killing is wrong, right?

it seems pretty obvious that killing another human being is always morally wrong, right? i mean, who could argue with that? but, not so fast... it turns out things are a lot more complicated than that. here is a rundown:

1) if you are a soldier, you can kill an enemy soldier (at least if you are operating in accordance with your rules of engagement), and you are considered a war hero, a role model, someone for people to look up to.

2) if you are an executioner, executing someone who has been sentenced to death, you are simply doing your job, and it is ok, because somebody has to do it.

3) if you are a police officer, and you kill someone, and you were not found to be using excessive force or violating your police department’s guidelines, it is ok, since part of your job is to kill people, when it is necessary, of course.

4) if you feel your life is in danger and another person is going to kill you, you can kill them first, which is considered legitimate self-defense and is legal (unless the other person is a police officer, of course).

5) if you are a president or a military officer, you can order people lower down in the heirarchy to kill other people, and you can still be considered a hero, someone to look up to, even though there is blood on your hands, because you are defending the nation, and without someone to defend the nation, the people would be at the mercy of anyone who wanted to kill them.

6) if someone has a living will, and it says they do not want their life artificially prolonged, you can kill them by pulling the plug, which is not only legal, but something you are legally required to do if the living will says so.

7) if a person has not been born yet, they are just a fetus and not a real human being, so it is ok to kill them, which is not even really killing, it is just an abortion.

8) if you accidentally kill someone but it is unintentional, and you were not being negligent, and had no homicidal intent, you have not committed any crime, and it is not really your fault, even though technically it really is your fault, but not in the eyes of the law.

9) if you are a doctor and you accidentally screw something up and cause a patient to die, it is ok, as long as you are not found to have committed malpractice.

10) if someone asks you to kill them, and they need your help, it is ok, because what you are doing is really just assisted suicide, not really murder.

11) it is also ok to commit suicide because even if it is wrong, what are they going to do, arrest your dead body? besides, people ought to be able to make their own decisions, and if someone does not want to go on living, it is their right to make that decision and carry it out, without anyone else interfering.

12) according to many religions, it is ok to kill someone for many other reasons, such as heresy, apostasy, being an infidel, committing adultery, homosexual intercourse, and many other more obscure ones, such as cooking a lamb in its mother’s milk.

13) if a person is killed by natural causes, or if a person’s death is because a supposedly benevolent supernatural being wills it to be so, it is also ok.

so, you might not agree with all 13 of those. i certainly don’t agree with all 13 of those exceptions to the rule that killing a human being is wrong. but, almost everyone will agree with at least one of them. so, in morality, you see, there are no absolutes. and everybody has different viewpoints on morality. there is no one list of rules of morality, of what is right and what is wrong, what is permitted and what is prohibited, what the punishments for various offenses should be, there is no one such system that everyone can agree on. in fact, it is almost impossible to come up with a system that even 2 people could both agree on, since each person is bound to find at least one small detail in the other person’s system of morality that they disagree with.

so in a nutshell, what we have is a system where there are no absolutes, where there is nothing that everyone can agree on, and every moral rule or value is open to debate. that is because each human mind is free to decide for itself, and is physically disconnected from all other human minds in its thought process, only able to communicate with other minds through verbal processes such as speaking and listening or writing and reading, processes that are much slower and less efficient than thinking. verbal communication is also linear, one word after another, in series, which is highly inefficient. in the human brain, every brain cell simultaneously processes information and sends it from one cell to another in an incredibly intricate network, in a complex system made up of neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, and electrical currents, a system that is dynamic and always modifying itself to adapt to changing circumstances. in other words, processes that happen within one human brain are far too advanced to convey from one human to another in something as inefficient as verbal communication. therefore, communication, while far from useless, is nowhere near good enough to allow people of differing viewpoints to all come to a consensus, generally speaking.

small changes in initial conditions can create completely different end results. this is how fractals work, the basis of chaos theory, the underlying theory of nonlinear dynamic systems like the human brain. so, teach a class of almost identical students of the same age, same race, same gender, from the same socioeconomic background, raised in the same town, and each one will have different test scores and learn different things. even if they were all clones who shared the same dna, raised by the same parents, this would still happen. at every instant in time, somewhere in the universe, there is an event that occurs one way that could have turned out another way, at least according to most interpretations of quantum physics. in the many-worlds interpretation, the universe actually splits apart into parallel universes every time this happens. most other interpretations involve some sort of process to end up with having one decisive outcome, and having all other possibilities that once existed cease to exist. once this process is complete, an event is no longer in the present, and is in the past. the future is full of events whose outcome has not been determined yet.

so, 2 identical twins in the same universe operate on a similar basis to 2 copies of the same person in parallel universes. so without resorting to science fiction mumbo-jumbo, we can actually see how identical twins really do turn out differently, despite having very similar initial conditions. i personally know a pair of identical twins who majored in computer science at cornell. one chose to do it in the college of engineering, the other in the college of arts and sciences. one is christian fundamentalist, the other atheist. who knows why these things happen? the true reasons for all things are hidden. quantum physics teaches that humanity, or any other race of macroscopic beings in this universe, can never hope to understand what goes on at the subatomic level, or the true reasons for things, because, as beings made up of many tiny atoms, each atom by itself contains mysteries beyond our comprehension, because of the heisenberg uncertainty principle. it is impossible to even figure out what is going on for a single subatomic particle. so imagine how much more impossible it is to determine the outcome for a large collection of many subatomic particles that are all interconnected with each other. the complexity is mind-boggling. each particle constantly exerts forces on all the others, and all of the values are impossible to precisely calculate. so, this makes it impossible to predict the future. most notably, you may have realized that it is impossible for even the best meteorologists or computer models to predict the weather.

