Sam Harris talks to Jon Stewart

The moral landscape is a book about morality based on scientific principle. I have not read it but I sure want to now!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Sam Harris
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

The Need For a Higher Power and Morality

Nehamashira:

I think that any society that is not accountable to a benevolent 'higher power' will eventually fall into moral decay and violence. Humans have shown time and again that they tend to follow the path of the least moral resistance. What are our greatest needs? They are to be fed, clothed, protected, and loved, and we need to be challenged to become our highest and best selves. In order to do that, we require a standard to be upheld. It is not easy to do the right thing, and in the midst of moral dilemmas, we need ethical guidelines that will help us make the right decisions. A society is best judged by the way it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens. Is it 'life-loving/preserving', or does it glorify death?

Some of what you say is true. Almost all People indeed do follow "the path of the least moral resistance" and rarely like to invest any effort in anything greater than the primal needs. For a society to function and excel, its residents need to have moral standards, ethical guidelines, basic discipline and on top of that a template of character that they can emulate. The easiest and most reliable service provider who if available can render these services to a society has always been religion. Take for example most societies today based on any of the three major religions. These religions always give birth to organizations which have the skill, ingenuity and posses the required resources and experience to make a relatively good society

But is it true that the only thing that can shape a society well is religion? Is it true that any society that does not believe in the supernatural is undoubtedly evil? Seriously? You say that a society that does not believe in a "higher power" will undoubtedly end up in a state of moral decadence and violent anarchism, but this is just not true! Religion does give us standards to measure up to but there are many other things that can give us standards to measure up to, and as a requirement to function as an integral part of a society even a godless one, you have to have some standards . Some people use great figures, revered figures, history etc as a guide or role model, some people think of dreams, goals, ideals or just other people as references for moral decisions. Just because a society's residents do not think that some "higher power" somewhere is looking over their shoulder at what they do all the time, everywhere does not mean that the society is decaying.


Ndigilia2:

The real issue isn't whether an atheistic society can have moral people, rather, the issue is whether the atheistic society has the "language" to justify the morality.

For instance, it was Christianity that gave post-Christian Europe it's definition of what a human being is, (a creature who has the image of God as it's essence). It is this definition of a human being that made all human life of equal and infinite value. (Of course, there's periods in Christendom when Christians didn't live up to this standard). It is from this understanding that the concept of human rights developed.

So if a 2-year old child is trapped in a building being razed by a fire, Christians have no problem believing that an atheist firefighter will run into the building and try to save him. The real issue is whether the atheist firefighter can rationally justify that action.

I am not sure i really do understand what you are saying. I am assuming that what you are trying to prove is that without god there can be no morality, since your position is that god is the one who defines morality or puts it in our hearts. I however do not think that morality is hinged on god, at all. I Think of it as a product of human civilization, humans evolved to require a sort of code to differentiate the intentions, decisions and actions that can be helpful(good) to the individual, family, community and society with the harmful(bad) ones.

This is a common disagreement with many people, you are a divine command theorist while i am something else.

There are many reasons that one can 'justify' a moral action, this is not an issue, If mad men like hitler can base their insanity on morality then it should be relatively easy for other nobler and more justifiable actions to be morally defendable. If it is in the case of the atheist firefighter, Logically you can give reasons about society, opportunities of life, blah blah blah. But the best course of action in a case like this, is to make an appeal to emotions. Because humans have an ability of empathy(which i also think is not from god), we can empathize with the kid in the fire. I don't think anybody would want a toddler to be roasted in burning building for no reason.I wouldn't want it, you wouldn't want it and this is because we can imagine the kids pain and sorrow and if we don't want to endure it, we wouldn't wish it happening on the kid.


Ndigila2:

This is where the slippery slope gets. You've identified society, logic and emotions.

If society judges creates it's own morals, then by what standard would an individual look at another society and say that slavery and child sacrifices are wrong?

Before you talk of opportunities of life as a reason for the fire fighter to save the child, you first have to define what human life is and what makes it very valuable.

