Comment on Good, Evil, and Self
The following comment was written in response to a theist named Bridget from the last Dawkins post [here is her original comment]. I wanted to present this on its own page since I think it begins to address some core issues in Sacred River.
Where does the evil and good come from?
“Evil” and “Good” aren’t substances or states, but moral judgments on behaviors and ideas. All judgments are products of the human mind grounded in the evolutionary necessity of primates to live together in a reasonably harmonious way. We are beginning to find the basic building blocks of human ethics, which are related to such issues as fairness, resource/mate protection, incest avoidance, and reciprocal altruism (to name a few).
As in language, the moral building blocks have evolved into complex structures that are now largely culture-based. These structures form in every group (churches, schools, workplaces, clubs, and even whole cities and nations), and the majority of them are implicit, meaning they are unspoken mandates and rules of thumb that guide how group members behave and interact. When someone violates a rule, everyone knows it, even when that rule isn’t written down. Humans are simply wired this way.
Although the underlying purpose of morality is logical—the creation of social rules that allow humans to live together in groups—individual morals or moral sets are not always rational or even beneficial. At one time, for example, slavery was considered perfectly acceptable by many Americans and was even justified with the Bible. Many people would now consider slavery to be an unambiguous evil.
This is why there is a movement to push morals into a principle-based system rather than attempting a set of absolute rules. For example, increasing fairness and decreasing suffering are “good” principles, but what those look like will change along with a changing society, just as the acceptability of slavery changed with the Civil War. This is but one benefit of a non-theistic perspective—we can approach goodness from a reasonable and compassionate place rather than by attempting to fulfill rigid decrees, regardless of their relevance or logic.
Where does the “self” come from? And please don’t say the self is a set of neuronal connections…that is ridiculous and has not been proven.
The experience of self does indeed stem from complex neural nets in the brain, although the total self certainly includes the whole body. This might seem ridiculous to you, but there is a great deal of empirical evidence for it (and no evidence to the contrary). True, we learn more about the creation of self all the time as we learn more about the brain, but it isn’t the mystery you are making it out to be.
What we call the self is constructed from many psycho-neurological mechanisms, including temperament, emotions, personality (a la the Big Five), subjective perception and awareness, motivations and bodily needs, working memory and long-term memory, worldview and heuristic sets (e.g. social roles), and what you would call thinking. The self is an emergent phenomena that arises from the integration of all these functions, each of which are borne in the brain and derive from a combination of genetics and experience, and shifts according to environmental priming (a great example of this is an experiment with Chinese-Americans: one group was shown American symbols and the other Chinese symbols: each group then interpreted a single image, with the first group preferring a Western concept of individualism, with the other preferring an Eastern communal perspective. So based on how they were primed, different “selves” came to the fore).
To learn more, I strongly recommend “The Developing Mind” by Dan Siegel.
I’m afraid you might be falling for what our ancient ancestors fell for: the assumption that anything we don’t fully understand in nature must be due to a supernatural agent. It’s as if to say that if something in nature is amazing and beyond our comprehension, it couldn’t have “just happened”. But why not? There is no reason to think that anything in nature required an external agent, and the more we learn about the universe, the more we must conclude that indeed no agent could have caused any of it. Nature is self-sufficient; that is part of its majesty.
93 Ash,
Your post is interesting and informative, although I don’t tend to have the energy to rebut people that appear disingenuous. For example, she claims to have extensively studied neuroscience yet somehow never came upon a neurological explanation of the self… either the research wasn’t done or it was done extremely incompletely.
Moving on: I think an implicit point you make but don’t state explicitly is that there is no such thing as Absolute Good or Absolute Evil. There aren’t certain principles which universally produce ‘good’ (e.g. ‘decreasing suffering’ could easily lead to euthanasia, eugenics, and other fun eu-words), nor evil. You could even introduce the nuance that ‘evil’ implies such an Absolute principle, and perhaps even a Universal Moral Order of some sort (ruled by Jesus or Karma, doesn’t matter), but ‘bad’ does not carry that connotation and is therefore much more useful to describe the situation.
