Ethics

Last time I ended with the bare-word "Ethics".

I want to lump all of ethics, morality and "right-living" into the same basket. There is one group of things - goodness in action.

Good actions are mostly purpose-relative and their fitfulness is determined by whether or not the purpose is fulfilled by them.

But purposes can also be actions - when we choose a purpose, we decide to call it good. Such actions also can be good and bad - good and bad deciding between purposes are the kinds of decisions that are most important for us because they are closest to our own souls.

If we commit to a purpose, we adopt that purpose as our own, as a permanent part of our own being, a stamp, as it were, by which we ask other people to recognize us. The are therefore what we are.

We can therefore choose what we are. We are free.

Freedom in purpose doesn't mean that we have a complete free reign to decide whatever we want. For if we recognize that that freedom of purpose is ours, then we recognize that we are responsible for the purposes we choose - that they define us just as we define them. And these purposes are ours to own, we can not disclaim them.

If we choose to hurt someone, we can not later disclaim that choice, only make excuses for why we made a bad choice.

There are people who say there is no difference between bad and good choices. I believe that such people have not been recently punched in the stomach or in the nose. Nor will they have seen their own children suffer needlessly because of another person's greed.

Morality is reality, it is one's own inner-being.

One With God

There is a long scale from faith to rationality. I'm going to give a general outline of the major points before delving into the real problem here.


Pure Faith - where one adamantly refuses to intellectually question whether or not something is true or admit any kind of evidence
Subjective Evidentual Faith - where one is willing to intellectually question whether or not something is true but only accept subjective evidence or subjective criteria for validity of that evidence
Absolute Subjective Evidentual Faith - where one claims to absolutely know the truth by subjective evidence
Objective Evidentual Faith - where one is willing to question intellectually matters of religion with objective evidence or objective standards of evidence
Absolute Objective Evidentual Faith - where one claims to know the truth by objective evidence

Lastly I think we have agnosticism and skepticism which I think is best characterized by the refusal to accept any evidence whatever on any basis. We won't be much considering these two here, I do elsewhere.


The point of providing the scale is also the point of providing the basis for a discussion of the meaning "One With God" or "God Realizations" and perhaps "Self-Realization" when given a religous tone.

Some people will claim to have reached God by pure faith - they simply know they have received the truth by pure faith.
Some people claim that it is impossible to do such things and that they know so from pure reason.
There is a scale similar to the epistemic scale above - differing kinds of evidence are presented for the one-ness with god.

These are similar to the claims to prophecy - you can accept a prophet by pure faith or by evidence of the truth of their prophecies. (Prophecy, though, passes away for what was once a surprise becomes obvious after it happens...) or by whether or not the prophet "resonates with you."

I'd like to think that there must be some kind of objective standard for these things although I think the matter is not that simple.

I regard relationships with God as similar in character in some respects with relationships with people. There is no good science of relationships with people per se - psychology, sociology, linguistics, etc. - all attempt to be sciences of people and relationships among people. Clearly politics would be another such in the list. I think the best example of "scientific relationships with people" are actually negative in our world - war and gambling. We have a great science of war and similarly a great science of gambling (lying and telling other people lies). This is likely just a question of the character of our people. There should also be a science of love and I suspect if people were to spend as much effort knowing how to love one another as we do knowing how to kill or cheat one another, we would have a much better world indeed.

God relationships are different. God is super-personal - not like one person, but not unlike one person - simply beyond us people. Nevertheless, I believe there is an art and science to God-knowledge just as there is an art-and-science to people-relationships. To make friends, you make gestures of friendship, to make love you make gestures of love. God is similar in that God provides a means to relationship by living with us, inside us, beside us. This makes it more difficult than other relationships but easier, but we're moving too fast.

The problem of determining THAT there is an art-science of God-relating is different from deciding what the content of it is.

What I want to reject here though is the idea that there is no such art-science of God-relationship.

Throughout time there have been people we think of as prophets or people specifically people who are closer to God than our common man. The "big names" come to mind - Mohammed, Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, Elijah, Ramakrishna, Ghandi, etc.

Of course it is possible to doubt that these people had any closer a relationship with God than any one else. And of course it is possible to try to be picky among them - is Christ a better prophet than Buddha? Is Mohammed better than Moses? Is Lao Tzu better than Ramakrishna?

