Very Illustrious Guest, Professor Allen Wood, from the Stanford University, Kant on Conscience, and Professor Marcia Pinheiro as Provocateur

Very Respected Professor Allen, it is an honour and a joy to receive you 'in my blog'. Today, our theme will be your work on Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). More specifically, the discussion will be about conscience. That is something very few people have these days, and diamonds are expensive because they are rare to find, so that this is perhaps an investment: in the future, this blog will be worth millions... I have just used 'conscience' in the way most people would use this sigmatoid. Most people on earth have morality tied to conscience inside of their Inner Realities: they believe that saying, you don't have conscience, implies saying that the person does not have their moral foundations in place. In 2000, I learned from one of the biggest before me that Philosophy has the power of creating meaning that not only goes beyond the lexicon, but may actually frontally oppose the world references there conveyed by means of printed sigmatoids. Maybe that is the case of Kant and this sigmatoid, conscience... 

Very Respected Professor Pinheiro, I am happy to contribute to the cause of popularising my insights, findings, and understanding, but also to make of Kant’s name something even greater. For Kant, it is your intellect and judgment, not your conscience, that tell you what you ought to do. All of us have fallible intellects, and powers of judgment, so we sometimes make mistakes. Those mistakes can be innocent, but we are also sometimes dishonest with ourselves, and tell ourselves we've made an honest judgment when we haven't. Conscience is a judgment separate from our intellectual judgment about what we ought to do. Kant thinks it is an "inner court" in which I play the role of accused, prosecutor and judge. Conscience judges me guilty or innocent. I am guilty if I did not follow my best judgment, or if I acted against it for corrupt reasons. I am innocent if I did follow it, even if my best judgment was intellectually mistaken and I innocently did the objectively wrong thing.

Very Respected Professor Allen, you have very dense writing, to the point of making my 17 lines be worth ten of yours, so that I beg you to go really slow here. Conscience sounds more like a spiritual concept, according to what you said, since I now believe the human soul is something like a one-dimensional being - aligning my thinking with the ‘flat-earth’ theorists’ - whilst intellectual judgement would belong to the human body, physical brain, and therefore Kant is sounding more like Descartes at this stage. Conscience is then like Hubbard’s idea of Personal Integrity: you have it if you do what you think is correct. I would think that they disagree as to what is ‘best’: basically, Hubbard believes that best is what we want to do, but Kant seems to believe that best is what is moral. In here I am concentrating on a very small piece of your so interesting token: ‘did not follow my best judgement, of if I acted against it for corrupt reasons’. It seems that Kant allows for us to be intellectually mistaken as for what is morally correct, what is also very interesting: morality would have to do with best use of Logic, which I assume is then Classical or Cartesian Logic, so that there is good and evil, nothing else. In this scenario, if I think that loving Hamish is a moral act, given the universe that I know, so say my Universe of Knowledge is limited by my perception, so perhaps I am a person who ‘lives in a bubble’, and all I know of life is what I am told by those who visit me inside of that bubble, then my conscience tells me that I must do that, I do, and I am innocent. If we find out that Hamish was always married with kids, hid his marriage ring from me, as well as everything else, even with him appearing every day to visit me ‘in my bubble’, as very-much-in-love partners do, then I was intellectually mistaken about morality, even though, by the time of the act, I was innocent, what then tells us that my conscience was clean.

Very Respected Professor Pinheiro, Conscience is part of our rational nature, which we have as embodied beings. I would see intellectual judgments, and moral judgments as two rational functions of the same natural human being. A person can do what he or she thinks is right, and still not be acting conscientiously, if the thoughts about what is right were based on dishonesty or self-deception. People can want to do some terrible things, so I cannot agree that what is best is always what we want to do. Logic plays an instrumental role in deciding what to do, but moral principles, such as human dignity, do not come from logic but from other rational grounds. There are people who live "inside a bubble" and think only what others tell them. Those people are irresponsible, and should free themselves, and think for themselves. If they do what is wrong because they don't have the courage to think for themselves, then they are not innocent. You would be innocent if you were cleverly deceived by Hamish into thinking he is single, and then found out later that he has a wife, and family. But if you let yourself be deceived because you did not think critically about whom to trust, and whom not to trust, then that is no longer innocent, and if, in that case, you tried to pretend you acted conscientiously, you are just perpetrating another guilty self-deception.

