Respectful R.F.C. re: epistemic categorical imperative

[libertarianbob01]

Greetings All

In Michael Martin's "The Case Against Christianity" Dr. Martin notes that: "...there is both a moral duty and a epistemic duty not to believe Christian doctrines unless there are good epistemic reasons to believe them." p.20-21

Martin's prior discussion of William K Clifford leading up to the above quotation adequately explained the moral imperative imparting a duty(correction: duty should be replaced with self-interested inclination) upon the rational person; however, Dr. Martin assumed (at least so it seemed to me) that the reader would understand how one has an epistemic duty(correction: duty should be replaced with self-interested inclination) to use only empirical evidence based reasoning in evaluating religious claims. My lack of expertise in formulating a categorical imperative(correction: categorical imperative should be replaced with causal goal seeking) that imparts an obligatory duty(correction: duty should be replaced with self-interested inclination) to use only empirical rational objective reasoning betrays my newbie status relative to objectivist studies. It seems to me that it is possible to devise such an imperative(correction: categorical imperative should be replaced with causal goal seeking) based on the axioms without recourse to arbitrarily introducing some derived value or virtue. Why should any rational being prefer to use reality based thinking rather than some arbitrary fantasy to make decisions? This in part reduces to why should a rational being desire to exist? It seems to me that the desire to live is a brute fact of life. Where ever life comes to be it seeks to continue. An evolutionary principle of self-organization and adaptation distinctly different from vitalism or Lamarkism and completely naturalistic that compels life to continue, to self-replicate, to metabolize nutrients, to adapt to changes in the environment is fundamental to life. It seems that whether life's origin was abiogenetic or panspermian, life from its inception on this planet has evolved to remain alive. Organism lacking a nervous system or a brain do not exhibit purpose nor do they strive, yet the fact of evolutionary natural and sexual selection informs us that delusional thinking or improper chemical processing leads to becoming dinner for some organism that instead utilitizes the principles embodied in the axioms even if only in the fashion of counter chemical reactions. Yet how can our world's evolutionary history and the self-interest of life in general be used as springboard to formulate an epistemic categorical imperative that imparts an obligation(correction: obligation should be replaced with self-interested inclination) to use empirical objectivist reasoning onto any rational minded being?

Here is my attempt to answer my question. A thing is what it is. That is to exist is to exist as something specific. Life is a condition involving the self-organization, self-replication, and metabolization of matter and energy. Life stands in opposition to entropy and non-life. But is life an existent? Would the fallacy of the excluded middle obtain by the assertion that either an organism is alive or that it is not? A firm no would be in order since the law of non-contradiction would be soundly applied to the proposition that life (does not equal) ~life. It is true to say that the law of identity formulated as life = life would indicate that life is indeed qualified to be something that exists rather than simply an emergent property of self-organized matter. Since life exists, it exists as something specific, and as something specific it has identity. The identity of life can be perceived by an aware mind. The mind's action of being aware of life or anything is consciousness. Indeed, to be conscious is to be conscious of something. That the mind is unable to alter anything by its awareness informs the rational mind itself that its own existence is dependent upon the more general obtaining of reality. By comparison of the relative behaviors of life with its self-organization to the entropy of non-life in response to thought experiments, consciousness can ascertain that wishing cannot modify either life or non-life. Why? The primacy of existence must instantiate in ascendancy to conscious intentions. This could be my sought after epistemic categorical imperative(correction: categorical imperative should be replaced with causal goal seeking). The law of identity, existence exists itself in conjunction with the evolutionary self-organization of life compels the rational minded being to use empirical reasoning to evaluate religious and all other(philosophical) claims.

Am I anywhere near to something that could pass for right? What do you fine and good people think? BTW: Thanks in advance for all your thoughtful replies.

