Monday, May 25, 2015

A Philosophical Work in Progress IIII

If nature had a feeling, it would probably be something analogous to nihilism or indifference. One may claim that nature is cruel, but may run into problems if one means to imply that nature is intentionally cruel, for such would include the feeling of choice making and application. I doubt nature possesses feelings or choices outside of the generations of minds, but anything could be the case if absurdity exist. A being either exist or not, and if it exist it does what it does (one can perceive in science or knowledge the existence of beings performing actions). The notion of ethics is expressed by humans, and features of it are seen in other creatures. Ethics relationship to nature is the question of whether it is a logical system discovered in nature or a human artifice; and how one applies praise and blame to different beings such as nature, other humans and creatures, objects, and notions.

Praise and blame are themselves entangled with states of mind, behavior, and logic. For one may show the attitudes or prolonged feelings of happiness or sadness through a smile or a frown. But upon the first appearance of a smile or a frown, i.e. a smile or frown without a context or history (like the tragedy and comedy masks), one infers happiness or sadness or pleasure or pain without any information. One may infer the existence of geometric shapes from the senses of sight or touch, and likewise perhaps one could infer ethics from history, biology, and interaction between the world and the observer.

How does ethics relate to nothingness? Like the number line, nothing seems related to the negative and positive, in that it is between the two. The positive appears better than nothing, assuming one can obtain a true positive (the positive is perhaps happiness). Real nothingness, i.e. nonexistence, can be seen as better than a certain degree of the negative. Typically creatures would prefer nonexistence to an existence of pure suffering. Science contains various criterion for judging various physiological and psychological states. Nothingness, being the final form of negation, is a transcendent form/being or notion like God, nature, reality, truth, logic, perhaps goodness and ethics.

One may be able to praise or blame nothingness. One can praise nothing in the same way as when one praises the negation of something negative occurring. One may blame the other for doing nothing to change a negative condition into a positive one when the other could have done something. For minds typically want other minds to take responsibility for being conscious or intelligent or possessing some other role that can affect moral circumstances. The way minds relate to one another is different from the way they relate to other physical objects.

Nothingness would imply that a mind does not exist, which would also mean ethics would not exist in nothingness. A mind may judge nonexistence as bad if it judges existence as good. The logic of the mind appears to be quite different from the logic of the universe. Whereas the world is merely the appearance of something, the mind is in the world and over the world. Ethics is relates to how minds allot the physical world, since the body must change the world in order to change itself.

A Philosophical Work in Progress III

I think Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason are appropriate examples of ethical systems. Aristotle analyzed individuals according to extremes in personality traits; what was considered ethical or best was the midpoint between extremes. Kant formulates a law, the categorical imperative, which generally states that a human should only act in ways that that human would allow other humans to act in. The question for every moral theory is whether it is subjective (a notion) or objective (an object)? Any ethical system derived from science should be objective and found in nature, like science; but subjectivity has much to say on the subject of ethics.

The biological entity appears to have a sense of what is good and what is bad, and perhaps it derives such a sense as an extension of please and pain; for the unconscious maybe a consolidation of all the knowledge that the biological being possesses. But this is where the difference between biology and psychology becomes apparent; for biological awareness is what occurs at the cellular level, which is beyond our immediate experience of the world. Perhaps the biology inferred that if it is a colony of cells, then it would be best to gather information about colonies of cells rather than individual cells. Physics can then provide a scalar relationship between objects in space, which I think are the qualities of large and small being represented with quantities. Knowing is only one kind of action, an observer may perceive the biological entity performing all sorts of actions. Thought, either one’s own thoughts or another’s, may consider some actions as moral or immoral, and perhaps any attempt to understand those notions are pursued in human centered science. Science, however, does not contain a system of ethics, I believe. The question is whether that exclusion of a formal ethical system is due to a lack of an ethics in nature or a lack of discover.

Most human systems contain laws that mediate and govern our wide range of behavior. Existence itself may have a wide range of motions, yet what one perceives is ordered occurrences, instead of the chaos or complete silence of everything. For what would the image of all the visual memory of an individual superimposed on one another look like, or what would all the feelings one has felt feel like if experienced simultaneously? Usually the appearances are consecutive and somewhat predictable.

For me, science begins with the study of simple objects, such as simple three dimensional shapes, but that is to say I’m extracting a universal idea from a common perception of existence. In this case, one seems to take commonality for granted, then moves logic along with an “always happening.” Nothing is eternal with reference to God, but time allows occurrences to happen for long durations.

Following the lines of Aristotle’s worldview, to be good with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way, is an odd thing to judge as easy or difficult. A good being shouldn’t find it difficult to be good, for it is predicated to be good. But beings are malleable and adaptable, thus they may become something other than good. A good being can still perform wrong actions; such errors can lead to bad outcomes and could be seen as immoral by other beings. The notion of goodness is ambiguous much like God, logic, nature, and science which exist universally (or, perhaps, because they exist universally).

