Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MrMcCall 559 days ago
True, but our consciousness comes with an integral moral compass that we are completely free to utterly ignore or even act in opposition to. It's our gift and our responsibility, and our absolute choice, for good or ill.
1 comments

Is it actually integral? I’m not sure. Try asking a person whether some arbitrary scenario is right or wrong and why. A good null hypothesis is that, for people with no training in morality or ethics, responses will be uniformly distributed over outcomes.
Yes, but we can choose to ignore it. Ignorance of our human nature potentials is our choice, too, and that's the reason for the inertia of the world's societies, including ones that claim to be religious.

The key is that, just as our physical bodies have developmental stages of ever-increasing capability, so does our moral compass. We must learn how to not only use it, but to develop it and fine-tune over time, and we must train and use our mind to self-evolve ourselves.

Note that we can use our free will to de-tune it as well so that we have pointed ourselves in the direction opposite to our happiness, and that of those we come in contact with. In other words, we are free to use our abilities to create unhappiness, out of sadistic pleasure.

The first step of the spiritual path is awakening to this highest of human potential, where we learn to willfully and with difficult effort develop our moral compass in the direction of compassionate concern for the well-being of our fellow human beings. This is why the selfish -- to themselves and their in-group -- people of the world are loath to hear the term "woke"; they take pleasure in remaining ignorant of both the unhappiness they cause and thus karmically receive by their selfish actions. And the same impulse within us that seeks to keep us ignorant of our highest human potential, is also keen to keep its ideals, attitudes, and behaviors off other people's radar. The development of a selflessly compassionate morality become like garlic to a vampire (and they do suck, and suck the life-blood out of the world's systems and people, for sure, causing so much misery by their efforts).

So, yes, our moral compasses are each in various states of development, from the utterly ignored to sometimes-positive-sometimes-negative to the fully developed. As usual, such distributions follow a bell curveish shape. But only the long tail in the positive direction understands and manifests the highest morality. The middle bulk are hit or miss, per their cultures' predilections and the circumstances of their life. And the negative tail are the uttlerly selfish evil bastards of the world.

You can find a full explication of our human nature to self-evolve and the process of manifesting such change in the deep dialog I had yesterday under my comment to Maria Konnikova's poetry article submission. You have to skip past my initial reply and its grand-reply to get to the meat of it.