philechat

Huh? Consciousness can be independent of thought and sensations? How so? Could we self-reflect without using either thoughts or memory of past events?
How do you know you are objective on this issue? I never claim objectivity myself. Prove you are objective.
I don't know about the event. If you have the articles about it...
Yes it is a gross generalization. To say a whole nation is evil does not take account of the individuals in a given nation. Perhaps select leaders are evil by character, but most people are, well, just following orders from a higher authority who might kill them if they didn't.
Is Palestine a nation? Or is it still subjected to Israeli rule? It is all speculations now if Palestine is never yet a nation. It is the argument of the reunionists in Taiwan as well, if you want to know ("how do we know we will get equal treatment from the Taiwanese government, blah blah blah"). Let's say everything we are speculating now is only potential in our minds.
Just giving you some historical information. So no misunderstanding will occur...knowing well that Taiwanese history will be of no interest of the citizen of the Greatest Country In the World (tm) :boohoo:
Have you known why it will be so? Using your famous speculative ability...
Want a yes or no answer? Objectively no. But it does not mean I will not loose respect for those people though...
Why will human emotions be any different if it was given by God or not? Are we not appealing to our emotions no matter it was God-given or not, when we are giving thoughts to our moral understandings? As you said before, by intuition.
How do you know human are not programmed to feel compassion for other human beings or help other human beings? Is morality not a question of instinct (A.K.A. intuition)?

yguy

Not only can it be, it should be; i.e., the more objective you are to your thoughts, the more you are their master, not the other way around.

Look at it this way: someday, perhaps computers will be able to directly interface with the brain, allowing bi-directional data transfer. Should the human control the computer, or the other way around? The latter, I should think; likewise should your thoughts be controlled by your consciuosness, rather than the other way around.

Surely you have had thoughts come into your head which were nonsensical or worse. The fleeting moment of objectivity which produces the realization that it IS nonsense is almost immediately overrun by the thought, "Where did THAT nonsense come from?", or something to that effect. But that moment of pure perception is there, is it not?

I don't mean to say I'm objective all the time. In fact, it's rare that I am - but those moments do happen.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...le.asp?ID=6485

It has been said that weakness is the handmaiden of wickedness. That's why people who used that excuse were not acquitted at Nuremberg.

The land was given the Israelis by the British. Israel has a right to exist. The Pals have recognized that right in word, but not in deed. Since the surrounding Arab nations have not been as charitable to the Pals as they think Israel should be, they have been hoodwinked into thinking they have some legal claim on Jerusalem. They have shown a willingness to fight to acquire it. The Israelis, understandably, have a comparable desire to keep it. They have a right to defend what belongs to them, using all necessary force.

So you always lose respect for people who don't act the way you think they should? If not, why would you lose respect in this case?

If the authority is God-given, one will not feel the pangs of conscience.

What do you mean, giving thoughts to our moral understandings?

Some people are. They do good things so as to be seen as good people. They give to get back.

I object to the equating of instinct with intuition. As I see it, instinct in humans allows them to sense another's weaknesses. Intuition tells us that to take advantage of such weaknesses would be wrong.

