Tales from the briny deeps
A month ago scientists discovered a giant blob of something on the beach in Chile. It was fleshy and formless and 40 feet long. At first they thought it might be a giant squid, but then after testing it turned out to be a dead whale. Apparently when sperm whales decompose their bones fall out and their head detaches and turns into this giant bag of whale head which drifts around and in this case washed up on a nice Chilean beach.
I always loved marine biology. I could have been a marine biologist except for the fact that I would probably eat all the animals I studied. Here's another marine biology fact. Octopuses are apparently very intelligent. This is a bit surprising since they live amongst the not so intelligent ocean animals. Fish aren't too smart, neither are lobsters. I guess whales and dolphins are smart, but they aren't gonna last too much longer anyway so I wouldn't get too attached.
Studies have discovered a lot of surprisingly intelligent behaviour in our octo-buddy the octopus. In the 90's some Italian scientists were testing octopus intelligence by giving an octopus a red ball or a white ball. This sounds like a fun game, but much like any red ball/white ball grabbing game, one of the choices conceals a bitter surprise, for you see the white ball was electrified. Eventually the test octopuses learned to not grab the white ball.
There were other octopuses that weren't in the experiment but were in another tank in the same room and they also watched the experiment. Later when the scientists did the experiment on them they quickly grabbed the red ball. Apparently they learned just by watching the other octopuses.
I heard of another story which took place in a lab with 2 big tanks on opposite sides of the room. In one tank were some octopuses, and in the other tank was a bunch of crabs. One morning the researchers came in and noticed there were some crabs missing. So they put a video camera in the room overnight. What they found was the octopuses crawled out of their tank, across the floor, dropped into the crab tank and ate them. Surprisingly, then they got back out of the crab tank and sneaked back into their own tank.
What does this all mean?
I have no idea. But it makes me wonder. What if one day there will be other animals as smart as us? There's no argument that the humans are on top right now but eventually we will die off. It's not totally inconcieveable that one day the earth will be ruled by a race of apes, or maybe even super smart squiddies. And maybe watching the matrix reloaded has sent my mind off on a few too many tangents lately.
Will the civilization of intelligent squiddies be anything like ours? Will they have multinational corporations? Will they have diet sodas made of imitation sugar so their fat people can pretend they are somehow offsetting the half a cheesecake they ate for lunch with some sort of scientific cheesecake antimatter? Will they have ethical ideas like right and wrong?
If you look at nature it doesn't operate according to any kind of morality. It has no conscience, it isn't even fair. Nature has no such things as good or evil. But it also has no plans. But we do.
And that's the difference. We plan things, and so maybe that's why we have morals. Nature has no intelligence, therefore no goals so it has no need of morality. It's annoying to make plans in a universe that has no rules so we make them for ourselves. That explanation is probably a little too simple.
I think about morality and I can't explain where it comes from. It's convenient, it keeps us from driving over each other with our cars and then eating our brains, but does it come from somewhere outside of us? The bigger religions think it comes from god. Some of the more fringe religions have more hilarious reasoning about morality but I haven't got any time or any facts to go into that.
Since I'm not catholic I didn't get the seven deadly sins to go by. So the best I could come up with were the seven deadly smurfs. There was grouchy smurf, vanity smurf, greedy smurf, lazy smurf, gambling smurf, asian smurf, and skier smurf.
All religions have morality built in. Its a very useful tool to suppress the anarchy of human desires. But for some reason I have morals and I don't even buy into all that religion stuff. Maybe its my recognition of the anarchy of my desires. That sounds reasonable but its a little too simple as well.
Where does it come from? I have no fucking idea.