When it comes to logic and emotions, if they coincide, there's no problem. But what happens when appeal to logic contradicts appeal to emotions? In the case of the firefighter, what if a stronger argument could be made not to save the child. Which one do you side with?

It is not a slippery slope because there is no natural high ground. Many people who believe in divine command(morality from god) also believe that god has an absolute moral law which is infallibly righteous or always right. But I do not believe such a thing exists. Morality is what it is because people have built it up to where it is.

I don't believe there is such a thing as an infallible moral law.All moral law is man made law and not free of wrong, thus I choose to decide on the definition of morality that I see as good. I'll then use rational thought and logic to build the moral framework that is appealing to me. You gave an example of slavery and child sacrifice. I do not see any benefit to those things in modern life, I abhor violence and value freedom and I am afraid of me and my dear ones falling prey to these terrible things; these positions I hold logically force me to take a standpoint against slavery and child sacrifice. I will therefore build and adopt a moral framework for myself and my society that shuns these things.

I will also use emotion to reinforce or make strong the framework I have adopted. If I am told to justify my reasons for thinking slavery is wrong or rushing into a burning building to save a child, I could use the emotions in question to justify myself. This is how the morality seems to work for everyone. Even people of religious leanings will have a moral framework that they choose to adopt and will use anything including emotion to keep this framework steady.


Just imagine that there is this religious order that has a holy book that tells people to bash children on a rock.(I was trying to be corteous in the forum but are passages in the bible that say to do this) Even though I am sure that they would have a meaning behind such a twisted, cruel and terrible edict, If I criticize any person of the given religion with this edict, they will undoubtedly get mad since I am attacking their moral framework which is based on the holy book. I can very well imagine their logic going against their emotions as they try to reason on the reasons for what they believe. I have experienced this very conundrum myself, where good people are trying to defend such malevolent statements in the bible. Can you imagine trying to defend against slavery or bashing children's heads on rock. If you are a christian, you could say that the passages should be interpreted in context of their time or something of that nature, but some things like killing little kids by bashing their heads into rocks is just wrong, no matter what time or place you are from. In the end however peoples decisions can rarely be linearly interpreted to logic or emotion or calculated choices after evaluation of options, The people who are stuck basically usually do two things, they will either choose to follow their cruel moral framework/code or decide to abandon that version of morality for another better morality.

Psalms 137:8-9

⁸ O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-

⁹ he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

Hosea 13:16

¹⁶ The people of Samaria must bear their guilt,
because they have rebelled against their God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open."

This is basically from one of the tenants of Cultural relativism

There is no objective measurement that can be used to tell whether one culture’s moral norms are better than another’s. There’s no moral laws or truths that hold for all societies all of the time.

This excerpt was gotten from discussions on Mashada

'The Evolution of Confusion' by Dan Dennett, AAI 2009

What do you make of this confusion?

Piracy

Online piracy in the form of p2p and other file sharing using means like online hosting and IRC's is one of the largest sectors of crime in today's world. "One credible analysis by the Institute for Policy Innovation concludes that global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers' earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes" according to the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI). To combat this, Organizations like the EFF, RIAA, MPAA, MPA, GVU and others have mounted a considerably huge legal campaign which we now call the The Intellectual Property Wars.



A long time ago, when the prepubescent adolescent hormones of stupidity ruled my friend's mind and he didn't have a computer,he got caught shoplifting. Of course, this was horrendously stupid , not advisable and will never be repeated; but for the 20 buck movie,he got a year of probation, had to pay close to 1000 dollars in legal fees and almost went deaf for a month due to the yelling his got from my parents.

Today, all around me people are doing much worse and getting off Scot free. I watched the movie that he tried to steal so long ago on a computer for free(not on my computer off-course!) I even know a couple of online hosting sites where you can watch the movie and many others illegally without any legal recourse possible. In the engineering department, There are so many people in the engineering department carrying laptops around with pirated softwares like Orcad, Allegro, Matlab, Proteus, Autocad that have licenses that can go for about 1000 to 3000 dollars without any sort of guilt whatsoever. I am basically shooting myself in the foot right of the bat in my studies and in real life if i choose not to use warez software. There are open source options like KiCad and others and, legal options like student licenses, other options like exclusively using school computer but to be able to compete in the academic world and even in the real world, you gots to be rich or do some pirating.

