Marat

You have to be careful not to dismiss a medical practise such as acupuncture just because the theory offered to explain it, in this case, Qi, is false. Prior to the Michaelson-Morley experiment, the waviform transmission of light used to be explained by the theory that it was carried on a subtle interplanetary fluid called the 'aether,' but the wave theory of light still has some merit. Rather than look at acupuncture in terms of how it is now explained, consider how it first arose. Chinese warriors injured in battle by arrows often reported that their pre-existing illnesses seemed alleviated by their injuries, so from this the idea of deliberately manipulating these pressure points and finding which disease symptoms were correlated with them arose. It turns out that this basic concept, that you can manipulate nerves in one part of the body and produce an alleviation of disease symptoms elsewhere in the body corresponds to the independently developed, modern scientific theory of Head Zones. Physicians in Germany now inject procaine at strategic junctures of the nerves in parts of the body far away from the seat of the disease to be treated, and these procaine injections far away can reduce the disease symptoms.

Though how long would the transition take for people to conceive of themselves as like-minded citizens of a global nation rather than as furious anarchists who refused to be ultimately governed by a global state whose principle of democratic rule didn't absolutely require an Ayatollah as the supreme ruler. The hoped-for economic spin-off of the world government idea seems to replicate oldfashioned colonialism. That is, the poor people move to wealthier areas where they can be more productive (cf. the British Empire's importation of Blacks and Indians from colonies with surplus populations to areas deficient in workers such as Uganda, the Caribbean, and South Africa). Then the colonial powers (the rich) buy up the land left behind by the migration of the population to the more productive lands (cf. the late 19th century competition among the Great Powers of Europe for colonies in the remaining open spaces of Africa, such as Camberoons, Southwest Africa, Eritrea, Abyssinia).

Kant says that it is the essential heuristic assumption of all scientific reasoning that everything is caused by something else, so there is no self-activation, which is usually regarded as the death of scientific explanation, called 'hylozoism.' However, he notes that while what we see in the world usually compels us to explain the connections we see by cause-effect relationships, when we see a person act against his own apparent interests, such as when he runs into a burning building to save someone, we do not feel so clearly compelled to explain this by saying that some external drive caused him to act this way, rather than some internal decision in opposition to the material drives operating on him. He suggests that this failure on our part readily to see the causal connections everywhere opens the possibility of subjecting the world to another explanatory strategy instead of scientific cause and effect. This other heuristic approach is to explain certain actions by human freedom. Since we live not just in the material world of physical nature where cause and effect are accepted as the best explanatory strategy for what happens, but also in the ideal, cultural world where it is just as true that murder is wrong as that the Earth moves around the Sun, we should have the option to switch from the causal explanatory heuristic to the human freedom mode of explanation where the obviousness of the cause-effect links does not force us to explain things scientifically. Of course we could always extend the scientific explanatory style and say that causal determinism operates even where we cannot see it, but we have good reasons in the cultural fact of our moral experience, which can only be explained by adopting the explanatory approach which conceives of humans as free, not to posit that scientific, causal explanation has to extend that far as the only acceptable explanatory strategy. While you could say that morality is a kind of sham, in that it does not really discuss what we deserve in terms of real justice, but instead just seeks to describe the rules of human behavioral control and conditioning in terms of a misleading moral language, but this would not really be morality at all, but just a form of human animal training posing as a system where praise and blame were deserved. Kant's whole account is an attempt to explain how it might be possible to speak in terms of morality, freedom, and deserved praise and blame, not how a sham morality might operate as a misleading description of behavioral conditioning.

This is one reason why democracy fails to fulfill the original expectations for it as a system to ensure the legitimacy of government. People think qualitatively rather than quantitatively, and as a result they fail to comprehend almost every major social problem that confronts them. Would the American public have supported the War on Terrorism if they had understood that 9/11 killed the same number of people who die every year from accidental drowning in the U.S., or would they have found the $2.4 trillion price tag of the war sensible if they had worked it out to $800 million being spent for every death that occurred in that tragedy to prevent its recurrence? Even though every numerate person knows that dividing and multiplying by factors of 10 is very simple, for some reason the general public, which has to be able to do this if it is to understand the large numbers involved in public policy choices, assumes that dividing a billion by a million must be impossibly difficult because the numbers are so big, and they already have trouble dividing much smaller numbers, like 24 by 17.

