[SnareeWer]

...and aneeshm?

[ebookinfo]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
I agree about your assessment of substance dualism. The problem with the modern world isn't that it says that both are separate, but that it denies the existance of a spiritual realm altogether. It's a form of materialism which has been prevalent.

Secondly, as for monism, there are certain problems. The scientific revolution, not Christianity was the impetus for substance dualism (it was Descartes) who really came up with the idea as a way to reconcile the deviations between what science observes and what religion observes.

If you rely on monism, then you have problems with how do you reconcile the fact that science has not detected any such thing as a 'spirit' or a 'soul'? Let me clarify: this isn't so much a philosophical argument as a cultural one. I'm trying to write not about the philosophical problems, but the individual and cultural effects of the way we see ourselves.

And it isn't really a criticism of Christianity, more of a criticism of a particular way of looking at the world. It is, IMO, incorrect to think that this is irreconcilably linked with Christianity.

As for monism - well, again, this is not really a theoretical argument, more a practical/cultural/individual one, relating to the consequences of different ways of defining what an individual "I" is.

[Dokescoonse]

Originally posted by Jon Miller

Aneeshm, your points fail because for some people murdering, raping and cannibalizing a person is not revolting to their instincts.
But it is revolting to ours, and therefore we lock them up or punish them in some other way.

Originally posted by Jon Miller

Additionally, it is a fundamental tenant of Christianity (from Paul) that everyone has (at some point) some inherent knowledge of right and wrong and chooses based on that. (He also states that everyone chooses wrong, and is so condemned and in need of the Savior)

Of course, since you are indian I don't think you understand these things without expending effort you don't seem interested in expending.

JM JM, I didn't mean to come across as critical of Christianity. It was simply an example I was trying to use, along with feminism, of how a view of the world based on something which is not factually true, can lead to contradictions in policy and practice, both individual and societal.

This criticism is, in case you are wondering, as applicable to most of Indian society as it is to Western society.

[we0MA4MI]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
JM, I didn't mean to come across as critical of Christianity.

Did you even read your own thread title? Yes. It was simply to give an example. The trailing dots indicate that the list does not end, and that this is universal problem, not merely one with some specific idea of Christian thought.

Conversely, did you read my post?

[LeaderBiz]

BTW, the idea of dualism/etc isn't from Christianity but is rather from Plato (as I have said before, Aneeshm, I think you need to study up on Western Civilization period).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms

Of course, wiki isn't a very good source. It just tells you about what to read up upon to understand the discussion. Reading Plato and the other greek philosopers would do a lot to help your understanding of western culture (reading Christian and enlightenment philosophers would also be a good idea).

JM

[OvDojQXN]

Originally posted by Elok
Well, I got to the second point before giving up in disgust. I managed to skim the rest of it. Aneeshm, I'm afraid you really don't have the faintest idea WTF you're talking about.


It's always easier to criticise.

Could you please rather give me a concrete idea of where I'm wrong, and in what way? That would be much more helpful.

[lopesmili]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
(I posted in response to Christianity, but don't think you understand feminism either.) Are you serious? Feminism is full of Kantian drivel about "objectification" in pornography and commercial representations. You hear it on an almost daily basis...

[interznakinfo]

I wouldn't believe in a God that doesn't throw feces.

[codecouponqw]

Salami

[alexosnasos2]

Originally posted by Riesstiu IV
Aneeshm, why do you continue to practice a archaic polytheistic religion developed by primitive people? There is only one true god and his name is Allah. Mohammed is his prophet. You must convert to Islam if you are to be saved. Salam, friend. Muslims aren't supposed to say Salam to non-Muslims.

[c6vkuNRg]

Originally posted by aneeshm


Muslims aren't supposed to say Salam to non-Muslims. I'm a progressive muslim.

[antiggill]

Kant saw the light at the end of his life - when he finally admitted that "God might only be a concept within me".

Spinoza had understood that 150 years earlier, and at a young age.

[cjOTw7ov]

Leaving out "a good nose for bad odors," I'll just examine what's wrong with your first point.

Originally posted by aneeshm
The first point:

The dualist view of man - and I'm not talking about philosophical dualism, but culpability/moral dualism - was probably a legacy of Christianity. As you've been told, dualism predates Xianity, and is mostly to be blamed on Plato. Plato was integrated into the Christian faith, though strictly speaking we're more of a "triad-ism," body, soul and spirit. We generally do think of only body and soul, though, so eh.

Under this view, moral judgements are made completely in the mind, and only by a process of free-willed decision-making by some agent who is morally culpable. Under this view, it is the mind/thinking and judging organ which constitutes the "person" or "individual" as we know it. To be fair, this isn't ignorant so much as just plain silly. What do you make decisions with, your pancreas? Your spleen?