For quite a while, I used to regularly buy a magazine called racecar engineering. This is a UK magazine that analytically talks about the technology in High-performance cars and automotive racing machines. It was one of a kind. They would talk about F1 technologies like the J-damper, F1 aero devices like barge boards, diffusers and double diffusers, ground effects skirts. They would analyze aero on open and closed wheel prototypes in detail. rake angles,ride height effects for front and rear, effects of aero devices like the splitter, canards e.t.c. One of my favorite issues was one where they were able to get detailed plans of the BloodHound SSC, almost a year before the builders even made a scale model. It was SO COOL!


But the fact of the matter is I am an unemployed sap, Even though I used to try and buy the magazine monthly, I stopped due to financial problem, and as a result due to low demand for the magazine, the only bookstore selling the magazine (Barnes & Noble) stopped stocking it. It is now simply impossible to find the magazine in Mobile Alabama. All of this drama could have been avoided if i simply torrented the magazine instead.

The intellectual property war has now become such a stupid fight with lawyers, governments, companies, and legions of people fighting out this battle that cant be won. What possible reason can exist for fining a single mother 2 million dollars for a single cd. We have got to get to a middle ground. Pirating on one level is wrong, if people in a society do not have a basic respect for other peoples intellectual property then that society is not really healthy. However the current copyright and patent laws are illogical and hopelessly outdated, some of the most prominent laws have gone unchanged since the early 15'th century, and the RIAA and other western organization in lieu with America and other western countries are using these laws as a vice to perpetuate neocolonialism on the rest of the world. So humanity is stuck and will stay stuck in this web for quite a while.

There are many such reasons that people pirate. It is simply unwise to follow some given antiquated sense of morality that is not defined by you to your own detriment. You simply do what you got to do. However a good guideline to use is to still retain a basic respect for intellectual property, don't blatantly flaunt the law like for example hosting a server in your basement or blogging about piracy :D and pray to Jebus or whomever you choose to that the RIAA, MPAA or the many other big bullies don't choose to pick on you.

Emotions

Emotions are the enemy of reason. Get swept up in emotions and you are bound to lose the goal in your mind. You get swept up in your angst, despair, ecstasy or desire and you are bound to want to act them out, you are bound to start taking steps to fulfill these feelings. Your behaviour, thought-patterns, ideals, goals and dreams will all eventually heavily corrupted in one way or another by an emotion if let it completely overrun you. So, Control your emotions!!!

You should however treasure and cherish your emotions. Many people choose to suppress and hide what they feel due to the effects that such emotions have. Such a reaction could be highly detrimental. Love, Joy and other enthrallments seem to change reason, logic and basic psychological balance; Sadness, anger and fear tend to do something in the same line. Depending on the situation or atmosphere you are in, you might not appreciate the effects. For example, a romantic interest might distract from a given task or anger might get you too steamed up to work properly. You must however remember that emotions are the fuel behind all our actions. You must value this fuel wherever it is from. Cherish your feelings for they might be of use in your future.

Isaac Asimov, greatest sci-fi writer yet

There have been many great science-fiction writers. The golden age, the birth of Hard sf had many great writers like John Campbell,Robert Heinlein and many more . The greatest writer for me however is undoubtedly Isaac Asimov. He was essentially a claustophilic, aviophobic coot who was born in the Soviet Union. When his parents emigrated to the United States. Isaac (three years old at the time) stowed away in their baggage. He has been an American citizen since the age of eight.

At the age of nine, he found the love of his life (in the inanimate sense) when he discovered his first science-fiction magazine. By the time he was eleven, he began to write stories, and at eighteen, he actually worked up the nerve to submit one. It was rejected. After four long months of tribulation and suffering, he sold his first story and, thereafter, he never looked back.