The problem with having a federal system of different component jurisdictions as a way to solve the problems of dissonant values within one world government is that this solution undermines the strength of the hypothesis in the process of saving it. Obviously a world government is much less a world government if it is subdivided into more or less autonomous regional governments, since if these local governments had to be very autonomous to address the problem of cultural diversity, then you would just have something approximating what we now have, which is a world of 204 nations under one United Nations, one system of international treaty law, one collection of jus cogens international law principles, one World Court, etc. There would also be problems of coordination, since what if someone in jurisdiction A fired a gun into jurisdiction B, killing someone there, but while jurisdiction A would allow the killing as an honor killing of a woman who had disgraced her family by her promiscuity, jurisdiction B would regard that as just unexcused murder. These coordination problems would become even worse for what is now an increasingly globalized system of finance and industry, since it would be undermined by dissonant local rules regarding acceptable contractual arrangements. Thus an Islamic province might forbid charging interest as inconsistent with the Koran, while a non-Islamic jurisdiction would allow it, so what would become of the world government's credit market? All these divergent pressures would exercise their centrifugal force and quickly begin fragmenting the world government into independent states again. Much of the reality we now find in front of us is there for a reason, and I suppose that the 204 nations exist because historical and cultural forces make them necessary. Interestingly, the world seems lately to be going in the opposite direction from a world government, since many states have been spliting up into sub-states, like Czechoslovakia turning into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Yugoslavia fragmenting into even more pieces, the old Soviet Union breaking down into parts which had been united ever since the Tsars, etc.

Two centuries ago, Kant presented a solidly-founded, well-derived non-theistic morality. His first premise is that morality itself can only make sense if there is free will, since if there is not, we would have no reason to praise or blame people, which is contrary to the basic idea of moral rules. But since the basic premise of science is that all action is caused, freedom seems impossible. However, even though the basic posit of science is that everything is caused, we cannot always see clear evidence that everything is in fact caused. Thus if the wind pushes a rock down a hill, that is a clear case of the rock being caused to move by something external to it. But if a human decides to race into a burning building to save a friend, we could argue that that is also caused by external factors, such as his hormones, his instincts, his education, his culture, etc., we cannot trace the causal network so densely as to exclude the possibility that there is a residuum of free self-determination in the person's decision to go into the burning building. But how can we know ourselves as free? Freedom depends on our elevating ourselves above the realm of causal conditioning, and we can do this by determining our actions not be physical influences around us, but by giving ourselves ideal rules as commands. Since these are intellectual rather than material causes, they no longer belong to the causal realm. However, if we just give ourselves rules for action which support our material, instinctive drives, then these rules hardly make us free. Rather, the basis of those rules we give ourselves also has to lie in our respect for freedom. But what can we imagine to be free in the causally conditioned universe described by science? Obviously, other humans like ourselves, who can also in principle give themselves ideal, moral rules as the non-physical, and thus non-causal, bases for their action. So we make ourselves free by giving ourselves ideal rules to respect in our actions the equal freedom of others, since we are all equally human, and only humanness seems complex enough in its actions that we can imagine it not to be conditioned by external causes, like the rock being blown down the hill by the wind. So in one single act of respecting the equal freedom of other people in the ideal laws we give ourselves to obey, we not only provide ourselves with a basis for conceiving ourselves as conditioned by our own intellect which gives us these rules rather than by physical causes, but we also make ourselves moral, since the rule of respecting the equal freedom of other people is just the Golden Rule of the Bible: Love thy neighbor as thyself, or Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So here we have a well-founded morality based on humans respecting humans, and at no point in the derivation have we been forced to have resort to the God hypothesis.

The problem of cultural, moral, and institutional relativism would prove intractable. Just to take one example, how would you design criminal law for a single world jurisdiction? If a female atheist who rejected Sharia law committed adultery in partnership with the husband of an Islamic marriage governed by Sharia law, would the female adulterer be subject to no criminal penalties whatsoever, as modern Western legal systems would insist, or should she be stoned to death, as the aggrieved wife of the Islamic marriage would demand? Similar irreconcilable differences arising from different cultural value systems would arise over female circumcision, blasphemy against Allah or Mohammed, theocratic or democratic governance, the legality of chewing cocaine leaves, etc.