The body is not much more than some sort of locomotor device for this "person", and more often than not a source of anti-moral impulses which the moral agent must then fight against in order to remain morally unblemished. This sounds like you got your whole idea of Western Values (TM) from a very strict Catholic school education, and is drastically oversimplified, but in the essentials it's correct. Moving on...

What happens after that is that people are also judged on the basis of their impulses. If you look at the list of the Christian seven deadly sins, you will notice that many of them aren't actually actions which anyone can choose to perform or not, they're physiological responses. Pride, lust, jealousy are all pre-programmed emotions, not something which a person usually chooses to invoke. ...aaaaand here's the real ignorance. Having the impulse is one thing. It's the human condition, and most every Christian faith I know of accepts that it's not our fault that the impulses come. Calvinism even goes a little overboard in that respect. Sin enters the picture when the impulse is consciously entertained. So: noticing that your friend's wife has a luscious booty--not sin. Fantasizing about bending her over a table and tapping said booty--sin. Admiring your neighbor's car, wishing you had one like it--not sin. Grumbling to yourself that a douche like him doesn't deserve such an awesome automobile--sin. Feeling thrilled that you won an award--not sin. Looking down on others as pathetic losers because they didn't win awards themselves--sin. And so on. Your mileage may vary, depending on denomination.

But still, they are made a basis for a moral judgement passed on that person. Now this leads to a lot of unnecessary guilt, which is probably what keeps people bound in the religion itself - they need some way to absolve themselves. Again, this is a generalisation, not necessarily applicable to every adherent, so please take it as such. I don't mind that it's a generalization. I mind that it's a grotesquely patronizing generalization, and therefore rude. "I think you're an atheist because you like the idea of being immoral without having to fear divine punishment or retribution. That's probably what keeps atheism going."

Another thing this leads to is that the culture produced by such a world-view tends to teach the individual to distrust and sometimes despise their instincts, because they are seen as somehow "evil". This leads to all sorts of really undesirable consequences, because everyone is repressed in some way or the other. It also leads to a culture of weakness, because most of man's instincts fundamentally tend towards strength. It also leads to a glorification of weakness and a distrust of strong people, in all forms. Again, what Sister Mary Frances says =/= Western Values. It also doesn't chime with my experience of American life, at least. Look at the GOP, the more religious wing of American politics and therefore (presumably) the more inclined to believe in dualism. They're much more fond of the wealthy than the more secular Democrats. I'll leave it to someone with more knowledge than I of politics and history to explain why, but I believe it involves a thing called the "protestant work ethic." Weren't you around for Philosophizer and his long speeches about how the wealth of WASPs and Jews proves that they are divinely favored? Also, I don't know how India stacks up, but I find it hard to imagine a culture that worships pro athletes, supermodels and other celebrities more than America does. It's sick, really.

For instance, it is this culture which is responsible for the anti-intellectualism which has been an ever-present threat to Western society, and has manifested itself in various ways throughout history in the Western world. The suppression of dissent, the burning of midwives as witches, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo and Copernicus, all of these were symptoms of the fear that this culture of weakness felt towards anyone who knew more, and was thus stronger intellectually. A very bare assertion; you're speculating on the motives of hundreds of thousands of people from an alien culture five hundred years ago and more. Care to actually support it? Leaving out that Galileo's persecution was largely caused by his publicly ridiculing the Pope, are you implying that common people in India, China, and everywhere else you call The East do not resent those who are stronger than them? No peasant revolts in India?

Though most feminists claim that they have liberated themselves from this judgementalism, I notice that they have inherited the same underlying world-view, and it manifests itself in most discussions, here and elsewhere. It usually takes the form of the anti-naturalistic fallacy, when a feminist claims that women's' bodies should have no effect on how they are treated, everything should be based purely on personality/the mind, or "who they are". Well, the problem is, they're using the same definition of "who a person is" as the Christians were doing, and with that comes all the baggage which they were trying to discard in the first place! This sounds like your usual, and not descriptive of most feminist screed I've heard. Some of the most rabid feminists can be distressingly obsessed with their special hormonal impulses. They go into study-citing shpiels about how women are more nurturing and sensitive consensus-builders, as compared to dumb violent men who rule by coercion.