philechat

Strange definitions indeed. Where do you determine that objective thought? Through evidences (thus from our experiences)? Through the state of mood we are in (the calmer we are, the more objective our consciousness is)? Through how logical the linguistic appearance it has? Through the so-called "flash of insight"? By far all of these determinations require our thoughts, the first being our experience, the second our emotional states, the third being through linguistic thought, the last one being a combination of thoughts and emotions. Or are there other kinds of determination of objectivity?
"Flash of insight"? See above. It is a mental state, a combination of thought ("I just realized it was nonsense after I pondered on it") and emotional state (such as joy, calmness).
I am never "objective" (independent of perception, that is), to tell the truth. Any ideas based on perception must be limited by the perception of a given person.
Okay, I will comment on it later.
It is the determination of intention, is it not? For while they say they are truely "just following orders" (even under the threat of death) we are stamping our perspectives on them that they are lying about their actions. I agree weakness often becomes the servants of dictators whether earthly or heavenly. They deserve to be pitied, not treated as evil by nature.
Well. It was because the Arab nations never entered a mutual agreement with the British, that is to say. They simply lost the war, having a less powerful army than the Israelis. Well, winners have all the claims of justice in a war, don't they?
Not always. Though there are specific criteria I refer to which I determine whom to respect and whom not to respect. I call it "virtue ethics" or "ethics of value". For example, a person's actions in a given situation may fit in the valuation of being "courageous" or "cowardly", from which I will grant differential respect.
I believe there is some syntatical errors here. Do you mean "If the authority is God-given, one will feel the pangs of conscience"? But I digress. "Pangs of conscience" hardly need to be explained in theistic terms. We might fear retribution from the others and from society if we harmed another person, which we internalized into "pangs of conscience". Or otherwise, we may feel compassion to the person we hurt previously without given a full thought, resulting in again the "pangs of conscience". Or perhaps we internalized our values from instinct, our parents in childhood, then later from our experiences in a social settings and in books. And anything that we performed against our values may result in the feeling we commonly refered as guilt.
When we determine morality, it is often based on "the appeal of emotion" and "the appeal of consequence". Both of which are nonsense by pure reason, but in an intersubjective setting it may be the norm.
Yes, that's how morality operates most of the time. We base it on the rewards we will acquire from people, no matter it be concrete rewards or simply emotionally satisfying, entering into a "social contract" relationship with other people based on mutually agreed-upon values. This intersubjective act is probably the origin of societal mores.
I will check the dictionary definition of these terms, and get back to you. Your definition is right now too vague for me.

philechat

I do not know if Front Page magazine is exactly the most reliable magazine we can refer to. Do you have a more mainstream resource? The articles and books in the magazine webpage smacks of conspiracy theories (some with titles like "Do left wing conspiracies exist?"), as if they believed all liberals, Muslims, and academics were having some massive "secret-thingy" going on. Again we should look for a more balanced source instead of relying on the unfounded speculations of an unreliable magazine. I guess that's it.

Wiploc

Welcome to the list, pleasant_darktwist. That's a very good first post.
crc

yguy

How, you mean? The same way I determine that I'm awake.

No. The realization, the gateway of which is objectivity, comes first. The thought comes second. The realization is everything, the thought is nothing.

Likewise we do so when we convict a man of murder though he claims innocence.

They deserve neither. Self-righteous condemnation is useless, and pity coddles their weakness.

Sounds rather mechanical.

No, I said exactly what I meant. If a person has a conscience, as the vast majority do, and he can do the act without feeling those pangs AND without deadening any such pangs by external means, he did the right thing.

That's not conscience. That's just animal selfishness.

Neither is the guilt from disobedience of inculcated societal values legitimate, because it gives human authority figures a power they shouldn't have.

It appears there is no love in such morality, since love doesn't expect anything in return.

philechat

Do you think or feel awake? Or are we playing semantics games here? Or do you mean consciousness as some sort of animalistic awareness of its surrounding environment.
I am lost here. You mean we can acquire knowledge independent of our perspectives? How do we do so? The so-called "realization" is but a combination of our past experiences into some new form, which has nothing to do with objectivity but as an acquisition of a new perspective.
Yes, but say he is proved to killed someone out of self-defence. Don't we acquit or at least light their sentences? It's rather of determining the truths according to available evidences. People's truths and lies can only be determined relative to what were discovered as evidence of their given intention.
Then I guess there's no moral judgments against their weaknesses. They are simply weak in a way that gives me a lower value factor when I determined how I should treat them.
Maybe. Or parsimonious.
Alright. So we (or most of us) have the so-called "conscience", or instinctive ideas about what was good or bad. Note the psychopaths are out of the equation, if you talk about the existence of this "pang of conscience". But where do you leap from this instinctive feeling to God? Why must this feeling be related to God's existence?
Note my inclusion of our inborn instincts, such as the instinct of the perservation of our species. Actions against this instinct might cause us to "feel bad" which we in turns interpret it as guilt.
There is something in return from love, and that is our pleasurable feelings about the affection of others toward us. In short, love makes us feel pleasure and therefore we engage in it. Note my inclusion of emotional satisfaction in my last post.