I guess you're right! Still, the Carthaginians themselves are in part to blame for the Roman predominance in the propaganda wars, since we are forced to rely on archeological evidence to figure out what they were like, while the Romans have left us a lot more of their opinions in clearly decipherable form.

Although there has been a lot of research showing that young children learn to use their imagination academically only by being allowed huge amounts of time for free, unstructured playing, for some reason our society now is insisting that all children begin their formal education at an earlier and earlier age. This could well produce a generation of dullards who can't creatively advance knowledge by inventing new theories, even though they knew the alphabet four years earlier than the generation before them. Interestingly, I now teach university students who started pre-school when they were 4 years old, while my generation had the option of starting kindergarten at age 6, but didn't legally have to start grade 1 until age 7. For some reason the three years of additional learning these students received haven't made them any smarter in their early 20s than my generation was, and many of my colleagues insist that they are much less smart than the previous generation. Did they spend too much time being lined up and told what to do and when all day at an age when they should have been wandering around the neighborhood, inventing their own games with other kids their age?

That example just illustrates my point, though it is not essential for it. It could be that those people were jumping for some reason which would surprise us, rather than for what appeared to be their logical motivation in that situation, but this doesn't affect the argument. Rather, since we can all agree that there are physical states -- let's say being blind, deaf, in intractable pain, paralyzed from the neck down, and dying on a cot in a Turkish prison -- which would make continued life worse than death if they could not be corrected, then we can also agree that there can be rational reasons for suicide. Someone could object that some mysterious being in the sky actually 'owns' our lives and has the right to determine when we die, so we should not commit suicide even in such a desperate circumstance, but since this is the ethics rather than the religion forum, I am assuming that only objective reasons in principle open to rational discussion count. In this I am following the philosopher John Rawls' view of what can count as acceptable reasons in public policy debate based on 'public reason.' But even if we assume that some invisible entity owns our soul and thus forbids us to take our own lives rather than letting him decide when we should die, this requires us to answer the difficult question whether people who eat too much fat, never exercise, and never visit the doctor are guilty of committing slow suicide and so should be eternally punished post-mortem. If this amounts to the sin of suicide, but just in slow motion, then are we all guilty of suicide unless we become physical fitness nuts and spend all day on the treadmill feeling the pulse in our neck and eating granola? This is the problem with trying to give moral rules an absolute foundation in the Divine Mind rather than just a relative foundation in human conventions. Because God-given rules have to be perfect and absolute, they become too brittle to work in the complex, subtle, empirical world in which we live. In contrast, the relaxed, approximate, common sense approach of a human court of law would have no trouble in saying that a quick self-killing by jumping out a window was suicide, while a slow self-killing by spreading too much butter on your toast was not.

The problem with Needimprovement's argument seems to be that we have two purely metaphysical postulates: 1) God exists; 2) suffering has some transcendental point so that it serves some mysterious, ultimate good which our finite minds cannot comprehend. From this he draws the conclusion that the second unprovable postulate can come to the rescue of the first unprovable postulate, and so the mysterious reason for suffering can somehow negate its ability to challenge the idea that God is omnipotent and infinitely good. But his opponents are asking for some demonstration that these postulates are either empirically verifiable or logically demonstrable, and Needimprovement seems to rely on faith or revelation for his belief in them, so his position remains unconvincing.

