The standard argument for how morality exists in a godless universe, is that it's a function of evolution. Communities define themselves by rules (generally, the social rules we call "morality") that are instrumentally conducive to their flourishing (and therefore to stable conditions for reproduction), that get ingrained, and even selected for genetically to some extent, and further reinforced by social conditioning (parents, social structures).

The only problem there is that one isn't able to argue anyone into morality - to tell them why they should choose the goal of their flourishing, or their community's flourishing, or humanity's flourishing.

But then the idea that one could argue anyone into a "should" was always pretty dubious anyway. Even if you say that "it is good because God wills it" - one can always say "so what?" even to that.

Basically, you can have instrumental reasons at the level of selection between rules that are conducive to goal X (which is for most people, usually, this kind of flourishing or happiness idea). "If you want X, then you must/should A, B, C." That all makes perfect sense, and is perfectly objective. The problem comes in the choice of X - the choice of the over-arching goal that sets in place the structure of that particular set of moral rules. That is something you can't really argue someone into.

But then the godless argument would be, well, that's just what we're born with, what we've evolved to be. Most people happen to be (as a result of their genetics) basically "good" (it would be a bell-curve distribution like most other traits, with a few saints at one end and a few sharks at the other end). And from that point of view, it is very much an "is" from which the "ought" of morality follows. It's just the way we are, we are just built to be basically nice (most of us, most of the time). And those who aren't have to fall in line, or they get punished (and there are more of us).

The best response is to not have another person be born to experience the broken world that is always needing maintenance repair, novel change,and stuff to occupy the restless human striving. — schopenhauer1

See, the problem is, most people don't find that problematic, because most people are built to cope with it just fine - in which case you might consider the possibility that it's you that's "broken" (I trust you understand I don't mean that in an insulting way, but as something for contemplation).

I always find the pessimistic stance a bit of a pose. As the great British poet and occultist Aleister Crowley said, "It is yet to be recorded that any man brought comfort to his fellows by moping."

Also, Love is not the only good in the universe. Strife is also good. (Love and Strife being the two fundamental forces in the universe according to Empedocles - "you can't have one, you can't have one, you can't have one with the o-o-o-o-ther." :) ) As the Daoists too noted a long, long time ago, there's a rhythm to life, activity and relaxation, synthesis and analysis, catabolism and anabolism, Blake's "Angels" and "Devils," etc., etc. - and none of us know whether either is ultimately "good" (in fact either can be good or bad depending on the circumstances, or depending on whether they're taken "too far" or not, which again is an aspect of tact, or virtue in the Aristotelian sense).

On the matter of going "too far" in a virtue, consider what would happen if we did, say, ban conception. Wouldn't that be adding to the quantum of misery somewhat? But that's not what we set out to do was it, seeing as we were supposed to be into Love and all that?

I guess that we will difficult path to an agreement here. — Damir Ibrisimovic

Yeah, I think your position is too Panpsychist for my tastes :) As I said, I'm willing to admit that there's a kind of directedness and teleology baked into nature, but that's not yet identity, which requires an internal modeling capacity, which requires a level of computing sophistication simple organisms just don't have.

As others have said, you're kind of mixing up several senses of "objective" here. It's helpful to look at all the dictionary definitions of a term, and focus more narrowly on the one you're interested in.

There are usually etymological and historical relationships between the different uses of a word, but great confusion can be caused by using a word one way when your listener is thinking of it in another way.

But responding in the same general terms as you're using, I think of the objective as the ingress of surprise into consciousness. Surprise is what clues us in that there's something "external" to our minds, our feelings, our preferences, our wishes, etc.

In that context, objectivity is then an attitude where we subordinate what we think to what we discover.

Have you read Clement Rosset? You might like his take on the essential metaphysical "cruelty" of the universe, and how the two responses to that are basically either the fig-leaf approach of traditional philosophies or the joyful yes-saying(eternal return, etc.) of a few maverick philosophers like Montaigne and Nietzsche.

