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.

Agreed! I don’t even see how they would be relevant anyhow. They could be bastards.

2. Morality has evolved.  It has not been intelligently designed.

For sure.

3. Morality is a 'value stream'.

I’m not exactly sure what this means, but I agree it’s totally to do with an individual's values.

4. There is no 'out there' yard-stick (god or other).

Agreed. It would be essentially arbitrary, or at best some sort of average.

5. There is no non-human representation of right/wrong.

I think some animals have the notion of what we call right/wrong, or at least "fairness"; but I doubt they have the kind of internal meta-analysis about it that humans have.

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).

Agreed.

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.

I’m not familiar with this so I’d have to do more reading, but from the sounds of it I agree.

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).

Sure yes, I think it’s some kind of very complex feedback system involving many steps. I don’t know enough scientifically to identify those steps.

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.

This is again beyond my knowledge, so I’d need to read more to fully understand it. I expect I would agree, and I recognise the term "governance" from our earlier conversation.

If you’d like me to do some reading on any/all of the parts I’m not so familiar with, please let me know, and I’ll do so! When I’m more with it, I’ll try and add some more of my own philosophy here too.