Implications of evolution
What implications do you think can be validly be drawn from the theory of evolution?
Throughout its history it has been used in various ways to justify ideologies and actions. The worst examples stem from The Nazis ( "Alles leben ist kampf"), eugenics and communists. This should concern us I think, when a theory can be interpreted in such a damaging way. This is not usually the case with ideas in science such as gravity or Quantum physics.
On one account evolution is deflationary and destructive of purpose and meaning and all action can be seen in the light of attempts at brute survival. I have not heard pf a positive account of evolution although some people talk as if it involved progress which is controversial.
In a trivial way it easy to claim anything we do is ultimately a survival trait regardless of our intentions. i don't like being in service of this system.
I am not keen to save someone from harm just so they can go on and mindlessly reproduce.
Throughout its history it has been used in various ways to justify ideologies and actions. The worst examples stem from The Nazis ( "Alles leben ist kampf"), eugenics and communists. This should concern us I think, when a theory can be interpreted in such a damaging way. This is not usually the case with ideas in science such as gravity or Quantum physics.
On one account evolution is deflationary and destructive of purpose and meaning and all action can be seen in the light of attempts at brute survival. I have not heard pf a positive account of evolution although some people talk as if it involved progress which is controversial.
In a trivial way it easy to claim anything we do is ultimately a survival trait regardless of our intentions. i don't like being in service of this system.
I am not keen to save someone from harm just so they can go on and mindlessly reproduce.
Comments (430)
If organisms don't adapt to the changing environment, they will eventually die off. With the elimination of various life forms, the world would become less diverse, and hence less enjoyable. Imagine an Earth with no flowers, no birds, and no butterflies. Nature suddenly holds less appeal, and probably loses some of its power to soothe the soul. Taken to the extreme, think of Earth with no life other than humans - a barren landscape, and nothing to eat but other humans!
You can give a deflationary account of this view. In order to coerce us to reproduce we could be wired to see life as good.
It certainly isn't unmitigated good and the good can be highly subjective. Personally I value meaning and purpose.
Also I don't think the vast majority of species reproduce because life is good.
I think your view is a good argument for the continuation of humans and I think it is quite compelling however I think it will just lead to a one size fits all justification for human values.
I think the good for humans is mostly objective in this case, if we can agree that the minimization of suffering and maximization of contentment are good.
I'll continue with the idea that in the absence of evolution, we would eventually be left with a barren landscape, and cannibalism.
There is an undeniable connection we humans feel with nature, especially when it comes to other living things. I think it is fair to say that the existence of plants and animals makes life more enjoyable.
Also, since we have things other than humans to eat, we are not left wondering if we are going to be the next meal, which I'm sure would lead to mental suffering of some kind.
There are many planets that have no life on them and we still appreciate them. (We seem to be obsessed with Mars).
I think harm can be objective but not the good. People can be discontented with any aspect of existence. (Especially a lack of purpose and meaning). (Me for example)
Your view seems to depend entirely on the continuation of human consciousness. However life ends in death and our conscious experience are finite not inherited by our offspring.
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Yes, but given the choice, on which planet would you choose to live?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I think these principles apply to an individual's finite existence as well. If one decides to continue living, they will naturally want to make that existence as pleasurable as possible. To me, the most pleasurable life is one where I have persistent peace of mind, with as little physical suffering as possible, sprinkled with moments of joy and physical pleasure. The continued existence of other life, made possible through evolution, undeniably contributes to those goals.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
On a side note, I currently believe that the brain may have over-evolved, in that humans feel some unshakeable need for purpose and meaning, creating a conflict between what we think should exist, and how the world really operates. If we can accept that life really is meaningless, we can shift our focus toward satisfying our instinctive biological needs and desires (food, water, shelter, family, community, procreation).
Not entirely true. Quantum physics is being interpreted in such ways that basically say "magic is real" and then being used by con artists and hucksters to fleece people. See also Scientology. Not Quantum mechanics, but also a misappropriation of science to legitimize bad behavior. It's not rare for bad actors to use science, religion, politics, nationalism, or whatever else to lend an air of legitimacy to their nonsense.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't understand what this means. I have no idea why evolution is destructive of purpose or meaning, unless you are suggesting that purpose and meaning can only come from a creator, and evolution makes the likelihood of a creator less.
Regarding a "positive" account of evolution, why should there be such a thing? Is there a positive account for general relativity? Godel's incompleteness theory? These are analytical tools used for explaining and making predictions about the world. The only positive accounts should be "they are logically self-coherent and they cohere with the available evidence. That's all a good theory is supposed to do.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
That would show a failure to understand how evolution works. The theory of evolution by natural selection doesn't imply that all traits are best suited for survival (adaptive). There are non-adaptive traits:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/misconcep_07
As far as being in service to it, I' don't know what that means either, unless you are saying you don't want to be an evolutionary scientist, which is, I think, fine by everyone.
This is actually Richard Dawkins position especially in the selfish gene.
"They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. "
This is not the equivalent to justify killing numerous people based on a notion of the survival of the fittest or justifying racism and forced sterilisation.
"In 1929 Hitler said at the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg, "that an average annual removal of 700,000-800,000 of the weakest of a million babies meant an increase in the power of the nation and not a weakening".[1] In doing so, he was able to draw upon scientific argument that transferred the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human beings and, through the concept of racial hygiene, formulated the "Utopia" of "human selection" as propounded by Alfred Ploetz, the founder of German racial hygiene."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_euthanasia_in_Nazi_Germany
Design makes purpose and meaning somewhat inevitable.
A spoon has a purpose and meaning for us.
If we are here solely by chance and with no intention we are here for no reason with no purpose. Any meaning is accidental.
"They came into being with language. Look for them floating loose in a sea of data ; they have cavalier freedom (if worms have it). Now they swarm inside the neural networks of mankind."
I am a meme editing agent.
Regarding the equivalence, they are equivalent insofar as they are ideas being adopted as justifications for bad acts. How is the degree of harm relevant?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Not at all. A creator could be acting arbitrarily. A creator could not care. A creator could be free of intention totally. A thing only has meaning and purpose if we assume a creator is intentional like we are. At that point though, all you have determined is the the creator has it's own meaning and a purpose for what it created. There's no reason to assume that it's meaningful to us or gives us any purpose.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You've already established that purpose is created, not inherent with your spoon analogy. Why is a spoons purpose ok when we create it, but creating purpose for ourselves not ok?
Despite modern technology our life is still about brute survival. Everyday we are struggling to stay alive. It is easier to fulfil basic needs giving ample time to reflect on meaning.
I think religion etc may have sprung up in a response to fear and meaninglessness but now it has been undermined. I think the need for meaning now has been created by the destruction of wide spread superstitions. I am not an expert in anthropology but I have the impression that most humans societies have been superstitious and not atheistic and they had no scientific theories to justify atheism.
I don't makes reality less "magical" but it has been used in a deflationary and reductionist ways concerning human relations.
Origin of the Species by Darwin and Wallace's On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type were concurrent. They arrived at a time of intellectual ferment in many scholarly area. But then, what period doesn't ferment intellectually?).
Had Darwin and Wallace been Renaissance personalities, or even better, ancient Greeks or Romans, "evolution" would probably have not triggered such a strong reaction. First, the theory was not about the physical world of physics & chemistry; it was about all life and thus human beings. It laid bare a process of nature which had previously not been recognized (not very clearly, at least) and which had been assigned to the divine.
Darwin and Wallace severed the divine from the human in a particularly effective way.
Evolution placed mankind in an embarrassing relation to primates. The effect was worse than discovering that the exalted royal family's roots were actually very low class trash--nothing exalted whatsoever. We were (gasp) descended from chattering, grinning, idiot monkeys -- an outrage! (We aren't descended from contemporary monkeys, of course. We diverged a few million years back.)
Evolution was tied to the notion of survival of the fittest -- without asking "fittest for what?" Social darwinism is more the idiot bastard son of evolution, rather than a core principle.
The spoon inherits a purpose but we don't. It doesn't randomly exist.
What purpose could we be said to have? In a trivial sense someone can claim watching paint dry is their purpose. But this kind of invented purpose lacks profundity and also it can be given a deflationary evolutionary explanation.
Do you want me to cite what evolutionary theorist have said about how our purposes are subservient to brute survival of genes and species.
Anyhow here I am talking about interpretations of evolution and what restrictions they put on claims if any. I am am examining statements such is "if evolution is true then X follows"
The problem with evolution on some interpretations is that it reduces or deflates human claims. For example you could help an elderly person cross the road with genuine kindness and altruism but that disposition is seen as primarily in service of the survival of the genes.
That molecularly biologists should perhaps have several critical agencies looking over their shoulder was revealed in a bit of science news--that a group had succeeded in building the polio virus from scratch. They would, of course, try to build the variola virus (small pox) from scratch too.
Why would they select two of the most dangerous human viruses to try out construction techniques? There are numerous viruses far more benign than polio and small pox. Why, for that matter, are two or three governments and some science groups reluctant to burn up the samples of small pox or polio (which hasn't yet been eradicated -- almost, but not quite).
What these issues reveal is that our cultural capacity to proceed into the future ethically and safely has not evolved sufficiently.
Explain the treatment of homosexuality then.
Theorists are attempting to explain homosexuality as having adaptive advantage. They are not happy with it just being a spandrel.
"Another possibility is that homosexuality evolves and persists because it benefits groups or relatives, rather than individuals. In bonobos, homosexual behaviour might have benefits at a group level by promoting social cohesion. One study in Samoa found gay men devote more time to their nieces and nephews, suggesting it might be an example of kin selection (promoting your own genes in the bodies of others)."
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13674-evolution-myths-natural-selection-cannot-explain-homosexuality/
That's not 'on one account', it is true even according to its most ardent advocate, Dawkins, whom you mention. He frequently observes that Darwinian theory is a lousy basis for any kind of social philosophy, and that we have to transcend it, which sits oddly with his self-proclaimed mission to destroy the traditional sources of such transcendence.
The point about evolution is that it has social, cultural and philosophical implications, due to what it displaces, namely, biblical creationism. Whereas in the latter, man is part of the whole scheme, in the former, man is simply another product of an essentially mindless process. That has many implications, most of which are taken for granted.
And then there is evolution 'as a secular religion', as Michael Ruse observes.
Evolution by natural selection is a mechanical process, like water vapor condensing into rain.
Water vapor condensing into rain does not imply that things are getting better or worse, that certain responses are warranted or not warranted, or anything like that. It just means that under certain conditions water vapor will condense into rain, nothing more, nothing less.
Nobody says that rain is "advanced" and water vapor is "primitive".
Nobody says that a rock is "primitive" and a pebble formed by the action of water is "advanced".
Nobody says that the wind transporting pollen and pollinating a plant justifies a certain social structure or threatens a certain tradition.
Anybody who thinks that evolution means "progress", "advanced", "backwards", "better", "worse", etc. is reading way too much into it.
Evolution is just a description of a mechanical process like water turning into ice at or below a certain temperature is a description of a mechanical process. Period. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Evolution does not "imply" anything other than genetic material being produced and distributed through a particular mechanism.
Dawkins writings are contradictory. I already quoted him here as calling us Gigantic lumbering robots.
Saying we should some how transcend evolution does not mean that you have not presented a thoroughly deflationary account. I can cite his strategy in "The Selfish gene"
What I am referring to is the way things are primarily described as survival apparatus. For instance homosexuality is supposed to have a primary explanation in terms of enhancing fitness.
Here is a quote from a paper by a group of evolutionary psychologists
"Exclusive homosexual orientation seems to defy evolutionary logic since it presumably fails to increase an individual’s reproductive success. Although evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed for homosexuality, as discussed earlier, none have received empirical
support thus far (e.g., Bobrow & Bailey, 2001)"
http://www.dianafleischman.com/epap.pdf
The implication being that things have to ultimately be reduced to their evolutionary purpose. This the deflationary account.Nothing can exist unless that it is at some stage subservient to evolution. I can cite many cases where things have being giving hypothetical evolutionary explanations (music/dancing/religion etc) rather than being accepted as spandrels.
The Nazi and eugenicist interpretation of evolution was that we could actively cull the weak and aid evolution. Natural selection is open to this interpretation if it is seen as improving fitness. So for example it is not in our interest to prop up people with poor genes leading to sickness because it could condemn our species as a whole. For instance we advise against interbreeding because it has been shown to cause disabilities. So I don't think that negative applications of evolution are irrational. The idea we should or could transcend evolution is idealistic. It would only be possible to a non determinist who considered human behaviour flexible enough and spandrel like to transcend innate traits.
But in the evolutionary literature things are described in terms of adaptive pathways and adaptive "benefits". There is a hierarchy and a notion of defunct or harmful forms.
I could agree with proposition that both humans and amoeba and raindrops are impressive phenomena but humans get called "meat bags" and "Just another animal" We are not compared to other animals in a complementary but in a deflationary way.
Raymond Tallis wrote a book about this "Aping mankind" (Which I have yet to read.)
It is clear that humans have numerous abilities other animals do not have especially an infinitely flexible vocabulary of thousands of words. You can say all animals are amazing without having to deny unique capacities of humans.
In these debates I feel like people are just ignoring a lot of what has been said because I have debated these things and read debates and followed media discussions and they are very trivial, reductionist, dichotomous and deflationary.
Dawkins in particularly has used science as a weapon against religion and wildly supported Lawrence Krauss's "A universe from nothing" book comparing it to Darwin. evolution may or may not imply there is no God (although I don't see how) but to actively use it in this kind of pursuit is value ladened.
In analogy, someone might tell you that you were adopted and you declare that your adoptive parents are your true parents and you love them dearly. However you could inherit genetic disorders etc from your biological parents.
So I don't think that scientific facts or claims are neutral so that we can transcend them and make our own reality.
Implications can be drawn from any idea, including religious ones. Everything is interconnected and therefore has an implication on everything else.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Survival isn't a good thing? Religion seems to be all about survival, too - the survival of your soul. Believing that you will continue to survive after your death, and behaving in a way to achieve that, isn't much different from running away from a predator to survive.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I'm not too keen on being in service to some entity that created me just for me to be indebted to it for all eternity. Neither one of us was asked what kind of system we'd like to be born into, nor guaranteed that the system we are born into would be something that we like.
Quoting Andrew4HandelWe don't "mindlessly" reproduce. Many animals don't reproduce when resources are scarce.
What is the point of reproducing?
Survival without an afterlife is temporary Religions are about eternal survival not just surviving so you can reproduce.
Depends on how and why you do it.
There might be a point somewhere in the room while your doing it but it's a matter of perspective.
It could be the point of a Samurai sword, or the point of a needle, the point of your nose, the point of your prick, the point of your intellect, the point of your gorgeous face, or a numerical point in your bank savings.
But you are indebted to your parents in the same way. You only exist because of them. being created doesn't mean you owe a debt. I have argued this in my "No consent" thread.
I am referring to a deflationary account of human attributes as ultimately coercive to encourage reproduction. My nihilism doesn't come from Evolution but it is exacerbated by it.
I highlighted it concerning the search for an evo explanation of homosexuality. I think it is insidious to make peoples attribute subservient to brute survival/reproductive success.
For example John Travolta featured in a science journal article about the evolutionary reasons for being a good dancer . But it failed to mention that he has long been speculated as being a closeted gay and one of his children died of a genetic illness. So using his photo undermined their theory by itself. But it shows this desire to encroach on everything with evolutionary motives.
Why isn't this just an extension of what everyone is doing in this forum, full of selective pressures on the "proper" way of doing things. Obviously the ability to reason well has benefits for whatever reasons are the "good" reasons. I also have to be able to write in English. I also have to have access to the internet and a relatively recent computing device. Lucky me (except for the glaring "bad" traits). I have to conform to necessary rules.
If life is a bowl of sausage is it better to not look behind the curtain to see how they are made? Only the sausage makers should be allowed back there (a different species of being).
On one side of the fictional future is an intimidating tower of powerful authors (tools used to control human nature which are (un)justly distributed and ultimately leashed to instinctual effects) while on the other side is a pit of postmodern despair, insensibility and madness.
And this is all bullshit because you can go take a walk (unless you don't have functioning legs). There is nothing here yet to determine when you can and cannot take a walk.
Is there?
What specific creature is the target of our concern: Harry, Andrew, Wayfarer, Reformed Thespian? Whose concern is "our" concern?
I think the Buddhist spandrel of "dependent arising" is fit to reproduce in the corner of a postmodern cathedral.
"When this is, that is
This arising, that arises
When this is not, that is not
This ceasing, that ceases."
Where is the moderating agent who didn't appear who would have saved us all this trouble (either Jesus or Baden will do).
Am I passing the Turing test?
[quote= Baden: PF Guidlines]
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What is the point of surviving eternally?
My parents don't ask me to pray to them, nor tell me that my happiness is tied to doing everything they say.
Quoting Andrew4HandelTheres more to procreating than heterosexual sex. The offspring need to make it to the age of being able to procreate themselves and gays adopting unwanted children are part ofv the solution. Not everyone gets to mate, but every member of the social group shares the same genes, and participates in ensuring genes gets passed down to the next generation.
Evolutionary psychologists are liable to over-emphasise evolution, and people with a scientific cast of mind are inclined to re-work interesting stuff we do into dreary scientific-sounding generalisations.
It seems to me that as soon as we humans have culture, we lay down a good claim to transcend evolution. Whether or not this claim is justified is then an enjoyable intellectual discussion that began with Darwin and will go on and on, because there is no way of arriving at the right answer. I'm an arty-fart so I will have my arty-farty view. On homosexuality, for instance, anti-homosexual culture has until the last few decades blinded much scientific endeavour to how species other than our own own do sexual business. You know, there have always been gay penguins, that's just the way they are, sweetie.
But I would add - culture in the USA faces a bigger threat from the religious/populist movement against the theory of evolution, than it does from the likes of E O Wilson. So we should be sure we see the wood for the trees. I often disagree with Harry Hindu here, for instance, but we should be clear that the likes of him and the likes of me need to stand shoulder to shoulder against anti-intellectualism, and not let careless talk about evolution run away with itself.
What is the point of surviving at all?
We were talking about creation and I am pointing out your parents created you. What is the difference between your parents creating you and a god creating you?
Parents often create their children for a reason because humans have desires and reasoning.
People have children for dubious reasons. My parents spent my entire childhood indoctrinating me into religion. There is a difference between an unthinking species reproducing without motives and humans who can have motives. A lot of cultures have expected children to revere their parents and they have even being worshipped. I don't thinking taking gods out of the picture frees you from being created with dubious motives.
You seem to be attacking a narrow notion of a creator rather than the general concept. A parents with benevolent motives (are there any?) is more likely to help a child than a dogmatic parent.
My experience of a lack of meaning probably derives from my upbringing. Having children for incoherent or bad reasons undermines meaning. I think meaning is often just derived from benevolent relationships. Anyone can reject their parents reasons for having them.
All that exists after a parent dies is copies of some of their genes. I don't see any need to do that and haven't. If death is the end then when your consciousness ceases you will have no idea about the fate of your grand children and whether or not they reproduced. I actively don't want to leave my genes behind or continue the species because life has a bad track record and is prone to suffer and I dread to think of my descendants accumulating in the future doing who ever knows what.
Your genes could go in all sorts of dubious directions.There's no telling.
For example the couple who wrote the book "The population bomb" deliberately had one child but she went onto have four of her own and that is not what they wanted.
To me life is about dealing with death. Trying to approach death with dignity. Trying not to be harmed too much before death. Death makes life temporary and futile in my opinion. It's a leap in the dark.
You might enjoy this review. (The author, Anthony Gottlieb, is no slouch.)
Quoting mcdoodle
I would like to agree, but I think there is plenty of oppobrium to go around. I personally find the polemics of Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins just as bad as that of their opponents. Pox on both houses, maybe.
I've been thinking about how my mother and father both sang to me; who sang to them when they were babies; who sang to them in turn. A genealogy of mothers, stretching back 50000 years, singing. In the sounds we make and the little foibles each of us uniquely has, live the cultures of our forebears, all the way back to when culture began. This emphasis on 'genes', on abstractions supposedly embodied, discards much of what makes us human.
The first idea I share with you. However, the second part appears to be anthropomorphism. In particular your own. There are many people who live life without procreating.
Quoting Andrew4HandelNo you are contradicting yourself. Remember when you said this:
Quoting Andrew4HandelDo we mindlessly procreate, or do we procreate for a reason? I'm a parent and the reasons I procreated was to share something special with my mate, to leave a legacy behind when I die, and to experience being a father and the love of my children.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
My parents didn't have me so that they could indoctrinate me. I was a "mistake", as they were young, and their marriage didn't last. So, in a way, my coming into the world wasn't planned, or wasn't expected. I was the result of two teenagers following their physical urges. Many, but not everyone, is born this way. Some, like my daughter, were planned.
Quoting Andrew4HandelWell, I am. I'm attacking the one and only creator - the creator of my ancient ancestors that begat all the rest. If God didn't create anything, then we wouldn't be here discussing who created who in the first place.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No it doesn't. Some of my childhood was bad. When my parents divorced, I felt like my father didn't want me. They used me as a tool against each other, too, but there were good times as well. I had some great friends growing up and will always remember those good times, that seems to outweigh the bad.
Just because my parents didn't have me for the same reasons I had my kids, doesn't mean that I don't have meaning, or that life is meaningless. I created my own purpose in life.
Genes are carried by every living organism, not just homo sapiens sapiens. So no, it can't be anthropomorphic.
As long as you are using the concept of desire it has to be emanating from somewhere. Are you suggesting it is emanating from the gene (a physical entity) or from natural selection (a concept)? If you are suggesting it is emanating from the gene, then that would be anthropomorphism. If you are saying it is from natural selection, then you would be using anthropomorphism on a concept.
Any type if anthropomorphism begs the question of why would a concept such natural selection create a condition of desire of any sort much less procreation. It would seem like the whole theory it's based upon some feeling of some individuals that procreation is natural, leading of course to homophobia and other related sins similar to religious beliefs.
What I said is that evolution deflates the reasons we give for reproducing. What ever reason you have for having children by having children you are just carrying on the cycle of reproduction. To carry on reproducing is doing what our genes allegedly "want" us to do. Our genes don't care about our survival but their survival (see Dawkins) I am not defending this view but saying that evolution can easily give a deflationary account of anything
I think there are lots of good reasons not to have children which I have discussed elsewhere but obviously antinatalism isn't an evolution friendly belief.
