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

A while ago we chatted about ethics in the absence of God. I now have an entry on the topic, modestly entitled 'Ethics', which is currently going through peer review. The peer review conversation is at: http://www.h2g2.com/F48874?thread=87220&post=707794 The entry is at: http://www.h2g2.com/A468920 You will now be returned to your regularly scheduled pillowcase... ;-)

Time spent searching for God is time wasted. Carpe diem.
I do however agree with you UMP () about the necessity of creativity and generating different models. The problem is that promoting the traditional idea of God (I am not accusing you of this)leads many people to exactly the opposite behaviour. Dogmatism.

I read your entry on ethics, Lucinda. It is interesting and well argued, I will check into the peer review forum later. I am well aware that there are many kinds of foundations on which ethical systems can be based, and in a way there is a lot of equivalence between them. But there are also situations where just about any ethical system can break down. There are "lose-lose" situations where just about no choice is a right one. I wonder if there would be a way to come up with a strategy to avoid such "lose-lose" situations in the first place.

My own system of ethics is not a reactive one but a pro-active one; it is about what to do in the absence of problems, or avoiding problems in the first place. And in my own case it is based on what I believe to be the truth: that my life, my soul is not confined to my present body and location in spacetime, but interlinked with everything else. So, if anyone anywhere in the world suffers, I suffer. And if future generations enjoy the fruit of my present labors, then I enjoy it too. And it goes beyond humans: I can identify with every living creature, so the happiness of all things at all times is my priority. So my code of ethics is very simple: act constructively and positive in everything, in a way that will benefit the greatest amount of living creatures for the greatest period of time. And because I believe in these interconnections I believe I can actually make a contribution that will affect everything for all of time.

Percy, just what does "carpe diem" mean anyway? (Not a translation, I know what it means, I'm asking what it "means", get it?! !) We seem to have incredibly little time here on earth. Just HOW is it possible to "make the most" of it? Whatever you choose to do, there will remain an infinity of things you could have done but never got around to. You can dedicate your life to the experience of sensual pleasures, or to reading books, or to improving the lives of your fellow human beings, or to making scientific discoveries - which of those counts as the "best" use of available time? And even more important - can any pursuit be considered "wasted time"? If you take a look at society, especially if you take a look at history, you will see some interesting uses that people put their available time to. There are the Jains of ancient India (and perhaps there are still some around) whose highest ambition was to stand totally still in one place until they starved to death. There are Americans who employ every available minute in making money they will never get to spend. There are advertising executives, teenage "bubblegum pop" musicians, scriptwriters for soap operas and dozens more who spend hours and weeks and years doing inane things and seem to be totally oblivious to the fact that there might be better ways of using their time. What the heck is time anyway? The situation we find ourselves in is preposterous. Life is absurd. "Carpe diem" can mean anything to anybody.

How about instead of "seizing the day" you changed it to "seizing eternity"? To me that is the only approach that makes sense. If I thought that this life was all I had I would only spend it in a frantic frenzy of repetition of experiences that billions of people before me have experienced before and that billions of people will experience after I am gone. But because I believe that I have an eternity of time ahead of me, I am free to do what I REALLY want. I can think as long as I want about anything that I want and I can start tasks and projects that might need millions or billions or more years to complete. In practice it means that I will probably lead a life quite different from the people before and after me. This is somewhat ironic considering that I identify myself with them - but then, identity is a very complex thing. To get back to the principle: if you can think about the fullness of time in a self-transcending way it gives you a different kind of freedom, the freedom to really influence the future, to make a difference to a reality greater than your own life. You can start initiatives that will eventually benefit the entirety of mankind. And if you aren't physically there to enjoy those eventual benefits - does that mean you were a chump and wasted your time on a futile endeavour? I mean it was a real sacrifice you made. Your whole life you struggled and sweated and worried about other people's problems and then you died, and you never got a chance to have any real fun or attend to your own problems. So you missed out on a lot. But after your death all of your efforts pay off in that society improves, people are happier and more prosperous than they would have been otherwise.