None of us will be alive a century from now, and yet we all strive energetically to make our transient lives better, since now and the near future are important even if infinite time will swallow up and negate everything that happens in the short term. The Romans would have followed the same reasoning. Carthage was destroyed because there was no way to build and extend the Roman Empire (then still rather small) unless this aggressive, militaristic, expansionist power lying right across the narrow strait between Sicily and North Africa was removed as a distracting threat, and also negated as a competitor for the lucrative trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. People like Hannibal, Hamilcar, and Hasdrubal were fanatics in their hatred of Rome, so there was no way that they could safely be ignored, nor could Rome ever feel secure with just 'containing' Carthage by inflicting a minor defeat on it and then forcing it to accept moderate peace terms. The vicious actions to ensure that no new center of power would be established at Carthage to threaten Rome could be rationally defended by arguing that Carthage was such a strategically important location that it had to be neutralized against future development by an enemy. Even so, it became an important urban area again under Roman control. Given all the intermixing of historical forces in the current net product we know as the world today, it is difficult to pick out and isolate the strands which were produced by Roman influence. However, if you view the modern world as a vector product of all the cultures that came before, the Roman Empire's 1100-year persistence won it the right to claim one of the largest contributions to the formation of the world as it now is. It is lucky for us that it was Rome and not Carthage that won the Punic Wars, since from Rome at that time we inherit a tradition of republican rule, rule of law, and preservation of the great cultural achievement of the Greeks, while Carthage at that time was apparently just a shallow, technocratic, barbarous culture, which seems to have practised a religion involving the sacrifice of living babies in ovens!

Even more challenging for the purely factual theory that women and men are equal is the inability of women to compete with men at the highest levels of chess and the total absence of great female composers. But neither those facts nor the inability of women to run as fast as men says anything about women being unequal, since the equality of people is a legal and moral assertion, not a factual judgment. Everyone gets one vote no matter how little attention he pays to the news; everyone is entitled to sue for damages in tort no matter how little contribution he makes to society; everyone medically fit is subject to the military draft no matter how much better he could spend his time than stopping enemy bullets with his head; everyone is assumed innocent when charged with a crime, even if he has a long history of past criminality. None of these assumptions is realistic or justified factually as a working hypothesis for a scientist, but they are all manifestations of the moral resolve of our society to treat all people as though they were equal.

Formal, institutionalized schooling teaches some important skills for later life, such as how to deal with stupid and oppressive bureaucracies, insane supervisors, disruptive fellow-employees, standing in line, filling out forms, finding your way around irrationally structured institutions, etc. If often wonder how people tutored at home manage to handle the absurdities of public institutions when they finally emerge into the objective world. While it is theoretically appealing to allow students to pursue their natural curiosity, curiosity itself has to be broadened first by education. Autodidacts are infamously narrow-minded and unself-critical in their understanding, since they have never been drawn out of themselves by true education. As is often the case, the etymology of the word gives a clue to the truth behind it, and 'education' comes from the Latin 'educere,' meaning 'drawn out,' which is more than just expanding on your own only as far as you feel like going. Even the word 'idiot' comes from 'id,' meaning 'self,' and refers to the idea that a stupid, uneducated person is someone whose whole knowledge is concerned only with himself, rather than with influences which have drawn him out beyond himself.

Usually people can decide for themselves whether they want to die or not and then put their intention into action, but the issue becomes difficult when they require assistance from others. Thus if the quadraplegic wants to commit suicide but cannot manage it on his own, should his friend who assists him in this have immunity from the laws against murder? Also, given that there certainly are cases where continued life is much worse than immediate death, should the state constantly be spending taxpayers' money to run ads against suicide on television, to have anti-suicide hotlines, to install collapsing coat hooks in seniors' homes so that they can't easily hang themselves, or to erect barriers along the sides of high bridges to prevent people from jumping? Sure, people sometimes kill themselves for silly reasons and thus cause their temporary stupidity or despair to have irrevocable, negative effects for their lives, but many decisions we are free to make have this character, such as marrying the wrong person, investing money badly, choosing the wrong job, etc., and yet the state doesn't intervene here with the assumption that our decision will always be wrong. Psychiatry seems stupidly to assume that no one can be depressed about a perfectly rational decision to commit suicide without being in need of care and supervision so that they don't commit suicide. It is logically possible that suicide would be an excellent choice on rational grounds, but that it would still make the perfectly sane person making this decision depressed to realize this.

