I'm not evil, I'm just indifferent...

... and that's being scientific.

How the mind works have always intrigued us as humans, there are even those who go so far as to say that we should unravel its mysteries lest we stop it from ever working. I am, of course, not such a person and scientists have for a long time been poking and prodding the mind as much as they can in the hopes of getting it to reveal its inner workings. However there are some things that we know about the mind, and one of them is that it is poorly suited for the environment that it finds it self today. The brain is an organ that, like any other organ, have adapted to situations in the past, stored in it are helpful strategies to cope with events a long time ago. It isn't built to solve equations, or to construct algorithms, or even to be rational in buying things. People who find themselves bored have to actively restrain themselves from trying to get a snack, this is not so much as them being greedy, but because as prehistoric hunters and gatherers, food sometimes come out short, people were thus adapted to storing as much food as possible when at a meal.

This and many other examples of residual loads in our heads were undeniably transferred from a working strategy in the past to the present. There has not been enough time for the brain to remove its primitive shackles as it found itself suddenly thrust into the future (except maybe for the British). The process of mutation and natural selection requires hundreds of generations before small noticeable changes can be found. However the whole of the modern age have only lasted for at most 3 centuries, and only for a century if you are in Asia. This leads to a huge deviation from our expressed behaviour to the optimal behaviour we should have, such as being indifferent to the abundance of food. One of this deviation is in the way we treat people, or what you would call morality, but what I would just call expressions of the mind.

The ability for the mind to deal with other minds lie within the whole concept of emotions, a system of checks and balance that have specially arise in the past when social communication first started to grow in importance. From basic game theory, we would want to invest in each person, with as much as they would invest back in you, and that's what emotions cause you to do, as well as to punish people who break their commitments. Back then we live in small family groups that not only were closely related, but also stayed together for a long time. Therefore, heavy investments in other people made much sense because they have a high chance of encountering you again. The gathering of people to form large agricultural societies, civilisation, was only a very recent development, and that's where the rules started to fall apart.Today, we leave in a world so vastly different from the past that previous strategies of our mind completely do not apply. The chances of having another encounter with an acquaintance is so minute that it would be like trying to find a grain of sand after you dropped it, quite easy on a pavement, but close to impossible where at the beach surrounded by sand. To argue that we should invest a lot on acquaintances because of the slight possibility of that impacting your life makes no more meaning than that you should invest in gods, for however small the possibility is for their existence.

Talking about gods, we now come to another residual function in our brain, cognitive dissonance. That is the "art" of the brain combining 2 entirely contradicting positions to try to form a logical connection between them, such as "gods are benevolent" and "there is suffering" into "people who suffer have committed crimes against gods because they have been given free will". This "art" can be easily seen to be beneficial in the past whereby very little ideas are in circulation, when you see a set of fresh animal tracks on the floor, and remember that in the past you saw a boar making almost the same type of track, you connect them to interpret that a boar is close by. However, the world today is so filled with ideas that this primitive system of connection no longer works properly. And it is with particular difficultly that I try to overcome this mismatch of facts as much as possible, I require that sufficient evidence be presented to me before I acknowledge a right answer, or even a possible answer, but at a price to the thought process. My embrace of atheism is because of a strict requirement in my head to always keep consistent, and not because I'm evil, and neither does it cause me to be evil. (As a note, I'm defending atheism here, atheism does not make you an emotionless person, regardless of how much I wish it would. You find me an atheist because atheism admits all kinds of people who doesn't believe the supernatural exist, and I hope I don't need to tell you that it's not a religion, or even a faith)

When I am asked if I'm too afraid to bask in my emotions, shouldn't the opposite question be more relevant? That why is their other side afraid to let go of their emotions, to grow up from a prehistoric past? Emotions have reduced us to the simplicity of following the natural order, and to go with what we feel best. It is antithetical to what the Enlightenment has been all about, which is individualism and the power to understand and take control of our own lives, the separation of beliefs and actions. Emotions are also antithetical to Science, the great body of knowledge that arose out of the ashes of the middle age to bring forth the modern, whose strict system requires all observations to be able to be repeated by any person, or for that matter, any machine.

Furthermore, it can be argued that emotions have brought forth the largest harm to the world. Is it not true that the passionate feelings of nationalism is just another form of sectarianism? How many times have people killed in the name of sectarianism, or hatred, or jealousy? How many times have people got themselves in trouble in the name of happiness, by way of lust and greed? How many times have people massacred in the name of love for their countrymen? (How about all the time?) And then how many times have people killed because they hold no emotions or beliefs? (The answer is none) It is for the same reason why science-fiction books displaying evil robots have got it all wrong. What reason would robots have to kill or torture when they do not have emotions? What would they achieve besides self defence? We wouldn't achieve anything either, but those emotions are too deeply rooted in our brains to wipe off.

To sum up, I am not moral, neither am I immoral, I am just amoral. That doesn't mean that I would not help people or that I would deliberately cause harm, I would only do what is necessary. And that is all that is needed to make the world a better place, as well as being as scientific as possible. (Look carefully, if you think I'm nihilistic or relativistic, I am NOT saying that there is no such as being right, or being better)