Hume expressed his ethical system using the dualities of praise and blame. These dualities are more concrete than good and bad, for they imply a judgment and pointing by persons, e.g. one can point out errors in systems with goals, or one can be aware of pleasure and an object which generates that affect. Theoretically, one maybe able to have a being categorize all the possible actions in existence as good or bad/praise or blameworthy. Problems typically occur when multiple beings are categorizing actions and have the ability to dissent from one another. Well, there is only a problem if ethics necessitates that all beings agree on which actions are good or bad.

It seems to me that there are psychological differences in how praise and blame are applied to various situations. One praises those objects which gives one pleasure. Pleasure, a feeling, is activated by appealing sensations. What is considered a moral action comes as a sensation. What appeals to the senses is perhaps not as important as why a sensation appeals to a mind or biological being. For biological beings the appeal appears to be related to the energy exchanges between the world and the being. The mind, being a record of the biological beings experiences, perhaps finds its appeal in how aspects of the world are connected.

The mind intersects the world at some point, but it appears multiple minds cannot intersect the world at the same point, for such would imply that two minds can exist in the same place at the same time. There are cases where two minds may appear to exist in the same place and time simultaneously, such as split personalities, identical twins, or collectivism. For we all exist on the same planet and share similar knowledge. These facts and other similarities are used to justify the assumption that others possess minds and consciousnesses. Yet, there are differences between minds/consciousnesses, for there would exist no friction or conflict if there were no differences. This may all be a result of intersecting the world from different points. Two physical points not being able to exist in the same position in space at the same time implies a distinct history for both points.

Perhaps ethics revolves around a logic based on the notions of good and bad, which are derived from biological functions (particularly the feelings pleasure and pain; and the behaviors or applications of praise and blame). What are the outcomes of categorizing something as good or bad? I would think God is to blame and praise for all that happens, but I’m unsure what that implies. A part blaming or praising the whole implies it blaming or praising the other parts that together make the whole. God is still beyond the whole.

The notion of ethics is also strongly related to judgments and decisions, Because the creation of a consciousness/mind in existence is so subtle, it has many degrees of freedom. Why one does what one does is a personal question. An ethical system seems to require a kind of universality. Science can tell one how to stay alive, but it doesn’t tell one how to exist; it merely exclaims what exist in nature.

The appeal to the senses is desire, for one comes to know what one wants through multiple interactions with the world and with one’s self. The desires of the self appear distributed between the biological structure and the particular mind which it possesses. The desires of the world are the wants of other beings and the necessity of physics. Though all are objects of praise or blame, the consequences of each are different.

A Philosophical Work in Progress II

The mind is what the brain is doing, or one could extend the brain to include the whole cellular system. Where is the observer relative to the mind and the world? The brain appears to recreate or represent the information it receives from the other organs, and the other organs communicate their conditions to the brain. Thus the world is how the brain represents the organs’ reactions to the world acting on them. The brain also manipulates the information it produces, perhaps automatically. One manipulation is extending the innate first-person view to the third-person or bird’s eye view. The observer perceives the five senses and the abstractions, and to the mind the mental constructs are perhaps more congruent with “reality” than the sensations. The observer is everywhere a mind is, in a sense; but since the mind is a product of the cellular system, and the cellular system is a logical operation of physical material, the observer could be physical material itself, wherever it may exist.

The only particular objects that matter philosophically are everything or/and God, which in themselves are not pragmatic; for everything is omniscience, which is beyond human capacities; and God in Its nature is beyond nature, therefore any talk of it appears to be nonsensical and absurd (I myself will not stand by my own words about God because I’m not God). In any case, such notions are investigated and categorized under philosophy, which in some sense associates philosophy with absurdity. I think this understanding merely serves as a warning of sorts when one is moved to duality, i.e. something other than the absolute.

What is the process by which nothing becomes something, and something becomes everything, then everything becomes one thing, and one thing becomes nothing? I think such is a simple logical question derived from word play. Yet, what it means to be, which is the study of ontology in philosophy, entails the notions of what does it mean to become and what does it mean to cease being, or whether such actions even occur? My immediate answer to such a question would be that one needs to look at particulars in order to understand universals (even though everything is insignificant in relation to God; it is also as great as God, assuming what is below God is still part of God).

I assume I’m in the “something” part of the process of existence because of an appearance. The appearance has an immediate form and a mediate form as it comes through consciousness. To the observer the immediate form of the appearance is all that passes through one’s mind at any given moment. The mediated form of the appearance are those items which affect us yet are outside of our awareness; such would include those perpetual mechanisms in the brain that find their expression in the mind yet go unnoticed by consciousness. It is science that assists us with understanding the appearance of something which is complex and nebulous upon first acquaintance. One may need to use the immediate appearance to move about the mediate appearance to acquire scientific knowledge. Science can then begin with the study of simple objects, such as simple three dimensional shapes; that is to say I’m extracting a universal idea from an extremely common perception of existence. In this case, one seems to take commonality for granted, then moves logical connection along with an “always happening.” This may all be a result of a kind of trust in a system or what one considers truth. The expression or organization of knowledge (in words at least) comes in many forms; but two interlocutors can simply agree on a mutual understanding and hope it is true. Real truth is perhaps with God, but absurdity/paradox is difficult for the mind to comprehend.