I think this is one of the reasons why attitudes towards what constitutes "liberated" behaviour are so widely dispersed across the feminist spectrum. There are the pro-porn feminists, and there are the rabidly anti-porn feminists. There are the pro- and anti-promiscuity feminists. There are the pro- and anti-marriage feminists. The conflict, I think, stems from an attempt to reject a world-view seen as wrong while still holding part of that world-view themselves. So feminists in countries where beauty pageants are frowned upon see them as liberating, whereas many feminists in the more culturally liberal countries see them as degrading and objectifying. This fundamental contradiction in the world-view, this fundamental fallacy, expresses itself in too many ways to count, and in large part contributes to the image of feminism as inconsistent. Or it might be that it's a relatively new movement claiming to represent the best interests of a little more than one half of the human race, coming from many diverse backgrounds with different perspectives and responding to the differing status of women in different areas.

[Efonukmp]

Why the rant against Catholicism Elok?

It has nothing to do with us.

[JoesBro]

Originally posted by aneeshm
The second point:

While I was reading up on pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures (thankfully, I am myself from one, so I find it much easier to switch mental culture-frames), I came across a very different view of life and the world. The mind was not the sole definition of "person". The locus of individual identity lay as much in the body as in the mind, and instincts and impulses were not within the domain of judgement, but actions were. That is, a person was moral based on what he did, not on what he felt. So a person giving up something dear to him for what he thought was a greater cause was a morally admirable act precisely because of the difficulty of the action involved, not because of obedience to some God-given commandment. Here, there were no self-destructive moral actions. ? Giving up something dear for the greater good is not a self-destructive moral action? I would think that would be by definition self-destructive to some extent.

Also, these people did not have what is commonly referred to as an "integrated view of body and mind", because there was nothing to integrate - the mind-body dichotomy, or separation, even if it existed in some small form, was never anything significant anyway. Sounds like a semantic objection, but fine.

The third part:

It seems to me that most people would do better to adopt the second view of human nature - the one in which you don't have to worry about an integrated body and mind because you never separate them at all. You don't have to worry about being "in touch" with your instincts, because you know that you are your instincts, there is no need to speak of them as dichotomous. You assume, of course, that the instincts are or should be regarded as something separate from the mind. See: Freud, Sigmund. Id, Ego, Superego, all that fun stuff. As a practical matter, what are you suggesting? The negation of the superego, doing whatever the hell our instincts suggest, or what?

This gets rid of the fundamental weakening contradiction at the core of most of modern culture - the cultural and moral, yet still artificial and damaging, duality between body and mind. It also gets rid of the anti-naturalistic fallacy. Judgements will no longer be conferred on a person's feeling or instincts, but on their actions. And instinct not being regarded as somehow "evil", human interaction will become far more fulfilling, for the simple reason that they aren't born of a tortured nailing together of contradictory ideas and emotions. When it is recognised that an act is immoral because it is revolting to one of our instincts, and not because of some external absolute moral authority deeming it so, morality and law will accord far more with human nature than they do now. Even assuming it's plausible, that does not sound like a good thing. Xenophobia and aggression are natural instincts too. But I don't think it plausible. Do you honestly believe people feel guilty about improper thoughts because of dualism? It doesn't follow at all. If anything, I would think a non-dualistic person would feel his/her whole self implicated by negative feelings. Not that I think, "Oh, my brain just thought something bad!" Wait a minute, what about Buddhism? They explicitly believe that suffering is caused by improper mental activity ("grasping," or what-have-you), and just as explicitly reject not only boundaries within the self but boundaries within the whole universe. Everything's just interconnected energies to them.

As an amusing afterthought, this also gets rid of the geek-jock fallacy, because both are what you get when you accept the mind-body dichotomy and artificially starve one part of yourself, or neglect it. Both are, in a sense, broken. The mind without a body is as incomplete as the body without a mind. Yes, it's great fun to stack and re-stack ideas into neat conceptual boxes. That's why PoMo is so popular in some circles. Ultimately, though, it doesn't say anything about reality. It just shows your level of skill and interest in idea-stacking.

The fourth part:

This will also force us to accept some facts about the natural world, and about ourselves, which modern culture will frown upon. I'll illustrate with an example.

This post was inspired by feminism, so I'll start with the most common objection there. Feminists will have to accept "objectification" as a biological fact of life. The body being as much part of the individual as the mind is, there is no moral condemnation attached to judging both men or women by their bodies. Your fitness shows, to a great extent, how much you value yourself as a person, because, remember, your person is also your body.

Secondly, what is called "objectification" today is pretty much innate to humans. When a man looks at a woman for the first time, the first judgement made is to place that woman on the scale of 'bang ability'. This isn't conscious, by the way, it's completely subconscious. The only thing men consciously have access to is the result of that judgement. The in-built assessment circuitry says, "That woman is an X on the scale", and that's that. From there on, it cascades. Training can change the criterion of judgement - as you become healthier, so does your taste, generally - but not the fact that the judgement occurs.