If you believe that you only have a single, short life, then as an individual you would try to grab what satisfaction you can. But society would be hell and there would be very little satisfaction for anyone. If you believe that you have an unbounded life and infinite time for enjoyment, you would focus on increasing the enjoyment to be had for all eternity, on long-term efforts, and miss out on lots of short-term pleasures. But society would be heaven and there would be incredible amounts of satisfaction available for everybody.

Now suppose that the TRUTH was that this life is all we have. Even then individuals actually benefit more if everybody adopted a long-term view. But this only happens if those benefits are already available. At present society is closer to hell than to heaven. So the first generation of long-term thinkers will miss out. They will not experience the benefits of the "selfish" view, and neither will they experience the benefits of the "selfless" view. They will get the disadvantages of both, instead: live a life in hell and not even experience its meagre, fleeting pleasures before they die. From their own perspective they would in fact be acting very stupidly. So the turnaround from hell to heaven cannot occur unless there are huge numbers of people willing to act real stupid, against their own interest.

Now note that the "dogmatic" religious view you are opposed to is STILL a "short term" and selfish view. It proposes that people do have immortal souls, but that after death their souls have nothing more to do with this world and this universe. It is a divided view, with people divided from God, and from each other, and moreover divided into the "saved" and the "lost", and also a heaven and a hell that are realities separate from that of this universe.

The view I propose is very much different from this one. But it can account for the existence of views such as these. I don't want to go into that right now. But I do want to make a point that if you look at religions you will find some with very clear-cut, intricate, rigid creeds, expressed in lots of words. And you will find others with really vague creeds, expressed in images and metaphors or even unexpressed. The first kind of religion is rigid and intolerant while the second kind is open and tolerant. Now I contend that the first kind of religion is further from the truth than the second kind. If you look at some of the vaguest and hardest to understand religions you will in fact find stuff that is currently being supported by scientific theory and experiment. That is quite a long story to go into. But just note this: reality is vague and elusive, and when people try and grab firmer hold of it, they change it into illusion. They then have a clear, fixed image, but they don't realise that it is a wrong one, not the subtle and ever-changing reality itself. Then they cling to it even in the face of opposition because their insecurity cannot handle the uncertainty of the truth.

Dogmatism happens not only in religion, but in science, politics, culture and tradition - everywhere. The best response to dogmatism is openness, but usually people who feel threatened by one kind of dogmatism retreat into a different kind of dogmatism. To beat dogmatism you have to keep learning and changing throughout your life. That means pursuing ALL avenues of knowledge open to you. In the search for knowledge and understanding, NOTHING is wasted, provided you do not merely ingest knowledge and reproduce it, but DIGEST it and recreate it into ever-new forms. This very act of creativity happens to be the working of God, in each of us! And that is not a dogmatic statement, because it can be interpreted in an infinity of different ways.

wow u write a lot ump
I disagree with ur arguments
because I belive that you
are argueing that we should belive
thinks that are benifical to
us which my be ok for the genral
Sun reading population but
just dosent satisfy me.
No one has refuted my fairies in
red buses hypothosis so I fail to
see why every one should not follow
the way of not wearing any pants becuse
it makes the faires happy! this hyp will
benifit people as they will all be less restriced.
THe surch for truth is not aposed to
romantic poetical stuff but you must
remember there is a diff between what
evokes emotion and what is meaningfull
and abstractly usefull.
JK the unwise
worship the faires

follow them and your life
will be better they are only
a mad fiction of JKs sad
imagination but Ump says there
is no reason to dismiss them
so why should we to sing
about their buses is much more
satisfying then to sing about
physics.Let thier power guide
you!

Hmm, hell I´ll go with any religion that tells ppl not to wear pants Don´t you think the fairies would prefer if women were to be entirely naked?