Best Regards, Kevin Brown (DFW, Texas)

Edited November 4, 2007 by libertarianbob01

[Brant Gaede]

Greetings All

In Michael Martin's "The Case Against Christianity" Dr. Martin notes that: "...there is both a moral duty and a epistemic duty not to believe Christian doctrines unless there are good epistemic reasons to believe them." p.20-21

Martin's prior discussion of William K Clifford leading up to the above quotation adequately explained the moral imperative imparting a duty upon the rational person; however, Dr. Martin assumed (at least so it seemed to me) that the reader would understand how one has an epistemic duty to use only empirical evidence based reasoning in evaluating religious claims. My lack of expertise in formulating a categorical imperative that imparts an obligatory duty to use only empirical rational objective reasoning betrays my newbie status relative to objectivist studies. It seems to me that it is possible to devise such an imperative based on the axioms without recourse to arbitrarily introducing some derived value or virtue. Why should any rational being prefer to use reality based thinking rather than some arbitrary fantasy to make decisions? This in part reduces to why should a rational being desire to exist? It seems to me that the desire to live is a brute fact of life. Where ever life comes to be it seeks to continue. An evolutionary principle of self-organization and adaptation distinctly different from vitalism or Lamarkism and completely naturalistic that compels life to continue, to self-replicate, to metabolize nutrients, to adapt to changes in the environment is fundamental to life. It seems that whither life's origin was abiogenetic or panspermian, life from its inception on this planet has evolved to remain alive. Organism lacking a nervous system or a brain do not exhibit purpose nor do they strive, yet the fact of evolutionary natural and sexual selection informs us that delusional thinking or improper chemical processing leads to becoming dinner for some organism that instead utilitizes the principles embodied in the axioms even if only in the fashion of counter chemical reactions. Yet how can our world's evolutionary history and the self-interest of life in general be used as springboard to formulate an epistemic categorical imperative that imparts an obligation to use empirical objectivist reasoning onto any rational minded being?

Here is my attempt to answer my question. A thing is what it is. That is to exist is to exist a something specific. Life is a condition involving the self-organization, self-replication, and metabolization of matter and energy. Life stands in opposition to entropy and non-life. But is life an existent? Would the fallacy of the excluded middle obtain by the assertion that either an organism is alive or that it is not? A firm no would be in order since the law of non-contradiction would be soundly applied to the proposition that life (does not equal) ~life. It is true to say that the law of identity formulated as life = life would indicate that life is indeed qualified to be something that exists rather than simply an emergent property of self-organized matter. Since life exists, it exists as something specific, and as something specific it has identity. The identity of life can be perceived by an aware mind. The mind's action of being aware of life or anything is consciousness. Indeed, to be conscious is to be conscious of something. That the mind is unable to alter anything by its awareness informs the rational mind itself that its own existence is dependent upon the more general obtaining of reality. By comparison of the relative behaviors of life with its self-organization to the entropy of non-life in response to thought experiments, consciousness can ascertain that wishing cannot modify either life or non-life. Why? The primacy of existence must instantiate in ascendancy to conscious intentions. This could be my sought after epistemic categorical imperative. The law of identity, existence exists itself in conjunction with the evolutionary self-organization of life compels the rational minded being to use empirical reasoning to evaluate religious and all other claims.

Am I anywhere near to something that could pass for right? What do you fine and good people think?

Best Regards, Kevin Brown (DFW, Texas)

You are positing compulsion and not considering freedom.

--Brant

[libertarianbob01]

You are positing compulsion and not considering freedom.

--Brant

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, and I agree with your observation. I am positing that there exists as a natural brute fact of existence a mandate obligatory upon all rational, objective, existent conscious minds to use only an empirical reality based method of reasoning to evaluate religious and philosophical claims (correction: added-if that rational being is self-interested and has causal goals it wishes to obtain). The primacy of existence informs the thinking person that reality is not amenable or mailable simply by the whim of any consciousness.

