My apologies, readers, if my last post seemed confusing. It's hard for me to explain a view of reality that is so different in character from the one held by so many moderns, the moral relativist one. I am a moral realist, through and through. Moral relativism, I believe, if we don't outgrow it, is going to get us all killed. But one more try and I'll move on. 

We humans evolve culturally, not genetically. We've stagnated genetically for probably 50,000 years. If anything, we've gotten weaker over the last 2000 generations. We save people who would certainly have died young in Neolithic times and these people with various conditions and injuries then live to breed, which in primitive times would not have happened. The gene pool is getting less fit, but so what? The pool of memes, the pool of ideas that drive our behaviour patterns, is getting more fit. In short, we have embarked on a course of cultural evolution, something no other species has ever done, and that strategy, so far, is working. We have come to dominate the earth in ways no other single species has ever come close to. 

We pass collections of ideas and mores down to our young generation after generation, and the ideas and mores that work keep multiplying because they equip the tribes that carry them to multiply. Good culture is culture that causes its carriers to survive and flourish. Weak cultures, by and large, die out, via natural disaster sometimes, but more often via war. 

A harsh view, but on the other hand, maybe gentler ideas called "morals" have survival value. They must, come to think of it. Look at how many modern tribes contain various versions of them. 

In fact, they do. Courage and wisdom are very general moral values that have multiplied as memes in nearly all of the cultures of the world because they make us behave in ways that effectively answer a most basic quality of the real universe, namely entropy. Courage drives us, as whole tribes, into the downward flow of the physical matter of the universe and wisdom enables us to steer.

Everything in physical nature, atoms and molecules, tends to fall apart. Metals corrode. Stars burn out. Living things die. But in life forms, programming drives us to swim into the current and around the obstacles. In most life forms, it's mostly genetic programming, but in humans it's mostly cultural imprinting. And the most general principles that we learn from our parents and mentors are the ones that must inform our behavior in the most general way if we are to survive and pass our values on to our kids. Courage and wisdom, in balance, guide our patterns of behavior in ways that cause us to survive because in the giant picture those behavior patterns are meeting the basic adversity of life. 

The other major quality of reality that must be dealt with is uncertainty. We have only begun to understand what this means in physics. Quantum uncertainty is as much a quality of reality as entropy is. But entropy we have understood for a long time. We have formulas in physics that describe it. Uncertainty has only been a seriously considered concept since Bohr and Heisenberg figured it out in the 1920's. But it is a fact. I believe that. There is no single fixed future for the universe as Newton and Laplace pictured it. Bohr and Heisenberg overthrow that whole worldview. We flow into a future that is not only difficult, as influenced by entropy, but also crazy and hazardous as influenced by quantum uncertainty. 

Life isn't just hard, it's hazardous. Luckily it is hazardous in probabilistic ways, not random ones. So in the most vigorous societies, we have learned over many generations to live by the values we call "freedom" and "love". Living by freedom gives us a community of variously skilled and talented people, not a uniform, homogeneous population. Love enables us all to live together in the same town and get along. We end up with a pluralistic population, and it is more fit than a uniform  population could ever be because when the uncertain universe throws a surprise at us, as it does every so often, a society with a lot of different kinds of people in it has better odds of having someone in town who knows what we can do to get us out of the crisis. 

Courage and wisdom, freedom and love. They cause us to behave in ways that, over millions of people and thousands of years, enable us to survive. And that's why values are real. They have real consequences. It's just that those consequences take a long time to become visible in the patterns of human history.