Determinists of any shade don't believe our reasons matter because we are supposed to have no free will.
I think the problem with humans is they can control their reproduction and reason about it, but choose not to. Any reproduction that is not done on a coherent basis is mindless.
One of the problems for me is my parents made me believe Christianity was absolutely true (by intimidation among other things) Abandoning it lead to a loss of meaning.
For example I had numerous rules like I couldn't watch TV, listen to the radio, shop on sunday and so on. I left due to the horrible atmosphere but it was traumatic and what I discovered was that no rules and no morality could be justified. Before I was told to do X because God said so..
If God does not exist and isn't a moral authority there are no moral facts or moral authority.. That lead me to nihilism. Having to abandoned one extensive belief system made me highly skeptical and demanding better justifications for things.
But nihilism and a sense of futility is a terrible experience. I don't like to see it endorsed as a scientific theory. If science is saying life is pointless and meaningless then we certainly should not reproduce.
i have issues with the idea of making your own meaning but that would constitute a whole new thread"
The fact that some traits are (or in this case, might be) adaptive doesn't logically imply that all are. The fact that theorists attempt to explain traits in terms of adaptiveness also doesn't logically imply that all traits are adaptive. That's just flawed logic.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Whether a purpose is profound or not is a matter of judgement, not fact. A purpose imposed by a creator seems more arbitrary than one decided for one's self, and that arbitrariness lacks profundity to me. That's my judgement. You're welcome to your own. It is also not the job of a scientific theory to lend purpose, profound or otherwise to life. It's job is to effectively explain our observations, which the theory of evolution by natural selection does very well.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
So if something is good for our species, it cannot also be good in itself? How do you make that leap of logic? That's like saying that we can't eat food because it tastes good, because we all know that we eat food because it nourishes us. Both can be true. They are not mutually exclusive.
Personally as someone who overeats I find the enjoyable taste of food a treadmill. (See obesity, tooth decay, heart disease)
I think music is one of the few pleasurable things that isn't a vice.
I agree that helping others is an independent good, the problem is that it is subservient to mindless.
reproduction.
As an antinatalist I feel a sense of futility when helping people. For instance the population of Ethiopia has tripled since the 1980's and Famine aid. Malnutrition related disease are a big problem there.
Empathy and helping people is not an unmitigated good. The same instincts have been posited to play a role in war and prejudice.
If there is no over riding point then I don't see the point in anything, it is just a set of distractions. I didn't used to see life as meaningless as a child for some reason. I thought it was going somewhere. I thought it had a purpose. I am hoping it turns out to have a meaning.
What does that mean? Who makes it subservient? By what method of categorization is it subservient? By evolution? Well, in terms of what is most successful in reproduction, yes, reproduction (mindless or mindful) is at the top of the list. It doesn't logically follow that because someone accepts evolution as an effective explanatory model that they also prioritize reproduction personally as being more important than doing good.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
So because there is still harm done, all attempts at help are futile? More flawed logic. Even if we assumed that all help offered by a person to another or others added only to a drop in the bucket compared to all harm done (which I don't think is true), then it is still the case that the world is at least minimally better for the help.
True. Does that imply that we should stop trying to do good? Or does it imply that we should be more careful when trying to do good to avoid ending up doing evil?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Well, you can feel that way if you want, but it's not very sensible in my opinion. What makes you think that life is supposed to have an objective purpose? My guess is that it's a cultural artifact created by a religious history that purported to offer that meaning. Let me ask you this: If there was an over-riding purpose, and you didn't like it or agree with it, what then? What if the purpose of the universe was to glorify shrimp?
That's exactly the kind of thinking that is at issue. It is the attempt to 'explain' the history of philosophy and religion in terms of adaptive necessity. It is just the kind of thing that fills books by Dennett and Dawkins. But where do you find those books? Why, in the 'philosophy' section of popular bookstores, snuggled alongside the Family Bible and Deepak Chopra. But unlike them, they claim that 'philosophy books have nothing meaningful to say'. But, why do they not fall by the same criteria? If what they are saying is correct, their authors are simply chimps standing on a mound of dirt, making 'boo' noises. After all, that's what they say philosophy is.
That's not what I said. What I said was "my guess...". Nothing about adaptive necessity at all. Just my personal read on how a culture and it's history can effect a person's view on matters like an "overriding" purpose. It's no different than theorizing why the Japanese language had no word for "self-esteem" until recently, which no doubt points to a cultural and historical difference between Japan and the west.
Quoting Wayfarer
Need I once more protest that Dennett, Dawkins, and I are all different people who think and say distinct things? I feel like there is a poisoning of the well here. Anything I say that somehow reminds someone of either Dennett or Dawkins (or both simultaneously), gets viewed as if it fits perfectly into the narrative of either (or both) of those guys, and then is dismissed, ad hominem, because of the alleged source (which isn't even the source). It's just a logical mess. Do you mind if it stops? It's exhausting trying to defend them against implications I never made.
Quoting Wayfarer
You use quotes around the sentence "philosophy books have nothing meaningful to say". Who are you quoting? Where do they claim that? Are you sure that's really either one of their positions? Seeing as though Daniel Dennett is a writer of philosophy books, I suspect you're mistaken.
Natural selection is a process, not a concept. The theory of evolution by natural selection is a concept.
Quoting RichDesires are natural inclinations. It's really quite simple, (which is the magic of the theory - the simplicity). Any organism that doesn't procreate leaves no offspring. If your inclination is to not procreate, then there won't be any descendants that also have the natural inclination to not procreate. Those species that exist, and are successful at existing within an environment for many generations are those that procreate. Any species that doesn't procreate who is competing for the same resources as those that do, will lose out and won't exist long enough to leave a mark in the fossil record or even be noticed by humans millions of years later to be classified.
To exist for any length of time, means that you must have some attribute or quality that enables you to continue to exist. Procreating is how genes do it.
Not 'anything you say' - the specific thing you said. Namely, that 'the search for meaning' is an evolved trait. Don't make statements like:' What if the purpose of the universe was to glorify shrimp?' and then protest because someone jumps on it.
.Quoting Reformed Nihilist
Dennett is probably among the best-known public intellectuals in the US. And, it is a fact that what he understands as philosophy, undermines or tends to dissolve anything that was previously understood as 'philosophy'. That was the central message of one of his books, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, where he compares evolutionary biology to a 'universal acid':
Transformed such that we understand that everything we are and do is the consequence of a biological algorithm.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Sure, we can control our reproduction. After our third child, I had a vasectomy. I did so, because having kids costs money, and I wanted the children we did have to have more than what we could have given them if we had more kids. Other species are no different. When resources are low, certain organisms won't procreate. It's logical as having kids with no resources is equivalent to not having them at all because it is likely they won't survive.
My father is very religious, but not as harsh as your parents. I was raised as a Christian and was even "saved" and baptized. I abandoned those beliefs. I began questioning everything in my late teens, and when I realized that there wasn't really any consistent answers, I began a new search for truth. I understood that the truth isn't going to be what I wanted it to be, or what I would like, or what sounds trendy. I realized that I couldn't make an emotional investment in the truth - that if I really wanted to know the truth, I go where the evidence leads, not where my emotions, or desires lead. I found science to provide more answers than any religion and that it was consistent and held true for every person - no matter where they are from, what culture they call their own, or what time period they live in. I'm an atheist, much to my father's disappointment. In my mind, most people hold on to their beliefs because that is what gives them purpose and allows them to carry on their lives. As is commonly said, "religion is a crutch for the weak mind." It is for those that don't understand, or may even be fearful, of the power in their own hands to make their own meaning and purpose in life.
When did I say the search for meaning was an evolved trait? That's my point. You're arguing against things I didn't say. What I'm actually saying is that the search for a "higher purpose" is a cultural artifact, which is entirely different from saying it is an evolved trait.
Quoting Wayfarer
Wow, that's a big leap of logic. His theories purport to subsume, dissolve, or correct previous/alternate theories on a particular subject matter, like every other theory ever proposed. That's a far cry from claiming that "philosophy books have nothing meaningful to say". You might as well say that Hawking says that physics books have nothing meaningful to say. He just thinks other theories are mistaken or incomplete. That's sort of his job.
I took that to be the import of this:
Quoting Reformed Nihilist
Please feel free to set me straight.
I won't ask how you came to this conclusion.
So it is your position that as soon as I say that the theory of evolution by natural selection is a good descriptive theory, everything else I ever say means "according to evolution...(add what I said)"? I also believe in the explanatory power of Quantum Mechanics. Why aren't you busting on me for saying that the search for meaning is a result of QM? Because in a normal discussion, people understand that these are theoretical frameworks, proposed to be usefully descriptive about a specific subject matter, not overarching ideologies (even if they have broad implications). You want to criticize evolutionary psychology? Sounds good to me. I'm skeptical that the field isn't much more than unfalsifiable conjecture. But for the love of whatever you find holy, surely you can see a difference between the conceptual framework of biological evolution through natural selection and cultural history? They're two distinct and exclusive ways of framing an issue.
Sure! Then it's no longer an implication of evolution.
Right. That's what I said. I feel as though you mean that ironically for some reason, as if thinking everything should be "an implication of evolution", because I think evolution is a good theory for the explanation of biological diversity.
...which includes the diverse ways in which minds work and adapt (learn) to the environment, hence evolutionary psychology's new and powerful explanatory power. I don't see how someone can go on about the explanatory power of biological diversity, which includes how the brain evolved, yet say evolutionary psychology is just a bunch of conjecture.
I haven't concluded it just a bunch of conjecture, it's just an impression I have (admittedly an underinformed impression). I'm just not sure how evolutionary psychology is falsifiable. If it's not, then doesn't that make calling it conjecture fair?
Evolution consists of numerous claims not just one truth. The truth might be "some form of evolution has happened". A lot of claims recieve validity because they come under the banner of evolution. That is a problem because it has led to some pernicious claims.
Truths can be good or bad.
Cancer is a bad truth. Winning the lottery is a good truth.
I have said elsewhere that discovering evolution would be like a cow discovering she was heading for the slaughterhouse. I don't see why any new piece of information or theory should have no implications but rather the reverse. Evolution narratives certainly undermine some religious claims especially in Christianity.
For instance when I was growing up I seemed to have an underlying sense of hope. God was supposed to be watching over me and had a plan for me etc. Cruelty in nature and human cruelty was attributed (incoherently) to the fall of man. I was badly bullied in school and Bad behavior towards me confirmed this picture somewhat. I could cope with human fallibility etc.
Now your left with the terrible behaviour and no purpose or divine protection or hope. It is harder to explain what happened to me without the excuse of this tale of fallen nature. Also things that seemed benevolent like creating a family now seem futile and purposeless and not a pinnacle of Gods plans. It's like religion is just anther narrative justifying human conduct.
I would put it slightly differently.
I would say (as the Daoists believe) that everything seems to be constantly changing (evolving) because we (our intelligence and memory) is constantly experimenting and learning. But, I leave open the possibility that somewhere in the life/death cycle there is a pause (rest).
So there seems to be duality and cycles.
Here's what Dawkins says in "The Selfish Gene"
"What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world. If we allow ourselves the licence of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do? It is trying to get more numerous in the gene pool."
I don't think you can translate purposeful language back to mechnical language in the way he wants to.
Also I don't think evolution is at all sufficient to explain being human because our fundamental feature is we have a rich consciousness that has not being explained by science and any theory of our psychology is defunct in my opinion unless we explain consciousness.
Psychological Theories are already confounded because of the private nature of consciousness and mental states making them inaccessible. Also even without consciousness the mind is the most complex thing to explain because humans have a wide range of mental faculties whose definition is controversial and a huge range of causal influences and competing psychological models and perspectives etc
Which truth has escaped from this predicament. Even religion, the pinnacle of goodness, has pernicious consequences. Look at the news. That said, I agree that evolution is demoralizing, to say the least.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Agreed but truth is not obliged to make us happy. That's what I mean and perhaps better expressed in true phrases like ''bitter truth'', ''sweet lies'', etc.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Please read above.
Also, it'd help to understand that science is just a POV. It tends to transform our worldview, giving it a materialistic flavor and there's no room for spirituality or religion. However, science has, say, a 500 year history and despite ''progress'' I think it still has a blindspot where possibilities multiply. I think scientific knowledge is filtered through peer review and we have access to only knowledge that has been confirmed. There's a sort of confirmation bias in this because journals only publish hits and not the misses. If we take the trouble to do some research it's not long before we find a lot of imperfections in science. At its best, science is an approximation.
It just seems to me that it would be contradictory to say that natural forces that have a hand in molding the biological shapes and behaviors don't have a hand in shaping our brains and therefore our mental functions. The brain, after all, is intimately integrated with the body through it's massive network of nerves. The shapes and sizes of brains should account for the diversity of behaviors that we see in animals.
There are many videos on Youtube and books on the subject that are enlightening. You should inform yourself.
You can start here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
Genes don't try to do anything. They don't have a mind with a goal that they then try to achieve. They simply function as a result of causal forces driving them forward.
Quoting Andrew4HandelI think evolution by natural selection is the best theory we have. Sure the mind is a difficult thing to explain, but it seems to me that science has a much better track record in it's short history compared to religious and philosophical explanations. Give it time and don't be afraid to read books and watch videos on the subject, as I posted above in my response to Reformed Nihilist.
I have a degree in philosophy and psychology and I have had to read a lot of on the Philosophy of mind. I had to read Dennett's "Consciousness explained" I am well versed in the major issues in consciousness. The problems for explaining mental states are not comparable to other problems science has solved. (including the privacy of mental states making them only first person accessible/ semantics et al)
Dennett is a consciousness eliminativist (which frankly is a ridiculous position) symptomatic of materialist trends that rather than trying to explain mental states honestly are keen to deflate the threat they pose to the materialist perspective. Studying philosophy of mind had a big impact on my opinions. It is not a minor topic and it is clear our only access to reality is through consciousness so it is a fundamental issue to understanding reality and not a trivial fact.
I believe explaing things in their own terms and not subsuming them under an ideology.
It should be obvious that the body influences the mind and the mind influences the body. How is it that natural selection only influences the body and not the mind as well?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano
"Since 2010 Graziano's lab has studied the brain basis of consciousness. Graziano[42][43] proposed that specialized machinery in the brain computes the feature of awareness and attributes it to other people in a social context. The same machinery, in that hypothesis, also attributes the feature of awareness to oneself. Damage to that machinery disrupts one's own awareness.
The attention schema theory (AST) seeks to explain how an information-processing machine could act the way people do, insisting it has consciousness, describing consciousness in the ways that we do, and claiming that it has an inner magic that transcends mere information-processing, even though it does not."
All that is being done here is assigning all human qualities to the brain and making the brain anthropomorphic. It explains nothing about how quantum magically becomes human. Ditto for assigning all human qualities to some quantum matter and calling it "natural". To paraphrase Evolution theory, everything happens because it it's natural and if doesn't happen it is because it is unnatural. In this regard, I believe religion is way ahead of science in at least coming up with a decent story. All they do is create sn anthropomorphic God but to all possible limits. They are at least up front about it.
Regarding keeping myself educated, it's all about prioritizing, right? Apart from educating myself for direct personal or professional gain, the rest is just following my nose. I pretty much look into whatever seems interesting to me at the time. At the moment, evolutionary psychology doesn't make that cut. Maybe that'll change.
The field explores the problems our ancestors had to solve and the mental processes and functions that would solve them and how that explains our current condition.
If you're asking the questions, then it seems that you ate interested and would probably garner more information if you didn't take my word for it, but rather get it straight from the scientists in the field.
Quoting Reformed Nihilist
Well, I consider explaining the reasons we think the way we do and behave the way we do quite important. The unexamined life isn't worth living.
The theory of natural selection is first and foremost a biological theory which was intended to account for the origin of species. I don't think it's feasible to doubt the basic facts of evolutionary history, which have been so thoroughly documented with reference to the fossil record, geology, paleontology, and so on.
But many of the conflicts over the implications of evolution, revolve around questions of what these facts mean. I think the issues of biological reductionism arise when it is declared that this means that the above human attributes can be understood solely through the perspective of the biological sciences. It has been declared, for example, by one of the founders of that discipline, that 'sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology.' Daniel Dennett, as has been discussed, believes that everything about human nature can be understood in terms of organic chemistry, and that thought, agency, and indeed the mind itself, is basically an illusion. This is why Dennett is quite happy to admit that humans are 'moist robots' (from a Dilbert cartoon) and that minds and computers are not essentially different.
There's a cultural blind spot around this issue, and the debates coming out of it, which is far more subtle and far-reaching than simply 'creationism vs science'. Basically to question the Darwinian/biological/reductionist model is to be categorised as some form of creationist, even if you think creationism is completely bogus. So if you're a 'scientific thinker', then you are supposed to accept the 'biologism' of the day, which is just as much a form of fundamentalism as it's opposite.
Yes I understand what the field covers. That doesn't really answer my question.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Only if you assume that the answer is that the field is more than conjecture. My impression is based on the opinion of a science communicator that I generally find to be well balanced and sensible.That doesn't mean he's right, but it does give me an indication that maybe it's not worth putting at the top of my list, unless I see other reasons to do so.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I am actually more interested in what the ways we think (and specifically decide) are, rather than the historical causes for these ways of thinking. If I thought that there was a reliable method for determining the causal history of our thinking and decision making processes, I might be interested. I'm just skeptical that such a thing exists.
If you aren't willing to expand your knowledge, then your loss, not mine.
Acutally they're not. Firstly, problems faced are not passed down genetically; knowledge can't be isolated or transferred that simply. And Punctuated Equilibrium would break down that connection anyway since we don't evolve in a progressive timeline.
Secondly, much of our way we think is irrationally and rationally derived from our socio-cultural surroundings, of which the transfer cannot be isolated or traced.
The problem is not the mind body relationship but how mind comes to exist at all. Our minds are full of a huge range of things including awareness of bodies but also a large vocabulary and a wide range of memories and knowledge and much more.
The thing is we have have a wide knowledge of the brain,neurons and neurotransmitters and of physics and biology but none of that predicts the emergence of consciousness so there is a large explanatory gap.Defining consciousness is controversial as well.
It has been a classic trick to manipulate people with ideas and paradigms that are semi plausible so that large groups of people conform to the latest ideas. People Followed Victorian ideas, religious ideas, social darwinist ideas and fascist ideas and so on. So telling people "this is what you are" or this is what society is a way of prompting behaviour. How are we supposed to act on evolutionary and evolutionary psychology claims?
I am a gay antinatalist so is that going to be reduced to some natural selection tale? I am always skeptical and I don't see myself being coerced to believe anything (as an adult) as if driving by unconscious natural forces.
It is all a bit arbitrary.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
The socio-cultural surroundings is basically our environment that we find ourselves in. A concrete jungle filled with thousands of other human beings is just another type of natural environment. We are products of natural causes, just like every other species. Other species have different social environments. To say that theirs is natural and ours isn't is to reject the basic tenet of evolution by natural selection - that we are natural animals that fill our own environmental niche.
Yet you participate in a philosophy forum which is nothing but conjecture, yet I don't see you making that argument.
No, solutions aren't passed down genetically. Not only are actual final solutions immensely rare, they are not passed down through our genes.
No, we are more than the product of natural causes. We are also the products of ideologies that have no direct correspondent to natural causes. And I never said it wasn't natural; you incorrectly said I did. And either way, those causes and ideologies give us information our genes do not.
Is camouflage passed down? Is it not a solution to a problem? Of course there is no final solution, as the environment is dynamic.
Quoting Thanatos SandThis is utter nonsense. Either we are a product of a natural process, or we aren't. God (if it exists) is just as natural as what it creates.
And that is the problem that evolutionary psychology attempts to solve. Do we have minds and other animals don't? If so, then why? Why would minds evolve in humans and not other species? What problems were minds meant to solve?
You said the solutions were passed down genetically. I said they weren't. You still have failed to show they are. And camouflage is neither a solution for many things nor a perfect solution for one. So, my argument there is correct, too. Try to address the issue at hand.
The only utter nonsense is your ridiculous response to my correct and logical post. The fact you only see things as natural or not shows a difficulty understanding the world and its complexities. .
Maybe the kinds of problems which the theory of evolution is not equipped to tackle. 'If the only tool you have is a hammer then the only problems you're interested in involve nails' ~ Abraham Maslow.
Biochemistry is the field that explains how body's are created. I don't see how evolution could give a causal explanation of the mind?
The mind in the humans goes beyond solving a few survival problems. There is a difference in explaining the benefit of a feature and describing how it emerged. Having wings is obviously beneficial to a bird but that is not an account of how the come about.
At bottom evolutionary explanations rely on things like genetic mutations and emergent properties, when something emerges it can then be propagated or made defunct by the environment.
Instead of quoting, why don't you reflect on your own mind and the skills you wouldn't have if you didn't have one - and how you would survive if you didn't have one.
The only one arguing with idiots in this exchange has been me, and you've proven that. Nothing in the theory of evolution by natural selection and the field of genetics/heredity supports your outlandish theory of solutions being passed down genetically. The issue at hand is I have been arguing with one who ridiculously believes they are.
Quoting Andrew4HandelOther animals have adapted their anatomy and behaviors that initially evolved to solve a different problem. Ostriches don't use their wings to fly. They use them in mating dances and to scare off predators. We are no different in using our higher intelligence for new purposes. We do religion, art, etc. but doing these things can all be explained in evolutionary terms of passing on your genes, and even filtering the genes that get passed down to new generations.
Why don't you think about what your consciousness enables you to do, and what you can and can't do while you aren't conscious.
You and everyone else in this thread should watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_WrKno972U
You all should also inform yourself of Steven Pinker and read his book "How The Mind Works".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gen2p-9DvFE
This video is 20 years old, which just means that most of you are that far behind in educating yourselves in modern explanations of the mind and what makes it useful for survival and procreating.
You know that sounds very judgmental and insulting, right? For no reason that I can think of either. You're free to pursue whatever course of interests you find appealing, as am I. Just because a particular area of interest isn't one we share isn't call to say that I'm "not willing to expand my knowledge", implying that I embrace ignorance for some reason. I don't appreciate the implication. It's not called for, and on top of that, it's also intellectually lazy. The flaw in the logic behind "RN isn't interested in pursuing information about X, therefore RN isn't interested in perusing knowledge period" should be obvious. Have some pride. Be smarter and kinder.
Lizards and fish survive just fine. Honestly, asking 'what's the point of having a mind' is one of those questions that makes you wonder whether the person asking it is worthy of one.
