In a mechanical world, all our believes amount to nothing. They are just random collisions of atoms in a lump of fat. Also, the distinction between exsistence and non exsistence becomes meaningless since the matter exsists regardless of what happens to a human body. Remember, your soul or feelings doesn't really exsist in this world view, they are merely results of particles in motion. These particles will still move after death and destruction of the body.

point 2, I readily agree and also pointed that out in the post you are quoting. However, for us to hold up life as 'better' than non-life there has to be some sort of fixed point of morality or ethics if you will. My point is that this fixed point can not be found if exsistence is reduced to nothing but a deterministic mechanical view.

The fixed ethical point is life itself, that we live and agree we enjoy life and that we all have a right to live and a right to enjoy life to a degree that it does not harm other's enjoyment, and we might also take upon ourselves a duty to somewhat enrich the lives of others in the course of our life, but there need not be a higher power or point beyond the miracle of life itself

What i'm propounding here is not a nihilistic view, just one of finding meaning in the world that does not necessitate crafting powers that exist beyond the world. I believe religion can do good things for the world if it encourages us to enrich our lives and the lives of others and that these views might serve as a nice tool by making these concepts more palatable and less dry and/or dense, but that to speak of outside things is ultimately unnecessary. Goodness can be its own thing, unhinged, unexplained, yet built into our makeup

This answer does little to solve the puzzle. Fine, you aim to live a long life enhanced by progress and coexisting. What about the countless people who aim for detonating a nuclear bomb in a large city? What makes your choise 'good' and their choise 'bad'?

Without something that exsists outside of the mechanical universe there is nothing to judge the two different actions against each other. It's all just particles in motion anyway. The mechanical universe doesn't care one way or the other if I live and think or if I die and decompose. Basically, how does my desire to live carry more weight then someone elses desire for me to die? The right to life is not a law of nature. A purely mechanical universe have no normative rules what so ever. So without allowing for something that exsists outside of physical reality it's impossible to create a system of ethics  that is consistent.

It's important to note though that the fundament for normative rules doesn't have to be religion. It can be any number of things, but to my knowledge it can't be inferred from matter. If you know how that is basically what I started asking about. There has to be something outside of the physical representation of things that define what is good or bad. Be it that life has a value somehow in itself, or a rule made by a God somewhere or whatever.

And lastly, Pi survives for more than 220 days on a life raft in the pacific, with a homicidal madman that he eventually manages to kill. He stays alive by eating human flesh as a last resort. The killing of the crazed chef is completely justified both as a matter of self defense and as retribution for the chefs behavior, and eating human meat is also justifiable if it perserves your own life. To me Pi shows an unbendable will to survive which is heroic.

Yes, you are right. 'Goodness' can be its own thing, and does not require religion. As I have stated several times, this question is not about religion. But 'goodness' is not a physical entity, it is a feeling. In that sense it is 'supernatural'. It is a property of exsistence that is outside the pure physical mechanics of matter. From this I claim that if you want to subscribe to a purely rational world where everything can be explained using the laws of physics, then 'goodness' reduces down to a particular configuration of electrons in a human brain and that is it. It is no longer better than 'badness' just a different configuration of electrons. And so it follows that normative statements become meaningless.

For the record, I don't believe in this world view myself. I believe that there is something more to the world than a cold and deterministic collection of atoms. This 'something' is hard to frame in words, and that is why we have so many different ways of explaining it, from the multitude of religions to the concept of human rights, to your explanation of goodness being part of the basic essence of being human.

To anyone who thinks I have derailed the thread: I have brought up these points not to prove someone wrong or right, but to try to encourage critical thinking around the concepts of spirituality and reality. To make people ask these questions is the ultimate purpose of The Life of Pi as well, and hopefully reading through these deep arguments will shed light on the deeper meaning of Life of Pi.

Actually, you're quite wrong. Normative rules don't need any justification other than our own will. If madmen want to kill themselves, they're free to do it. If they try to kill me,  I won't allow them. And me and all the people who don't want to be killed will band together and protext ourselves from the madmen.

The lack of a higher instance to regulate morality doesn't automatically lead people to resort to nihilism.

