It blows my mind that people still don't get this

Good an evil is a measurement, much like math. It's applied to whatever it's measured, the same as me saying "I have two apples, I add another apple and I have 3". I use math, the same way that people apply good and bad to other people. However, good and evil is just a concept, break a human down to a molecular level and it's not broken into good and evil, because good and evil only exists as a concept. Take away these arbitrary notions (which change from culture to culture and person to person) and we can start looking at why people behave the way they do, instead of asserting arbitrary measurements of our approval of their actions.

tl:dr - good and evil doesn't exist.

Other urls found in this thread:

discord.gg/012OE9ge1GbmdqbZD
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Good and evil do in fact exist. *Raises left fist.* This is Good. *Punches you.*

*Raises right fist* And this is Evil. *Punches you with other fist.*

That picture is really weird.

That is all.

It blows my mind that It blows the minds of people who don't get that people don't get this

>materialist troglodytes evangelizing Veeky Forums

It blows my mind that it blows the mind of people who's mind is blown that people's minds are blown by people who don't get why people don't get this.

First time trying LSD?

Dummy, the measure is the reality. Without delving into something abstract, let's picture this: a painting is just a smuttering of colours, no? No, it is not, painting does not belong in the physical, yet it is real. The same with the good and evil emergent from the tiny particles of human behaviour.

>saying what things are made of makes them not exist.

discord.gg/012OE9ge1GbmdqbZD

Honest and truly, that doesn't make sense. You're saying that because things exist and everything isn't just random then therefor... uh. You're trying to conflate good and evil with a painting, but it almost sounds like you're making some weird ironically deterministic argument, which I don't think was your intention.

Not really.
I am saying that a lot of things, by your definition, do not exist - paintings, for example, because the quality of being "a part of the painting" is not inherent to components making up said painting. The same with society: there's no idea of society that is hard-wired into an individual man, but take a lot of these men and society emerges as if by miracle. "Being good" is a quality that can't be found on molecular level, but that doesn't mean that you can't reach it by changing the scale. You can.

''Human'' is a concept
''Molecule'' is a concept
''Existance'' is a concept

I believe that I experience a real world. I believe that everyone else experiences the same world. My actions affect the experiences of others and if I do so in a negative way I'm being evil. Most people don't question the idea that everyone else is conscious which isn't that unreasonable of an assumption. The only thing they'll ever miss out on is being as much of a complete fucking faggot as you so nothing of value is lost in ignoring materialism.

>babbys first spookbusting
>doesn't realize he's busting spooks in the name of other spooks
>doublespooked

Why does no one ever respond to my hilarious shit posts??

They are too avantgarde for Veeky Forums

The one in this thread is literally like something Batman would say to a nihilist baddie though

Obvious samefagging. Your post was garbage.

philistine detected

A concept is a concept. Come
at
me
bro
A painting exists because we give it the meaning of the word painting, which we associate with certain ideas, but yes the painting in reality does exist outside of our mind (or not of you're a solipsist) as a series of ultimately random shapes and colors. I think what people get wrong with good and evil is they don't understand absurdity and determinism. Inside of our heads there's nothing less random and absurd than what we see in a painting, although beyond our abstract reasoning, there does exist a world independent of the meanings we give them. The whole concept of meaning and existence is really only an illusion of being conscious, because we perceive things. Imagine you're dead. No afterlife. Except things still do exist, but we're not there to apply these meanings to them. Everything still exists without the meanings we apply to it.

>dur dur dur we cant measure it it doesnt exist
man im feeling 82% happy today
what is quantum mechanics

If Good and Evil don't exist, then how can you talk about them?

Also can you please explain how Molecules are not a concept or embedded in a concept, akin to how Good and Bad are?

How about you explain it, because you're the one that seems to think there's an explanation for that sort of thing. Try to explain to me a world that isn't based on determinism.

There's an explanation for what sort of thing?

Also why don't you answer my first question?

