Our server costs ~$56 per month to run. Please consider donating or becoming a Patron to help keep the site running. Help us gain new members by following us on Twitter and liking our page on Facebook!
Current time: March 29, 2024, 11:31 am

Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
#31
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
(July 27, 2014 at 10:59 pm)whateverist Wrote:
(July 27, 2014 at 5:40 pm)rasetsu Wrote: Would it be useful to an organism to "know" the color of objects in its environment? Their shape? Their relative location?

Certainly it would if you like your fruit ripe, or are looking for a sexual display of a certain color, or require color vision to spot a predator in time. Consciousness for the win.
Data processing for the win.
Reply
#32
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
I think you may be trying to read too much into my analogy. Nevertheless, many of the things you mentioned about steam also hold for qualia. Not all, of course, because steam isn't qualia.

If there is a selective pressure for the mechanism - then all products, and byproducts of that mechanism are being selected for.

I'd also like to point out...that if we were to create a "dead" machine that was as advanced as we are, able to perform all of our functions....we probably wouldn't be able to tell with certainty that it was, in fact, "dead" or that we were "alive"-in the sense we're using those words. We might say "Oh, well, we know who created you, we watched you come together from parts, we see your wiring carrying a charge and we know your subroutines" - at which point, he'd point at our skulls.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
Reply
#33
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
(July 27, 2014 at 11:05 pm)bennyboy Wrote:
(July 27, 2014 at 10:59 pm)whateverist Wrote: Certainly it would if you like your fruit ripe, or are looking for a sexual display of a certain color, or require color vision to spot a predator in time. Consciousness for the win.
Data processing for the win.

Words. Precisely what about consciousness are you holding out for?
Reply
#34
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
(July 27, 2014 at 11:14 pm)whateverist Wrote: Words. Precisely what about consciousness are you holding out for?
I've been pretty clear that I'm talking about the ability to experience qualia.
Reply
#35
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
Is there an issue with qualia seen as a consequence of the machine (if not a feature)? And what is the difference, if perception or experience is the function(rather than just an effect)..between perception or experience and data processing, specifically?
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
Reply
#36
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
(July 28, 2014 at 3:21 am)Rhythm Wrote: Is there an issue with qualia seen as a consequence of the machine (if not a feature)? And what is the difference, if perception or experience is the function(rather than just an effect)..between perception or experience and data processing, specifically?
The difference is that data processessing doesn't require the existence of qualia. And since the physicalist model of behavior is physical input--> physical brain processing --> physical output, there's no plausible explanation of why the actual experience of qualia would have evolved, or by what mechanism it exists.
Reply
#37
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
I think you may be driving right over my grass. I'm suggesting that qualia -is- data processing. How would we determine that it wasn't? Sure, we could process data some other way - in the case of a punchcard reader, for example(which we assume has no qauaia)...but we aren't punchcard readers. If qualia is the sum total of experience, and an overview of it from some specific POV, the subjective experience of consciosness - what line are we drawing. Is a chain of origami swans not, ultimately, a chain of paper? If someone pointed to that and said "This is origami, these are swans- not paper" wouldn't we be a little bit mystified by that claim? What is the distinction between data processing -in humans, and qualia-in humans? I'm suggesting, in no uncertain terms..that we place too much value on qualia, creating a box for it simply because it is "ours" and important to us. Perhaps it is just data processing, and you are just a "dead" machine, or at least no different from one functionally and observationaly speaking.

Also, as I've been mentioning, no matter how you define qualia, so long as you do so by means of our brains or reference to our brains there is a plausible explanation for it's existence and it's evolution. If wings were blue, and selection favored wings...it would favor "blue" by association. Understand? In this manner, even harmful (either potentially or actually) ancillary traits can be preserved due to the strength of whatever trait is being selected for. We could conceptualize this with regards to our experience by reference to our experience making us easier to "trick" than a sunflower might be. We don't seem to have been selected out on the basis of this potentially harmful trait that comes as added baggage to our immense data processing power (especially relative to sunflowers).
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
Reply
#38
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
(July 28, 2014 at 12:08 am)bennyboy Wrote:
(July 27, 2014 at 11:14 pm)whateverist Wrote: Words. Precisely what about consciousness are you holding out for?
I've been pretty clear that I'm talking about the ability to experience qualia.

In cerebral achromatopsia, the ability to experience the qualia of color is lost. Not only are they unable to see things in color, they're unable to imagine colors, and their memories are all colorless. I'd say that's a pretty convincing display that the ability to experience qualia is tied to brain circuitry.
[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg]
Reply
#39
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
I haven't lost interest. Please carry on. I've just lost any sense of what is being contested. Maybe it'll come to me.
Reply
#40
RE: If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)
A case description of cerebral achromatopsia:

The Case Of The Colorblind Painter

Quote:It is almost two years since Mr. I. lost his color vision. The intense sorrow that was so characteristic at first, as he sat for hours before his (to him) black lawn, desperately trying to perceive or imagine it as green, has disappeared, as has the revulsion (he no longer sees his wife, or himself, as having "rat-colored" flesh).

There has, we think, been in his case a real "forgetting" of color — a forgetting at once psychological and physiological, at once strategic and structural. Perhaps this has to occur in someone who is no longer able to imagine or remember, or in any physiologically based way generate, a lost mode of perception. It does not, by contrast, happen in those who have become ordinarily blind or deaf, but their cerebral cortices, their powers of inner representation, are unimpaired; it is quite different for the blind or deaf, who become not only unseeing or unhearing, but as if they had never been seeing or hearing, as did a patient with cortical blindness described by one of us (see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Summit Books, 1985, p. 39).
[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg]
Reply



Possibly Related Threads...
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Beauty, Morality, God, and a Table FrustratedFool 23 1756 October 8, 2023 at 1:35 pm
Last Post: LinuxGal
  Is Moral Nihilism a Morality? vulcanlogician 140 10155 July 17, 2019 at 11:50 am
Last Post: DLJ
  Subjective Morality? mfigurski80 450 34899 January 13, 2019 at 8:40 am
Last Post: Acrobat
  Law versus morality robvalue 16 1327 September 2, 2018 at 7:39 am
Last Post: The Grand Nudger
  Objective morality: how would it affect your judgement/actions? robvalue 42 8219 May 5, 2018 at 5:07 pm
Last Post: SaStrike
  dynamic morality vs static morality or universal morality Mystic 18 3501 May 3, 2018 at 10:28 am
Last Post: LastPoet
  Can somebody give me a good argument in favor of objective morality? Aegon 19 4409 March 14, 2018 at 6:42 pm
Last Post: The Grand Nudger
  Morality WinterHold 24 2792 November 1, 2017 at 1:36 pm
Last Post: The Grand Nudger
  What is morality? Mystic 48 6897 September 3, 2017 at 2:20 pm
Last Post: Edwardo Piet
  Morality from the ground up bennyboy 66 10837 August 4, 2017 at 5:42 pm
Last Post: The Grand Nudger



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)