We are part of some sort of natural/cultural project of continuance
Dawkins had his "gene-centered" view. Gould and others have criticized it for being reductionist. My question here is not about his theory tout court, but just the implication that, perhaps the individual person exists for something else's purpose. Two examples:
1) The individual is here to unwittingly (or wittingly) carry out genetic replication such that genes can survive and continue in their ecological niche. The interaction of environment and genetic/epigenetic/phenotypic factors creating the bias for natural selection (and thus continuation).
2) The individual is here to carry out memes. Cultural institutions and traditions (Western consumer, tribal, sub-cultures, etc.) promote procreation to carry out the lifestyle of a particular culture into perpetuity.
If people are for something else's purpose, what does that say about the individual? Are we just pawns in the greater scheme of some sort of natural/cultural project of continuance? Is the goods of life consolation enough to make this not matter? In other words, we may be pawns, but pawns that can have our own personal happy moments, so who cares?
1) The individual is here to unwittingly (or wittingly) carry out genetic replication such that genes can survive and continue in their ecological niche. The interaction of environment and genetic/epigenetic/phenotypic factors creating the bias for natural selection (and thus continuation).
2) The individual is here to carry out memes. Cultural institutions and traditions (Western consumer, tribal, sub-cultures, etc.) promote procreation to carry out the lifestyle of a particular culture into perpetuity.
If people are for something else's purpose, what does that say about the individual? Are we just pawns in the greater scheme of some sort of natural/cultural project of continuance? Is the goods of life consolation enough to make this not matter? In other words, we may be pawns, but pawns that can have our own personal happy moments, so who cares?
Comments (66)
It's not clear what you mean by us being pawns. Am I a pawn of gravity? Am I unwittingly (or wittingly) being made to move towards the Earth's core? If not, is there something different about biological (or cultural) influences that makes it more a case (than with gravity) of being used for something else's purpose?
So you'd be asking whether people are here because of some other sentient creature's overarching goal or credo. Well, the first question we'd need to ask is "what other sentient creature are we talking about"?
Gravity may be too far removed for it to directly influence whether there are more humans. Natural selection and cultural bias, however, are much better candidates for overarching reasons for the human species' continuance (and thus candidates that reign over the individual).
Then you can switch purpose with a word you like better. It does not necessarily change the whole "whole" versus "individual" part.
A game of chess, that made you think you were pawning structures, but meanwhile you were its pawn the whole time. But, this view of learning and growing seems really narrowly focused. Life has more than this, of course. One time I ate ice cream and felt satisfied for a few minutes after.. life is not simply that moment of satiation, nor can I necessarily extrapolate from that moment. Even if I broadened the view to say that, I have had numerous moments of satiation, that would still be narrowly focused on one experience over many others.
Even Dawkins himself admits under pressure, (and then ignores) that the selfish gene is a mere analogy; that genes have no will, no desire, and no view. And certainly nothing remotely like a purpose.
Memes are an analogy of the analogy, and the same applies only even more emphatically.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Only living beings care.
But it is still a gene-centred view of what life actually is - it is the genes that are the subject of variation and selection, and the phenotype is part of their environment.
Quoting unenlightened
Memes, like genes, are subject to variation and selection, and they cause themselves to be replicated. So they are neither an analogy nor an analogy of an analogy. Genes and memes really exist!
But I addressed that I was not talking about his view tout court (in full), just the idea that springs from this that we are beholden to something that is not our own will, but that of something beyond the individual. I even explained how the theory itself has been proven to be reductionist, and thus I was not talking about the theory for the theory's sake but merely as an analogy for something bigger than the individual.
Quoting unenlightened
And thus the obvious- since we are living beings, we care.
And therefore an imaginary view, since genes do not have eyes or a viewpoint of any kind.
