subjectivity – Harmonia Philosophica

Understanding morality.

Moral judgment is a tricky subject. For example, most people would agree that lying is immoral. However, most people would also agree that lying to Nazis about the location of Jewish families would be moral. New research sheds light on how people decide whether behavior is moral or immoral. The findings could serve as a framework for informing the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies.

Scientists proposed a model of moral judgment, called the Agent Deed Consequence (ADC) model – and now we have the first experimental results that offer a strong empirical corroboration of the ADC model in both mundane and dramatic realistic situations. The ADC model posits that people take three things into account when making a moral judgment: the Agent, which is the character or intent of the person who is doing something; the Deed, or what is being done; and the Consequence, or the outcome that resulted from the deed.

“This approach allows us to explain not only the variability in the moral status of lying, but also the flip side: that telling the truth can be immoral if it is done maliciously and causes harm,” Dubljević says. (1)

Difficult to see the morality behind an action.

Because we always tend to see the tree and not the forest.

What is here now will someday no longer be.

What is today important will soon be insignificant.

What is now ridiculous will soon be essential.

What is true will eventually not be at all.

A dirty man talking to God.

People laughing at him.

Asking him for the truth.

Requesting him to abide by the facts.

But they do not know the facts.

He does not answer.

For He doesn’t need to.

There is no agent.

Nor deed.

Nor consequence.

For the truth is not something to reach.

But a veil we need to break through.

Look at that immoral man.

He is the One defining morality…

Virtual real reality…

Future therapy patients may spend a lot more time exploring virtual environments than sitting on sofas. In a clinical trial of a new virtual reality treatment for fear of heights, participants reported being much less afraid after using the program for just two weeks. Unlike other VR therapies, which required that a real-life therapist guide patients through treatment, the new system uses an animated avatar to coach patients through ascending a virtual high-rise. This kind of fully automated counseling system, described online July 11 in the Lancet Psychiatry, may make psychological treatments for phobias and other disorders far more accessible. (1)

Fearing reality. Based on imaginary fears.

Being healed. Based on an imaginary reality.

Look at the essence of the cosmos.

And you will see that there is nothing to see…

Except the things that you see…

MAGNIFY! (Do you trust your eyes?) [against senses… again]

Extremely distant galaxies are usually too faint to be seen, even by the largest telescopes. But nature has a solution: gravitational lensing, predicted by Albert Einstein and observed many times by astronomers. However recently, an international team of astronomers, led by Harald Ebeling of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered one of the most extreme instances of magnification by gravitational lensing.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope to survey a sample of huge clusters of galaxies, the team found a distant galaxy, eMACSJ1341-QG-1, that is magnified 30 times thanks to the distortion of space-time created by the massive galaxy cluster dubbed eMACSJ1341.9-2441. (1)

Everything we see is distorted in one or the other way.

Light passing through fields, light passing through matter or dark matter, through water or air, through lenses, through your very… eyes! No, you can never be certain that what you see is real. Look without prejudice and you will see, that the only thing you can be certain of is that you cannot see!

Look at that coffee cup.

There is no coffee.

Only molecules of coffee.

But you are smelling coffee.

Wishing coffee.

Because you have a hard time waking up.

And you have to go to work even though you don’t want to.

It is your life that you are experiencing.

Not just a cup of coffee.

But sure.

You can just say “I see coffee”.

Time standing still…

Quickly glance at an analog clock. You might find that the second hand seems stuck at first. But if the precise machinery ensures every second is the same, why the pause?

Amelia Hunt, a neuroscientist with the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, says the standstill (nicknamed the stopped-clock illusion) occurs because our brains anticipate what we will see before we actually view it. When we move our eyes, everything shifts position on the retina. If we couldn’t sense those adjustments coming, we’d be incredibly disoriented. So our brains figured a way to cope: As we navigate the world, our visual cortex creates and updates an interactive map of what’s around us. The brain uses it to predict what we’ll see to prevent discombobulation.

So, when you look up at a clock, your mapmaking brain has foreseen what it will look like. And when your gaze does reach it, you are a step ahead of time. In a 2009 study, Hunt’s team found that, on average, clock gazers set the time as 39 milliseconds earlier than what actually landed on the clock.

For a fleeting second, time might seem to stop. Too bad it won’t help you catch up if you’re running late. (1)

Yes, time can be an illusion.

Every time you think of you, as a child. Every time you sense love, for someone long gone. Each time you rip through the fabric of the universe, seeking kindness into the touch of your grandma.

It is then that time seems just a shadow in our mind.

But time can be very real as well.

When you are running late to see the birth of your child. Every time you miss her birthday because you were overseas. Each time you lose your opportunity to say that you love her before it’s too late…

It is then that you know that time exists.

And the shadow disappears.

Look at that clock.

Yes, it does move.

And yet…

It doesn’t…

Seeing. As if “thinking”. Being. As if “seeing nothing”.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades. [1]

In another story: Scientists have long known that when sounds are faint or objects are seen through fog in the distance, repetition of these weak or ambiguous sensory ‘inputs’ can result in different perceptions inside the same brain. Now the results of new research, described online Dec. 7 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, have identified brain processes in mice that may help explain how those differences happen. [2]

Vision: Totally subjective. Dependent on the scale on which we see things. Dependent on the brain which interprets signals from sensory organs. Dependent on our own perception of things. Dependent on the weather. Dependent on… fog.

And yet we tend to believe only what we see.

The only catch is that we do not realize we trust our eyes not because we believe they are objective. But because we believe our mind is. After all, who wouldn’t trust his own mind?

Stop thinking. And you will stop seeing.

Stop seeing and everything will stop existing.

Being: What is left when you are in the… fog seeing “nothing”.

See now?