Alonzo Fyfe

Perhaps some illumation can be shed here by looking at the distinction between a functional and a physical explanation of an event.

Among my various hobbies, I program a computer. I have a part of my program where the user clicks a button on the screen and gets a printout of the data.

There is, of course, a physical description of what happens when the user prints a report, having to do with applying so much force to the top left corner of the mouse button (under certain circumstances), making an electrical connection, sending an electrical impulse into a computer, that travels a determined route, ultimately sending a signal down another wire to a printer where toner gets smeared on a piece of paper that gets rolled out onto the printer tray.

But there is also a functional definition of printing a report, which is "click on this button and the computer will print your report."

As a programmer, I know very little about the physical description of what a computer does. However, I am fairly well versed on many of its functional descriptions. I let somebody good at hardware worry about the physical descriptions; he lets me worry about the functional descriptions.

The point being that the physical and functional descriptions are distinct. They are related at a certain level, but still distinct.

If a person comes by and offers a physical description of how a computer works, explaining how clicking on a mouse button causes the computer to activate a hard drive and transfer data from RAM to the hard drive, this description may be entirely accurate.

Yet, we are still entitled to ask if this physical description is a description of printing a file, or saving a file.

The person offering the physical description cannot save the description by arguing that it covers that part having to do with clicking a mouse and sending a stream of data to a destination. The word 'print' involves sending the data to a particular destination and obtaining a particular physical result.

The question remains, does the physical description actually account for the print 'function', or is it a description of something else?

My objection to DRFseven is not that the physical description offered is in error. My objection is that it does not describe the function 'moral'. The function 'moral' contains many elements that are not captured in this description, the way that the function 'print' contains many elements not captured in a description of saving a file, even though they also have certain elements in common.

If anything, DRFseven is offering a physical account of the function 'action', but if accurate it applies to all 'action' whether 'moral' or 'immoral'.

Part of the problem is that people use the word 'moral' when they think that an action has certain properties that it does not have, just as people sometimes say that they 'print a report' only to discover that nothing has come off of the printer.

A physical description that counts failed attempts at printing as 'printing a report' is an error. Similarly, a physical description that counts 'failed attempts at moral behavior' as 'moral behavior' is also a mistake.

DRFseven's physical description does not even allow for the possibility of 'failed attempts at moral behavior' -- it takes all attempts at success -- even though debate over which actions were successful and which failed is a significant and unavoidable part of the 'moral' function.

A correct physical description has to include these elements. DRFseven's does not.

Therefore, I argue, DRFseven is not, in fact, describing the 'moral' function but something related but still different from it.

yguy

Obviously.

No, I think it's wrong to cheer up others for the purpose of feeling that pleasure.

And my point is that to the extent you become enmeshed in each other's emotions, you become slaves to each other.

DRFseven

And that's just what happens. Emotions are made up of (or caused by, whichever you prefer) strings of amino acids called neuropeptides and other information molecules, such as hormones, that carry information and released in different ways from the classic neurotransmitters. There are 60 or more neuropeptides recognized so far, among which are the "famous" beta endorphins.The neuropeptides and neuropeptide receptors are located in the body, including the brain, on neurons. The neuropeptides carry information that is produced at times of emotional arousal and carried to remote sites in the body. When you recall something to which you previously responded with disgust, those same neurons are going to bring forth that "disgusting information" again, if they've been so coded. Since this is a conditioned response, it can be extinguished, but sometimes these emotions last for years and years.

Substance P (SP), a neuropeptide, is thought to be the main pain transmitter. The receptor sites are located in the C fibers. The main neurochemical substances involved in stress are epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and, not surprisingly, dopamine. What happens with stress is that the body's stress chemicals (the allostatic load) are helpful in the short run in that they provide messages to slow down, conserve energy, prepare for seige, adapt, etc., but that in the long run cause disease and break the body down.

I think so, too. Another point is that we think we are "some way" and that way describes a permanent personality, but in reality, we have learned many things that are contradictory (as in the thread on lying) and we only remember some of them at any one time because of the way the memories are triggered. We do have personality dispositions in terms of temperament, but our beliefs and opinions change according to what we happen to be thinking of at the moment.

Another point I wanted to make earlier, but forgot, is that anything that causes an increase in instances of a behavior is referred to as a reward. The reward need not be hedonic, or experienced as pleasurable in the traditional sense. Learning experiences can be rewarding, calling forth neurochemicals that enable that behavior in the future. An example might be seen in operant conditioning; you don't put on a sweater because you think the material of the sweater will keep you warm, you put it on because in the past when you have put it on, you have lessened a momentary anxiety caused by memory activation that says "temperature X requires sweater." Later, someone asks you why you're wearing a sweater and your rationalizing brain sort of wakes up and says, in all sincerity, " Because I wanted to keep warm."