Quoting tom
But they do not really have a will to survive, a desire to propagate, or a purpose of their own.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It doesn't matter what we call the idea you're getting at there. Doing things "for something else," being pawns to some aim or motivation or whatever, or your later comment re "reasons for," where you're not simply talking about a descriptive accounting of what's going on causally, etc. doesn't refer to anything that occurs in the world sans sentient beings assigning aims and goals and so on.
It does not matter whether the it is "motivations" or for some unthinking mechanism- it does not destroy the argument that it is doing something DUE to a thing outside the individual (mechanism or otherwise).
What argument? There is simply a declared globalisation of 'mechanism', itself another analogy that suggests, again, an agency, this time called a 'mechanic' that is 'using' us. The denial of agency is justified by its projection onto 'the blind watchmaker'. It's really poor philosophy, motivated by bad psychology. Mechanisms are unthinking, but people have no such excuse.
Okay, but how would we phrase this so that it doesn't suggest anything teleological?
It would have to be something like, "Are we not completely in control of everything in the world? Do we have to do some things because physics demands it? Do we not have complete freedom in the free will sense? Do some decisions we make stem from survival instincts?"
The answers to those questions should be pretty noncontroversial.
These are not the only two possibilities.
A third option could be your purpose is to generate a new meme.
I don't know if that would mean your purpose is for others still or not.
This reminds me of Daniel Dennett when he calls consciousness an illusion but then turns around and says it is not moral (good) to tell susceptible individuals that they don't have free will. It is strange and disconcerting to disconnect the idea of consciousness from free will.
What other beliefs or types of action do people have no excuse for?
I don't like the notion of free will. But it seems obvious that consciousness and the ability to think confers a great freedom of response that blind mechanics lacks. Why deny it? I guess because freedom means responsibility. Much more comfortable to blame the mechanical other.
I disagree. The word 'purpose' is in the title of your thread. The question of the whole in relation to the individual is a different issue, if 'purpose' is not involved. A word someone likes better will not mean the same thing. Human-defined systems have purpose ascribed to them by seemingly purposive humans.
I think you are missing the point of Neo-Darwinism, but yes, genes don't have eyes.
Quoting unenlightened
Again, you are missing the point of Neo-Darwinism, but yes memes don't possess desire or purpose, which is sort of the point. They do however cause themselves to be replicated.
What if the processes of evolution are also creative? That 'the Universe' somehow needs to manifest itself in the form of conscious sentient beings who can look at the Universe and wonder at it?
Such ideas are found in e.g. Bergson and Tielhard du Chardin, but they're generally suppressed in our scientistic culture, mainly to save people the bother of having to think deeply about life.
The problem with Dawkins, and neo-Darwinism generally, is treating a biological theory - how species survive and replicate - as an actual philosophy or 'meaning of life'. This has happened because science has been slotted into the role previously accorded to religion as 'a guide to how right-minded people should think' - which is essentially 'scientism'. Of course, the view from that perspective is that the Universe is meaningless and the only purpose of life is to replicate the gene. But it's a misapplication of the theory from the outset, a giant 'category mistake' that half the planet is now enmeshed in.
From the (true) gene-centred perspective, an individual is a conjecture, one of a population of variants, that is tested against reality.
Neo-Darwinism is mostly metaphysical. That is why it applies to such diverse fields as life, culture, and quantum mechanics. Scientific theories can never be certified as true. Neo-Darwinism is true.
It's not a true perspective, it's an imaginary perspective. Truly, there is no such perspective.
That's a succinct illustration of 'scientism vs humanism'. There are no persons, only gene-carriers.
Quoting tom
It's opponents (of which I'm one) would say that it uses the language and rhetorical techniques of metaphysics against metaphysics.
I guess you are so anti-evolution that you just make stuff up.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, neo-Darwinism is the explanation of biodiversity, none other exists.
What is your alternative explanation of biodiversity?
Iluminating remark, from one who has been known to spell 'Worlds' with a capital W. ;-)
Just to reiterate:
Quoting Wayfarer
This actually has nothing to do with evolutionary biology, per se. It's simply an observation about the purported implications of evolutionary theory for culture - neo-Darwinism as a faux religion, as documented by Michael Ruse, et al.
