a question about the value of human life

OB1Shinobi wrote: that is the next evolution of my question; how does logic justify the value of life or the appropriateness of morality without religious thought?

Logic doesn't justify anything. Logic is purely a mechanism to draw necessary conclusions from premises that cannot not lead to those conclusions. Logic is not concerned with the reality of things but exclusively with the validity of thought. I can prove logically and inescapably that you are a unicorn and there is no amount of logic you can throw back that would break the proof. Still won't make it true.

but if the very most fundamental indoctrination of our most esteemed intellectual institutions encourage the idea that the world might even be a better place if someone DID push the button, then we dont just have to worry about the nutjobs - we have to worry about the most intelligent and well educated people in the world - you know, the ones who get to become president and stuff like that (i guess i have to strike the word INTELLIGENT if we're going to talk about presidents) maybe the ones who get to run ENRON and HALIBURTON

This also works on smaller scales. What's morally wrong about suicide? If you think the world would be better off without you in a particular moment, what is your reason not to eat a bullet?
There isn't one. People with no will to go on living often do not go on living. People with no survival instinct don't survive. Unless, that is, they care about others. In kids' ethics courses the question of "would you give your life to save someone else's or multiple other lives?" comes up time and time again. Well, I wouldn't. Not because I value myself more than them, but because I feel that I have the potential to be of more use to the world if I continue on rather than if I leave, after which I'd be guaranteed never to contribute to this world again.
In the short run much of the planet's biosphere may indeed be better off without us. In a very short run, that is, because beyond that we have no grounds to speculate because the sheer number of unknwon variables cannot remotely be estimated. Butterfly effect and so on, you get my point. The intellectual elites, if you will, understand this full well. And most of them also kind of sort of don't quite want to die or watch everything they love die. So the danger of all or near-all mankind going extinct comes from exactly two places: A psychopath who is empathetic enough to deceive all of us long enough to get close to the button or a full scale zombie outbreak. If you wish to say either of those is a possibility that it is worthhile to consider, be my guest.

next we have this

Gisteron wrote: No structure of thought is so failure-proof that it would stop everyone from massacring the entire planet.

which is an evasion, but it is a relevant one which i intend to address as soon as we have established that the first point of the discussion is settled

How is this an evasion? You asked where the obligation to not murder everyone would come from. How is this not an answer? And how was this not one of your very first questions so you have to first clear up something prior?

Gisteron wrote:

OB1Shinobi wrote: this question is the proof of the value of religion as i understand it because at some point we either determine that we and our logic are the sole arbiters of what is right, (in which case having the capability to do the thing would be all the "right" one needs)
or that we are a part of a meaningful whole, which has inherent worth as it is, even if we do not understand it, and which we do not have the right to break, and within which we may even find purpose and value

False dichotomy fallacy .
...
Then what was all the fuss about religion all about? And don't give me that by religion you really meant their personal experience all along. Throughout this thread you didn't and I can prove it.

a false dichotomy requires a valid third alternative

or a functional "grey" area between the two extremes

as of yet no one has established this third alternative

Ask and ye shall receive:

• We could be both part of a meaningful whole with inherent worth and still be the sole arbiters of what is right.
• We could neither be the sole arbiters of what is right and still not be part of anything greater, inherently meaningful.
• We could be part of a greater whole that still has no worth or meaning, ultimately.
• We could be part of a worthy greater, meaningful whole and still have every right to break any part of it.
• We could be part of a meaningful whole with inherent worth and no right to break it where it would still never grant us either purpose or value.
• Our logic could be the sole arbiter of what is right but we might not be required for it.
• We could be the sole arbiters of what is right but logic could have nothing to do with it.
• We and our logic could be the sole arbiters of what is right and might alone could still not make right.
• We and our logic could be the sole arbiters of what is right and we could be ignorant of that fact and thus think we needed more than we had.