Very Respected Professor Allen, perhaps I was here referring to the Myth of the Cave, so to people who are artificially deprived from normal life somehow, say because they have been enslaved, what modernly could equate having been implanted a CIA bug, or a miniature of a satellite mobile through their ear, that is, with no surgery, and, since it is slavery, totally without their consent, and probably without their awareness. In this case, all they can see is the shadows, or what those who ‘enter the cave’ want them to see through those. You seem to point at the distinction between intentional, and unintentional acts, but, at the same time, you seem to fail to recognise that there are degrees of consciousness that are not readily accessible to us as we live. Yet, from memory, Kant does recognise those degrees. The Bible talks about us being punished by it only if we read it, so that one should not be labeled ‘guilty’ until we can prove that the deception happened during full awareness. There are perhaps several subtleties involved in all this, several POVs, and also several concepts that need to converge to a single world reference, and sigmatoid in our own Inner Realities before we can expose something that leads to insights that matter. Perhaps you could explain how a person can deceive themselves through practical examples involving Fuzzy Logic, and levels of conscious awareness. Would the Collective Unconscious play a role there? When you say it is not based on Logic, it seems that it is not rational, so perhaps you could explain, through a practical example, how something is rational but not logical. In my work, I suggest that we have something called ‘extended ID’, so that we could have a part of our morality in that area. Would you think that morality, for Kant, is located at least in part there? You write, ‘A person can do what he or she thinks is right, and still not be acting conscientiously, if the thoughts about what is right were based on dishonesty or self-deception’. The difficulties with this one are plenty: you yourself proposed that people could more frequently do the wrong thing if going for their own logic, and I agree with that. In this case, one needs a lot of logical work over their own decisions, and body to get to sublimate, sacrifice, and act in the name of morality, and therefore against their impulses. That sounds like something that is mandatorily conscientious to me, so that I really need a practical example to digest this token.

Very Respected Professor Marcia, some philosophers, such as Mill, think that conscience is a sort of conditioned social reflex, making you feel pain when you violate rules society has taught you. He rightly concludes that, as people become more enlightened, and think for themselves, conscience (in this sense) will fade away, and be replaced by rational judgments. Given what he means by conscience, I think he is right. Kant distinguishes socially inculcated conscience from real conscience, and thinks the conscience whose judgment we should follow is the one that involves exercise of our own rational capacities, not the one involving inculcated rules, and conditioned feelings. No doubt our rational capacities were acquired through education by others, but true education has to be distinguished from mere social conditioning or brainwashing. If we were all simply brainwashed into thinking what we do, then none of us would be genuine moral agents at all. Morality itself might then be an illusion we were conditioned to have. The idea that there is a right, and wrong or that anybody should care what they or other people do is for the birds. 

Very Respected Professor Allen, you now surprised me because I was not expecting to have conditioning, especially self-conditioning, of the type I mention in my work about the new model of the human psyche, taken out of the pile of items we ‘are allowed to draw’ when arguing in the direction of supporting Kant’s views.

Very Respected Professor Marcia, some people think this is the way it actually is, or at least they pretend to -- at least when they are doing philosophy, and want to prove to others -- and to themselves -- that they are the cleverest person in the room. I think they convince themselves that they are clever, but probably don't convince others, unless the others are rather foolish, and gullible. David Hume says that those who consider morality an illusion are arrogant individuals who are just trying to show how clever they are but cannot seriously mean what they say. Kant considers the position that morality is nothing but a "figment of the brain," and gives reasons to reject it. I am not sure he says everything he should have in response to these sophistries, but I think he is right in rejecting them. When we are honest with ourselves, and others, I think we all realize that morality is not an illusion, and that responsible moral agents have both the fallible capacity to judge what they ought to do, and the moral capacity to judge whether they have made this first judgment honestly, and have followed their best judgment.