That is a irrelevant to explaining how consciousness is produced.
Determinists and epiphenomenalists and eliminativists believe that consciousness has little to no role in action.
I had came to the conclusion that you're saying solutions are not passed down genetically, which would be disproven by showing a solution that is clearly passed down genetically. Is there something so far in this paragraph I've misunderstood?
No, my statement is perfectly clear, you haven't shown how it isn't, and I don't want you to do anything. You can address it or not, but I won't address your questions strawmanning that statement.
This is actually true. So, you are free to prove your claim by proving a solution is passed down genetically.
This is like saying that in a discussion of religion it's okay to talk about religion when all you know is the religion you practice, and not anything about all the other religions. It's not. It's arguing from ignorance.
It's not conjecture. It's obvious you won't take my word for it, which is why I provided links, which you won't even then pursue. That is what being intellectually lazy is.
So you have clear and cut evidence that lizards and fish don't have minds? Where is Reformed Nihilist and his criticism of conjecture?
If one trusts the theory of evolution by natural selection, then we need to explain the selection pressures that were applied to brains. We need to recognize that brains are different and need to account for those differences. We account for those differences the same way we account for every other biological difference in every species - through evolution by natural selection.
When people avoid questions instead of confidently answering the question in a way that shows that the question isn't valid (instead of just claiming that it is), then it is most likely that they know where the question leads them and they don't want to go down that road.
No it isn't. You need to know why minds exist to understand how they are produced, especially in a world where there is evolution by natural selection. You do believe in that don't you? Why were mind selected? What problems did having a mind solve? These are questions that need to be answered if there is evolution by natural selection and selection pressures apply to minds. I'm trying to get you to think, but it seems that you don't want to. Just make an attempt to answer the question. What is it that you can and can't do when not conscious as opposed to being conscious?
I don't understand the aversion to watching a Youtube video in order to better understand what it is that you all are actually talking about. What are you all scared of?
(Y)
Scientific version of Genesis: Natural Forces created the universe and it took millions of years.
There really is no difference between the two versions which is why some people reject elevating evolution to some special status. Survival of the fitness is just an intellectual expression of some elitists in European culture. Some took this to a limit resulting in eugenics and Nazism.
There is no reason for minds to exist. The only valid explanation is an explanation of how consciousness is produced.
Consciousness is involved in numerous things, composing symphonies, language, doing math, reading books, sexual pleasure, pain, concept formation, thought, dreaming ad infinitum.
The explanation for biology is biochemical and refers to specific biochemical behaviours,it is not "evolutionary". Natural selection can only select something after it begins to exist it can't produce consciousness (or gills) on demand. conscious has to begin to exist before it can be of any use.
You haven't really proposed any argument apart from telling people watch this etc I have a degree in psychology and philosophy. I know how neurons work and about different brain structures, I know about fMRI etc (I had to write a critical essay on brain scanning techniques) etc and studied the search for neural correlates. I had to read seven books on the philosophy of mind for my course and I have also read Dennets Consciousness explained.
I watched a video by Stephen Pinker where he claimed "We think in images" But I don't I think in words. That to me is poor quality broadcasting that youtubers are liking unreflectively.
I never argued that evolutionary psychology was nothing but conjecture, I expressed that I had the impression that was the case, and based on that impression, it wasn't an area of interest that I was currently interested in pursuing. For some reason, you seem to have made it your own personal mission to convince me otherwise, and failing that, insulting me for not immediately being convinced. I entered this discussion with good intent, and you have been rude, and attacked me personally. That's both bad reasoning (ad hom) and just bad behavior. On top of that, it's the near certain way to potentially sour my already dubious opinion of evolutionary psychology. So job well done. I wonder if there's a response that I could offer you that would convince you that you have been rude? I doubt it. Maybe I could ask if you could imagine a situation where you were rude because you got caught up in an argument on the internet, and because you were caught up in it, you couldn't see your own rudeness? Then I might ask how this situation differs from that hypothetical. Just something to chew on.
". One class of limitations pertains to phenomena that are truly puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, such as those that appear to reduce an individual’s reproductive success, and cannot be explained by mismatches with, or hijacking of, our psychological mechanisms by modern day novel environmental inputs. The most obvious example is homosexual orientation, which has been called “the Darwinian paradox.” Exclusive homosexual orientation seems to defy evolutionary logic since it presumably fails to increase an individual’s reproductive success. Although Evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed for homosexuality, as discussed earlier, none have received empirical support thus far (e.g., Bobrow & Bailey, 2001).
Another puzzling phenomenon is suicide.
In the United States, more than 30,000 individuals intentionally take their own lives each year (Gibbons, Hur, Bhaumik, &
Mann, 2005)"
http://www.dianafleischman.com/epap.pdf
It seems like Evolutionary psychology is trying to be deterministic and predict what behaviours we ought to automatically exhibit. So that all behaviour must subsume under an evolutionary paradox even if there is no plausible reason linking it to whatever model of evolution they are using.
Heterosexuality is not explained yet it is taken for granted because of it obvious benefits to gene transmission/reproduction.
"The purpose manifested in evolution, whether in adaption, specialisation, or apparent progress, is only an apparent purpose. It is just as much a progress of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the tides, It is we who have read purpose into evolution, as earlier men projected will and emotion into inorganic phenomena like storm or earthquake."
Walker then says:
"In making this statement Huxley has stepped outside the province of science, for a scientist can neither assert nor deny the existence of purpose in nature (...)"
But it's pretty amazing what natural-selection has accomplished.
Michael Ossipoff
This is precisely what happened. Scientists imbued a human tendency into some unknown mysterious force that governs all which is called Natural Laws. There is no way to distinguish Natural Laws from God (the God of Abraham and not the God of Michaelangelo).
Are you suggesting that natural selection will be weeding out Gay people? This type of reasoning, perpetuated by science, is as least as distasteful as any religious teaching along the same lines. Nazism was fed by this type of scientism.
People seem to be conflating the benefit of a trait with a causal explanation. Homosexuals could be very altruistic and have super fertile mothers but that won't explain homosexual desire.
"1920s, Belgian ethnologists analysed (measured skulls, etc.) thousands of Rwandans on analogous racial criteria, such as which would be used later by the Nazis. In 1931, an ethnic identity was officially mandated and administrative documents systematically detailed each person's "ethnicity,". Each Rwandan had an ethnic identity card.[11"
These identity cards formed part of the later Genocide.
Since Evolution is indistinguishable from other Western religions, it would make sense that adherents would draw the same conclusions, e.g. being Gay (or any other target minority group) is unnatural and is a target for extinction. This the Nazis could justify the murder of tens of millions of people by simply suggesting that they were agents of the natural universe. Similarly, the Inquisition could be justified as the adherents being agents of The Lord.
We can thus view Evolution and religion as a battle for the hearts and souls of fatalists (determinists) who embrace the concept of an outside force directing the Universe.
Nonsense. I've repeatedly criticized Scientificism (Science-Worship) at these forums.
Commendations to you for not being a Science-Worshipper. But not worshipping science doesn't mean you can play ostrich with it. Science (as a process for finding out how things happen in the physical world) is valid within its purview, its region of applicability.
It's not going to go away, by your doctrinaire, dogmatic anti-science belief.
So then, to you likewise believe that global-warming is just fake news?
But you aren't alone. There are a number of other people who want to prevent evolution from being taught in schools. Sorry, I won't wish you success in that goal.
Since around 1854, it's been more and more accepted that there is such a thing as evolution, and that natural selection is what drives it.
Join the 19th century. And then maybe the 20th and he 21st.
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I support everyone's right to make their own life choices. That includes gays. That also includes people who want medical euthanasia for any valid medical reason--any disease or injury that they regard as lowering their quality of life to what they regard as an unacceptable degree..
And that right to make one's own life choices has nothing to do with the PC (political-correctness) issue about whether gayness is hereditary, environmental, or both. I'm not into PC.
If gay-ness is more environmental than hereditary, so what? That's completely irrelevant to the individual-rights issue. I support everyone's individual right to make their own life-choices, where no one else is directly harmed. (Raising crocodiles in your backyard isn't just a personal choice, because it would endanger other people and animals.)
Dare I say it?: Natural selection suggests that gay-ness must have an environmental component. Probably a strong environmental component. Otherwise these discussions of course wouldn't be taking place.
Anti-Science PC?
And no, the suggestion of an environmental component to gay-ness doesn't feed Nazism. But anti-science advocacy does.
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By the way, "Scientism" isn't a good name for Science-Worship. What would you call an adherent of Scientism? A Scientist? But that word (without capitalization) has another meaning. It means a practictioner of science--a completely different meaning from "Science-Worshipper"
That's why I say "Scientificism" instead.
Michael Ossipoff
The discussion is about the all-powerful force called Natural Selection which was totally concocted by science and which seems to be obsessed with reproduction (something Freudian going on here). Apparently, according to this reproduction obsession, Natural Selection is weeding out all those that aren't equally obsessed. It's all about procreation? Sounds very strange to me.
If theres an environmental aspect to Gayness that can make one Gay, there has to be one that can make one straight, but theres neither. Gay people mostly come out and mostly have come out of predominantly Straight communities and most of the children raised by Gay parents have turned out straight.
Nazism was entirely technology driven, and after the war the U.S. used many Nazi for our missile program.
As far as ideology was concerned, the concept of the survival of the fittest race was music to their ears. They actually set up labs that experimented on humans (in the most barbaric ways) trying to figure out ways to exterminated faster. It was all about Natural Selection and the survival of the fittest.
Why is it that you can't answer a simple question? You avoiding it just shows that you aren't being intellectually honest. I've addressed and answered your questions, yet you cannot do the same. It's getting to the point where you are insulting my intelligence and wasting my time.
Quoting Andrew4HandelOkay, finally. Some of these have to do with surviving in the social environment (composing symphonies, language, etc.) and some have to do with filtering behavior (sexual pleasure, pain, etc.). What about learning new skills and filtering your instinctual behavior in social environments? When learning something new, your attention (consciousness) is focused on the task at hand. Only after you have acquired the instructions (stored them in long term memory) can you then perform the task without much attention to it. Why would consciousness be fully focused on a new task but then relegate it to a background task (on auto pilot) once you are able to repeat the skill without much attention to it?
Quoting Andrew4HandelAnd I asked about how natural selection has molded the brain, which is a biochemical organ, and how that isn't selection for fitter brains and minds. All you do is repeat yourself without answering the pointed questions that I pose.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I have proposed an argument - that the mind has evolved as a result of environmental selection pressures and that consciousness improves evolutionary fitness. How else can you explain how human beings have spread across the planet and manipulates his environment and the complex social environment (which is really just a kind of natural environment)? So you haven't taken the time to watch any of the videos?
Quoting Andrew4HandelWe do think in images. We are visual creatures. Most of our terms that we use are visual terms. I don't know how many times I've posted the story of the Man with No Words:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words
in different threads, yet no one responds to it. This many knew no language yet was able to survive and categorize his thoughts. Language is simply visual squiggles and sounds. So even saying that you think in words is saying that you think in visuals and sounds.
Camouflage is a solution as long as any hungry predator in the vicinity uses vision to locate prey. I never said that they would be perfect or final.
You need to watch the video with Tooby and Cosmides and pay special attention to what Tooby explains near the end.
I already went over homosexuality. You are just being purposefully obtuse.
I do not. I think in words. In what way do I think in any images and how can you know this?
Saying wings aid survival through flight is for example an explanation in service of evolution not a biochemical theory about the evolution of wings.
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This is one big reply to several posters:
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Alright, I came here to discuss metaphysics. I didn’t come here to explain and advocate natural selection to evolution-deniers, or to justify science to science-haters.
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Besides, I suspect that the evolution-deniers and science-haters aren’t really that, and are just devil’s-advocate-trolling.
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But here I am anyway, replying in this topic. Explain that. :)
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Maybe, but if eugenics conflicts with kindness and humanity, I’d choose kindness and humanity.
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But don’t expect societal improvement.
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What has been the result, the culmination, of all of the best efforts of people working for societal improvement? Don’t take my word for it, just look around at what’s happening societally.
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Have you ever noticed that the sheep are matched and suited to their herders like a glove to a hand?
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…as if the sheep were made for their owners?
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It’s like Huxley’s Brave New World, except that of course there’s nothing new about it. And of course, in real life, as opposed to the novel, it wasn’t achieved by drugs.
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It was the result of evolution.
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Don’t get me wrong. It’s amazing what evolution has accomplished. If you aren’t awed by it, then you haven’t noticed it.
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But there must have been a time in our species’ prehistoric past (and after too?) when complete obedience to authority was adaptive.
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Think of it as a “theory” to explain societal events and the societal stasis.
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It’s a particularly well-confirmed theory.
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P.T. Barnum said that there’s a sucker born every minute.
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W.C. Fields said, “Never give a sucker an even break.”
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Those two great social-scientists have provided the explanation for the societal stasis.
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It can be called a stasis, because of course nothing has changed throughout history, from ancient times, to Classical times, to medieval times, renaissance, up to modern times. Only a few details of the herding-method, the mode, have changed, with technological advances.
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There were always differences and variation among individuals. Those differences were augmented by mutations. Most mutations were maladaptive. But just a few were adaptive. The individuals with those adaptive mutations (or just with more adaptive attributes within ordinary variation) survived long enough to pass them on. Soon the individuals with the more adaptive traits and attributes increased their percentage of the population.
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That’s how varieties of species arise.
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As industrialization arrived, in some places soot filled the air, and trees’ bark became blackened with soot. In at least one location, it was noticed that the moths that landed on the tree-bark had eventually acquired a dark coloring, for camouflage against the black tree-bark.
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Sometimes populations become geographically separated for one of any number of reasons. Maybe some move into a new niche somewhere else. Then, as the two populations continue to diverge, in their separate adaptation to their different environments—or maybe just because they’re geographically separate and not interbreeding—soon their genetic makeup is so different that they can’t interbreed. …or at least not with the full efficiency that’s possible within a species.
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Now there are two species instead of one.
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That was inevitable. That speciation has been happening for as long as there’s been life.
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The benefit of an adaptive trait results in its possessor surviving longer, having, and successfully rearing more offspring. …resulting in adaptive traits increasing in the population.
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Causal? You bet.
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• Andrew4Handel
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Science (and misunderstandings of science) has been abused. Does anyone believe that abuse of science and technology hasn’t taken place even after the Nazis?
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But are we worse off because of science?
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How were things in medieval times? Sure, rulers didn’t have the technology to do as much harm as they can do now. But they did the best they could, didn’t they. …reminiscent of the Walrus in Alice in Wonderland (or Through the Looking-Glass?), who didn’t eat as many of the oysters as the Carpenter did, but nevertheless ate as many as he could.
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If you lived in ancient times, would you still be alive at your age? And what kind of hardship would your life have consisted of?
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Yes, arguably, life might have been pretty good in Paleolithic times, but that lifestyle just isn’t societally-attainable now.¬
20 hours ago
• Rich
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Rich:
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Evolution isn’t a religion. It’s an established fact.
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Thoroughgoing utter nonsense (as from a troll).
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The Nazis abused their misunderstanding of evolution, but that doesn’t mean you have to be an evolution-denier. Most people who aren’t evolution-deniers don’t endorse or support Nazis or the like.
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In fact, evoluion-deniers are among the most numerous supporters of Nazi-like policies.
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Your conclusion: So we should all be evolution-deniers and science-haters.
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The Nazis’ misunderstanding of science, and the Inquisition’s decidedly unscientific justification for its crimes have no valid role in justifying evolution-denial or science-hating.
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Too silly to answer. The question is, why do I waste my time answering trolls? Well, just this last post, and that’s all.
18 hours ago
11 hours ago
• Rich
Rich:
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Selective reproduction is the obvious mechanism of evolution.
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See above in this post, regarding natural-selection..
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Darwin was a few decades before Freud.
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Freud deserves credit for having the courage, in Victorian times, to mention the dreaded “S-word”.
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Other than that, I don’t know that Freud said anything societally helpful. (But I’m no Freud-authority.)
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Obsessions probably aren’t optimally adaptive. But yes, natural selection has tended to weed out survival-&-reproduction-disadvantageous attributes.
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But it isn’t just reproduction. It’s survival for long enough to reproduce and successfully rear and protect one’s offspring.
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Sorry, but it’s nevertheless true. What, other than selective procreation resulted in speciation?
• Thanatos Sand:
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Of course. But there’s also a blatantly-obvious natural-selection influence too.
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That’s your scientific pronouncement? I stated an obvious reason why, in view of natural-selection, a strong environmental influence is needed to explain gay-ness.
Rich:
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Answered above, in this post.
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Adaptive attributes either existed here and there among the population, to varying degrees, or else were the result of (usually maladaptive, but sometimes adaptive) mutations.
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(see the natural-selection explanation, above in this post)
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The changes, from one generation to the next could have been quite gradual, but eventually, over time, those changes could be big.
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Animals react to their environment. Call that “consciousness” if you want.
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Consciousness is used as an obfuscatory way to refer to the fact that animals react to their surroundings.
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"Consciousness explained"? Darwin explained it in 1854.
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Sorry, Mr. Dennet.
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That’s Darwin’s explanation.
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He beat you to it in 1854.
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Heterosexuality is not explained yet it is taken for granted because of it obvious benefits to gene transmission/reproduction. — Andrew4Handel
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You say that it isn’t explained, and then you give its obvious explanation.
.Alright, enough troll-engaging, evolution-defending, and science-defending.
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As I said, I’m at this forum to discuss metaphysics.
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Michael Ossipoff
Is it possible that homosexuality is just a bug in the human reproductive program, rather than an emergent trait with evolutionary implications? Heterosexuality is obviously the normal instinct, as it is essentially required for continuation of the species. Homosexuality may just be a flaw in the system that occurs when a human is first forming, where a male brain gets paired with female sex organs, or vice versa. There is no hereditary component other than continuation of the chance of the flaw occurring, because there are no homosexual sex organs, only mismatched bodies and brains.
Then there has to be one for Gays, too, because they've been here forever and are still going strong..
You did nothing of the kind; your reason was neither obvious nor correct. And it's really lame to reduce my statement to three words from the middle statement and treat it like my complete one. If you have faith in your incorrect view, at least address my entire statement. You have failed to do so, so far. Here it is:
Consciousness is experience and awareness of surroundings. There is no explanation as to why we have experiences ( including dreams, pain and other sensations )qualia). Defining consciouness is controversial but you certainly haven't characterisied it convncingly.
You once again are conflating the trivial observation of somethings benefit with the mechanical, biochemical or otherwise explanation of emergent properties.
The benefits of consciousness do not amount to a causal explanation of why we are able to perceive anything or have sensations. (how the brin if it does "produces" experinces and sensations)
You do not seem to have a demand for thorough causally complete coherent explanations for anything. New body parts have to be created in conjunction with mutations and environmental factors but these require a biochemical thery fo properties available and caused by biochemistry and not just a reference to "fitness".
"Natural selection" seems to be verging on a trivial tautology that if something survives it is well adapted.
As long as there is death and reproduction, the mechanisms of natural selection are in play. There is a common misconception that what we might think of as "better" traits are not being selected for, or what we think of as "worse" traits are being selected against, that means that evolution isn't occurring in the human population, but that betrays a misunderstanding of what evolution is. Whatever traits continue to be passed on are those traits that are "selected for" and those that are not are "selected against" given the current environment (which includes our cultural and technological environments).
Heterosexuality is required but what it requires is much more complex than homosexual desire.
Homosexuals just need to fancy each other. Heterosexuality has to get a different sex attracted to a different looking sex (it failed for me as an exclusive homosexual) and keep complex sexual organs in seperate bodies compatible which is a bizzare feat.. So for example the woman gets ovaries, eggs and womb and breast man gets sperm etc.
So you need a set of really providentially mutations selected. People seem to downplay the role of consciousness in sexual attraction as well.
That's a good explanation. Admittedly the environmental explanation wasn't really that good (It was just the best that I could suggest) . Your explanation sounds better, and explains the otherwise difficult-to-explain fact that homosexuality is found in other animal species too.
Michael Ossipoff
Michael Ossipoff
Are people really spewing this anti-scientific, homophobic nonsense that homosexuality is "just a bug in the reproductive system," and that there are no "homosexual sex organs, only mismatched bodies and brains?" That is so pathetic.
Gays and their sexual preferences bringing them together are not flaws and neither are their predilections. Gays and the homosexuality they practice have been here for millennia and many of them, like Alan Turing, clearly are not who they are because of "bugs in the reproductive system."
It's thinking like that from the quote above that led England to castrate the man who arguably won the Allies WWII and drive him to suicide. Unreal.
Yes, in view of what CasKev posted, maybe my explanation wasn't the best one. Maybe a better explanation is that it's just a "transcription-error", to borrow a term from the movie Timeline.
Note that I admit when I'm wrong (or was likely wrong).
...none of which precludes environmental causes. But CasKev's explanation is more plausible.
Michael Ossipoff
Attributing Gays' sexual preferences to an unproven, unscientific, homophobic "mechanism" that you see as a "bug in the reproductive system" and not just a regular product of the reproductive system that made Gays and their predilections is a value judgment. You are saying that Gays' sexual predilections are not as natural as Straights'. that is an immense value judgment.
Of course it precludes environmental causes since Gays mostly come out of Straight environments and mostly Straights come out of "Gay" environments. So, the environments clearly aren't making people Gay or Straight.
A person's environment is more than just the home in which they are reared.
Michael Ossipoff
Yes, but it is their primary shaping environment showing even the shaping environment doesn't make people Gay or straight. Considering you havent shown any other environment that overrides those environments to make people Gay or Straight, my point stands as true.
Not unless it's intended that way.
Look, one thing for sure is that gay-ness isn't hereditary.
That isn't rocket-science.
If it were hereditary, then, with no one (or many times fewer) to inherit it, then it would soon disappear from the population.
So it isn't hereditary. What other alternatives are there. Well, environment is an obvious one (and not just the home in which one is reared).
CasKev's explanation avoids some of the problems of the environmental explanation.
If you agree that gay-ness wouldn't be propagated and perpetuated by heredity, then you'd agree that another explanation is needed. Environment, &/or the genetic transcription-errors suggested by CasKev are alternative explanations.
Don't make an issue about "natural". What's natural? Without the CT-hit, there'd probably be no humans.
