(10-22-2018, 07:29 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(10-16-2018, 12:27 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Yes, better living through chemistry. A favorite slogan of LSD partakers in the Haight-Asbury sixties.
The brain is not the source of morality, however, but the soul is. So only soul work can provide morality in the long run. Drugs, genetics and invasive machinery of various and sundry kinds may only have temporary benefits. Morality does require the exercize of free will, which only exists in the soul. We need to better understand the soul and the spirit. "The soul is that faculty which we all call self-moving" -- Plato
" Nothing exists, save atoms and their combinations. There is no atom, which wouldn't periodically take part in life." -- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
A 21st century addition: The "soul" is a program, running on the hardware called brain. Better hardware allows more complex programs, including moral ones. Our moral and emotional instincts are stuck on the level of hunter gatherers, so we should adjust them to civilized conditions. For example, eliminating brain circuits related to tribalism or desire for revenge.
...another analogy: some people need to get and use a strong anti-virus program to free themselves of the malware (spyware, viruses, and trojans) in their minds. That suggests the need to examine beliefs and their consequences and to test the media that they see for factual viability.
Maybe in upcoming years we will make K-14 education the norm instead of K-12, with youth getting to take survey courses on philosophy, economics, psychology, statistics and probability, world history, comparative political systems*, and freshman competition because such are necessary for coping with the complex realities of our time. Donald Trump succeeded in winning the Presidency, and Tea Party pols before him, in offering a simpler view of the world that people could accept then and is proving terribly flawed now. I saw warning signs in Trump that suggested, those of such questionable leaders as Rafael Trujillo and Juan Peron, if not Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein.
We are finding out the hard way what we could have learned with a little structured study, and what must now be basic learning.
*Churchill said it as well as anyone could: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” He is still right.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.