprinted on Soul, which apparently has a longer shelf-life. Conversely for apostasy. Or is one ‘stuck like that’ either way?
*** And a valid view of morality! 😉
I suspect that most theists think WJM’s view of dichotomising humanity into automata/embodied souls is wrong. Yet they never say so.
it stinks in the big tent but they know as soon as they open a flap to let some air in it’ll collapse. So everyone politely ignores those on their “side” even when they have mutually exclusive positions.
Child abuse is an objective moral value? What value does it have and how do you know?
No it doesn’t. Quantum uncertainty.
Didn’t I already ask that question?
I’m finding it hard to read every post.
If we had a clear definition of the technical meaning of “brain state”, I would not be objecting to that expression.
OMagain:
Prime example:
Mung makes the following unbiblical statement…
…but fifth is afraid to openly disagree. And we all know how fifth feels about the Bible.
Lizzie,
I don’t see why not. Indeed, plotting a trajectory through state space is a great way to visualize a dynamic process!
Neil,
One such definition is that a brain state is the physical state of the brain. Every physical system has a physical state, after all.
The particular definition chosen depends on context, just as it does in computer science and physics.
Allan,
And there’s the always unanswered question: How do souls (or whatever you choose to call the immaterial thingamajigs) twiddle with brains to steer them in the right direction?
Kantian Naturalist,
I appreciate the description of your views. I think where we fundamentally diverge is in the most basic premise about the nature of our existence. I’m not particularly a dualist either, but dualistic terminology is pretty much all I have to use here in order to avoid recurring long explanations for those here with short memories.
Let’s just leave dualism aside. IMO, we have two entirely different views of what is fundamentally causing existence; to simplify, you (correct me if I’m wrong) fundamentally believe that non-mindful matter and energy behaving according to patterns generates an emergent phenomena we call mind, and then those minds figure out, as best they can, the patterned behaviors of matter and energy that surround and generate these physiological minds. So to you, a mind figuring such things out is actually engaged in accumulating what real truth and knowledge there is to be found in the world, which is why science is so important to that process.
I, on the other hand, hold the premise that the reverse is true – that mind is actually what is generating the patterns of behavior of what we call matter and energy (even if they are essentially the same thing – non-dualist – like “matter” in a dream). I don’t see science as a means of gaining knowledge about what created our minds, but rather about gaining a useful understanding about what our minds (or God’s) have created. Science, however, cannot answer the question about why what exists was created or – more importantly – why we as individuals are experiencing what we are experiencing.
I think this is one of the profound differences between a spiritual framework and a non-spiritual framework (although you are certainly free to define “spiritual” some other way); and that is a spiritual framework considers the question “why” more fundamental than the question “how”. Science only deals with “how”. While “how” is a very useful question, “why”, on the other hand, is the most important kind of question (from a spiritual framework). “Why”, in a spiritual framework, is really all that matters.
IOW, under a spiritual framework, “how” is just a means by which to play around in what “why” has created. Spirituality is a mindset where “why” is essential and “how” is largely irrelevant; physicalism is a mindset where “how” is essential and “why” is largely irrelevant. Even if we dismiss dualism, in one “mind” and the question “why” are primary and the physical/how secondary, and in the other the reverse is the case.
It seems t me that your perspective necessarily presumes questions like “Why am I here? Why am I experiencing this?” are mis-phrased “how” questions. Science describes facts and models and doesn’t ultimately answer why those facts and models are what they are. Indeed, from a scientific-knowledge point of view, “why” questions are rather nonsensical.
From my perspective, science is like a really fun toy or a really useful tool; you can do lots of really cool things with it, but it provides no essential knowledge or truths.
So you’ve finally worked something out of significance.
But I’m afraid I’ve got some terrible news for you. There are no useful “why” answers to be had. At least, not so far. As discussed, theists can’t even agree on the most basic tenants of “objective morality” so given that rate of progress the universe will be over before “why” gets a reasonable answer.
Then perhaps share some of those truths with the rest of us then, if they are so profound.
You know it’s perfectly possible for atheists to also be “spiritual” people too, right?