Dawson Bethrick in his essay "The Axioms and The Primacy of Existence" makes this point via example: "If I see a bottle that was manufactured in Atlanta, Georgia, my supposing (LB: via way of my freedom of consciousness) that it was manufactured in Montreal Canada will not alter the fact that it was actually manufactured in Atlanta, Georgia. Why? Because of the primacy of existence: the task of cognition is to identify reality , not to create or alter it. ... Notice how this principle is integral to the concepts 'true' , 'false', 'error', 'correct', 'incorrect', etc. Because cognition requires some object(s), (LB: for to be conscious is to be conscious of something) and the data which informs cognition about an object must be gathered from the object by some process performed by the subject, and because it is possible to misidentify the nature of an object, we need a set of principles which guide the mind through the process by which it identifies what exists." (www.geocities.com/katholon/AxiomsPOE.htm)

Bethrick's cogent observation of a need for a set of principles gets to the heart of what Michael Martin assumed the reader of "The Case Against Christianity" should intuitively understand. That there is an epistemic duty or obligation(correction: duty should be replaced with self-interested inclination) for a rational minded being to use an empirical method like methodological naturalism to obtain verified true knowledge. My question reduced to how Bethrick's need is translated into Martin's duty(correction: duty should be replaced with self-interested inclination). To answer the question in a way that is universally true for all rational beings, I appealed to life and life's basic chemical tendency to form in opposition to the entropy of non-life, for a rational mind's freedom is a composite trait built upon a foundation of the primacy of existence of chemical life. The earliest self-replicating molecules propagated due to self-organization resultant from the way existence operates (i.e.: the laws of biology, chemistry and physics; see "Genesis: The Scientific Quest for the Origin of Life" by Robert Hazen). I attempted to show that life exists by deductive reasoning from not committing the fallacy of the excluded middle by positing that life is not equal to non-life. I do not know if this attempt was valid because it may be the case that a thing may still not actually exist even if it can be posited in such a way as to avoid violation of the fundamental laws of thought. My assumption that a posited reality's failure to violate the three basic laws of thought would be sufficient to establish the existence of that reality is a weak point in my earlier argument as was the possible fallacy of equivocation in equating life with life's evolutionary self-organization. This latter flaw can be eliminated by simply rewriting and elaborating the earlier argument. However, if life does actually exist, then primacy of existence and the axioms can establish that all rational conscious beings do have an epistemic obligation(correction: obligation should be replaced with self-interested inclination) as a result of the laws of biology, chemistry, and physics translated into the innate properties of an aware rational conscious mind. Such an epistemic obligation(correction: obligation should be replaced with self-interested inclination) can be characterized as a sort of Kantian categorical imperative(correction: categorical imperative should be replaced with causal goal seeking) to use empirical methodological naturalism as a means to acquire verified true knowledge. This characterization is more in way of a loose metaphor than a metaphysical quality of some primacy of consciousness fallacy laden and ill defined "human soul" (correction added - or supernatural being) as Kant thought.

On the objection regarding freedom of conscious minds I note that freedom in the philosophical sense is "the power to exercise choice and make decisions without constraint from within or without; autonomy; self-determination."(from Dictionary.com) Thus freedom is a property of consciousness and is subject to the many fallacies afflicting consciousness. Yet existence still exists, and any universal existent will be applicable or cognizable to any appropriately aware consciousness. For that reason I think that while a living being with a consciously aware mind has the freedom to destroy itself or to seek some disadvantage, to do so would not be rational or objective and would go against the organism's innate evolutionary desire to live and prosper. All rational conscious beings that are alive and seek to remain alive and prosper will conform to Bethrick's and Martin's observations. Why is that? Why does life exhibit the property of self-interest? Because life in its most basic form as self-replicating molecules capable of Darwinian evolution and coupled to some type of metabolism will (due to the way existence works via the laws of biology, chemistry and physics) continue to live as long as it has the resources to do so. When such simple organisms encounter an adaptive constraint, natural selection of positive beneficial mutations enables the daughter organisms to survive and adapt. Evolutionary fitness (genetic adaptation) via differential rates of reproduction (survival) of lineages of an organism endemic to the core root of a physical existent being enjoined with the primacy of existence ascendant over freedom of consciousness entails life has an obligatory duty(correction: duty should be replaced with self-interested inclination) to lift itself up out of the mud, out of privation, to throw off bondage to false gods, to rise up as with inherent nobility and dispense with dark age superstition (Christianity), and oppressive forms of government, as well as to use empirical methodological naturalism to ascertain verified knowledge. Thus I think it an example of the primacy of consciousness fallacy to assert any rational being's freedom of consciousness relieves it of the need and duty to use empirical methods of knowing and of obtaining existent benefits if that indeed was what Brant was inferring.

