Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (42151)	9/25/2013 9:43:45 PM
From: GPS Info	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

Re morality at the rational level Your reply was very well thought out and clearly stated, while I am still groping for fragments of a more fundamental understating of the human mind. The religions and philosophies in our history attempted to tease out enough of our nature to provide a framework of personal interaction. We also have a variety of economic and social theories which have taken us down some very dark paths. We have had civilizations rise into empires and collapse back into tribal systems, and we are still sorting through the wreckage of the last two or three thousand years. Fundamentally, I want to understand what is it in our nature that blinds us to the seeds of destruction. When does morality actually work and when does it fail? Is it sometimes overconfidence or hubris or arrogance or selfishness or vengeance? Jared Diamond has a thesis that sometimes a problem arises that is just too big for the ruling body to handle, no matter how good their reasoning or their adherence to a rational morality. I am not currently in the market for a new moral code, nor do I have a need to refute other religious or socio-economic belief systems. I'm happy to leave that to others. My personal (high-level) view on these belief systems is that if they deny basic aspects of human nature, they will eventually fail one way or another. Pure socialism or communism removes competition from the social equation. The Shakers or the Catholic priesthood removed sexuality. Tibetan Buddhism denied self-defense in the face of aggression. Pure capitalism would deny a sense of a broad community or commons. I learned something from the Catholic Church although I stopped my participation when I was about 14. Christ does represent a set of moral values that I try to follow, along with some Buddhist ideals. Because I believe that compassion and forgiveness strengthens a family or a community, I strive for this and try to be mindful of my actions to others. I also believe that the idea of Christ is partly a construction of values, and these values are to promote cooperation, contain the level of competition such that we minimize jealousy and greed, and deal with aggression with something better than more aggression. Being equally imprecise, I think that the church or temple or mosque wants sexuality to be contained within a marriage, and two practical values of this could be to minimize the spread of venereal diseases and to provide a stable institution within which children can be raised. I think monogamous relationships without the formality of marriage would work as well. Christ's crucifixion provides another important insight in that no matter what harm anyone does to you, you can still choose how you respond to them. You can choose to show them compassion instead of the natural instinct to respond with violence and scorn and venom. For me the message of the crucifixion was that Christ understood that this idea is so critically important that He was willing to give His life to teach it to the world. The fact that I might be able to surgically or chemically remove a person's ability to regulate that choice doesn't detract from this moral ideal. In many moral codes we see the idea of freewill. I no longer believe that this can apply equally, and it probably only exists for short moments in our lives. Experimentations of 'learned helplessness' show that it can be completely removed from individuals and probably from larger groups. I had intended to review my thoughts a little more, but I will post the link of a talk by Gabor Maté on 'The Human Face of Addictive Behaviour'. youtube.com a snip from wikipedia on Dr Maté Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944, he is a survivor of the Nazi genocide. His maternal grandparents were killed in Auschwitz when he was five months old, his aunt disappeared during the war, and his father endured forced labour at the hands of the Nazis. He emigrated to Canada with his family in 1957. He was a student radical during the Vietnam era in the late 1960s and graduated with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He worked for a few years as a high school English and literature teacher, and later returned to school to pursue his childhood dream of being a physician. Maté ran a private family practice in East Vancouver for over twenty years. He was also the medical co-ordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital for seven years. Currently he is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre for the people of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Many of his patients suffer from mental illness, drug addiction and HIV, or all three. He works in harm reduction clinics in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Most recently, he has written about his experiences working with addicts in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.