I don't think it's all that helpful to cast the universe in such human terms though. It's really more that the universe is indifferent - you can go with the grain or against the grain, the universe doesn't care one way or the other. We are in a corner of it that seems relatively benign, but that's an accident of our evolutionary adaptation to the situation we find ourselves in. Exposure to a nice, sunny day would be anathema to a mole rat.

The only connective tissue we know is causality. If a thing has an effect on something else, then they're together in the same universe, that's your metaphysical unity.

It's possible to imagine other kinds of unification factor, but that's the only one we actually know.

Schopenhauer himself ofc was big on this (his Fourfold Root is actually a brilliant work, I think); but I don't think the idea of the "in itself" of causality being the Will really makes much sense. The whole idea of appearance vs. thing in itself is misconceived, part of the baggage carried over from Descartes' investigations, British Empiricism, etc.

What Pirsig means by Quality is what the classical philosophers meant by "The Good/True/Beautiful." That's probably a good way to triangulate with the more common philosophical discussions. Philosophers sort of got out of the way of thinking about such topics during the modern period for a while, but there's been a recent re-awakening of interest in the classical philosophies (e.g. the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas), particularly with a resurgence of the idea of "virtue ethics," but also wrt the foundations of science and scientific concepts.

I'm not even sure what branch of philosophy this is; I stuck it in "mind" for lack of something better. Maybe it's metaphysics, or not philosophy at all. Psychology? — ScottVal

It's more common in Eastern philosophies to take account of the sort of thing you're talking about, and talk about it openly but it's not completely unknown in the West (most of the great philosophers have waxed mystical at one time or other, it's just that they haven't systematized it as much as, say, the Buddhists or the Advaitins or Daoists).

We can also assume that "I" is hidden within every unicellular organism. Social like behaviour, for example, was exhibited by yeast cells. When there is not enough food - cells start to die to provide themselves as food-packets for the rest of the colony. An "altruism" at the cellular level... — Damir Ibrisimovic

I dunno, I think the "I" is more of a complex thing than you can get at that level, although I'd agree there is directedness and teleology even at that simple level. But for the "I" you need not just those, but also the capacity for self-reflection, I think - some kind of internal self-and-world-modeling capability.

You are assuming something like Descartes' dualism... — Damir Ibrisimovic

I don't assume it, it's a tacit premise in most discussions about Free Will with a capital "F" and "W," since it's the supposed bearer of free will. Although formerly it would have been cast in more plainly religious terms (spiritual and material, etc.), not in terms of Cartesian dualism.

And it's perennially tempting, because everyone has that illusion of being something inside the head peeping out, something mysteriously extra, something over and above the human animal that they are.

From the angle of "determinism," it's quite unproblematic to conceive of a deterministic robot having free will in a deterministic universe. Regardless of the fact that both the robot and the universe are deterministic, the robot's deterministic computing machinery would still have to make decisions and choices on scant information (because it lacks full Laplacian omniscience) and the level at which free will operates would mean simply that its choices were not forced by something external to the deterministic robot-bundle. And we are such robots, only we are "moist robots" as Scott Adams put it, robots made of squishy biochemical machinery instead of silicon and steel.

The puzzles about free-will only appear when the "soul" thing (however else it's conceived) is conceived of as not being causally concatenated with the rest of the universe. It seems paradoxical, but it's not: the very fact that we are deterministic machines thoroughly embedded in a deterministic universe (if it is a fact) is what allows us to have the kind of free will that we do have, the kind of free will that's (as Dennett says) worth wanting. (If the universe isn't fully deterministic, it doesn't affect this argument much - clearly it's deterministic enough in most respects.)

I do not know in detail about Buddhists' meditation but it fits nicely with the fourth scenario of learning new thoughts, feelings and actions... — Damir Ibrisimovic

In all 4 scenarios, the boundary of the "I" is the total physical animal; its own awareness of itself, its internal modeling of itself, is secondary, and it doesn't matter if that happens some time after the brain machinery has worked to produce whatever action it produces.