Want "natural"? What could be more natural than Nothing? Nothing can be regarded as the natural state-of-affairs. ...and you'll eventually return to what could be called Nothing, at your end-of-lives. (or at the end of this life, if you assume that there's no reincarnation). And of course it will be Timeless, as opposed to our limited time in life (...limited if you believe either that there's no reincarnation, or those who say that there's inevitably an end to lives, when a person achieves what, in the East, they call "Liberation".)
Much of the variation that makes natural-selection possible is due to mutations. ...instances of cosmic-rays, or radiation from radioactive minerals, altering chromosomes. is it a disparaging value-judgement to suggest that some human attributes could have resulted from those accidental collisions?
Did you know that there's strongly-convincing evidence that we're all the descendants of a pig and a chimpanzee (or someone very similar to a chimpanzee) that had an affair, a relationship, or at least a tryst?
If so, the only reasons why there are humans is because of what happened between that pig and that chimpanzee.
Is that suggestion a disparaging value-judgment about humans?
Michael Ossipoff
It doesn't matter how it's intended; a homophobic statement is still a homophobic statement. That's like saying a racist statement isn't racist if it isn't meant to be. Ridiculous.
For someone who claims to eschew brute facts, your posts are just one big bundle of such.
Look, you have no idea if it isn't hereditary or if Straightness isn't hereditary. And it's not rocket science; its Genetics, a science in which you are clearly uneducated.
This makes absolutely no sense since there have been a consistent amount of Gays who clearly could have, and probably did, inherit it. And you still failed to show what environment can override parental rearing. Thanks for supporting my point again.
As I well-showed, Caskev's explanation is unscientific, homophobic nonsense. The fact you buy into it doesn't speak well of you.
I never agreed to this and you haven't shown that to be true. Heredity is still the best, most scientific explanation.
I didnt' make an issue of "narural;" you and Caskev did with your homophobic "explanation" of homosexuality by presenting it as an unnatural "bug in the system."
This is incoherent, irrelevant nonsense that doesn't address anything I said.
And this is more irrelevant nonsense having nothing to do with our discussion. Try to stay on point.
A very clear explanation of how and why Natural Selection, via it's hold on all things including Nazi Stormtroopers, will seek to eliminate all that is not Natural. It has now gone to a place that is pretty much beyond distasteful. Is this any different from a religious Inquisition? I don't believe so. It is probably worse. Hunduism has it's caste system. All religions fighting to be king of the hill with some supernatural forces like Natural Selection eliminating all that is sinful.
Sorry, I didn't expect my statement to be taken as homophobic. It is meant to be anything but; just a plausible alternative as to why homosexuality hasn't been naturally selected out of existence, despite having no direct benefit as far as reproduction is concerned.
Given that homosexuality exists, and those who practice it seem to be merely following their natural instincts, harming no one in the process, there is no reason to criticize it.
It doesnt' matter if your statement wasn't meant to be taken as homophobic. It was homophobic as you presented Gays and homosexuality as a result of a "bug in the reproduction system," making it less natural than being born from the reproduction system functioning normally. As Rich pointed out, the Nazis used to make similar eugenic statements about Jews. We saw how that worked out.
So, stop making homophobic statements like that and you should be fine.
Homophobia is a "natural" conclusion for any ideology that is driven by reproduction as fundamental or essential. Once one goes down this path (as the Nazis did) the preferred path of the supernatural force called Natural Selection is inevitable, i.e. weed out.
The scientific explanation of human evolution is not only a silly story for which there is zero evidence (all that survives, survives because of some force called natural selection), it is downright horrific.
How is it not less natural in the context of evolution? Continuation of a species requires procreation, and homosexuality removes the desire to couple with the opposite sex. I suppose a 100% homosexual human population could make it work, because we're smart enough to know that we will cease to exist unless we find some way around our lack of sexual desire. However, it is hard to imagine a 100% homosexual dog population deciding to couple with the opposite sex, without the instinctive drive.
The Nazis used this line of reasoning not only for Jews, but on anyone who stood on land that they wanted, which included 10s of millions of Gypsies, Slavs, Russians, and millions of others who were deemed inferior. The Nazis envisioned themselves as but a tool of the inexorable force called Natural Selection. These outside forces governing our lives can be quite murderous at times.
It's pretty sad you have to ask. Because you said it Gays an homosexuality was a product of a "bug" in the reproductive system, not the reproductive system acting normally, as opposed to Straights who are products of the reproductive system acting normally.
To show how vile your statement was, imagine saying Blacks are a product of a "bug" in the reproductive system while Whites are products of the system acting normally.
That you and the Nazis are so hung up about the continuation of a species or race is purely an individual issue and desire Some share your obsession and others don't. Some have children, some just adopt. Everyone is different. Is this necessity to continue a species or a race being taught in philosophy, science, or religious classes? It's rather frightening. I hope there are some people who reject it and the the whole concept in favor of a quieter view of life.
And now you show your homophobia again by presenting homosexuality as counter to the spreading of the species. The fact Gays and Straights who do not want kids or cant have kids have been with us forever proves they're part of the normal evolution of the species. The fact you can't see that these people, like Alan Turing, don't greatly contribute without procreating--and overpopulation shows its good not everyone is procreating--shows the deficiency of thinking and homophobic bias in the matter.
So, you should stop spouting your homophobia and stay out of evolutionary biology, you clearly are poorly educated, if at all, it it.
Not only is that irrelevant to my correct point that your homophobic "bug theory" unjustly and erroneously shows one side as less natural than the others, it shows you forget that humans born not wanting to reproduce, like straights who don't want to reproduce, don't have to come from a "bug" in the system. They can and do just come from the reproduction system naturally.
P.S. Nobody has ever found this "bug" you speak of, so the "science" behind your homophobia is non-existent.
As I already said in the post you responded to, if you think in words, then you think in visual scribbles and sounds, as that is all words are. How did you learn words if you couldn't see or hear prior to learning words?
I'm not conflating anything. If something is beneficial, it is selected (passed down to subsequent generations). How does a beneficial trait come about? - Mutation. Genes copying themselves make mistakes sometimes. This is expected when there isn't an intelligent designer. Evolution by natural selection is a theory that has an expectation, or prediction, (one could even say an implication) that not every solution would be perfect or final. It is what you would expect from a mindless process. It isn't what you would expect if God did it. That is when you would expect solutions to be final and perfect.
"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. " - Darwin
But aren't you the one who is disparaging gays, when you say that they're criticizably unnatural if they're the result of an accident?
I described a variety of ways in which all of us are the result of various accidental occurrences.
Michael Ossipoff
Well, I carefully, and at length, explained how natural selection works.
A brute fact is a fact that is posited without an explanation, typically with a claim that it doesn't need one. But natural selection, and its central role in evolution, is very well explained.
Michael Ossipoff
I didn't understand. Well your entire explanation then becomes a brute fact.
We're making progress.
In particular, which part of my explanation didn't you understand? Which statement or conclusion didn't seem supported?
Michael Ossipoff
I really, really don't know to what to say about this tale.
Natural Selection isn't a force with a mind or will; it's merely a description of the events that are occurring. Living things reproduce. If a feature is added to a living thing that allows it to live longer and reproduce more, it will eventually replace the version that didn't have that feature.
Nothing "supernatural" about it. It's an obvious consequence of accepted natural events.
For details, I refer you to my explanation of natural-selection.
There's really further nothing to say to you. You've decided what you want to believe, the position that you want to take, and you're going to try to rationalize and justify it no matter what.
There's no possibility of communication with you.
Are you a cliimate-change denier as well as an evolution-denier and, overall, a science-hater?
You must be very proud of our current president.
Maybe you should move to a red-state, and work to ban evolution from textbooks.
Michael Ossipoff
Brute fact alert!
Morphogenic fields and morphogenic resonance? The out-of-body holographic repository?
Those are the brute-facts.
That more successful attributes would increase their occurrence in a population because more successful individuals more often survive long enough to reproduce is just obvious.
Its nothing other than what one would expect to happen.
It would be surprising if it didn't happen. Then there would be something needing explanation.
Michael Ossipoff
That's a question for any evolution-denier.
Michael Ossipoff
The creative mind experimenting, learning, and evolving. No need to bring in supernatural forces. It is our minds.
Actually, I don't think you have written one post that isn't chock full of brute facts, but I could be wrong.
So the mind of some one-celled organism decided to make it procreate a more complex organism...in a sequence of organisms whose minds decided to procreate a still more complex organism, ultimately resulting in a nonhuman primate deciding to procreate a human?
Do you believe in some as-yet unknown biological mechanism by which an organism can decide to, and know and decide how to, and have a way to, give birth to a more advanced organism--and be motivated to do so?
And what about the organic compounds that, by whatever mechanism, somehow gave rise to the first life--Did those organic compounds have minds too, and decide to create life?
Michael Ossipoff
I wouldn't call it an organism. It was the mind (The Dao) that began the process. Pretty straightforward Daoism.
The One (Mind) created Two (Yin/Yang, polarity, standing wave)
The Two created Three (Qi, energy, moving wave)
And from the Three (moving waves) everything else was created.
Got hand it to the Daoists for some extraordinary observational skills thousands of years ago.
It all begins with the Mind (Dao).
No, you're saying more than that. According to your belief, no only did the mind start that process of evolution of ever more complex life-forms, but it has continued intervening, to on-goingly shape them into more complex forms that are better suited to survival in their environments.
I'm not an Atheist, and I don't criticize your belief in a Creator, though I personally don't regard God as an element of metaphysics, as you do. You're using God metaphysically, as the explanation for what is, as, of course,do many others.
I claim (starting with my initial post at these forums) that all that "is", is systems of inter-referring abstract facts and hypotheticals, including mathematical theorems, abstract logical facts, hypothetical quantity-relational facts called "laws of physics", hypothetical quantities that, as the subjects of those physical laws, are part of them, and various if-then facts involving those hypotheticals.
And there's no need to explain why there is that. Such hypotheticals couldn't have not been, for reasons that I've discussed (I'll repeat it if you like). You can call it a "brute fact", but an inevitable fact isn't brute.
For that reason, you needn't use God or Dao as an element of metaphysics (as the creator of what is).
I don't agree with your belief, but I don't criticize it.
Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Rich
The difference is that I've told specifically what I find wrong with what you say. ...whereas you just make vague generalizations like the above-quoted one.
Another difference is that I've made an effort to justify my proposals and other statements.
I asked you why there is the out-of-bodies (extra-spatial too?) distributed holographic memory-repository that you believe in.
You didn't answer.
...because you didn't want to admit that you believe in and advocate a brute-fact.
So, can you answer that question now, or do you continue to evade it?
Michael Ossipoff
As best as I can tell, you have no idea what I'm talking about.
Yes, you already said that, and I answered it.
Or are you saying that you also don't understand the question:
"Why is there the un-embodied holographic memory-repository that you believe in?"
Which part of that question don't you understand?
As I mentioned, I suggest that you don't answer it because you don't want to admit that you believe in and advocate a brute-fact.
Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Rich
But yes, you're right about that.
Michael Ossipoff
One more comment:
Quoting Rich
You brought up religion, your belief in a Creator. I answered about religion, basically stating something that i didn't agree with you about.
I said that your use of Dao amounts to a use of God to explain the creation of what is. ...and that I don't.
if that's what you don't understand, that's ok.
I said that I don't regard God as an element of metaphysics.
Ok, I can't say that I expected you to understand exactly what I was talking about. My object wasn't to convey religious understanding, but only to say something about where I disagree with you--without expecting you to understand the specifics,
Suffice to say that you 're using Dao or God metaphysicallly, as the Creator of what is. I don't.
No, of course, don't expect to understand other people's statements about religion. I didn't mention it with that purpose.
Oh, and by the way:
Why is there that un-embodied holographic universal memory-repository that you believe in?
Or do you not understand that either?
If not, then, as I already just asked: Which part of that question don't you understan?
Michael Ossipoff
Why is there the un-embodied holographic universal memory-repository that you believe in?
Which part of that question don't you understand?
Your refusal to answer indicates that you can't explain that entity that you believe in and advocate, and that you believe in and advocate a brute-fact.
Therefore, your refusal to answer is, itself, an answer.
Thank you for that answer.
Michael Ossipoff
Mind is quanta. The universe is quanta. Memory is mind/quanta in holographic form. Mind is evolving by creative experimentation and learning.
Why are there the quanta that compose the mind, the universe?
Michael Ossipoff
https://youtu.be/WIyTZDHuarQ
Why is there Bohm's quantum potential?
Michael Ossipoff
I'm not denying that it exists, or asking you to prove that it exists. I'm asking you why the Bohm quantum potential exists.
You'll say you don't know what I'm talking about, so i won't repeat it, but I've spoken of the primacy of the Protagonist of life-experience possibility-stories.
Be clear about this (!!): I'm not asking you to understand what I'm talking about in that paragraph before this one.. I'm just mentioning that I, myself, have spoken of the primacy of the experiencer.
But (with the understanding that I'm not asking you for proof of the mind's existence), why is there the Bohm quantum potential?
Skepticism doesn't leave the question of "Why is there mind?" ...or any "Why" question..
Michael Ossipoff
So quantum potential is explained if there's Mind.
You could say, "There's Mind, the Experiencer, because Reality wouldn't be meaningful to speak of without an Experiencer.
So, as I understand you, you're saying that it comes down to "Me" as the brute-fact.
I used to say that, when I was arguing for Advaita.
But Skepticism goes one better, and doesn't leave any "Why is there..." question unanswered.
Yes, as brute-facts go, "Me" is the most justifiable brute-fact. ...in a class by itself, in that regard..
But Skepticism goes one better, and doesn't leave any "Why is there..." question unanswered.
Even "Me" needn't be posited as a brute-fact. "Me" goes with other facts that are self-evident and inevitable, in Skepticism.
"Me" fits in with those inevitable facts (the system of hypotheticals described in other postings). In fact "Me" is primary to the other elements of a life-experience story, because the Protagonist is the essential and central component of such a story.
But, as "Me" fits in with that inevitable system, it isn't necessary to say that "Me' is brute.
That's neater..
Let me guess: You don't know what I'm talking about.
Then just understand that I recognize some acceptability of declaring "Me" as a brute-fact, though it isn't necessary to say that in Skepticism.
Michael Ossipoff
So far, it seems that it one starts with mind as being fundamental it explains a lot, and if we view memory as a holographic remnant of mind, it explains even more. The prerequisite it's to allow for mind before matter.
I though I said this earlier. Determinism is a popular position in academia where the mind is seen as almost irrelevant and consciousness epiphenomenal.
You don't seem to get the point that something being beneficial does not explain how it arose. We seem to be on different pages.
I am not sure what you are saying here. The mind can be beneficial in a million ways (as well as a curse) What is missing is a causal explanation for the emergence of minds/self/sensation etc.
Before something can be "selected" as a a persistent trait it has to come to exist. We don't know of any other planets where the conditions exist for life to exist. Our planet has the right disposition for the masses of life forms it contains. These dispositions are physical and biochemical or otherwise but they have to prexist evolution. A planet with mainly hydrogen on it like Saturn is not going to see the emergence of life soon.
So consciousness can only come to exist if their is prexisting disposition for it. It is like a recipe book where you have to use specific ingredients to create the correct dish.
I am unclear what selection is supposed to explain except trivially pointing out that X survived because it was advantageous in some form. It is easy to give reasons why something might persist but these are not law like reasons for X's begining to exist. Human inventions either persist or don't based on their utility but that does not describe the invention process.
Yes, I was talking about metaphysics. We don't disagree because, as you said, we're talking about different matters.
"Me" as fundamental would make a lot more sense than matter as fundamental.
I'm close to saying that, when I say that "Me", the Protagonist is primary and central to a life-experience possibility-story."
"Me" is primary in my life-experience story, but, additionally "Me" and my world are part complementary to eachother, like the heads and tails sides of a coin. ...together comprising a system that is inevitable, for a metaphysics with no unanswered "Why is there..." question. No brute fact at all.
(...but I'm still the central, special, essential, primary component of my life-experience possibility-story)
But if you aren't proposing a metaphysics, then we have no disagreement.
Michael Ossipoff
And you still haven't watched the first video I posted a link to in this forum. Tooby emphasizes at the end of the video:
"One difference between the blank slate approach is that the basic model of human dignity is you're clay - you are passively acted on by the outside world - whereas an evolutionary psychology model the person, in a really strong sense, is inventing themselves, instead of just downloading the environment and becoming what you're told to be.
And also in prosperous societies with lots of choices you get this amazing fluorescence in which people get together in groups and they very creatively construct a lot of rich, diverse ways in which individuals find themselves and build their identity. That's a very different world-view than the "we are passive and empty receptacles" at first, or that everything is fixed. That's the thing that people fear. What's fixed is the design of the programs but the programs are themselves designed to be very flexible.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
And I've already addressed this but you are insistent on skipping posts, not reading them, etc. The mind is what the brain does. When selections pressures produced a brain, they produced the mind. Not every organism has a brain, and the brain was an organ that evolved later from the primitive nervous systems of primitive organisms. The brain is where all the sensory information comes together into a consistent whole of one experience - where the brain can use the different signals from each sensory organ to create a fault-tolerant experience where one sense confirms what another is telling it. Another problem that you have that is finding it's way into your model is your dualism. The mind/body problem is the result of a false dichotomy.
There is always magic in science's explanation for mind. This the magic:
Some supernatural force called Selection (which is apparently obsessed with surviving) creates the brain and then Out Pops the Mind from the brain.
Every single concept that science pulls out of its hat (including an infinite number of superimposed quantum universes in order to save determinism) is conceived fo one and only one purpose: to dehumanize humans (and in the process humanizing supernatural forces) and make them into machines. Why? Because science wants carte blanche in playing with humans, as if they are some dumb toys indistinguishable from a Sony PlayStation, and "fixing them" .
Yes, for some inexplicable supernatural, magical reason, individuals that survive long enough to reproduce seem to have more offspring. :D
And, for some inexplicable supernatural, magical reason, individuals that have more offspring are better-represented in the population.
Go figure!
Michael Ossipoff
Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Huh? You believe this? There is not a scintilla of evidence from any source to support any of this. It's a story. It's a story that people who are alive love to hear, i.e. that they are the Selected Ones. It's an age old story that any victorious nation loves to hear and repeat.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
And thus the Selected Superior Race survives.
It's a grade school story that sticks because it is what people want to hear. No different from God's Chosen Ones. And this passes off for science for atheists who do not have God but do have Natural Selection.
This is very controversial you are ignoring large explanatory gaps.
I don't see how selction pressures cause anything? Causes and dispositions we know of are properties of biochemstry and available dispositions
We know that we have vivid private experiences but these are not seen in the brain and there is no real explanation as how they emerge from the brain if they do. Also we know we have representations and semantic states and these are not explained at all by neuronal activity.
Your claims explain nothing mechanical or otherwise and you haven't actually given any explicit causal theory from the brain to conscious/mental states. There are a huge range of issues in consciousness studies that you seem happy to bypass altogether.
Determinism is a denial of volition. It denies that human consciousness can decide but that it is an epiphenomenon. Volitional movements are not explained yet, in biology but because science is only studying the observable biochemical cellular processes so on there is no room to insert selfs, subjectivity and volition.
Computers can now do immensly sophisticated things but we have no reasons to suspect they have minds.
It would take to long to go into all the issues in consciousness here with you. But I have studied things like the visual system and the transduction of signals from the retina. These do not explain the eventual experience of colour. I can also discuss retinotopic maps with you if you want. Retinotopic maps are posited to preserve aspects of signals from the optic nerve but these signals and maps do not capture the essence of photons/wavelengths. Also they require homunculi to eventually have visual experience.
There are interesting findings in people with brain damage that challenge alot of theories.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-his-brain-is-challenging-our-understanding-of-consciousness
In an earlier post, you'd said:
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Philosophy of mind is garbage. …fiction.
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What is “the mind”? It’s a figure-of-speech used to describe an aspect of a person distinct from his/her physically-measurable properties such as height, weight, physical strength, running-speed, etc.
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Some philosophers want to reify it.
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You’re the animal. Period. Full stop.
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Some philosophers seem to believe in a metaphysical substance that they all “mind”. Yes, Physicalists insist that they don’t believe in it, but then they sputteringly fall all over eachother trying to explain away what they say they don’t believe in, by such mystical mumbo-jumbo as “epiphenomena”, “emergent-properties”, and “supervenience”.
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It's worth saying again:
You’re the animal. Period.
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No special metaphysical substance, or epiphenomena, emergent-properties, or supervenience needed.
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No need to make it difficult or complicated…unless you like to, of course.
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Those philosophers get themselves all snarled-up quite unnecessarily.
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But let’s be fair: They have a good reason to do so:
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A little imperative called “Publish-Or-Perish”.
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Yes, you know what I’m referring to.
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Without making it complicated, without pretending to be all fnurled-up, academic philosophers wouldn’t have as much to publish about (so as to not perish).
You said:
Quoting Andrew4Handel
What utter nonsense.
The animal (that's you) has to be designed to do things.
The animal (as shaped by natural-selection) has places to go, and things to do.
In furtherance of its natural-selected reproductive imperative (which necessarily includes survival, and successful rearing of offspring), it of course has to respond to its surroundings.
You're a purposefully-responsive device.
So are other animals.
So are mousetraps, refrigerator-light-switches, and thermostats.
An animal's response to its surroundings is, of course based on those surroundings, so a detection of those surroundings, which we call "perception" is an integral part of that response.
In addition to detection (perception) of course the animal has built-in preferences, likes, dislikes, wants and fears, etc. And, of course, in addition to those built-in attributes, there are adaptably-acquired ones that are based both built-in attributes, past experience, and perception.
Detection, designed-preference, including evaluative-feelings,,and built-in (instinctive) or acquired knowledge of technique to that implement that preference, together, are response.
That's just what all animal are, including all of us animals at this forum.
Now, Andrew4Handel, what would you expect it to be like to be an animal with those perceptions, preferences, feelings, etc.
Don't you have all of those? Don't you have preferences and evaluative feelings, and choose what to do based on your preferences (inborn and acquired by adaption to environment based on your built-in attributes?
What's surprising about that? What needs explaining by silly fictitious mystical mumbo-jumbo?
You're the animal.
You're a purposefully-responsive device.
Period.
