Everything start with base instinct and senses... but this is like talking about an house design by only focusing on 1 brick.


Morality always regarding a social group, pretty hard to build a morality alone... Btw put a human as a kid in jungle and let it grow without any contacts with others humans, well he could integrate apes gang if lucky (and get some morality im sure! *)

The morality may varies, but it still serve the group, thats the advantage of being able to make a team to kill the mammoth instead of killing each others and to share (at various levels...) its meat of it to maintain the group.

Immoral individuals will be a threat for the group and will be rejected.

Sometimes the morality will push the individual to inflict pain or being in danger or even killing himself to maintain the group => and getting "pleasure" even if hurting himself.

Individual > group > morality > individual conditioned through the group morality.. this is a cycle, the social cycle or something like (sorry i never studied those things, maybe im not using the right words)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_consciousness


it's a self maintaining cycle


*excepted if he has a malfunction or a severe trauma, making him unreceptive or not receptive enough to integrate the group's moral (some psychopats maybe ?)



This post was edited by Saucisson6000 on Dec 12 2014 06:45am

[QUOTE=James84,Dec 12 2014 03:51am Imo. the 1st beings evolved quite fast to determine the difference from pleasure and pain.
[/QUOTE]

actually in simulations the "don't touch that's ow" doesn't actually show up until right around around the "self awareness" stage which is quite a distance in (100 million years or so, depending on the simulation used), but of course this is speculation, simulations are all i got on the topic.

e: also there are animals alive today that do not follow this path, so it is also dependent on the organsism, goldfish have a nervous system but no known sens of self (they also have no sense of morality so it may be outside the discussion, but i thought it worth mentioning

This post was edited by dude_927 on Dec 12 2014 07:39am

t I think that it is the nervous system (ability to experience pain/pleasure) that played a big part in the developement of morals. I think without it humans would have never started to think about right and wrong. I was just wondering why human brains have been able to start thinking about right and wrong and whether this has a physiological cause.

Mental constructs, thoughts, ideas about ethics, morals etc. On a biological level are a certain type of brain activity in certain areas of the brain with certain neurotransmitters firing. This particular chemical reaction in the cortex that leads to ideas or constructs such as morality and ethics is influenced by primitive feelings such as the feeling of pleasure and pain. So I think the origin of thoughts such as right, wrong, ethics, morals etc. lies in primitive brain structures that are responsible for our ability experience good and bad feelings. If the ability of those primitive nervous system structures to experience pain/pleasure was absent we wouldn't be alive and if we were than I think that we would not have developed concepts such as right/wrong etc. etc.

This post was edited by YaC on Dec 12 2014 09:43am

that's what I was trying to say. I think so, yes.

nope, sorry to harp on the same point over and over, but i think it is important to realize that morality is objective (it cannot change and your thoughts/opinions/biological functions have no effect on it whatsoever) whereas ethics are subjective (eg. it is never moral to lie, but it is ethical to lie if it benefits the person being told the lie. It is never moral to hurt someone, but it may have been ethical to kill Hitler before he had a chance to harm anyone)

i know it's only a minor semantic objection, and i basically agree with what you are saying, there is just a minor malfunction in my brain that refuses to conflate ethics and morality. (not a big fan of "morality" claims)

Now onto the evolution of ethics (morality cannot evolve), Not everyone is born with the same ethical principals, even today people do ignorant things to each other for no good reason, but humans are a pack species, and in modern society we remove unethical individuals (jail, death row, whatever) and this causes them less freedom to proliferate their "unethical" genes, so an "ethical" individual is much more likely to reproduce. Before society modernized it was a little more "gritty", but basically anything that broke down the "pack mentality" (humans are a pack species), caused that pack to die off, leaving only the packs that were capable of working together, and natural selection has been slowly removing the "non pack" humans for thousands of years, so it's not like What you think has any effect on your evolution, but if the way you think doesn't help you survive in a pack, you won't. (long winded way of saying i agree that the physical world selects the minds most fit for survival)

This post was edited by dude_927 on Dec 12 2014 03:10pm

So then the question is, why would we have evolved the ability to have phenomenal experience, or is "consciousness" not an evolutionary trait at all?

If mental states are just byproducts of physical states, then why do we have mental states at all? Couldn't we have just evolved the functionality of responding to pain without the "raw feels" or qualia of the pain?

One response is that of "functionalism" which says that mental states are inseparable from physical functionality. This is a view that states that philosophical zombies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie ) aren't possible because something that has the functionality of a human will necessarily have the experience of a human. I'm inclined to agree.

Sorry if this seems a little off-topic but I think it's relevant.

there can really only be one of two options:
a- you have a "soul" or entity that is separate that transcends the "cellular makeup"
or
b- you are a bag of chemicals that has no real control over your life, you are at the whim of your physiology

and as much as i desperately want to go with option A, i must admit that i am not the same person when hungry for instance



This post was edited by dude_927 on Dec 12 2014 05:34pm

yes i agree with this on a general level, in other words what you say is true for most cases. but also the most "non pack" or most unethical people can be favoured by evolution if they wear a perfect mask or mimic of a normally functioning and responsible person. however they will only be favoured by like 1-4% of the population as otherwise too much damage is done to society.

That's not at all what those words mean.

/e Ethics is knowing right from wrong, Morality is doing what's right instead of what's wrong.

This post was edited by Mastersam93 on Dec 14 2014 07:31am

this is going to sound really really stupid but i don't really understand what morality is or why it is objective.

if everything that exists needs a cause for it's existence or a creator, who is the creator or cause of morality? who determines what morality really is? who says that it is immoral to lie? why is lying not moral?

if we assume that the world consists only of energy and matter and everything else is just nothing or does not exist. if morality exists and is not nothing than it must be matter or energy. if it is not the energy (electrical firing of our neurones) and matter (the supporting brainc cells to do the firing) that create the concept or construct of morality than how does morality look like in the form of matter or energy? I am just trying to visualize the term morality to make sense of it.

This post was edited by YaC on Dec 14 2014 07:43am