The article is well written and all, but that "Copyright © 2023, all rights reserved" at the end is ultimate hypocrisy.

Why is killing people wrong, but ok in war? Why do we still kill animals even though we know it's wrong? Why is killing wrong in the first place? I bet you can't find a single rational reason. That is because ethics isn't based on reason, but instead on emotion. Given that, I don't find it very surprising that it's often very hypocritical.

Ah yes, good old hay ... delicious!

This post reminded me of a dream I had today.

I was hiking up a hill through a forest and saw a snake by the side of the path. I stopped to look at it. It was completely black with a strange white dotted pattern on its back, unlike any snake where I live. Then I heard something moving a little uphill, I turned to look, and it was another snake, and next to it another. I looked around and the ground was writhing with snakes. I started running away into the forest, but it was getting darker and darker. Then I heard an ominous whirring sound getting progressively louder. I woke up and it was the washing machine.

Yes, I agree it seems scary, but all it really means is that morality is not universal but specific to humans. You could say everything is inherently morally permissible in the sense that there is no higher power which will punish you for your actions, so essentially there is nothing preventing you from committing them. In short, the universe doesn't give a shit what you do.

Still, your actions do have consequences, and you are inevitably forced to live with them (pretty much Sartre's viewpoint). Because of this, doing things you think are wrong is often bad for you, because it causes you emotional pain in the form of guilt and regret, and also usually carries along negative social repercussions which outweigh the value of the immoral act in the first place. You could say that people are naturally compelled to act in certain ways out of completely selfish reasons. In this sense, I prefer to look at morality more as a "deal" between the members of a society to act in a certain mutually beneficial way (which is fueled by our instincts, a product of evolution), than something universal and objective.

The reason I doubt in our current understanding of consciousness is because I find its distinction between what is conscious and what isn't quite arbitrary and problematic. At which point does an embryo become conscious, and how can something conscious be created from something unconscious? The simplest explanation I can imagine is that consciousness is present everywhere and cannot be created nor destroyed. This view (called panpsychism) is absolutely ancient, but seems to be gaining some recognition again, even among neuroscientists.

As you mentioned, "cogito, ergo sum" might be the only real objective truth that philosophy has uncovered so far. I am an optimist in that I believe surely more than one such truth must exist. If it was only discovered 400 years ago, surely there is more to be found. Maybe it is possible to collect some of these small fragments and build some larger philosophical theory from them, one that will be grounded in fact and built up using logic. I guess only time will tell.

And yes, of course some abstraction is beneficial in order to make sense of the world, even if it isn't completely correct or objective.

Altschmerz would mean something like old-pain if translated directly from German I think

This happened a few months ago when I went to Iceland. One night, me and some other people drove out to a relatively remote part of Reykjavik to try and see the aurora since the conditions were really good. We were standing there just looking at it (we did end up seeing it), when we heard what sounded like a woman screaming from the woods nearby. We noped out almost immediately and drove away, but I still regret not checking it out. I'm appending a photo I took there to add to the creep factor.

Bonus story, although this one isn't really that creepy. This was on the first day of a summer camp I went to. I went to sleep a little earlier, since I was really tired, and as I'm lying still, trying to fall asleep, I hear this girl I was sharing my tent with enter. I didn't really know her since it was the first day. Then I feel something like a hand on my cheek/the side of my head. I'm freaking out at this point, but I didn't wanna turn around since it would be really awkward. Then I feel the "hand" move away in a really unusual way. I turn to look what it is and it's a FUCKING TOAD. Damn I'm an idiot.

The issue I see with these theories is that this idea of inherent value they all arrive at is very abstract in a way. What does it even mean for something to have inherent value, and why is it wrong to destroy it?

Another problem is that we talk about destroying life without even fully understanding it in the first place. What if life (in the sense of consciousness) is indestructible?

The way I see it, people accept that life has some inherent value because our self preservation instinct tells us that we don't want to die and empathy allows us to extend that instinct to other living beings. Both are easily explained as products of evolution, not rational or objective, but simply evolutionarily favourable. All these theories are attempts to rationally explain this feeling, but they all inevitably fail, as they're (in my opinion) trying to prove something that simply isn't objectively true.

Anyways, I feel like even if you accepted any individual theory that seems to confirm our current understanding of morality and stuck with it fully, you would come to conclusions which are completely conflicting with it. For example in the case of utilitarianism, you could easily come to the conclusion that not donating most of your money to charity is immoral, as that would be the course of action which would result in the largest total amount of pleasure.

You can make ethical arguments based in reason.

Come on, I'd love to hear some, also the stakes are still up if you can give me a rational argument why killing is wrong.