Errands and my birthday yesterday, and tennis today and, perhaps, getting over my birthday, have me too out of it to do anything new for this entry, so I’m putting an incomplete  blither I blithered a week or so ago and, so far as I know, did not post here:

The Biological Determinants of Morality According to Knowlecular Psychology

Beginning with the moral assumption that the Property Rights of the Innocent Ought to be Inviolable.

The knowlecular basis for this is the Urceptual Property Complex.  I believe a person has sensors that activate this complex upon encountering a part or the whole of some objectual complex in the environment that is in tactile contact with the person, and— therefore—with the person’s urceptual self.

Background: To explain what an objectual complex is requires a description of the objecticeptual awareness.  (Note: I count my thoughts on this as a theory once removed from my main theory—i.e., less probable to me than my theory of the anthroceptual awareness, for instance.)  Objectuality starts with the fundaceptual sensors.  They feed into just about all the initial precerebral areas including the initial objecticeptual pre-cerebral area.  Mechanisms there filter out stimuli associated with life.  That’s an easy more or less near-instantaneous task in many instances, but hugely difficult lengthy task in others.  My guess (and this is my first serious thinking about objectuality) is that many stimuli that cannot without significant difficulty be tagged as either objectual or living are ignored—until such a time as the filtering mechanisms have “learned” enough to make reasonably good guesses as to which they are.

In any case, the brain will allow what the initial objecticeptual pre-cerebral area considers objectual knowlicles (or objecticeptual units) into the secondary objecticeptual pre-cerebral area.  Here, mechanisms will sort out the urceptual objecticeptual knowlecules—i.e., the objecticeptual knowlicles that form one of the unified wholes that we innately consider an objectual complex.  I hypothesize that there are many of these such as tree, body of water, sun, cloud, rock.  The one I’m first concerned with here, however, is the urceptual property complex, which, as already mentioned, is any non-living thing a person comes into tactile contact with.

Make that anything a person comes into contact with because I believe that the early life form that first developed a sensitivity to property may have considered its prey to be its property once captured, and therefore fought off members of its species to keep possession of it.  Something along those lines would have been biologically sensible.

Wait.  Before all this, the first property-owning organism would come to consider its own body to be a property-object.  Something to be defended automatically when touched by something not-it, and eventually when something not-it comes close enough to touch it.
The further reflex of recognizing prey once taken as (1) not not-it and (2) as a property-object will evolve a reflex helping it to protect taken prey from being stolen from it.

Meanwhile, the reflex of considering simply the space around it to be its territory, or part of the body it owns will surely evolve.  The territorial instinct.  It seems to me that, however simplistic all this sounds, that nothing would stop the evolution of the urceptual property complex that would continue till our version of it: owned prey would become any object an organism touched and wanted to keep, and eventually any such object on his spatial property—i.e., his personal space.

Related urceptual reflexes would naturally develop concerning recognition of the property of those of his species, and not of other species.  Except enough of a reflex about the latter to warn him away from the cave some bear owns, say.

Result: an innate moral belief in the sacredness of a person’s body, personal space, and objects in that space or extending from it, and the evil of another person’s trying to take or damage any of these owned things.  The empathy drive, also basically urceptual, will combine with this to make healthy people share another’s fear of having property taken from him, and unhappiness whenever it is.  This is where one of mankind’s oldest written moral laws comes from: thou shalt not steal.  Natural Law, in my view.  But not supernatural law.

Ownership of a spouse and children makes sense, too: they are property a person is driven biologically to defend.  Of course, they are special kinds of property, so one’s ownership is very complex—in ways combined with a person’s being owned in certain respects by what he owns.  This, right now, I have thought long enough about to say anything more about.

I think most everyone would agree that everyone, including communists, believes—albeit, sometimes without conscious awareness—in simple property rights to one’s own body, house, and family—even when the house technically might belong to the state.  Difficulties crop up when concerned with economic property like a store or barn or mine.  Here I distinguish personal property like one’s own body from economic property, the former being what one has for survival and simple comfort, not to make money or the equivalent, the latter primarily to get beyond mere survival and simple comfort.

Direct and indirect property.  Some of the indirect property would become direct when its owner is in direct possession of it, like a store-owner inside his store.  But that would be the same as his house, which he won’t always be in.

Another question (and about all I have in my understanding of what I think is my present subject are questions) is partial ownership—of an employee, for instance.  A person can sell time shares in his body.  Rent his body, that is.  Similarly, if you rent a room from me for a week, you wholly own that room until the week is up—except what your rental agreement might say, and what might be understood such as your not having the right to smash a rented computer.  You have bought its effectiveness for a given length of time, so must return its effectiveness at the end of the rental period—with some unavoidable deterioration allowed.

When you rent something, you’re paying for its effective and the unreturnable time you are in possession of it.  This is something many economists (all economists?) seem not to understand—the ones who talk about unearned income.  Which brings up an important problem in the study of morality: what about items in our moral code not directly due to some urceptual complex like the question of the morality of taking money for rent.  This is where logic comes in, the principle involved being that anything not directly moral because of some innate moral reflex like the one that property is sacred is moral if logic can show it step by step to be the necessary outcome of  the application of the moral reflex.  Call the action of the moral reflex the pronouncement of a moral axiom.

Empathy will always be part of the determination of the morality of an act not directly based on a moral axiom.  With that, I’ve spread my thoughts as far as I can right now without losing all idea of where I am.

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It may be that the empathy instinct accounts for all other morality, natural empathy.  Perhaps just about all more complicated is just a matter of evaluation of priorities: which come first, security or freedom, for example.

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