These are nine perfeclty plausible alternatives. Need I go on?

who here believes they would have invented the scientific method if they had been born into a highly religious and even superstitious and xenophobic culture?

*Raises hand*
History is rife with people like that, too.

personal experience and frankly THE LUCK OF THE DRAW are possibly more responsible for any of us even knowing the WORD "logic" than any great logical ability on our parts

Knowing "the WORD" is not the same as or a requirement for understanding the concept. You are, again, mistaking the map for the territorry, sir. Logic is not cultural. It is universal. It is also, at least on its own, rather useless. Which brings us to this point that you keep bringing up:

the essence of my point there is that its perfectly logical and logically justifiable to kill 95-99% of the human population and enslave the survivors

Yes, we can see that this is your point and, I'm sorry to say, you are wrong. Logic does not deal in commandments, it deals in propositions. An action cannot be logical, only reasoning can. Logic is also not in the business of justifying actions. If anything, one could say it justifies conclusions, given premises, but "to justify" is really not a good word for this, given its other colloquial usages and connotations.

logic does not indicate that there is anything wrong with this

That is correct. Something that has nothing to do with ethics wouldn't have much to do with ethics...

Ariane wrote: ... a holistic view is that Science is a 'process' to find truth and that process includes everything that defines humanity such as art, science, philosophy, maths and other scientific subjects.

Science, as it stands now, is not a process to find truth. It is not designed to that end nor can claim credit for succeeding at that task. Art, likewise, is not concerned with truth and only some fields of philosophy are. Maths would be the closest we can get to a discipline searching for truth. Art, philosophy and maths are also not scientific subjects. Only scientific subjects are scientific subjects.

Because humans wanted knowledge to improve their chances of success, they tried to merge and combine ideas language and semantics was born and became important in philosophy and were both the tools to compartmentalised and defined or refined the many human ideas. So Science is also a philosophy.

Linguistics and semantics are not sciences. Pending a definition of philosophy they might qualify as that and so might science, but the latter does not follow from the former.

Occams razor kick started the Renaissance...

Source, please...

In philosophical thought the subject called geometry was a major academic subject for all citizens.

Source, please...

They were able to make water flow up hill with geometry...

Source, pl... you know what? Never mind that. This is false. Geometry does not generate energy. Magic might. Replace geometry with magic in that statement, and then we can have a discussion.

... we are biologically adapted to favour bigger societies.

Which is why for most of our history we had been living in tribes of like twenty people as do all animals most related to us and as we do to this day wherever global civilization didn't reach yet. Source, please. Best would be a paper on the genetic tendency for large societies, please, and about how stress and sickness from large amounts of people around are an illusion.

Removing 95% of humans would drastically increase the value of individual humans.

No, it wouldn't. Value is not inherent. Us valuing individual humans more would increase their value. Some people value the rare. Others don't. Some even value the abundant, which is why books sell so much better if you claim they are bestsellers or from bestselling authors than if you don't, even if both those claims are strictly false.

... Also maintaining a large gene pool is logical.

Is it? I mean, is it in any way other than the one in which, say, chicken soup is political?

It's a great risk to expose humanity to the dangers of reducing the population by 95% because a virus could easily wipe you out and you cannot afford many human losses. Humans would become so precious and vulnerable that they would be treated like expensive commodities 'wrapped in bubble wrap'.

You are presuming that the supreme leader responsible for the population reduction is concerned with either their own or anyone else's survival. What if they aren't? See, value is not strictly a function of availability... Or should I perhaps call it supply? There is also demand, you see...

In smaller societies it would be the rise of 'individualism' individuals could have more autonomy and control and create favourable conditions for ourselves with abundant wealth and we wouldn't rely as heavily upon 'man power' yet there are consequences.

You are presuming that a society is what the psychotic tyrant is after. Not speaking for OB, but I don't think he meant a scenario with just reduced numbers but also one where the emperor dictates the survivors' lives. That's different.

