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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (38000)	5/27/2007 7:35:35 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541990

>>I understand why people want to have souls. But it actually seems a counter intuitive idea to me.<< Iktomi - I agree. On a slightly related note, in that article about the Creation Museum, I found this paragraph interesting: "Charles Leckie, a family doctor in Tupelo, Miss., wrapped a family vacation around a visit. On the way, they stopped at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, where Leckie challenged the guide's assertion that the rock formations are millions of years old. He asks why people should believe 'so-called experts.' After all, 'they're all human.'" It seems like Dr. Leckie has a good question there, until you realize that he only thinks the Bible is the word of God because some humans told him so. By the way, Dale's link had a couple of extra characters at the end, and didn't work. Here's a working version: washingtonpost.com - Allen

To: epicure who wrote (38000)	5/27/2007 7:47:25 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541990

I think it is an attempt to explain consciousness. Don't you find quite odd that science has not enabled us in the least to understand what another species thinks? SciFi explores such ideas, but science has drawn a big blank. I know that my dog exhibits pretty much all the emotions I do, so I'm pretty sure that experiencing a dog's POV would not be totally alien to me just as we now know that pretty much everything else about a dog from his DNA to physical morphology is also similar to us. Of course, a few hundred years ago, lots of white people thought that there was an unimaginable gulf between them and black people. Sometimes I still think there is a significant gulf between me and my wife, and I've often wished I could inhabit her brain for a day. So far, no luck...

To: epicure who wrote (38000)	5/27/2007 7:57:50 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 541990

Revealing The Origins Of Morality -- Good And Evil, Liberal And Conservative Science Daily — How much money would it take to get you to stick a pin into your palm? How much to stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know? How much to slap a friend in the face (with his or her permission) as part of a comedy skit? Well, what about slapping you father (with his permission) as part of a skit? How you answer questions such as these may reveal something about your morality, and even your politics--conservatives, for example, tend to care more about issues of hierarchy and respect, while liberals concentrate on caring and fairness. In a review to be published in the May 18 issue of the journal Science, Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, discusses a new consensus scientists are reaching on the origins and mechanisms of morality. Haidt shows how evolutionary, neurological and social-psychological insights are being synthesized in support of three principles: Intuitive primacy, which says that human emotions and gut feelings generally drive our moral judgments. Moral thinking if for social doing, which says that we engage in moral reasoning not to figure out the truth, but to persuade other people of our virtue or to influence them to support us. Morality binds and builds, which says that morality and gossip were crucial for the evolution of human ultrasociality, which allows humans -- but no other primates -- to live in large and highly cooperative groups. "Putting these three principles together forces us to re-evaluate many of our most cherished notions about ourselves," says Haidt, whose own research demonstrates that people generally follow their gut feelings and make up moral reasons afterwards. "Since the time of the Enlightenment," Haidt says, "many philosophers have celebrated the power and virtue of cool, dispassionate reasoning. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth. This doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere -- in the emotions and intuitions that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place." Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of -- and constrained by -- a small set of evolved psychological systems. He presents evidence that political liberals rely primarily on two of these systems, involving emotional sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives, however, construct their moral understandings on those two systems plus three others, which involve emotional sensitivities to in-group boundaries, authority and spiritual purity. "We all start off with the same evolved moral capacities," says Haidt, "but then we each learn only a subset of the available human virtues and values. We often end up demonizing people with different political ideologies because of our inability to appreciate the moral motives operating on the other side of a conflict. We are surrounded by moral conflicts, on the personal level, the national level and the international level. The recent scientific advances in moral psychology can help explain why these conflicts are so passionate and so intractable. An understanding of moral psychology can also point to some new ways to bridge these divides, to appeal to hearts and minds on both sides of a conflict." From here: sciencedaily.com Bolds are mine.