RE: Moral Nihilism
May 20, 2009 at 8:52 am
(This post was last modified: May 20, 2009 at 8:55 am by infidel666.)
What EVF said.
What we experience as thinking things through and making a choice is just the light show that accompanies the flippings of the coin that occurs when you have multiple impulses that conflict with one another until a resolution occurs. It's your awareness of what is going on as you traverse your neural network. In those moments of indecision, a coin is flipped, and one path is taken over another, leading to another conflict and another flipping of the coin.
As anyone who has studied neural networks is aware, the chances of outcomes at a node of the graph are not usually even. The chance of taking one path over another is dynamically weighted in response to feedback from previous outcomes. But that doesn't mean that we have control over the outcome. When we think back to our previous experiences and try to predict outcomes and evaluate the desirability of those outcomes with respect to previous experiences, etc., we are just retrieving and processing the information we need to formulate the weights to be applied in adjusting the chances for selecting different paths at nodes of the graph.
Those people who seem to have greater impulse control have developed pathways and/or weight formulation processes, by chance, genetics, and/or circumstance, that consistently lead to behaviors that conform to what we perceive as "asceticism" or "good judgement" or "character" or "lawfulness" or whatever.
Of course, being a nihilist, I don't literally BELIEVE any of the above. But I do find it more credible than the idea of a "soul" or anything like that.
What we experience as thinking things through and making a choice is just the light show that accompanies the flippings of the coin that occurs when you have multiple impulses that conflict with one another until a resolution occurs. It's your awareness of what is going on as you traverse your neural network. In those moments of indecision, a coin is flipped, and one path is taken over another, leading to another conflict and another flipping of the coin.
As anyone who has studied neural networks is aware, the chances of outcomes at a node of the graph are not usually even. The chance of taking one path over another is dynamically weighted in response to feedback from previous outcomes. But that doesn't mean that we have control over the outcome. When we think back to our previous experiences and try to predict outcomes and evaluate the desirability of those outcomes with respect to previous experiences, etc., we are just retrieving and processing the information we need to formulate the weights to be applied in adjusting the chances for selecting different paths at nodes of the graph.
Those people who seem to have greater impulse control have developed pathways and/or weight formulation processes, by chance, genetics, and/or circumstance, that consistently lead to behaviors that conform to what we perceive as "asceticism" or "good judgement" or "character" or "lawfulness" or whatever.
Of course, being a nihilist, I don't literally BELIEVE any of the above. But I do find it more credible than the idea of a "soul" or anything like that.
