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I am religious and believe in free will

70 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

113 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (24%)

Total Members Voted: 249

[Strongpoint]

I don't believe that; I believe that it's a simple boolean: if the "immoraity is nonzero, it's immoral."

Well, yes. Ignoring zero, numbers are also either positive or negative. It doesn't mean that 1 is the same as 10000000 because both are positive.

The earlier examples in this thread demonstrate that: thinking about murdering someone, to me, is just as immoral as actually murdering them.

Having a thought is as immoral as murder. Being impolite to a neighbor is as immoral as murder. Shoplifting is as immoral as murder. Yeah, I guess your opinion IS unpopular.

Because you can be an immoral evil person and have a really pleasant practical impact on the world

Please, explain, why having millions of such "immoral evil people" is in any way bad.

And what exactly do you mean by evil? Because for me, something not harmful is not evil by definition. An entity needs to be at least potentially harmful to be considered evil.

[McTraveller]

Well that gets to I think an earlier question - what defines good or evil vs. destructive/constructive?

Sounds like you are a pragmatist, where some of us are existentialists.

I agree your views are consistent for a purely pragmatic view - there's no difference between "good/evil" and "constructive or restorative/destructive or harmful" in that view - because the only measure of merit is how constructive/destructive things are.

For existentialists, "good/evil" is a different axis from "helpful/harmful."

[Strongpoint]

Can you, please, define good and evil as an "existentialist"? How do you even differentiate them?

Why exactly murder (or a thought of murder) is evil?

[McTraveller]

For me personally evil is "goes against design intent" and good is "aligns with design intent."  This is definitely theist, because it assumes intent.

For a pragmatist I suppose you could say that evil is "goes against the optimal fitness function" and good is "aligns with it".  Others use "evil is things that cause harm for harm's sake, good is avoiding harm as much as possible (given that sometimes 'harm' is physically impractical to avoid, such as generally you have to harm things for some definition of harm in order to get food to live)."

In both cases, there's lots of room for arguing about "what is the design intent" and "what is the optimal fitness function", or "what actually is 'harm'" respectively.

I would say though there is much overlap - I think a ton of "design intent" is avoiding harm as much as possible, stewarding resources, not being a jerk, etc.

[Frumple]

I mean... one of the problems I often have with the whole design thing is design is shown by what is done -- a machine does what it's designed to do, and what it ends up doing is what its design dictates. That's not always what a human designer intended for it to do, but... most conceptualizations of a creator god doesn't really get to have that excuse.

If we're built by some sort of god (or at least common conceptualizations of them), we're very intentionally built to do great and often far and away excessive harm to all sorts of things, and some of that is difficult or outright impossible to avoid. Our "design intent" is kinda' fucking horrible if you look at how we function; jackass should have built us to photosynthesize and probably reproduce by parthenogenesis or something, just as a start. Maybe put some more effort into quality controls because holy good goddamn shit do we have problems on that front.

Hell, basically everything living has problems on that front, fucker shouldn't have pushed out a release build while nearly everything still got cancer, good gods. QA team for that one needs to be fired, possibly into the sun.

... but yeah, it's one of the reasons I kinda' hate the whole intelligent design thing, personally, and basically everything adjacent to it. If something designed mankind (or most everything, for that matter) the bastard was bloody malignant. If there's no god behind that, I don't have to live with the knowledge I have a great need to hate the divine with basically every fiber of my being, and that's a much more comforting world, t'me. I can live with uncaring better than I can malice.

[MaxTheFox]

I restrict "design intent" to a part of morality and sapience itself. I interpret "in God's image" as "humans have free will and sapience like God does".

Other than that? I am a transhumanist. Fuck this body. I do not believe God would make us susceptible to diseases we could very soon avoid or outright exterminate using technology.

[McTraveller]

Well that line of argument presupposes that it's possible to get the kind of complexity necessary for agency, without the possibility of even things like cancer.  Kind of like Godel... if you have a sufficiently capable system, there are unprovable things in it; extend to life, "if you have physical beings capable of any kind of agency, then you inevitably have potential for nasty side effects."

