Posted on 10/20/2006 8:52:20 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Let's all stop beating Basil's car
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
or evidence that the Bible is true after all:
the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Romans 8:7
I will pray for them so that they might be led to atone for their sins.
Amen.
My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car.
But wouldn't there be a judgement behind that laughter? And wouldn't that judgement be based on certain illusory constructs that are just irrational relics from our developmental past? And if this is the case, shouldn't we then laugh at the laughers? And shouldn't someone else laugh at us for laughing at the laughers, for a similar reason? Eventually there can be nothing but laughter.
It seems that the truth is actually that there is ‘no’ separation from evolution and the next logical step that is currently preached; the ‘meme’, altruism, and social Darwinism. Science is now boldly preaching our ethics and morality originate from ‘evolution’ while stating that rejecting any part of this is due to silly religious superstition. Does anyone now doubt that there is a difference between evolution/Darwinism and any other scientific theory?
I for one think that it is good that this is now coming to light for those who did not see it or decided to ignore. It is humorous in a sad way as we are now witness the ‘witnessing’ of the new ordained preachers of fundamental science from the books of naturalism affirming their contradictory non-belief - - - Morals, ethics, and consciousness per ‘their’ science via Darwinism, now ultimately originates from mindlessness.
They have excluded any telic or theological ideals from science due to the ironic naturalistic dogmatism that they hold in science while pointing to the historical dogmatism of that which they exclude. If they now choose to engage a playing field, which is again ironically off limits to science due to Darwinism, than I welcome this new discourse. We can now look at ‘evolution’ as a whole and remove the philosophy that has been attributed to this scientific theory.
I must confess I haven’t, to my own satisfaction, worked out exactly how this operates. The brain is of the body (temporal). The mind is of the spirit (as many of our acquaintance have observed). The brain is an instrument of the spirit (as is the whole of the body). The brain and the mind cannot be disjoined, nor can they exactly be thought of as one and the same.
In the instance of a physical disease we tend to speak of ‘the brain’. In the instance of a psychosis we tend to speak of ‘the mind’ (when a physical cause is not obvious).
There are, of course, those who would insist none but a physical cause exists for any dysfunction of the mind, and that the word itself is merely a synonym for ‘brain’, used most commonly in the instance of certain contexts. Such would be the argument of Dawkins, I presume, and I must further assume, had he the power to realize his ambitions, that he would be quite amicable to the idea of ‘treating’ someone whose ideas might be too divergent from those of his own. Such as the ideas of Christian Conservative nuts – just slide a needle past the eyeball and inject the ‘cure’ direct into the brain – and why not in a mechanistic universe consisting of nothing but random neuron discharges and unguided chemical reactions. Shades of Heinlein and ‘The Brotherhood’ { 8^).
I fancy your description (narrow, fabricated boundary).
Many of us judge ideas on the basis of their perceived consequences in the realm of our own greatest individual knowledge or interest. From this view-point it is clear there’s no room for government by the consent of the governed in a mechanistic life-view, despite the elaborate lip-service paid to the idea by some of those who count themselves among The Masters of the Universe.
I don’t see how it can, but then I am but a lowly and humble citizen of a great republic.
Perhaps that sort of a life-view is capable of a limited reasoning about its physical environment, but not, I don’t believe, to the extent that it can offer anything to a free society in the way of directing our affections or of informing our values.
We hold no truths to be self-evident, that all (men) are evolved based on chance, that they are endowed by a mindless chemical process from a mindless universal algorithm with uncertain unalienable illusions, that among these are a delusion of life, and the pursuit of happenstance. That to secure these illusions,, governments are instituted among chemical processes (called men), deriving their just powers from the happenstance of the governed.
- the declaration of mindless dependency(- Heartlander)
I don't know specifically about Dawkins and 'meme', but his ideas generally give me a severe case of the screaming memes. { 8^)
We hold no truths to be self-evident, that all (men) are evolved based on chance, that they are endowed by a mindless chemical process from a mindless universal algorithm with uncertain unalienable illusions, that among these are a delusion of life, and the pursuit of happenstance. That to secure these illusions, governments are instituted among chemical processes (called men), deriving the authoritarian elite's just powers from the religious philosophy that man has evolved so far and is so intelligent because his brian is programmed by chance that he should save himself by directing his future evolution.
…. and on the 3 billionth day, nature accidentally shude forth chemicals and looked upon it without saying or thinking, “this is neither good or bad, it’s just chemicals, and I shall form these chemicals in no specific image and without intelligence”. Then plants, insects, fish, and man evolved from this shude without intelligence, each according to its own inane kind.