NO
Only I can KNow#
THe Fairys wishs
If you DoUt thIs
Then iT is jUst
because U haVe
closed UR mind@
to POsibLitys]
othe.R then Ur oWn!
Belif,s SSSSSSS
ThiS MeaNs you
Ar e bAd scienTist
noT A Tru@E poet
liKE mE!!!!!!

UMP - 'carpe diem' means that life is wonderful - live it. One does not have to 'transcend' oneself to do this. Consider also 'vita brevis, ars longa'. The art may transcend the artist, but the artist cannot transcend himself. She is herself. 'Self-transcendant' is a contradiction in terms. If there were a prize for meaningless verbal effluxion then 'self-transcendant' would be right 'up' there with 'morality' and 'ethics'.

Literally "Seize the Day" - a direct quote from Horace - "Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero". "Grab the day, put no trust in tomorrow". A similar sentiment appears in Isiah 22 v 13. "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die." Reverse the order of the premises of the argument and one finds the motivation for the modern western hedonistic lifestyle. It is, perhaps, closeness to death (how much was moral behavious affected by the cold war for instance?) the prompts one to Live for Today. I have been reading Saul Bellow recently. In Humboldts Gift there are some magnificent quotes about how science must not be allowed to triumph over art (within which, I think we all seem to be saying in different ways, religion can now be classified).

I call the points below, derived from Saul Bellow, IN DEFENCE OF ART AND RELIGION

1) I have seen, on one related thread, the dogmatic assertion that there is nothing after death - blank non-being. Bellow asks himself the crucial question "Suppose...that oblivion is not the case? What, then, have I been doing for about six decades?". If the rationalist interpretation is accepted, it follows that how you live your life is "meaningless" (to quote the maudlin author of Ecclesiastes). Few REALLY believe this.

2) "certain kinds of misunderstanding are full of useful hints". How true. Not all religious or sociological teaching is wholly true, but it may contain some useful benefits to those prepared to examine it with an open mind

3) Ferenczi noted "nothing could be further from instinct than rationality". He therefore equates rationality with madness (acting against ones own (life preserving?) instincts). As proof he cites Newton (one could easily cite Nietzche). The Enlightment was the development of the intellect beyond the realm of need (science was no lnger undertaken for the benefit of mankind but for the extension of knowledge for its own sake)

4) In the early Modern period, "life lost the ability to arrange itself". He states that intellectuals took on the role of arranging it and suggests that it is "one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project".

5) Spinoza says the mind is fed by joy by things eternal and infinite

"A world of categories devoid of spirit waits for life to return"

Don't let the B*stards grind you down

Glider

"If the rationalist interpretation is accepted, it follows that how you live your life is "meaningless" (to quote the maudlin author of Ecclesiastes). Few REALLY believe this." - I would counter that with former Senator Moynihan's "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, however, they are not entitled to their own facts." Your "few really believe this" is an opinion, not a fact. Facts are not determined democratically.

As for the rest of your points in defence, they're more about feeling good than of doing the right thing. People have been screwing up the world enough because they're doing what feels good, and the rationalist goes mad because only he can see the consequences.

That quote by the Senator was pretty good, if it wasn´t for him being a politician I would use it.

People spend a lot of their life trying to find what the meaning of it is. I wonder what moron told them there was supposed to be a meaning with it?

I am probably wasting my words, but here goes ... the Meaning of Life is determined by the Universe itself and does not depend in the slightest on what individuals think. The purpose of the Universe is to produce life in the greatest possible abundance and diversity, and also to produce Consciousness and Knowledge in the most detailed form possible. We are only tiny little bits of the process. And at the very same time each and every one of us can encompass the totality of the entire process. The part can contain the whole. That is not meaningless effusion, and neither is self-transcendance a contradiction in terms. We transcend ourselves all the time. If we could not do that, we would not have been able to know anything at all about the outside world, and all our words would be meaningless, so why have a discussion like this? In fact if you could not transcend yourself, in the sense that your awareness was able to pass beyond the boundaries of your brain, then this entire discussion might be merely a hallucination in your troubled mind.