Michael Ossipoff
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Quoting Michael Ossipoff
No, Andrew4Handel is entirely correct in that. Science has no account of how experience arises from what it knows about neurology and the like. Of course, it knows a ton of stuff about neurology, far more than was known 20 or 50 or 100 years ago, but the 'hard problem of consciousness' is recognised by many scientists and philosophers as exactly that - a problem of the kind to which there isn't even an imagined solution. Because unlike any amount of scientific knowledge of neurology, experience is first person.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Don't sell yourself short. A million monkeys, with a millon typewriters, couldn't produce the above. (Although you do wonder sometimes, on forums....:-}
It's only controversial to those that aren't educated in modern theories of neurology. When you don't even make an attempt to learn about these things, then discussing it with others who have makes you look like you don't know what you are talking about. I don't see how someone with a degree in psychology thinks that this is controversial.
Quoting Andrew4HandelAs I have said, mutations cause new traits which could provide positive, negative, or neutral consequences to surviving and procreating. Selection pressures are processes that filter out the negative mutations and are what causes positive traits to become the new norm. I have never said that natural selection causes the mutations. You simply aren't reading my posts and I find myself repeating myself. It's getting old.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
As I said, you are injecting your dualism into the discussion, which creates this false dichotomy this impossible problem of explaining how the brain gives rise to consciousness.
The implication of indirect realism is that what we experience isn't the way the world actually is. So when you look at a brain, or an MRI of the brain, you are experiencing a representation, or model, of what is really there. That squishy, grey mass in the head that you see is a model of what is actually going on. What is going on are mental processes and the brain that you experience is just a model of that.
Quoting Andrew4HandelI've already answered the homosexual problem - twice. You need to pay attention and take into account what I have said because we are both repeating ourselves, and it's getting old.
No doubt such education greatly benefits the medical industry, which now consumes 20% of the GNP.
We are machines and the medical machine will fix our machine, for a price. What a racket.
Filtering out a negative mutation is not the same as causing a property to exist like the posited emergent property of consciousness. Consciousness has to come to exist before it can be selected or deselected. It is banal to point out why a trait might persist, anything that survives either aids survival or does not prevent survival. But it is a different matter to allege or speculate the survival "purpose" of something. I don't agree that consciousness is epiphenomenal but that is popular position across academia and the denial of volition.
I was unaware that anyone believed they had explained consciousness in a serious way with the backing of the larger neuroscience and science community. And theories of consciousness that have been proffered fail either because they don't really account for all the phenomena or they are vague and not causally or testable..
You may be listening to the claim of one or two scientist who get publicity but do not reflect the community at large.
Correlation is not causation and the brain basis of consciousness is founded on correlations but these usually non explanatory. Brain damage cases like the one I linked to undermine correlation claims.
I have not heard an explanation for example of why biochemical activity at neuronal synapses would lead to a private subjective severe pain sensation. Or why any physical activity should lead to an observer, subjectivity and sensation. Hopefully you can see the difference between someone examining my body and brain when I report pain and myself having the actual experience.
"Most recently, Sapolsky has been reflecting on the origins of human behavior, starting deep in the brain moments before we act and working his way millions of years back to the evolutionary pressures on our prehistoric ancestors’ decisions, with stops along the way to consider how hormones, brain development and social structures shape our behavior. He also has been thinking about free will and comes to the conclusion, based on the biological and psychological evidence, that we do not have it."
It is nice to know he has resolved the free will debate.
http://news.stanford.edu/2017/05/08/biologist-robert-sapolsky-takes-human-behavior-free-will/
Andrew4Handel said:
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I replied:
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Wafarer says:
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No, Andrew4Handel is entirely correct in that. Science has no account of how experience arises from what it knows about neurology and the like.
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No problem. If all Andrew4Handel meant was to bemoan the fact that science hasn’t mapped out the entire workings of the brain, then I owe him an apology.
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Let it never be said that I never admit when I’ve been wrong.
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But Andrew4Handel sure seemed be echoing the confused-Physicalist’s Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness, which asserts a belief in Consciousness or Mind as something apart from the body…and then desperately tries to explain away what those same Physicalists have unnecessarily and un-validly decided to assert belief in… explain it away by means of such mystical mumbo-jumbo as Epiphenomena, Supervenience (There’s nothing to do the “supervening”), and Emergent Properties.
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…bring it into existence with magical mystical mumbo-jumbo, and then try to explain it with more magical mystical mumbo-jumbo.
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…because the “problem” is ridiculous and fictional.
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…because the “problem” is the making of hard-working academic philosophers with a need to featherbed their livelihood, and publish rather than perish.
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What did you expect? Is it really surprising that an animal has perceptions, sensations, preferences, likes, dislikes, fears, etc? How else do you expect it to respond to its surroundings in an adaptive manner that natural-selection calls for.
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And, as an animal, should you be surprised that you have those perceptions, sensations, preferences, likes, dislikes, fears, etc?
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What are those if not “first-person” with respect to that animal? What else would you expect?
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Is it somehow surprising that the experience and point-of-view of an animal observed by a scientist is different from that of the scientist who is observing or studying the animal?
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…even if you’re that animal?
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That’s what I mean when I say that Physicalists have gotten themselves all snarled-up with their Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness, which is only of their own confused imagining.
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You’ve been reading the Physicalists, and believing them.
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The could, and they do.
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…just as evolved monkeys went to the Moon in 1969.
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But, lest you be insulted when I call us “evolved monkeys”, I hasten to add that we probably aren’t all primate.
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There’s strongly convincing evidence that, in addition to the Primates, there’s another order of Mammalia in our family tree:
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The order Artiodactyla.
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The Even-Toed Hooved Mammals.
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Pigs, in particular.
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So, I didn’t mean to insult you. We aren’t merely from the apes. We’re part pig, too.
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From what I’ve heard and read about chimpanzees, and about pigs, I suggest that we inherited our worst attributes from the Primate side of the family.
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Michael Ossipoff
That's the animal's (your) view, perception, of its natural-selection-caused incentivization to get its fingers out of the fire, to avoid damage.
What makes Andrew4Handel think that someone else examining him should feel his pain. If the examiner stubs his toe, then he'll feel his own pain.
Michael Ossipoff
1) First he had to store it.
2) Then he had to recall it.
3) It's really complicated.
Not bad after billions upon billions of dollars of research dollars. I guess the big news for me was that it is complicated.
That's what I took it to mean.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Typically, if scientistic types are faced with something they can't explain in scientific terms, then they will either (1) try and reduce it to something that can or (2) deny that it's real.
Besides, if Sapolsky's supposition were correct, he would have no choice but to believe that, and those who doubt him would have no choice but to doubt, so there would certainly be no point in debating, as nobody's view could ever be changed by rational argument.
Well, there doesn't seem to be disagreement after all.
Michael Ossipoff
Andrew4Handel said things that led me to believe that he supported the Physicalists' Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness. He seemed to be saying, with Physicalists, that it's puzzling that there could be first-person experience.
But maybe he was just saying, as you suggested, that science doesn't know the mechanisms--a true statement, of course.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
My answer was that those sensations are natural-selection's way of incentivizing you to get your hand out of the fire.
Michael Ossipoff
That I not an explanation causal or otherwise.
It would be great if natural selection had given me wings so I could fly to the shops.
You make it sound like evolution just conjures things up if they would be useful.
Now if determinists are right (they aren't) we couldn't act on out pain and also there are lots of pains we can't act on including toothache and headaches, severe pain at the final stages of cancer and so on.
Just because consciousness has its uses does not mean it can avoid having a biochemical or technical/theoretical causal explanation. If neuronal activity causes pain then how?
You have an unjustified overconfidence.
Free will arguments are philosophical anyway and not scientific.
I think science could only validly deny freewill when all behaviour and mental states have been described with no explanatory gap.
My example is if a man says "I am divorcing my wife because I believe she has been unfaithful numerous times". Motivations can be based on the semantic content of beliefs states and I do not see how these can be reduced physical or deterministically or coherently dismissed.
People forget how much information is transmitted through symbols and language and not by direct access to Physical states. Even in my case, marriage and divorce are social linguistic constructs. You couldn't make sense of reality just referring to neurons, hormones,brain scans and scientific symbols. If someones says "The Chinese economy is booming" you can correlate that with a set of neurons but not extract that statements from them. So it easy I suppose, to forget that we are imposing symbols and theories on the world.
100% agree. Even neuroscientists have to interpret the meaning of the data - the meaning is not 'in' the data, so to speak.
I’d said:
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You replied:
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You’re quite right, that, if I want to attribute something to natural-selection, then I have to answer your objection to natural selection. I have to answer your objection regarding the arrival of new attributes. I intend to address that question.
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There are two different issues in this discussion:
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1. How could natural selection explain new attributes or new anatomical features?
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2. Physicalists claim that first-person experience is baffling, unexplicable, and seemingly impossible, given that the body is a physical object observed by a scientist.
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(The Physicalists’ “Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness”)
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Yes, #1 must be addressed if I attribute something to natural-selection. But #1 is less interesting, because it’s just a matter of evolutionary-mechanics.
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So I’m addressing #2 first. …and asking that natural-selection be provisionally accepted for the time-being, when I use it to explain the animal’s inclinations when answering #2.
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So, leaving aside #1,what do you say about my arguments that I’ve been posting regarding issue #2?
Now, let me quote something you said in your most recent post about issue
Quoting Andrew4Handel
If you're referring to the detailed mechanism, that's something to ask neurologists. Maybe they know the details, and maybe they don't.
But it isn't inexplicable at all.
The animal is designed, by natural selectoin (please give it the benefit of the doubt for the time-being) to protect itself, to avoid damage. If your hand contacts fire, the pain tells you that damage is occurring, or is immanent. And it makes you want to get your hand out of the fire.
The exact detailed mechanism? Who knows? i don't. Maybe there are scientists who do.
But, even without knowing the exact detailed mechanism the explanation in the paragraph before last is sufficient to make the pain not be inexplicable.
The animal, for its purposeful response to its environments needs to have all sorts of feelings, sensations, preferences, likes, dislikes, fears, etc.
How could that not be "first-person".
It's inevitable if the animal is to act in response to its surroundings for some purpose, like survival and reporducton.
So, you have those feelings, sensations, preferences, likes, dislikes, fears, etc.
That's hardly surprising.
isn't it what you'd expect?
Michael Ossipoff
Lord Lytton cited Malthus and people were threatened with prosecution if they aided the sufferers.
But that photo, and the abuses of the various abusers, says nothing whatsoever about issue #2 that I answered about in my previous post.
Is evasion of answers to one's claims statements sometimes used to justify abuses?
Michael Ossipoff
What you're not addressing is whether this has anything to say about the problems of philosophy.
One can agree that the theory of evolution by natural selection is a sound theory, and yet dispute that it has anything much to say about the problems of philosophy.
Most often, however, what happens is the lazy assumption, which you have made above, that as we are 'just animals', then what there is to know about such questions must be knowable, in principle, in terms of biology.
However, I dispute that h. sapiens is 'just an animal' at all. Certainly, from the perspective of biology, humans are a 'species of primate'. But to then try and understand uniquely human abilities such as language, reasoning, art and imagination, in evolutionary terms, is what is called 'biological reductionism'.
Richard Dawkins' book, 'The Selfish Gene', is a prime example of such reductionism. It might have its merits as a biological theory - although it has its detractors - but, whatever it is, if it is regarded as being the definitive account of why humans are the way they are, then it is certainly reductionist.
I don't think you're the least unusual in having such ideas, after all, everyone knows that we are just animals, and only what evolution has created. It is the folk wisdom of the day. It just so happens that I believe it is profoundly mistaken.
It is a video not a photo. It is worth a look. Science is not just about facts but it can impose and support pernicious brutal theories about human status. That video highlights how theory was imposed on the world to justify abuses and hierarchies and inaction and genocide.
I think it is reasonable to look at the historical genesis of "theories". Natural selection it's a direct result of nations and populations seeking "scientific" justification for their social superiority and the imposition of imperialism during the 1800s. This is strictly a European view of life and the war machine it was building to control large swatches of the world.
I would like to repeat there is as much evidence of Natural Selection as there is it God's Chosen. It is simply a reformulation of an old story. How do we know they are selected? Well they survived didn't they?
There are a multitude number of reasons people live the lives they do, and Natural Selection addresses none of them. It is a story created for a purpose. Money and power molds science.
I think there is a clear difference between mechanism and sensation. It is possible to build unconscious sensors that avoid fire. You only need to make unconscious sensors that create automatic behaviour leading to a machine avoiding heat.
We know enough about neurons and about physics to see that it does not present a framework for explaining experience and as I have said determinists in the sciences don't believe we control our actions consciously making consciousness epiphenomenal and not a survival benefit.
There are famous physicists who have supported the position of idealism which incorporates mind into reality as fundamental. Including Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur eddington and Martin Rees. In this sense consciousness is not seen as merely an emergent property of the brain. A similar position is held by panpsychism.
It has been recognised from time immemorial that there is a problem in describing physical objects and mental states using the same terminology. It was not a problem posited merely by Televangelicals or something. I was quite materialist and atheistic before I study philosophy of mind and psychology. I find most religious people I speak don't even understand the problem so it is not clear that dualism of the mind body problem emerges from religion.
Sorry. Can you link me to these posts or quote them as I can't seem to find them.
I am using homosexuality as a case where people are trying to subsume homosexuality or other characteristics within an evolutionary framework and as a survival benefit as opposed to what you cite John Tooby claiming the evo psych modular position offers a lot of flexibility.
Trying to reduce homosexuality to its reproductive benefits is not offering a flexible model more flexible than the blank slate approach.
Also you linked to a Sapolsky video but he doesn't agree with Tooby obviously because he is a strong determinist. And as I point out determinism undermines any role for consciousness which is a position accepted in the related literature (epiphenomenalism)
So it seems to depend on which theorist you sympathise with or believe or what evidence you choose that informs the perceived ramifications of something we know.
But we know from history that natural selection ideas almost immediately had a negative impact propping up racist hierarchies and class hierarchies etc and was later invoked to defend genocide and the murder of the disabled. So it is not like the religious right just invented potential harmful effects of the theory . And so there is good rational reason to be careful about what positions you arise to in this situation and not try to cram everything in a paradigm for ideological reasons.
I would like to be very clear on this point. Natural Selection does not simply produce the extremely harmful and murderous effects. On the contrary, it's whole invention was to justify what was happening at the time and all times afterwards. Money and power invented and nurtured Natural Selection as a justification in lieu of God which was and is continued to be used as justification for similar activities. It removes responsibility from individuals and places it in some supernatural force, whatever the name. If course, the Greeks did the same thing, so such efforts have a very long history.
I’d said:
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You replied:
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Then I’ll say it now: It doesn’t.
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But there’s an unnecessary, made-up problem of philosophy, (the Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness), and, in fact there’s an unnecessary, fiction-based branch of philosophy (philosophy of mind), tries to make a philosophy and a philosophical problem about something that, rightly, is purely a scientific matter.
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Quite rightly.
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There’s nothing in our experience to suggest that we’re anything other than animals.
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And, that being so, there’s no reason to diddle about “epiphenomena”, “supervenience”, or “emergent-properties”, etc. …in search of what and how we are. Philosophers-of-mind are misguided, confused supernatural spiritualists.
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Yes, we’re different from the other animals in some ways: language, technology, etc. So what?
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Different animals do different things and have different ways of coping with their surroundings.
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Yes, the word “Lazy” could describe a contrast with the hardworking academic philosophers who have industriously invented the make-work philosophy-of-mind.
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I give them credit for industrious fictional creativity.
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Well, I’d instead say that your own experience as a person (by which I mean “human animal”) is what you know from. Expecting your experience to be seen or shared by a scientist who is studying your physical makeup, is part of what leads to the fallacious “Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness”. That “problem” can, in one way, be regarded as a fallacy that confuses different points-of-view.
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Maybe it’s the result of some people clinging to the pseudoscientific belief that the only reality, the only valid point-of-view is the objective, externally-viewed, 3rd-person point-of view—which of course isn’t anyone’s point-of-view.
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…and which doesn’t leave any room for animals to have a valid point-of-view. …hence the Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness.
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What else then?
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No one denies that we’re different from other animals in significant ways. Animals aren’t all the same.
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…but probably not entirely primate, as I was saying.
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With all of our unique traits, we’re not an easy animal give a detailed evolutionary explanation of. That doesn’t mean that we’re other than an animal.
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…everyone except philosophers-of-mind.
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No, it’s established science, increasingly universally-accepted since 1854.
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If we aren’t animals, then what do you say that we are?
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Maybe I should explain why I emphasize “You’re the animal”:
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I mean that there’s no need for the mystical, magical, spiritualist mumbo-jumbo about “epiphenomena”, “supervenience”, or “emergent-properties”. And there’s no need to be surprised that animals, including us, have 1st person experience. That’s to be expected, for the reasons that I described.
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It’s a question of from what point-of-view you want to speak of us. The simplest description of what we are is just to say that we’re the animal.
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I usually follow that statement with “…period.”, to emphasize that no other explanation or description of us, or theorizing is needed.
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But philosophers love to theorize. It’s their livelihood, so we can’t blame them.
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Michael Ossipoff
I’d said:
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You replied:
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Of course.
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Of course. You’re speaking of a simplified analog of us. Different in degree from us.
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Basically, if you want to go into it, and philosophers-of-mind do want to go into it, then yes, we’re all purposefully-responsive devices, as is the machine you described.
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…like a mouse-trap, a refrigerator-light-switch, or a thermostat.
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Only that. No need for such mystical, supernatural, spiritualist mumbo-jumbo as supervenience, ephiphenomena, or emergent-properties.
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Why would you expect experience to come directly out of the 3rd-person view of the observing scientist, via biology and physics?
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I completely agree if you doubt that approach.
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But I took the time to explain, at great length, why “1st person experience” is inevitable for an animal, designed as animals are, to purposefully respond to their surroundings.
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How could it be otherwise??
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You’ve entirely ignored what I said on that matter. Rebuttal doesn’t consist of repeated denial without replying.
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…believing in Mind as a separate metaphysical substance.
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Mumbo-jumbo.
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Idealism is a kind of metaphysics. I’m an idealist. But you’re still the animal.
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…and, in particular, the same point-of-view.
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It’s a problem made-up by philosophers-of-mind.
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I’m neither. But we’re still animals. Period.
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before I studied philosophy of mind and psychology. I find most religious people I speak don't even understand the problem so it is not clear that dualism of the mind body problem emerges from religion.
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It certainly needn’t. I’m religious, and Idealist.
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But we’re still just animals. That’s the simple and best description of what we are. …avoiding the spiritualist, mystical mumbo-jumbo of the philosophy-of-mind.
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I suggest that you disregard philosophy-of-mind, and then the Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness will vanish.
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Michael Ossipoff
I study philosophy purely out of interest, and the necessity of asking such questions. I recommend it.
This is categorically false, assuming "our" refers to the entirety of humanity throughout all of history.
We all believe what we believe and these beliefs change over time. Some beliefs are more harmful to certain groups or populations of life than other beliefs.
Where things go awry, is when certain mystical beliefs, such as Natural Selection (which is a code for Natural Supremacy), is taught as some sort of objective fact in educational environments. This little idea should be taught in philosophy classes and subject to the same sort of scrutiny as determinism and other elite seeking philosophies. Instead, it is taught as "settled science" in grade school in order to present a scientific religion to children that stands in opposition to what is being taught in religious institutions.
Likewise. So do I.
But I was talking about academic philosophers. They have an additional incentive--the Publish-Or-Perish imperative that i referred to.
When philosophers invent a make-work problem, to complicate something that's simple, so that they'll have more to publish about, that goes beyond liking philosophy.
The Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness is a fictitious make-work "problem".
Even when I was in junior-highschool (pre-secondary school, now called "middle-school") it was obvious that there is nothing surprising about our "first-person experience". That an animal evolved with its natural-selectoin-designed life-purposes would have feelings, sensations, preferences, etc. was just obvious and unsurprising.
You look at a mousetrap, and don't see any consciousness.
Suppose science knew the full details of how the brain works. A white-smocked scientist with a clipboard looks at MRI & EKG of your brain, and says, " I can see exactly how this device works, but I don't see the Consciousness, the 1st-Person Experience! Inexplicable!"
Nonsense. Why should he expect to experience or see your 1st-person experience.
Physicalists have gotten themselves (and anyone who listens to them) all confused.
By the way, not only is an animal's 1st person point-of-view perfectly valid, but it's actually the only really valid point of view in this life.
That's because your "1st-person" experience" is exactly what your life-experience possibility-story is about.
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People who claim that there's a Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness have, so far, been unable or unwilling to defend that belief. I've told why your problem is fictitious.
The absence of any defense of your claim is, itself, an answer. It's an admission that you can't justify your claim about there being a Hard-Problem-Of-Consciousness..
Michael Ossipoff
Then share with us one piece of evidence that we're other than animals.
There's nothing in your experience that isn't consistent with your being an animal and nothing more.
Michael Ossipoff
How are you defining animal?
We have Shakespeare, Einstein, Bach, Language, Mathematics, Science, Internet,Psychotherapy, Computer Programming, Schools, Cookery, Philosophy, Psychology, Art, Music, medicine...
Oops! When I said "EKG" I meant "EEG".
Michael Ossipoff
To biologists, I guess an animal is a member of the kingdom Animalia.
The definition of that kingdom has been changing lately, partly because of DNA stidies.
But here's what I mean by "animal":
An animal is a purposefully-responsive device resulting from natural selection.
Yes, but a bird can fly unassisted, and an octopus can change its color and make an ink-smokescreen to escape from predators. Can you do that?
Michael Ossipoff
I believe what he means is that despite having highly evolved intelligence, our initial drives and instincts, as well as everything we experience, are biological in nature.
Exactly.
Michael Ossipoff
If that sounds disparaging, it certainly isn't intended in that way.
It's astonishing and impressive beyond words what evolution produced when it produced the animals, including us!
Michael Ossipoff
Life is definitely changing all the time. What is disparaging is that this disgusting idea that Natural Selection is creating the change based upon who is fittest? As if the Nazis who survived deserved to survive while those that they killed weren't "fit" to survive. And it is this grotesque story of evolution that is being taught in schools?
What is evolving (or changing) is creative intelligence that is experimenting and learning and all life forms are doing this and they may (or may not) find different ways of survival among the multitude of other things they are experimenting with in life. This is why we have so many different life forms all acting together in some way.
And things like cancer, brain disease, and missing limbs at birth exist because the intelligent force isn't perfect, and the programs can have recurring bugs? Or because the intelligent force doesn't discern between good and bad, letting natural selection take care of the rest?
Nothing is being altered. It is all just evolving in response to what it is experiencing. It is a continuity of life (memory and creative intelligence) through duration.