>A painting exists because we give it the meaning of the word painting
>Everything still exists without the meanings we apply to it.

I'm confused

>If Good and Evil don't exist, then how can you talk about them?

you can talk about all kinds of non-existent ideas

Because your question is a fallacy. You're asking me to explain how something doesn't exist. You're the one that's assuming it does exist, so I'm asking you to explain how a world *****without determinism**** could work. Because in order for the concept of good and evil to exist, there has to be some sort of free will. What is that? How is our biology not just that of a computer? You're really not getting this and I'm putting effort into this just because I hope that we can eventually see eye to eye on this issue. If you're just in this to troll me though then please, fuck off and die.

You will immediately cease and not continue to access the site if you are under the age of 18.

You're asking me to explain how something doesn't exist

If this is a fallacy then your thread is a fallacy no? Or is this not what you had done in the OP?

>Because in order for the concept of good and evil to exist, there has to be some sort of free will.

Why?

>How is our biology not just that of a computer?

Do i have to make you aware of the qualitative differences that exist between humans and computers? Since you are in for determinism then the first big difference is that humans are drive-directed. This is the first break with a pure computing machine. There exist no rationality in a human being as even his rationality emerges from the organical. The Computers is free of will, it is free of drive, it is entirely dependant, and this is the second difference, on external commands.

Why do i have to explain a world without determinism? If we live in a world of determinism, then why do you ask me to explain it? And i can frankly not see at all how this relates back to good and evil in any way. Could you maybe explain what determinism has to do with good and evil? Does determinism render non-material ''ideas'' or ''concepts'' non-existant? How so?

His name ? Albert Einstein !

Really makes you think, woah

>Good an evil
>an
stopped reading

>Good and evil is a measurement
>Good and evil doesn't exist
What...?
Oh wait you're a cultural relativist, hows the humanities degree going ?

>*Raises left fist.* This is Good.
Communist scum

In order to think that our brains are somehow different from computers, then you'd have to think that somehow the human mind exists parallel to or separately from the brain. The human mind exists because of the brain, not next to or outside of the neurology of the brain. That would imply that there's some sort of soul inside of our brain, and our consciousness isn't the result of brain function. Your ideas exist as ideas, but my problem is that people use concepts such as good and evil. How do you qualify these sorts of things? How do you define good and evil? This is a question that philosophers have struggled with for centuries, but what it comes down to is determinism.

Let me try to explain determinism. Determinism is basically the idea that the universe is like a big wound up clock. Everything happens because it was set in motion. So basically, the problem is, if bad people do bad things, and were destined to do them for billions of trillions of years, since the beginning of time, is it really justifiable to say that we even have free will, is it correct to have things like good and evil as concepts? I'd argue no.

To a certain extent we already can measure the outcome of certain events, except on a much larger scale everything is determined. It's just on a scale of complexity that we couldn't grasp, which is why we can predict how fast a ball will drop and it's terminal velocity, but we can't predict the future. This is why I content that there really is no such thing as good and evil, because in order for there to be evil there would have to be some sort of "force" from within us that isn't determined by determinism. Everything is determined, as I explained in that example. This is why I have such a problem with people even using the words good and evil. Our minds are determined by our brain matter, nothing more.

>Good an evil is a measurement,
using what unit?

Made me kek desu senpai nice1

Of course they don't exist in and of itself, OP. But they do exist in our consciousness, and that matters, otherwise ou consciousness would be no better than that of a bacteria.

Our subjective judgement matters because we can find what is close to the objective Good through experience and logic.

Easy answer OP cmon

>In order to think that our brains are somehow different from computers, then you'd have to think that somehow the human mind exists parallel to or separately from the brain.
this is a silly thing to assume. brains could simply do different things than computers

>The human mind exists because of the brain, not next to or outside of the neurology of the brain.
is there research to back this opinion up?

Good and evil may not exist "as such," but ideology in the form of the ethical binary nevertheless retains objective reality on the basis of its determining place in the structure of the social formation.

