Honor killings are rare but not unheard of, every society has it's share of fanatics and nut jobs, remember how much senseless family violence and abuse happens in the west.

No one really follows the literal translations of the bible anymore, at least not the educated. Religious fanatics are a problem everywhere.

Hive society animals have a completely different form than our own so I feel your comparison is unfair. You use hive insects as the example for all social animals and that is a mistake, at the very best we could be compared to other primates but not insects.

Unless you think that morals are a natural feature of the world, which i do not, I also don't think comparing us to other species is helpful either,

In self defense. In order to ensure the survival of the society. As punishment for truly heinous crimes. Those are the immediate instances where I can find justification for killing and no grounds for your argument.

Our modern times are definitely a challenge. The societies I was referring to tend to marry in. The husband would have been a first or second cousin and so would be under the same family law as the wife. I have studied a Bedouin village in Sinai for many years now and the women have a lot of strength. The divorce rate is like in New York, around fifty percent and the only real fear the women have is that their husbands will leave them or take a second wife.

When we justify it.

Killing is not the same thing as murder.

It really isn't relevant if I agree or not. I probably do agree with the second one, at least to some degree, however to say that all killing is wrong seems a bit of stretch to me. When you say follow them devoutly do you mean 'fanatically'? Is there a difference? I don't think that we should do anything out of fanaticism, ever.

However, this doesn't change the fact that they violated two universal rules of good and evil: "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's assets". Two very sensible rules, regardless of whether you are a Christian (I am not).

How do you support this conclusion? Where do your 2 universal rules come from? As a species we have an amazing propensity for killing, we are the best on the planet at it. Jealousy also seems to be a powerful, natural emotion felt by all.

Morality and the concept of good and evil only seem to emerge as a social response. Moral considerations to one's family are the most simple. When applied to the tribe it gets a little more complicated, however the basics are the same because the tribe is the family extended. Once different tribes cohabit, far more complex rules are needed. The more advanced the society becomes the more technical the rules need to be.

It is true that "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's assets" are probably the first and most important rules we develop however that does not make them universal.

Reason is highly overrated and only Hume had the guts to stand up and make the point. We are an irrational species because we are not ruled by reason.

Trouble, death and taxes.

Forming beliefs in the absence of any proof or evidence is never the greatest idea. Both W.K Clifford and Bertram Russell made this point.

I believe that Hume says it is wrong to believe in miracles unless the alternate explanations are even more improbable. We do usually choose the most probable explanation for everything in life. why should God catch an easy break?

We may not technically responsible in the sense you are seeking, however our position in the group 'holds' us (and all of the groups members) responsible for their acts. So you are responsible without being responsible and that is fine because we are all the same in this respect. All of us are egalitarian victims of determinism so freedom doesn't really come into it.

Our choice to live in societies is an evolutionary one. Survival is of prime importance and we survive better in groups, it is not a choice made of freewill. Remaining in society however is a choice although very few could consider living outside of it, as Aristotle said, only a God or a beast.
Your comparison of humanity to ants, well ants do not share our level of sentience or consciousness (as far as we can tell at least), ants also live in a very different type of society than we do, I often wonder if Plato studied ants for the Republic.

Sounds like an outright attack on morality to me.

None of us have freewill. We are 'all in it together' fate believes in equality. We choose to live in societies. Societies need rules to function. Rules need the attachment of responsibility to function. We agree to the rules so we agree to our share of responsibility.

We don't need to (and it is probably wrong to) reduce freewill to mental states in order to to refute it. Firstly we operate much of the time on 'automatic', doing things and making decisions without really thinking, in these cases we are obviously following a deterministic path. When we do actually think and consider a possible action or a choice all of our considerations are from nature or nurture. We don't need perfect prediction of human behavior to see the uniformity of it as Hume said, we can't ignore it and can rely on it with the same certainty we rely on natural laws. Ultimately it is our belief causal powers we cannot detect and the rejection of regularity being the only experience we have that leads us to feel that we are free when that kind of freedom does not exist.

We can still have moral responsibility in the absence of freewill in the Libertarian sense. Strawson's approach is interesting, I haven't read the paper yet but I am interested in what he means by 'truly responsible' and if there is an angle of compatibilism there or not.

As long as we accept the Cartesian premise that we can rely on our thoughts and self-knowledge and as long as we don't press Berkeley on his metaphysics of God, his argument is at least as strong as Locke's. I am more interested if his thesis of immateriality is better than Locke's thesis of materialism. He seems to rest his arguments on the same premises he attacks Locke for using. In which case is he just exchanging the terms 'material object' and 'substratum' with Ides and minds?

ask the liar if they are an elephant

I think that what we call morals are more of a pragmatic code for survival. As people develop into societies and congregated to live in ever larger groups, codes of behavior had to evolve to find ways of not killing each other all the time.