If this creative intelligence exists within us, it must be at an inaccessible subconscious level. Otherwise people would have eight arms and gigantic penises by now. :D
I think would be easier to believe that the creative intelligence is separate from living things, and either has a sick sense of humor, or just isn't that smart.
There are a myriad of ways to evolve and creative intelligence is not only accessible, it is us. There is nothing mysterious going on. Some life forms so have a multitude of extremities and others have evolved in a totally different way. The big creative intelligence is just evolving in many, many forms. With the ocean there are waves and within waves there are endless more waves (there are 10x more bacteria and viruses in a human body than there are human cells).
Quoting CasKev
The good news is that your reading and comprehension abilities are still evolving so maybe sometime in the future, you might want re-read what I wrote.
And how would you explain counterproductive things like birth defects, cancer, and autism. Are those just caused by environmental interference?
For example, some scientists in the pharmaceutical industry came up with the idea to sell opiouds to people who take them because they trust them, and as a result 183,000 people have been killed. So we have here an interesting case of how people experiment with other people's lives and how people experiment with their own lives. Intelligence does not infer positive health outcomes. The incredible increase in autism births is increasing at a rate that is commitment with the amount of drugs that humans are choosing to consume. Likewise there is an enormous amount of junk in our foods, water, and air, thanks to technology, which is having some affect on our bodies.
I thought he said we were nothing more than animals.
Which animal are we supposed to be comparing ourselves with? This has been a classic ploy throughout history, to compare certain types of humans or human behaviour to animals as a justification for assigning a particular status to them. But there is massive diversity among animals.
People seem to forget that words like biological and animal are human inventions not a transparent reflection of what is in the external world. We don't need to know about peoples genes or biology to successfully communicate with them and muddle along. Now people can say things like "My genes made me do it" because it sounds more scientific without making a rigorous causal theory.
Biological in the sense your now using it seems to be invoking a particular view of biology as uncontrolled hormones, ruthless mechanism and instincts. Humans have a lot of self control to exhibit far more drives and behaviours that involve "prehistoric" urges or brain pathways. Sitting around all day staring at a computer screen is hardly something we can be said to have adapted for.
We are all animals; we just happen to be highly intelligent and advanced ones. If you want to get rid of classifications like "animals," you would have to get rid of all the words in our language as well.
Any problem is hard if there is no explanation. The difficulty with consciousness is that it is only directly available to the person having the experience whereas a cell isn't , so obviously it is a harder problem than something a group of people can publicly examine.
Subjectivity is even hard to talk about but it is not the same as looking outside yourself at an object in the world.
Psychology and Philosophy of mind are serious disciplines that closely analyse the mind and cognitions and seek to give reasonable definitions. They are not trying to create mysteries. We have a global mental health crisis and huge widespread use of psychiatric medication up to 1 million suicides a year so there is a serious need and desire to accurately understand the mind.
That is not true. We often get rid of words in our languages without having to abandon a whole language. We also keep words that refer to fictional entities.
In what situation is there an urgent need to describe something as animal?
Of course it's true since you cant' have a language of words without classifications of those words to give them specific functions...such as verbs, adverbs, adjectives. So, if you refute the need for classifications as you did, you refute the need for language; we know that's not a good idea.
I never said anything about any urgent need for anything. But we're still animals.
Par example.The word atom had been associated with lots of models of atoms. The word atom refers to whatever the current model of the atom is.
You haven't shown why we need use the particular word animal at all. It is clearly as I have mentioned a word that is applied selectively for different purposes. People can be described as animalistic or behaving like one animal or another.
The following article should give you some clue of this trajectory..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-conversation-africa/comparing-black-people-to_b_9345322.html
"Long before post-Darwinian “scientific racism” begins to develop, then, one can find blacks being depicted as closer to apes on the Great Chain of Being. Take mid-19th century America in circles in which polygenesis (separate origins for the races) was taken seriously. Leading scientists of the day Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, in their 1854 Types of Mankind, documented what they saw as objective racial hierarchies with illustrations comparing blacks to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans."
I never said you said we should get rid of the word animal; I said you erroneously said we shouldn't use it, as you did in your post here:
And I have shown why we should use it since I said it was the proper classification just like we have proper classifications of words. So, if you don't want to use the proper scientific classification of "animal' to describe humans, then you'd be a hypocrite to call a shark a "fish" or a dog a "mammal," since they are classifications, too. Since I'm sure you don't want to present yourself as uneducated, I'm sure you'll avoid doing so.
This is the genesis of Darwinianism. It was embraced by Europeans (and funded) because it justified the occupation of Africa and Asia. There is no science here, just an economic invasion justified by Natural (what else?) Selection.
What we do have in abundance is plenty of elitism and the supernatural force called Natural Selection that is mysteriously weeding out everyone who can't survive the concentration camps and sterilization programs. The concept of a Master Race was nurtured by the rather disgusting idea of Natural Selection.
Natural selection was operating many millions of years, a billion or more years, before any of the Nazis were even a gleam in their parents' eye..
The Nazis believed in evolution? Oh, then we'd better all be evolution-deniers.
The Nazis celebrated Christmas. So presumably Rich wants to ban Christmas.
The Nazis drank beer. Then we'd better ban beer.
The Nazis breathed air. Then we'd better not breathe air.
What kind of Nazis will we become if we follow Rich's reasoning?
Michael Ossipoff
No, there musn't. Tha'ts religious talk.
Nature has more than shown it's a very potent and creative creator in the existence of the universe, it's many wondrous phenomena, and all the different life forms--including humans'--on Earth. So, the development of legs on a centipede shouldn't make you doubt Nature did it without any divine intelligence.
That's a fallacious question that presumes I have to explain how Nature did something to correctly claim it did it. I don't and neither does anybody else. Using your flawed logic, someone would have to know how genetics works to be able to say reproduction is natural. They don't.
The Aztecs couldn't explain eclipses. I guess they weren't natural either.
All human behaviour is human behaviour. I don't see how you can claim some behaviour is more human or more instinctive/animalistic or evolutionarily valid.
I also think that if you want a theory of all reality you have to include all human traits as facets of that reality.
It certainly was a waste of time for me.
Yes. There is nothing religious about creative intelligence. We experience it as ourselves every minute of every day of our lives. Watch a baby building with blocks.
What is religious is transferring this obvious creative intelligence from ourselves into some supernatural force called Nature and then claiming that we are just robots fulfilling the aims of this mysterious force. Nature becomes God or the Puppet Master and we are just mindless billiard balls bouncing around at it's whims.
The topic in general. As is this next comment.
I think people are being hopelessly naive if they think words are simply transparent and not power tools intended to defend ones own ideology. I don't think classification and conceptual division are neutral.
In terms of the word animal you can say things like.
"You were an animal in bed"
"You're worse than an animal"
"We are just animals"
"She was a party animal"
"He likes animals"
"Men are animals"
There are even more sophisticated uses of language in rhetoric, polemic and persuasion
In the human body there is cellular intelligence all working together to create a large body v intelligence. There is no boundary, all working individually and together simultaneously.
[b]This is all irrelevant to the discussion. I was solely talking about the scientific classification "animal" meaning: "a living organism that feeds on organic matter, typically having specialized sense organs and nervous system and able to respond rapidly to stimuli."
Humans fit that definition and are part of that classification.[/b]
It's amazing, one day Rich is saying there are waves within an ocean when just days before he said the ocean was just ocean, and waves were mere human perception:
If inconsistency were a virtue, Rich would be a saint.
That was weak, Rich. And it didn't come close to clearing you as the super-dense one.
So, what is it, Richie? Are there waves or not? Your wee brain is clearly confused on the matter...:)
So if you replace 'semi-aware consciousness' with 'universe', does this fit with what you were saying about accelerating heat death?
So it is not a positive relation in that the physical realm has the intellligence to decide to make life. Instead the physical realm is limited by its dumbness in a fashion that makes a drive towards intelligence inevitable, if such intelligence is possible.
So a case of creative dumbness?
Is that a literal statement, because it seems to me a completely unprovable assertion. Or do you mean, 'the kinds of objects which astronomy and cosmology study are not intelligent', in which case, no contest.
Your children will die and your grandchildren and so on. You are unlikely to meet your great grandchildren and so on. So what is surviving is a bit of soulless matter.
Before genes were discovered people could not give this kind of justification for having children. But to now advocate just carrying on a piece of unconscious genetic material seems ridiculous. In the past people were believed to have souls and some people still believe that so creating a child was creating something transcendent.
If one analyze what science did, you will notice that consciousness was simply transferred from humans to Natural Selection. All creative action is now imbued into Natural Selection. The same trick is performed when transferring consciousness to Natural Laws. Whenever you notice the word natural in any scientific explanation (it is used all the time), it should raise a red flag - human consciousness is being transferred somewhere else.
Yes, when you hear the world "natural" used in discussing farming, human reproduction, rainstorms, humidity, evolution or any other natural phenomenon or dynamic, it should raise a red flag. Anti-scientism really is making a comeback.
Natural in such contexts is tantamount to God. It is a substitution word. Atheists can't use the word God so they rename it Natural. The scientific explanation becomes equivalent to the religious explanation, that is no explanation at all other than calling upon some new supernatural force. It's a cute trick.Take note how often this transfer of power to Natural is used, e.g. Natural Selection. Is Natural equivalent to Pantheism? Panentheism?
No, natural in such contexts is tantamount to "natural." Your use of the word "consciousness" is tantamount to God, if not quite as omnipotent. And the fact you call "natural" the supernatural force shows not only a failure to grasp those words' meanings, it shows a failure to grasp how words work.
Take note of how Rich makes the supernatural "consciousness" the "natural," and actually tries to make the "natural" the supernatural.
The problem is that your are imbuing all kinds of human attributes into the gene. All you are doing is transferring creative consciousness into the gene. Just look at how you described the little gene. It has memory. It can capture. It can make useful. All that is done is anthropomorphize the gene. No doubt the rationale is that it is natural.
And then likewise, there is memory in the most general technical sense as a systems theorist or semiotician most especially would use it. And there memory describes any form of information capture that serves to constrain future system dynamics.
Metal for instance can be fabricated to have a,memory - a form it wants to snap back into.
So you are making a loose use of language - one not really scientific or philosophical. I am talking about memory in a generic yet fully technical sense.
I identify as gay but I avoid telling people I am gay over and over so it doesn't become my defining characteristic. Identifying as gay is important to challenge prejudice but it can also become a burden of expectations and stereotypes and defensive positions. On the one hand you can say "I am X Loud and proud but then that visibility leads to more exposure to trouble. I would advocate non self centered individuality where we see everyone as a unique individual not as a member of a group.
A: "We're nothing more than animals" -> B: "false, assuming "our" refers to the experience of all of humanity" C: (you): "everyone believes stuff, and sometimes it's harmful and sometimes not".
What's you're argument?
Gladly:
And another:
Examples could be multiplied.....which is something that you know how to do, right?
Then share with us one piece of evidence that we're animals.
On most days, yeah...but my personal scope is very limited.
And, we ought not to forget that the co-discovered of the 'principle of natural selection', Alfred Russel Wallace, never agreed with the materialist implications of Darwin's theory, even though he was completely in agreement with the soundness of the basic theory. For which, see his 'Darwinism Applied to Man'.
Damn, that's a lot to digest. What's the book, and where were you reading that? You paint it as a picture of a landscape that doesn't really change much; just the four seasons in rotation.
At the same time, so called 'evolutionary thinking' gives rise to a lot of crap philosophy (Steve Pinker and Daniel Dennett being prime examples). Trying to explain or understand philosophical problems through the mechanism of adaptive necessity is invariably reductionist, in ways its protagonists never seem able to grasp.
But the upshot is, one can be fully committed to scientific method in respect of evolution and every other scientific question without thereby committing yourself to materialism. Mariner is a prime example of that.
Oh, absolutely. I fully agree; my response above was literally just an honest question, not an argument of some sort. Thanks for the elaboration.
Quoting Wayfarer
I would need to read these people in full to comment appropriately. But the gist I've gotten is in line with your crits, and crits I've seen of yours and others elsewhere. It's the sort of thing that I'll investigate personally if I have the time and resources.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes absolutely...but just in theory. In reality, how realistic is this? That's my only real qualitative question to all of the other things I agree with you on here.
All you need do, is realise the Universe is not physical - it's more than, or other than, physical. This falls naturally out of not accepting materialism. If you're not materialist (and I have never been) then it becomes urgent to work out an alternative to materialism.
That Natural Selection is a belief system, promoted by biology/medical industry to further its own agenda. There is not a scintilla of evidence that there is supernatural force called Natural Selection that is the working motivation of life - all life.
What we have is, by simple inspection, lots of different forms of life, at all levels,, that is evolving by experimenting, learning and changing. All life is equal and none is superior or more likely to survive than others. Stephen Hawkins has lived longer than the physicians who claimed that he would die young.
Right. Natural Selection merely is the prime motivator for the helpless glob of material called humans that naturally creates such actions as eugenics, sterilization, selective breeding (science is well on its way to promoting this), and of course mass genocide. Natural Selection did it all. Sort of like a vengeful god.
One really has to get their arms around this story and really understand why science/industry/government collaborate to promote it.
So, people playing trumpets, and a drawing of Manhattan Island are evidence that we aren't animals?
No, they're merely evidence that we're a type of animal that does some things that other animals don't do.
...as do most or all animals.
Michael Ossipoff
Biology classifies us in the grouping "Animalia", because of our similarities and commonalities with other members of that grouping.
Of is it just a coincidence that have so much in common with other members of Animalia, anatomically, chemically and cellularly?
The evolution of humans from apes is thoroughly well-established, and is a virtually unanimous consensus in biology.
When I say that, however, I should emphasize that there's strongly-convincing evidence that there's a pig in our ancestry too--so that, though we're mostly of the order of Primates, we're also partly from the order Artiodactyla, the Even-Toes Hooved Mammals.
I believe that Eugene McCarthy is the name of the hybridicazion-specialist geneticist who has written about that. He has a large website that thoroughly discusses the convincing evidence for his claim, and answers objections to it. Search google for "Eugene McCarthy, Pig ancestry.", or somesuch combination.
(Yes, "Eugene McCarthy" was also the name of a politician.This is a different Eugene McCarthy.)
Michael Ossipoff
:-O >:O
I didn't mean to say that we're not animals. But we transcend that basic starting point. See my comments here
H. Sapiens has abilities which demonstrably are absent in all animals. Nobody here is disputing that humans are in some sense animals, but that they are not merely or simply animals, on account of having such abilities as constructing buildings and composing symphonies (among many other things). And if that is a distinction that you're not able to recognise, then surely it is not worth wasting time on debating it. Just squeak, or grunt, or whatever animals do. ;-)
Birds and insects have a capability that is demonstrably absent in humans--the ability to fly without mechanical assistance.
Chameleons and octopi have a capability that is demonstrably absent in humans--the ability to change color.
No one here is disputing that humans, as well, are different from the other animals in some ways. Humans, too, do things that other animals can't do. Welcome to the animal kingdom.
For one thing, unlike the other animals, humans can perpetrate a mass-extinction among the other animals, and are in the process of doing so. ...and have the ability to render the Earth uninhabitable, and are in the process of doing that too.
Wrong. Humans aren't merely "in some sense" animals. Humans are, in every regard, animals, and nothing more.
If you don't believe it, observe Wayfarer's expression of his animal instincts here. ...and they call that evolution? Maybe we shouldn't kid ourselves about how far we've come.
Every forum has someone whose behavior reminds us that we aren't as far from our simian ancestors as we might want to believe.
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Different animals do different things.
That doesn't mean that some of them aren't animals.
...or make angry noises to support an invalid claim.
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The initial topic wasn't about whether we differ from the other animals in some way.
Michael Ossipoff
There are important considerations and standards by which humans are the shame of the animal kingdom.
Michael Ossipoff
What does that mean and how does that relate to my comment?
I just want to add that, at no time did I disparage Bach, Einstein, or people who play the trumpet, or cartoonish pictures of Manhattan-Island.
What I said about our being the animal was in response to Spiritualist positions taken by some self-styled "Physicalists" (who are really Spiritualists), and other Spiritualists in these forums.
Some of the opinion expressed by the OP in a different topic had showed up in this topic. Here is something that was said in the original post at an only slightly different topic:
People here have said basically similar Spiritualist things.
Though it's from a different topic, let me comment on a few things said in that paragraph:
No, what's self-evident is that that's exactly what we are. All of our experiences are entirely consistent with that.
So you say, but you've merely defined yourself as something else.
...by your definition of yourself as other than your body.
See above.
And now, you can try to explain it to Spiritualist Searle and friends.
Michael Ossipoff
Ii was merely agreeing with you, and giving a few examples of ways in which we've shown ourselves different from the other animals.
Michael Ossipoff
But how is us being the "shame" of the animal kingdom related to what I said?
Here's what you'd said:
I agree that we of course differ from the other animals. All the animals differ from eachother in various ways.
And we differ from the other animals in various ways. I was merely mentioning some of those ways in which we differ from the other animals--as you'd said that we do.
As I said, I was agreeing with you, and giving examples.
Michael Ossipoff
But the distinguishing feature of humans is not simply another biological attribute. While it's true that spiders can make webs, birds can fly, and so on, the rationality that characterises humans is not something of the same order as those attributes. So the thing that makes humans different, is of a different order to the biological. To say that it is, is precisely to fall into the trap of 'biological reductionism'.
As a matter of interest, are you aware of what biological reductionism is, who its proponents are, and who are its critics?
So why shame?
You're right. We should be proud of the fact that we're the rogue species that is perpetrating a mass-extinction, and in the process of rendering the Earth uninhabitable. :)
Michael Ossipoff
But humans aren't as rational as they'd like to believe.
It's a big exaggeration to say that rationality characterizes humans.
Quoting Wayfarer
"Here's an idea", said the giraffe, let's just say that the one with the longest neck gets all of the jellybuns."
(Roughly quoted from Kenneth Patchen)
Quoting Wayfarer
That I don't understand. Our entire construction is biological.
Are we completely different from the other animals, in regards to technology and science? Of course.
Are those still attributes of an animal? Of course. Do our special attributes give us unique environment-ruining capability? Sure.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not yet. Let me get back to you on that.
Michael Ossipoff
It was a serious question because it wasn't clear to me what you meant.
The problem is that you're beginning with the assumption that mass-extinction and rendering the Earth uninhabitable are bad states of affairs, but the very consciousness you possess as a human being is the sole tool with which you've come to that conclusion. In other words, you're looking at only one side of what it means to be human. The idea of us as the "shame" of the animal kingdom has no referent; shameful as opposed to what? In reality what you're saying is that humanity should care for the earth, not destroy it, but your consciouss mind is what came to that conclusion, and your conscious mind is the very thing that actually sets humans at the top of the animal kingdom. You're ironically beginning with an irrational emotional argument when you address the question of where we fit into the animal kingdom.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You'd be prudent to research that before further trying to expand on your ideas here.
Humans aren't always rational - but you have to be rational to know what 'exaggeration' means, or to argue any case whatever. An animal is not going to be able to persuade you of anything by argument.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
A theatre is a building, right? Perfectly true, but also beside the point. One doesn't go to the theatre to study architecture, but to watch drama. So the fact that we're physically the product of biological processes doesn't provide for a complete account of what it means to be human.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Nowadays humans are demonised, by the likes of animal rights activists and environmentalists. I can understand it, but I think it's also mistaken.
Compared to the other animals.
If the other animals spoke a human language, they'd tell you themselves, that they don't want themselves or their young to be killed by overhunting, clearcutting, pollution or climate-change.
...in other words, by us.
And, as I said, we kill more than the other predatory animals do, because we, not they, are currently perpetrating a mass-extinction.
Humans have great potential. As a species, we don't live up to that potential at all, and our effect on Earth's life is incomparably worse than that of other animals.
You seem to be confusing our potential with our actual deeds and effect.
.Wayfarer said:
I said:
Don't worry, i wont say a peep about biological reductionism till I find out what it is. :)
But no, regardless of what it means, its definition, whatever it may be, doesn't invalidate anything that I said. Labeling something doesn't refute, invalidate or contradict it.
So far, I've taken a look at a few articles that define biological reductionism, and (unsurprisingly) have found various definitions.
One article said that biological reductionism says that if ractial-minority students do more poorly on an exam, it must, and can only, be because of their different biological make-up.
If biological reductionism says that, then you can forget about trying to pin that label on me.
Some other articles say that biological reductionism merely holds that human affairs are the result of humans' biological makeup. Well what else? ...unless you're a Spiritualist. Are you a Spiritualist?
But I won't say more about it till I read more articles' definitions of it.
Michael Ossipoff
Yes it is, as any type of thinking humans do comes from our bodies and genetic programming, as does birds' ability to fly. Secondly, rationality is just our Western cultural concept we apply to our thinking; it isn't an exact description of our thinking process, not to mention the fact people are usually more irrational than they are rational.
You know this - how? That is simply question-begging, i.e. 'assuming what needs to be proven'.
Of course, humans are often irrational. I am not saying that rationality is a Dr Spock-like attribute, meaning that humans live according to reason. I'm referring to the ability to think, infer, use language and abstract symbols, to say that 'this means that', and so on and so forth, which is demonstrably and clearly different to the abilities that animals exhibit. And, I think it's discontinuous, it is not explicable in strictly biologistic terminology.
No, your erroneously calling it question-begging is question-begging. I know it because there is nothing else it could come from. Feel free to name something; you haven't yet.
That is the dogma that is the question this thread is exploring. The fact that you have swallowed it to the point you can't even see what it is anymore, is what I'm calling into question.
No, the only dogma is your correction of it, since you clearly can't offer an argument for an alternative to what I said. Thanks for helping to prove me right.
I don’t think there’s a disagreement here. It seems to me that we’re just talking about different matters.
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I’d said:
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With that I have to disagree.
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Turn on NPR any day of the week, or network TV, and you’ll hear all the irrational arguments that your heart could desire.
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Listen to speeches by various politicians too.
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No, regrettably, someone doesn’t have to be rational to argue a case.
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Yes, sometimes fallacious arguments are done intentionally, with a rational purpose. …because they’re always readily believed by the irrational sheep-population.
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But, admittedly, there are regional differences—You have Jeremy Corbyn, and we have…well you know who.
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So maybe your perspective is influenced by your immediate surroundings.
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A dog that I was walking persuaded me to go to a hamburger-place, because she emphatically argued how much she wanted a hamburger.
