High level philosophy

[robvalue]

DLJ and I are nearing level 50 in philosophy, so we decided to grind out some discussion* so we can finally enter Plato's Cave. We heard there are some amazing axioms to be found in there.
...

Apologies for taking my time ... this week I are been mostly preaching governance/ethics to an oil company (they all passed the exam but they left me all kinda succubusted).

Perhaps a good place to start would be a brief deconstruction of the previous levels (1-49) and the various level-up red-pills we found there.

Here are some of mine:
1. "Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là" -- Laplace.  Gods and goddesses are not required in this or any hypothesis.
2. Morality has evolved.  It has not been intelligently designed.
3. Morality is a 'value stream'.
4. There is no 'out there' yard-stick (god or other).
5. There is no non-human representation of right/wrong.
6. Morality/ethics requires a social context.  Therefore, it is a social construction.  
It is an 'idea construct' (in that different people have different ideas about it and these ideas affect how they behave in social situations) and a 'constitutive construct' (in that it cannot exist outside of social relations that validate it).
7. Morality is not a simplex system... it is duplex (and perhaps multiplex?) in that there are two pathways:
a) Sense data to decision(s)
b) decision(s) to action.
8. In-game map, zoom-function:  It isn't just one click from values/ethics to neurons.  Therefore, there is one or more intermediate steps. Each step may have a different naming convention (terminology) but each view must be compatible with its next level (whether zooming in or out).
9. Morality is:
An evolved, human governance / continuity management system.
This system is an evolved extension (in the cognitive domain) of the pre-human immune system, endocrine and limbic system architecture and requires an ethical baseline (requiring memory), emotion-based thresholds, event-detection (e.g. deception detectors; a conscience) and reasoning (hence consciousness). It is enabled / influenced by chemical inhibitors and inducers and social constraints and drivers.

That'll do for starters.  I can add a few more relating to 'consciousness' later.

Awesome, thanks! This all looks sensible to me. I’ll have to do some research into some terminology I’m not familiar with, and then I’ll do a proper response

As another baseline subject, I was thinking of summarising my thoughts on what it means for things to be "real", and my analysis of solopsism-style problems.