Severian: I would say that the grounding in social morality of the virtues usually based on the command of God clearly provides them with all the objective basis that we can ever reliably detect in the real world. If you believe that it is an 'objective fact' that the English word 'tree' means the leafy green bushes we see growing with a certain characteristic dimension around us, then you recognize that intersubjectively agreed upon meanings, supported by nothing more than the common practise of humans, can constitute our objective reality. It is in this sense that we can say that 'murder is wrong' is just as much an objective truth, grounded in our social system, as 'money has value,' 'leaves are green,' or 'maps are properly oriented with North at the top' are. Things don't need to be transculturally true for all times to be objectively true, they only need to be more firmly anchored in socially constituted, public belief and values than the relatively less objective beliefs of individuals. Thus if you surveyed 1000 people and asked them whether the statement, 'chocolate is better than vanilla,' which is my personal, subjective belief, is more or less objective than the statement, 'murder is evil,' all of them would agree that the evil or murder is clearly more objective than the superiority of chocolate to vanilla. This relative objectivity is the highest objectivity that exists in the real world for values, though the primitive mind wants some transcendental support for values above all capacity of positive evidence to confirm them, and it sets this in an imaginary old man in the sky who reassures us that murder is indeed necessarily evil.

The law always has to operate with arbitrary, 'bright line' distinctions in order to generate possibilities of determinate decision-making, even though children obviously mature at variable and continuous rates. You can make a legally binding contract when you are 18, but if you are a day younger, you can't. In contrast, science operates with mathematical continua which are more natural if less clear for generating easily administered distinctions. Some of the most ridiculous cut-off points in the law relate to the age of sexual consent. In some jurisdictions, males can consent to sex at an earlier age than females, so if a young male and young female of exactly the same age have sex, legally the male is guilty of statutory rape while the female is the innocent victim of the attack. Since sex is occurring at earlier and earlier ages, while the age of legal consent to sex remains stable, it will soon be the case that literally everyone in the society will be guilty of statutory rape by their early teenage years, and the only way that spending time in prison will not become a universal teenage experience, like getting a driver's license, will be because officials simply decline to enforce the law.

No, there is something more objective than personal subjectivity and less mythological than God in which to ground morality, and that is in society and our social love of humanity, which together provide the foundation for the same ethics that religion attempts to establish pictorially rather than conceptually, by positing a dogmatic mythology. It would be a real pity if the only reason we had for being good to each other were our mutual belief in a mythologial being who told us to do this and who would punish us later if we didn't! In that case, our belief would lack all moral significance, and would express only our recognition of the utilitarian benefit of avoiding punishment.

Several things happen in type 2 diabetes: First, the cell walls throughout the body become resistant to the entry of insulin, and in response, the pancreas produces more and more insulin to overcome the resistance. Second, as the ability to overcome this resistance declines with the increasing exhaustion of the pancreas by constantly having to over-produce insulin, the blood sugar rises. This is why patients can begin their therapy with diet and excercise, but then have to add oral medications, and finally have to start injecting insulin. The third process is that either the hyperglycemia itself, the atherogenic properties of excess insulin flowing through the vascular system, an inflammatory process that occurs along the inner walls of the vascular system, genetic predispositioning, or some combination of all four phenomena occurs to cause the vascular and neurological complications of the disease. The amylin deposits on the pancreas described here may only be a side-effect rather than an important step in the causality of the processes of pancreatic beta cell destruction. Even if it is part of the causal mechanism by which the ability of the pancreas to produce insulin is destroyed, blocking this step would not address the initial mechanism which causes the disease, which is the increased resistance to the passage of insulin at the cell walls. So if blocking this step prevented or slowed the pancreatic burn-out, the cell wall resistance to insulin would persist, and you would still have type 2 diabetics suffering excess insulin production all the time, and having supra-physiological levels of insulin floating around all the time is damaging to the cardiovascular system, and the hyperglycemia from the inability of the insulin to transport glucose across the cell walls would also continue. Also, by far the worst form of the disease, the autoimmune condition of type 1 diabetes, might not be addressed. I say 'might not' because it has recently been suggested that type 1 and type 2 diabetes may both be autoimmune diseases, so if the amylin plays a role in the autoimmune apoptosis of the pancreatic beta cells, perhaps this new result could suggest a line of intervention less toxic than immunosuppressive drugs to prevent or at least delay type 1 diabetes.

Also, there are numerous medical condtions for which patients have been prescribed large doses of bicarbonate for long periods of time, and in this patient group the correlation of bicarbonate dosing and cancer reduction has not yet been noted.