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But the same dog, using the same sort of argument, failed to convince me to let her go down into a creek-bed in alligator-country, where the depth of the water, and the abundant aquatic-reed-vegetation could easily conceal an alligator. (Later we saw a 7 foot alligator sunning itself on the bank of that section of river).
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She didn’t have instinctive knowledge of alligators, and didn’t know of any reason to not let her go down there. But, in the human-environment, she accepted that I knew better about where was safe to go, and when it was safe to cross a street, etc.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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…or to be any animal. Of course.
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What it is, to be any animal has nothing to do with biological origin explanations. A squirrel doesn’t know or care what the biological explanation for squirrels is.
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The stories behind various human accomplishments are more complicated than the stories behind animal behaviors (but not always less knowable). But that doesn’t mean that all that we are, isn’t the result of our biological makeup. Yes, our surroundings enter into it, but that’s true for other animals too.
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I’m not finished looking up definitions of biological reductionism, but (as I mentioned in my post to this topic just before this one) I’ve found a few, and they differ from eachother.
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If it’s “biological-reductionism” to say that what humans do is ultimately a result of humans’ biological makeup-- …well, how could that not be so? It’s either that or Spiritualism.
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I emphasize that I’m going to read more definitions of biological-reductionism, and that I’ll try not to say any more about it till I do.
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Whoa…Now you’re sounding like a certain much-in-the-news politician (who will remain nameless) in this country.
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To borrow a familiar saying, I’m not demonizing humans. I’m just demonizing what they’re doing to the Earth and to the Earth’s other animal species. I’m just demonizing their effect.
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As I was telling Noble Dust, I agree that humans have great potential.
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And, sometimes, some humans actually live up to that potential, to some degree.
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In fact, living up to our potential as humans, that’s really what Dharma (in Vedanta usage) refers to.
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In future, I’ll refer to the text between the dotted-lines, if anyone says that I deny the human potential.
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Of course the problem is that, overall, humanity doesn’t, worth diddly-shit, live up to human potential.
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So, you see, we don’t really disagree. We’re just talking about different things. I agree that there’s such a thing as great human potential.
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And I guarantee that it will never be realized on a societal scale. Not ever. Not a chance.
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We humans seem to have a need for unrealistic hope for this world.
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I love this world as much as the next person, having been born into it like everyone else.
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But we have to be realistic too.
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Though I love this world, even some of its humans, it’s only one of infinitely-many possibility-worlds. It happens that we were all of us born into the Land of the Lost. Human society has always been the Land of the Lost, and it will always remain so.
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This human societal world hasn’t got a chance. Accept it.
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So we just do the best we can, in our own lives.
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And yes, we should each try to live up to human potential, regardless of how few people do, or what the Joneses are doing, and regardless of where the world as a whole is going.
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All of that’s quite irrelevant to our own individual Dharmic need and responsibility to ourselves and to Life, to, on our part, live up to human potential as best we can.
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Michael Ossipoff
You're welcome, Thanatos. You have no idea of how happy it makes me to be able to cast light on your greatness!
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
That's a really good illustration of what I consider the cultural dilemma around the question of evolution. Either humans are a 'product of evolution', and therefore basically a biological phenomenon, OR 'you must be a "spiritualist". You see, I think that's a false dichotomy. Obviously, evolution occurs, pretty much as described by evolutionary biology. But we are still compelled to seek and live up to 'our own individual Dharmic need', and I think that's not really a matter of biology.
So, you still can't make an opposing argument. Good to know.
The only one making insults was you. And you clearly can't make an opposing argument, despite your blather. So, you've only been wasting my time, and you can move along.
A good starting point is a piece from The Stone column in the New York Times opinion section, called Anything but Human, by Richard Polt.
Likewise, philosopher Thomas Nagel said in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos, that
And finally, another philosopher, Roger Scruton, says that :
I think these passages illustrate the kind of problem being discussed: that to think about humans only in biological terms, doesn't come to grips with the problem of agency, of making choices and decisions.
Alright I see what you mean. It's a matter of emphasis.
We can say that what other people do is obviously a combined result of their biological makeup and their environment...
But, when it comes to ourselves (and that's what counts, and what our life-experience possibility-story is about), then it's a just a matter of what the situation is, what we prefer or like, and what we want to do, for achieving what we prefer or like.
We do what we want, to achieve what we want or like.
I've said that, with regard to an animal, it's that animal's point-of-view--not that of a white-smocked scientist with a clipboard, observing the animal--that is the valid point-of-view.
So, sure, what we prefer, and what we choose to do, to achieve what we prefer, that's the valid point of view. The outside, 3rd-person point-of-view isn't the valid one.
But, with that, I also emphasize that each of us is the animal.
This also relates to the free-will issue. I say that we have free-will, as described above. We do what we want to, to achieve what we like or want. That's how it is from the animal's point of view, and we're the animal, and our point of view is what our life-experience possibility-story is about.
The free-will issue, and all of the argument about it, accentuates how much difference point-of-view makes. To that scientist with the clipboard, the mouse doesn't have free-will. To the mouse, it does have free-will. It does what it wants to.. And the mouse's point of view is the valid one, as regards the mouse.
Michael Ossipoff
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Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I said nothing of language; my comment was about consciousness. Your comment hear doesn't respond to my argument.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You continue to completely miss my point. Shame, along with all emotions, only exists as a concept within consciousness.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Is our potential environmental and nothing else? Why does the environment matter? What's the referent for why it matters? Why is it wrong to harm the environment?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I'm trying to help you see that these things you consider morally wrong need a non-physical referent in order to be coherent.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Your entire argument has been biologically reductionist thus far, in it's own unique way.
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095507137
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
What is a spiritualist?
No, emotions are also physical reactions and expressions of unconscious experience and feeling, particularly with the more irrational ones like hate, love, and anger. So, they are products of the brain/body and, as you mentioned, another product of brain/body--consciousness.
All mental processes are obviously functions of the physical brain, but this doesn't explain consciousness itself. I said "shame...only exists as a concept within consciousness". Michael was talking about the concept of shame when he said we're the shame of the animal kingdom. To feel an emotion without consciousness is physical (animal), but to make an emotional argument, as is doing is intellectual (conscious); not physical. That's the argument I'm making against Michael. For humans to be the "shame" of the animal kingdom requires consciousness; other animals don't consider us the shame of the animal kingdom because they don't consider anything. Whether or not animals actually feel the emotion of shame is not related to a human (conscious) argument about whether or not we as humans are "shameful" animals.
I continue to try to bring the discussion to a fundamental place of considering what the assumptions are that you all are making when you focus so heavily on biological considerations when making philosophical arguments; I continue to ask why you find these discussions worthwhile, I ask what the referent is to why these questions matter, and you all continue to only respond with more biological arguments. You have to agree to go where I'm trying to lead you in order to make arguments against the actual points I'm bringing up.
I got you, but I would say we are not the "shame" of the animal kingdom because Nature knows no "shame" and every "shameful" thing we do is as much a part of our biology--very often in deficient forms like psychopaths or pedophiles--as tearing animals to shreds is to crocodiles. And our feelings of shame are usually more emotional than parts of our consciousness, which is itself a conceptual term for bio-physiological dynamics.
What is Nature, capital N? the poetic device here is confusing.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
The physical symptoms in the brain that lead to psychopathy or pedophilia are not the same thing as a crocodile feeding to survive. And furthermore, those physical symptoms of mental illnesses are simply the machinery by which our subjective conscious experience of those states of mind are set into motion, and we only know that through the subjective experience of conscious scientific observation. You're reducing those mental states to biological functions (biological reductionism). This is fallacious because you're doing this through your conscious intellect. None of us have the ability to actually observe the world outside of this mental state that we all share. When we observe the physical mechanisms of our own minds, we are doing just that: observing the mechanisms. We are not observing anything to do with an ontological meaning by which one might be able to make a philosophical argument.
You're basically saying: The lasagna is only a product of the oven. No one made the lasagna, and they didn't (not) make it for anyone else to eat.
I just mean the natural world, as in everything.
I never said they were. You need to go read what I wrote again and retract that.
The sentence in question is pretty vague, so maybe simplify it? Then feel free to comment on the actual argument that I just made instead of nitpicking on things that I misinterpreted because your language was vague.
No, they are not; they are somatic and mental manifestations of chemical imbalances in the brain.
No, I'm not. They are biological functions and biological reductionism is a ridiculous religious term.
No, it's not because my conscious intellect is a product of my brain and the rest of my body and nothing more.
We can't observe the mechanisms of our minds. Only neurologists and their equipment like EKGs can.
No, i'm not even close to saying that at all, and you haven't shown I have. What a ridiculous metaphor.
Sorry, the sentence in question and my language werent' vague and you haven't shown it is. You just completely misrepresented what I said. So, it's on you to read better. And asking you to not misrepresent what I said is not nitpicking; it's asking you to actually use your English skills if you have any.. But since you're fine with misrepresenting me, we're done and I won't be reading anymore of your posts.
Cheers.
This is not a response to my argument. You continue to avoid how conciousness plays into this.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
See above.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
yes, you are.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
No they're not, we only apprehend them through subjective conciousness.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
So why are you making arguments on their behalf?
Quoting Thanatos Sand
I thought it was pretty tasty >:O
There's no need to insult me; consult my posts to see if I have English skills. I trust you have it in you to philosophize with arguments instead of insults. All of us do, and you're no different. It just takes a willingness to question one's own beliefs, to weigh the beliefs and philosophies of others as impartially as you're able to, to put yourself in their shoes, and to use reason to assess arguments, including your own, in a leveled manner. I wish you the best in cultivating that ability.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
I'm not, which is why I asked you to simplify the sentence in question. It's a small, inconsequential sentence, and not worthy of cutting off debate with a specific forum member over.
Quoting Thanatos Sand
I've seen you say this to others. It would appear that at this rate, you'll only be singing to your own choir on this forum, or possibly just not posting at all. I'd love to debate with you more in the future if you decide to change your mind. Good luck!
Always comes back to insults in his/her case. Apparently they are a product of 'unconscious brain mechanisms', so there's not much point arguing with, or about, them.
:P
We don't stay up late, and so i must sign-off for the evening, but let me just make a brief preliminary comment or two:
I didn't mean to say that the other animals are ashamed of us. Only that we should be ashamed of ourselves, or our conduct toward the Earth and its life.
If you're saying that the other animals don't have consciousness, I disagree.
More tomorrow.
Michael Ossipoff
Someone who believes in consciousness as something apart from the physical animal.
Such a person believes in consciousness or mind as a separate metaphysical substance.
..even if you believe that the body is, by supervenience &/or emergent-property, etc., the origin of mind or consciousness--but still believe in mind or consciousness as something separate and different from body.
The body doesn't make or originate mind or consciousness. Mind and consciousness are Spiritualist fictions. The fact is that we're each an animal, with preferences, likes, dislikes, fears, etc., and that's it.
Your need to artificially separate us into separate mind and body, and say that we're the mind, is fictitious philosophical make-work.
More tomorrow.
Michael Ossipoff
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You're thinking of dualism; a spiritualist is a person who practices spiritualism.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
What's your argument for this claim? I assume you mean dualist fictions, not spiritualist ones.
For instance, this:
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Is not an argument for this:
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Are you using the word "substance" here as a metaphor on purpose or no?
A few messages ago, I said that I disagree if you say that the non-human animals don't have consciousness.
But that contradicts my statement that mind and consciousness are fiction.
So I retract the statement that I disagree if you say that nonhuman animals don't have consciousness.
Let me just say, instead, that, though humans have a special adaptability, language, and special talents that the other animals don't have, if you meant that, other than that, there's some qualitative fundamental attribute possessed only by humans, then I disagree with that.
Or, to say it differently, though I disagree with the notion of mind and conscious as things, as us apart from bodies, it sounds even more wrong to me when you say that humans but not animals have it.
(even though I don't believe that either has it)
I just wanted to fix that sentence in which I contradicted myself.
Michael Ossipoff
But consciousness itself is that qualitative fundamental attribute because it's the very "realm" in which we humans have these discussions. Consciousness is the foundation of all human experience. You can't make a physicalist claim without your consciousness. The problem you need to address is how to even go about making an argument that that consciousness which is the foundation of your experience is a physical attribute of your body. The burden of proof actually always lies with the physicalist here because consciousness is something that we experience as not being physical, regardless of whether or not it actually is.
Sure, Dualism is another word for what I mean. A better word, because it's more familiar, in philosophical discussion.
But philosophical Dualisms sound to me like varieties of Spiritualism.
I'd said:
You reply:
I mean both, because Spiritualism is Dualism, and philosophical Dualisms sound to me like something in the same class as Spiritualism. I don't perceive much difference between philosphical Dualism and what's usually called Spiritualism.
My argument is that the simplest description of what we are, is that we're nothing other than what we seem to be--an animal. Our experiences are entirely consistent with that simple description of us.
This philosophical need to believe that the animal consists of separate body and mind (or consciousness) is an unnecessary elaboration.
Ii prefer simplicity, without all the added assumptions.
Our simple-animalness was obvious to me when I was in pre-secondary school. It never occurred to me that there might be philosophes who were contriving elaborate unnecessary other theories.
When simple-animalness is completely consistent with our experience, then there's no reason to believe that your elaborate separate Consciousness or Mind are other than fiction.
You said
No, it's more of a re-statement of it.
Above, I spoke of arguments for it.
Let me just ask you this:
Given that animals are natural-selection-designed to accomplish certain purposes, by responding to their surroundings for that purpose, what would you expect that to "look like" and "feel like" to the animal?
Wouldn't you, in fact, expect it to be exactly what you experience?
That's why I say that Dualism/Spiritualism of mind or consciousness is fiction.
I've discussed all this in other topics.
I'm using "metaphysical substance" with its usual metaphysical meaning.
Michael Ossipoff
Alright, what's usually called "Spiritualism" differs from other Dualisms, in the fact that most Dualists don't talk to the spirits that they believe in.
But the similarity is still too close to ignore.
Michael Ossipoff
Isn't the simplest description of us that we're conscious beings? Your conscious experience is the ontological starting point. The concept of "I am simply an animal" is not the ontological starting point; it's an abstract concept.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Not at all because I experience consciousness.
Of course. A squirrel doesn't say to itself, "I'm an animal." It just goes about its business of avoiding dangers and getting what it prefers and likes. ....as do we. ...as any animal would.
I'd said:
You replied:
If someone built a robot that can navigate a maze, or vacuum a carpet, etc., that purposefully-responsive device has to get information about its surroundings, and act based on that information and its built-in purpose. ...usually involving some analysis of that information about the surroundings.
Likewise for the natural-selection-designed purposefully-responsive devices known as animals.
Don't you see that "consciousness" of yours is your perception and analysis of your surroundings, maybe with a monitoring of that analysis, for purposes of optimization or communication? ...and your feelings of preference, likes, dislikes, fears, etc.?
Don't you see that that "consciousness" of yours is nothing different from what one would expect for the point-of-view of any purposefully-responsive device, including an animal?
Michael Ossipoff
A completely vague statement.
I've agreed that your own 1st-person point-of-view is the only really valid one, because it's what your life-experience possibility-story is about.
But your Dualism has the burden-of-proof, because of its unnecessary elaborateness.
"Framework"? Sure, you can build as elaborate a philosophical framework as you want to, to describe what can be much more simply described.
Michael Ossipoff
I've looked up a number of definitions of "biological-reductionism. But if you want to say that I'm talking biological-reductionism, then you should say by exactly what definition of "biological-reductionism" you're wanting to label what I've said.
Anyway, labeling something doesn't refute or discredit it.
Michael Ossipoff
I mis-spoke earlier when I asserted that there's free-will. I think it's a meaningless issue.
Obviously, even from our own point of view, our choices are determinisitic. We act according to our preferences, and available information, including the conditions in our surroundings.
As some famous philosopher was quoted (recently in these forums) as saying, we can't want or not want something by wanting to want or not want it.
Some say that free will is compatible with determinism, and some say it isn't. It just depends on what someone means by free-will, and that's why it's a meaningless issue.
Michael Ossipoff
I'm not arguing against that. I'm saying conciousness is the ontological starting point, which you seem to agree with.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
But how can it be the simplest when consciousness is the proper starting point? Conciousness does not present itself to you as "animal". You still haven't peeled back the onion layers far enough; I'm not talking about our conscious experience of our physical surroundings; I'm talking about the pure, simple, experience of your conscious mind: your bare thoughts and feelings.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Where have I constructed an elaborate dualism in this thread? Ironically, conciousness as the ontological starting point is the simplest possible way to begin a philosophy. It's the most intuitive. What you're perceiving as elaborate and unnecessarily complicated are the layers of the onion of your mind that you need to peel back in order to arrive at this simplest, purest starting point.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Peel back further; it's not only that.
Well, that's a good start. 'Reductionism' generally is trying to explain a higher-level phenomenon in terms of its lower level components; typically atoms, but broadly speaking anything which is believed to be fundamental and scientifically predictable. Reductionism is to say of something that it is 'nothing but' - in this case, that humans are 'nothing but' animals, or that the mind is 'nothing but' neurochemicals.
Biological reductionism is typical of neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins. His famous book, The Selfish Gene', is one of the all-time greatest hits of reductionism:
(I've never been able to understand why that's 'astonishing', but then, the kinds of things that Dawkins find astonishing might be astonishing ;-) )
HIs buddy, Daniel Dennett, sings from the same hymn sheet:
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I haven't explicitly argued for dualism in this thread. The problem with 'dualism' is how 'substance' is generally understood. Most often it is conceived of as some ethereal stuff, some ghostly goo which is thought by dualists to inhabit brains - rather like the spirit in liquor. And then the implicit question is, 'what is the evidence for that'? To which the answer is (probably): none whatsoever, because the question is misconceived.
But to understand why, takes quite a bit of analysis. This is because the word 'substance' has a very different meaning in philosophy, than in common-sense usage. The philosophical idea of 'substance' that the likes of Descartes were speaking of, was descended from Aristotle's metaphysics 1. And 'substance' was the Latin translation of a Greek term, 'ousia', which is much more like 'being' 2. So in some ways, when we speak of a 'thinking substance', we're not referring to any kind of objective reality, but to the 'subject which thinks'. That is the sense in which 'substance' is nearer in meaning to 'being' than it is to 'stuff'.
But we've very much lost touch with the understanding that gives rise to this perspective. We nowadays are very grounded in 'objectivism' - that what is real is what is 'out there', what is, in principle, knowable in objective or scientific terms. I think an important part of philosophy is becoming aware of that perspective and how we embody it, which is often unconscious or implicit. And that's not an easy thing to do, it takes a lot of work, in a subject that very few understand or teach. So understanding philosophical dualism 3 requires a solid grounding in philosophy and also the history of ideas - how modernity evolved from its predecessors.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Schopenhauer: 'Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.' It is a comment on the difficulty of reigning in the will, or how desires have a life of their own. Sure rings a bell for me.
I’d said:
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Then where’s the need for this additional Dualistic entity that you call “Consciousness”?
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Well, I said “Sure”, but I should be more specific about what I agree with:
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I suggest that all that’s objectively, or globally-assertably, real and existent or true are maybe some abstract logical facts.
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The rest of our life-experience possibility-stories consists of a variety of “if-then” facts, whose applicability is only within the inter-referring system of “if-then”s that they’re part of.¬
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Obviously the subject, and the central, primary, essential component of your life-experience possibility-story is you. The story is about your experience.
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So yes, you have special ontological status, in your live-experience possibility-story.
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We could choose to call you a Consciousness, but what are you in that story? You’re an animal. The story is about that animal’s experience.
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You insist on wanting to artificially, unnecessarily, dissect the animal into a Consciousness and a body.
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It’s as if you wanted to go around cutting every dime in half, into a “heads” and a “tails”. Or cut every magnet in half, into a “north” end and a “south” end (that wouldn’t even work).
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Most animals have no awareness of having or being a Consciousness. Only imaginative Dualist philosophers can create that fiction.
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Would you say that a squirrel perceives that it is a Consciousness, or that it just perceives that it likes acorns?
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If squirrels could speak English, and if you could ask a squirrel what it is, would it say that it’s a Consciousness? Or would it say, “I’m someone who likes acorns. Give me some acorns.”
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You think that you’re a Consciousness that “has” a body. This artificial and unnecessary dissection of yourself into Consciousness and a body is what I mean by an elaborate Dualism.
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You say that what’s ontologically-primary is a Consciousness that is separate from the body. How do you support that claim?
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You say it’s simple. Ok, but its artificiality and its un-necessariness, is a demerit, when your theory is compared to something much simpler (without that artificial dissection) that is completely consistent with experience, and doesn’t require assuming or positing anything other than what your life-experience story is clearly about: an animal’s experience.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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You say that Consciousness is the proper starting-point. Can you show justification for that claim?
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Consciousness what is directly observed? What’s directly observed is the experience of an animal in its surroundings, with its feelings, preferences, likes, dislikes, etc.
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You’re positing an abstract thing, a Consciousness, that has a body, and is the experiencer. That’s positing a contrived entity, and an artificial dissection.
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Your’re dividing yourself into a body, and…what?
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Say you total a car, but are unharmed. If you can afford to replace the car, then it’s no big deal. That’s because you’re separate from, different from, the car.
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Say you fall off of a bridge. If you aren’t the body, then why should that be a big deal? No, what happens to the body happens to you, because you’re the body.
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What is presented to you is your surroundings, and your evaluation and impression of them, with respect to your needs, feelings, likes and dislikes.
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That’s exactly what an animal would feel and notice, as you’ve already agreed.
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We don’t just perceive our physical surroundings. We analyze them, have feelings and impressions about them, and about what we want or would like, or what we need to avoid. And yes, as human animals, we have an analytical capacity greater than that of other animals, and sometimes an interest in abstract things not directly related to physical needs.
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Thoughts and feelings are about something. Maybe something of expected animal-interest, such as survival, food, shelter, avoiding trouble, etc. Maybe about things that you like. Maybe other things that aren’t directly survival-related. Remember that otters, birds, and even crocodiles have been observed to play. Why should it be surprising that humans likewise enjoy non-surival-related forms of play?
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None of those things are bare thoughts and feelings.
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By the way, maybe my saying that we’re nothing other than the animal matches some already-established variation of philosophy-of-mind Physicalism (pomp). (…even though I’m metaphysically an Idealist). But I don’t know of such a version of pomp.