Humans in a favourable state of affairs would cease to develop themselves and become immortal.

:blink:
Source, please...

Since it is adversity and difficulty that is the mother of invention and the basis of evolution we would have to redesign ourselves but could a small population really have the will power to achieve this? It would require lots more work which would be easier with more people. There is a film that addresses this problem, with a small population we would need technological solutions and this is best described in a film called 'WALL E' made by Disney in 2008.

With all due respect, and with all love toward Disney, I really don't feel like that should be anyone's source on questions of biology. Populations don't evolve more slowly when they are small, but more rapidly, because small changes are propagated faster in a small group than in a large one. The exception to this is when after a bottleneck situation the population has too little genetic diversity in which case it only survives for as long as the environment stays reasonably constant. This also applies to ideas. This is not a matter of individual will either.

There are other potential questions such as 'what meaning do individual humans have', the answer they have no meaning. ...

Source, please.

Gisteron wrote:

Ariane wrote:

Science, as it stands now, is not a process to find truth. It is not designed to that end nor can claim credit for succeeding at that task. Art, likewise, is not concerned with truth and only some fields of philosophy are. Maths would be the closest we can get to a discipline searching for truth. Art, philosophy and maths are also not scientific subjects. Only scientific subjects are scientific subjects.[/maths]

There are two methods or views like 'Aesthetic' value and 'Empirical' value, I would consider empiricism to be much more calculative in science, yet there is also an Aesthetic value in science. A good aesthetic value which became a scientific principle is Occam's razor. It was religion and the arts that placed an Aesthetic logical meaning upon finding truth, while the principle is not irrefutable it still describes how subjects merge like science and art. There are other Aesthetic values in science like 'normative' to be the normal or correct way of doing something. 'Informative' the desire to be accurate 'identification' to fit observation into particular roles or create identity. Since these values are subjective and personal to human values and views.

Occams razor kick started the Renaissance...

Source, please...

Well maybe that was an exaggeration my statement should be 'aesthetics kick started the renaissance' but that's just my opinion.

In philosophical thought the subject called geometry was a major academic subject for all citizens.

Source, please...

umm im not explaining how geometry was important in ancient greece

They were able to make water flow up hill with geometry...

Source, pl... you know what? Never mind that. This is false. Geometry does not generate energy. Magic might. Replace geometry with magic in that statement, and then we can have a discussion.

The roman's used the inverted siphon which didn't generate huge amounts of energy yet it allowed water to flow up hill.

Removing 95% of humans would drastically increase the value of individual humans.

No, it wouldn't. Value is not inherent. Us valuing individual humans more would increase their value. Some people value the rare. Others don't. Some even value the abundant, which is why books sell so much better if you claim they are bestsellers or from bestselling authors than if you don't, even if both those claims are strictly false.

Your making this subjective, its unreasonable to suggest that everyone has different opinions which they do and they could be ignorant enough not to value humans yet this goes against self preservation which is not a 'normative' aesthetic value.

... Also maintaining a large gene pool is logical.

Is it? I mean, is it in any way other than the one in which, say, chicken soup is political?

Provide a logical argument or I wont respond to straw man arguments.

In smaller societies it would be the rise of 'individualism' individuals could have more autonomy and control and create favourable conditions for ourselves with abundant wealth and we wouldn't rely as heavily upon 'man power' yet there are consequences.

You are presuming that a society is what the psychotic tyrant is after. Not speaking for OB, but I don't think he meant a scenario with just reduced numbers but also one where the emperor dictates the survivors' lives. That's different.

Oh i see my mistake thanks for your correction.

Humans in a favourable state of affairs would cease to develop themselves and become immortal.

:blink:
Source, please...

hmm its a 'hypothetical' perhaps immortality isn't favourable to some people. Yet I would consider this an example of a favourable state of affairs, its a solution to the problem of viruses and other sickness which would put the population at risk yet even if this was achieved would that population possess the will power to adapt? In such a dictatorship as you Gisteron suggests it would seem people would be uninspired and this could hinder human progress.

