Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Why Morals Don't Matter.

What Makes Up Our Actions?

A lot of my themes in more recent times have revolved around habits. Habits and emotions to me are phenomenon I believe explain most of our behavior. Emotions can be positive or negative. They can bring pleasure or pain. Nobody ever really finds a happy life. Life is a struggle with moments of pleasure and pain that increase or decrease happiness at given points in our lives. We want to be happy, so we develop habits based on our subconscious memories of the most pleasurable and painful experiences, and base future choices on the most pleasurable and painful conscious memories.

The remembering self, and the experiencing self are two different selves. The remembering self perceives pain and pleasure from experiences at the most extremes. When feelings are extreme emotionally, and then end abruptly they leave the most impact as being remembered very painful or very pleasurable. When an experience ends more gradual by slowly reducing the pleasure and pain of that experience, we tend to remember them less pleasurable or painful than they were, and are more likely to do painful things again, and pleasurable thing less in these cases. That is the remembering self. All conscious future choices are based on the remembering self despite real feelings of the existing self in our present. We live in the remembering self, even when it has nothing to do with the current experiencing self. All past experiences determine what kinds of choices we will make in the future.

Those experiences that are not extreme enough to recall consciously still create some level of pleasure and pain in our subconscious to continue or discontinue a behavior through habits. Where habits are subconscious, voluntary choices based on memory are conscious, but they both are driven by feelings. We want to feel good and not bad. We do not have a lot of patience in most cases, and are more likely to seek pleasure sooner than later with our choices. It is in our biological makeup in order for us to survive as we did for so long in a world that no longer looks like ours. The biological makeup is an important ingredient, because all the ancestors in our lineage had personal experiences in their lives, and each one of them contributed to our current biological makeup. In other words, we are made up of a compilation of the habits developed over millions of years by those in our lineage that came before us. We are not born as complete blank slates when it comes to many habits. We want to eat, sleep, have sex, and feel like part of group or community. On top of this we have artificial physical pleasures that mimic the the originals, like processed foods that have high salts, fats, and sugars, which were scarce and essential to survive way back, so they are addicting, drugs that keep us awake so we can go longer without sleep, pornography to mimic sex, and online networks to mimic physical communities.

Just as there is a physical world created by technology that mimics our biological desires, there is a non-physical reality that mimics intangible experiences. The intangibles came through our interactions with other people in past societies, and traditions, codes of conduct, and interpersonal struggles have created habits we also carry with us in our everyday interactions at a subconscious level. We act as we act, because society and culture have created a layer over the biological frame that has an artificial pleasure and pain enforcement created by beliefs about right and wrong over past interpersonal struggles, and we still act them out today as we are the accumulation of all those habits. One way to look at this is like culture and society as a labyrinth of artificial customs, and at the end of the maze are biological habits. The labyrinth changes shape more quickly in time than the biology. The labyrinth is composed of social mores and folkways. Social mores are more ethical with our beliefs of how we ought to be based on abstract beliefs in religion and laws layered over our biology, and folkways are more informal rights and wrongs that we might get dirty looks for, but will not be enforced strongly. These social rules attempt to punish us for behaviors a society or a culture deem wrong, and they came about through the traditions, codes of conduct, and interpersonal struggles of our closer ancestors. This in a sense is artificial pleasure and pain. The pleasure and pain are real, but why something is actually considered right or wrong does not always cause biological harm. In many cases it is emotional harm, and since it is naturally in our biology to want to feel accepted by a group of some kind, this labyrinth of rules enforces us to act as we otherwise would not have in nature. They are manifestations of problems more than real problems due to abstract concepts of reality invented by our culture.
On a deeper level we have the individual self with our own personal experiences of pleasure and pain. One way to look at this is, we are a prop in a play, and culture is the stage we act on. Within a cultural stage, we are more likely to have certain kinds of pleasure/pain experiences than if we were acting on another cultural stage. On another cultural stage we would be surrounded by numerous other kinds of props in the form of artificial physical addictions, and artificial intangible customs. The stage we act on creates a greater probability in the type of personal experiences we have. Although we all have different issues as individuals based on our personal experiences, we still have a greater probability of similar issues when we exist in the same social ecosystem. This is why institutions such as the family, military, or a financial firm will give us different environments that influence our pleasure/pain scenarios, and definitions of right and wrong based on pleasure and pain.

Does Morality Matter?

Up to this point we have habits and feelings determining our actions for more pleasurable experiences, a conscious self making choices based on the most potent memories, which can in fact be flawed, because we only remember the sharpest potency in emotion that ends abruptly as the real experience, unconscious habits based on the most pleasurable feelings, a biological self seeking more pleasure, a cultural labyrinth created by a lineage of struggles that define good and bad conduct enforcing a level of punishment and reward, and ourselves as cultural props with personal experiences and a biological lineage of our own that seeks to be a certain way.