One thing we can say is that each of the major religious traditions has its archetypical example of the successfully-God-related person and each provides a method for following their example and attaining a similar God-Relationship. (In the case where God is not the correct word we have cognates "supreme peace" "truth" "englightenment" to take its place).

So we have a model of religion:

An Archetype
A Method
A Supreme Goal

We could make a grid but it wouldn't be that complicated so we can suffice ourselves knowing that the grid could exist.

So here we have the question of deciding on a method, an archetype and a supreme goal.

Religion need not be this way. We could doggedly insist on defining our own religion. Perhaps we could have a religion without a goal or method or archetype or various combinations of them.

Some forms of buddhism I think of this way - without goal or archetype, but only method. Some forms of Christianity I think of as without method but having Archetype and Goal.

I think there must be a way of deciding whether and which things we need to have what we call a religion.

If not, we have to agree that any religion must be arbitrary - why should listen to Mohammed's prophecy? Why should we take on the devotion of Krishna? Why should we follow the example of Christ? Why should we follow Buddha's Golden path?

It should be noted that any answer to such questions will have to use reasons which are not necessarily themselves dependent on the evidence from the "inside" of those religious traditions. I mean, it would be unfair to point out that Buddhism gives a way of avoiding the demons one encounters in the Bardo as a purpose for choosing the path of Buddha since in order to be worried about the Bardo, you have to have adopted a certain amount of the Buddhist tradition. Similar considerations apply to each of the world religious movements. The christian can't assume that oneness with God is the supreme goal without knowing that God is available for one-ness and how would we know that without assuming something about God given to us by Christ?

I think there must still be an answer to this. But it is not the same type of answer to which we are accustomed - a yes or no, true or false, black and white answer. For us to choose an archetype, we have to choose one with which we somehow identify. Can we choose who we identify with or do we decide that? Choosing methods, similar questions apply. Not every method is good for every player in chess, why assume that there is only one method for attaining the highest goal?

Goals don't have what normally are considered "scientific methods for determining them" but some common considerations apply. We want happiness, peace, joy, a cessation of pain, etc. We want our children and families to be happy. The more illumined among us (again from my point of view) want everyone to have these things - knowing that no one truly has peace until we all do. But the question of goal-choosing is a person-relative problem. The question is not "What is the Goal?" but rather "What is MY GOAL?" - that is, what do YOU WANT.

For this you have to decide for yourself. And if you are pragmatic, you then you will also (probably) choose a method - to have failed to choose a method will have been to chosen a kind of anti-method which is itself a kind of method. For definitive methods, you may or may not want an archetype.

But this is not to reject the notion of Goal and Archetype and Method.

Being human, I make a few assumptions about you - along the lines of those outlined above - that you have goals that are somewhat "rational" in that they are themselves fundamentally desirable. If these things don't appeal to you, I may have nothing interesting in common with you. We may not even be sufficiently similar for it to be worthwhile for you to read what follows. In fact, I may not want you to read any further than this - please adopt my goals, they're good ones - happiness, peace, joy, cessation of pain and universal compassion.

If you -do- share these goals, then I think there is a (perhaps many) method(s) for attaining them and archetypes which have by their various methods.

For that we must wait another week, I fear. For now all I hope to have resolved is that there is a simple and rational set of questions underlying religion:

What should we attempt to attain as a highest goal?
How should we attempt to attain them?
Has anyone ever done this before that might be helpful?

And that answers to these question have a fundamentally rational - even scientific - method for determining their answers.

We call this science Ethics.

Implication and conditionality

The traditional problem of platonism is this - how can eternal extra-worldly objects affect this temporal world and vice versa.

As analysis moves up the chain the question becomes about the phenomenon of logic - reason - and the absolute notion of reason, logic.

In my terms, "reason" will refer to the actual good reasoning of human beings. "Logic" will refer only to the abstract notion of the possibilities of valid and sound inferences.

In this world, there are reasoning-events where people deduce or induce. Those reasoning-events are members of the causal or pseudo-causal chain of events of this world. They have relations to things with causal efficacy, including causal and pseudo-causal (quantum?) relations with them. I don't know the full nature of those causal and pseudo-causal chains, only that they are there.