Your analogy doesn't work. The painting would not equate with good or evil in the OP, but rather the human. To make your analogy work, you would have to argue that a painting can be objectively good or bad, or have some other abstract quality despite a part of the painting, like color or form, not having that quality.

You're just substituting one word for another and saying Q.E.D. What does it mean to affect others "negatively"? How do you determine whether any particular action is negative or positive?

Well, first of all, to assume that the brain isn't responsible for your mind, you'd have to assume that your mind operates or exists from somewhere else besides the brain; I obviously think the mind is a consequence of the brain, but I guess I could be wrong about that. I'd like to see someone contest that scientifically. Until then there is nothing in the provable universe that suggests that your brain isn't responsible for your thoughts. The question of whether or not a computer is the same as a brain comes down to whether or a not a computer can emulate consciousness and the same functions that a brain does; an artificial brain. If this is possible, and we create some sort of artificial brain, then that will prove that our consciousness is nothing special, and is simply the result of super sophistocated evolutionary processes that we were able to emulate. I speculate that we already are emulating them, we're already on the path to creating artificial intelligence and there's predictions that it will happen around 2040, I think.

>If Good and Evil don't exist, then how can you talk about them?

What definition of existence are you using? Do you belive unicorns, naiads, and the flying spaghetti monster all exist simply because we can talk about them?

>babby's first materialism post
Bravo faggot

It blows my mind that people still don't get that discussion of this kind doesn't belong on Veeky Forums even when it's good, and it certainly isn't in this case

Okay guys, I'm going to bed. Talk to you later.

bump

You just said it's a measurement and a concept, thus it does exist.

Is that a grill?

I strongly doubt it. Don't fap.

So beauty does also exist itself?

No, it doesn't. That doesn't even make sense. You didn't explain or prove anything. This statement doesn't even offer any alternative point of view, there's nothing I can gather from this statement that I can even base a new opinion on, based on what you suppose the alternative answer to the idea I proposed is. It's really frustrating, I just want to sink my thumbs into your eye balls, because you're literally no different from all the other idiots on this planet, yet you're smug and stupid enough to think you're right. The same people who killed Socrates think the way you do.

The reason that the concept of good and evil exists is because society doesn't have any inherent meaning, so people have to add their own sort of meaning based on their primitive lack of understanding for the universe. We are animals just like any other animal, and the fact that we're aware of our own consciousness doesn't make us any less of an animal. Show me the fucking physical manifestation of the concept of good and evil that exists somewhere in reality. It fucking does not, it's a human concept. I have tried to explain this so many times to people like you but it is fucking lost and I don't know what else I could possibly say that wouldn't be lost on people like you. I have spent this entire fucking thread trying to explain this concept, no please, if you don't mind, go fall on a spike and impale yourself through the eye.

You are so fucking stupid, oh my god.

edgy

Why tho

>tfw got hard

Fuck me.

It's not a measurement, because it's relative and unquantifiable. It's an opinion.

You're right, that's a better way of putting it.

God exists because love and you can't explain love just like you can't explain the tides. Tide goes in tide goes out, you can't explain that :^()))))))))))

Who's that semen demon?

Define inherent meaning, as far as I'm concerned, no such thing exists.

"Belt" is a proper substantive while "good" and "evil" are substantivations of adjectives. That should say enough.

It exists as a concept/measurement created by us. Nobody is claiming it's anything more than that as far as I'm aware, and I'm fine with it being this. It exists as this concept/measurement.

>Show me the fucking physical manifestation of the concept of good and evil that exists somewhere in reality.
I see good as doing things that increase human well-being and bad as the opposite. It's hard to measure in all cases, but beating your child would probably just produce more suffering. Or throwing yet another person into a North Korean prison camp.

/thread.

So "hungry" or "fast" don't exist either according to you, since they can be used as substantive adjectives?

Hunger exists. Fast things exist, but fastness doesn't.