And Pi commited something that I find despicable, and what's worse he won't admit it, and created this whole delusion so he can live happily without suffering any consiquences. Such a thing could permit someone to commit any atrocity.

So, nothing is then 'good' or 'bad' in itself? If the majority of people on the planet decide that it is 'good' to kill children and eat them, then that is indeed good?

Your example uses a higher instance to regulate morality, so you need to come up with a better example. In your model 'the will of God' is replaced with 'the will of most people'. If the will of most people is just a random configuration of atoms then there is still nothing that is ethically bad or ethically good.

I'm not saying this position is wrong, but it is not my position. I think killing another person is wrong no matter what the current consensus might be. This means that there is something outside of the relm of matter that makes somethings 'good' and somethings 'bad'. It also means that actions are 'good' or 'bad' regardless of the convictions of the person who commits them.

This approach to morality makes it possible to make an ethical assesment of something like the 9/11 attacks for example. Either mass murder is wrong, and will always be wrong, or there is some sort of moral relativism where the people who felt that 9/11 was justified are right and the people who feel it was not are also right.

This question can not be solved by science, at least not with the knowledge we have today, since there is no way to measure if there is a 'law of morality' in the universe or not. It basically becomes a question of faith (if you can separate the meaning of faith from the religious context you keep going back to).

This ultrainteresting discussion is the real story in Life of Pi by the way. Your interpratation of it as an unwilling exposure of the dangers of religios delusion pretty much misses the mark.

I can't really say that anything is really "good" or "bad" in itself. These are subjective terms, and the study of the morality present in different cultures essentially prove this (unless you have an ethnocentric view, and think that what is "good" and "bad" in your culture is absolute, and that other cultures are "wrong").

In my example with the "will of most people" I was reffering to the ideea of individuals with similar interests forming groups in order to protect their interests. I was in no way suggesting that what they deemed to be "good" is univeral, or should be imposed on other people. They should defend themselves though for those who threaten them (like the suicidal manian who wants to kill everybody).

You think that killing someone is bad, no matter the consensus. But that is just your opinion. What is this "something outside the realm of matter" that makes some things be "good" and some things be "bad"?

(FTR, I myself believe that killing someone is bad, and hope that most people will share my view)

Your 9/11 example is quite interesting, because the fact of the matter is that neither side is "right". There really is no "right" or "wrong" in this situation. As with war, the "right" side is the winning side. Speaking of war, it's a situation were killing is validated, and even and presented as a virtue, in pretty much every society, regardless of the general beliefs regarding killing (tell war veterans that they're murderers, and see the negative reaction you'll get from the general population). As I said, this is the case regardless of the general beliefs regarding the morality of killing (Christians in the US support their country's wars, and are more likely than other categories to join the Military).

Science hasn't solved this "problem", but I don't really know if there's anything to solve. Morality isn't really natural, it's constructed by society. It's not really a matter of "faith" as much as it is a matter of going with what works best for everyone. Morals essentially assure that society works well, and society assures our survival. Now you may ask "What importance does our survival have anyways, as there is nothing outside the real of matter? After all, what does the physical universe care whether or not we survive?" Well, the simple asnwer is: I have no answer. This is an unanswarable question, at least at this moment, and I don't see it being answered within our lifetime, or even within the current millennium. All we can do is continue to live in our culture and absorb all the constructs and myths (all of them obviously made-up) that give us the illusion that our existence has meaning, and that the world is structured in a certain non-chaotic way. Within our cultures, we could make it the purpose of our lives to simply enjoy our existence, find something that we'd like to dedicate our existence to, and try to fulfill those aspirations.

If that answer isn't good enough for you, well sorry, it's all I've got.

Back to the Life of Pi, if you believe killing someone is bad, then how can you call Pi's actions "heroic"? Isn't that hypocritical of you?

1.  Now we're getting somewhere! This is pretty much the point I've been trying to make. What you say about morality is a natural consequence of a mechanical world view. It is also one of the most difficult problems to address with this view. After all, if nothing is bad or good in itself, where is the justificiation for laws, punishment and reward. To place this justification in the will of people with similar goals or feelings is problematic.

2. Another implication of this world view is that the world is deterministic, meaning that nothing is really free to change. The entire course of history, our actions, feelings and fortunes are already set for us. Does it make any sense to punish people if they don't have free will? Does it make any sense questioning punishment when who gets punished and who doesn't is already predetermined?