I was wondering: What think you of the ‘mystic state of mind’ (for lack of better words), or the phenomenological experience of an undifferentiated unity without multiplicity attested to by mystics of all cultures and many modern men (including Koestler, Tennyson, that fellow Aleister Crowley, and one could argue Whitman, etc. etc)? Even if we do not take the experience to reflect objective reality, it has very real psychological & behavioral effects. An ethics even grows out of this very often that it is because of our strict ego-boundaries (what you call ‘self’ in your post) that we focus too much on things like greed, envy, jealousy, anger, etc. which most people would call ‘negative.’ Now, I acknowledge it is certainly psychologically healthy to maintain a coherent identity (which, I think, is a good justification of Crowley’s formula ‘None AND Two’) but the mystic perception of unity should be addressed naturalistically (is that a word?). Crowley was indeed the forerunner of this attitude: ” …the “vision of God,” or “Union with God,” or “Samadhi,” or whatever we may agree to call it, has many kinds and many degrees, although there is an impassable abyss between the least of them and the greatest of all the phenomena of normal consciousness. “To sum up,” we assert a secret source of energy which explains the phenomenon of Genius. We do not believe in any supernatural explanations, but insist that this source may be reached by the following out of definite rules, the degree of success depending upon the capacity of the seeker, and not upon the favour of any Divine Being. We assert that the critical phenomenon which determines success is an occurrence in the brain characterized essentially by the uniting of subject and object. We propose to discuss this phenomenon, analyse its nature, determine accurately the physical, mental and moral conditions which are favourable to it, to ascertain its cause, and thus to produce it in ourselves, so that we may adequately study its effects.” [emphasis added, of course]
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IAO131
I think an implicit point you make but don’t state explicitly is that there is no such thing as Absolute Good or Absolute Evil
I think it depends on how one approaches the subject (keeping in mind that I am not an expert on the philosophy of ethics). While there is no externally-derived or a priori Absolute Good/Evil, it can be argued that some things will always be considered unambiguously good or evil by the general population, such as saving children from a burning building. But the situations that exist on the ends of the spectrum aren’t the problem…few people will debate the evilness of, say, torturing a small child for fun. It’s the sticky middle that trips us up.
What think you of the ‘mystic state of mind’
I think it is a practice that can lead to profound experiences for some people and I’m all for people trying it out if it suits them. While I do not believe that such states provide access to any deeper truths about the nature of reality, I do believe that they can lead to significant secondary effects. Contemplation, concentration, and expanding awareness beyond the self can produce major changes in one’s perspective that lead to increased fulfillment and happiness, and empirical evidence backs me up on that one.
Does an ethics precede from mystical states? I don’t know, maybe. I don’t think we need mysticism to encourage things like altruism or emotional balance, although mystical experiences might reinforce such perspectives.
Now, I acknowledge it is certainly psychologically healthy to maintain a coherent identity…but the mystic perception of unity should be addressed naturalistically (is that a word?).
Yes, it is a word.
It is certainly possible to approach mystical states apart from any supernatural concepts, as some sects of Buddhism have been doing for some time now. Psychologists and neurologists are now actively studying mystical states, and have started forming compelling naturalistic (i.e. scientific) hypotheses as to their nature and impact. In fact, certain mystical practices (stripped of all religious language and dogma) are becoming integrated into mainstream psychotherapeutic practice.
93 Ash,
“I think it depends on how one approaches the subject (keeping in mind that I am not an expert on the philosophy of ethics). While there is no externally-derived or a priori Absolute Good/Evil, it can be argued that some things will always be considered unambiguously good or evil by the general population, such as saving children from a burning building. But the situations that exist on the ends of the spectrum aren’t the problem…few people will debate the evilness of, say, torturing a small child for fun. It’s the sticky middle that trips us up.”
And this attests to the relative uniformity of human physiology/psychology across cultures and the evolution of these values, etc. as you spoke about. The point is there is no inherent right or wrong coded into the universe for which one is punished with sin/hell or bad karma/birth in lower realms, etc.
“I think it is a practice that can lead to profound experiences for some people and I’m all for people trying it out if it suits them. While I do not believe that such states provide access to any deeper truths about the nature of reality, I do believe that they can lead to significant secondary effects. Contemplation, concentration, and expanding awareness beyond the self can produce major changes in one’s perspective that lead to increased fulfillment and happiness, and empirical evidence backs me up on that one.”
Right, that was generally the point I was trying to make. There is evidence, most recently, that belief in a caring God helps depression by mediating hopelessness… (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122393987/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 if you care)… not that a Personal, caring God exists, though. There are tons of studies showing that religion & spirituality in many facets has many beneficial effects (one of the reasons why I enjoy Hitchens but cringe when I hear the subtitle to his book, although I recognize its a polemic to create controversy anyhow).
“Psychologists and neurologists are now actively studying mystical states, and have started forming compelling naturalistic (i.e. scientific) hypotheses as to their nature and impact. In fact, certain mystical practices (stripped of all religious language and dogma) are becoming integrated into mainstream psychotherapeutic practice.”
Ive heard some ‘transpersonal’ and ‘humanist(ic)’ psychologists integrating these type of ‘peak experiences’ into the theory & practice. It sounds good; I think its best if its stripped of all religious dogma also, though I hope they dont introduce new dogmas (philosophical or otherwise) into the mix. On this front of psychology/neurology I would recommend anything by Andrew Newberg, also James H Austin. Should you be interested in the integration of this ‘mystic experience’ of unity into philosophy, I have to recommend W.T. Stace’s ‘Mysticism and Philosophy’ which is available fully online… Check out the first chapter, at least
P.S. A good reference for explanations of the self emerging from neurology is a new book by Thomas Metzinger called ‘The Ego Tunnel’ … check it out (you or her).
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IAO131