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And, even if there is one, each pomp version, including mine, should have a name, by which to refer to it. If my version already has a name, then I’ll start using that name. But, in the meantime, my suggestion that we’re the animal and nothing more will be referred to by me as “Animalness”.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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Alright, I admit that you haven’t been very specific, but I assume that you’re saying that, in addition to a physical body, in addition to the animal, there’s a separate entity called a Consciousness. You must mean that, when you say that we aren’t just the animal.
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That sounds like Dualism. Any Dualism is more elaborate than Animalness.
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…maybe a philosophy constructed abstractly, instead of from our actual experience.
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Yes, for example, I can’t match or equal the elegance or simplicity of Advaita’s extreme Monism, in which there is only one Existent.
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But does that make it more parsimonious than Skepticism?
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No, because it has an assumption.
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Years ago, I used to argue for Advaita, at a philosophy forum. When people told me that I expressing a belief that I wasn’t supporting, they were right. I’d read about Advaita, and wanted its details to be true.
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I was arguing something that I couldn’t really support, and I wasn’t comfortable with that.
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Skepticism and Animalness are free of assumptions.
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“You are the body” describes our experience. As I’ve said, that was obvious to me even in pre-secondary school.
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A notion that we’re a noncorporeal Consciousness, different from the body, never occurred to me then. Why should it?
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I’ve said that Skepticism, it seems to me, qualifies as a Vedanta version, because its conclusions and consequences are the same. In fact, I’ve said that it seems to me that its conclusions and consequences don’t even really differ from those of Advaita. …leading me to say that Skepticism and Advaita could be regarded as just different wordings.
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Most likely there are many metaphysicses that lead to the same conclusions and consequences.
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Advaita is very popular. Is its metaphysics your metaphysics?
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That should set off an alarm-bell for you, when you know that your proposal can be perceived as elaborate and unnecessarily complicated. Your simplest, purest starting point is different from what our experience shows us.
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…not that it necessarily contradicts experience. But it claims an assumption that isn’t in our experience.
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Simple, but not parsimonious, because of that artificial, unnecessary dissection-assumption that it involves.
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I’d said:
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You reply:
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You’re assuming something different from our actual experience.
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You like it because it has a sort of ideal appeal. But I claim that parsimony, match to experience, and easy supportability are more important.
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If parsimony is about a count of Existents, then Advaita would win. But I feel that it’s more about absence of need for and use of assumptions and brute-facts.
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Michael Ossipoff
It sounds like support for Determinism--which I subscribe to.
That sounds awful. Is he an Eliminative Physicalist?
(I used to know what he was saying, but I have no reason to read him, or about him, now.)
Maybe I don't thoroughly understand the history of Dualism, but I've read statements of its various versions (a long time ago). What I've been criticizing about it now is that it posits more entities than are needed for consistency with experience.
Michael Ossipoff
I never said I was a dualist. You asked if I was a spiritualist; I questioned what that was because it's not a philosophical term, and I clarified that I thought you meant dualism. You're assuming I'm a dualist, it looks like, probably because i'm questioning your physicalism, and because my correction about spiritualism/dualism made you realize that you meant dualism, which is now what you've correctively proceeded to accuse me of.
I'll go ahead and let you know here that I don't consider myself a dualist or a monist (or an idealist) in the classical senses. More later.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
What?? How does that relate to your insistence on "animalism"? Are we just animals, or is objective reality just "some abstract logical facts", or are you an idealist like you say later on, or...???
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Your assumptions about what I'm arguing are getting tiring. Nowhere am I arguing for a "dissection". I'm arguing for the primacy of conciousness within experience. As I'm reading through your tome of a response I'm feeling more and more that you're not really comprehending my argument at all. I sincerely don't mean that as an insult. You basically continue to say the same things, and now I'm just saying the same things, because you're not addressing my points; but my points were direct addresses to your points...
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I don't even know what to say.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Nope
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Nope
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Re-read if you want that
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Classically, dualism means that there is an inseparable divide between the two concepts soul and body. I don't see consciousness as inseparably "other" from physicality, but neither am I a physicalist. If I have to label myself with blithe philosophical terms, it would be something like "generative mystical monist". I doubt that would interest you much though...
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Right, I didn't elaborate clearly on what I meant by simplest. conscious experience as ontological starting point is not experientially the simplest starting point; physicality is, which is your argument. Let's clear this up. What I'm saying is that the simplicity of a physical starting point is not in consonance with the actual state of reality. The actual state of reality is what you seem to consider superfluously elaborate. Recognizing that conciousness is ontologically primary requires a very robust amount of philosophical and mental work. But once arrived at, it's the simplest and purest starting point. It's, rather, a re-starting point. I didn't make that clear, and I apologize.
Dennett helped invent it.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
Philosophical dualism has a pretty bad reputation, although I happen to think that it's often misunderstood. IN any case, as ND points out, dualism is not 'spiritualism'. And 'philosophical materialism' is....well......
Creative, learning, and evolving.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
You learn or are taught that you are an animal. Experientially, one just exists and is evolving by exploring and creating in memory.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
On the contrary, all of life is exploring, learning, and creating in it's own way. It's called evolution. Different but the same.
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
No duality or dissection required. They are one and the same. The differences are in substantially. It is the continuum that exists from quanta wave form to the atom (which is largely empty) to solid.
Michael, I'm not sure you are aware of this, but your metaphysics probably is the antithesis of what you are seeking. It is one brute fact after another and there seems to be an endless steam of them to support your view of life. Maybe, if you are interested in a parsimonious philosophy, you might want exam your posts, and as an exercise number each of your brute facts and then trying to limit them somehow?
It is the obvious and most natural starting point. It is what we experience all the time.
You didn’t say one way or the other, and I was guessing. Of course it isn’t good to guess, because people don’t like being misquoted.
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You asked if I was a spiritualist; I questioned what that was because it's not a philosophical term, and I clarified that I thought you meant dualism. You're assuming I'm a dualist, it looks like, probably because i'm questioning your physicalism…
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I’ve been expressing a form of philosophy-of-mind Physicalism that I call “Animalness”, because I don’t know what name it goes by. (But it’s so obvious that it must already have a name.) But I don’t subscribe to metaphysical Physicalism. I express that distinction, between those two Physicalisms, by writing-out “philosophy-of-mind Physicalism”. Because that’s a long term, I abbreviate it “pomp”.
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Well, I knew that I meant “Dualism”, but I was saying “Spiritualism”, even though of course not all Dualisms say that their entities can be communicated-with. Calling it all Dualisms “Spiritualism” was therefore admittedly a little inaccurate. I said it that way to emphasize that Dualism in general should be regarded like Spiritualism.
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It was just a guess, but, as I said, it isn’t good to guess.
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Ok.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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All of the above.
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The metaphysics that I call “Skepticism” proposes that your life consists of a hypothetical life-experience possibility-story.
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That possibility-story is a hypothetical system of inter-referring “if “s, “if-then” facts, and abstract logical facts.
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That story has no objective truth or reality other than in its own inter-referring context. It rests entirely or almost entirely on “if “s.
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For example, as I mentioned before, physical laws are hypothetical facts that relate some hypothetical quantity-values. Those hypothetical physical laws, and the quantity-values that they’re about, are parts of the “if” clause of some if-then facts.
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Similarly, mathematical theorems are if-then facts whose if-clause includes a system of axioms.
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That metaphysics is an Idealism.
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That life-experience possibility-story is about the experience of an animal (you).
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Why is there that story? How could there not be? It’s all hypothetical “if-then” s, and it needn’t be real or true in any context other than its own, among its inter-referring “if-then” s.
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I was saying that abstract logical facts have special status as objectively true, but I don’t know if I should say that. Maybe all those abstract logical facts can be said as “if-then” s, in which case they don’t sound more fundamental or objectively-true than mathematical theorems. …and, if so, it could be said that the whole story rests entirely on “if “s.
But the whole life-experience possibility story can’t be said to be objectively-true.
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So, Animalness doesn’t contradict Skepticism, an Idealism.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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Sorry, but you didn’t thoroughly specify your position. I was assuming that it was a Dualism.
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I agree that you are the primary, essential, and central component of your life-experience possibility-story.
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So, in that way, I agree that the person (animal) is primary (in his/her life-experience possibility-story).
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It seems that we’re saying pretty-much the same thing.
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…except that you’re separating “Consciousness” out from the animal
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…and maybe saying that Consciousness is the Fundamental Reality.
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If so, then aren’t you expressing Advaita?
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But you’re wanting to separate-out a component of the animal and call it Consciousness, or a. Consciousness. I don’t think that I’m misquoting you when I say that.
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I’m saying that the animal is a unitary whole, like the “sealed-unit” refrigerator motor-compressor unit or a VW transaxle. No need to try to philosophically divide the animal into parts.
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Your wanting to separate-out Consciousness is what I mean by “dissection”.
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But have you thoroughly specified your position?
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None perceived.
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I never intentionally evade addressing what someone has said. If I didn’t answer something, then that must be because I misunderstood what was meant.
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Alright, you aren’t a Dualist. But am I mistaken to say that you philosophically separate Consciousness out from the animal, whereas I regard the animal as a unitary “sealed-unit” that needn’t be regarded in separate philosophical parts?
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Must you not be doing that, in order for you to say that Pure Consciousness is the Fundamental Existent?
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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I’ll take that as non-disagreement. Thank you.
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I meant to illustrate that, obviously, animals don’t think of themselves as Pure Consciousness, but as someone with various likes, needs, dislikes, concerns, etc.
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I'd said:
You replied:
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Certainly. I may very well have missed it.
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On which page of this topic, and which date, was posted the posting with the justification?
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You said:
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Why not? I feel that it’s always good for positions to be fully-stated. For one thing, then I wouldn’t make the misinterpretations of your positions that I’ve been making.
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Generative Mystical Monist-- That sounds like Advaita.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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Yes.
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But what you’re calling the actual state of Reality is less likely to be the actual state of Reality, because it makes an unsupported assumption, positing something that doesn’t come from experience.
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But don’t you see that it’s superfluous elaborateness makes it less likely to be the actual state of Reality?
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I suggest that it requires an assumption that doesn’t come from experience.
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(…though I’m not saying that it’s contradicted by experience either.)
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I don’t deny that.
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Advaita is more simple, neat and pure than Skepticism.
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Your position on philosophy-of-mind is simple, neat and pure.
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But Skeptism has no assumptions or brute-facts, and Animalness posits nothing about us other than our obvious animalness.
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Proposals with fewer (or no) assumptions are more likely to be true, or are at least more aesthetically-appealing, even if they aren’t quite as simple.
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Pure simplicity, in disregard of the assumptions that it needs, has artistic beauty, but its assumptions can detract from its merits as a proposal for how Reality is.
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Michael Ossipoff
I'm not metaphysically a Materialist or Physicalist.
I subscribe to a version of science-of-mind Physicalism (pomp), which I call "Animalness", because I don't yet know its name.
Maybe Biological-Reductionism (by one of it several definitions) is the name that it goes by.
But there are meanings of Biological-Reductionism that don't apply to me. For example, if members of a racial minority don't do as well on an exam as members of other races who have taken the exam, I don't believe that that has to be because of a biological difference between them and others who have taken the exam..
I like to avoid words with several definitions, because it can unfairly imply things about a person that such words are applied to.
We agree that metaphysical Materialism or Physicalism lacks merit as a proposal for Reality.
Michael Ossipoff
You said:
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I’m saying that “Consciousness” and “Mind” are unnecessary fictions or abstractions from the whole that is the animal. From what you say above, then the philosophy-of-mind position that I subscribe to can be called “Biological-Reductionism”.
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Maybe I should replace the word “Animalness” with “Biological Reductionism”. …except that I’m not comfortable with all of “Biological-Reductionism” ‘s various meanings.
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I’ve sometimes guessed about people’s positions here, and not always correctly.
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I feel that the person (animal) is the essential, central and primary component of hir (his/her) world. …and that the 1st-person point-of-view is the only really valid one.
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Michael Ossipoff
I meant "a version of philosophy-of-mind Physicalism..."
Michael Ossipoff
Well, since it's you who say that my metaphysics is full of brute-facts, then I suggest that it is you who need to specify them.
Michael Ossipoff
You have your IF statements (and there are tons of them in your posts, as I said they are ceaseless), and then you have your Then statements which are in almost all cases arguable.
Everyone does this, but the more you have the less parsimonious is your philosophy. It's all OK, I am just not sure whether you recognize the plethora of brute facts in your philosophy.
Here are a couple examples from one sentence.
"I’m saying that “Consciousness” and “Mind” are unnecessary fictions, "
"the whole that is the animal."
Maybe, by "IF statement", you're referring to a hypothetical fact that is (at least part of) the "if" clause of an if-then statement. I'll just guess that that's what you mean.
And you're saying that all such hypotheticals are "brute-facts". You clearly are quite clueless about what a brute-fact is.
A brute-fact is asserted, posited. It isn't the "if" clause of an if-then statement.
Fine. Then you should feel free to name one of mine that is "arguable".
The "Then" clause states a consequence of an "If" clause (which consists of one or more hypothetical "If" facts).
Some If-Then facts are demonstrably true, such as some abstract logical facts, or mathematical theorems.
Of course there can also be If-Then facts which, themselves, are hypothetical and whose truth is part of the "If" clause of another If-Then fact..
As I said, physical worlds aren't as simple as you might like them to be.
For example, a mathematical theorem is an if-then fact whose "If" clause includes (but isn't limited to) a set of axioms.
Similarly, abstract logical "Then" conclusions demonstrably follow from their "If" clauses.
From the "If" clause consisting of a set of physical laws and quantity-values, there is a demonstrable conclusion, consisting of other quantity-values.
Feel free to specify one. You haven't done so yet.
For one thing, your quotes below aren't from my description of my metaphysics. They're from a discussion of philosophy-of-mind, which is another topic.
...unnecessary because, by itself, the physical fact of our animal-ness is fully consistent with our experiences.
So the animal isn't a whole? If you want to posit some more elaborate nature, or something different from what experience implies, then, unless you can verify it, you're offering an unnecessary, unsupported assumption.
Michael Ossipoff
Really Michael, your philosophy is simply an endless stream of IF statements, which are debatable, followed by even more debatable THEN statements. There are so many, it is difficult To know where to begin. I was simply wondering if you realized it.
Good. You've caught on to the fact that Skepticism is about hypothetical "if-then" s. Congratulations.
Not quite sure what you mean by "debatable". Then feel free to debate one.
Yes, I realize that Skepticism is about a system of inter-referring "if-then" s.
Michael Ossipoff
It is a very open ended my metaphysics. If you can state and IF ... Then, then it is approved. Such a metaphysics will pretty much envelop all existing metaphysical ideas. It is wonderfully accepting.
Thank you.
Yes, it encompasses every self-consistent possibility-story.
All of them. An infinity of them.
But no, I wouldn't say that it envelopes all metaphysicses. Someone brought up that suggestion once here.
Yes, all self-consistent possibility-stories, but no, this metaphysics doesn't "envelope" or include all metaphysicses..
Michael Ossipoff
I take it back. I shouldn't say that there's no such thing as bare, pure Consciousness.
There is, for everyone, at the end of lives (or, if you don't believe in reincarnation, at the end of this life), a time, during death, during body-shutdown, when you there's no time, and no knowledge that there ever was time, events, individuality, identity, a life, or a body.
At that time, of course there is what you could call bare, pure Consciousness.
I've been saying, "You are the body.", but, at that time, near shutown, at the end of lives, that can't be said.
Michael Ossipoff
But of course every metaphysics that is contrived to somehow, in its own elaborate way, explain this physical world, can be simulated by Skepticism. ...because, during your life, those metaphysicses can't be distinguished from eachother or from Skepticism.
At the end of this life, that's the only time when the different metaphysics have different conclusions or consequences. At that time, you won't be conscious enough to know that, though. And so the indistinguishableness is never really observed to be breached.
Michael Ossipoff
If people want to know what your personal use of the term Skepticism means, I suggest you write out a hard, clear definition of it.
I'm not quite sure what that means.
Regarding metaphysicses that (maybe via elaborate contrivance) explain this physical world:
Of course every one of them simulates all of the others, during your life, because, during your life, they're all indistinguishable from eachother.
That's all i was saying.
I've defined, at great length and in great detail, the metaphysics that I call Skepticism.
I've also quoted dictionary definitions of skepticism, the common noun.
I've justified Skepticism as the name of my metaphysics, by the fact that complete rejection and avoidance of assumptions is skeptical.
If you have a specific objection to, or question about, Skepticism, feel free to say what it is.
But we've been over this many times already. Must we repeat this conversation forever?
Michael Ossipoff
You should know exactly what it means since you, yourself, said it in the bold quote below:
Yes, and that great length has confused things. Again, nobody will know what you mean until you give a hard, clear definition of your personal use of the word "skepticism." If you know what you're talking about, you should be able to do so.
Except that quoting has been useless, since your personal usage of the word has a different meaning.
Except your inclusion of all "if-then" statements counters thins since many "if-then" statements can be assumptions or brute-facts. So, you really need to make that hard, clear definition, and a better one than that "complete rejection."
I just made it in my post above yours, and you haven't addressed that rejection since you refuse to make a hard, clear definition of your personal use of "skepticism."
You could write if-then facts that are brute-facts, as I myself have said.
But what I said was that Skepticism doesn't need or use assumptions, or posit brute-facts.
You can posit brute-fact "if-then"s if you want to.
I'm not positing them. My point was that Skepticism doesn't posit them. Take that as part of the definition of Skepticism.
Many or most other metaphysicses, including Physicalism ("Naturalism") do need and use assumptions, and do posit, and depend on, brute-facts.
That's the difference.
Thanatos has again descended to his full troll-ness, and it's time for me to declare this conversation concluded.
Bye, Thanatos.
Michael Ossipoff
Then your personal usage of Skepticism is no longer a rejection of brute-facts, since you acknowledged--in your bold quote below--your personal use of skepticism is about an endless stream of IF statements that must include many brute facts
So, since your personal usage of "Skepticism" no longer rejects all brute-facts, you really should write a hard clear definition of your personal usage of the word.
And since I'm the one actually making my arguments, and you're the one making personal attacks, the only one who has descended to his full troll-ness is you.
No, I've shown very well, in my last few posts, you haven't said this at all.
As, clearly, does your personal use of "skepticism."
So, not only have you been trolling your last few posts, your decidedly inconsistent and contradictory personal use of the term "skepticism" has been trolling, a clear avoidance of making an actual argument and facing its criticisms.
I don't agree that consciousness is primary; only a small part of experience is conscious experience. What is primary is our experience, both conscious and unconscious or subconscious, of being in a world with others. including inanimate objects, both natural and human-made, landscapes, plants, animals, humans, music, literature, painting, architecture, the media, the sciences, money and politics and so on.
Thanks for pointing this issue out.
Regarding the timelessness at the end of lives, I should add that that stage, with no time, events, body, identity, problems, lack, incompletion, or any knowledge that there ever were or could be such things, is close on the way to what we worldly-beings could call "Nothing".
It's at the end of lives. I haven't claimed that our life-experience possibility-stories are objectively real, though I call them "actual" to us.
I suggest that that Timelessness that is arrived at before shutdown, and that full Nothing that is being approached then, has more reality than the relative world of possibility-stories.
So, during shutdown, as the former-person reaches timelessness, in close approach to Nothing, that person is approaching a state-of-affairs that's more real, natural, and basic than hir previous lives, life-experience possibility-stories, in the relative worlds.
Of course each life seems very long, and it's said that we live lots of them. But their overall duration is slight, in comparison to the Timelessness at the end of lives.
...not that any of us are even anywhere near close to that end-of-lives.
Michael Ossipoff
So how are you a physicalist then? I'm confused at this point. You're posting a lot of stuff in this thread, and I've kind of lost the thrust of it, as well as my own interest in it. I was responding to a very specific problem I thought I saw, and kept my comments very specifically about that (consciousness), but at this point I'm having a hard time understanding your views on any of these topics.
But conciousness is constant, at least in waking life. Consciousness just means the state of your mind right now as you read this; it's the same state when you go clean the kitchen, go to work, have sex, etc. At least that's my conception of it; it's a very broad, basic state of existence; the only basic one, in fact. Of course it's also a spectrum; if you're sleep-deprived or drunk, your conscious experience kind of obtains in a different way. The subconscious and the unconscious are "fundamental" to experience, if you will, but I can't see the use in saying that they're a significantly larger portion of experience itself.
Yeah we've already been over this.
I don't call myself a Physicalist..I'm not a metaphysical Physicalist.
But "Physicalist" is evidently used with two different meanings.
A metaphysical Physicalist (which is what I mean by "Physicalist") is someone who claims that this phsyical world is independently existent, and is the fundamental, primary Reality, the fundamental, primary Existent.. ...and is Reality itself.
But Physicalism is used with a 2nd meaning too "Philosophy-of-mind Physicalism evidently refers to the position that we're completely described by our physical definition or description, without such nonphysical separate entities as spirits, mind, or consciousness.
Though I'm not a metaphysical physicalist, I probably would be called a philosophy-of-mind Physicalist.
When I say "Physiclism", without a qualifying-phrase, I'm referring to metaphysical Physicalism.
I'll often denote philosophy-of-mind Physicalism by the abbreviation "pomp, to avoid a long phrase.
Well, I've been fairly explicit.
Well then it's a good thing that you let me know now.
I misunderstood, and thought you were interested in these subjects, and might be interested in my comments. Otherwise I wouldn't have posted comments to you. But alright, sure, there won't be any more comments to you, since you aren't interested.
But, in return, I'm not interested in hearing from people who aren't interested, so let's not hear from you agaIn, O Noble Dust.
Then just disregard it.
Michael Ossipoff
You'll hear from me if I decide to say something. ;) don't succumb to the ways of Thanatos!
But really, no ill will towards you, Michael. Cheers and all the best; maybe we'll wrangle again elsewhere at some point.
No, my time is too valuable to discuss anything with someone who has expressed disinterest in what I say.
(It won't mean that you've said something irrefutable)
Michael Ossipoff
'Conscious' is one of those words that are used and interpreted many different ways. Quite often it is taken to mean 'not asleep', literally. I don't use it that way, because that is an uninteresting, uninstructive way of using it. Think about all the moments you can remember of your experience from the twenty four hours before you woke up this morning: those were the moments you were most conscious. Some of those moments may have occurred when you were asleep, dreaming. It is not a black and white 'on-off' phenomenon; it shades away into subconsciousness, unconsciousness.