I mean, just look at all our machines that we do build, even simple ones - the fact they are all realized in the physical universe means they have failure modes. I think it's probably a mathematical proof that everything has failure modes.

I don't think being "slow" beings powered by photosynthesis, or having asexual reproduction, would solve any of the problems we experience. I'm sure if you had beings capable of forming an opinion, they'd find some way to fight each other; after all, if nothing else, entities are going to compete for access to an energy gradient...

Now why did God create a universe with these rules of physics, including entropy and quantum mechanics? Or why did the universe spontaneously inflate with the rules of physics we have, including entropy and quantum mechanics?  These seem to be... irrelevant questions, given the universe exists.

[Egan_BW]

what the heck, you guys aren't talking about railguns in here at all!

[Strongpoint]

For me personally evil is "goes against design intent" and good is "aligns with design intent."  This is definitely theist, because it assumes intent.

It doesn't answer how to tell evil from good. I guess the actual answer is to look in a holy book of some kind because there is no other way to determine "the design intent".

Also, you have a very weird version of existentialism fully embracing the absurdity of design intent. Design intent assumes that there is an external purpose to our existence and either I understand existentialism very wrong or it goes against the core idea of existentialism.

[MaxTheFox]

Well that line of argument presupposes that it's possible to get the kind of complexity necessary for agency, without the possibility of even things like cancer.  Kind of like Godel... if you have a sufficiently capable system, there are unprovable things in it; extend to life, "if you have physical beings capable of any kind of agency, then you inevitably have potential for nasty side effects."

I mean, just look at all our machines that we do build, even simple ones - the fact they are all realized in the physical universe means they have failure modes. I think it's probably a mathematical proof that everything has failure modes.

I don't think being "slow" beings powered by photosynthesis, or having asexual reproduction, would solve any of the problems we experience. I'm sure if you had beings capable of forming an opinion, they'd find some way to fight each other; after all, if nothing else, entities are going to compete for access to an energy gradient...

Now why did God create a universe with these rules of physics, including entropy and quantum mechanics? Or why did the universe spontaneously inflate with the rules of physics we have, including entropy and quantum mechanics?  These seem to be... irrelevant questions, given the universe exists.

The issue is that yes, you could possibly cure cancer. And Huntington's. And Alzheimer's. And hundreds of other debilitating diseases. Of course conflict will always exist no matter what, but I have little to no respect for the human form. The human mind, sure.

For the record, I think creationism is essentially discredited and so I subscribe to theistic evolution more or less.

[anewaname]

what the heck, you guys aren't talking about railguns in here at all!

The carefully-avoided topic is the thread-ending railgun.

[TD1]

I prefer to get hammered, myself.

[dragdeler]

How to tell good from evil crash course:

You know your mirror neurons, the ones that can allmost make you taste the sprite if I showed or even just described to you how I'm gulping down an ice cold, refreshing, moist because of the condensation can of sprite.

So when these mirror neurons flare up and you feel bad, you know you done fucked up and it's propably too to late remedy the situation, so in future avoid the situation at all cost. That is assuming we're collectively too dense to predict how something is going to make us feel.


That is the thing that is real, realer than being bound to any cultural preconceptions, realer than the entire linguistic superstructure we superimpose onto reality.


At some point you have to permit me to ask: common guys really? are you really being for real here, really?

[Schmaven]

How to tell good from evil crash course:
...
So when these mirror neurons flare up and you feel bad, you know you done fucked up and it's propably too to late remedy the situation, so in future avoid the situation at all cost.
...

Do you mean that people feel bad when they do evil things, and that inner conscience is a way to tell good from evil?

[dragdeler]

The so often ascribed to children innocence, would see this clear as the day. It takes "nurture" (most cynical use I ever did of that word) to be able to confuse oneself over this.