Many thanks in advance for your thoughtful replies, and please don't be shy. Kick in your opinions and of course best regards to you and yours.

Edited November 4, 2007 by libertarianbob01

[Brant Gaede]

"Imparting a duty upon the rational person" only means forcing it on him or annoying the hell out of him. And don't forget the irrational person.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

Am I anywhere near to something that could pass for right? What do you fine and good people think?

Best Regards, Kevin Brown (DFW, Texas)

We don't have duties. We have contractual obligations.

People who have made no contracts, explicit or implicit have no duties.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[libertarianbob01]

"Imparting a duty upon the rational person" only means forcing it on him or annoying the hell out of him. And don't forget the irrational person.

--Brant

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Yes I think I agree with you. After reading Ayn Rand's essay "Causality Versus Duty" this afternoon I came to understand the error of presumption of Kantian moral duty implicit in Dr. Martin's statement in "The Case Against Christianity". I now agree with Rand and have corrected my earlier posts by noting that the words duty or obligation should be replaced with the phrase self-interested inclination. The Kantian term "categorical imperative" was replaced with the phrase "causal goal seeking".

As for irrational beings there would be a number of cases determined by the extent of brain or CNS development. Organisms without a brain or CNS would be completely unable to exhibit capacity of self-interested directed inclinations. These beings would depend upon biochemical reactions that have evolved as adaptations to their environment to carry out beneficial activities promoting the survival of their species. Organisms with a CNS and sensory organs would be able to process signals from the environment to guide their behavior to achieve adaptive survival. However, animals of this characteristic would not be able to engage in self-interest as they lack a sense of self. Organisms with brains that are capable of decision making would have and even better chance of adaptive fitness and survival. Such animals having the advantage of reasoning and a sense of self would be very much advantaged by employing their self-interested inclination to use only empirical methods of ascertaining existence because doing so would allow them to more efficiently procure the necessary nutrients, obtain mates, rear young and so forth. But would such animals be rational? Perhaps it would be better to exclude rational animals with brains from any discussion of applicability of self-interested inclinations resultant from goal seeking causality to irrational beings. Is rationality an attribute of a CNS or is is limited to brains? Or is rationality a purely hominid phenomena and if so is it due to mental memetic mind virus'? What is rationality anyway?

But to directly address your point regarding the irrational person, any lack of self-interested inclinations to be reality based in the thinking of the irrational person will when conjoined with whatever bad luck may come will result in that person's genes being deselected. Whatever the reason for the affliction of irrationality in the mind of the deselected gene carrier we can be sure that the reason was completely naturalistic and that the irrationality was fully determined by natural causation.

That's all I got for now. Perhaps I'll think of something else by morning.

Best Regards

Edited November 4, 2007 by libertarianbob01

[libertarianbob01]

We don't have duties. We have contractual obligations.