Kant thinks that every person who is a genuine moral agent (who can be held responsible for their actions) has the capacity to make the judgment of conscience. Kant says that when we say of people that they don't have a conscience, what we have to mean is that they don't pay attention to its judgment. That seems to me right, since if they are moral agents at all (not to be excused on grounds of absent or diminished capacity) then they must be able to judge themselves in the way Kant says conscience does. I agree with him about this. He also thinks everyone DOES make this judgment and can't help doing so. To judge oneself in this way, he thinks, comes to us instinctively if we are competent rational agents. There I am not so sure I agree. I think people can, and often do, get so out of the habit of attending to conscience that it might make sense to say that they don't even hold the inner court -- though if they are competent moral agents, they must be able to. The difference here between Kant, and me may not amount to much. For if we are sufficiently habituated to not attending to the judgment of conscience, it may simply be unclear whether we make such a judgment, and then ignore it (as Kant thinks many do), or instead do not make the judgment at all (as I tend to think most people do most of the time).

Very Respected Professor Allen, you are basically saying that, for Kant, I am obliged to always be aware of my instinctive moral decisions, and make sure I stop my action in time if my conscious being has a chance of judging it wrong on the ‘plans to execute it’. I could illustrate this with a case scenario, and forgive me if I now reveal all my passion for Contextualism, and dilemmas: my Extended ID now makes me always wake up at 7 AM, regardless of the beep of the alarm, so say that today, 27/10/2018, there was no beep. I am in a situation where it is morally wrong for me, and in general, as for morality of where I live, that I wake up at 7 AM, since that is before the time my husband, Hamish, wakes up today. If I wake up before him, then he is lazier than his wife, and I have been offered his position in top management at the company, since we both work together. We are on TV, playing Big Brother, and that has to do with justifying to the other members of the board of directors why my husband is the company’s choice, not me. I personally, so from an individualistic point of view, would love to be the top manager, so that pretending that I did not wake up at 7 AM on national TV is violating my Personal Integrity (Hubbard’s concept). I would not be deceiving myself, however, and would be acting inside of morality if pretending. That is because my husband got me my job: I was more experienced, more competent, but my resume was poorly written, and my references were from overseas, a Last World nation. I owe him gratitude. It would be ‘unfair’ that I ‘stole’ this promotion from him because he is now in the same situation I was before: slightly in disadvantage. I am acting as an agent, and I am not deceiving myself as I ‘pretend’ not to have woken up before him on national television. Now everyone believes he deserves the job more than me, and the board feels supported, so that he will get the job. I did that because they needed a ‘public’ excuse to put him on top, given my qualifications, experiences, and competency levels. I cheated a little to favour him in the same way he would have done when I got my first job at the same company, which we share in the condition of employees. If I followed my Extended ID, and woke up in full at 7 AM, there would be nothing in his favour, and he would not get the promotion: I would get it instead. That is what I wanted, and it would be fair from a cold employer’s, and even audience’s, perspective. By doing things in the way I did, however, I am a ‘moral agent’ and proceed without deceit, what, according to Kant, would be fair. Yet, I could be being unfair with myself, and I could also have already paid the favour by giving him such a treatment in relation to another situation, say sports played for prizes, so another situation in another branch of our joint life.

References

Google LLC [US] 2018, Kant Philosophy, viewed 28 October 2018, https://www.google.com/search?q=kant+philosophy&oq=kant+philosophy&ie=UTF-8

ResearchGate 2018, Higher Order Vagueness, viewed 28 October 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327623745_Higher_Order_Vagueness

ResearchGate 2018, Possible Worlds x Psychiatry, viewed 28 October 2018, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308968450_Possible_Worlds_x_Psychiatry

Church of Scientology International 2018, Scientology, viewed 28 October 2018, https://www.scientology.org/what-is-scientology/basic-principles-of-scientology/personal-integrity.html

Skirry, J. 2018, René Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction, viewed 28 October 2018,  https://www.iep.utm.edu/descmind/

Doctor Allen Wood Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor emeritus, Stanford University                              Ruth Norman Halls Professor, Indiana University Bloomington E-mail wood2420@gmail.com Web: Research Gate

Doctor Marcia Pinheiro Lecturer at IICSE University Certified Translator and Interpreter Portuguese & English NAATI  40296          Member: PROz, RGMIA, Ancient Philosophy PhD in Philosophy and Mathematics Master in Philosophy Certified TESOL/TEFL professional Licentiate in Mathematics PO Box 12396 A’Beckett St Melbourne, VIC, AU, 8006 E-mail drmarciapinheiro@gmail.com Web Research Gate

Godel's Proof of God

Godel only engaged in this sort of theme because of Leibniz (proving the existence of God).  

