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I’m closing comments on this thread, which has wandered far off topic and could best be pursued over email or on your own blog. Thanks for your interest in the topic though!

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I haven’t listened to him in several months. Perhaps he has changed.

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1. in order to really train the mind to observe the “suchness” of now, and to incorporate so many perspectives, it requires a meditative practice. A specific kind of way to train your brain to be aware without thought, and see phenomena before form and color. It’s really what Nagarjuna brings to the table.

I used to believe in the possibility of experiencing the world like that, and I used to believe in the possibility of enlightenment, of living in the now, and all of that. But I can’t say I think it to be at all possible now.

It is not possible to see something and not see its colour or shape – that’s just people see. Objects appear intuitively discrete and whole to most brains, and their characteristics lead to categorisation. That’s just how it works. If you could see things without any human biases, then you wouldn’t be seeing at all. Your brain cannot simply use the eyes to see a mass of essentially undifferentiated particles, which would be closer to the “truth” of what is actually in front of you than the images created by the brain, but which would be impossible to comprehend.

Your brain and therefore your mind is fundamentally practical, and has evolved to cope with life in the universe – not to understand quantum mechanics on an intuitive level, or to be able to “see” individual atoms or the one-ness of everything, or any other philosophical notion in that vein. These things are knowable but not realisable, I think.

I tried all kinds of meditation techniques when I was younger. I started qigong when I was ten, and yoga when I was an undergrad, and actually, most of the first philosophy that I read when much younger was Chinese – Zhuangzi, the Four Books, the Daodejing, Gongsun Lun’s white horse dialogue. I’m not unaware of non-”western” philosophy. I’m also not unaware of the existence of the idea that people can directly experience the cosmos and one-ness and so on. I just don’t believe it to be the case any longer. I’m willing to be persuaded, of course – it’s definitely not an idea I’m hostile to, just one I don’t think is correct.

There’s nothing written in the Madhyamika school of Buddhist philosophy that really contradicts the world of Hume or his student.

Well, to me, Hume is useful as a reference for when I can’t be bothered or am not able to fully outline the argument. It doesn’t matter to me who created the is/ought argument, and whether it was Hume or someone else doesn’t really matter. The rest of Hume’s views are to some extent irrelevant to the issue.

So while there may not be any inherent problems between Hume’s views and those of Nagarjuna, for instance, the reality is that reality is the determiner. If someone proposes that the division between the individual and society is not real for both metaphysical and ethical purposes, then I would say that that person is incorrect. Metaphysically, I would say, there is no society, and practically, society exists but the aggregate of views in a society are not those of any individual within it (or certainly most individuals in it).

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Read: we don’t differ much

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Yes it is what it is. You’re the one that brought up rational and irrational. I’m just saying that these two terms cannot be removed from observable behavior. It’s like love. You can literally see love on a PET scan in the brain, you can feel love, you can express love in a poem, and you can socially institutionalize love in marriage. All of these things are no less love than any other.

I brought up “rational” and “irrational” in the context of behaviour to point out that the terms are absolutely inapplicable, and can certainly be removed from observable behaviour. Behaviour can be logical, or reasoned out, but that doesn’t make it rational, in the sense that I employ it. Logic doesn’t have to be based on reality; it can be based entirely on fictions, assumptions, and assertions, and it will function. Rationality, by contrast, is a direct flow from facts and from reality. Behaviour – like morality – doesn’t flow from facts, but from assumptions and assertions, in that in order to make an action comprehensible, you need an assertion.

For instance, it would be logical to move out of the way of an axe swung at your head. It would be logical because you wish not to die, and it would also be instinctual, because you would automatically do it, and because on an emotional level, you do not wish to die. But it is not rational, because not wanting to die is not rational. There are no grounds on which anyone bases the idea of not wanting to die, because there are none necessary. It always comes back to an assumed good, or an assumed principle, but not to the basic reality of the universe.

Not wanting to die is an emotion and a logical atom on which the logic of some human action is based. It is not a fact resulting directly from any chain of rational enquiry.

And therefore, rationality is not applicable to behaviour, and this is why the is/ought problem shows up as it does. No “is” can produce any “ought” without the intervention of emotion or assumption.

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That’s not completely true, for the same reason a picture of you when you were 3 isn’t you, but it’s also not not you.