If I change the title to "impersonal mechanism" would that convey the point for you and change the debate from semantics to the implications of this?
How I'm I implying it's using us? You don't think you can be a pawn in an unthinking mechanism?
If this were true, the conclusion is essentially the same. The teleological mechanism creates more beings.
You mean like a China brain?
OK, here's another way of picturing it - you might know Star Wars drew heavily on mythological themes of 'the hero's journey', which was the subject of a famous book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. That book was in turn based on the cultural archetype of the hero who leaves his home, is challenged and threatened by alien or evil forces, before finally realising his 'true identity' and returning to his real home. Heck, you even see it in Lion King.
Many cultural archetypes and myths encode such stories into their folklore and religion - think of epic poems, the Ramayana, and so on. It's a big part of what culture is.
Now look at 20th C Western cultural history. One of the over-arching themes is the Death of God and the denial of purpose. Look at Russell's Free Man's Worship and then existentialism. It's all about being 'exiled', feeling that we're the random products of a meaningless process. 'Accidental tourists', I often think.
The OP speaks in terms of 'memes' which is one of Dawkins ideas, but Dawkins is very much associated with that notion of the meaninglessness of the Cosmos.
That attitude is writ large in 'secular culture'. But the new consciousness that is emerging, the 'greening' of the West, is totally different - not a return to the mythical religious past, but in terms of Gaia, environmental awareness, and new-age tropes of planetary consciousness and higher awareness. They re-imagine evolution as 'evolutionary consciousness'. Spaceship Earth, stewards of the planet, here to find a harmonious way of co-existing through saving resources and getting off the mindless consumerist treadmill.
If the cosmos began without meaning, it would still have no meaning UNLESS something happened to create meaning.
Genes and memes are not meaning creators. Neither are physical forces, biological processes, evolution, earthquakes, and so on. They are real, but they don't make meaning. There can not be pawns in a meaningless world. The pieces for which pawns are stand-ins have meaning.
Something happened.
Meaning makers came into existence. Meaning makers, of necessity, have the capacity to impose meaning on a meaningless world. We meaning makers can create and destroy pawns; we can generate ideas that "trend" mightily. If we were to disappear, the cosmos would return to meaninglessness.
Subjective meaning, that is.
No I don't. I think it's a muddle. One can be a pawn in someone else's game, if someone else is using one for some purpose not one's own. But an unthinking mechanism can have no purpose of its own. It is as if a driver complained that he had to go wherever the car took him. A passenger might reasonably complain, but not the driver. You can refuse to drive and then complain that the car is not going anywhere, but I'm afraid I have little sympathy.
This doesn't seem to me to be an answer as to why or how the word 'purpose' can have an adequate substitute of one's own choosing. It's an answer to another question.
I'm suspicious of the use of the passive voice. '...is tested against reality' does not name the tester. '...an individual is a conjecture..' by what or whom? The implication is that there is an agent. Well, who or what is the agent? Life tends to beget life. But is that 'purpose'?
Quoting tom
I don't understand the value of such a remark. Who could usefully argue for or refute it? I'm a great advocate of neo-Darwinism in (as neo-Darwinists might say) its niche. But to think of it as a guide to say political discourse, or aesthetics, or ethics, would be, in my view, an error.
Well, obviously the title is as it is now, I accept that.
And yes, I think 'impersonal mechanism' would be an interesting replacement. Then my answer would be straightforward, that 'mechanism' is an illuminating metaphor but nothing more, and that I don't think people are here 'for' anything, other than for what they commit themselves to, when they find themselves here as we do.
This is a good analogy. We can ask, why are there passengers and drivers. The passengers are very often complaining, you're driving too fast, you're driving too slow, you should go this way, you should go that way. We call them backseat drivers. Draw this analogy out to human life in general, and there are leaders and followers. Why are the followers so often complainers? I'm just a pawn in your game. Why do we even start to think that it is someone else's goal that we're working toward, not our own?