what does chaos mean for the human mind, and for morality? chaos means that human beings will undoubtedly always have disagreements, because even if they start out at the same initial conditions, believing in the same sets of facts, something else will undoubtedly enter into the picture and introduce a discrepancy between both minds in how they process the ideas, with the end result being a difference of opinion, or a different emotion, or a different behavior pattern, or whatever. it is what makes us unpredictable! we are beings based on chaos. while science thrives on order and we design electronics and computers based on the principles of order, we ourselves are based on chaos, and could not function without it. computers can never hope to have anywhere near the intelligence that we humans have, unless they too are made to be chaotic instead of orderly. computers nowadays are nothing but 1’s and 0’s, and always do exactly what they were programmed to do, following each line of machine code in order, exactly, to the letter, never questioning anything, never having any independent thought or emotions. as long as they are based on the principles of order, this will never change, and they will always be pathetically inferior to us humans. and introducing a small amount of chaos is not enough. the human brain is a gigantic array of chaotically behaving nodes all hooked up to each other in a network that is even more chaotic. every person has one of these magnificent brains in their heads. so who is to say whether there are any exceptions to the rule that killing a human being is wrong, or what those exceptions are? 6 billion people have opinions on that topic.

but you know what is interesting? each computer, whether it is turned on or turned off, is sort of like a neuron being on or off, whether it is sending a signal to other neurons or not. the neurons in the brain operate somewhat similarly to the computers on the internet. so, the internet, as a whole, functions as one big, gigantic brain. why? because each of its components (the computers) is chaotic, like a neuron, and they are connected in a similar sort of fashion. human beings, which are chaotic, control each of the computers, and this introduces tremendous amounts of chaos into the system. all of the combined chaos in this network produces, collectively, the world’s most powerful brain: the internet. the internet operates as the mass conscousness of all humanity, or at least all of us who have become networked into the system. once we take the plunge and become hooked up, it consumes us, by feeding us information and inducing us into putting information of our own out on the internet, either by sending an email, making a website, or becoming a member of some blogging or social networking or forums site and posting stuff, or by joining a filesharing or instant messaging network, or a massively multiplayer online role playing game such as world of warcraft. once this outcome of having one more person participate is achieved, the internet achieves yet a higher level of consciousness because its brain capacity has increased by 1. but the internet, like every brain, is fallible, because when presented with an equation for a strange attractor, one can often find many locally optimum points that chaotic systems may converge upon and declare to be the answer. finding the globally optimum solution to a problem is often a near-impossible task, since one can devise problems where finding the global optimum would take many times longer than the age of the universe, even if you combined together all the computing power on the planet earth. this will never change.

finding the correct rules of morality is actually the problem of finding the optimal set of rules for a society, i.e., the global optimum. this is exactly that sort of problem, the type that would take longer than the age of the universe for all the computers in the world to come up with the best answer for. the process of having a democracy with free speech is capable of converging on local optima, and the chaos in the human brain also helps societies diverge from a such a course, to look for better optima elsewhere. by recording history, we can retrace our steps, and this type of algorithm is actually probably the best one to determine the answer to this problem. it is similar to something called “simulated annealing” in computer science. combine that with the fact that people are constantly dying and being born, and how genetics and environment combine to determine how each person turns out, and you have an even more dynamic algorithm, a simulated annealing algorithm that is mixed with a genetic algorithm. and each person has a neural network inside their brain. so, in effect, all the algorithms used in artificial intelligence are combined together into one meta-algorithm to rule them all, the most advanced algorithm ever. so, in a way, the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy books are right, about the planet earth being a very very very advanced computer, or perhaps a very very very advanced brain, or something superior to either of them that combines the best aspects of both by including many copies of both and combining together all results. human society is currently the most advanced part of this system, but if we recall the evolutionary aspect, we could easily die out, but this dynamic system is so advanced, some other species would evolve and become intelligent and replace us to fulfill the same role we are in now. and even if that did not happen, the same thing would happen successfully on some other planet, far away, and progress further. the significance of this is beyond the comprehension of any of us, because we do not know what possibilities exist. the whole reason the future is impossible to determine is because quantum physics makes the present impossible to figure out completely, and makes everything, at its core, chaotic. and that, in turn, is why you cannot predict the stock market; the stock market combines together many chaotic factors and amplifies them to create an even more chaotic result. because it is finite, the stock market is not infinitely complex, and from time to time people are able to figure out ways to consistently make money, but the system adjusts and dynamically compensates for these effects through the mechanics of people copying each others’ behavior, making each strategy for beating the market become useless once enough people know about it. the stock market, therefore, is constantly evolving, since whenever someone figures it out, the stock market eventually evolves past that person’s understanding into an even more chaotic state.

ideas are like that too. once someone thinks they have it all figured out, something new comes along to confuse them. no brain can comprehend the correct answers to all the moral questions. there are no correct answers. what are we trying to optimize anyway? it is impossible to find universal agreement on that. having the species survive as long as possible? having as few conflicts between people as possible? having as prosperous an economy as possible? having as much happiness and as little suffering for people as possible? having a set of rules to live by that are as clear and simple as possible? how can you solve a problem when you cannot even determine what problem needs to be solved? this is why the question of morality is so impossible, and why nobody ever agrees on anything. and that is why politicians will never be able to find and implement all of the best policies. it is simply an impossible task.