The Buddhist (and also general "non-dual" - as it's called - Asian philosophical) idea is that we are accustomed to thinking of "I" as an internal receiver of impressions, perceptions, experiences, etc., conceived of either as a sort of notional point on which all experiences impinge (by analogy with artistic perspective - which not coincidentally was being developed in a big way in the West roundabout the same time that modern philosophy and science developed) or as a kind of aware, awake "capacity" or "space" (this is the metaphor that's more usually favoured in the East).

If you reflect on your everyday experience, it normally seems as if the true "I" is something behind the eyes, looking out at the world through them, sort of prisoner inside the head in some sense, or inside the body, along for the ride. In Christianity, something like this idea is meant by the "soul," the thing that's notionally free in terms of the classical free-will debates.

This is an illusion, and we all have it (or most of us do, most of the time). A large part of the purpose of Eastern meditational systems is to either knock the illusion out of commission (considered a lesser result, because it's usually temporary) or to get into a position where you may still have the illusion, but you don't take it seriously, you don't habitually live from it (considered the greater result, usually called "enlightenment").

The Libet experiments only pose a problem if you believe that the "I" is something like this "soul," this "ghost in the machine" If no such thing exists, then the various timings of what goes on within the skin bag are of little importance to the question of free will, the cash-value of which is really more in the libertarian or political sense: one's will is free when it is not coerced - that is to say, this human animal, and all the workings within its skin bag, is the active entity, the entity whose will can be free or not, and either subject to coercion or not (one may also consider freedom from various kinds of internal incoherences too, which have an effect somewhat analogous to external coercion, in that they also limit one's potential to act).

To put all this another way, when one says "I" one may, on the one hand, be referring to one's sense of oneself as the "ghost," but on the other hand, one may be referring to oneself as the human animal that one is. In the former case, there is no free will, because the entity in question simply doesn't exist (to either have free will or not) and all the puzzles arising from that are nugatory. If the latter sense, then all ordinary talk about free-will makes perfectly ordinary, intelligible sense, even taking into account findings like Libet's.

I think the apparent paradoxes disappear if one stops believing in the "ghost in the machine" and all its variants.

The "I" that's choosing is the entire rational animal, including all its internal brain workings, unconscious deliberations, etc. It remains true that "I chose to raise my hand" regardless of whether the machinery went into motion before the conscious part of the rational animal became aware of the choice, because "I" refers to the total rational, social animal, not to some etherial inner observer, puppet-string puller, etc.

But admittedly the illusion of in inner "I" is very difficult to get rid of - it takes Buddhists, for example, several years of serious meditation :)

But I think the gist is accurate of many people. — 0 thru 9

Well the gist of it is that the political process has been captured by an unholy alliance of Left-wing ideologues, sundry so-called "experts", NGOs, banks, big corporations and civil servants, so it's no wonder people in general have lost interest in it.

Similarly, we can talk about Communism as idea
and Communism as real society - they are absolutely different. — Number2018

They're not "absolutely different"- obviously they're related, just as the idea of Brexit is related to Brexit as a process.

On the whole, they voted for the return of the British Empire, and to expel all those whose skin is a different colour from their own. — Pattern-chaser

This is a distortion of reality and it sounds like it's based on prejudice against Leave voters. The vote was for independence of the EU and control of UK borders.

But what is your government position? It is opened to endless interpretations! — Number2018

Oh yeah, well of course the Tories didn't expect the Brexit result, and a substantial proportion of them are pro-EU for obvious snout-in-trough reasons. The PM has been in the invidious position of trying to implement something she doesn't believe in. Whether Brexit will be carried out in any serious way remains open to doubt - it's quite possible that we might end up with the worst of all possible results, i.e. still being subject to EU rule, but without even the minimal kind of representation we formerly had as a member. However it's also possible that (because the Tory rank and file is slightly more inclined towards Leave on the whole) more hardline Brexiteers take the lead. It's even possible that with all the confusion and faffing about, we get a no-deal default exit, which would actually be quite a good result.