This biological lineage does not seek to harm others for any reason. It is only when others cause us pain that we feel the need to harm them. At this point some would make the argument that it is our rationality that keeps us from making the choice to act on our feelings and impulses. I would argue the complete opposite. It is our feelings and impulses that keep us from harming others, and rationality is nothing more than a maze to emotion as a labyrinth is to culture, and as impulses and feelings are to biology. In other words, rationality is the artificial maze of experience in our cultural stage based on memories that we act on consciously combined habits we act on subconsciously to get to the end point of feeling more pleasure. Conscious rationality takes into account all past memories applicable to an issue, and tries to find out the best way to get to pleasure. If we did not care about pleasure, we would be robots crunching numbers with no desires to use those numbers to take us somewhere. It is for this reason rationality is the slave of pleasure, feelings, desires, and habits. Habits are the subconscious reactions we have based on prior experiences, and biological makeup seeking pleasure.

The case would then arise when someone says, we cannot just go around doing whatever feels good. I would say, yes we can, and I will tell you why. If someone makes the argument that doing drugs will give us brain damage, or killing someone might feel good, then how can it be justified that doing what feels good is really good? For the same reason memories determine conscious choices about our present, and habits are reflexes from the same past. Growing up we have experiences seeing others do drugs, being educated on drugs, and possibly trying drugs too after hearing and seeing things or people that convince us the experience will be pleasurable or painful. This is our cultural stage. As an actor we think about if we try or do not try drugs based on our interpersonal relationships, traditions, and codes of conduct (laws). These are our pleasure and pain experiences as a prop on the cultural stage. We are going to do what we think will bring the most pleasure. If we do drugs after assessing all this information, and do not like the feeling afterward, we will have a more painful than pleasurable experience, and not try that drug again, and do again it if it was good. If we see people around us that have been doing a drug long term, and see bad side effects, we will take this into account too. Obviously, there will always be deviants who will do what is bad for themselves and/or to culture, even after a bad experience, and it is because on a biological level a deviant minority is natural in cases environments change abruptly, and a new behavior is more beneficial for survival, that the cultural maze reflects this same pattern. If there were never deviants in culture, societies would never change, and this is what causes the struggle for change over time. The struggle is not for good or evil, but change, and the outcome of the struggle is where good is defined at the end. It is good, because after all the struggle, what is left is what the most people agree on will feel good and legalize. The same goes for murder. It is not in our biology to naturally harm others unless they harm us. In a system with no rules, we would not hold ourselves back, but culture created a labyrinth, and a maze or social mores and folkways creates a layer of rules that can punish and harm us based on our actions. These rules once again were developed over time through interpersonal relationships, traditions, and codes of conduct (laws), and through our experiences as an actor on the cultural stage we learned the laws, and that ignorance is no excuse for the law, saw others get arrested on TV or through education, or in person for particular actions, and although we do not know all the laws consciously, our subconscious habits use their reflexes to stop us before we kill knowing that greater harm will come to us if we harm now in the short term to feel good. We know from experience that in some situations when we harm people, we felt worse afterword, and for that reason our reflexes stop us, but it all comes back to conscious memories, and subconscious habitual memories that we choose to act on in a way we think will maximize pleasure to ourselves – not on a the greater more good. Once again deviants will exist due to nature mixing up their genetics to sociopathicness, or experiences that deemed their actions okay in certain circumstances, and these once again are the tools for change in a changing world that will help the majority population adapt after a struggle to a new way of life. If it is truly the proper way then it will prove itself in time when the struggle ends. If we have what others consider bad habits at our subconscious level, we become conscious through cultural and social conflict too, and in a diverse culture, there is a greater chance of us having a conscious experience that alters how we try to act in the future.

It is because culture has a set of rules on top of biological rules that can cause additional pleasure and pain, that we change our actions to other than pure biological ends of such. Culture can give us pleasure and pain at the artificial level by having people show disdain for our actions through bad looks, and ignoring us based on social mores and folkways, and this level of maze rules in many cases is enough to change our behavior, where as in nature, we would possibly need a physical confrontation followed by memories each time to teach us pleasure and pain. In a sense culture has evolved to make us more peaceful in confrontation, but at the same time it has enslaved us with artificial rules based on old ways that may not be the best choices in our new environments. Some cultural rules may not be the best for us, but if we truly feel acting against them will feel good, and it proves so, then we are either the deviants for the new direction of culture, or a failed attempt at it. Rationality only exists to figure out based on experience, the best way we know of to feel good. In the end, the only thing that matters is feeling better than we did before we acted, and the more long term those feelings can be the better. Folkways can be seen as cultural habits, which are less conscious. Social mores can be seen as cultural rationality, because they are based on things like religion and law that tell us how we ought to live in theory. Since we are surrounded by these concepts, they bind our rationality at some level to what path culture has taught us, and will allow us to feel good. Beneath this we have our own experiences of what we think has and will feel good. We will always do what we think consciously and unconsciously will feel good, and with all the rules in culture and biology, morals in the ought to sense do not matter in our lives. We will attempt whatever we think will feel good surrounded by cultural and biological rules, stop if it does not, and that morally will determine right in wrong in the end – doing what feels good is the only good moral rule to live by.

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