Leibniz calls this a proof of a necessary being, not a proof of God, but everyone else calls this a proof of God. 

http://www.leibniz-translations.com/proof.htm brings Leibniz’s proof. 


It reads:

If a necessary being is possible, it actually exists.

Necessary being?

Who says that this is possible, and why do they say that?

Then how is it that we go from possible to actually exists? 

Perhaps it exists as an idea (like at least or something)?

For let us suppose it does not exist - from that I shall argue like this:
    A necessary being does not exist, by the hypothesis.
    Whatever does not exist can possibly not exist.

If something is true, then it is also possibly true. 

It is falsely said of whatever can possibly not exist that it cannot not-exist.

What?

We can accept the first direction, right? We here talk about the direction if something is true, then it is possibly true.

However, we cannot accept the second: If something is possibly true, then it is true does not look like a correct assumption. 

This is not an acceptable move. 

Therefore it looks correct asserting that this is false, and then it is falsely said of whatever can possibly not exist that it cannot not-exist.

Of whatever it is falsely said that it cannot not-exist, it is falsely said that it is necessary.

Sure. 

If it is false that something cannot not-exist, then it must be because it can not-exist, what makes of the thing something not necessary (even though we are not seeing the purpose it serves, like necessary for what? 

For as long as we do not see the purpose of the thing, we cannot sign under the logic involved). It may be that we need something and we die because the thing does not exist, so that its non-existence is allowed, yet it is necessary, what does not make it false that it is necessary. 

Call the following line (W).

For necessary is that which cannot not-exist.

Not really. We have just proven that it is all context-dependent. 

Therefore it is falsely said that a necessary being is necessary.

(?) Now we do not see any connection between what is said before this sentence and this sentence (because of (W))… . 

This conclusion is either true or false.

This is not a conclusion, therefore it is a false conclusion.

If it is true, it follows that a necessary being implies contradiction, or is impossible, because contradictory things are demonstrated of it, namely that it is not necessary. For a contradictory conclusion can be shown only when a thing implies contradiction.

If a conclusion is false, and we do not see a contradiction, then the argument is not something we can judge based on our logical inferences.

If the conclusion is false, it is necessary that something is wrong with the premises.

No, it is not. We may simply have drawn wrong inferences, as it is clearly the case. 

Yet the hypothesis can only be false because of the premises, namely that a necessary being does not exist.

Once more, this is not really the case.

Therefore we have concluded that a necessary being is either impossible or exists.

No, we have not.

Therefore if we define God as ens a se [being from itself], or as a being from whose essence existence follows, or as a necessary being, it follows that if God is possible he actually exists.

No, nothing like that. 

We do understand, however, that if a necessary being is that whose essence existence follows, then it has to exist when it is necessary.

If words from the lexicon are used to prove our points in Logic, that will confuse people. 

Besides, that is a rule for Logic: we perform extraordinary effort to have words that allow for just one sense being inserted in the mathematical/logical universe, not mattering if we have to create them or not. 

If he defines a necessary being as something that exists, then we do not have any inference there. 

It is all improper language. 

Perhaps we could make Leibniz's argument be a lot shorter following what we are learning now: God is a being whose essence implies existence. Because we think that we know His essence (therefore it does exist), we have to acknowledge His existence. 


Once more, we would have problems here with Leibniz's reasoning, but way fewer problems than before. Why could God not be only essence, like without existence? What is existence and what is essence?


It is quite a shock learning that a mathematician of so much value, creator of our Calculus (http://www.storyofmathematics.com/17th_leibniz.html),  has so many problems with either the figure of God (and that is why he cannot reason well when trying to write about this topic) or Classical Logic when the context is not one that belongs to Pure Mathematics (yet it should not be tried in any other context).