People who have made no contracts, explicit or implicit have no duties.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Greetings: In my (new and improved: now corrected for improper nomenclature) first post, the duty or more accurately the self-interested inclination was implicit upon the self and imposed by self. My question was about why any rational consciously aware thinking intelligent being would be responsible to themselves to adopt a empirical way of knowing things. Thanks to reading Ayn Rand's essay "Causality Versus Duty" in "Philosophy Who Needs It" I identified the problem as the error made by Dr. Martin and myself in assuming the Kantian morality and concept of duty that are part of the standard indoctrination performed on young children in America was presumed valid and sound. Therefore I dispense with the notion of "duty" or "obligation" as the denotative meanings of these words infer a connective relationship with a supernatural being in some incomprehensible Platonic other realm. (BTW: did you notice you used the now bad word "obligation" in your post.) In my second message I attempted to explain and elaborate what my meaning was and why any rational being if they want (or have a natural propensity) to prosper and be evolutionary adaptive has a self-interested inclination in the form or a responsibility to themselves to employ only empirical methods of gaining verified knowledge. Then in my response to Brant and to you I explained how I found the error and corrected it. In the third post I explained in further detail and cited Rand from her essay. Yet the brief boiler plate like replies of Brant and yourself indicate you have little understanding of how evolutionary phenomena affect intelligent, rational beings within the context of objectivism. Hominids and primates when after maturing to reproductive age have a very strong natural instinct to reproduce. This is an evolutionary adaptation to achieve evolutionary fitness. The drive to sexual activity controls the minds of many otherwise quite intelligent and reasonable young people. The emotional attachments people feel for their children and the children for the parents is likewise an evolutionary adaption that has served our species well despite the obvious disadvantages to the adults. These are obvious examples. All the features of the human and primate minds are evolutionary adaptations. We are the result of billions of years of natural evolution. This indisputable fact is the foundation of my assertion that a rational minded being has a strong self-interest in promoting their natural inclination to be evolutionarily adaptive. Fulfillment of that self-interest and with some luck the rational minded organism can experience personal prosperity and evolutionary fitness via survival. When sapience is conjoined with self-interested inclination purposeful action results yielding self-imposed responsibility, for the rational minded organism recognizes its strong inclination to want to prosper and survive. Such recognition instantiates meta-cognition that self imposes a goal to be obtained. This goal can be loosely labeled as a self-imposed responsibility. Rand wrote of this in her essay mentioned previously.

Regarding your point about contracts and obligations. If the contracts are made under authority of a religious theocratic government, then they should not be enforced by objectivists, for the notion of obligation as a duty under the mysticism of theocracy is that of subservience to the imaginary deity of the leadership. No gods means no legitimate contracts under a religious government. Rand puts this well. "In a mystic theory of ethics, "duty" stand for the notion that man must obey the dictates of a supernatural authority. Even though the anti-concept has been secularized, and the authority of God's will has been ascribed to earthly entities, such as parents, country, State, mankind, etc:, their alleged supremacy still rests on nothing but a mystic edict."

Thats all for now. Perhaps I'll think of something else later.

Edited November 4, 2007 by libertarianbob01

[libertarianbob01]

Here is my third post on this topic written shortly after reading Rand's essay "Causality Versus Duty" from "Philosophy Who Needs It"

Today I went to my local library and checked out their copy of Ayn Rand's “Philosophy Who Needs It”. Her essay “Causality Versus Duty” addressed the issue in my question regarding Dr. Michael Martin's assumption that his readers would intuitively understand that rational minded beings have a “duty” to use empirical methods to gain knowledge. Rand correctly identified the error that Dr. Martin made in his assumption. It is the same error that has afflicted my own thinking for all of my life as the notion of duty as defined by the dictionaries Rand cites in her essay was pounded into my little mush filled cranial cavity from the beginning.

Ayn Rand wrote in her essay “Causality Versus Duty” the following in contrast to Immanuel Kant's descriptions of duty as a component of his prescriptive morality. “If one were to accept it, the anti-concept “duty” destroys the concept of reality: an unaccountable, supernatural power takes precedence over facts and dictates one's actions regardless of context of consequences. Duty destroys reason: it supersedes one's knowledge and judgment, making the process of thinking and judging irrelevant to one's actions. Duty destroys values: it demands that one betray or sacrifice one's highest values for the sake of an inexplicable command and it transforms values into a threat to one's moral worth. Since the experience of pleasure or desire casts doubt on the moral purity of one's motives. Duty destroys love:who could want to beloved not from inclination but from duty? Duty destroys self-esteem: it leaves no self to be esteemed. If one accepts that nightmare in the name of morality, the infernal irony is that duty destroys morality. A deontological (duty-centered) theory of ethics confines moral principles to a list of prescribed duties and leaves the rest of man's life without any moral guidance, cutting morality off from any application to the actual problems and concerns of man's existence, Such matters as work, career, ambition, love, friendship, pleasure, happiness, values (insofar as they are not ;pursued as duties) are regarded by these theories a amoral, i.e., outside the province of morality. If so, then by what standard is a man to make his daily choices, or direct the course of his life?”

