- No Recommendations yet - go add some!
- There is SO MUCH to learn about this subject!
But one must be willing to turn one's back on psychology and trust that somebody besides PhDs might know something about life.
Oh well!
- Finally! We sail beyond the domain of the merely scientific! This is the stuff leaps in knowledge are made of! But don't let anyone convince you that "we don't know why this works." We know plenty about why it works.
- Based on my training, here is what they are missing:
1) The thought problem.
The question of whether it is better to kill one than many is an ETHICAL problem, not a moral one. There is no moral law against accidental death. There is one against murder. That makes the question of murdering someone a MORAL one. So you are really asking these people (on the thought level) if they are willing to violate their morals to do something that seems more ethical.
Moral rules usually make ethical sense. But as they are rules they can only be used as guidelines. What is ethical is what results in the best survival for all involved. What is moral is what results in the least guilt for the individual.
2) The emotional problem.
The problem as posed at the beginning of this episode was not a real thought problem. It had a huge emotional content. As you tell the story of the problem, the listener will get emotionally involved. That means they are looking at (or even feeling) the actual body efforts associated with the story. And something that involves a lot of body effort (like killing someone with your own hands) is much more disagreeable than an action that takes relatively little (like pulling a lever to kill a man). So in such a scenario, most will shy away from the choice that takes more effort. If there is also a moral prohibition to such an action, the choice will be even easier to make. The better test, when it comes to effort, is to make it an effort that has no particular moral or ethical implications.
3) "Moral sense"
Beings have an innate moral sense. It is based on empathy (the "Golden Rule"). But the researchers must assume we are "born" with it because they don't know that it belongs to the being, not the body.
However, this moral sense, which is active to some degree even in animals, has been perverted in man. Men can become confused enough to completely believe that other men are too dangerous to be left uncontrolled, and will set about to create a system of control for the people around them. In the "civilized" world this is known as the "rule of law" (or something similar). It is based fundamentally on the threat of pain. Confused people think this is the best way to control others. It is not.
In the "perfect" civilization, people who follow the rules (are moral) will live a pleasant life and those who break the rules (are immoral) will experience pain. We know that it really doesn't work this way. But the system continues due to a general confusion on the subject. A big part of this confusion comes from ignoring the fact that beings exist, not just bodies.
In an actual perfect civilization, all beings would strive to follow the rules, but would above all seek to be ethical in all their decisions, even if this meant breaking a rule here and there. They would recognize that the true hierarchy of thought and effort starts at the spirit and descends through the mind to the body, and they would act based on this understanding.
- I'm listening to this episode right now. I am so frustrated! They refuse to leave the bounds of neuroscience to solve this problem. Why? Why should neuroscience know about the higher levels of consciousness when they specialize in studying the brain? Don't they know that their cousins in psychiatry have already discovered that memory survives body death? And that thousands of people knew this before anyway? So it can't all be in the brain. It just can't. They'll never solve it with a brain-only model of consciousness. Never.
- I listen to your show here in Seattle because it addresses aspects of experience that modern thinking people are wrestling with. It is clear that you want to include academic (scientific) viewpoints on these issues. But we are dealing here with being alive. And being alive includes more than science.
This particular episode contained only one segment that really revolved around scientists. But it was the first and sort of set the stage. And that segment firmly established our current modern myth about the mind and the soul: that they are all the result of brain function. This myth is unprecedented in our history on earth and I believe is very worthy of a large dose of skepticism. There are many modern students of life that join in this skepticism.
Talk to them, too!
