h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What I said COULD have been interpreted as saying good and evil don't exist. The English language doesn't lend itself to clarity on the issue of whether mental structures are "real". Though we usually talk about them as if they were.
Perhaps the other lack of clarity is between good and evil as descriptions (which they are) and as explanations (which they're not, IMO).

I understand you're thinking of visiting us on this side of the pond, Nyssa. Hope you have a good time here if you make it!

Noggin

Call me a cynic: on this Earth there is evil, but rarely pure good. But good and evil, the instinct to judge them and the conviction of the truth is "evil", if you will.
We make our own distinctions. Free will, and all that. *shrug*

I agree with EE: plus Hi Nyssa

Good and evil exist, but are they independent values, like Plato's Forms, or something else?

Well, they can't be strictly independent values. No good - no evil; and vice versa. Like hot and cold.

Noggin

No... I meant that the values of good and evil are independent of reality rather than of one another...

What I'm getting at is the relationship between good and evil...

If good and evil are real they must be part of reality.
And if they're part of reality they must be real. But they're not THINGS, either material or Platonic. Deep water, here, FwT!
What is the SENSE of real?
Unless that wasn't what you had in mind either?

Noggin

I put my foot in it there didn't I?!?!

Im just overwhelmed by the new h2g2 skin!!

How do you know that they aren't platonic things?

Technically, how do we know the truth about anything. As someone i know says "this is the truth as i perceive it"

Mathematicians would argue that 2+2 is always 4, an independent value to how we perceive it...

2+2=4 because we define it as such. The problems would start if the definition stopped working. (If we started to perceive the number we call 5 when we added two things to two more things.)

There are socially agreed (tacitly) rules for deciding when something is true, or even intelligible. In a pluralist society these rules may be "further from the surface" than in monolithic societies.

Noggin

I agree, because I'm too lazy to think of a clever reply.

I disagree, but I'm not going to say why, because I'm being deliberately obstreperous [?]...

And that means what exactly?

awkward

Oh, I see!

good

But with the uncertanty principle, we see that we can actually define the values '2' or '4'.....

I meant *can't*

What's the uncertainty principle got to do with it?

It's true you can't define number terms in a way that a being with no number terms in its understanding of the universe could understand.
You can't define space or time or good and bad outside their own terms either. They're all basic.

There are no Platonic forms because they don't do any work in the universe we know. What would pure evil, unattached to any person or action, be like?

Noggin

none whatsoever... sorry, I'm not being very helpful today am i?