Posts Tagged ‘Philosophy’

Moral science?

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

If I piqued anyone’s interests with my previous entries maybe I can start this one with an open ended question. Do you think there can be such a thing as moral science?

To define it, it would be equal essentially to physical or biological science in that it would describe universal processes that go on in the world or within a specific set, like human beings.

A moral science would thus describe at the very least, a framework according to which to determine how ALL people form their morals and at most determine the actual morals that are universal to all people.

It is important to distinguish this from the imposition of ones morals on to others. This would not be the objective of moral science anymore than it is an objective of physical sciences to impose ones arbitrary idea of why objects attract each other on to all others to believe. It is about observing, hypothesizing and then testing the hypothesis.

Someone attempted to create such a scientific framework already. I’m not sure he’s the only one (probably not), but he’s the one who caught my attention. He is Stefan Molyneux and his theory is called “Universally Preferable Behavior“. I’ve read Part 1 where he explains most of his theory and I have to say it’s quite interesting. Stefan Molyneux is quite an unorthodox and somewhat controversial philosopher with a bit of a cult following. My assumption is that the latter is due to him being one of those easily impressive people with leadership qualities that tend to, intentionally or not, attract a little too much zeal from those impressed. I’m not a big fan of personallity cults, but it’s no reason to completely dismiss the man and his ideas. Often the best and most revolutionary ideas have been brought about by most controversial of persons.

But I’m not necessarily making up my mind about whether UPB is a valid moral science theory or not. By default I do subscribe, to an extent, to moral relativism if not because I believe that morals are always subjective and cannot be a part of predictable patterns, then because I don’t yet understand such patterns. Just because something hasn’t been discovered yet, doesn’t mean it wont be, and attempts like the UPB are thus worth paying attention to.

One thing I continue to believe as strongly as ever though is this. I can hardly go wrong if I adopt only a single moral principle, or just The Principle if you wish, a “prime directive” to use trek-speak: non-initiation of force. Whether one is a moral absolutist or a moral relativist if both can agree that at least we wont force each others beliefs and morals on to each other we can make tremendous proggress as we continue to journey through life and explore the world and our beliefs.

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The merger of realities

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

A little upgrade on last entry. I’m just trying to get this stuff out of my mind.

Taking the assumption that reality is relative to you while at the same time believing in the distinct possibility that this subjective reality of yours is based upon the absolute reality outside of you, what do you do when you are trying to convince someone that what you believe is real? Well, of course, you debate, but if both of you are assumed to have different realities then it would make sense to identify the commonalities between them.

You define the terms you use to make your claim and seek agreement from your partner on those terms. By this process you are identifying a common paradigm according to which you would judge your arguments, like defining the rules of the game. Once they have been defined and ones argument breaks them, their arguments must be taken as failing.

And I believe most people who would call themselves reasonable and are privy to scientific method would almost universally, take two things into the common paradigms: internal consistency (no logical contradictions) and empirical consistency (no contradictory evidence from reality you both defined as such).

Also it is crucial to ask questions. If you’re in doubt about whether you’re “on the same page”, that your subjectivie realities are in misalignment, nothing can detect and solve the problem better than questions. You ask your partner; so do you think this is or this isn’t? Ask questions until you understand where he’s coming from and can then see if you can match where you’re coming from with it or dispute the entire framework of thinking.

A relativist described previously would possibly just call the whole debate an illusion, but who cares about them relativists. ;) More reasonable ones would say this is a merger of realities, because in the process of pinging the reality of another you are identifying the common points and thus seeing evidence of reality that is beyond only your subjectivity, but is actually objective to both. That’d be more sensible, if you ask me. And yes, that belief reflects my own subjective reality and needs to be understood if anyone is to continue debating reality with me, among other things. :P

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“Absolute” relativism revisited

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

I was discussing absolute relativism or just “relativism” a bit more yesterday on #libervis IRC channel on irc.freenode.net where as it turned out we already have at least a couple of relativists, one of them being a voluntaryist. I’m just still not sure whether I can call them absolute relativists as the way I described it in my last blog entry doesn’t necessarily describe them.

