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this one is kinda weird, hang with me.

think about how you know grammar rules. the weird ones in english. things like how “you oughtn’t do that” looks right, but “you ought’nt do that” doesn’t. there are rules, lots of them, but that’s not how you learned is it? you just know that some things are right just by looking at them, and some things are not. it’s instant, and often hard to explain people who are still learning english.

now, consider the possibility that morality works in the same way as language: absorbed at a formative age by what we see in others, with rules being created later to explain our own reactions to ourselves. note that when you see something that requires a moral judgement, you don’t consult a rulebook, but instead know. even in ambiguous situations, our response isn’t to start following a logical process and try and resolve it, but usually to freeze and be not sure what to do.

what if all our rules for morality, all the religious, philosophical, societal, etc ponderings are all just navel gazing of the “is it ok to split an infinitive” type? what if we already know the answers based on what feels right to us, and instead just argue because black-and-white rules make us feel more comfortable with ourselves?

ambiguity is scary, and so is the idea that everything holding our societies together might not actually be imposed by laws, gods, or anything of the sort, and the moral failings of others are as mutable as their desire to spell ‘you’ as ‘u’

so let’s say you’re reading/watching some fantasy thing and you hear the phrase “dark magic”. yes, it’s cheesy, but you inherently understand what it means: someone is using a magic ritual that will give him power while hurting innocent people. an unfair magic ritual. it’s inherently understood as morally bad.

now, let’s turn that around. think of the phrase “dark mathematics”. doesn’t work, does it? the brain automatically goes “no, that’s stupid, mathematics is amoral, it’s how you use it”.

so why does magic have an inherent morality while mathematics doesn’t? what about other words?

• dark physics – no
• dark engineering – no
• dark science – maybe
• dark experiments – yes
• dark acts – very yes
• dark programming – lolno

so the rule appears to be “things that are understood as implying action are inherently moral, things that don’t, aren’t” even when the logic makes no sense (programming, after all, is in fact an action, ditto chemistry).

not really going anywhere with this one. i came up with the phrase “towers where adepts practice dark mathematics” while in the shower, thought it was hilarious, pondered why, and needed to write it down in over 140 characters.

stephen hawking, in a lecture is saying that the human race has ‘entered a new stage of evolution’, in that we are now taking control of our genetics directly. yes and no, his point is entirely accurate and valid, but his word choice is wrong. people abuse the word evolution because it’s the only one they know to describe change (perhaps ‘improvement’) of a population over time.

look, you wouldn’t say “bob has entered a new stage of walking, he has a bike now”, you would say “bob doesn’t walk places as much, he now bikes”. similarly we’re no longer evolving, we’re now doing something else. coin a word, or just say ‘custom designing ourselves’. evolution requires natural selection and that force nowadays has very little effect on humans, in a world with health care and birth control.

we can’t understand the future by simply blindly shoehorning our reality into outdated concepts and terms. so yes, partially this is me just being a stickler on word choice, but partly we also need to be aware that we shape our thinking in terms of things we know, and there’s no reason to give people wrong conceptions on what’s going on.