Bodily integrity vs moral responsibility

[Syne]

Well this study of his is laughable. It never makes an empirical connection between emotion and memory...it only assumes emotion is a factor in cognitive impairment due to brain damage. With only newer technology used, it describes things that have been known since the 1950s. And I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that was in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Hell, he even used to word "somatic" to describe it...and that's the second word in this guy's study. This study even makes use of skin conductance response (SCR), which is what they use in Scientology.

So how much credibility are you willing to lend him now?

It has nothing to do with Scientology, Syne.  Somatic just means relating to the body.  You have the somatic nervous system, somatic biology, etc.  Damasio’s hypothesis has nothing to do with Dianetics.  He’s a professor of neuroscience.  Hubbard used it in terms of describing psychosomatic ills. "Hubbard described Dianetics as "the hidden source of all psychosomatic ills and human aberration" when he introduced Dianetics to the world in the 1950s."

Damasio’s hypothesis is similar to an idea that was originally developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange.

Hubbard actually used the term to specifically describe the parts of the brain that correlate to parts of the body and that emotion arises from the body. "...somatic signals are based on structures which represent the body and its states..." - http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/3/295.full Both actually refer to the cortical homunculus, created by Dr. Wilder Penfield, a contemporary of James and Lange, who mapped the cerebral cortex via direct electrical stimulation.

Antonio Damasio’s—Life and Work

How Our Brains Feel Emotion—Antonio Damasio

Nevertheless, I’m not stuck on Damasio’s hypothesis.  I was simply trying to convey to you that our emotions aren’t necessarily a hindrance. Curiosity is an emotion. Empathy is an emotion, etc.

Well, it looks like you have a good crush going, but what comforts you because it supports your assumptions doesn't really mean much without compelling evidence. Bias never makes for a good argument.

Somatic marker hypothesis:

The somatic marker hypothesis represents a model of how feedback from the body may contribute to both advantageous and disadvantageous decision-making in situations of complexity and uncertainty. Much of its supporting data comes from data taken from the Iowa gambling task.[39] While the Iowa gambling task has proven to be an ecologically valid measure of decision-making impairment, there exist three assumptions that need to hold true. First, the claim that it assesses implicit learning as the reward/punishment design is inconsistent with data showing accurate knowledge of the task possibilities[40] and that mechanisms such as working-memory appear to have a strong influence. Second, the claim that this knowledge occurs through preventive marker signals is not supported by competing explanations of the psychophysiology generated profile.[41] Lastly, the claim that the impairment is due to a 'myopia for the future' is undermined by more plausible psychological mechanisms explaining deficits on the tasks such as reversal learning, risk-taking, and working-memory deficits. There may also be more variability in control performance than previously thought, thus complicating the interpretation of the findings. Furthermore, although the somatic marker hypothesis has accurately identified many of the brain regions involved in decision-making, emotion, and body-state representation, it has failed to clearly demonstrate how these processes interact at a psychological and evolutionary level. There are many experiments that could be implemented to further test the somatic marker hypothesis. One way would be to develop variants of the Iowa gambling task that control some of the methodological issues and interpretation ambiguities generated. It may be a good idea to include removing the reversal learning confound, which would make the task more difficult to consciously comprehend. Additionally, causal tests of the somatic marker hypothesis could be practiced more insistently in a greater range of populations with altered peripheral feedback, like on patients with facial paralysis. In conclusion, the somatic marker hypothesis needs to be tested in more experiments. Until a wider range of empirical approaches are employed in order to test the somatic marker hypothesis, it appears that the framework is simply an intriguing idea that is in need of some better supporting evidence.

The Conditions of Morality by Allen Wheelis

Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists. If we know nothing for sure, how can we ever know we are right? And if we can never know we are right, how can we act? We can live without truths if we must, but quietly. But to defend good an attack evil means killing people, and how can we do that without being sure? The longer we are paralyzed by this nostalgia for lost certainty the deeper our nihilism. To go back is not possible; to go on requires that we give up the demand for certainty, become willing to act in a field of probable goods and probable evils, "to fight a lie" as Richard Hilary said, "in the name of a half truth."

Once we leave the mythical realm of certainty and enter the real world where all is contingent and temporary, we find immediately, as a great bonus, that we are already beyond nihilism. We are not in chaos, as we had feared, but in some agreement of what is wrong and what is right. Agreement is never complete, never yields certainty, but it is more than a random throw.

Nihilism and Reason—Allen Wheelis

My wife and I order sandwiches and coffee, a couple with a child, sit at the next table. The boy’s knee upsets the glass of milk, it falls. The snap of glass and splash of milk is followed a moment later by another sound, something like the crack of a rifle; the boys head jerks back. After a moment he begins to cry. His father stares at him unspeaking, unmoving. All faces are towards the family, all eyes on the man who now slaps the boy again, his hand like a rapier, quicker than a reflex, the child can’t see it coming, there’s no time to flinch: again that rifle shot, and the boy’s head jerks back. The outline of the father’s hand appears like a negative on his son’s cheek, finger’s white, outlined in red.