Another factor which feminists may be loath to admit, yet is as true as the "objectification" one, is that women also have in-built assessment circuitry. It is more complex than that of men, because it has to measure physical intangibles, but it no less potent. The in-built assessment circuitry for women assesses three things:

a) Resource provision capacity - more specifically, in today's context, the man's financial stability
b) In-group social power - in our context, status in whatever hierarchy the male is competing in
c) Genetic fitness - this is usually a function of the above two, as that is what matters from the long term for genetic fitness, but occasionally, due to the quirks of human sexual selection, a specimen comes along with all the indicators of sexual attractiveness. This is the one most closely resembling the physical "objectification" most feminists so despise.

The point here is that women also innately "objectify" men, but it is more subtle, as a function of their earning potential and social dominance, rather than just their bodies. The same way that feminists complain that men see only their bodies, men may well complain that women see only their bank accounts (or indicators thereof - clothes, watch, car, et cetera) or their rank in the social hierarchy (how dominant a person appears).

Both complaints are essentially pointless whining. This assessment instinct is innate, and instead of trying to block it and make everyone unhappy, why not accept it as a fact of life - which, after all, it is - and move on? The fact that this instinct exists does not mean that men are incapable of seeing anything beyond a body, or that women can see nothing beyond wealth and status. What it means is that these are the first, and probably most powerful things, which will catch our attention. Acknowledging that is better than suppressing it. Some folks reinvent the wheel. You just reinvented "ladder theory" ( www.laddertheory.com ). The difference is that the wheel is useful and not born of cynicism or spite.

[PerfectCreditForYou]

Thanks elok. I'm curious as to the tripartite theory you were advancing. In my understanding was that it was substance dualism, in that the soul and the spirit were considered to be spiritual, while the body was considered to be material.

[boltondd]

Originally posted by DaShi
The soul can become substance by compressing the air around it. Sig material.

[MontyP@thon]

Well it would be news to me. I had never heard that before, so I was curious if you had been taught that in the Orthodox church. As far as I know, the soul and the spirit are both considered to be the same substance apart from the flesh.

[Galvanoidum]

Originally posted by Elok

? Giving up something dear for the greater good is not a self-destructive moral action? I would think that would be by definition self-destructive to some extent.
A greater good which is a good to you.

Originally posted by Elok

Sounds like a semantic objection, but fine.
I'd disagree, but well, let it go.

Originally posted by Elok

You assume, of course, that the instincts are or should be regarded as something separate from the mind. See: Freud, Sigmund. Id, Ego, Superego, all that fun stuff. As a practical matter, what are you suggesting? The negation of the superego, doing whatever the hell our instincts suggest, or what?
That's in the fourth part.

And instincts are not separate from the mind nor from the self, they, in their multifarious forms, are the self. Instincts operate at all levels of human abstraction.

Originally posted by Elok

Even assuming it's plausible, that does not sound like a good thing. Xenophobia and aggression are natural instincts too. But I don't think it plausible. Do you honestly believe people feel guilty about improper thoughts because of dualism? It doesn't follow at all. If anything, I would think a non-dualistic person would feel his/her whole self implicated by negative feelings. Not that I think, "Oh, my brain just thought something bad!" Wait a minute, what about Buddhism? They explicitly believe that suffering is caused by improper mental activity ("grasping," or what-have-you), and just as explicitly reject not only boundaries within the self but boundaries within the whole universe. Everything's just interconnected energies to them.
Which is pretty much the way reality is, too, isn't it?

More seriously, when you break down the motivation behind an action further and further, what we come to find as the atom is some evolved instinct, not a reasoned justification. This applies to our entire civilisation. Even law is an expression of innate human nature.

Originally posted by Elok

Yes, it's great fun to stack and re-stack ideas into neat conceptual boxes. That's why PoMo is so popular in some circles. Ultimately, though, it doesn't say anything about reality. It just shows your level of skill and interest in idea-stacking.
I don't really know what to make of this.

Originally posted by Elok

Some folks reinvent the wheel. You just reinvented "ladder theory" ( www.laddertheory.com ). The difference is that the wheel is useful and not born of cynicism or spite.
I think you underestimate me in this regard. I haven't reinvented anything. I've read up quite a bit about this topic, and I've distilled what I've taken away from many hours of reading and understanding into this one part.

The topic is, of course, much more intricate than that, but it would have taken me an inordinate amount of space to cover all the details and sub-cases which I know.

I would refer to the works of Matt Ridley, Geoffrey Miller, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and Marc Hauser for more information - I'll cite names if you want.

In case you want an online open-access journal, I'd suggest the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology.

[SallyIsNice5]

Maybe you should read some background and know who Plato is before reading psychology journals?

JM