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Wrong. You're confused. Allow me to explain. Step by step. >This is just a confused article which sets up a dichotomy between reason and brain science. The ar

Wrong. You're confused. Allow me to explain. Step by step. >This is just a confused article which sets up a dichotomy between reason and brain science. The article sets up an assumed dichotomy that you missed. That dichotomy is morality and reasoning. It assumes you're aware that morality and reasoning are two different and incompatible things. Then in assuming that you know this, it begins by saying that human morality is not created through reasoning but it is created as pre programmed behavior in our brain. You did not reason your way into knowing what is good or what is evil. You along with most people were born with a moral module in your head that predetermines what you consider to be "good" and "evil". It does not set up a dichotomy between reasoning and brain science. Your brain can reason it also has preprogrammed instincts. "Brain science" encompasses the existence of both. The article is saying that morality is a preprogrammed instinct. >However this isn't actually a good argument for ditching higher level concepts. Reason doesn't stand in conflict to brain science, Talking about moral issues in terms of reason or even divine judgement or whatever is engaging in a higher level of abstraction, which can be vital to aid in creating meaning. Nothing is ditched. Again reasoning never did stand in conflict with brain science and the article never claimed this to be true. You are simply making an incorrect assumption that the article is doing this. The assumption you are making is that morality = logic or morality = reasoning. It's a common mistake because much of our morality feels logical but it is not, it is all instinctual pre programmed behavior similar to hunger or pain. The issue here is that this moral module is highly integrated with our reasoning facilities so it is hard for us to see how our instinct to do "good" is similar to our instinct to avoid "pain." That being said there are certain moral paradoxes where you can bring your moral instincts into conflict with your logical brain. Meaning that these moral paradoxes can make you feel as if you should do one thing that is "moral" but when you think about it, it is actually illogical. See the link for a good example: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Trolley_problem#:~:text=The%20trolley%20problem%20is%20a,to%20save%20a%20larger%20number.&text=There%20is%20a%20runaway%20trolley,up%20and%20unable%20to%20move https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Trolley_problem#:~:text=The%20tr.... The logical outcome is to save as many people as possible by pulling the lever. But what if we replace the lever with just a single track with 5 people tied up and you can stop a train by pushing an unsuspecting really fat man in front of the train killing the fat man but stopping the train and saving 5 people. You can adjust the parameters of the experiment and change your moral feelings about the whole situation. Either way, in both thought experiments the logical thing to do is to save the most people, but I can introduce variables that mess with the emotional module in your brain. By replacing the lever with the actual pushing of a fat man the logical situation has not changed but I have influenced the moral centers of your brain. The reason why your brain is built this way is because morality was evolved to help you behave in ways that would allow you to survive in communities of humans. It was not designed to help you reason about the fine grained logical behind it all... as long as your community passed the filter of natural selection nature thought it was good enough. Your moral brain did not need fine grained internal logical consistency in order to help you survive and form communities and societies therefore nature allowed the module to evolve and form in an imperfect and semi-illogical way. The existence of a dichotomy between how we reason about this situation and how we morally feel about the situation should help you identify the fact that there are two separate modules in your brain where one module is logical and the other module is emotionally moral. >When you try to understand the meaning of a work of fiction you don't go around and count individual letters in the book and try to decipher the shape of the letter 'A', you look at emerging properties of the story and how things hang together in the broadest, not the narrowest, sense of the term. Likewise when discussing morality, it probably isn't very fruitful to try looking at chemicals in synapses for the same reason it's not very fruitful to try to argue about software programs by counting electrons in semiconductors. They are doing exactly as you say. The brain is too complex for a low level analysis. If we had the ability to do a low level analysis we would be able to build emulators or run the brain on a computer similar to how we can emulate entire computers on a computer. However because this is outside of our capabilities we come to the conclusion that morality is an instinctual phenomenon based off of high level analysis. For example: In clinical psychology and you can actually physically identify people who lack all sense of morality and also identify the physical brain damage associated with it. The term for the condition is called "anti-social disorder" better known as "psychopathy." People who are psychopathic retain extremely high reasoning abilities with almost zero moral consciousness. See: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unburdened-mind/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unburdened-mind/ for more information. Since we have identified people with specific regions of their brain with brain damage who exhibit behavior and lack understanding of morality and empathy we can know from this high level analysis that morality is an instinctual in inborn phenomenon and not a logical one. Your logical brain knows 1 + 1 = 2 but this part of your brain is not the part of your brain that determines how you know good from evil. Again we know this from observing people who have lost the ability to know good from evil.