I think "ordinary simple people" view it the way I've said: except they couch it more in terms of a visceral sense of, "We don't want to be ruled by Brussels" and "this insane level of mass immigration has to stop."

Political powerlessness. An individual's feeling that they cannot affect the actions of the government. — 0 thru 9

This particular point is hilarious.

The basic point of democracy is to avoid civil war by ensuring that the biggest opinion coalition affects the actions of government, and that power is transferred back and forth between the major shifting opinion coalitions in an orderly way, hallowed by tradition.

The tradition of democracy in the West arose out of numerous bloody civil conflicts in Europe, with strongly held opinions on religious and political issues - it was a hard-won lesson on how to keep the peace in a society full of people with strongly held opinions.

That is all, everything else people wish democracy were and imagine democracy is, is fantasy.

Obviously the individual qua individual has no impact, they are only ever a tiny part of a larger coalition.

The power of our weakness for pleasure is much more controllable than humanity's weakness for fear, instilled by the same authoritarians in Orwell's 1984. — yatagarasu

Well, it's always carrot AND stick isn't it? :)

now it is almost impossible to say what is Brexit about — Number2018

No that's just obfuscatory media propaganda. It was always pretty clear in the Brexit materials, in debates, interviews and written stuff, and it's still absolutely crystal clear: the Leave vote was about national sovereignty and our wish to extricate ourselves from the EU superstate experiment; immigration and all the other issues are subsets of that fundamental point.

Just as many other oldsters who voted Leave, I'm someone who remembers the lies and bs we were fed when we got ourselves into the mess back in the 70s and 80s. Even when I was on the Left I was on the anti-EU Left, along with Tony Benn and many others in the Labour Party at the time.

I'm reading Jonah Goldberg's, Liberal Fascism, and he does make that point in the book. Where did you service your conclusion, from that book too? — Posty McPostface

No, from general reading and reading of history (I'm 58, educated in a different age); but the following article is probably the best thing you can easily find on the web on Fascism:- http://www.la-articles.org.uk/fascism.htm (Steele is an ex-Communist libertarian btw.)

Goldberg's book is ok, but his take is a bit too neocon for my tastes, and he downplays the Right-wing element in Fascism a bit too much. The usual Left-wing narrative about Fascism is certainly hokum, but there's a grain of truth to associating it somewhat with the Right as well as the Left (that's partly why it was thought of as a "Third Way" at the time - it blended elements of revolutionary socialism with some older traditionalist Right-wing tropes, like strong leadership, hierarchy, military mobilization, etc. - but then again, it was also forward-looking, futurist, etc. too).

The US already had its Fascist period at the appropriate time, with the early 20th century Progressives. The New Deal was essentially a mildly Fascist program, very similar to Mussolini's and Hitler's ideas (both Wilson and FDR were admirers of Mussolini). And both Social Democracy and Fascism were, in a way, developments of Bismarck's original late 19th century ideas about what we now call the welfare state.

It's a bit of a mistake to associate "authoritarianism" exclusively with the Right (the error comes from Adorno's absurd drivel in The Authoritarian Personality). Communism was plenty authoritarian.

I don't think the US is in danger of being a Fascist state any time soon. It might be possible again in the future, but it's not on the horizon at all at the moment, TDS sufferers notwithstanding.

The problem is simply that predation, free-riding, exploitation, etc., are always options, and to guard against that you need rules, and ultimately the backing of force.

IOW, it would be nice if everyone was nice, but everyone isn't nice, so you always have to be prepared to fight to defend yourself against strong and weak forms of exploitation.