I must admit that your correction is better and hope you use it as you see fit… BTW, I view your posts as a great addition to this forum – FWIW…
Oh, you said a mouthful there, YHAOS!!! Maybe that sort of a life view can reason about its physical environment; but human beings do not live in the physical environment exclusively. For that would not be sufficient to account for the full experience of the existence in which we (sentient and hopefully rational) human beings actually regularly partake in our own day-to-day lives.
If the physical were "all that there is," then there would be no such thing as history, nor of cultural development (use the word "evolution" here for "development" if preferred), nor of systematic science, nor of philosophy, nor of the arts, nor literature, nor just about anything else of the way human beings actually experience their, er, experience as human beings.
And so I give you a tautology. :^)
Sometimes a tautology expresses something that is manifestly true. If so, you can't scream, "tautology!!!!!!!!!!" in defense against the manifestly true.
It seems we get into all kinds of trouble when we insist on indiscriminately applying Aristotle's law of the excluded middle to all cases. What modern science (e.g., quantum and relativity theory) has taught us is that real life consists, not of a choice of "A" or "B," but that "A" and "B" may be somehow complementary. That, to me, is the situation that both science and philosophy need to pay more attention to.
The "classic" statement of this problem (i.e., "Plato vs. Aristotle") was recapitulated by Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein held that if you have two truth claims, at least one of them must be false.
Bohr, on the other hand, held that both could be true, but not at the same time. Yet together, the seeming mutually exclusive opposites reconcile in a higher-level principle, which he called the "complementarity principle." Thus truth can be perceived by different observers in different ways; but all observations are ultimately reconciled in the higher-level principle.
Which describes a pattern that seems to govern the actual universe in which we live, be it the physical universe, or the universe of reasonable discourse. Certainly, Bohr's take on such questions leaves the exercise of human liberty wide open, and yet ultimately constrained by the "higher-level principle."
Einstein -- and may God ever bless him -- was more of the mind of Newtonian mechanics, at least taking it as his starting point. He quicky had to digress to accommodate his own mathematical thinking, choosing to adopt Reimannian geometry to articulate and express his own reasoning. Suffice it to say his predictions were confirmed on the basis of observation and experiment.
Still, he was never comfortable with his friend's take (Bohr's that is) on the "uncertainty principle." Yet it seems to me, practically speaking, uncertainty is built into the very heart of life; so how can one ignore it?
All of which might sound like a complete digression from the points you raised, dear YHAOS.
Still, I maintain that in order for human beings to live in free societies, this is the very sort of question that needs moast urgently to be addressed. It seems to me that Aristotle's law of the excluded middle is a fertile field for ideology and indoctrinalization. Both close the human future to what is already "known," and make the future "yet to be known" a slave of the past.
The complementarity principle, on the other hand, leaves life "open" -- which is how I think we humans all really experience life, at least if we're paying any attention to our own experience at all.
And so I hope we can dispense with the "food fights" and the "mud wrestling" and just engage in rational disacourse. Perhaps that is too much to be expected, these days.
Thank you ever so much for writing, YHAOS, and for sharing your thoughts....
What happens when the body dies and worms eat the brain.. Do we exist?.. And if so what are we, in what measure, and to what extent?.. Are we a spirit riding a body as transportation?... Is a human body merely needed to function while on this planet.. during a certain age/eon/time/dispensation.. or part of WHOM we are?..
Now THATS the science I'm interested in.. I see no problem with God(the Spirit(s)) adjusting physics and cosmology in his leisure.. What would we call this "new" scientific discipline?..
Praise God I will get to find out.. Those that fail to pass the test.. "the God test".. will not, I think.. Pity.... that many that have devoted their lives on this planet to finding out these things will be rejected.. from the joy.. of the answers to many questions and answers including some of these...
Would be a HELL of a way to end up..
</Sarc>
I had a stroke.. The only result (I could determine) was that the words "I thought" wouldn't come out my mouth.. I spoke certain words(in my mind).. but other words came out my mouth, different words.. Strange situation.. maybe me shut up.. Eventually I could speak a couple words that matched my "thoughts", then a sentence, then two sentences.. All this while I could write emails perfectly.. Theres a distinct gulf between what "I" could think and what I could speak/say.. Only reason I know this is because it happened to me.. What you think might not make it out your mouth.. -or- what comes out your mouth could be different than what you think..
Got me thinking how that could be.. There is linkage between your(a person's) thoughts and your brain(body).. but I testify they are not identical.. For communication the human brain just might be "somewhat" like a telephone.. A very useful tool, but the phone is NOT ME.. The telephone metaphore could be expanded greatly.. If you get my drift..
You can answer these questions based on your beliefs:
What happens when the body dies and worms eat the brain.. Do we exist?.. And if so what are we, in what measure, and to what extent?.. Are we a spirit riding a body as transportation?...
Groovey subject.. Eh!...
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