3. In the end, subscribing to a purely mechanical world view is ultimately a matter of faith as well. You have to chose to reject supernatural exsistence, you can never prove that is doesn't exsist.

Finally, to round out a few of your direct questions:

I have no idea what something outside matter that controls ethics would be. It could be a set of undiscovered natural laws (similar to gravity and friction) yet unobservable (at least for now) or it could be a all knowing supreme conciousness, or perhaps it is an essential part of the human body? I really have no idea, it is also very possible that no such rules exsist and that the world is nothing but matter.

And, killing in self-defense is not the same as killing in aggression. The way I see it Pi kills the chef out of necessity and self defense. His actions are heroic because he manages to survive against increadible odds. Being trapped with a physically superior insane murderer being one of the things that stacks the odds against him considerably. When I say it's wrong to kill somebody, it is not an absolute rule. There are exceptions. In fact, I don't think there is a moral universal law that says killing is bad. I think if there is a fixed point of morality it will probably say something more along the lines that forcing your will on others is bad. That said, questions of ethics are notoriously difficult to determine with 100% certainty.

5. PS: This conversatiopn is exactly what Life of Pi is meant to inspire. I guess the book is successful on some level ;)

1. Problematic, but again, we do not have absolute knowledge about the universe. Of course you find it problematic, and unsatisfying, but unless you want to make up absolute answers (like religion), you're gonna have to be satisfied with this.

2. I don't see why this implies any determinism. Care to elaborate on this.

3. I've never seen any evidence that anything "supernatural" exists, nor have I any reason to believe in something like this. There's also a problem with the terms "natural" and "supernatural", as they're mere conventions. We deem "natural" that which is in concordance with our current knowledge of the world around us, that which we have observed, explained and classified. What we don't have knowledge of yet, what we can't explain, we deem "supernatural". However as we gain more knowledge about the world around us, seemingly unexplainable things become perfectly explainable, and the "supernatural" becomes "natural". This is why I say that if something really exists, it is "natural", not "supernatural" (this would even include something like "God").

4. I agree that killing in self defence is acceptable. However, the problem is that Pi created a delusion to make himself forget what he did. The danger is that someone could do the same after commiting an attrocity, thus erasing it, and being able to live without suffeing any consiquences for it.

5. Don't give too much credit to the author.

I am more than willing to concede that it is possible, perhaps even most likely that the universe is nothing more than matter. I also know that there is no way of know this for sure though. To believe in something more or not is the basic concept of faith. To reject it is also a form of faith as I have pointed out, in the end it is a choice that everybody have to make for themselves, hopefully after giving the matter some serious thought.

This concludes my ramblings around the Life of Pi. And it would be a great place to end this thread if I didn't owe you and explanation of why a mechanical universe is deterministic.

If everything in the universe is describable with strict rules of physics then there is no room for randomness anymore. When a feeling is just a certain pattern of chemicals in your brain, and a decission is just an eletric pulse then all these things breaks down to interaction between molecules, their state is again determined by the configuration of their atoms, which again are determined by the presise position of the electrons, netrons and positrons at a given moment in time. Their state is determined by their quarks and probably etc. etc.

This means that at any instant in time, if we had the technology to do it, you can determine the exact position of every single particle in the universe, and from the laws of physics you can determine how they will interact and thus infer their state in the following instant of time. There is no randomness anymore, just particles doing what particles does.

Some might try to conter this by introducing chaos theory and how the behavior of particles can not be predicted. Of course, a chaos system is deterministic, it's just that we are too stupid to be able to predict them. Even seemingly random events are predetermined in a purely physical universe. That means not just how the earth moves around the sun, but how you act, any thing you feel is just a direct result of the previous state of the universe. In fact, you reading this post (or deciding not to) was already implied at the begining of the universe.

Of course, to reject the deterministic universe there has to be some force in the universe that is not governed by strict physical laws, a force that has the power to chose which way a quark will turn or whatever. If you allow for such a force we are back to square one, as this would be an instance of something 'supernatural'. Again, by supernatural I mean things that are outside of the physical universe and is not ruled by the laws of physics.