Their basic premise seems to be that all reality is dependent on the mind and what it perceives since anything that it doesn’t perceive it can’t also consider to be “real”. The reason this doesn’t necessarily reflect the belief that truth is only what you choose it to be is that it is based in perception more than deliberate choice or in other words, perception rather than conception. So a relativist who isn’t absolute in the sense I’ve described previously, but only in the sanse that all we see as real depends on mind perceiving it as such, wouldn’t necessarily say everything he conceives as truth is truth and everything he conceives as false is false. He would just say that everything he perceives as truth and finds to be true by logical and empirical observation of and within “his” reality, is true.

I can’t say I have much of a problem with that assertion. I just think it’s pretty useless and irrelevant. The only thing that it really means is that there is a possibility that reality I am perceiving is just some sort of an illusion or that absolute external or objective reality doesn’t exist. But by definition it can’t deny its existence either. I could practically come up with the same kind of conclusion from my default stand point as well; which is that external objective reality exists, for all I know, but all I see is my “subjective” reality and it is an attempt at copying the objective reality on which it builds. So I too can say that I could be perceiving a mere illusion or that the nature of external reality is that it doesn’t exist, or whatever. :P

So I’m basically, and have been for a while, more of a relativist than not. The difference, if there’s any, seems to be merely semantical. Even relativists like my friends on #libervis would say that they live as if the reality they perceive is truly real. I can say the same thing in different words; I live knowing that reality I perceive is based on reality that is objective and absolute. It might be coming down to a difference between assuming what may or may not be and just deciding to make the assumption into “knowledge” based upon the observation of reality in question itself. It may seem illogical, but within the framework of relativism it really isn’t. If I can assume that the orange in front of me is real to the point of acting on that assumption as if it was absolute knowledge, it practically ceases to matter whether I’m calling the assumption an assumption or “knowledge”.

But you can see now why relativist statements like this are seldom useful or relevant. It’s more of mental entertainment than anything else.

Still, there’s an interesting observation to be made. If you claim that there is a possibility that you don’t exist, you’re making a self-destructive claim because in order to make that claim you have to exist. A relativist would say, though, that this statement “existence precedes the ability to make the claim” is based upon the observation rather than reality itself.

But then again a relativist can say this sort of thing for anything at all. There’s no standard. Again, this is why it is simply irrelevant, useless mental masturbation.

Here’s another interesting case. You and your friend are observing paintings in a gallery and stop by a particular painting. You tell your friend that you see a painting of a red car and your friend confirms it. His confirmation could in one sense be taken as evidence that reality you perceive as real is actually in common with his own and thus there is a single reality encompassing both of you. Yes, if you were to look through his own mind you might see what your own mind would call a green color, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the same pattern (as Taco mentioned in last entry’s comments) and his confirmation proves that the same pattern exists in both of your perceived realities.

Now, a relativist could deal that away by simply saying that your friend could also be just a figment of your imagination since perceiving him requires your mind. Can you see how useless relativism is?

Because seriously, I think one of the smartest things you can say to such statements is “so what”. It simply doesn’t matter. To conceive (or fantasize) of the possibility that your friend is just a figment of your own mind matters not to the fact that you’re still seeing him. And my gut would tell me that it is more likely that he is real than that he is imagined. And if that isn’t enough for a relativist then I can just say that I’d rather for my own sanity assume he is real than not, and it wouldn’t be contradictory to the relativist point because such an assumption is just as valid as any other.

And that again shows simply the intangibility, irrelevance, uselessness and mental masturbation inherent in absolutely relativistic statements and “beliefs”.

By relativist admission alone whatever you prefer to believe about the nature of reality you can believe, but according to that reality in question itself (including logic and empirical evidence derived from it), it proves its own existence. Nothing else matters.

There’s also an argument to be made similar to the one christians would use to keep believing in God except I personally believe it makes far more sense here: Pascal’s wager. The reason I think it’s far more applicable here is because unlike with the existence of God (I’m sure christians would disagree though) everything you perceive seems to scream reality is real whereas it requires positive effort to keep reminding yourself that it couldn’t be. And since both propositions are equally valid it wouldn’t be wrong to say reality does exist outside of your mind while it would be prudent to do so in order to account for the tendency of perceive reality to suggest just that.

I would suggest that you will live a more productive and happy life if you assume reality as real and your friends as real people than if you constantly entertain the idea that you’re just hallucinating.

Whether you’ll take that suggestion or not is up to you.

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Absolute relativism

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Absolute relativism is basically a belief that truth is only what you choose it to be. It is relative to your own choice and nothing more. If you choose a statement to be true it is true and if you choose it to be false it is false. The only thing that can possibly determine the falsehood or truthness of a statement is your choice of either.