Could you explain how Taine can be applied to our situation? Do we have a kind of revolution coming soon? — Number2018

It's already happening, the clash between "globalism" and nationalism is that revolution. The "globalists" (university-indoctrinated lunatics in academia, NGOs, HR departments, the diversity industry, the mass media, etc., etc., etc., and their cynical big business cronies) are the equivalents of the out-of-touch, leeching aristocrats huddled in Paris, extracting heavier and heavier taxes from the peasants, for less and less reciprocal fulfillment of their time-honoured duties, the performance of which had formerly made them tolerable.

It comes from the long period from about the end of the 19th to about the end of the 20th century, when "rational organization" of a society of atomized individuals - ending up, as the ideal, with the entire connected globe run that way - had been thought to be the cutting edge idea. That's pretty much failed now, and people want their countries back. They want their countries back because the nation state is still the largest feasible democratic structure that's connected enough to people's voting preferences to make some sort of consistent pattern (where the connection between people is the natural, already-existent shared ethnicity, language and culture).

The first hint of the breakdown was the fall of the USSR and the reasons for it: formerly, Communism had been one of the ideologies subscribing to the idea of total, rational organization of society. But it was discovered that central planners cannot plan centrally (and there are logical reasons for that, expounded by people like Hayek and von Mises). At the end of the day, the so-called "experts" aren't in a position where they can gather the necessary information to make informed decisions at the national level, far less the global level.

The experiment can, and probably will be be tried again in the future, when we have super-powerful AI. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it will fail for the same reasons. Even if it's capable of solving a global economy in theory, i.e. even if it has the theoretical horsepower to do so (which the "experts" we've had up till now haven't even been capable of), it still won't be able to gather all the necessary information unless it has an intrusive feed from everyone's experience, or, more likely, simply teleoperates human beings, or gets rid of them entirely (all of which are obviously intolerable prospects).

I think the elite is always vampiric — unenlightened

I wouldn't quite put it that far, I think usually the relationship starts off fairly symbiotic - for example the French feudal system coalesced in the course of the Dark Ages as a functional system in which yeoman farmers were protected from banditry by warriors in return for upkeep, and it worked pretty well for a long time, falling apart really when the Lords' descendants lost their connection to their land, and put abusive managers in place.

I think it usually goes in phases like that. with functional relationships between some elite (usually rotating between merchant, warrior and cognitive elites, in ever-shifting alliance) changing to dysfunctional relationships over time, and having to be renewed or replaced (note that the type of abuse or exploitation each elite class indulges in is different too). Essentially, the generations that set things up, and the generations that follow, eventually give way to generations that forget the original social contract that made the mutual accommodation possible; plus of course the reasons change (the feudal system made France safe coming out of a period of turmoil, but that eventually made the feudal system itself obsolete).

I'd say at the moment, we're coming out of a period when there was an alliance between cognitive ("Left") and merchant ("banksters", big business) - aka "globalism" - and we're coming into a period where the cognitive elite is falling out of favour and will have to reform, and we're probably looking at an alliance between the military and the the merchant class again. That will provide some stability and prosperity, at the cost of potential ossification that a renewed cognitive elite will be able to break up. And so it goes.

On the face of it, it makes far more sense to say that loss of worker power through trade unions, loss of the benefits of colonial exploitation, loss of power and income is what is driving the search for scapegoats, - lefties, feminists, others of any kind. — unenlightened

The tail that's wagging the dog of those things is the vampirism of the elites that I've mentioned (being paid more and more bloated incomes to strangle the system more and more), just as the cause of the French revolution was an absentee aristocracy putting an ever-heavier tax burden on the peasants.

It goes back to roughly the early 20th century, and the idea of "manufacturing consent." It's not just a phenomenon of the past few decades, but it rather came to a head in the past few decades.

In both the US and Europe, the idea came about that democracy is basically unmanageable, and that things go much more smoothly with "experts" in charge - this was part of the general idea of "rational" management of the economy, etc., that had arisen with the Left in the late 19th century, and actually-existing Communism was just a particularly extreme example of it. Fascism too (which was admired by many "progressives") was another example of the same sort of general idea. Huxley's Brave New World is a much more accurate depiction of the dystopia we've been in danger of getting into than Orwell's book (though of course Orwell's ideas are relevant too.)