With all due respect, and with all love toward Disney, I really don't feel like that should be anyone's source on questions of biology. Populations don't evolve more slowly when they are small, but more rapidly, because small changes are propagated faster in a small group than in a large one.[/quote]

It is the speed of reproduction that increases the speed of adaptation such as in bacteria they adapt much faster and only happens if the bacteria has a large colony with many. Changes do propagate faster in a smaller gene pool yet they would lack the diversity for greater change.

There are other potential questions such as 'what meaning do individual humans have', the answer they have no meaning. ...

Source, please.[/quote]

Nihilism philosophical thought life has no inherent meaning. There are competing philosophies such as Aesthetics where you learn to appreciate the beauty and ugliness of nature, humans and so on..

Gisteron wrote: Science, as it stands now, is not a process to find truth. It is not designed to that end nor can claim credit for succeeding at that task. Art, likewise, is not concerned with truth and only some fields of philosophy are. Maths would be the closest we can get to a discipline searching for truth. Art, philosophy and maths are also not scientific subjects. Only scientific subjects are scientific subjects.

There are two methods or views in science like 'Aesthetic' and 'Empirical' value, I would consider empiricism to be much more calculative in science, yet there is also an Aesthetic value in science. A good aesthetic value which became a scientific principle is Occam's razor. It was religion and the arts that placed an Aesthetic logical meaning upon finding truth, while the principle is not irrefutable it still describes how subjects merge like science and art. There are other Aesthetic values in science like 'normative' to be the normal or correct way of doing something. 'Informative' the desire to be accurate 'identification' to fit observation into particular roles or create identity. Since these values are subjective and personal to human values and views.

Occams razor kick started the Renaissance...

Source, please...

Well maybe that was an exaggeration my statement should be 'aesthetics kick started the renaissance' but that's just my opinion.

In philosophical thought the subject called geometry was a major academic subject for all citizens.

Source, please...

umm im not explaining how geometry was important in ancient greece

They were able to make water flow up hill with geometry...

Source, pl... you know what? Never mind that. This is false. Geometry does not generate energy. Magic might. Replace geometry with magic in that statement, and then we can have a discussion.

The roman's used the inverted siphon which didn't generate huge amounts of energy yet it allowed water to flow up hill.

Removing 95% of humans would drastically increase the value of individual humans.

No, it wouldn't. Value is not inherent. Us valuing individual humans more would increase their value. Some people value the rare. Others don't. Some even value the abundant, which is why books sell so much better if you claim they are bestsellers or from bestselling authors than if you don't, even if both those claims are strictly false.

Your making this subjective, its unreasonable to suggest that everyone has different opinions which they do and they could be ignorant enough not to value human life yet this goes against self preservation which is not a 'normative' aesthetic value.

... Also maintaining a large gene pool is logical.

Is it? I mean, is it in any way other than the one in which, say, chicken soup is political?

Provide a logical argument or I wont respond to straw man arguments.

In smaller societies it would be the rise of 'individualism' individuals could have more autonomy and control and create favourable conditions for ourselves with abundant wealth and we wouldn't rely as heavily upon 'man power' yet there are consequences.

You are presuming that a society is what the psychotic tyrant is after. Not speaking for OB, but I don't think he meant a scenario with just reduced numbers but also one where the emperor dictates the survivors' lives. That's different.

Oh i see my mistake thanks for your correction.

Humans in a favourable state of affairs would cease to develop themselves and become immortal.

:blink:
Source, please...

hmm its a 'hypothetical' situation perhaps immortality isn't favourable to some people. Yet I would consider this an example of a favourable state of affairs, its a solution to the problem of viruses and other sickness which would put the population at risk. Yet even if this was achieved would that population possess the will power to adapt? In such a dictatorship as you Gisteron suggests it would seem people would be uninspired and this could hinder human progress.

