Comment by IgorPartola
14 hours ago
The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given.
The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans.
I used to believe the same thing but now I’m not so sure. What if we simply cannot fathom the true nature of the universe because we are so minuscule in size and temporal relevance?
What if the universe and our place in it are interconnected in some way we cannot perceive to the degree that outside the physical and temporal space we inhabit there are complex rules and codes that govern everything?
What if space and matter are just the universe expressing itself and it’s universal state and that state has far higher intelligence than we can understand?
I’m not so sure any more it’s all just random matter in a vacuum. I’m starting to think 3d space and time are a just a thin slice of something greater.
Well are people not part of the universe. And not all people "care about what we do" all the time but it seems most people care or have cared some of the time. Therefore the universe, seeing as it as expressing itself through its many constituents, but we can probably weigh the local conscious talking manifestations of it a bit more, does care.
"I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans." This is probably not entirely true. People developed these notions through something cultural selection, I'd hesitate to just call it a Darwinism, but nothing comes from nowhere. Collective morality is like an emergent phenomenon
But this developed morality isn’t universal at all. 60 years ago most people considered firing a gay person to be moral. In some parts of the world today it is moral to behead a gay person for being gay. What universal morality do you think exists? How can you prove its existence across time and space?
Firing a gay person is still considered moral by probably most people in this world. If not for the insufferable joy they always seem to bring to the workplace! How dare they distract the workers with their fun! You are saying morality does not exist in the universe because people have different moralities. That is like saying attracting forces dont exist because you have magnetism and gravitational pull(debatable) and van der waals forces etc. Having moral frameworks for societies seems to be a recurring thing. You might even say: a prerequisite for a society. I love to philosophize about these things but trying to say it doesnt exist because you cant scientifically prove it is laying to much belief in the idea that science can prove everything. Which it demonstrably cannot.
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>"The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans."
The universe might not have a concept of morality, ethics, or life; but it DOES have a natural bias towards destruction from a high level to even the lowest level of its metaphysic (entropy).
You dont know this, this is just as provable as saying the universe cares deeply for what we do and is very invested in us.
The universe has rules, rules ask for optimums, optimums can be described as ethics.
Life is a concept in this universe, we are of this universe.
Good and bad are not really inventions per se. You describe them as optional, invented by humans, yet all tribes and civilisations have a form of morality, of "goodness" of "badness", who is to say they are not engrained into the neurons that make us human? There is much evidence to support this. For example the leftist/rightist divide seems to have some genetic components.
Anyway, not saying you are definitely wrong, just saying that what you believe is not based on facts, although it might feel like that.
Only people who have not seen the world believe humans are the same everywhere. We are in fact quite diverse. Hammurabi would have thought that a castless system is unethical and immoral. Ancient Greeks thought that platonic relationships were moral (look up the original meaning of this if you are unaware). Egyptians worshiped the Pharaoh as a god and thought it was immoral not to. Korea had a 3500 year history of slavery and it was considered moral. Which universal morality are you speaking of?
Also what in the Uno Reverse is this argument that absence of facts or evidence of any sort is evidence that evidence and facts could exist? You are free to present a repeatable scientific experiment proving that universal morality exists any time you’d like. We will wait.
I have in fact seen a lot of the world, so booyaka? Lived in multiple continents for multiple years.
There is evidence for genetic moral foundations in humans. Adopted twin studies show 30-60% of variability in political preference is genetically attributable. Things like openness and a preference for pureness are the kind of vectors that were proposed.
Most animals prefer not to hurt their own, prefer no incest etc.
I like your adversarial style of argumenting this, it's funny, but you try to reduce everything to repeatable science experiments and let me teach you something: There are many, many things that can never ever be scientifically proven with an experiment. They are fundamentally unprovable. Which doesnt mean they dont exist. Godels incompleteness theorem literally proves that many things are not provable. Even in the realm of the everyday things I cannot prove that your experience of red is the same as mine. But you do seem to experience it. I cannot prove that you find a sunset aesthetically pleasing. Many things in the past have left nothing to scientifically prove it happened, yet they happened. Moral correctness cannot be scientifically proven. Science itself is based on many unprovable assumptions: like that the universe is intelligible, that induction works best, that our observations correspond with reality correctly. Reality is much, much bigger than what science can prove.
I dont have a god, but your god seems to be science. I like science, it gives some handles to understand the world, but when talking about things science cannot prove I think relying on it too much blocks wisdom.
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That still makes ethics a human thing, not universe thing. I believe we do have some ethical intuition hardwired into our welfare, but that's not because they transcend humans - that's just because we all run on the same brain architecture. We all share a common ancestor.
Maybe it does. You don't know. The fact that there is existence is as weird as the universe being able to care.
Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that.
This is not evidence of anything except this is how the math of probabilities works. But if you only did the one experiment that got you all heads and quit there you would either believe that all coins always come out as heads or that it was some sort of divine intervention that made it so.
We exist because we can exist in this universe. We are in this earth because that’s where the conditions formed such that we could exist on this earth. If we could compare our universe to even a dozen other universes we could draw conclusions about specialness of ours. But we can’t, we simply know that ours exists and we exist in it. But so do black holes, nebulas, and Ticket Master. It just means they could, not should, must, or ought.
> Think of it this way: if you flip a coin 20 times in a row there is a less than 1 in a million chance that every flip will come out heads. Let’s say this happens. Now repeat the experiment a million more times you will almost certainly see that this was a weird outlier and are unlikely to get a second run like that.
Leaving aside the context of the discussion for a moment: this is not true. If you do that experiment a million times, you are reasonably likely to get one result of 20 heads, because 2^20 is 1048576. And thanks to the birthday paradox, you are extremely likely to get at least one pair of identical results (not any particular result like all-heads) across all the runs.
We don't "know" anything at all if you want to get down to it, so what it would mean for the universe to be able to care, if it were able to do so, is not relevant.
@margalabargala: You are correct, hence the meaninglessness of the OP. The universe could care like humans make laws to save that ant colony that makes nice nests. the ants dont know humans care about them and even made laws that protect then. But it did save them from iradication. They feel great cause they are not aware of the highway that was planned over their nest (hitchhikers reference).