Morality is fake and doesn’t exist

That is not what morality is at all. If that is the basis of your thoughts on morality, you shouldn’t expect anyone to take your stance seriously.

It’s not? But even if it weren’t, what do you think it is?
To be sure no morality that hitherto existed or was recorded stated that everyone should be his own judge and no one elses.

Be it the Ten Commandment or any other religious morality, or that of Humanism or Marxism, its always about some allegedly objective standards of right and wrong.
Moses, nor Marx nor Jesus nor any morality-creator came out with an argument overtly based on his personal values.

The only ones who did that sort of thing successfully were Dictators like Napoleon and some others, but they aren’t credited with being moral men.

You seem to have the idea that I’ve couched some claim to moral relativism or subjectivism in my previous statement, which isn’t the case.

Morality is subject dependent. People make value judgments based on both subjective and objective criteria. There are people who believe values are determined by external sources, but it’s always the people themselves who ascribe and act according to those values. Even people who act on the basis of being judged by an external source do so on their own accord in hopes of being judged favorably.

You can speak for all people in the whole of history? Does the quote “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law” ring any bells? I don’t think that’s how morality works to be sure, but some people seem to have believed as much. People can be wrong in their value judgments and their actions regardless of what they believe. People can be wrong about morality.

Hello Statik
Let me give it a shot. Ill respond to three errors I perceive.

  • “Being judged favourably” isn’t a moral value.
  • That Liber 77 quote is a commandment from the outside, if you hadn’t noticed.
  • That people can “be wrong abut morality” implies that there is an objective wrong and right to morality.

Who said it was? The judgment would be based on adherence to particular values.

From the outside? What do you mean?

Yes, it does. The moment you point beyond yourself to justify a moral position, you are implicating objectivity in the matter.

You clearly imply it, in the first quoted statement.

C says “Do what thou wilt”, not “I do what I will”.
Whoever takes this commandment as a moral rule is taking this rule from the outside.
“I must do what I will”.

Which was Uruz’ point to which you objected.

I don’t see how. I don’t know what else to tell you.

The former implies the latter, no?

What’s the difference in this context? Either way, the subject does what he will and is his own judge.

No it wasn’t. His was a claim about appealing to a higher moral authority. Mine is about the criteria by which we make moral judgments. You don’t seem to see the difference. Using objective criteria does not necessarily mean you’re appealing to a higher power.

Objective criteria depends upon authority to exist. Objective “laws” of the universe require enforcement by an authority independent of all subjectivity or else the “laws” are merely regular happenings that are consistently observed subjectively, which could happen by chance or consequence rather than strict dictation. If there is objective law, such as morality, we certainly have no way of discerning it.

Serendipper has this one.

No, it doesn’t. Objective criteria depends on an authority only to recognize its existence, but things can exist without subjects observing them. That’s how we discover new things. We find things that existed objectively before we observed them subjectively. I never said anything about objective laws, but laws are based on subjective observation of objective phenomena. Again, subject dependent is not the same as subjective.

Also,

That is pretty much the definition of a law. The emphasis is on what you’re observing. Is it merely a matter of your opinion that it exists or not?

But we are not the only observer. If we discovered an atom, it doesn’t mean there was no observer before we first observed it. One atom can observe another through electromagnetic interactions, and gravity I suppose, so each is subject to the other’s object, but neither can make an objective observation because the observation is subject to the atom’s capability to observe.

However, in the case of objectivity, there can be no subject or it would be subjectivity. In the case of objectivity, the observer is virtual as in the example of imagining that the universe was smaller than an atom prior to the big bang inflation when there is no such thing as spacetime or any concept of “size” when viewed from outside the universe. By definition of “universe”, there can be no observer outside of it and therefore the universe is the only true “object” in existence.

Laws are objective by definition because the authority of a law is established independently from any observers of the law. In other words, if all observers (all those who could be affected by the law) were dead, the law would still be in force by the authority that engendered it.

Any observer can only offer subjective interpretation, so there is no need to distinguish into types of subjectivity. When you look at a cup, all you can perceive is a rather thin band of electromagnetic radiation emanating from it; therefore, you cannot say you know everything about the cup, but only what you’re “subjugated”/relegated to realize by virtue of your humble abilities as a human.

Here are two conditions:

  1. Speed limit set by the state.
  2. Speed limit set by mechanical attributes of a car (max speed of a car).

#1 is in force even when no cars are on the road, because: there is the sign that says so (authority).
#2 is only in force only when cars are on the road because the “law” is determined, not by authority, but by attributes of the car itself, and so the “law” is just an artifact/consequence/happening and not a law at all.

#1 is objective (does not depend on subjects in order for law to exist).
#2 is subjective (depends on subjects in order for the law to exist).

Existence is relational, but not a matter of opinion. In order to exist, a thing must have something to affect (be observed by).

Serendipper

This may be a silly question but can there not be an objective interpretation? Does interpretation deal only with personal perception on our part? Can there not be any real evidence or facts involved or seen in interpretation - meaning objectivity? I may not have expressed that well.