I’m not positing an individual essence, here. I’m simply saying that the views of a person and the views considered to be those held by society will always be at variance. That isn’t to say that the individual is totally autonomous, or that society isn’t important in the creation of the views of the individual, or that there isn’t a commonality to a lot of views within a society, it’s simply that people frequently disagree with the general consensus and even when they agree in general, there are often minor differences. People’s views are not simply those of the society in which they live, but result from a convergence of experiences. When discussing moral issues, as one’s moral assumptions are not going to be exactly those of society, what is good for society is not inherently what is good for the individual as their basic assumptions, and therefore the basis of their moral and ethical views, will not be the same.

A good example of this is when you think you are finally all grown up and above certain behavior you just need to go home to visit the family on Thanksgiving to realize just how quickly you can regress.

While this is certainly the case, an individual’s views are not entirely shaped by the then-present situation, but by a variety of experiences and life-history. People’s views don’t automatically undergo total change by transplanting them into a different situation. An Indian immigrant to the United Kingdom will not automatically and suddenly adopt the views and background of UK life, and despite being part of – indubitably – the society of the United Kingdom by living and working there, his views will not be those of the dominant societal patterns.

Individuals’ views, then, are separable from those considered to be of the society in which one lives, and therefore equating the morals of a society with those of an individual in it would be incorrect. And that is the point I wished to make. I don’t dispute the metaphysical points you make. Few thoughtful people would.

My mental state, my behavior is only now existing because of a computer. So, I only exist now because of you.

Only if your present mental state is the totality of what you are, which is not the case. Your mental state right now is informed by me, yes, but also by previous experiences. Your ability to write doesn’t come from me, nor your ability to analyze things, nor the knowledge which you write down, nor your attitude, nor the reason for the discussion…

Metaphysically, you are not the person labelled with your name ten years ago. In a practical sense, however, you are, in that what happened ten years still informs your thoughts now and, while eradicable through illness of various kinds (Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, amnesia of several kinds), and while not an absolutely perfect recreation of your life ten years ago, you still retain your ten-year-old experiences. Many of them, anyway.

Your views are thus unique, and you are an individual, for practical (ie, ethical, legal, etc) purposes at the least.

Apologies to the mods for the length of my posts.

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As an aggregate there are only patterns and tenancies which can be measured, and which we can categorize as human. I didn’t say that there was any essential quality to the category of human, rather there was definitely a pattern of humanness, just as a table has a particular quality. Such things co-arise with the conditions upon which they are dependent. This relationship goes all the way up and all the way down with no essential quality of any “thing” to be found anywhere. Nagarjuna goes past Hume, and again he did it in the 2nd century. You can’t confuse ultimate with relative truth. Ultimately nothing exists in any permanent or essential way, but relatively here we are. Too many anths. who played philosopher got lost in this, hence post-modernism. You can measure human behavior and you can say that certain aspects of human behavior have stable tenancies. Anyone who would deny this is in the wrong field.

“Behaviour is never rational or irrational, as I see it.”

Yes it is what it is. You’re the one that brought up rational and irrational. I’m just saying that these two terms cannot be removed from observable behavior. It’s like love. You can literally see love on a PET scan in the brain, you can feel love, you can express love in a poem, and you can socially institutionalize love in marriage. All of these things are no less love than any other.

“Individuals, however, are distinct from other individuals. Their points of view and internal thoughts, while influenced by other humans, are always individual.”

That’s not completely true, for the same reason a picture of you when you were 3 isn’t you, but it’s also not not you. You’re positing an individual to be separated when there’s nothing to posit or separate. You are basically building a building starting on the second floor, with a priori and unfounded assumptions. But, for reasons that would take too long to get in to. Long post are illegal here. Basically, I would ask you to look up the concept of “Emptiness” in Buddhist philosophy. This is the hardest to understand concept in it, but it’s actually very simple. It’s only hard, because it empirically looks at your above point and it tests it for validity. Usually a metaphor of a “mirror” is used. If you would like to get beyond Hume or Wittgenstein, I would recommend Garfield’s translation of Nagarjuna’s, “The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way.” Or, a more modern scientific approach to the same thing would be Steve Hagen’s, “How the World Can be the Way it is.” Please don’t read this as me acting superior or anything. It’s just that it’s really hard to explain and I literally can’t do it here without pissing the moderators off.