The proof above is not the same we see described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, however.

There (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/), we read:

(1)	God is a being having all perfections. (Definition)
(2)	A perfection is a simple and absolute property. (Definition)
(3)	Existence is a perfection.
(4)	If existence is part of the essence of a thing, then it is a necessary being.
(5)	If it is possible for a necessary being to exist, then a necessary being does exist.
(6)	It is possible for a being to have all perfections.
(7)	Therefore, a necessary being (God) does exist.

The premise number (2) is already a bit controversial: perfection is an absolute property.


Perfection is a personal concept, ultra personal, instead.

In the end of 2001, we thought that Tom Cruise was absolutely perfect (just like ourselves, by the way). Would we not find people on earth to say that his nose is too big, or that he is too short, or that he is promiscuous, or that he is homosexual, or that he is a drug addict, or a coward, or a criminal, and others, like all depending on their personal experience with Tom Cruise, and their own concept of perfection?

How come this is an absolute property then? It is a super relative one instead.

Simple property? Joking! Perfection is a complex property.


What sort of definition of simple are we considering? 


If we ourselves think that someone is perfect, we are thinking of morality, physicality, partnership, virility, and things like that. 

Is that simple? 

A person must have almost all qualities that we can think of, if not all of them, for us to think that they are perfect. 

That has to be super complex, not simple.

Existence is a perfection? It just gets worse!

If we are suffering violation of human rights, especially of the most serious type, such as slavery, brainwashing, or torture, how come we would not think, probably for the entire amount of time in which we are in that situation, that human existence is absolutely imperfect, like it is something absolutely undesirable. 

If we have spiritual beliefs, then we would think that we are losing because of being alive, and we would not have lost had we not been born, so that this is an absolute imperfection, rather than just an imperfection.

Since we cannot really believe that (2) is a rational move (one step is enough), this is not a proof of anything (therefore this is not a proof of the existence of God, and this is also not a proof of the existence of a necessary being).

(Poor Leibniz?)

A Proof of God

How it all started is an impossible-to-solve puzzle because there is always an unanswered question, and there is always at least one unanswered question whilst we are limited to the human shape.

All is knowledge, and all is achievable through it.

If all is knowledge, but our existence is not enough to cope with certain pieces of knowledge, and one piece is enough, say the never-answered question, then there is something or someone who has the knowledge, and that someone or that something is not part of human kind.

Knowledge must belong to someone or something because otherwise it would not be knowledge; it would be another thing. 

Knowledge has to belong. Knowledge cannot exist per se.

Who has it then?

Nobody who is alive, and is a human being has it.

Therefore, the dead or the about-to-be-born might have it if it belongs to humanity somehow.

Not mattering to whom it belongs, it is something beyond the living creatures.


It could not be that the living creatures who are not human beings have it because they clearly know less than us.

It belongs to a non-human entity in our sense of non-human, for the body on its own cannot have knowledge, like perhaps devices inside of it can have knowledge, but not the dead body.


There is also a chance that knowledge belong to the about-to-be-born. Now we have a blurred area: are the about-to-be-born human beings?  


If they are, and knowledge belongs to them, then perhaps knowledge belongs to human beings.


However, if we can never access what they know through them, would it not be better excluding them from human kind in terms of mental maps?


Their knowledge cannot belong to human kind anyway. 

The body can have knowledge if the person is in it, if the human being is alive...

We do not call the corpse human being. 

We call the corpse dead human being, therefore non-human being.

We do not call the about-to-be-born human being, we call them human being in formation, therefore non-human being.


Now call this non-human entity, who has the knowledge, God and we then have a proof of the existence of God based on epistemic beliefs that are universally seen as beliefs of human kind.

Obs.: We have called our article with Semiotica A Solution to The Sorites to copy the name of our talk at the Newcastle University in 2000. However, we never wanted to call it either of them A Solution for we are the only ones who have the solution instead. Our research supervisor insisted that we called our work that way. This little piece, however, we call A Proof of God for willing to call it this way. 


There must be zillions of proofs of the existence of God. This is just one more.