This allows for such statements as the following to be true, if you decide and convince yourself it’s true:

“This marble is both red and blue to me at the same time”

I added “to me” purposely in order to account for the claim that what one perceives as red may be what another perceives as blue. I tried to make the statement into one which is according to my own current paradigm stating an impossibility.

But according to the belief that every statement can be true or false depending ONLY on whether I choose to believe it is or isn’t, that statement can be true.

As you can imagine I have trouble accepting this. It effectively means that a cause is equal to relativity. I can say an object is moving relative to another object from which you observe. But according to absolute relativism whether the observing object exists or not is completely irrelevant. The object is moving because I have chosen that it does. Thus absolute relativism denies all other relativism replacing all cause and effect with a single thing: your choice, regardless of whether it’s conscious or unconscious. The only thing that can matter is your choice. (And even that statement can be chosen to be false.)

Absolute relativism thus implies that I am a god and you and other humans exist only because I think you do. I am omniscient because everything I see is everything that I choose I can see and I am omnipotent because everything I can do is everything I choose I can do. This goes beyond “The Secret” which suggests that one can alter reality, since absolute relativism puts you in the position of reality’s creator, effectively. Limits of your reality are limits you yourself have chosen to exist.

I think this is different from saying that I believe something exists only because I have perceived and chosen to believe it does. This is not about choosing beliefs, it is about choosing reality itself. If reality outside of that which you think is real does not exist, then the only reality that does exist is your own.

This kind of belief requires no evidence supporting it whatsoever because its validity or invalidity can be chosen at a whim. A true absolute relativist thus has no “standing ground” from which to judge because the standing ground itself is something he brought into existence by nothing more than a choice. Thus there are no paradigms according to which evaluate true or false. There’s no need for evidence or a scientific process.

I’m not sure there even is anyone who is truly an absolute relativist. I think instead that everyone who would ever claim to be one is just trying to escape the need to provide a more solid argument or evidence for his belief. It’s like saying “you’re wrong because I say so”.

And if there’s in any case ever a need for solid evidence to support a particular belief that evidence must be based on something that exists outside of your own mind, something that your own mind did not fabricate. In other words, reality external to that which is consisted only of what we believe (subjective reality or “belief reality”) must exist. This does not necessarily mean that there couldn’t be other realities existing outside of the one external to my subjective reality, but that ceases to matter.

Also it doesn’t matter if a statement is true or false if its truthness or falsehood does not matter to me or you individually. Also, it doesn’t matter to the universe itself (external reality) whether you are right or wrong about something.

In any case, I as a voluntaryist have to say that if absolute relativism means anything at all then it is that an individual matters since it is individual choice which makes up individual’s reality. Forcing one reality on another results in destruction. On the other hand, since believing in absolute relativism can also mean believing that such force is perfectly justified and perhaps even good, the whole idea of absolute relativism is one of perpetual contradiction, a constant collision of realities and paradigms.

Currently, I remain a relativist only in the sense of knowing I can be wrong, enough to make me believe that I shouldn’t force my beliefs on another. But I also believe that reality outside of my beliefs exists as well and it is where the data stream I perceive comes from. I tend to call that one the “absolute reality” and my own subjective belief as my “subjective reality” or “relative reality”.

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Exploring animal rights

Monday, October 27th, 2008

I sometimes get into heated discussions with my (former) friend regarding my belief that all human action must be voluntary and that therefore we should have no coercive government (instead each individual should govern himself). We rarely agree on any point and never agree on our paradigms. Right now I even doubt whether he has a consistent paradigm due to his apparently absolutist relativist thinking, but I digress (and absolute relativism may be a good topic for some other entry).

One good thing that I take out of the recent debate is my curiosity about the issue of animal rights. Since my last blog entry effectively posits that rights are inherent in being what and who you are rather than something given by others it does not in principle discriminate between species. It applies to every thing and every one in the universe. In that entry my focus was on humans though and here I want to focus on animals.

The basic premise of the previous entry was that if one was capable of something one must have the right to exercise that something so long as it doesn’t deny another to exercise his own capabilities. To deny the existence of this right is to deny the existence of this capability and since it is what makes one what it is, it means to deny its existence as such.