Okay, that doesn't explain why it's bad. The dumbest fucking person in the world can go around saying things are bad or good. You could be literally retarded and someone could say "what do you think of war" to the retarded person and they would say "DAAAAH I THNK WAR IS BAD BCUAUSE PPL DIIIIIE AND DYING IS BAAAAAAD". You're literally no fucking different. Good and bad is a useless concept, one that if we had real understanding of the universe and not just presumptive fill in the blanks logic with easy answers, we wouldn't even need to have this sort of concept. The reality is that good and evil are concepts of a very primitive human nature, and I'd challenge anyone intelligent enough to refute that theory, but I know there's nothing that can refute that theory, because it's absolute.

qualities exist regardless of their objecthood, retard.

Whoa, does blue exist?

holyyyy fuuuuck op you're not gonna sauce that sweet boipucci? dafuck man

Without the existence of fastness fast things wouldn't exist. Fastness is an ability that objects posses. An object either has an ability to be relatively fast, or it doesn't. Most things can be fast, but we would have to come up with a method to maximise its fastness potential. A rock's fastness when it is thrown by a human is pretty fast, but by putting the same rock into a giant rocket machine and blasting it to the space is faster. If fastness didn't exist, we wouldn't even be able to conceptualise fast things.

>The reality is that good and evil are concepts of a very primitive human nature

Sure. We don't like to die, we don't like to suffer or have bad things happen to us. So we, as a society, have agreed to label people who intentionally cause us to suffer as "bad" or "evil" and the opposite as "good".Does everyone agree on everything in regards to this? No, but we do have some sort of consensus. Mass shootings are bad, raping babies are bad etc.

Imperfect? Sure. Primitive? Maybe. Who cares.

0000FF is objectively blue, you can't prove me wrong ;^)

I'm going to try to explain this again. The concepts of good and evil are inane concepts. Anyone can say something is good or bad, but that doesn't explain why it's good or evil. There's no way to measure and quantify what good and evil is. Really, the only thing that's really useful is science, because science gives a reliable and consistent explanation and understanding of the universe, and is constantly getting more complex. Science doesn't have a system of dogma though, science simply seeks to understand things; it erases that good and evil dichotomy and simply tries to understand understand these things, instead of giving what is basically an opinion.

This goes back to what I was saying before, about the system of justice being inane, how I don't believe there is such thing as a good and bad person. I've tried to explain this in many ways, but so far it's been lost on a lot of people. Human beings are just animals, we're just matter. You wouldn't get mad at a rock for falling on someone's head, you wouldn't get mad at an animal for killing another animal for food. I think it's a fallacy, that human beings see our own actions as good and bad, and I've tried to explain this to other people using the example of a deterministic universe, which I have come to accept that not everyone will accept, because of what their beliefs tell them.

That's fine. I believe in science, that's the only thing I believe in when it comes to giving a consistent and very useful explanation of the universe. Other people can go on believing their inconsistent beliefs and give themselves no realistic perspective of the universe, that's fine. You can live in the same world as the people who deny evolution because their bible tells them otherwise. The fact is, the concept of good and evil is inane and worthless, judging people by these criteria is bullshit.

>Fastness is an ability that objects posses.
Could you define it by itself, without mentioning its submission to objects? even defining it as a scale (just like height--distance from the floor), you still have to recognize its submission to whatever is being measured, which does effectively exist and we know about as a body in which certain qualities have certain defined values.
>An object either has an ability to be relatively fast, or it doesn't.
The effectiveness of that ability, among other shitton of qualities, is what defines an object. That doesn't mean a sole quality has a definition by itself.
>Most things can be fast, but we would have to come up with a method to maximise its fastness potential. A rock's fastness when it is thrown by a human is pretty fast, but by putting the same rock into a giant rocket machine and blasting it to the space is faster.
Rockets fastness is generally higher than rocks.
>If fastness didn't exist, we wouldn't even be able to conceptualise fast things.
I feel it's more like the opposite: if fast things didn't exist, we wouldn't even be able to conceptualise fastness. There is no supreme fastness we can check as a model for fast things, but we can tell if a thing is faster than other things because fastness works only as an scale (which works by being applied to things that are or aren't fast), not a reference/model.