I think that this type of thinking is unhealthy. It completely misunderstands intentionality, assuming that there are individuals, (or in the case of the op, possibly some entities), with their own secret goals, directing people around, as pawns, without disclosing their goals, what they are using the people for. However, we know from thousands of years of experience that this is not how intentionality works. Intentionality works by having intentions clearly disclosed, through concise, well formulated language, so that individuals clearly understand each other's intentions, and work together toward common goals. There is no such thing as "I am your pawn", when goals are common goals.
There is no substitute for the word "purpose" in neo-Darwinism, because purpose is explicitly absent. Teleology is anathema!
Quoting mcdoodle
The test is comparative breeding success. Genetic variants better adapted to their niche become more prevalent over time. There is no designer or agent.
Quoting mcdoodle
It explains how religions survive though. Which is useful knowledge.
But the unthinking mechanism has a teleology of sorts, and that is to continue the project of life. It may not be designed with purpose, but it is there nonetheless. Notice, my examples are both ones whereby the outcome is whatever is optimal for continuing to live (both culturally surviving or genetically surviving). Natural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for life to continue via adaptation. Cultural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for culture to continue into the future. We are here due to these type of processes- they are not due to any decision made by us, but the unthinking mechanics of a process whose outcome is more life. You, the individual's preferences, ideals, and personal whatever, is not factored into this other than the general ability to optimize this process as the process would lose momentum otherwise. However, I think instead of understanding this implication, you are getting caught up with the title's wording.
I guess my answer would be similar to what I said to unenlightened's response. I'll just copy and paste it:
But the unthinking mechanism has a teleology of sorts, and that is to continue the project of life. It may not be designed with purpose, but it is there nonetheless. Notice, my examples are both ones whereby the outcome is whatever is optimal for continuing to live (both culturally surviving or genetically surviving). Natural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for life to continue via adaptation. Cultural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for culture to continue into the future. We are here due to these type of processes- they are not due to any decision made by us, but the unthinking mechanics of a process whose outcome is more life. You, the individual's preferences, ideals, and personal whatever, is not factored into this other than the general ability to optimize this process as the process would lose momentum otherwise. However, I think instead of understanding this implication, you are getting caught up with the title's wording.
I think my answer would be similar to what I said to unenlightened's response. I'll just copy and paste it:
But the unthinking mechanism has a teleology of sorts, and that is to continue the project of life. It may not be designed with purpose, but it is there nonetheless. Notice, my examples are both ones whereby the outcome is whatever is optimal for continuing to live (both culturally surviving or genetically surviving). Natural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for life to continue via adaptation. Cultural selection just so happens to create the optimal situation for culture to continue into the future. We are here due to these type of processes- they are not due to any decision made by us, but the unthinking mechanics of a process whose outcome is more life. You, the individual's preferences, ideals, and personal whatever, is not factored into this other than the general ability to optimize this process as the process would lose momentum otherwise. However, I think instead of understanding this implication, you are getting caught up with the title's wording.
No, you have the teleology backwards. The aim of genes is to go extinct, and most of them achieve this eventually. Natural selection provides the optimal situation for extinction to occur to all but the unfortunate minority.
I hope this makes as little sense to you as your teleology does to me, and you can see in the reflection that both are equally senseless.
Genes don't want to survive any more than they want to go extinct. It is humans that want things, and then project their own teleology onto nature.
I don't agree with this. I think that teleology is bunk outside of sentient creatures thinking about things in terms of goals/aims/purposes. Re evolution, it's not that there are non-sentient goals of survival or anything like that. It's just that (a) offspring aren't identically/exactly replicated, and (b) it's simply a contingent fact that things that are (better) able to survive to procreate will pass their genes on. There's no teleology in that.
