CopyRight @ 1997
Realize that I have now worked on this near 30 years. No matter how you look at it, this is some difficult stuff. How many times I have wanted to be able to finish and be done with it. Well, perhaps I have some new tools that will allow me to organize this in such a way that I can finish. As such, I offer the following introduction. I have learned that you have to describe something from the beginning.
This section is about morality, the learned methods that humans use to survive. Humans have thoughts, knowledge, beliefs, understandings and perhaps even some wisdom. We use what we know, to survive, more than instinct. That is the mark of a human. Only our knowledge allows us to survive. This knowledge must be described to be able to understand how it can work together to make a morality that works or does not. Here is how the building blocks of human knowledge can be described usefully.
Overall, this is an idea that one must think about. It then should fit into a persons understanding as another useful tool.
A while back I noticed that knowledge (best word) comes in clumps. If you have an idea, it may take X amount of time to think of it. As the idea expands and gets added to, it still takes about X amount of time to think it. It's like you can string thoughts together where they were previously seperate. It takes the same amount of time to retrieve one big combined thought as it does to retreive a small individual thought. For this reason, I came up with the term 'mindset' to describe these clumps of thoughts. Really, all these clumps have their own linkages that a person develops through life and that big clump is called a persons mind. Still, mindsets is a good way to look at some processes in the mind.
Eventually I ran into the term 'meme'. It seemed to be the same as a mindset, but it was a more complete description with many implications that I didn't think of. I found the essay in a book by David Brin, called 'Otherness'. It's mostly speculative fiction, but he wrote about a lecture on memes, that he had attended and he thought the idea important enought that he included it in his book. There is an irony to that that will be mentioned.
The concept of a meme is that it is the inheritable unit of knowledge, extremely similar to genes in the biological world. It is not just that ideas group together as mindsets, but also that ideas survive and spread. If an idea is a useful one, it grows and spreads. If not, it dies and vanishes.
The irony here is that the concept (meme) of memes, seems so useful that people (David Brin and I at least) think it should be spread. Obviously a very superior meme. In my terms of morality, it seems that the concept of memes will be very useful, because it is a good way to describe the methods humans use to survive (moralities).
This also suggests that some ideas can combine and some really cannot. There are likely to be catalyst memes so that unlike memes can combine. Some individual memes that are not of much importance by themselves, can take on great importance when combined. Did you ever notice how one idea can bring together others that didn't fit before? Many things observed in evolutionary biology are going to be recognized as having analogs in memes.
More specifically, memes can refer to ideas at many levels. They may be simple like a persons sudden realization of the solution to a simple common problem. They may be understandings of technical or physical principles. They can be a simple insight or they may be represented by the moral and philosophical progress of humanity over the centurys.
There is a parellel to this in the computer software world. It is the object model. It is a model that is taken from how things occur in the real world. It recognizes that there is a relationship between any data and how the data can be manipulated. Data can be written, read, changed, etc. In the object model the data is bound to the methods that manipulate it. The idea of the meme is that there are things that humans know and bound to them is their history, known variations, known importance and even how it effects or associates with other memes. When data includes information about what the nature of the data is, that information is called meta-data.
Actually, it may be more important than that. There is another concept that comes from computers called data abstraction that may apply here as well. This is an extremely powerful method in the computer world and if it applies here, then the meme model of human information could revolutionize human understanding. Data abstraction allows information to be manipulated without a knowledge of what the data is, just its nature. It is like using a pointer or reference in programming. (Just figure that it's a sort of complicated idea that simplifies really complicated ideas). It's hard to say if this will be possible, but if it is, humans will be able to develop understandings that we cannot approach at present.
In any case, the concept of memes is presently a useful way to describe human knowledge in the real world.
Realize, I started this study looking at more traditional biology and genetics. It was only after a fair amount of time that I realized the importance of morality to this study. As I continued my research, my understanding of morality and its importance grew. Initially, I just worked to collect a summary of what ideas humans used to survive and then tried to catagorize them in useful ways. Initially, in the next two chapters, I catagorized them as:
Since I was operating on the premise that human survival was largely based on cooperation, the next chapter is called Contractswas to describe methods, some quite informal and some quite institutionalized, that facilitate cooperation. This section includes both informal agreements and what could be called contracts that are more formal agreements, such as marriage, political treatys, money and other methods humans use to take advantage of our ability to act together. The first thing to examine about cooperation though is language and other methods of communication.
The last chapter was supposed to be a summary of what these all meant. We'll see about that.
The better known moralities are referred to as religions. Most art, science and technology was part of religion, but separated as the innate conservatism of religion could not keep up with the technical innovation of human history. Religious conservatism is the reason it is still is a prime repository of social and reproductive moral knowledge. Technology changes rapidly, basic human survival strategies have not. This is because human survival is based on the family and that has not fundamentally changed.
One characteristic of religious moralities, is that they are based on precedence and authority. They may give reasons for why something is done, but more often, rules are followed because either it is the way the ancestors did it or else God said to do it this way. In terms of reproductive survival, doing something the way your ancestors did something, makes a lot of sense. It worked for them over generations. Innovation in biology, is mainly done when it is necessary. Biology generally follows the rule of that if it isn't broke, don't fix it. This is especially true in genetic evolution, because changes that can lead to progress are based on random mutation, the majority of which are failures. Using a survival system that is based on past success makes great sense, considering the risks involved any time a new moral system is adopted.
So an objective of this examination of morality is to examine existing moral systems by looking at the moral laws of the system. They must be described as memes in the context of their sources, consequences, apparent logic that might have led to the law and adaptability.
An examination of moralities as collections of memes, should allow for the other primary objective of this book, which is to describe any morality well enough to show what parts are based on reason and logic and what parts are based on authority and precedence. This could do a lot towards allowing the intentional development of new memes that an individual could add to their own morality. This is the primary way by which humans adapt to their environment. It would also allow a person to examine their morality and know better what it means and how it could be improved. It would help any individual that has trouble using a morality without completely understanding it. The reasons of authority and precidence are not enough for them to embrace and use a morality. They must also have an understanding of the reason and logic of the morality.
This view of a new moral system should look quite similar to the moral systems husbanded by religions at present. This is for a few reasons. The first is that present moral systems work pretty darn good at present. The second and third reasons are related. The second reason is that we do not yet have much to work with in developing new moral survival strategies. The third reason is that there is inherently extreme risk to humans modifying our moral system. The risk verses gain equation is just way to high to promote a lot of change without compelling reasons. Just because something appears like a good idea, it will still have to be judged conservatively, over time, to avoid the potential for dire consequences. On the other hand, change is occurring at an accelerating rate. That, population growth, communication, medicine and other factors are going to promote changes that are going to encroach on the effectiveness and practicality of our current moral systems. A moral view based on reason and biology has an ability to use the various tools of science to analyze different models of morality and to look forward for new models. The current precedence based moral systems must be analyzed in terms that can be compared to a biological analysis of morality. This must be the starting point of creating a biological model of morality. Any future models of morality must be based on past models. This is a feature of the conservatism of biology.
Survival is the ultimate expression of conservatism.
So, this next part of the book starts by looking at the elements that make up morality. Then it examines them as memes that are organized into moral systems. This information is then analyzed to show the meanings of the memes making up present moral systems and suggest potential future memes that could be useful to a moral sysytem. Part of what is called future moral methods refers to what Chapter 5 described as creating post tribal and post multi-tribal stratified societies, but actually more interesting is a currently existing meme that allows for the cooperation that has been and could be a basis for some of the greatest of human progress.