There is a murmur of protest. Ladies whisper disapproval. His mother is dismayed but does not intervene, does not protect, wipes away his tears with her napkin. I think the child feels her sympathy; she is telling him that this is all that is safe, that she would do more if she could.

The man is carved stone, impaling the boy on a murderous stare. The man moves not a muscle; his controlled fury does not subside. His gaze remains fixed on the convulsed boy and his expression does not alter. A minute passes. The mother daubs at her son’s face.

There it is again, that rifle shot. His head jerks back again. The murmur grows louder: “What a shame!” “He didn't mean to do it!”’ “It was an accident!”

I turn away, cannot bear to look. A young couple beside us is silent. The girl has lowered her head, the young man is staring at the father, his shoulders hunched forward, muscles as if they would burst out of the yellow tennis shirt.

Where is your nihilism now?

And if ethics are relative and the body can have a positive effect on decision-making, through reward/punishment, who are you to say that corporeal training is unethical? If you have no standard, you cannot be taken seriously when trying to hold others to one. From a relativist, ethics seem nothing more than a solipsist's navel-gazing.

[C C]

If ethics are a construct of motivation alone, no cogent discussion about ethical merit is meaningful.

Simply forming a group is going to demand regulation of such if it is to survive (i.e., "regulation" would equal crafting moral codes, rules, government, etc in human context). The group itself is consequently the most fundamental trigger or reason for generating regulation, for need of the latter arising in the first place.

It's possible that a group might form arbitrarily, but difficult to imagine it enduring for long via that random origin alone or minus recognition of benefits which chance from it. Usually there are stimuli (when not the psychologically heavy "reasons" of humans) for a collective coming into being or for remaining in it.

Just by forming groups, social animals have to cooperate, coordinate, and discipline their actions (often according to status or rank). The stimulus for such assemblies is protection -- among possibly other things -- and afterwards there's the obvious incentive to maintain the group for those benefits. For animals, evolutionary developments have gradually made such behaviors inherent and specialized for the needs and environment of their taxon. Rather than it being a prescribed plan which they learn and obey.

So primitive precursors to the full-blown, invented moral customs / social systems of humans do fall out of the relationships and interactions of other organisms. But only basic properties like the creation of the "group" itself and possibly items like hierarchy, mating rituals, etc may be universal. Some of those can be disrupted / modified when the creatures are placed in alternative conditions than the natural circumstances they're usually found in (like domestication).

As for the mutability of morality or pluralism of all these ethical systems, here's an analogy: Humans have reasons or motivations for seeking and constructing shelter. That there have been multiple ways of building / designing houses or abodes throughout history and across cultures does not eliminate them or render them insignificant. There should also at least be some basic or general properties common to them all and the processes of their creation. Similarly with the affairs of invented moral prescriptions.

Abode builders of a particular time / region / style would usually be confined to discussing their trade in the parameters of their local, agreed-upon contract of how such is done. Or caught in the hand-me-down impetus of the existing traditions there. Similarly with the affairs of invented moral prescriptions.

Ethical discussions of a particular time / region / style would usually be confined to the parameters of the local, agreed-upon contracts of its people or law-giving and law-enforcing institutions. Or caught in the hand-me-down impetus of the existing social traditions there.

An exception is when the discourse is nomological: When it involves revising or introducing new rules, standards. That might involve considering and recruiting some ideas and ways of exotic social contracts from elsewhere. Or outright devising new views and regulations from scratch via their current local needs (the stimulus of changing circumstances demanding action to adjust to them).

Going back to the animals: Doubtless humans have a few innate tendencies or moral-like precursors as well. But because only feral children could enter life without exposure to their parents' existing culture, it might be difficult to discern or isolate just what those characteristics would be.

When growing up under the lax guidance and unruly conditions of a crowded, drug-infested, poor community in a city... Youth are as apt to adopt the criminal behavior of gangs as travel the road to being "nice" citizens. Any predisposition to "not steal", "not destroy", "not rape", "not be violent", "not murder", etc, does not particularly stand-out as glowingly endorsed by a genetic or other non-artificial provenance for human behavior. Sacrificing both adults and children (and occasionally wives to dead husbands) was a pretty hot trend in some pre-West influenced societies, especially in Latin America before it was Latin America.

The natural world is non-conscious, non-intellective, disinterested. It can be an unreliable ground for justifying _X_ invented ethical system on because it allows any behavior that can prosper temporarily (and "temporary" is the extent of most things in the cosmos).