No, when genes start optimizing reproduction (more people surviving and reproducing, etc.) it tends to retain the optimization strategies or adapt accordingly to the circumstances as time moves forward (until or unless a catastrophic event occurs). Add in the idea of memes and this too tends to optimizes "its own" and the species survival.
There is no aim, I agree, but there is an outcome of natural selection that optimizes survival and once at a level of stable reproductive rates, continues to survive accordingly due to surviving in the suitable environment.
It seems like you are trying to find meaning by smuggling it across the border inside a package of evolution.
Don't like Jehovah? Zeus maybe? Amazon.com has other god-models you can order and have delivered by lightning bolt.
To be honest, I'm at a loss to find the right place to cut through this circularity, so I'll have to bow out.
Once organisms stabilize their populations in a new environment based on advantageous selection, often they will optimize for stable selection. Thus, anything that greatly deviates from this causes adverse effects and thus will cause that generation (or perhaps a bit later in the next few generations down the road) to die out. Therefore, once stabilization occurs, your idea about genes tending towards extinction does not apply.
I am not advocating for an intentional teleology. Perhaps an inadvertent tendency towards maintaining stabilization in an environment while, with each generation, there is less tendency for genes that lead to extinction. Besides, I the discussion was not really about the mechanisms of evolution, which would have been a separate thread in a science forum. Rather, it is the implication that the individual does not matter here except as a vehicle in a broader process.
Yes, I do not disagree with you here. You need to have differential reproduction in a given population at some point in the process. However, once organisms stabilize their populations in a new environment based on advantageous selection, often they will optimize for stable selection. Thus, anything that greatly deviates from this causes adverse effects and thus will cause that generation (or perhaps a bit later in the next few generations down the road) to die out. Therefore, once stabilization occurs, your idea about genes tending towards extinction does not apply. Or I should say, does not apply until some environmental change occurs.
Also, given that orgnanisms share many of the same genes that optimizes survival, in an overall level (looking at all species), once organisms survived in general, the genes that were passed on were still viable for survival and thus, genes with a tendency for survival are conserved (e.g. hox gene).
In one way this is true, and in another way it is not true. In the grand, multi-galactic scheme of things, one squirrel getting run over, one human at work, doesn't matter. But in the same big scheme of things--from a different perspective--individuals are all that matter--life is present only in individual creatures, not as an over-arching abstraction. Humans matter on an individual basis. Just try to not matter to yourself.
I guess this is what I am questioning. Individuals can never choose to be here, we are never fully satisfied, and all the other tropes I usually bring up via antinatalism. People's tendency for pair bonding with a mate to raise a little version of themselves seems to override the individual's state in the world. Humanity wanted you here- not just the direct last generation of your parents..Via genetic stabilization tendencies, via cultural stabilization tendencies, you are here, for good or bad.
To simply reduce the decisions of a parental process may diminish the role of genes and cultural conservation to stabilize the species, reproduce individuals who have a tendency to reproduce, overriding any individual experience or say in the matter.
Mattering is subjective, though.--it's a subjective measure of how important something is to someone, how much significance they put on whatever it is.
Well 'unthinking mechanism' is a metaphor. It doesn't have a telology.
Cultural selection is a secondary metaphor derived from 'natural selection', which itself has the implication from 'selection' of teleology which again, is unwarranted.
I don't deny any of the likely causal stuff. But the language one uses about the likely causal stuff is suffused with implications of intention. Life continues via selection to reproduce: it's a marvellous thing, but does not diminish or enhance or enpurpose me, the individual human. Actually I feel enhanced, as a human, that humans have divined (sic) so much of its apparent workings. I know I am small and un important, but that's the deal.
That is the deal. Your preferences, happiness, ideal set-up and outcomes, or whether you even want to be a part of it in the first place, don't mean much. Whether you die out or suffer does not mean much. What does happen though, is the chain will keep being linked to the future via procreation- as the stability of the species is wrapped up in this, and it does not diminish from any individual's protest. Via genetics and cultural memes, the species continues.
