Isn’t that a binary question? I have a third explanation for morality – it is just one part of the blossoming of complexity and beauty that the planet (universe) has been on for a few billion years.
I’ve always viewed the moral codes about how we should behave to be the codification of how an animal with instincts to maximize its own personal resources and contributions to the future gene pool, how that animal reconciles those selfish drives with the requirement to live harmoniously in a peaceful society in which being altruistic is important, as well as the fact that someone exhibiting those selfish drives wouldn’t be tolerated for very long and the society at large would quickly put a stop to it, and worse (we typically call these people psychopaths or sociopaths, and from my understanding they actually have something physically wrong with their brains). Basically, as we quickly moved from small tribes up to cities and countries, clearly that’s going to create some conflicting drives in an individual since there is no way that our genetic programming for behaviour can change that quickly. It is interesting that the 10 Commandments and other similar religious guides on behaviour came out right around the time that small tribes were merging into much larger societies and started to increasingly face these tough moral questions…
Most people are able to reconcile these competing drives fairly easily in a society that is compassionate, has enough resources to keep everyone satisfied, and fairly rewards individual effort. It’s the sociopaths that can’t, and we all lament how it’s them who migrate into positions of power.
For example, if a polar bear had a 10 Commandments, they wouldn’t be the same as ours. Polar bears basically have no society and they can fall back on their quest to maximize personal resources and contribution of genes to the future without any qualms, since a polar bear has no need to do otherwise; to the contrary. But what if those polar bears started to live together in societies of thousands? What about the Kodiak bears in Alaska who come together to fish for salmon? Clearly there is some kind of a social structure in place which allows that plentiful resource to be more or less equitably shared by all the bears; it is in no one’s interest for one bear to go crazy and try to kill all other bears for being in its territory. They have to have some unwritten code for how they are to live together harmoniously for those few weeks of plenty. Do they have an unwritten 5 Commandments of Catching Salmon?
I agree that this is a very mechanical, materialistic and Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour, but it is undeniable that it explains very well these conflicting drives within our societies and ourselves, and puts them into perspective. But while I do believe that the classical interpretation of evolution undeniably describes the progress of life on earth quite well (including our behaviours), what I do disagree with is the HOW of evolution, both at the genetic level and behavioural. It is simply not remotely possible that a population of a few thousand rhinos could reproduce quickly enough to allow random mutations to express themselves upon which natural selection could act and change the species. I won’t discuss any of the genetics of this, other than to say that it is beyond ridiculous. There is something else driving complexity.
Many people have framed it as being one of two options: the world being either material reductionist (the atheists, in which case anything goes as long as it maximizes some measure of happiness or similar). This asserts that if you can understand the parts of the whole then you can understand the whole. Some determinists expand beyond this to admit that when these parts come together, sometimes the system is unpredictable because “emergent properties” occur, almost like it’s just because we can’t measure the starting conditions accurately enough to predict it; but ultimately everything is still deterministic even if we can’t measure it well. This is how they explain unpredictable biology.
The alternative to this of course is the explanation that some external force is driving the material world (the theistic religions). Forgive me if I am misrepresenting religious explanations, but I understand that the world was made by an immaterial Creator who shaped the material universe in His image. Our material bodies still retain some of this immaterial essence – in other words, our souls. This separates us from rocks or grass which do not have souls – they are mere materialistic objects. It is a dualistic explanation asserting that reality exists, and it is created by and described by immaterial laws of the universe from a higher creator. Since objective reality exists, it must exist within something bigger.
It is interesting that atheism basically emerged out of the church. Early evolutionists who were using the scientific method to discover and understand these laws of the universe created by God, some of them separated from the church and cast aside the idea of God and the soul, but kept the materialistic part, asserting that everything can be explained by a set of physical laws which form the basis of a deterministic universe. But it was still dualism – you have the material real world we can see and touch, in addition to a set of immaterial laws of the universe that we couldn’t see but whose effects we can see as they influence and govern the behaviour of material things. This world view made sense centuries ago since our ability to observe the universe was still pretty crude. Recently it has been creaking and groaning the more we learn about physics and biology.
The reason some things in the world are totally mechanically predictable (like an engine) is because their individual components are large enough to not be influenced by quantum effects. While the individual atoms in a metal part in your engine may be operating at the scale of quantum effects and not subject to deterministic behaviour, this collapses into something predictable when they are observed and created into larger objects by us because they number in the gazillions (Avogadro’s number) and therefore, statistically, are 100% guaranteed to collectively behave in a certain way. This is why the laws of thermodynamics are totally unbreakable, because statistically, when an object is created with many quadrillions of atoms, statistics takes over. But an individual atom can break the laws of thermodynamics no problem, when we observe it. This was alluded to in a recent podcast when it was mentioned that individual transistors in computer chips are now so small that they are no longer subject to deterministic laws and therefore cannot be relied upon to be repeatable.
Contrast this with biology, in which our minds work in an incredibly complex matrix of neuronal connections, where the brain’s complexity goes all the way down to the sub-cellular scale. It is entirely conceivable that a single synapse behaving non-deterministically can create a thought which causes someone to behave a certain way, in which case the bizarre microscopic realm of quantum physics gets translated into a macroscopic action on the scale of our bodies. A bolt on your car cannot do this because it is not this complex at the microscopic scale.
But even the above explanation is still materialistic – it is simply allowing for some “random” and weird phenomena happening at the tiny scale to influence a material reductionist explanation for reality. Is it really that we are basically materialistic objects mostly predictable, but which are subject to some quirky unpredictable behaviour due to our brains being so complex at the sub-cellular level? Or maybe it’s the other way around…
I take an entirely different interpretation, I flip it around. Consciousness isn’t just an emergent quality of other physical stuff. Consciousness IS the creative force. In other words, I disagree with the supposedly most basic truism of all - “I think, therefore I am”. Firstly, I do not separate myself from the universe. “I” do not exist in anything except my thoughts, since it is impossible to clearly draw a line separating my body from the rest of the environment around me as it is constantly in flux with its surroundings by the trillions every second. The only way that “I” could exist independently is if there was some immaterial part of me (a soul) separate from the material world. Secondly, there is no “other” thing to exist in, since that implies a greater framework outside of the world, which brings us back to dualism.
This so called “chaos” at the microscopic scale IS the consciousness that has created the so called material world. WE created the world because we are the world. There is no fundamental difference between the emergence of genetic complexity (“evolution”) versus any behavioural complexity or morality, since it is all part of “complexity”. They are just the same thing expressed differently. Our morality is an integral part of human society which itself is an expression of beauty in the universe. We are changing, we are driving it, and our “morals” will change over time along with the genetic drivers of our behaviour as the beauty of the universe continues to advance. It will happen faster than anyone thinks random evolution will drive it, but unfortunately it won’t progress nearly quickly enough to save ourselves from the inevitable collapse on its way caused by the behaviours of a few psychopaths in power whose brains are broken.
Nice to hear your ideas laid out here.