Belief in something like "all humans are born with basic rights regardless of the status of their parents, rather than having to earn or qualify for those rights in some manner"... Belief in that being a non-invented, pervasive fact rather than a local, agreed-upon contract -- may have to rest outside the contingent and fickle circumstances of nature.

While imagination is arguably one of the most potent tools that humans have, reason is probably incapable of defending everything that falls out of imagination. When reason is tethered to a celebration of or an all-importance of empirical phenomena (material events, objects, etc).

So we may just have to primitively appeal to fear of the potential consequences of being without them when it comes to defending some ideas / principles. But humans don't have a native capacity to be persuaded by intellectual activity, anyway. We just have to be aware of our psychological ancestry in that regard: That the acceptance or defense of "why we should believe / do this" can be gut-driven sometimes rather than compelled by lofty stratums of deep reasoning, proofs, etc.

[Secular Sanity]

Hubbard actually used the term to specifically describe the parts of the brain that correlate to parts of the body and that emotion arises from the body. "...somatic signals are based on structures which represent the body and its states..." - http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/3/295.full  Both actually refer to the cortical homunculus, created by Dr. Wilder Penfield, a contemporary of James and Lange, who mapped the cerebral cortex via direct electrical stimulation.

No. Dianetics is defined as what the soul is doing to the body.  Hubbard proposed that physical illnesses were caused by the soul. It’s a discipline designed to heal the body by cleansing the mind of engrams. A term used in Scientology and Dianetics for a "recording" of a past painful event not normally accessible to the conscious mind.

Well, it looks like you have a good crush going, but what comforts you because it supports your assumptions doesn't really mean much without compelling evidence. Bias never makes for a good argument.

If I had a crush on anyone, it would be on Wheelis, not Damasio, but unfortunately, Wheelis is dead.

[Syne]

If ethics are a construct of motivation alone, no cogent discussion about ethical merit is meaningful.

Simply forming a group is going to demand regulation of such if it is to survive (i.e., "regulation" would equal crafting moral codes, rules, government, etc in human context). The group itself is consequently the most fundamental trigger or reason for generating regulation, for need of the latter arising in the first place.

TL;DR

Law and regulation are not equivalent to ethics. While ethics may be a consideration, laws are more concerned with agreement than right and wrong. So yes, laws are relative, one society to another. That does not speak to ethics. You seem to be conflating an awful lot. Law, instinct, ethics, etc..

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No. Dianetics is defined as what the soul is doing to the body.  Hubbard proposed that physical illnesses were caused by the soul. It’s a discipline designed to heal the body by cleansing the mind of engrams. A term used in Scientology and Dianetics for a "recording" of a past painful event not normally accessible to the conscious mind.

Seems you've stumbled over that simplification, because you just said that bodily pain is the source of "engrams" (Damasio's somatic markers) and that these, in the mind, effect the body. It's a feedback system, that Damasio calls an ‘as-if body loop’. I don't see how that is substantially different from anything Damasio says.

[Secular Sanity]

Seems you've stumbled over that simplification, because you just said that bodily pain is the source of "engrams" (Damasio's somatic markers) and that these, in the mind, effect the body. It's a feedback system, that Damasio calls an ‘as-if body loop’. I don't see how that is substantially different from anything Damasio says.

You simply cannot claim that Damasio is a proponent of Dianetics or that he even drew his inspiration from it.  He clearly admits that the assumption first appeared in the late nineteenth century following the well-known debate between the James–Lange and Cannon–Bard theories of emotion.  Walter Cannon challenged the James–Lange theory, postulating that emotional feelings are generated directly by subcortical brain regions rather than from the feedback of situational bodily changes. The Papez-Maclean theory was another influential theory. Damasio’s study simply provides support to reconsider the James–Lange theory. The James-Lang theory was published in 1884. It was Richard Semon who coined the term engram.  He died in 1918. Dianetics wasn’t published until 1950.  Hubbard borrowed the term from Semon.  Look at the Papez-Maclean theory. Paul Maclean’s triune brain theory, which was popularized by Carl Sagan.  It, too, is similar to the three parts division in Dianetics.

That’s what Scientology is all about.  Mixing a little bit of facts with a whole lot of fiction.  

Like I said earlier, I’m not stuck on his hypothesis, but I do think that emotions play an important role in decision-making.  That, in and of itself, offers some aesthetic appeal.

One way of thinking holds that the mental process of decision-making is (or should be) rational: a formal process based on optimizing utility. Rational thinking and decision-making does not leave much room for emotions. In fact, emotions are often considered irrational occurrences that may distort reasoning.