It depends on who or what we're talking about for that though. For example, if we're talking about on-sentient objects, then saying "your preferences . . . don't mean much to non-sentient objects" is a bit disingenuous rhetorically, because of course nothing means anything to non-sentient objects.
But if we're talking about the sorts of things for which there is meaning in the first place--individual sentient creatures, then one's preferences might mean a lot and might be one of the most important things there is.
Many people do pair bond without any intention of continuing the species, you know.
I have thought, think, and will probably continue to think that anti-natalism is a cry from the heart. By that I don't mean antinatalists are profoundly unhappy (maybe you are, maybe you are not -- I don't know). What I mean is that antinatalists, and nihilists too, have a hungry heart -- it has not been satisfied yet. You are hungry for something. Actually, lots of people who are neither antinatalists nor nihilists are equally hungry. For assurance? Meaning? Certainty? Clarity? Belonging? Love? Something basic.
Antinatalism IS a trope: it's a virus. It's a meme. (and no, I don't think these things perpetuate and spread themselves. We are the vector.)
As long as there are those who do pair bond and it results in the continuance of the species, the argument still stands.
Quoting Bitter Crank
That is a good point. Routine gives some solace and not others. Likewise, variation gives some solace and not others. Most are content perhaps when they have both routine and variation. This allows for the appearance that they did something new and exciting and consequently are able to accept the routines they inevitably face, like a release valve. Then there are those who question the whole routine variation while participating themselves as that is the default option.
Quoting Bitter Crank
But so is procreation as an institution as well as other social institutions, and keeping society going the way we have in general can be considered many tropes playing out, so that is isolating one trope without taking into account the others. The difference is that this trope is questioning why we continue all the other tropes rather than merely following the tropes without question or only questioning one particular trope. Furthermore, if I was to keep with the theme of this thread, we are dominated by tropes of continuance. Cultural institutions, and genetic determinism for likelihood of procreation being a part of this.
I'll just state this again.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I mention routine and variation because this goes into these questions. Belonging, meaning, assurance, etc. are not forever, but are experienced for a duration of time. Then they become routine and thus, variation occurs, and then back to the routine. I don't think there will be a permanent satiation to the hunger for many. It will always be there. Something basic can be met for a moment, but then something else takes its place.
I would not say that we are "pawns", as this implies we are being manipulated by an agent, and as far as I know the universe is not an agent. Thus any description of our predicament as manipulative or pawn-like is only a metaphor, a description that only makes sense from the "inside" and not from the "outside", the inside being a phenomenological account and the outside being an (ideally) impartial naturalistic account. Just as it's poetic to say the sea "swallows" a sinking boat, it's similarly poetic to say we are "slaves" to our genetic programming. It's not wrong, but neither is it entirely accurate, either. It's just one way of interpreting the same set of data, just one of many ways of painting reality.
Actually this very point was brought up in a book based upon a conference in Germany a few years ago, called Is Nature Ever Evil: Philosophy, Science, Value, which covered issues including whether or not we can actually see "Nature" as good or bad. Such topics brought up include analyses of "selfish" genes, or "nature, red in tooth and claw", or "a chaotic, indifferent cosmos" or what have you. Science is NOT as impartial as it tries to be. There will ALWAYS be value somewhere.
The best I can say right now is that, ultimately, nothing is intrinsically valuable in the sense that it contributes or plays a role in some cosmic theatrical production. Part of the human condition seems to be the realization of time-linearity as one of many constraints on our being, and the disconnect between what we can imagine and what actually is the case. The angst emerges when one sees that the universe as a whole has an unconscious direction towards maximal entropification, and that this "telos" is not in line with our own desires and expectations.
So, going back to the whole metaphor thing, I think it makes more sense to describe humans (and other sentients) as prisoners, victims, or, even better, exiles. Any sort of description like this is going to somewhat metaphorical and from the perspective of life-as-it-is-lived, and not life-as-it-is-studied. Or something like that.