Unless I am misunderstanding your statement, I think that doing the above WOULD lead to more information and truth?

Wow! Can you teach me how to do this? I am not capable of perceiving that.
That would be quite awesome.

Kind of like seeking out your ancestry. I suppose this is why we also have the Antique Roadshow. :evilfun:

My emphasis;

Do you honestly believe that?

No because that’s essentially an observer-less observation and quantum physicists would love to get a hold of that in order to look without looking, but there is no such thing.

There are no silly questions concerning objectivity since it’s very difficult to get one’s head around.

You may ask other people for an objective view of a personal situation you may have and it will be more objective than your own assessment, but it’s still subject to the limitation of the other person’s ability to relate to you and your problem (among other things). The degree of objectivity is subject to the subject’s tools of perception and internal biases.

A subject can only observe with the tools it has to observe (be affected by something). A photon, for instance, can only observe that which contains charge because that is the only means of affecting electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter has no effect on photons since dark matter contains no charge. However, dark matter does affect space which affects the path of light, but it doesn’t affect the light directly.

Dark matter is only real to us in terms of gravity and, although we can learn more about dark matter by studying the interactions it may have on other elements, there is no way for us to objectively observe the dark matter because we do not possess the tools necessary to “see” it.

I suppose we can extrapolate and surmise what something may look like if we weren’t there to look, but it’s not real observation.

Goethe said, and I agree, that thinking (deduction) is a tool of perception just like vision, smell, etc, so we may be able to piece together objective views by “virtual observation” (for instance, what the universe looked like at the moment of the big bang when viewed from outside the universe, whatever that means), but we can never be assured that we’ve considered all the information (in other words, we can’t know what we don’t know.)

You can differentiate subjectivity into types if you want, but I was just saying there was no need to in this case.

Light is just a higher-frequency radio wave or a lower-frequency xray and visible light is a sliver of the radiation that exists.

What you commonly call “heat” is really infrared radiation. What physicists call “heat” is all EM radiation since heat is energy in transport.

Birds can see tetrachromatically via a 4th cone that allows perception of ultraviolet radiation and, presumably, they have a neural network that allows conceptualization of a color such as ultra-orange, which does not exist to us. People wearing sunblock at the beach probably appear like they’re wearing aluminum foil to birds due to the intense reflection of UV light.

Deer hunters should also be aware that deer can see UV light (blue and up) very well and although some pee dribble may not seem very real to us, it’s like a light bulb to the deer. Deer are crepuscular, meaning they’re most active at dawn and dusk in order to take advantage of the remaining UV light from the sun to pinpoint predator urine while also having the ambiance dark enough for predators to be at a relative disadvantage.

I like that show :slight_smile:

Yes.

I’ve tried before to find exception to James’ central tenet, but I’m at a loss to describe any existence which no affect on anything.

And how does that work, the affecting and being affected? Thats what the WtP describes. Reality (rather than god) affects at the same time as it is being affected.
Though even God was “affected” when he watched his own creation and saw that it was good.

What I meant to address though is that “to affect” is not the same as “to be observed.”

The observer becomes affected by what the observer sees - the act of observing has no affect on the observed << Is this more or less what you are saying?

Also: Is WtP, Will to Power? I am not as good as many with abbreviations.

I didn’t mean to make a definitive statement this time, merely to point out that the term “affectance” leaves a lot to question. For instance, how are things affecting each other? Equally? In that case, the WtP doctrine (indeed, Will to Power) is false.

And if unequally, then apparently there are different qualia to “affectance”, at least two.

All of existence is transition because everything is in a constant state of motion. That is one of the two fundamental truths. The other one
is that existence cannot ever become non existence. There always has to be something regardless of what ever form it might actually take

Thanks for chiming in, Encode. Yes, that’s essentially it. Observation is simply being in the path of information that produces some change upon arrival. Being affected by something is what observation means.

  • James’ central tenet, which I’ve struggled to find exception to and yet have not, says that nothing exists unless it can affect something.

  • Alan Watts made a good argument for why existence itself is relationship youtu.be/iXSCzofqX8Y?t=25m1s

Nothing can exist in abstraction because it’s a contradiction in terms since existence always implies existing: in, on, around, as a function of, as a part of, in relation to something else.

I think that is true if the subject and object are not part of the same continuum otherwise infinite regression is produced through self-observation where the act of observation affects what is being observed (and that is what we see in the quantum experiments).

I have no idea other than they are part of the same continuum. The problem of causality that bogged Descartes down was: how does one thing affect another thing? (How does spirit affect the body if they are truly different things?) The answer must be that there are no separate things.

That seems logical to me. If A observes B and B observes A, then they hold each other up. If A and B are secretly the same, then I’m not sure how the origin of attention can be the focus of attention. How does a gun shoot down its own barrel? But if A and B are not secretly the same, then how do they affect each other? How does one universe communicate with another universe? It’s a paradox!