[schizoid mode]Not to say there exists no darker sides of love, however. I have reserve making love a necessity of life because relationships are very problematic, not to mention mutually exhaustive. A lot of times love lead to possessiveness, jealousy, and despair. For this reason I have tried to detach myself and remain solitary.[/schizoid mode]

yguy

Neither. I know I'm awake. Yes, the thought, "I know I'm awake" comes into my head, but that is a byproduct of knowing.

No, it's a human awareness of one's self.

Of course. That's where Newton got the idea to ask, "If the apple falls, why doesn't the moon fall?" That's where Einstein got e=mc^2.

No. Realization can show a person that his past experiences are meaningless, i.e., that he has wasted his whole life.

Yes, but I am suggesting that the intentions of those who "just follow orders" are not so innocuous as they appear.

To refrain from condemning someone is not equivalent to eschewing moral judgment. You can call a person a murderer - if he is one - without judging him, can you not?

Because conscience is that within us which bears witness to His presence.

That's not love. That's commerce. Love, when it is met with hatred, doesn't hate back. It doesn't return evil for evil.

philechat

But could knowing be "independent of" experience? That's what I am asking. Can we even know something like we are awake without the experience we acquired from our sensations of external stimuli? If we do not experience anything through our senses, could we even "know" we are awake?
You know chimpanzees also have this "self-awareness", don't you? Human beings are hardly unique in this respect.
You think they came directly from heaven? Or was it because those scientists combined their past experiences and observations into some new form, aka new perspectives for interpreting our experiential world?
It was because when they combined their past experiences together, their thoughts rendered those experience contradictory to their present states of mind. Or that they found logical inconsistencies when the past experiences were put together.
Then only external evidence can affirm or deny their "innocence". We can only infer how much they are aware or intentionally acting a certain way, through external evidences available interpreted by us, if we were the judges.
Yes, I do perform "moral judgment", what I said for "value judgment" is equivalent to your idea of moral judgment, except that I consider it subjective (or intersubjective).
Logically this does not follow. Because there is something in our instinct that says a certain thing to be "good" or "bad", it does not follow that this "something" must come from God. It can come from, as I said before, the instinct of the preservations of our species, for example. Plus psychopaths innately lack this "instinct"--if it is given by God, why will someone lack it in their nature?
Oh right. The instances of love turning to hatred or indifference when one is rejected vastly outnumber the instances of love's continual after it is received with hatred or indifference. "Unrequited love" is based on the expectation that "in some indefinite time in the future", this love will be returned and the rewarding feelings will occur, or that a certain pleasurable feeling is experienced when the object of love occurs in our mind.

yguy

Sure. What experience do you need to know you exist?

What we call awake does involve sensory input from within the body, but that is not what tells us we are awake. In fact, you can be awake, but not aware that you are. This is why you can drive many miles and forget how you got where you are.

Evidence?

They built on what was known, of course, but something higher gave them the ability to see the connections they needed to.

But the kind of person I'm talking about makes the same mistake time and time again. How come they didn't find those inconsistencies the first time?

Only from the perspective of others. If they have a conscience, they already know it.

No, the second does not follow from the first, but it is true nonetheless.

Why should I care whether the species survives?

They can throw it away. Very rarely, perhaps, they are born without it.

Not sure whether you are being sarcastic, but the divorce rate in America is around 50%. Obviously "love" turns sour more than it should.