shit for curious

ty. Strap in, I packed a new bowl for this post.

So I want to start by saying that I don't wan to wade into defining the meaning of "good." Let's just go with the widely accepted colloquial understanding we all share about the idea that something that is good is something that we would like to have exist and continue to exist.

I need that to be said so I can introduce a premise upon which I think we need to assume is valid as much of what I think hinges upon it. The most observable constant in life on earth is that it primarily concerns itself with continuing to exist. Be that long life or reproduction. Life sets the goal to have life continue, perhaps towards the end of generational immortality. The premise we should assume from that observation is this: Continuing to live and reproduce is good.

For, oh idk, a billion years or so it was up to single-celled organisms to undergo mitosis to really populate areas enough. But once you develop a concentration of identically constructed organisms (the early idea of species) it introduces a new paradigm that created the initial node towards what we would consider morality, and that paradigm is cooperation.

Whichever group of cells were the first to happen upon a situation in which mutual effort yielded greater results for the entire group should be credited with the first existence of a morality. This would also mean that morality may not actually be conscious, but that's another thicket of leaves to ramble through. This is the first moment in history in which behaving in a manner that is more aimed at helping another than helping oneself will have achieved something good, which is continued life and reproduction. Immediately the incentive to become increasingly cooperative as a group/species becomes gigantic. Groups of single cells would now want to start co-locating, working in a system, engaging in mutual and symbiotic relationships with particle passing.

Push this forward until we get to the Cambrian Explosion in which we start to see the first examples of massive beds of identical fish species that would connote schools of fish much like we know today. Each individual fish would like to not be eaten if confronted with a predator. Each one would like to escape in the most expeditious route possible. However, the fish may innately be aware that it must fulfill its responsibility to the school to stay bunched yet active, thus confusing the predator in a way that they could not pick out a solitary fish in order to eat. The idea of responsibility and membership in a group is so basically understood that these fish act in a way that is absolutely outlandish from the perspective of a solitary fish, yet acting in a way that prioritizes its membership to the group over its individual well being yield the net result of the continued survival and reproduction of the group as a whole. Small individual action sacrificed for the common good, demonstrated in a minnow sometime 530 million years ago.

Pleistocene epoch, the meta for hunting is now mammal packs. To a degree it still is today. Mammoths stay grouped, proto-canines stay grouped, large cats are evidenced to have been found trapped in tar pits in groups of up to a dozen. If we use today's animals as an likely allegory, we can observe behavior that mirrors the idea of human morality that lays primal ground rules by which these animals abide. They know that killing within their pack, for the most part, is bad. A murderer is outcast or killed themselves among the timber wolves of North America. The largest Hyena on the Serengeti eats first when finding a carcass. The dozens of other members of that pack would hedonistically love to dig in and fight for the scraps as that would be the most direct route to their individual and current survival. But they all wait and allow the largest to get first dibs on the most nutritious and voluminous portions. This largest Hyena is their main protector and the harasser of lions that start to encroach on their territory. They, knowingly or unknowingly, stave their own hunger to ensure their defender is in top form because that will ensure an overall greater survival for the entire pack. Does that not mirror human morality?

Even today we come across tribes that are absolutely isolated from the outside world, still living in the rough with loincloths and burying their food in hot sand to cook it. They have no concept whatsoever about any worldly religions other than their own. Today the Ben Shapiro types say that societal values are informed by abrahamic values but I think that's debunked by the idea that we continuously come into contact with indigenous folks of the Amazon and Congo that have no clue who Moses is but still have come to some identical conclusions to our own. Such as "let's not kill one another, that's not helpful," "let's not steal from one another, that's not helpful," "let's make sure the children are obeying their parents, that helps their survival." All these supposedly religious values crop up in remote corners where that religion has never touched. So it can be concluded that these values pre-date religion. And maybe even self aware thought.

Cooperative forces have developed a system which have optimally increased the chances for survival and reproduction. That usually involves abstaining from some forms of violence and sharing resources as is required for the betterment of the group. This isn't a religious thing. This is something chimpanzees and groundhogs exhibit. I think the ideas that informs our morality come mostly from our need to continue living and reproduce. What we consider good is absolutely aligned with the goal of generational immortality. The very DNA inside us is coded in a way that makes us want to be with people, help people, be helped, appreciate others, be appreciated, gain status, help others to status, etc etc etc.

I don't think morality is objective but I do think it is intrinsic. I think nihilism concerns itself far too much with the supernatural. The natural is just-as-if-not-more complicated and offers just a ridiculous amount of example from which we can pull to find the same values we hold in bird flocks or pine forests or oceanic thermal vents. What makes a country work and what makes a termite colony work aren't fundamentally different when distilled down to its most base features or ideas.

Anyway I think god is invented because we lacked the tools to define our own instinctual properties for so long. It's only in the last 10,000 years of human development that we've discovered the ability to be self-critical and that is likely the breakthrough that we need to overcome our predisposition for the transcendent.