After exposing the undesirability of “duty” per Kant and due to Kant's philosophical fixing of duty as an obligation to a supernatural being or to the designated agents of some supernatural being, Rand describes how causality instead serves rational ethics.:

“Reality confronts man with a great many musts, but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is “You must if - “ and the if stands for man's choice: “if you want the achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. Your must think, if you you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think – if you want to know what to do – if you want to know what goal to choose- if you want to know how to achieve them.

In order to make the choices required to achieve his goal, a man needs the constant, automatized awareness of the principle which the anti-concept “duty” has all but obliterated in his mind: the principle of causality - specifically, of Aristotelian final causation (which, in fact, apples only to a conscious being), i.e., the process by which an end determines the means, i.e., the process of choosing a goal and taking the actions necessary to achieve it.

In a rational ethics, it is causality - not duty - that serves as the guiding principle in considering, evaluating and choosing one's actions, particularly those necessary to achieve a long range goal. Following this principle, a man does not act without knowing the purpose of his actions. In choosing a goal, he considers the means required to achieve it, he weighs the value of the hierarchical context of all his other values and goals. He does not demand the impossible of himself, and he does not decide too easily which things are impossible. He never drops the context of the knowledge available to him, never evades reality, realizing fully that his goal will not be granted to him by any power other than his own action, and, should he evade, it is not some Kantian authority that he could be cheating, but himself.”

From the forgoing it is plain that Dr. Martin and I have erred in assuming that the word duty would suffice for the purpose of representing the evolutionary inclination to self-interest. A rational conscious being will use an empirical way of gaining certain (to some degree or other) knowledge (via methodological naturalism) if that being is self interested in continuing to live, to prosper, to adaptively fit to whatever constraints the environment may impose, to survive by passing on its genetic material to a new generation. So while my case for an obligation to one's own self via way of inclination to fulfill self-interest due to evolutionary self-organization was flawed by the error of not defining the terms obligation or duty as in no way having a meaning associated with any primacy of consciousness fallacy like a Platonic metaphysical other realm or a supernatural “spirit” being. To correct the error, the terms duty or obligation anywhere found in my first two posts should be replaced with the phrase “self-interested inclination”, and categorical imperative should be replaced with "causal goal seeking".

Please accept my apologies for arguing from error. It is my goal to always be self-correcting when it comes to philosophical reasoning.

[BaalChatzaf]

Regarding your point about contracts and obligations. If the contracts are made under authority of a religious theocratic government, then they should not be enforced by objectivists, for the notion of obligation as a duty under the mysticism of theocracy is that of subservience to the imaginary deity of the leadership. No gods means no legitimate contracts under a religious government. Rand puts this well. "In a mystic theory of ethics, "duty" stand for the notion that man must obey the dictates of a supernatural authority. Even though the anti-concept has been secularized, and the authority of God's will has been ascribed to earthly entities, such as parents, country, State, mankind, etc:, their alleged supremacy still rests on nothing but a mystic edict."

Thats all for now. Perhaps I'll think of something else later.

There is nothing mysterious about contracts. They are voluntary agreements among parties in which valuable considerations are exchanged. Very often the exchange is goods for goods or goods for services or services for services. The existence of our society depends on the faithful execution of contracts. This is not biology per se, but a modality that humans have created to promote survival which requires some kind of society. Some of the more advanced apes have something akin to to contracts but nothing as abstract and complicated (mutual grooming arrangements and fighting alliances). Evolution is involved to the extent that a mentality sophisticated and complicated enough has arisen among the hominid species and some of the apes (in particular chimps, bononbos and baboons and possibly gorillas). Evolution is about one thing and one thing only, reproductive success. So far, the ants (for example) are better at it than we are, in the sense they have been doing it much longer.

I think you are looking for something that is not there, and that is Purpose. There is no purpose in or for evolution. It just happens. It is, as Darwin noted, a consequence of reproduction our running the means to support life, so something akin to culling (but without conscious direction) occurs with living things. Evolution is very, very complicated but there is no mystery to it. The doings of living things appears mysterious to us (in some ways) because we do not understand them nearly as well as we understand how elementary particles and and fields work.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited November 4, 2007 by BaalChatzaf