Christian Physicalism And Dualist Anthropology

[asbestosman]

Look at the last 10 minutes of this interview:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3133438412578691486

Maybe spiritual sight is caused by gremlins (like the ones in automobile engines ).

The evolution of ethics is an interesting topic but it isn't hard to imagine that society (and perhaps therefore our genes) could not survive without ethics.

I agree with that to an extent--I believe that all societies need some sort of ethiscs to survive, but there is significant leeway in what is necessary. There may a core of necessary ethics to survive or there may be a number of various choices of systems that will work with some systems sharing qualities an others sharing no qualities. Or maybe all must share a certain core and then need various other parts.

Take math. In geometry we can accept the parallel postulate or we can choose to go for a Hyperbolic or a spherical geometry. There may be other choices in mathematics such as whether or not we accept the axiom of choice or the continuum hypothesis. We can also try avoiding making any assumptions about whether such things are true or not. Perhaps ethics can work similarly.

Furthermore with both ethics and mathematics there may be no physical meaning for certain things that are modeled within the ethical / mathematical systems. What does aleph1 mean in a universe made of a finite number of discrete parts of finite, discrete duration? That is to say, I think in some sense mathematics is great for us because we find it useful, but then again so is the concept of such things as Hobbits who have to save Middle Earth. Math is useful for design and survival, but Middle Earth is useful for entertainment.

There are some things in ethics I believe are not well defined. I don't see objectively why we so strongly hate the idea of witholding prescious resources on people who are permanently disabled. From the point of view of resources, wouldn't it make more sense to let those who are unable to provide labor or entertainment to just die? Wouldn't the species be stronger if we could spend those resources elsewhere? Granted we can't do that now because such actions pull on our heartstrings, but what if they didn't? Wouldn't we be stronger if we weren't so sensitive to that sort of thing? What if people were to find nothing wrong eating a cow that wants you to eat it as in the Hitchhiker's books?

When I brought up ethics, I wasn't trying to use it as a proof of God or spirits. I was merely trying to argue that perhaps we believe in some ethical principles for non-smart reasons. Certainly some core of ethics does seem to be quite logical from a wide survival perspective. I have no problem with that. All I meant was that if some ethics are believed for non-smart reasons, then why is it not also possible that the believe in the non-existence of spirits and gods is adhered to for similar reasons?

It appears that there may be some decent reaons to believe in God--say the fine tuning of the cosmos. As with spirits, the belief seems to follow somewhat from our experience with consciousness. It's true that Dennett has his own ideas on that which do not require anything extra. On the other hand, I'm not convinced he's necessarily right. On the one hand I tend to believe it's possible in principle to create an intelligent computer (although it may be so impractical as to be unacheivable before the sun dies). Yet I also think there may be something missing from machines which is availble to spirits. It would certainly be interesting if we could demonstrate that human minds are (or are not) capable of hypercomputation instead of mere Turing Machines (although I still don't know where we're gonna store all that tape unless we can pack it in an extra dimension somehow ).