Isaac Asimov was unlike any other writer in his age in that he used real life scientific truths to think of introspective and intriuging possibilities for the future and that in almost all his science fiction works, he used these to build up a universe, with such interesting and intricate technological, social, political structures that till today, many authors still use his fictional universe in their works(the three laws of robotics,positronic brain, the galactic empire,e.t.c.). He invented the term robotics, Psychohistory(which is an actual study), wrote over 500 pieces of work, won over 20 different awards and had 14 honor doctorates. His foundation series and the robot series still are the greatest works of fiction to date, though some may say that other title like the lord of the rings fiction are better or maybe David weber's honorverse build a greater story, I fervently disagree.

Here is a Quote from one of his robot series books, Robots and Empires

“My death, Daneel,” he said, “is not important. No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists. --Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Daneel said, “Yes, Partner Elijah.”

“The work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes an undying part of the totality. That totality of human lives--past and present and to come--forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens of thousands of years and has been growing more elaborate and, on the whole, more beautiful in all that time. Even the Spacers are an offshoot of the tapestry and they, too, add to the elaborateness and beauty of the pattern. An individual life is one thread in the tapestry and what is one thread compared to the whole?

“Daneel, keep your mind fixed firmly on the tapestry and do not let the trailing off of a single thread affect you. There are so many other threads, each valuable, each contributing--”

BP oil spill update

Well, It is now 69 days into the Deep water horizon oil spill, What's happening?

• BP's Oil cap is still in place although the amount of oil collected is less than half than is leaking from the sea floor.

• The efficiency of the whole oil collection operation is still in question. Never mind that an underwater robot is somehow able to knock off the cap, while filming! There is no emergency plan if a storm were to come near the operation, Even though it is hurricane season and there is a tropical storm(alex) on the way; Official procedure is just to abandon collection of oil if there is a storm.

• BP has replaced their CEO in a futile attempt to placate the American public. After BP CEO Tony Hayward's recent inconsiderate remarks about the spill "eating up his personal time", being caught on his luxury yatch sipping mohitos in the heat of the crisis, and his frankly awful gaffe at the hearing in congress
  
  
  
  , and not to mention unleashing the obama on himself, the British dude had to go. He was replaced by a man who BP calls a real "southern guy" someone who was "affected" by the spill like the rest of us, Mr. Bob Dudley

• There have been attempts from the US. to gain more control. BP has been essentially forced to not pay dividends to its shareholders and set up an independent entity with 20 billion dollars in funds for compensation

• Their public repoire has gotten so low that their own twitter account is supposedly being eclipsed by one dedicated to mocking them.They are on a very weak limb and can be pushed around by anyone marginally influential. Kevin Costner was able to get BP to buy 32 of his crap centrifuge things that separate oil from water. They were basically badgered into submission for alabama , florida and louisiana for money to be used in advertisments(stupid ones at that)
  
  
  
  Alabama's Gulf Coast - Lucy Buffett Tourism Spot

• BP is still a Supermajor oil company, Even with all the money they are supposed to be shelling out, They will still be at a profit.The company is probably still run with finances being the first and foremost priority.
  
  The gulf is seemingly first and foremost a financial headache, then a legal one and then maybe a social one. That is why for example when a crowd-sourcing effort such as InnoCentive comes up with nearly 1000 usable ideas for review on a task that BP itself set up for them. The Oil giant can totally ignore the effort with only the feeblest excuse and not be straying from its goals.
  
  
• Its gotten so bad that people are starting to question BP's Value. Gulf Fund Administrator, Kenneth Feinberg might say that there is no sense bankrupting BP but that stand point along with other related ones are now questionable.
  
  Should we continue pressuring British Petroleum even though we are causing damage to the cooperation? Should America begin planning on seizing BP assets in America(in case BP wont pay) to ensure that the damage to the gulf is fixed even though this might (at least temporarily) actually bankrupt the company? Should the US government have put a moratorium on deep sea drilling to re-assess the dangers involved and revamp regulation in the sector even though we are now putting some hurt on an already fragile industrial sector?e.t.c.

UPDATE: The flow of oil in the well has now been officially really capped