A Little Research

I forgot to say that in my story of pleasure and pain, I don;t define them as joy and sorrow or just toe curling pleasure and agonizing pain. Eating a solid meal is pleasure, while taking that meal from someone else causes them pain. That may have been obvious, but you know how I obsess on being understood.

That is probably one of the saner discussions I have seen on this site. Bully for you Big, those are great questions!

1&2- If you can answer these with absolute certainty, then you deserve a nobel prize for scientific achievement. 3-Truth is subjective. the only absolute is fact. There's a difference between those 2 words. 4-From our mothers. Women are the sane side of the species that keeps us barbarians in check. I claim no affiliation to any church & believe that a person's spiritual well being is a personal choice. I especially believe that the path to "God" is not found only through the church. I know That I'm living right. but I'm still going to hell according to a lot of folks.Because I've not been "saved".

LOL I'm religious but I can tell you an Evolutionist will answer your question by asking? 1. Where are the Dinosaurs in the Bible? 2. Did Noah have any penguins or Polar Bears in his Ark? 3. Does a cat or a dog have a soul? 4. If the Christians are right about everything, does this mean the Jews, Buddhists, or Muslims go to Hell? And vice versa.

you should also be asking where DNA came from. It is one thing for the 250 some odd proteins to "randomly" be forced into a functioning cell, but where did the DNA come from that was it's blue print for building and reproducing?

1) If you believe the universe is infinite, then you must also believe that it never had a start. I tend to agree with this theory in the sense that the universe has never truly started and nor will it end. It simply expands and contracts over long periods of time. I think most people have trouble with the idea of a never end/starting universe, but I also think something as large as the universe is not a concept that is to be totally understood by the current knowledge of man. Without even knowing if there is truly more life out in the universe, or even some more of the "simple" questions here on earth, I think understanding the true birth of the universe is a far off problem to solve. 2) I'm a little lost as to this question. You mean did they use the common male/female organs? If so, the reproduction of pre-human organisms has already been widely studied and the information can be looked up on any credible Science website or library. If there is something else I am missing here, please let me know. If not, organisms now, and then have always evolved with many different methods. The single celled organisms found ways of reproducing (and still do) via mitosis for obvious reasons while more complex organisms have been made to bump uglys from time to time. Then again, this is all basic 5th grade science stuff here so I get the feeling Im missing the point of your question. 3) No. There are only perceptions of ones own reality. This would tend to explain the nature of the earth as well as the nature of human behavior. Then again, the very question of absolute truth only creates the same unending questions about the universe and its start. If you believe there is absolute truth, then you would also have to believe that there is a purpose and direction for all decisions made in the universe. Which tends to lead people against the idea of Free Will. On the other hand, to believe in no absolute truth would mean that nothing I say or do really matters. Instead however I feel at that moment is the "right" feeling to me. I generally choose this type of thinking becuase of how my own life has played out. Even on this very website the idea of absolute truth seems like a joke. I would need a hundred hands to count all the times one persons perception of a problem on the site was completely different from my own. Entire clans of people have left 2old2play for what they thought to be an absolute truth while my own reflections was %100 different from their own. Im not saying this proves my own idea of no absolute truth, only that it strengthens my own believe in it. 4) Asking who started to determine right from wrong is not a question that can be answered. Its like saying, who was the first guy to murder? Who has the first guy to think murder was wrong? We simply dont have any way of researching this and and answer given should not be taken seriously. In terms of why it started, I suppose it can be hypothesized as to moralities use for basic human survival. If we look at it from evolutions stand point, we can see that morality is a basic function of humanities own survival in the world. Wolves tend to not eat other wolves if given suitable prey. This is something common that most people can agree upon. Is the reason becuase they have morality? Or is it simply becuase eating ones own pup or offspring brings down the chances of a packs survival? A more advance organism (such as our selves) can take this idea further with the continuing growth of morality. It evolves within societies to provide an easier way for us to reproduce an live on the planet. Also, plenty of cultures do not share the same morality as others which can lead you to believe that morality really isnt a singluar idea with all humans. The only constant within this idea is the need to survive. So while some cultures may think it is moral to beat women and treat them as slaves, others would disagree. If harmony within the culture is maintained, then the morality is serving its purpose for survival. Oddly enough, this same idea goes back to the idea of no absolute truth. An entire cultures reality can vary differently from our own. Food for thought I suppose. Good talk.

the answer to everything is 42. Didn't anybody here read The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

I agree with doodi. Probably not helpful, but all i have time for. :P - BAT

1. I used to believe the big bang. It was that belief that started my journey towards God. It seems to me much more fantastic to believe that nothing became something , it exploded and became everything. Form this, life was created? Nothing begat life, which became a cell which became the amazing complex life we see today? 2. This leads me to my disbelief in the first question. How did sexual reproduction begin? What how did the first male slime know to reproduce with the first female slime and so on. 3. Yes, there is absolute truth. 4. Morality was given to us by God. Everyone , every culture, knows that it is wrong to steal, it is wrong to kill.