Populations don't evolve more slowly when they are small, but more rapidly, because small changes are propagated faster in a small group than in a large one.

It is the speed of reproduction that increases the speed of adaptation such as in bacteria they adapt much faster due to this and it happens much faster if the bacteria has a large colony with many. Changes do propagate faster in a smaller gene pool yet they would lack the diversity for greater change.

There are other potential questions such as 'what meaning do individual humans have', the answer they have no meaning. ...

Source, please.

Nihilism philosophical thought life has no inherent meaning. There are competing philosophies such as Aesthetics where you learn to appreciate the beauty and ugliness of nature, humans and so on..

umm i dont need sources..

Oh why not then I will explain geometry:

Pythagoras founded a cult of mathematical spirituality where numbers held meaning such as divine proportion, PHI. The geometry was considered sacred such sacred geometry was a big in theological and philosophical thought for hundreds of years.

A message to Gisteron:

Firstly thanks for your time and you should post back your response i am have been a little unclear.

You cannot compare human values to chicken soup.

For example its like saying: 'My Ferrari is better than your apple or grape...' It is simply not a comparative. Whilst they can be compared and that they grapes, apples and Ferrari do have their own intrinsic, extrinsic value. Much like chicken soup does also have extrinsic and intrinsic value.

Yet you cannot compare them or emphasise one value as or superior to another. Much like you cannot devalue humanity or their values because while people can dehumanise or disassociate and remove the image or sense of value that value is intrinsic and implicit to everyone.

Anyone who removes value from their species or individual humans has a cognitive disorder which most humans do have some form of disorder we are never entirely functional and can be dysfunctional but logically humans have both intrinsic and extrinsic worth albeit similar value to that of much needed refreshing cup of tea. Yet human value is a product an object a thing that can grow or fade much like the rise and fall of gold value. However there will always be a value to every human some people are worth less and some more, even the most immoral human has rights and value.

Also Math and Science are more than just well to look at it as a tool to find truth there is great Aesthetic value in science and math and it can be compared with much like the ecclesiasticism and ecstatic height of spiritual truth. That such truth of Mathematics and science, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics and science as surely as poetry.

Steven Hawking said with a smile on his face, in his book - A Brief History of Time - "Only Scientists can be Philosophers".

So.. In my opinion "intrinsic value" is an oxymoron. Value is necessarily subjective and if there were no subjects to value things, things would not have value, by definition. Of course, by implication, from a perspective like my own, if I cannot take the premise that value is something independant of the process of valuing, an argument about a direct correlation between supply and value gets no traction. Even from an economic standpoint, demand is a much more essential factor than supply is, in the sense that without supply demand still determines value, but without demand, supply doesn't. Maybe what you mean by intrinsic and value respectively is something else and we are talking past each other. That's fine, clearing up things and exchanging ideas is why we are here.

In the same sense, when I read or write "logical", what I mean is "of or according to the rules of logic or formal argument". So when you say that humans have intrinsic value, whether that is true or not, it is not "logical" in that sense of the word. That is also why I compared the statement "maintaining a large gene pool is logical" to "chicken soup is political". I did not misrepresent your saying, I just meant to express how it sounds to me. Chicken soup has naught to do with politics and in that same way I feel that the maintenance of particular gene pool sizes has nothing to do with logic either. It can be a wise decision to make given premises about our condition and our desires, but it is if and only if all of these conditions are met in full and with no exception, that it follows that particular gene pool sizes are preferable.

Also, when I say that science is not concerned with truth, what I mean is what I say. There is no step in the scientific process as defined and practiced today, where truthiness of a proposition comes into consideration or where beauty does, unless simplicity is a measure of beauty. Whether something that is true comes out of the process I shall leave to the philosophers to debate, and whether something beautiful is generated in the meantime shall be up to the artists and while many scientists may express how close they feel to a truth they seek or how inspired they are by the beauty they find, neither of those feelings are - eventhough often present - strictly relevant to their scientific work and that is why they tend to write more about those feelings in their books than they do in their research papers.