Ethics, I believe, is a formalization of the natural behavior of cooperation. Creatures typically cooperate or conflict, and that maybe a result of the attraction and repulsion forces, or the general fact of dualities, which manifest polarizations. Diurnal life, however, is not as disambiguous as polar opposites (which usually express themselves with terms like good/bad, moral/immoral, virtue/vice). What would God, a being beyond ethics, think of ethics (assume God does something analogous to thinking)?

The leap from ontology to ethics feels quite pretentious, it would be best to look at problems first. The general truth of appearances is, in my opinion, found in science. For science is our best record of what nature is. However, the records themselves are subjective; science would consider nature to be an objective entity (basically meaning a being that is outside of one’s self). The observer itself is either outside, inside, or both in relation to one’s self. For one’s self is one’s whole self. In reference to ontology, one’s whole self is everything, for one is a part of all things. It seems to me that all ethical systems exclude some aspect of the everything. Perhaps many ethical behaviors can be supported by science, since science is the expression of objects in space and what they are doing.

Philosophy and science are both similar in that they seek the truth, where they diverge is perhaps at some extreme point generated by philosophy. The use of science as a bases for ethics does help in placing one’s mind in a natural context, I believe. One could think of nature as the observable universe, and the limit of sight. Sight itself is a strong sense in reference to science. How far out does one extend the notion of ethics? Theoretically, one may extend one’s ethical system as far as to God (although it may become absurd at that point). What one should encompass in one’s ethical system is an ethical question involving exclusion.

Science informs the mind of objects in nature that immediate nature, perhaps, cannot inform the mind of. Again, one is not born with scientific knowledge; it is acquired or discovered in nature. Science allows one to trace back to the origin of an object, and by knowing what an object has done, one can infer what an object can do. Roughly the objects studied in science are particles, molecules, cells, creatures, societies, and galaxies. Ethics mostly revolves around societies and creatures; this exception is related to what makes science and ethics different, and that is to say ethics seems to exclude extremely small and large objects and objects that are not constructed from cells.

I think Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason are appropriate examples of an ethical system. Aristotle analyzed individuals according to extremes in personality traits; what was considered ethical or best was the midpoint between extremes. Kant formulates a law, the categorical imperative, which generally states that a human should only act in ways that that human would allow other humans to act in. The question for every moral theory is whether it is subjective (a notion) or objective (an object)? Any ethical system derived from science should be objective and found in nature, like science; but subjectivity has much to say on the subject of ethics (subjectivity being one’s present thoughts and experiences).

For the most part, the biological entity has a sense of what is good and what is bad, and it probably derives such a sense as an extension of pleasure and pain, for the unconscious maybe a consolidation of all the knowledge that the biological being possesses. But this is where the difference between biology and psychology becomes apparent. For biological awareness is what occurs at the cellular level, which is beyond our immediate experience of the world. Perhaps the biology inferred that if we are colonies of cells, then it would be best to gather information about colonies of cells rather than individual cells. Physics can then provide a scalar relationship between objects in space, which I think are the qualities of large and small being represented with quantities. Scientific data one can obtain quite easily from the internet was rather difficult to acquire, express, and propagate, and still, knowing is only one kind of action. An observer may perceive the biological entity performing all sorts of actions. Thought, either one’s own thoughts or another’s, may consider some action moral or immoral, and perhaps any attempt to understand those notions are pursued in psychology. Science, however, does not contain a system of ethics, I believe. The question is whether that exclusion of a formal ethical system is due to a lack of an ethics in nature or a lack of discovery.

On the other hand, science does contain social science, which is a record of the various social systems which have been observed. Most social systems contain laws that mediate and govern the wide range of possible behaviors. Existence itself may have a wide range of motions, yet what one perceives is an ordered occurrence (given significant time has elapsed), instead of the chaos or complete silence of the everything. For what would the image of all the visual memory of an individual superimposed on one another look like, or what would all the feelings one has felt feel like if experienced simultaneously? Usually the appearances are consecutive and somewhat predictable. Nothing is eternal with reference to God, however, occurrences may happen for long durations of time. Knowledge of a continuity is the insight from science or memory/rationality. The first continuity one may perceive is existence, and any most laws seem to consider existence. It is through the notion of existence that one is able to form considerations, and perhaps one can simply jump into any moral dilemma by use of consideration. For typically one considers the goodness and badness of actions.