1. If you ask my ex-wife, her answer is "you're the fucking reason for all this shit". So I guess it came from me. 2. I'm guessing it took 2 martinis and a cigarette. 3. I have an email into Bill Clinton for the answer to this one. 4. Everything dies... everyone is moral because they die.

Did I win?

1. The worm hole in the center of our galaxy exploded and our planets/moons are the left-overs that came out. 2. I imagine the same things, the pee pee and whoo whoo. 3. Humans are not capable of absolute truth but it does exist. 4. Morality started out as someones natural instincts and expectations of right and wrong. Later those people came into power to turn those things into law to define what is moral for everyone.

The morality question is a toughie. What is it and where did it come from? It's actually sort of counter-evolutionary. I had a discussion with someone not too long ago about this. It brought to mind a discussion in a high school science class, about altruism and how it could possibly benefit a person to pull someone else's baby out of a burning building at risk to oneself. But back to the question at hand--I have never been able to fully satisfy my curiosity regarding how morality could have ever evolved. It is definitely different from culture to culture but it seems everyone has some type of code that gets passed down. My feeling is that it starts out for some practical purpose--don't have sex with many different people, or you will get a disease and die--and somewhere along the line it just gets changed to, sex is bad.

1. What was the first cause? In this case I'm looking at ultimate first cause. If you believe int the Big Bang theory, where did the material that exploded come from and what force enacted on it. No answer to this one but it is important to note that if you are a subscriber to the "Big Bang Theory" that you have to accept as one of the postulates that an explanation of origin is not included in the theory. It's a model used to describe conditions subsequent to an origin, rather than a theory about origin. I'm not real comfortable with the semantically nonsensical "Infinite-Expanding" universe thing, but I'm fairly sure that's a lot of malarkey anyway dumbed down to give layman an explanation and model for something that only a few people in the world are even qualified to judge their own ignorance regarding. The Theory of Everything does a nice job of developing the ideas of origins through the use of the waveicle model of superstring theory. If you by that light and sound can travel it's not too far a leap to imagine a variety of indetectable wavelengths that form energies we don't perceive and have no way of detecting. It is still just a model though. However, I'm pretty sure any self-respecting physicist will tell you the same thing I am which is that nobody knows these answers. 2. WIth what did the first species capable of reproduction, reproduce with? I'm looking at normal male/female reproduction here. This a typical "chicken-and-egg" question that attempts to semantically trap you into anthropomorphizing cellular behavior. Why do sodium and potassium always try to equal each other out? They don't. It's their condition to be in balance within a cell structure that causes nerve firing. They have no motive. Prehistoric protists probably reproduced asexually until a favorable mutation developed a diploid of a species that enjoyed the evolutionary advantage of more quickly repairing genetic damage and more easily sharing beneficial traits to its progeny. If you are limiting your thinking to some hairy/feathery platypus looking thing crawling through mesozoic soup looking for a girlfriend then you can't possibly envision a successful outcome. However, the more realistic image is billions of cellular exchanges and reproductions and radioactively initiated mutations occurring in the same teaspoon of water. 3. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? Everyone familiar with Schrodinger's cat? The thought experiment determined that at a molecular level everything existed as a cloud of probability. Humans are approaching a mindbogglingly large biomass which by it's sheer numbers is becoming increasingly unpredictable. Me calling it "true" does not convince anyone. Me demonstrating a "fact" does not end the debate in almost any situation. I have a pretty smart friend that thinks we faked the moon landings. People believe what they want to believe. Truth to me is the sense of rightness I get when presented with an idea that leads me to a closer understanding of something. So for me, absolute truth can't exist. 4. Where did morality come from? Moore and Hume are the guys to get into this with. They are the ones that fuck up the idea of "evolutionary ethics." This provides a very neat model of certain behavior continuing because it beneficial to the practitioners of that behavior. So simple and neat that the more secular minded could point to early grassland protohumans surrounding an antelope and hitting it with rocks at the same time, while the more fundamenatlist types could piss on Eve for eating the apple and saddling us all with this difficult question. However, they do a pretty neat job of knocking down everyone that wants an elegant solution to absolve us from guilt and say "nope, naturalisitic fallacy!" Morals are just more white men attempting to subjugate everyone else through a nonsensical explanation of a a non-natural state they call "good." After that you have to get into an argument about how it has changed to determine if it is beneficial at all. I had a professor named Jim Livingston at Rutgers that delighted in this type of discussion. It was him that resolved a lot of these nagging arguments for me when one of the whippersnappers in the room tried to trap him into a conclusion on the existence of God. I was a lot older than everyone else I was in school with at the time and I knew I was no match for Jim's brain so I just shut my mouth when he told them he was an atheist that believed in God. When they tried to "explain" to him that God was a man-made construct Jim just pointed out to them that a dam was too. It still held back the water.