Other 0000s are, I guess

(2/2) I believe in science, that's the only thing I believe in when it comes to giving a consistent and very useful explanation of the universe. Other people can go on believing their inconsistent beliefs and give themselves no realistic perspective of the universe, that's fine. You can live in the same world as the people who deny evolution because their bible tells them otherwise. The fact is, the concept of good and evil is inane and worthless, judging people by these criteria is bullshit.

That doesn't mean though that I don't get angry at other people. You see me saying all the time that I wish that certain people would just fucking die. That's a luxury that I indulge in, because I have feelings. I don't claim that this is an intelligent point of view, and I don't claim that it's even consistent with my logical points of view. I believe that it isn't logical to say that you wish some people would just fucking die, because it's applying that same arbitrary (and ironic) notion of what you believe to be good and bad on other people.

The fact of the matter is that the concept of good and evil is a primitive concept, that only exists because human beings need some sort of fill in the blanks presumptive logic, because we're not smart enough to realize how the universe works. If we actually understood things, maybe we could actually figure out why they happen, and maybe we'd actually have a shot at preventing them instead of imposing crude methods of control like prison. To be honest though, and I think this is the most important point I can make, to be honest I think that at our current understanding of the universe, we don't have much control over it. There's so many things outside of our control, like rape, or murder. Maybe some day we could learn how to fix these problems, but I doubt it, not without going into a post-human society where we augment our bodies.

Waaay to many questions in one post for OP to answer coherently mate. Be more precise is my advice. Oh and you are also wrong.

>The concepts of good and evil are inane concepts

They exist as concepts and are valuable to show what is or is not destructive towards society, and the health of the majority, regardless of opinion of "existence", as if that word holds any water in this context. Any argument to the contrary is immature and childish, the rantings of someone who's just entered the world of philosophy.

What you are suggesting however, lacks further meaning than what you are suggesting is meaningless.

>it lacks meaning
>this is somehow wrong or make me incorrect
by the way I wrote a second part a couple posts down from the one you replied to that may put my post into further perspective, it is still on the same train of thought.

>it lacks meaning
>this is somehow wrong or make me incorrect

>(2/2) I believe in science,

>scientific realism
>2016

end your self

Man I wish the posts on this board weren't so fucking lazy and useless.

I think good and evil lies in our choices, and that all else is indifferent. What each person imagines to be the greatest advantage (whether to themselves or society) they think to be good, and the greatest disadvantages to be evil. In that sense, no one believes they are evil, or willingly makes an evil choice.

To define good and evil we must use an objective standard of measurement. It would be madness to use a system for weights and distances, but not for the most important measurement, the distinction between good and evil.

So how do we judge anything to be good? A good knife is one that cuts well. A good soap is one that cleans well. We can say then that things are considered good to the extent that they fulfill their function or by how much of their defining value they possess. We must judge humans by the same measure. What is the function of man? To fulfill the role of a human being. What then is the defining value of human beings? What sets us apart from other creatures? The use of our rational faculty. A human then is good in so far as he is rational.

How is our biology not just that of a computer?

In order to think that our brains are somehow different from computers, then you’d have to think that somehow the human mind exists parallel to or separately from the brain. The human mind exists because of the brain, not next to or outside of the neurology of the brain. To say otherwise would imply that there’s some sort of soul inside of our brain, and our consciousness isn’t the result of brain function. If you’re looking for that argument, you won’t find it here.

The universe is like a big wound up clock. Everything happens because it was set in motion. Everything that ever happened was destined to happen for billions of trillions of years, since the beginning of time, is it really justifiable to say that we even have free will if everything we do was destined to happen? That’s essentially the way we see computers, we see them as having no mind, they simply operate data. However, in a deterministic / materialistic point of view (“ Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are results of material interactions - Wikipedia”). In this world view our minds and computers are no different.