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They also lie habitually

That’s an extremely common sociopathic attribute. Have you read Columbine by Dave Cullen? The author himself said he was inspired by ethnographic writing in his work about the Columbine killings, and his depiction of the town and events is fantastic. But the parts about Eric Harris – the psycho/sociopathic leader of the killers – are particularly good, and Cullen uses conversational/ethnographic data from people who knew him with psychological analysis in a perfect blend. Describes sociopathy brilliantly, especially the capacity to lie in an extremely charming way.

It’s interesting that I learned this lesson from studying Buddhism, which goes back to my point about both pre and transrational aspects of religious thought. In Buddhism, human consciousness is divided into the 5 sense organs, plus mind. It is all of these that make us human. Even a deaf person is aware that they are deaf.

I seem to remember reading something along those lines in What the Buddha Taught, years and years ago. Very interesting conception of cognition. Better than Socrates’ chariot, I’ve always thought.

Nonetheless, I’m afraid I don’t believe in the concept of “human”, not as a metaphysical category. We’re all different genetically and physically, and there’s no essence; I therefore don’t see anything that makes someone “human” per se. It’s a category imposed on the world, so I’m not sure it makes all that much sense to talk about the things that make someone human. It’s much more interesting to me to look at it backwards: we have this concept, “human”, and we know intuitively what it means, but whenever we start a formal list we exclude some of the people and beings that we call “human”. Rather than saying “all humans have these things or they must be something else”, it makes more sense to me to say “the beings we label as human share these attributes to some extent and differ within a certain range in these attributes”. The whole issue then becomes very complicated, but if we want to describe objective reality then there’s no point imposing arbitrary classifications on it. At least, that is my view. Certainly, a sociopath is not less human than a non-sociopathic person. Or rather, that’s not certain at all, but…

irrational behavior

It is the idea of this that I object to quite strongly. Behaviour is never rational or irrational, as I see it. It is a different order of thing from reason. It can certainly be logical, in that behaviour can follow directly in certain ways from certain situations given certain assumptions. But behaviour can’t follow directly from true statements without assuming something.

so to is any conceived separation between the individual and the social.

I think that’s a rather different thing from the difference between one’s relationship to a bacterium and one’s relationship to another person. Society is always a grouping of individuals, not a discrete element in itself. Individuals are informed by society and acculturate to certain general principles, but that doesn’t make the individuals in the society uniform. There is therefore a difference between the individual and society. A better question to pose might be, what is the difference between an individual’s relationship with someone seen as inside the society and one seen as outside of it? That makes the whole set up much fuzzier, and precludes the possibility of a syllogism based on the idea you proposed, that what is rational (I would say “logical”, but nevertheless…) for the individual is what is rational for the society, or something similar.

And again we come back to Hume’s guillotine. “Is” and “ought” are entirely different, not just in spelling but in logical formulation. There is simply no way to get to an ought from an is without a background assumption. That these assumptions come from acculturation is almost certainly the case, but the idea that the acculturation itself means that both society’s conception of “good” and right action and the individual’s conception are always in accordance is clearly not the case. So society and the individual are separable, both for practical purposes and for the purposes of making any ethical statements.

A comparison with smelling a flower is not so useful. The process of smelling a flower appears to have several parts in human language when it is in reality an undifferentiated whole. The reality, at the atomic level, is that the whole process is undifferentiated. Individuals, however, are distinct from other individuals. Their points of view and internal thoughts, while influenced by other humans, are always individual. Individuals may be influenced by several strands of culture and not at all by others which influence other individuals within the same social and economic sphere.

The reality is that culture and society are like the idea of smelling the flower. They don’t really exist except as conceptions imposed on reality, and the reality is not of an undifferentiated social world but a very-much-differentiated world of individuals with differing opinions, assumptions, and worldviews. Ergo, to say anything close to the idea that what is good for society (ie, the imposition) is what is good for the individual cannot be the case.

How did we get into this discussion?

A discussion of atheism inevitably leads to a discussion of morals and where they come from, or if they are real at all, and that generally leads to either human evolution or cognitive issues. It was inevitable, almost!

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So, the problem with separating out rational behavior with rational thought is that it is rather arbitrary. We only know rational thought by observing behavior and determining it’s rationality. Rational thought can be followed by irrational behavior to observers, and somehow our irrational, emotional lives lead us towards an aggregated rationality.