Globalism as a unification of the world under "expert" guidance is the same idea on steroids, on a global level, and that's basically what's being rejected in favour of a return to the core concept of the nation state (the largest workable democratic unit in a geographical region with shared culture and language).

I generally follow Taine on the French Revolution, and the parallel seems clear from that.

I think we are misunderstanding each other. — Dfpolis

No, although of course I may be mistaken, I do think I understand your position. I've read Hegel, etc., too. I'm just disagreeing with it and trying to "cut it down to size" (so to speak) :)

The only "subjective object" around is the person knowing, willing, etc., but that is just the objective human animal accessible to all, and its qualities can be understood scientifically (e.g. its/our means of knowing, its/our capacity for knowledge, etc.

On the other hand, if you mean something like "the knowing subject caught in the act of present knowing," then that's a misunderstanding of what knowledge is. It's actually not a momentary subjective relation in that sense (the momentary, present relation between a notional abstract subject and the abstracted contents of that subject's knowing).

Knowing is a whole bunch of things with family resemblances: various forms of tacit knowing and know-how (including things practiced and now unconscious, like driving), knowledge by acquaintance (which is closest to the momentary, present sense of "knowing" - one might call it "gnostic" knowing), knowledge by description, Platonic recollection (probably closest to the kind of tacit expectations about environment investigated by evolutionary psychology). There's nothing in common between them except the abstraction of knowing as a generalized relation between subject and object, but there's nothing to investigate, nothing to be discovered about that abstraction, it's just an abstraction lumping all the disparate cases together.

That whole line of thought from Descartes, via the rationalists/empiricists, through to Hegel, Fichte, etc., around this (most succinctly expressed by Schopenhauer with his "no subject without object, and vice-versa"), and as toyed with by the Postmodernists, is I think grossly mistaken.

To understand what's going on, I think you have to go back a bit further, to the causes of the French Revolution.

Essentially we have the (university-indoctrinated, NGO/HR-Department-employed) equivalent of a decadent, periwigged, pompadoured rentier "elite" (or rather, in modern terms, rent-seeking crowd) that's leeching off the body politic, whose way of life, whose ideology, language and manner, and whose dominance of the cybernetic industries, are absolutely hated by the average working person.

There is no knowing without a subject knowing, no willing without a subject willing. So, our experiences as subjects are essential data in understanding the reality of knowing and willing. — Dfpolis

Sure there's no knowing without a subject knowing - but this doesn't mean that:-

[subjective experiences] are tokens of types of experiences such as knowing and willing. — Dfpolis

Subjective experiences are "tokens of types of experiences such as knowing and willing" only in the case of knowing and willing about one's subjective experiences. (I had a dream, wish I didn't feel anxious, etc.)

But as I said, nobody (well, nobody except psychologists and your therapist :) ) are interested in that type of knowing and willing, most of us are interested in the type of knowledge that crosses the abyss between man and man, that is objective and shareable, common.

Your dream as such has no effect on me, but your knowledge of some hidden trail can be part of my world as well as yours (which is a poetic but potentially misleading way of putting it; actually it's part of the one, shared, objective world).

I’m just saying that that doesn’t mean that there have to be brute facts or contradiction at the level of physics or of verbal, describable metaphysics. — Michael Ossipoff

Yeah I get that, and as someone who's been rediscovering classical philosophy myself recently, I'm sympathetic to it - more than I used to be (I would have been on the other side even just 10 years ago).

Have you read "Good and Real" by Gary Drescher? The subtitle is "Demystifying paradoxes from physics to ethics" :) Highly recommended book (though hard, the guy is super smart and makes no concessions).