Laws are formed from pragmatism not fairness. As Frank Herbert said, 'Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?'

Wouldn't you say that the problem with the 'big bang' theory is Parmenidian? How did all of this matter come into existence from nothing?
We start to look again at 'matter' and try to discover 'anti-matter' as an answer, how can this not be seen as a return to dualistic principles?

In trying to solve this ancient problem we are pushed towards quantum physics to give us answers, but quantum physics requires an 'observer' as a causal influence which would seem to take right back to that other ancient, unanswered question about the existence of God.

Where is the progress since the first philosophers asked the same questions?

Searle says that humans have the unique ability of being able to lie, some animals can deceive but cannot lie. I am not sure if I understand properly the difference between deception and untruths in this case.

I had a dog that would shiver violently when left outside in the winter. It would show me that it was cold and wanted to come in by shivering. However when the summer came along and it was warm outside, but the dog wanted to come in anyway, it would pretend to be cold by violently shivering, even though it wasn't cold. Whether this was a deception or a lie it still shows an admirable level of intelligence in manipulation.

We simply do not understand enough about intelligence to give conclusive theories.

The ability to form a semantic conception from syntactic actions must be the measure for intelligence / awareness / consciousness. Sheep have some intelligence, and awareness even be a 'dim' one, Humans display the highest known level of intelligence that leads to a high level of conceptual self awareness that separates us from the rest of the animals.

Even if our brains do function on some level in similar ways to other species or computers, what separates us is this ability to learn seemingly without boundaries.

Also talking about concepts such as artificial intelligence, hallucinations and zombies as if they are real doesn't help us to make progress with the mind. I know that this view will not be popular here.

Obviously the literal reading is no more but has the deeper problem of 'being' actually been understood or are we just much better at 'explaining it away'?

The crux of Hawkins theory is exactly that problem. How does 'something 'come into existence' from nothing? The answers 'seem' to lie somewhere in understanding 'quantum observer theory' and discovering 'dark matter or ante matter'. Which to me seems to take us back again to search for the single particle of matter and the need to open ourselves to some form of dualism.

Searle already answered this question. Even if the robot can seemingly 'display' consciousness, it only a syntactic display of consciousness lacking and semantic understanding as shown in the 'china room' theory. A jelly fish can 'respond' to outside influences and so is 'conscious' on some level, but you cannot compare a dog or robot feeling pain to a ballet dancer dancing.

We first need to recognize the human brain / mind as the crowning achievement of evolution / creation / the universe as we know it so far. To fully understand the brain, the mind and ultimately ourselves is just as hard as fully understanding the deepest questions in physics.

The fact that it is only by virtue of having minds in the first place are we able to even ask the mind body question, or to allow us to ask questions about relativity or gravity.

The three biggest questions in philosophy, as I see it, are; "what is the universe made of?", "What are we? (the mind body problem) and "How are we supposed to behave as human beings?" . The answer to the second question can only really be found in the answer of the first question.

I think that with all of our modern technological advances, the fact that we are no closer than Descartes to having the answer might mean that we are looking at the question wrong. We still simply do not know enough about the nature of our physical universe to give an answer right now any more accurately than Locke or Berkeley could have.

I am starting to believe in a new, yet not fully defined, form of dualism that I believe eventually the scientific community will find no alternative other than to accept the possibility of. If one point of light can exist in 2 places at the same time, as the quantum guys have proven, or if atoms exist in all places at once until you 'observe' them, which they are trying to prove right now, how can the door to dualism not be opened and properly explored?

"But the nature of intelligence and that of consciousness are surely different questions, as there are conscious organisms that are unintelligent."

It is exactly this type of statement that made me ask my question. Which organisms are conscious and unintelligent? Insects display intelligence, bacteria could even be said to display some level of intelligence depending again on how one defines the term 'intelligence'.

On what do we base these terms 'intelligent, and conscious.'.

I think that the whole subject is being approached from the wrong direction. I think that the metaphysical question that must be first answered is 'what is intelligence?'. Isn't the Chinese room partially representative of how the brain actually functions by using a constant set of automatic mind states?

If I learn about 3 types of rock, I can pass myself off as a geologist, three types of birds etc
If learn three concepts of philosophy of mind in depth, and talk about them, you would automatically assume that I am intelligent, at least in that subject; where as all I have done is memorized a lot of syntax without any full semantic understanding of the concepts of which I would be talking about.


Is it not also possible that most inter personal communication and indeed most 'mind function' are 'automatic responses' carried out without true thought in a Chinese room style?

Many of us go through life in this state, faking it, living the illusion according to oriental philosophies and religions.


Could it not be that if you get enough layers of multiple syntax simultaneously then the semantics are 'created' from the syntax?