The Moral Compass of Higher Intelligence: Chapter 1 Where the truth of pragmatic morality lies

Before I can start moralising and telling you why certain ways of living our lives are likely to be more sustainable in the long term than other ways, I will first have to give you my subjective interpretation of pragmatic morality.

By no means I mean to be condescending towards other opinions in this series. I will just try to convince you that with our present ways of living our lives we are like bacteria depleting all the resources in their Petri dish, a reckless way of feasting without caring about the long-term consequences of our behaviour. And then I will try to show you what Nature has taught us in her evolutionary process of self-sustention by creating ever more complex structures and entities. I will try to show you how we could adapt our lives in line with these lessons to maximise our chances of survival of our species and if that is not possible at least how to preserve our knowledge for future entities.

Background

Morality comes from the Latin word “moralis" which means manner, character or proper behaviour. According to Wikipedia morality is that what allows distinguishing between intentions, decisions and actions that are proper and those that are improper.

Morality is a heavily charged issue, to which different people give very different definitions, especially since we all have different standards as to what should be considered “proper” and what should be considered “improper”. In fact without blushing I can state that morality is a relative concept. 

Moral values are necessary values agreed upon by a group of people to maintain a social coherence. Morality is not absolute as every society has different values, but whatever the values are they are usually intended to warrant maintenance of a social status quo. Progress of a society usually needs adaptation of the moral values.

It is important to realise that morality is a set of social norms for a given cultural group only. What is moral in a Christian society may be immoral in a Hindu or Muslim society and vice versa. Christians eat pork which is immoral in a Muslim society. Christians and Muslims eat beef, which is immoral in a Hindu society. In other words "morality" is a relative concept. 

Religions like to moralise, they like to tell you what is good and bad or evil, they like to tell you what is right and what is wrong. Whereas I do understand that some of the moral prescriptions of the religions have value to maintain the social cohesion, many of their moral prescriptions are also a cause of immense suffering. Take for instance the condemnation of homosexuality by the Catholic Church. And what about the oppression of women in several major religions? Plus the fact that religions tend to give a whole plethora of little rules and regulations, which can be extremely stressful if you wish to live your life pleasantly. The same is true for all kinds of sociocultural regulations of the niche you are born into. You may not be comfortable with the values they want to impose on you at all! You may not agree at all that certain things are “supposed to be so”.

That’s why Terrence McKenna used to say: “Culture is not your friend.”

Truth and Reality

People who are moralising to others often try to appeal to “Truth”, “righteousness”, “virtue” and “reality”. But is there really such a thing as an “objective truth” or and “objective reality” we can agree on?

In my previous series, “Is Intelligence and Algorithm?” I have shown you that science itself has revealed with Quantum physics that at the most basic level of existence events depend on the way we observe them. Our subjective consciousness plays a role in the actualisation of events. 

This is summarised by the famous adage “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”. 

As Terrence McKenna used to say with regard to this notion: “Object fetishism is completely bankrupt”.

If there is no objective reality, we are left with subjective perspectives. This means that things “are” not the way we perceive them, but appear so to us and not necessarily to others. The fact that we can still agree on many observations is because we often use the same mental and semantic toolkits, resulting in a kind of consensus reality. 

But it is here where it goes wrong: We assume everybody else has the exactly same mental and semantic toolkits, whereas we all have different filters. Even if we associate the same verbal meaning to a word, we do not necessarily experience the same emotion when thinking this word. A consensus may be shared by a given group, but not necessarily by all groups.

The problem with our language is that we use the verb “to be” and its conjugations far too often. This is an ingrained heritage from the family of Indo-European languages. In reality nothing “is”. As Heraclitus already pointed out, you cannot step in the same river twice. Everything we observe is subject to constant change. 

Thus, most probably there is no such a thing as an “objective truth” or “objective reality”!!! So what are sold as "absolute truths" are lies. Hence my double-meaning title "Where the truth of pragmatic morality lies".

In addition, the way we observe reality is not reality itself, but a virtual representation thereof concocted by our brains! How can you be so sure that what you observed really occurred? Which part was made up by your mind by filling up the spaces between the dots of information that reached your mind? In other words, we’re always hallucinating, but at least part of our hallucination corresponds to what others also may observe. This then we can call our consensus reality. But there are also parts of our experiences, which only exist for us alone.

Like I said in my previous series, E-prime language solves these problems to a certain extent by systematically avoiding the use of the verb “to be”: Instead of stating “the film was good”, you could say “I liked the film”. Instead of stating “this is the knife the man stabbed the victim with”, you could say “The man appears to have stabbed the man with what seems like a knife to me”. By systematically subjectivising your language, you avoid falling in a trap of believing something, for which alternative explanations might exist. You avoid reading wrong intentions in someone else’s actions, where such intentions may be absent. And thus you also avoid having difficult associated paranoid emotions.

First find your own ways...

So now that we have debunked the myth of “objective truth” or and “objective reality”, we can start to talk about “right” ad “virtuous”.

What is right or virtuous is merely a social convention in a given group.

It is important for everybody to find out where his/her moral boundaries are, and to be able do so just must have transgressed your preconceived moral boundaries to a certain extent (but not necessarily to the extreme!), because otherwise you're just believing in what you have been told; it is not an experience based judgement but rather a prejudice. On the basis of how certain moral standards experientially feel, you can then determine in a pragmatic way what suits you and what not. 