As philosophers we are not interested in subjective experiences because they a particular to each person, but because they they are tokens of types of experiences such as knowing and willing. — Dfpolis

I would disagree strongly with that. As I see it, knowing and willing are objective relations; their intentional objects are not subjective, but objective (and shared, public).

Why on earth should anybody care about their subjective experiences? They're of interest only to them.

It's like when someone at a party excitedly tells the assembled audience about their dream from last night and everyone stifles a yawn.

We care what Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton and Hubble saw, not about their subjective experience in seeing it. — Dfpolis

Eh, we still don't care.

Reality is the novelty-provider - this is complimentary to our minds being Bayesian machines that try to incorporate and try to find the best explanation for, incursions of novelty. Note that novelty wouldn't stand out as a thing unless there was a background of relative predictability and stability. In that sense reality is also the background stability provider too, but it's the novelty we're interested in, and novelty, surprise, irritant quality, orneriness, resistance, difficulty, etc., etc., are the primary reality markers.

Again, relative to our plans, relative to a projected path we might consider taking, reality is that which sometimes offers resistance, sometimes puts a spanner in the works, but sometimes goes as predicted.
What one might call "novelties of the past" (things our ancestors, going back to single-celled ancestors, etc., once encountered for the first time) are things like resistance, solidity, etc. Novelties of the past (what were novelties for our biological or cultural ancestors, whose coping strategies we've inherited) become incorporated as part of the stable, predictable background against which new incursions of novelty appear.

This is at a level of generality that's higher than questions about matter and energy. Those are certainly one form of novelty provision (so your critics are right about that, those are real, they are a form of reality), but it doesn't preclude religious possibilities.

I don't think that's something that's likely to have a special "neurological basis."

It seems like the brain just processes a whole bunch of stuff, and most of it is "rough working" that's below the threshold of consciousness; and sometimes urges and intuitions that come from deeper (archaic, perhaps) layers in the psyche crop up in consciousness out of the blue. But I don't think there's necessarily any special demarcation in the type of processing.

Dennett's model of consciousness as "fame in the brain" is pretty good - basically any bit of content in the brain (some change in "register" that gets its meaning from language and symbolism, both inner, private, and outer, public) can take the stage and take a bow (although Dennett would no doubt quibble with my use of a theatrical metaphor here :) - perhaps the analogy with viral videos would be even more apt).

I'm in the camp that says the distinction is problematic. Mind is in one sense the unique stylistic behaviour of the brain, or the behaviour of the brain/body combination. That's what we recognize when we mourn Grandad's passing away.

In the other sense, of subjective consciousness, again there it's quite feasible to look at consciousness as simply Being itself: the being of the brain, the very existence of the brain as it is in and of itself, not how it looks (grey lump) - IOW consciousness is the very perturbations of the brain by outside causal forces, and actually includes those forces (IOW consciousness isn't all in the brain, but is a "spread" phenomenon that includes its objects as part of its process).

In that sense the trauma, whatever it is, is located in the body (traumatized tissue) or in the brain (traumatized tissue in some more refined sense - for example something like the gated, reverberating pain proposed by Arthur Janov of "primal scream" fame), but that doesn't stop it from being in the mind, since the brain is the mind, in both senses above.

I say "I don't know" because I have doubts that AI is actually possible.

If it is possible, then we're stepping outside the normal economic/technological progression in terms of which anti-Luddite arguments would make sense, and into a totally different realm where we're talking about the eventual replacement of human beings altogether, so yes, not only will they take our jobs, they'll beat us up and take our lunch money too.

On the other hand, if AI is not possible (if all that's possible is idiot savant expert systems, or "intelligent" systems that only appear intelligent because the problems they're solving are relatively simple, or matters of brute force) then we're safe - we're still in the realm of normal economics and technological progress.

Sexual pleasure is real, but it's obviously subordinate to reproduction (if we didn't enjoy the thing we wouldn't do it - without that instantaneous reward, our animal ancestors would hardly have been moved by abstract appeals to "reproduce, goddamit!!!" :) ).