Now we just have to figure out how to get on Bill Gates' charity list and the system will seem significantly less strange, at least to us.

While religions often support useful moral codes, an atheistic love of humanity and desire to organize society so that people can live together in harmony would produce and sustain a similar moral code. Also, since an atheistic love of humanity would endorse its moral code on rational rather than superstitious grounds, it would give morality a more substantial anchor. Further, since religious moral codes always contain some purely superstitious rules which actually harm human good, while atheistic moral codes strive to be nothing but purely rational and humane, atheistic morality is superior. But religion's worst negative effect is that it infantilizes people by blocking their access to the most fundamental and sophisticated questions of human existence, such as what does life really mean, how do I create a meaningful system of values with nothing outside of me to guarantee that my choices are correct, how do I preserve the courage of my existence when facing the certainty of extinction at death, etc. When people's access to these questions is blocked by a child's fairy tale, the value of their existence is profoundly diminished.

I also note that all the imagistic, mythological, dogmatic rather than logical 'explanations' offered for suffering, such as original sin, the salvation-promoting power of human suffering, our inability to know the purposes of an infinite God, etc., all depend on the presupposition of the existence of this miraculous being and his associated mythology, which was what was first put into question by the problem of evil. Since this is exactly what is in question, its existence cannot be presumed in order to solve the logical problems of how it could exist. But further, these 'explanations' are just dogmatic imagery which purports to 'solve' the puzzle by a fable, rather than conceptual accounts which reconcile infinite goodness and omnipotence with evil.

Again, I'm not criticizing Bill Gates here. Let's just put it this way: If someone felt injured by Bill Gates keeping such a huge amount of money for himself, which he accumulated by the rules of private property now in force, that person's complaint would have no force in the system of law we have. In a purely utilitarian legal system, wealth could only be distributed so as to do maximum benefit for the greatest number of people, so the complaint of someone who felt that he was harmed by the maldistribution of wealth could be presented to a court to be remedied. But in a rights-based, anti-utilitarian legal system such as now exists, wealth is distributed according to certain established rules of what transactions produce which outcomes, regardless of whether they help or hurt most people in the society. That now brings us to the point I was making by introducing this analogy, which is that in a rights-based legal system, which arbitrarily demarcates certain spheres as those belonging to private freedom, whatever effect that actions taken within them may have on other people, those people have no legal right to object or to prevent those free acts. One of those acts within the sphere of private freedom which they cannot raise a legal objection against, no matter how much the act may hurt them, is someone committing suicide. You can break the heart of your relatives, you can deprive dependents of care, you can leave employees stranded, etc., but your decision to kill yourself is entirely your own in our legal system. This is interesting, since if a parent abandons a child that the parent is normally obligated to care for, this is a crime in common law systems; but if that abandonment occurs by suicide, it is not a crime, and even a parent who survived an attempted suicide could not be prosecuted for attempting suicide, even though this would be the equivalent, in fact, of attempting to abandon care of the child.

Also, there are many cases of human suffering which cannot possibly teach their sufferers anything, such as when infants are born with cancer and die before the end of their first year of life, or when profoundly mentally challenged people become gravely ill but are incapable of deriving any meaning from this experience. The most the believer could say to rescue faith from these challenges is that when other, sentient people see this suffering in others, they learn some important moral lesson and experience further development. But then a story comes to mind from the end of the Second World War, when the German population of East Prussia was trekking westwards to escape the advancing Russians. The Russian troops advancing through a deserted forest found a dead woman who had delivered a child and apparently died in childbirth, after which the child had been eaten alive by wolves. Now no doubt things like this have happened countless times in the history of humanity when no one has ever even had to the chance to learn a moral lesson from seeing the dead child after the wolves had killed it. In these cases, a human, the innocent child, would have suffered horribly with no possible compensatory benefit of anyone learning a moral lesson from witnessing evidence of that suffering afterwards, nor with any moral benefit of a lesson to the child with its primitive brain. In such a case we have an infinitely good God permitting terrible suffering for a human who does not deserve it and when it serves absolutely no instructive purpose. Since this act is evil, God is evil, and since he is evil, he is not perfect, which is an essential aspect of his definition, so he does not exist.