1. What was the first cause? In this case I'm looking at ultimate first cause. If you believe int the Big Bang theory, where did the material that exploded come from and what force enacted on it. If you have some other hypothosis, where did that first material/force come from? No idea. Both sides of this argument are working on a faith based position...faith in god or science. Its unknowable. 2. WIth what did the first species capable of reproduction, reproduce with? I'm looking at normal male/female reproduction here. Assuming life sprung up first in the oceans, this get really grey. Many simple organisms like corals and anemones are capable of a variety of reproduction. Sexual/asexual/cloning/splitting...all depending on whats available at the time. 3. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? Probobly not unless you go to the very basic idea like "I think therefor I am". 4. Where did morality come from? Not so much a commentary on how it's changed over time, but why did it start and who decided to start determining right from wrong. Really I think these rules just sprang up from a group of people acting as a team and working out what rules are the most beneficial to the group. The word morality implies rules and consequences, I dont believe in hell. To live by a code opposed to your neighbors brings its own consequences by their reaction to you but thats about it.

1. Any answer anyone has is based on faith in a belief. That doesn't mean it has to be a secular faith. Because enough thought experiments have shown that pretty much anything we think we know breaks down as we approach the concept of a singularity, I believe anything we claim to know about that singularity is simply a belief itself. Personally, I believe our singularity was not the only one. Popcorn kernels popping. Why some popped and where the kernels came from I dunno. 2. I'm in the group that does not understand the angle of your question. Not sure how to respond. 3. Since Truth is a mental construct, and so is Absolute, the answer to this question depends on how you interpret those mental constructs. The only absolutes, by my definition, that I know of are death of the body and absolute zero. The rest is shades of probability. 4. Morality is an eventuality formed from the golden rule, which I believe to be a self-evident concept. Once mankind developed the ability to think beyond our own pleasure and pain, we were able to envision the cause and effect of our actions on others and extend our own experiences onto those of someone else. Some were not bothered by this, just like some aren't today, but those who were, naturally began to band together when it became apparent that doing so would increase pleasure and decrease pain for all. Much much later, such natural concepts were codified into a series of beliefs that do not always agree with the concepts of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. I believe that the notion of minimizing pain somehow overtook the concept of maximizing pleasure and that is how the notion of morality became more about not hurting others or yourself than it did about bringing pleasure to others or yourself. What that "somehow" is, I don't know. But, if I had to guess, I'd say it probably began with leaders realizing that it made sense to have everyone else focus on not causing pain to others, while they themselves were free to explore the concept of their own pleasure. I'd say that started at the smallest group level and worked its way up the chain as larger and larger groups of people formed. Eventually, the groups became large enough, and smart enough to begin to question why they had one set of rules and their leaders had another. And so, leaders began to at least pay lip service to the rules, although they were always sure to make exceptions for themselves, based on the concept of royal privilege. of course, that term did not exist yet, but the concept sure did. Anyway, that's probably enough, since you asked for where it began and not the entire history of it. Yep, I'm a bit on the odd side of things. :)

Oh great, you already thanked everyone. My comments go unheard yet again.

I mostly agree with Doodi, but here's the short version: 1) Ditto doodi.. this is something we can probably never know 2) Cell division.. asexual reproduction.. sexual reproduction is beneficial for complex organisms and their more complicated phenotype expression.. amoebas, not so much 3) Sure there is, youll just never hear it from a human.. Anything we observe and express, to some extent, goes through our own personal cultural filters and gets a subjective sping before we can repeat it.. Except maybe math.. 4) It's probably a byproduct of human population increasing.. groups that had some type of moral code to prevent them from offing each other or contaminating their water supply would be more likely to survive the harsh reality of living without microwaves and pre-cooked bacon. Not trying to start a fight either, but I think the term 'evolutionist' is a bit of a misnomer, unless you're specifically referring to people who have a religious belief in evolution.. that would be like calling a casual mathematition an algebrist or a pythagorist... just my $.02