According to this, an animal which is alive has the right to live. If it is capable of marking property as its own it has the right to property. If it is capable of barking, running, crying and doing anything else it can do, it has the right to do all these things. The logical conclusion would seem to be that if a human denies and violates any of these rights, even while professing to be a voluntaryist like me, is not being consistent OR is suffering from what my (former) friend called “specieism” (an equivalent to racism) where I believe only humans can have rights even when I see the evidence that others are capable of having rights too.

Then the only way to keep voluntaryism consistent with itself, without falling into specieism, is to either prove that a given animal is not capable of having a particular right which we habitually deny them.

Driven by that I started a discussion thread on one of the voluntaryist forums and also with a friend on IRC. I posed this as a potential threat to logical consistency of voluntaryism. What we concluded is something that I apparently overlooked. I even hinted at it in an above sentence where I mentioned being “capable of having rights”. It is the issue of demanding rights.

A human may exist as a human only so long as he can exercise what makes him human, including demand. If we look at history only those who cared about rights and demanded and defended them have ever been admitted to them. Otherwise their humanity was suppressed by other humans.

A definition of “demand” could be useful. According to wiktionary it corresponds to a need, desire, claim for something, an urgent request or an order. A demand for rights, that is the recognition and respect of self as such then corresponds to a need, desire, claim, request or order to be recognized as yourself.

Are animals, then, capable of demanding their rights? I think the answer depends on whether they recognize their own rights to begin with, recognizing their own capabilities and what makes them themselves. In other words, it seems to come back to the question of whether they are self-aware? If they are not even aware of themselves as what they are then they don’t even recognize their own rights as part of who they are and are thus incapable of demanding such recognition from others. This is why most animals also willfully aggress on other animals and why humans which fail to recognize their own rights also tend to fail respecting the rights of others. Such lack of recognition results in violence.

It is hard to answer this question with absolute certainty, but given what we can scientifically determine so far is that animals aren’t self aware in which case the capability of demanding rights is not a part of who they are and thus granting them to live or do anything that they are instinctually driven to is up to anyone in their vicinity, whether it is another animal or a human. This is what makes it possible for a human to own an animal and let it do some things while denying it to do others.

This is also consistent with the known and widespread belief (even among non-voluntaryists) that only sentient rights can have rights. I think I understand better now the basis of this claim. The emphasis is on can. Whether they can or can’t depends on whether they are sentient.

This said, every individual decides for himself what sights or acts does he prefers more or less and I would say I don’t like the sight of a human torturing animals. I therefore reserve the right to ostracise everyone who does this. Animals might not be capable of having rights, but I am capable of feeling disgusted when they are being hurt for no good reason and based on this disgust I can make or break my relationships with other humans, at least this way, through non-forceful action, sending a signal to them that I don’t approve.

And like with everything in the free market, the more people demand of others not to do something less people are likely to do it.

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Right to Life, Liberty and Property Equals Human Being

Saturday, October 25th, 2008

I believe that rights are not given nor earned. They are inherent in who we are and inseparable from it. If one stomps on the right of another, his humanity is violated because to be is to exercise what makes you human.

And what is it that makes you human? You are alive, self aware, capable of thinking and acting on your thoughts and thus capable of creating and acquiring. All of this together constitutes your being human and to deny you to use your life, self awareness and ability to think, create and acquire would be to deny your humanity, to deny you to BE human. Thus life, liberty and property are one and the same. Without life you perish. Without liberty you cannot exercise abilities that make you human. Without property, the result of these exercises, you have nothing to strive for, nothing to cherish, nothing to call home, nothing to call your own – the fruit of your labor.

No two beings can occupy the same space, digest the same piece of food or breed the same molecules of air, at the same time. That’s the very basis of property ownership, simply the need to occupy and consume a particular piece of the world in order to exist AS whatever you naturally are; a fish, plant, bacterium or.. a human.

Since as a human, you’re in addition to being alive also defined by being self aware and able to think and act human property ownership is expanded to accommodate for the exercise of these traits. So in addition to the food you’re digesting, air you are breeding, space you are occupying (your body) you also own everything else that is created or acquired by the work of your mind and body.

No two persons can own the same thing. If we pretend they do there is a conflict. Which one decides what to do with it? Which one uses it when both want to use it? Which one is responsible for it? Even when two persons agree to share something these impossibilities remain. They can only “time share” the use of a thing and “time share” the responsibility, at one time one can use it and be responsible for it and at another the other can. Effectively, it is never owned by both, never becomes “collective property”, rather ownership merely shifts from one person to the other in time according to their voluntary agreements.

