I think one of the problems is that in discussing morality (or moral imperatives) we confuse it with sociology (or social imperatives) (sociology may be the wrong word). Sociology is ulimately a subset of morality because morality is concerned more with who you are in yourself. When you live a perfect morality, a perfect sociology occurs naturally. Sociology does not give you a perfect morality — it gives you something like Liberterianism: people have a standard for interacting but are otherwise free to do whatever they want in isolation or as agreed among individuals.

And Liberterianism seems to be exactly the kind of thing that Zindler is driving to. Zindler isn’t talking about morality — he doesn’t believe in it; he’s thrown out the bunk. He’s talking about sociology.

As I’ve said before, I’m not compelled to explain emotion, since emotion only ever serves to promote the well-being of the individual or the community; but if I must, then I’ll say that emotion is probably leftover evolutionary junk that promoted survival on both the individual and group levels among a lower class of humanoids that lacked higher-order brain function.

By the way, I see you’ve got MMJ under “the music” section — how long you been a fan? I discovered them late last year.

And I confess, as I did above, that I would not want to live in a world where it were actually true that all we turned out to be is just very highly evolved machines.

Therefore, I will assert that I cannot accept that all of human personality and will is merely and completely the result of a highly complex computer program. If I truly believed that, I would contemplate suicide. My personality, my consciousness, my will, my emotions….everything I experience…points me to a “beyond” that has a reason for being.