However, there are presently both theories and research focusing on the important role of emotions in decision-making. Loewenstein and Lerner divide emotions during decision-making into two types: those anticipating future emotions and those immediately experienced while deliberating and deciding. Damasio formulated the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH), that proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide (or bias) behavior, particularly decision-making. Pfister and Böhm believe that "the issue of rationality should be based on the validity of emotional evaluations rather than on formal coherence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotions_i...ion-making

Consider the competing theories of Ptolemaic system and Copernicus’. Even Copernicus held on circular orbits because of the aesthetic appeal.  Simplicity is not easy to dismiss. Successive modifications build on top of each other. Kepler was able to show that Copernicus’ model could accurately reproduce the observed motions of the planets with elliptical orbits. People line up on one side or the other, only to be pulled back when a practical test of the theory fails.  That’s how science works.

This only came up because you believe that a certain system of ethics is not just true according to subjective opinions, but factually true—tsk, tsk.

[Syne]

Like I said earlier, I’m not stuck on his hypothesis, but I do think that emotions play an important role in decision-making.  That, in and of itself, offers some aesthetic appeal.

And it's just that, a weakly-supported and unproven hypothesis. Nothing more. The only credence it has is due to people wanting emotional validation. IOW, it includes a lot of wishful thinking fiction.

One way of thinking holds that the mental process of decision-making is (or should be) rational: a formal process based on optimizing utility. Rational thinking and decision-making does not leave much room for emotions. In fact, emotions are often considered irrational occurrences that may distort reasoning.

However, there are presently both theories and research focusing on the important role of emotions in decision-making. Loewenstein and Lerner divide emotions during decision-making into two types: those anticipating future emotions and those immediately experienced while deliberating and deciding. Damasio formulated the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH), that proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide (or bias) behavior, particularly decision-making. Pfister and Böhm believe that "the issue of rationality should be based on the validity of emotional evaluations rather than on formal coherence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotions_i...ion-making

Consider the competing theories of Ptolemaic system and Copernicus’. Even Copernicus held on circular orbits because of the aesthetic appeal.  Simplicity is not easy to dismiss. Successive modifications build on top of each other. Kepler was able to show that Copernicus’ model could accurately reproduce the observed motions of the planets with elliptical orbits. People line up on one side or the other, only to be pulled back when a practical test of the theory fails.  That’s how science works.

This only came up because you believe that a certain system of ethics is not just true according to subjective opinions, but factually true—tsk, tsk.

Judgments based solely on your emotionality have no compelling merit. So I guess you're one of these people who don't see cold-blooded, premeditated murder as factually unethical? Serial killers tend to have very complex subjective justifications for their actions. Why should their subjective opinion be any less ethically valid than any other?

[Secular Sanity]

Judgments based solely on your emotionality have no compelling merit. So I guess you're one of these people who don't see cold-blooded, premeditated murder as factually unethical? Serial killers tend to have very complex subjective justifications for their actions. Why should their subjective opinion be any less ethically valid than any other?

Let’s look at cold-blooded murder then, shall we?  From your position, it is universally wrong and always has been.  Even though, we we’re barbarians throughout history, it was wrong. We just didn’t know any better.  

Why is murder universally wrong?  How do we know that murder is universally wrong?  How did we arrive at that conclusion?

[Syne]

Let’s look at cold-blooded murder then, shall we?  From your position, it is universally wrong and always has been.  Even though, we we’re barbarians throughout history, it was wrong.  We just didn’t know any better.  

Why is murder universally wrong?  How do we know that murder is universally wrong?  How did we arrive at that conclusion?

Any five-year-old knows why. I am human...I don't want to the be murdered...hence it would be wrong for me to murder others. But adult sociopaths seem to have difficulty understanding the basic universal ethics espoused in the golden rule. Not everyone at that point in history was a barbarian, and it's extremely naive to assume just because all people were not ethical that no one was. So some people, contemporary to barbarians and often their victims, were very aware of how wrong it was.

[Secular Sanity]

Any five-year-old knows why. I am human...I don't want to the be murdered...hence it would be wrong for me to murder others. But adult sociopaths seem to have difficulty understanding the basic universal ethics espoused in the golden rule. Not everyone at that point in history was a barbarian, and it's extremely naive to assume just because all people were not ethical that no one was. So some people, contemporary to barbarians and often their victims, were very aware of how wrong it was.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is that how feel about it?  Can you see where this golden rule might fail as a moral guide?

Murder, eh, Syne? How do feel about civilian casualties?

[Syne]

The golden rule implies consent, because no matter your personal penchants, you would rather be consulted if there is any doubt.

Ethically, we have to be able to exert equal force on those unconstrained by ethics. The unethical will use civilians as human shields, and often the civilians are complicit in their lack of resistance. No resistance is tacit acceptance. Non-combatants cannot be attacked, but collateral damage cannot always be avoided.

But how does any of that justify cold-blooded, premeditated murder?