A pragmatic subjective morality could then be defined that what is good gives you a good feeling and what is bad a bad feeling. If you have not lived somebody else's standards, how could you otherwise tell if it suits you or not? 

So if something is “OK or not OK” is a question that each one of us should in the first place figure out for him/herself by experience.

I told you I would tell you inconvenient truths, which truths by my definition themselves may not even be truths! You might have hoped that I would start to moralise and as a surprise, I tell you that there is no objective morality, truth or reality.

That said, if one actually were to figure out a bit of each other’s stances by experience, I'm convinced we'd move forward to a society which is based more on mutual understanding. There can be no love without understanding of someone else's stance. Such an understanding based on experience of feelings will make you think twice before you hurt someone else. If love based on understanding is established, people will start to live more harmoniously. 

...but do not forget to take into account others

On the other hand there is a risk with the above mentioned approach if you conclude that you should only pursue your own interests. After all, if you only pursue your own interests, you’re likely to collide with the interests of others. The result is suffering. Either of you or of the other, but most likely of both.

Growing up teaches us that we can’t always have what we want, and in order to live harmoniously together with other people, we’ll have to make some compromises. This is where a set of values is born in a group of people, which ideally may strive to warrant the best bargain for everybody.

Since it is clear that we will not be able to agree on a set of absolutes -because in this relative world, where everything only exists by virtue of the interdependent relations between objects or subjects there are no absolutes -

it is perhaps a good idea to look for the greatest common divisor we can all agree on.

I may be wrong, but I think I don’t only speak for myself if I conclude that human beings normally wish to avoid Suffering. We may be able to agree to suffer for a short period, if this serves a purpose of avoiding long-term suffering, but long-term suffering is surely something we can agree on that we want to avoid this.

A criterion for a pragmatic morality

So if we wish to have a set of values which warrants the best bargain for everybody, the avoidance of suffering is a promising starting point.

In this series I will explore one by one those sociocultural standards of morality which appear to be most universal across cultures and religions in this framework of avoiding long-term suffering.

I will try to see in how far we can arrive at a consensus of a pragmatic morality, which does not condemn any behaviour as good or bad per se, but which aims at avoiding long-term suffering and once that goal is realised, the achievement of the best bargain for everybody.

How this will exactly be translated into guidelines (rather than rules or laws) will be discussed for each of the universal sociocultural dilemmas regarding violence and wrath, truthfulness or the lack thereof, possessions, theft, sexuality, lust, depravity, greed and austerity, sloth, gluttony and intoxications, pride and spiritual materialism.

These are heavy themes, and the use of certain terminologies in the phrase above does not imply that I necessarily agree with what the meaning of such a terminology might suggest, rather they are themes where societies and religions often have preconceived ideas.

I think it is worthwhile to explore these themes one by one to see which limitations on behaviour the criteria of avoiding long-term suffering and the achievement of the best bargain for everybody would appear to impose.

In fact at this very moment I may have vague ideas of how I subjectively consider these different topics, but by writing this series, I will be investigating in what way these criteria naturally fit in with Nature’s “Intelligence Algorithm”, I discussed in my previous series. In other words at this very moment I am not sure yet what the outcome of this investigation exactly will be and I promise that I will try to keep an open mind and that I will try to avoid sticking too much to my preconceived ideas. 

I may have been a bit provoking in my seminal “preface” post, by using terminologies as “divisiveness” and “ignorance” when referring to certain behaviour, but I will promise that I will at least investigate whether anything can be gained from “divisive” and “ignorant” behaviour in order to avoid long-term suffering and achieve the best bargain for everybody.

Conclusion

In this post I have argued that morality is a relative concept relating to a set of values belonging to a given group of people. I have questioned the notions of objective truth and reality and come to the conclusion that it seems that there can be no such absolutes and that we’re dealing only with subjective perspectives*. Thus I have -like Baerdric- taken distance from a dualistic notion of inherent “good” or “evil”.

Yet I have tried to formulate a criterion for a pragmatic morality, one which I hope most people can agree on, which is order to avoid long-term suffering and achieve the best bargain for everybody.

Prospects

As said before I will explore the themes of what are considered “sins” in various cultures and religions one by one to see which limitations on behaviour the criteria of avoiding long-term suffering and the achievement of the best bargain for everybody would appear to impose and in how far such limitations are really in line with Nature’s “Intelligence Algorithm”.

I hope you have liked this post. If you do, please upvote and/or resteem. #steemtrail.

*Even this phrase would then negate itself. I said there are no Absolutes in plural, if something is absolute it is bound to be the only thing there is, so that there is no room for plural.  If there would be multiple absolutes, they would be relative to each  other, if we would apply logic. Reasoning about absolutes however cannot  follow normal logic, because the absolute does not fulfill the criteria  to create a premise. The absolute is outside of the realm of thought  which always works with relative terms. Even if we call a principle  "absolute" because we haven't seen exclusions to that principle, it is  still a relative principle in the sense that there are other such  principles it is relative to. In other words what we usually call "absolutes", are principles that are as far as we know universally applicable in their given domain. To state that a truth is absolute means that it would always apply under any given circumstance, but since our knowledge is limited there is no sure way to know whether there is anything for which that would be true. Let's assume that as far as we know it seems to be a universal principle that there are no absolute truths).