To a certain extent we already can measure the outcome of certain events, except on a much larger scale everything is still determined. It’s just on a scale of complexity that we can’t currently grasp, which is why we can predict how fast a ball will drop and it’s terminal velocity, but we can’t predict the future. The only other explanation is that there’s some "force” that is exists outside of the material world. Once again, you won’t find that argument here, if you want my opinion on it though, any opposing point of view is a waste of time . Everything is determined, as I explained in that example. Our minds are determined by our brain matter, nothing more.

The question of whether or not a computer is the same as a brain comes down to whether or a not a computer can emulate consciousness and the same functions that a brain does; an artificial brain. If this is possible, and we create some sort of artificial brain, then that will prove that our consciousness is nothing special, and is simply the result of super sophisticated evolutionary processes that we were able to emulate. I speculate that we’re already on the path to creating artificial intelligence and there’s predictions that it will happen around 2040, I think.

People who study humanities are truly retarded.

And "people who study" STEM are arguably more dismissive and retarded, and are only in their respective fields, most of the time, for income, and not to grow the fields in which they've belonged. There is far less passion for the work, far less getting done, and far more white dudes getting an engineering degree believing they'll get that paycheck in the end.

Money infests academia like a virus, the more likely effected, the lest credible and less passionate.

calling good and evil a measurement is not the same as calling it a concept. If measurements are the objects of observation in a particular experiment, then we have to make sense of them in relation to the preconditions of their appearances, that is to say, the way in which the events we perceive conform to or disregard the ideological contours of the observer.

No matter how many times you put an apple with two apples, you always end up with three apples: this is not a measurement, because 1+2=3 is true by definition and not because it has been measured/observed. Likewise, unless you're an edgy /pol/tard you would accept the fact that genocide is bad without ever having set foot inside a gas chamber.

I agree with you intuitively, but I have heard some pretty convincing arguments otherwise.

>Science doesn't have a system of dogma though, science simply seeks to understand things; it erases that good and evil dichotomy and simply tries to understand understand these things, instead of giving what is basically an opinion.
civilisation and progress do not occur in wholly neutral and amoral systems. The field of science may experience rapid advances under such conditions, but that certainly doesn't mean society can keep up simply by doing more experiments, without considering the societal implications of technological advances.

What so many scientists don't really grasp is that this incessant denial of dogma is, in fact, dogmatic: It denies the fact that the concepts of good and evil are ideas which are crucial to the standard functioning of social systems, and in fact destabilises the whole notion of conceptual or mimetic knowledge in a state of constant evolution and change. If the biological systems of the body are capable of propagating their genetic identity, why shouldn't the conceptual systems of the mind be capable of propagating their own memetic identity?

>civilization and progress do not occur in wholly neutral and amoral systems

And to add onto your point, neither does the human body. Specifically the mind. We ave classically saw the mind as OP does, totally capable of independent emotional free, "rational unbiased" thinking, free of any sort of emotion. But this is not the case at all.

In fact, the mind relies almost totally on what we experience, memory, and emotion, in order to have cognition, in order to think. We have to rely on our emotions, and how we relate to signs we see, patterns, to recognize them, and there's degree of emotion in that we are mostly unaware of. This has always made us believe, that emotion and thought were separate entities entirely, when they are wholly linked.

Evil, Good, these ideas can be linked to this, in that actions that can cause massive amounts of stress on large populations, can be seen as bad, evil things; because we're working on fixing, or at least keeping together, the whole we live in. Good things, can be seen as helping carve out that whole.

I don't think good and evil are totally wired into the mind itself, they are conceptual, and cultural ideas, depending on how a society as a whole can fashion itself, obviously. But I do think simply denying a sense of that exists of it doesn't exist within us, is at this point, actually unscientific.