Now that being said, as with other functions established by nature, once they exist, they can be gerrymandered to other uses, that's true. (e.g. once we have a capacity for suffering that evolved so we would avoid injury, we can be tortured to extract information; once we have big brains that can automatically compute the ballistic trajectories of rocks and spears, we can design aeroplanes, etc., etc.)

The situation with sexual pleasure is a bit analogous to sugar craving: we have the inbulit preference for sweet things, inculcated into us by nature because sweet things were relatively rare but high value; because of that, we get into trouble when sweets and cakes are cheap and abundant. Similarly, nature has made sex one of the most pleasurable experiences possible to us, but we get into a psychological tizzy when, instead of having to like or lump the array of average-looking potential partners on offer in our local tribe, we have visually displayed before us constantly the pick of the planet's sexual magnets, men and women who most of us will never have a hope in hell of cajoling into bed.

Or again, sex is an intense craving partly because of the attrition rate in the state of nature - of babies, of infants, children and adults. So even if people fucked like rabbits, only a very few of the products of that activity would have survived through to functional adulthood to contribute to the security and prosperity of the tribe (and therefore, with the tiresome circularity characteristic of natural patterns, to the tribe's reproduction). But as civilization progresses, even if it progresses to, say, the stage of early agriculture, that "natural" degree of constant casual fucking is no longer needed, in fact it's a liability (it would return us to the Malthusian constraints that the intensity of sexual desire was born in - too many mouths, not enough food, not enough provision or space for the mouths, no place for them).

As I'm fond of saying: sex is not a toy, it's a nuclear bomb. The "accidental" product of a sexual liaison isn't just something you can throw away, there has to be some place prepared for it (otherwise you're being cruel to something for the sake of your own pleasure). Formerly this was understood, that's why sex was hedged about with taboos - and even that didn't work all that well. But it worked somewhat. The great mistake was the 1960s and the "sexual revolution." Now everyone thinks that sex is a toy, and that sexual pleasure is a value in itself.

Anyway, you can't say a thing is "for" a thing that's just ancillary to the thing it's for. If it's for anything, it's for the original thing, and the other thing is also for the original thing, even if it can take on a life of its own.

To say procreation is the "primary purpose" of sexuality begs the question. Make your case. — tim wood

To say it's the "primary purpose" is just to say that's what the sexual organs, sexual dimorphism, etc. are for.

They're not suitable for playing golf, reading the daily newspaper or calculating the distance to the moon, for example. But reproduction? Yeah, the sexual organs, the bodies built around them, the social structures built around those - these things do that very well.

You're basically re-discovering the philosophical idea of "substance."

Your list is not a list of human rights, it's a list of liberal rights, and they are negative, not positive. Positive rights entail an obligation on others to do x (e.g. support someone else financially, obey agreed-upon rules, contracts, etc.), negative rights impose only an obligation on others to refrain from doing y (e.g. from interfering with someone else's control of their body, their property, etc.).

Take the right to free speech for instance. This right sets the truth and the lie on equal footing. It gives one authority to lie and be protected for lying - indeed, lying itself becomes a virtue, as the necessary result of the exertion of one's inalienable rights. — Agustino

This is absolute nonsense. The right to free speech is a right to be allowed by others to express one's opinions. Especially (and obviously) in complex matters, such as politics and religion, truth and falsity cannot be prejudged because there is no Central Scrutinizer with a hotline to reality who is able to definitively and certainly judge.

Indeed, this is part of the advantage of the right to free speech, it's what makes liberal societies powerful in the discovery of truth (because it sets in motion a distributed discovery process: if everyone's free to express their opinion, then opinions can be tested, and the truth hopefully discovered - any attempt to pre-judge that would short-circuit the discovery process and we'd be stuck with some asshole's opinion about truth and falsity being enforced on society).

On the other hand, certain types of lying (e.g. slander) do not fall under free speech protection.