This is true -no matter what- we say about whether or not our minds or souls or brains are part of or not part of this world - the world around us in a sense dictates to a large extent what we think about - that is, what we concern ourselves with - in the ordinary course of reason. Even "extraordinary reasoning events" - like thinking about metalogic - have their roots in physical conditions - who I am, where I am born, what my parents thought was important, what my teachers thought was important, etc., all combine to make this questioning about the notion of reason a reality for me. This is not to commit to causal determinism with respect to reason, but rather simply to note that the subject matter of our reason is to an extent subordinate to the availability of datum about which to reason. While we may be able to reason ex nihilo, in general we don't in fact. And what we're interested here preliminarily is "in fact" not the "abstract possibility" that were we disembodied eternal minds how we might then reason.

Similarly, the conclusions that we draw from a given set of circumstances appear to be to a large extent socially-determined. A child of the middle ages when seeing a sick person might make guesses as to the various humours involved in the sickness. In the early 21st century, we assume the existence of some virus or bacteria or poison is the cause of the disease. In the late 21st century, we may have determined the quantum basis of life and may attribute diseases to some field-conditions - I DON'T KNOW what we'll find out or decide obviously. Even the idea of thinking about our faculties of reason sociologically is a phenomenon of our century (Kuhn, feyerabend, etc.).

So we may call our reasoning-events "causally determined" - even the platonist won't deny the presence of a given person on earth is causally determined by their parents' mating - and without our presence, our conclusion-reaching isn't even remotely possible. Again, "causally determined" is not to be read in the sense of determinism as traditionally conceived.

Now, given that our reasoning-events are causally determined, there is a question as to their relationship to the abstraction notions of inference and validity which we (some of us anyway) have. And the question arises, what is the relationship between a given inference and it's generalized rule which makes it a "good reasoning"?

For instance, back to the math questions. We say "2 + 3 = 5" and so the correct answer to "if you have 2 cats and someone gives you three more how many cats do you have?" is 5. But here there are obviously counter-possibilities. Maybe the cats ran away during the transaction? Maybe when you add cats, they don't act like integers, but instead quintegers and are magically transported to another world. Maybe being the key word here. How will we determine from pure mathematics how many cats are in your possession? How can mathematics, indeed, decide what a cat is or how to count them.

I've said before that the concept of number is prior to set theory. I think it's also prior to mathematics generally. The questions "how to count and what to count" are more akin to what happens when a conductor and symphony interact than when a mathematician attempts an abstraction. The Conductor indicates the piece of music and tempo so that the musicians can stay together - all knowing what to count and how to count based on the movement of the baton and the conductor's gestures. This primal ability to count is in a way essential to what we do in a way evolutionarily. If a person can not repeat what its parents say eventually, it can not learn its language and it is unable to join society and be recognized as fully human. There are obviously such people. The genesis of this ability to repeat is unknown obviously, but some key elements have to be in it I think:

To repeat a phrase, someone must differentiate the phrase from other things and sounds around them, isolate it as a single thing of the kind in question (perhaps without having any thoughts of it being "single"). This happens in general with practice - hearing and testing to see which sounds produce the desired results in their environment - perhaps needed results. An infant is hungry and cries out. Eventually it learns to distinguish the hunger cry from the pain cry and indicate when the matter is settled and so the infant learns to speak eventually by identifying sounds made by their caretakers corresponding to the relevant events.

In this way also the core of "conditionals and implication" are learned. The baby learns that IF they scream such and such, they get food that they need. Then they learn that if they SAY such and such they get the specific kind of food that they need, etc. The -if-ness- is a relation between the word and the event. Eventually we learn that there are relations between words and words - our parents/siblings/teachers teach us the use of other new words not by ostension but by relations to other words. We learn to read a dictionary, etc.

This second kind of implication - semantic implication - is somewhat related to the first. We say "only use bald when someone has no hair on their heads" but we define "hair on the head" by ostension (sometimes). So while "bald" comes to have a specific semantic relation to "hair on the head" upon its first use, it becomes when used this way "linked" in a special way to no-hair-on-head (e.g. the phenomenon underlying "there is no hair on that person's head" when spoken and understood as true). By systematically relating words to each other (say by providing a dictionary or set of definitions) we can create a closed system of definitions - we'll come back to this.