Let’s take a challenging claim; that a given road is a public property. This claims that everyone living in a city where the road is located is the owner of that road at the same time. This also means that everything everyone in that city wants to do on or with that road they can do, all at the same time. So one can decide to drive a car on it as fast as he likes whereas another can decide to walk at the same place where the other guy is speeding a car. It also means that at the same time as those two are doing this, a third person can come and drill a hole in the middle of the road.

This obviously doesn’t fit reality and is in fact impossible. It is thus not surprising that when one claims a particular thing as “public property” it never really means that everyone can do anything they want with it. Instead there is a government which enforces rules of how it is going to be used. This government or moreover the head of the government (its president, for instance) contractually bound to his employers to propose and create the rules, is the actual singular owner of this so called “public property”.

Thus the conception of collective ownership or “public property” is a fallacy. It cannot and does not exist. Property by definition is always private and always belonging to a single individual. It is that person’s very extension, when acquired by voluntary consent of previous owners (through trade or gift etc.) or created by him or those whom agreed to create it for him. In all cases property is the result of thoughts and actions applied without violation of another’s right to think and act by himself.

Without property there can be no liberty. To deny ownership altogether is to deny ownership of self. This implies that someone else owns you and that thus someone else can decide what to do with you or what you should be, instead of you. You therefore have no liberty whatsoever.

If self ownership is admitted, but ownership of everything else is denied then your acts are not for you, but for someone else. What use is the admission of self ownership if nothing you do with yourself results in an enrichment of yourself, if every result you produce is for someone else to take without your consent. You are still a slave.

If self ownership and ownership of only some of the rest is admitted it is still not you who decides which of the results you produce are yours to keep and which are someone elses. Someone else can change the criteria at a whim. Because of this you’re still not in control of that which you yourself produce and remain a slave.

In short, life, liberty and property are human rights indivisible from each other and the process of being human. Violation of those is the violation of someone being human because one can’t be human without exercising that which makes him or her human.

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Everything happens for a reason.

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

The more I understand causality the less I believe in coincidences. Everything happens for a reason. A reason for every event is its cause. Where conscious choice is involved, the cause may be a purpose of the one who chooses. I pursue a goal, thus I act to produce a cause that will produce an event that is a part of the chain of events that leads to the achievement of my goal – my purpose.

The more one knows and understands the multitude of causality chains affecting ones pursuit of purpose the more powerful one is. Having a defined purpose is, however, a pre-requisite.

We may be facing a new Great Depression in this world, and a subsequent resurgence of violent fascism and war. This too happens for a reason. Some would say it’s prophecies coming true. Others would blame human inability to resist violence (which results in governments tyranizing markets of otherwise free people). Some would say both, or some other imaginative reason.

But whatever we say or believe the reason exists and it is what it is regardless of what someone thinks it is. The closer one is to the truth of what this reason is, and moreover what all to one relevant reasons are, the more powerful one is.

Great Depression and increases of threatening violence easily instill fear in us, but there is an illusive truth somewhere in my mind which seems to hold the key which opens the doors out of that prison of fear and into the endless realm of possibilities. Where even in the worst of times one can have a world of his own. Once you rise above the chains of events – the causalities of our time and sees what they are you can mold it to your will. Even if you can’t change the whole world, since it involves others who may have the same power as you, you can transform your world.

But it is an elusive truth. My guess would be that it reflects, one way or another, the exact belief that is the topic of this post: everything happens for a reason.

So perhaps, if you find and know the reason to everything that affects you and everything you want to be affected by you can act against reactions that press you down and instill fear in you, to create the consequences that do the opposite – empowering you.

Maybe the greatest of souls will be born during the hard times that are coming. Maybe the singularity, the awakening, the new enlightenment, the transition, the evolutionary leap – will happen when the times seem the darkest.

And perhaps it will be a deliberate act by the few and a react by the many inspired by those few, that will bring it about.

Freedom is a state of mind. So is serenity and power. Rewiring a mind to these states is a painful process, but it is possible.

As the banks fall and violence rises, let us be ready. A powerful mind can stop bullets before they’ve been fired and make a mountain out of a depression.

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