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Continuation of tangent discussion/civil debate about religion thread
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The main thing that confuses me about consciousness is: why aren't we more like philosophical zombies? For example, why do I sometimes have a random desire to throw a pencil at a wall? (heheh, I know that sounds crazy but hopefully you know what I mean.)
I wouldn't be surprised if current science can somehow account for this very well, but it strikes me as unusual that I should be able to do something so random. Sometimes I wonder if there is something unintuitive going on in our brains on the quantum level during moments of intense creativity, etc. Not because I know much about quantum theory but because our behaviors are sometimes soooo outside the box of normal human thought and experience that I can't imagine where else these ideas come from. For ignorant people like me, quantum physics is a convenient scapegoat....."If you don't know what the hell's going on, it's probably quantum physics." 
Last edited by Dragg (2008 December 31, 9:57 pm)
kazelee wrote:
The Bible containing historical fact does not prove it has not been edited. There are many fictional movies/literature containing large portions of historical facts.
Huh? Of course it doesn't, but no where in my post did I argue that it does! I did not even mention it whatsoever! Haha, I'm a little confused. 
What I did try to explain is that there is evidence that the New Testament is 99.5% texturally pure. That means amongst around 6,000 copies of the original Greek manuscript only 0.5% was not EXACTLY identical. And, as mentioned, where differences existed, the vast majority were just spelling errors and not a single one affected or changed meaning. The books in the New Testament we have now are the same as when they were written. It's as simple as that. Historians (secular and Christian alike) do NOT dispute this.
Tobberoth wrote:
Still no connection to religion. What tells us we SHOULD help the man are social norms. It's considered cowardice to run away from someone who needs help. You save yourself but people will think less of you. YOU will think less of you because social norms have been part of your life since you were a baby. God isn't telling you that you're doing the wrong thing, your upbrinding is...
I wasn't trying to connect it to religion yet anyway. Just suggesting why something like a Moral Law (ie. feelings of what we ought to do) cannot be merely instinctual, as you were suggesting.
It appears that you now agree with me, that "what tells us we SHOULD help the man" is not instinct alone. Thanks for that concession. So, having changed tracks it now seems you are suggesting that such feelings are the result of social norms or conventions. That would certainly be convenient, but for me this also falls apart under closer examination.
I think you might be taking it for granted that if we have learned something from parents or teachers or even society, then that thing must be a merely human invention. Of course this isn't the case. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something humans beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked.
Now, I totally agree that we learn descent behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different -- ie. in Australia we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might as well have been the rule to keep to the right. On the other, some things we learn, like mathematics, are real truths. So the question we are now asking is to which class does something like a Moral Law belong?
There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great -- not nearly as great as most people imagine. Whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent.
The second reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality. Yet if your moral ideas can be truer than those of the Nazis, for example, you are measuring them both by a standard. You are comparing them with some Real Morality. The reason why your idea of, lets say, New York, can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said "New York" we meant merely "The town that I am imagining in my own head", how could one of us have truer ideas than another.
In the same way if, as you suggested, feelings of what we ought to do are mere convention and "whatever each society happens to approve", there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; And no sense in saying:
phuana wrote:
You may have noticed that the world is getting more civilised as time goes on, and less religious.