Just as the new physics teaches us that the differences between the quantum and macro world are really only differences between what we assume in our cognition and reality (imposed paradox), or the difference between bacteria and ourselves is a matter or relative and not absolute kind, so to is any conceived separation between the individual and the social. Knowing this, what is rational for an individual or rational for a population become no less difficult to parse out. In ancient Indian philosophy they called this “the two that are not two.” A common way this is taught is to think about a flower. Without a bee the flower can’t exist, and they affect each others biology to the point that it’s hard to know where one begins and one ends. Then when you smell a flower, do you smell the flower, your nose, or your brain. Without any one of these the term “smell the flower” cannot exist.

Here we come full circle to the basic understanding that all human thought is both relative and dualistic in nature. That means that Levi-Strauss is famous for spending a lifetime figuring out what was well known by many thousands of years before he was born, and he still got it wrong because of the dualistic assumption that the dualistic mental world could be separated from the physical reality of being prior to thought.

How did we get into this discussion?

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This isn’t arbitrary, and is fully rational.

I agree with the line of thought you’re pursuing but not this assertion. Morality is not rational; it is logical, given a certain set of assumptions (logical atoms often being simply assumptions and assertions about things) but it is not rational in that it does not flow directly from what is the case. Of course, what we have here is a confusion of the meanings of the word “rational”, and not necessarily a disagreement. Rational certainly can mean logical, but for my purposes it means the idea that an idea might come entirely from reality without the imposition of any assumptions.

For instance, your relationship to other people and your relationship to a bacterium are not different by type but by degree. It’s the same type of relationship – a genetic relationship with a shared ancestor – but it’s a much closer ancestor. That’s it, really. You have more in common with the organisms we call people than those we call bacteria, but the relationship is basically the same. You kill millions of bacteria every day, and to eat you must kill organisms that are demonstrably your relatives, whether animals or vegetables. Or fungi. The point is, the organisms you eat and the organisms you don’t are not absolutely different, but relatively different, and the divide between them is assumed and asserted but not able to be positively shown to be the case.

Morals are therefore oft-logical developments on what seem to be shared ideas and shared assumptions. That does not make them “rational”, and the idea of rational morals has seemed strange really since Hume. And that’s fine. It’s okay for morals to be based on assumptions because most of the assumptions are logical based on stimuli and categorisation that all people do, and so are in their basics shared by everyone.

Only sociopaths have this ability, and they are medically insane.

Sociopaths may not be insane, per se, but they are not exactly standard people. They don’t seem to construct their worldviews in the way people “normally” do. Some psychologists believe that sociopaths and psychopaths are simply hyper-rational, and neglect emotions like compassion and empathy – possibly the basis of the assumptions made by humans on which they create moral codes – because they don’t really have them, or don’t feel them strongly. It may not be that psychopaths and sociopaths hate humans and want them to die; they just have desire and greed for various things and don’t see it as a problem to kill other creatures for which they don’t really feel very much in order to attain them. This is what I would expect, certainly, if morals were based on emotion and assumption rather than following directly from situations.

So, again:

tl;dr: is/ought problem. :D

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“Of course, as I noted very clearly, morality is not rational and can have no rational basis.”

I’m not quite sure how this can be stated in anthropological terms, because we can pretty easily test whether various moral axioms are rational for a given set of circumstances, and how universal they are. I think it’s safe to say that our evolution as a highly social species has given us a certain set of moral instincts, which are highly variable to given situations, but still very much there.
For example, there’s really not any culture where it’s ok to randomly kill anyone. Such a trait would be highly irrational for a social species, and as far as I know has never existed anywhere. Only sociopaths have this ability, and they are medically insane.

If we look at the change of morality over time, we see an ever expanding inclusiveness of who is conferred fully human status, and therefore full rights of not being killed (outside certain conditions like them not being killers), raped, starved, eaten, etc…
More recently this inclusiveness has developed the world’s first pan human moral systems in western secular traditions, and has begun to be inclusive of non-human species. For example, vegetarianism.

This only makes sense in a particular ecological set of situations, but we know that when these conditions are met humans are much more automatically apt to care for each other than to kill each other. This isn’t arbitrary, and is fully rational.

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