Meanwhile, it remains possible to detach baldness from "no-hair-on-head" and we learn this after a short time. There are a million varieties of baldness - thinning, thinning in just the crown, shaving the head, partial shaving of the head, etc. Not all of them or even any of them need be immediately related to having "no hair on the head" (which it turns out is very seldom associated with baldness if you take it too literally - everybody has hair on their heads). In fact, learning to detach "no-hair-on-head" given by the first ostension is critical to learning what "baldness" really is - so that baldness becomes a phenomenon of its own.

In this way, I think, all such semantic implication dissolves - when we learn to use "2" we also learn to semantically detach it from "1 + 1" or "count and stop at the second one" or whatever. We learn that 2 is special and that its PURELY SEMANTIC relations with other things dissolve the more we understand the phenomenon of two-ness. The argument is simple. If two is "by definition" 1 + 1, then what is the meaning of "I have two legs"? In what way are my legs added together? Are my legs subject to the union axiom? Of course we can try to tell such a story but that story gets wilder and wilder the more detail required of it. When stories about why something is the way it is become too wild, we have a tendency to start thinking of them either as literally false or as metaphorical.

And so we start looking for the base of the metaphor - that is, trying to understand the Phenomenon of Two-ness. By this I mean distinguishing the specific circumstances in which "2" is the appropriate descriptive modifier - and so we return to finding out what we are counting and how we should count it/them. So we have not "two mashed potatoes" even if we have two potatoes that are mashed, for instance - because we've learned that 2-ness is nevertheless a phenomenon of the nature of our speaking without it being therefore a purely semantic phenomenon.

Thus detached from pure semantic relations, I think, the temptation toward platonism is removed. If we understand the nature of semantic relations (e.g. relations between human communicative devices) and look at them for what they are (words, talking, singing, pointing, etc.) rather than what they should be (purely logical entities with absolute meanings) we come to be able to understand how things IN FACT have semantic relationships without therefore being extra-worldly.

These semantic relationships, though, then don't have the implication-force we're used to assigning to them. In the platonist system of thinking, implications are absolute because the predicates are introduced with purely semantic relationships - all bald men have no hair on their head in the platonic world BECAUSE to be bald is to not have hair on your head by definition. Again, though, if we recognize that such introductions by definition only go so far, then we're able to understand what the word "bald" really means phenomenally.

IN FACT, if we insist on the purely semantic meaning of bald, we are simply unable to understand real discourse about the word "balding" or "bald". "The difference between living things and non-living things is that living things are still moving". This saying isn't true (the sun is moving, isn't it?) but the idea behind it is - and it applies to words as well. If our words become "rigorously defined" they become useless because they are unable to cope the with ongoing phenomenon of the world around us.

So finally to the notions of implication and conditionality. There is a certain kind of conditionality which is primordial for our language - the ability to associate words with situations and phenomenon pragmatically to produce behavior in our parents. Without a notional similar to "If I scream, they'll come" the screaming ceases (and this is a tested fact - either the baby dies or learns some other way to get the attention it needs or learns that it doesn't need the attention it thought it did), language is impossible - because there's no associating linguistic phenomena (the screaming) with other phenomena (the help). THIS variety of implication though, is not what we call "semantic implication" - the relations between words and words defined by them, though. That relation - the relations between words and their definitions - has to be regarded as an heuristic tool for learning languages more quickly. A person who has never been exposed to the phenomenon of baldness can nevertheless get a sense of what it would be like by pure word-definitions and will make a variety of assumptions about a person described as bald. HOWEVER, these assumptions will never be completely accurate as they are unable to provide DEDUCTIVE CERTAINTY.

But we do have still implication - phenomenal implication - implications which are presumed by the notion of the possibility of semantic implication. These phenomenal implications we also call "reason" and in some cases "common sense" - and while known to be fallible, are also capable of being thought of as revealing real relations between real things, as opposed to their semantic counterparts.

So we have two notions corresponding to our initial "logic" and "reason". We have a notion of implication - semantic implication - for which a statement must be regarded as true because so defined - and a notion of conditionality - for which a notion must be regarded as true because it is the underlying phenomenon for the possibility of a semantic structure. To give another example - my own existence must be regarded as conditionally related to this email because it is a member of its underlying phenomenon that make it possible.