Barrin92 6y ago
>Since we have identified people with specific regions of their brain with brain damage who exhibit behavior and lack understanding of morality and empathy we can know from this high level analysis that morality is an instinctual in born phenomenon and not a logical one. How does that even make any sense? You can turn the exact experiment around, there are people who have brain damage to the areas of their brain that let's them reason logically, but they still have intact moral behaviour. By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically every function of the brain can be missing. You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition. Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their ability to reason about moral subjects?
- leafboi 6y ago
  >How does that even make any sense? You can turn the exact experiment around, there are people who have brain damage to the areas of their brain that let's them reason logically, but they still have intact moral behaviour. I didn't point you to a source that talks about the physical aspect of psychopathy just the qualitative aspect. You're going to have to find that yourself on google it's easy to find. Suffice to say that people who have psychopathy have either damage to the exact same area of the brain or a lack of nerve connections in the exact same area of the brain. Researchers have identified the exact physical location for this in the brain. If I recall correctly it's actually at the front of your brain above your eyes. Look it up. >By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically every function of the brain can be missing. All areas of the brain can be turned off and on and damaged. There are tons of experiments and recorded cases in psychology about this. Literally tons, in fact it makes up a huge portion of the field of psychology. Psychologists understand the brain through people who have suffered damage from it. Here's one case of a woman who cannot feel fear: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/S.M._(patient)#:~:text=S.M.%2C%20also%20sometimes%20referred%20to,consequence%20of%20Urbach%E2%80%93Wiethe%20disease https://www.wikiwand.com/en/S.M._(patient)#:~:text=S.M.%2C%2.... Additionally we can even turn "on" parts of the brain. One of the treatments of depression involve "turning on" or stimulating a specific part of your brain with varying amounts of electricity. See: https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Treatments/ECT,-TMS-and-Other-Brain-Stimulation-Therapies https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Treatments/ECT,-TM... It's not an off or on switch... more of a volume control but even that is a blunt description of what's going on. >You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition. I have shown it's instinctual. Let me walk you through the reasoning. If the moral part of the brain suffers damage you are no longer moral, but you can still reason. If you can still reason then if morality wasn't instinctual you can still be moral by your reasoning alone. However we have shown that by killing a part of the brain that doesn't affect your reasoning and creating psychopaths who can reason but cannot be moral we have shown that morality isn't part of reasoning. >Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their ability to reason about moral subjects? Wrong. Psychopaths can reason about moral subjects. Boolean logic and logic itself is universal and they can still reason that way. They just don't care to follow that reasoning, because morality itself is not logical. A psychopath can identify the behaviors we classify as "good" and the behaviors we classify as "evil" but he does not have an emotional response when plunging a knife into someones face. In short when the opportunity is advantageous to him, the psychopath will not hesitate to kill. Usually though, such actions are never advantageous, so the psychopath remaining logical to the core, will often not kill throughout his entire lifetime. The words "Good" and "evil" at it's most logical essence are just words that classify certain behaviors and actions... there is no true logical existence of either word beyond its usage as categorization. To a true Neutral intelligence of pure logic and reasoning "good" and "evil" are just arbitrary categories that are made up by human culture and behavior. A psychopath is just closer to a neutral intelligence than a regular human being.

Barrin92 6y ago

>Since we have identified people with specific regions of their brain with brain damage who exhibit behavior and lack understanding of morality and empathy we can know from this high level analysis that morality is an instinctual in born phenomenon and not a logical one. How does that even make any sense? You can turn the exact experiment around, there are people who have brain damage to the areas of their brain that let's them reason logically, but they still have intact moral behaviour. By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically every function of the brain can be missing. You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition. Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their ability to reason about moral subjects?

leafboi 6y ago
>How does that even make any sense? You can turn the exact experiment around, there are people who have brain damage to the areas of their brain that let's them reason logically, but they still have intact moral behaviour. I didn't point you to a source that talks about the physical aspect of psychopathy just the qualitative aspect. You're going to have to find that yourself on google it's easy to find. Suffice to say that people who have psychopathy have either damage to the exact same area of the brain or a lack of nerve connections in the exact same area of the brain. Researchers have identified the exact physical location for this in the brain. If I recall correctly it's actually at the front of your brain above your eyes. Look it up. >By that logic, logic itself is not logical because there's an area in the brain that can be turned off? Then nothing is logical because practically every function of the brain can be missing. All areas of the brain can be turned off and on and damaged. There are tons of experiments and recorded cases in psychology about this. Literally tons, in fact it makes up a huge portion of the field of psychology. Psychologists understand the brain through people who have suffered damage from it. Here's one case of a woman who cannot feel fear: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/S.M._(patient)#:~:text=S.M.%2C%20also%20sometimes%20referred%20to,consequence%20of%20Urbach%E2%80%93Wiethe%20disease https://www.wikiwand.com/en/S.M._(patient)#:~:text=S.M.%2C%2.... Additionally we can even turn "on" parts of the brain. One of the treatments of depression involve "turning on" or stimulating a specific part of your brain with varying amounts of electricity. See: https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Treatments/ECT,-TMS-and-Other-Brain-Stimulation-Therapies https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Treatments/ECT,-TM... It's not an off or on switch... more of a volume control but even that is a blunt description of what's going on. >You haven't shown that morality is instinctual, you have shown that morality happens in the brain, which big surprise as I said is true by definition. I have shown it's instinctual. Let me walk you through the reasoning. If the moral part of the brain suffers damage you are no longer moral, but you can still reason. If you can still reason then if morality wasn't instinctual you can still be moral by your reasoning alone. However we have shown that by killing a part of the brain that doesn't affect your reasoning and creating psychopaths who can reason but cannot be moral we have shown that morality isn't part of reasoning. >Why is it supposed to follow from the fact that psychopaths exist that morality is "instinctual", or "born"? Rather than that they've lost their ability to reason about moral subjects? Wrong. Psychopaths can reason about moral subjects. Boolean logic and logic itself is universal and they can still reason that way. They just don't care to follow that reasoning, because morality itself is not logical. A psychopath can identify the behaviors we classify as "good" and the behaviors we classify as "evil" but he does not have an emotional response when plunging a knife into someones face. In short when the opportunity is advantageous to him, the psychopath will not hesitate to kill. Usually though, such actions are never advantageous, so the psychopath remaining logical to the core, will often not kill throughout his entire lifetime. The words "Good" and "evil" at it's most logical essence are just words that classify certain behaviors and actions... there is no true logical existence of either word beyond its usage as categorization. To a true Neutral intelligence of pure logic and reasoning "good" and "evil" are just arbitrary categories that are made up by human culture and behavior. A psychopath is just closer to a neutral intelligence than a regular human being.