(August 19, 2015 at 6:23 am)robvalue Wrote: Well, all I can say is to try and find an incentive. My only incentive to live for the past 8 years has been what it would do to those around me if I killed myself. That's been enough to keep me going. I'm confused about whether this is a personal or scientific question.
Again, "good" is what you make it. To me, good is looking after people and animals, trying to make them happy, well and minimise harm I do to them. I strive for that, even though I'd rather actually be dead. I do the best I can, in the ways I see fit. To some people, "good" is have as much fun as possible and fuck everyone else.
This is a scientific question. My theory states that there is a scientific (psychological) basis for how things and people are of good value and worth to us (how they give good meaning to our lives). That psychological basis is not our thinking. It is not how we personally define good through our thinking. It is instead our incentive (our pleasant emotions). Our reward system (pleasant emotions) are the only incentives a human being has based upon what Robert Sapolsky has said as I pointed out earlier.
So based upon that, our pleasant emotions are the only things that can make things, situations, and people of good value and worth to us. So they would be the scientific version of good. That is where the moral version of good transfers over to the scientific version of good in being our pleasant emotions. It's like I said before, if we had no incentive, then it would not bother us at all if things and people that we judged to be good were to be taken away from us. We just wouldn't care.
So here again, I do not see how something or someone can possibly be defined as having good value and worth to us without our incentive. Here again, there are people who are bothered by losses even without their incentive (without their pleasant emotions). But this would only be because they are fooling their brains into thinking they had the incentive when they never had it.