And to keep with the recent tradition, a few words about geometry: My particular inquiry was - and admittedly I should have been more clear - whether geometry was, as you put it, "a major academic subjects to all citizens" (emphasis added), since I had no luck confirming this. In either case, and even with the inverted siphon, no geometry of a device can actually make water flow uphil. You can push water through all kinds of shapes, and you can employ gravity to push water higher than it used to be, but you have to either lift something before that yourself, or, in the case of the siphon, have water at a higher level pushing down to level out that on the lower level. I could say I can make rocks fall upwards and omit that I am just throwing them toward the sky and that it took energy out of myself and that for better or worse the rock will eventually fall back down.
It is true that some early findings in geometry were rather inspiring to the peoples who found them and that back in their superstitious day they readily credited their gods and spirits with inventing those correlations of which we now know that they follow inescapably from assuming little more than the empty set. Many modern day woo peddlers will point to pictures like the flower of life and claim how uber spiritual and ancient it is and that it has some meaning outside of what I drew back when I got my hands on a compass for the first time in third grade.
Granted, there is some elegance to that flower, and beauty and symmetry, but pretty is really all it is.
Now a few pictures from least to most pretty.
This is a burning bush:

This is the flower of life:

This speaks for itself:

This is the eagle nebula:

And this is geometry:

Thank you.

Well I understand you Gisteron, and my arguments are more refined because of you, I agree. Those pictures are both ugly and beautiful thanks for sharing. One point about the inverted siphon is that it was an essential thing to develop to control water to increase population size, because there was a demand for more babies. However Romans were the overachievers of their time and managed to transport water anywhere even a transfer of water over long distances using gravity down hill but their comes a time when they reach a hill and then they took out their inverted siphon and used gravity to push the water up the hill, yes it is clever using the force of gravity to do such things.

I agree that demand is the 'motivator' of value as is 'exclusivity' and 'necessity' yet 'supply' can add or detract from that value perhaps like the opposite way that demand works. For Example there are diamonds the size of houses in space a huge supply, but they are practically worthless. That is if I tried to actually sell them on Ebay as of tonight (perhaps that would be a long term investment .

But does that mean those diamonds have no value? Perhaps that is why without supply there cannot be a demand, and we humans are as a populous effectively a supply of resources in itself. We as human resources are also the demand of such resource. So does that mean that 'human value' has a third criteria a 'transcendent' quality that we may have the 'will' to invest in that value? That we humans will always demand of ourselves or die. That is why demand is not a primary factor in 'human value'. I suggested we humans have implicit value, as opposed to value being created by our subjective beliefs of such worthiness like 'desire'?

We as humans it is in our nature to favour ourselves and species we cannot remove our inherent individual value unless we are dysfunctional enough to sacrifice ourselves to oblivion. Humans have an inheritance the cosmos we are the most valued of all resources but our individual self worth might not be realised.



Just a thought...

Love and Light

Yea, I can see where you're coming from now... Still, I don't think that inherent value is the solution. Ultimately not only the magnitude of value (trying to find fitting words, bear with me :silly:), but value itself are subject to agents who can value things. If we didn't exist, probably nobody would value us, but then existence alone also doesn't fill anything with value. Valuing agents do. So if nobody valued us, we wouldn't have value.
On the other hand, if value is an actual property, nobody acknowledging it doesn't make it go away, I suppose...
Still, to say something has value when nothing values it makes little sense and something having value when nothing values it is likewise more or less meaningless. For that reason, in every practical sense, having value and being valued are equivalent. We do have value, or rather, it does make sense to ascribe value to us, and that is because and only because there is someone around to value us, be that ourselves or otherwise.

Gisteron wrote: be that ourselves or otherwise.

I'm glad you qualified the statement.