Glider - we know perfectly well the literal translation of 'carpe diem'. Sometimes it is necessary to read more than just the last posting.
I am glad you're here Colonel. I was beginning to feel outnumbered in this pit of insanity. If I had ever been inclined to read Saul Bellow I would now relegate that inclination to a place below many more worthy authors. The suggestion that the enlightenment was stretching the search for knowledge beyond need makes me shudder. The hypocrisy of posting such a thing on the internet is so great that, in charity, I can only assume that the implications have not been considered.

well, we don't *need* the internet, I'm sure. In my day we had yoghurt pots and string...

(oops, yoghurt pots came after the enlightenment too, didn't they?)

Percy, rest assured there are many forms of sanity. Many of which are considered insane.
I do not understand what you mean by
"The suggestion that the enlightenment was stretching the search for knowledge beyond need makes me shudder. The hypocrisy of posting such a thing on the internet is so great that, in charity, I can only assume that the implications have not been considered".
Of course, that might be because I'm tired and have an exam in all to few hours. Would be so kind as to explain a bit further?

Colonel Sellers: I'm sorry, I just have to be a nitpicker. I hope you will forgive me some day.. There is something like a fact determined by democracy. I belive it's called something like concensus-truth. (That might not be a word at all, but it's close to what we call it in norwegian..). That kind of truth is a pretty useless truth, but it's there nonetheless. In some occurences it might actually have some value. In this argument however, it has not.

Still, I'm listening eagerly. This is most interesting.

If I understand Percy correctly he's simply saying that the result of the enlightenment 'stretching the search for knowledge beyond need' has been computers, the internet, cars, sanitation, rocket flight, phones, a bunch of art and music that would interest me if I wasn't a humourless scientist, germ theory, genetics, and so forth.

And that if you really feel that they went too far in the enlightenment, the moral response might be to not use any of the products of that age (or based thereon). Such as h2g2.

Consensus Truth is an interesting breed of truth... it has many amusing properties...
Suppose there are three electoral candidates, Alice, Bob, and Chris. It can be consensus truth that Alice is better than Bob, and that Bob is better than Chris, and that Chris is better than Alice. All at the same time.
Similarly there can be consensus truth that Alice is not best, Bob is not best, Chris is not best, and that at least one of Alice, Bob, Chris is the best.

good luck in your exam...

I do not except that one
can to be transcendent of
ones self as one is ones self
how ever much you experience
that experience is you.
The fact that some of the
things we do are not necessary
for survival my make them
transcendent of our survival
instinct but evolution (of matter
and knowledge) has equipped us
with other instincts, these
other instincts such as the surch
for truth are not how ever transcendent
of self as they are part of ones psyche.
They have no 'vale' above and beyond
there existence.
On another note, I hate marmite but
I wouldn't surest that there is
a metaphysical sense in which marmite
is disgusting it is only my nature
that makes it disgusting for me
I could possibly (because of some other
interest of my psyche) will my self to
like Marmite and if I kept eating it
I could start likeing it.(this has happened
to me with coffee which I now love)
It is surly the same with morals
The Idea of killing bunny rabbits is morally
repugnant to me but I do not surest that it
is in any way transcendently 'evil' only
that it is my nature to wish that people
do not this bunny slaughtering. I could probably
even choose to change my nature (If some
part of me wished) by going out shooting
rabbits till I got used to it like I
got used to drinking coffee, and I could start
liking it (the same as coffee).
People are not divorced from them selves so
transcendence is nonsense.

I still don't get it, but perhaps I never will. Thanks anyway. Consensus truth is nice to have in Football, and in Electing Presidents and other silly little games like that.

cosensous truth
just means
popular opinoin
thats all.