Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Plant Sciences, Zoology & Evolution => Topic started by: DonQuichotte on 18/08/2013 18:06:42
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The Exclusive Biological nature of Evolution via the natural selection :
Hi,folks :
The nature of Darwin's theory of evolution via the natural selection is only and exclusively biological :
My question is as follows :
Why then is the theory of evolution extended to cultures, societies, religions or spirituality , politics, philosophy, economics, intellect, psychology, human consciousness, ....?
Thanks, appreciate indeed .
All the best .
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I think what evolution has in common with the other concepts you are referring to is just the selection process that is similar For example, in the market place, products that are useful or desirable with a price people are willing to pay, sell. The company makes money and continues to exist, may reinvest the profits, and expand. Products that are not desirable, don't sell, and the company goes out of business. You can find similar selection processes in politics, television, etc.
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Perhaps you could think of evolution like mathematics.
We wouldn't exist if there wasn't first prehistoric bacteria, prehistoric amoebas, fish, amphibians, early mammals, primates, and about 5 to 10 million years of hominid evolution.
Likewise, in mathematics, it is difficult to learn calculus if you don't have a foundation first of simple numbers, then addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, trigonometry, and finally calculus. Perhaps not everything has to be done in quite the same order, but it would be hard to study calculus without first knowing how to add.
Perhaps the scientific method and the development of engineering is similar. So much is based on, and requires previous work to build something new. Try as much as he could, Leonardo couldn't quite get powered flight down. It first required the invention of the steam engine a century or two later, then another century for the invention of the internal combustion engine. Then another half a century of development, and the Wright Brothers used a small gas engine to power their first plane. A bit more than a half century more, and jets replaced prop planes... and etc.
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I think what evolution has in common with the other concepts you are referring to is just the selection process that is similar For example, in the market place, products that are useful or desirable with a price people are willing to pay, sell. The company makes money and continues to exist, may reinvest the profits, and expand. Products that are not desirable, don't sell, and the company goes out of business. You can find similar selection processes in politics, television, etc.
I know what you are talking about :
I just think that both the biological evolution and the other kinds of evolutions : economic, intellectual, cultural, political, spiritual ,....are 2 different categories of evolution which occur at different levels and with other different set of "rules" : so, we cannot just copy and apply biological evolution to the non-biological evolutionary processes ,otherwise that would be just like confusing 2 different categories of evolution with each other ,otherwise we should be able to predict social, cultural, economic, political , ethical , ....developments with total accuracy , if we take into consideration the very mechanical deterministic nature of the biological evolution we would apply to those different human areas :
See how even modern maths ,not to mention quantum mechanics , the theory of chaos ,the relativity theory ...had kissed absolute determinism and absolute predictability goodbye :
See the following top docus on the matter : very enlightening indeed : fascinating :
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/high-anxieties-the-mathematics-of-chaos/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/dangerous-knowledge/
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Perhaps you could think of evolution like mathematics.
We wouldn't exist if there wasn't first prehistoric bacteria, prehistoric amoebas, fish, amphibians, early mammals, primates, and about 5 to 10 million years of hominid evolution.
Likewise, in mathematics, it is difficult to learn calculus if you don't have a foundation first of simple numbers, then addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, trigonometry, and finally calculus. Perhaps not everything has to be done in quite the same order, but it would be hard to study calculus without first knowing how to add.
Perhaps the scientific method and the development of engineering is similar. So much is based on, and requires previous work to build something new. Try as much as he could, Leonardo couldn't quite get powered flight down. It first required the invention of the steam engine a century or two later, then another century for the invention of the internal combustion engine. Then another half a century of development, and the Wright Brothers used a small gas engine to power their first plane. A bit more than a half century more, and jets replaced prop planes... and etc.
What you said refers to some view regarding some of the historic accumulated human knowledge ,skills , experiences ....throughout the history of mankind ,at both the individual and collective levels ,which do undergo some sort of evolution , progress and growth indeed.
But , i am mainly talking about different categories of evolution though, and whether we can or not apply those mechanisms of the biological evolution via the natural selection to cultures,religions, economics , society, politics, thought, human consciousness , ethics .... : see my post here above on the matter as a reply to the post of our friend here above .
Important notice and warning from history : we should be very careful in trying to apply ,if ever , the mechanisms of the biological evolution via the natural selection to human races,cultures, religions ,societies ....as history taught us : that's a very dangerous mine field : i am referring to those despicable and refuted racist Eugenics theories and also to social Darwinism for example , as well .
The nazis did also justify their persecution of jews via social darwinism, eugenics ...so: be careful .
Second : See how the evolution of human epistemology and of religions had finally given birth to the scientific method as such : see "What's the real origin of the scientific method ?" thread of mine in general science forum in this site by the way ,
See those fascinating top docus here above regarding the maths of chaos and how they proved the fact , among other things , that absolute predictability or absolute determinism are history .
In other words : we should be able to absolutely predict social, cultural, ethical, political, religious or spiritual , intellectual, psychological ....evolutions , if we apply to them those mechanical deterministic mechanisms of the biological evolution via the natural selection ,but modern maths of chaos had kissed absolute predictability and absolute determinism goodbye as those above mentioned top docus proved ,so.
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Well ,folks ?
What do you think about the above ?
And what do you think about the fact , for example, that materialist scientists such as Richard Dawkins and co . do try to apply the mechanical deterministic material mechanisms of the biological evolution via the natural selection to religions and spirituality , to cultures, ethics, society , politics, economics ,to human consciousness .....?
Thanks, appreciate indeed
Take care
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I just think that both the biological evolution and the other kinds of evolutions : economic, intellectual, cultural, political, spiritual ,....are 2 different categories of evolution which occur at different levels and with other different set of "rules" : so, we cannot just copy and apply biological evolution to the non-biological evolutionary processes ,otherwise that would be just like confusing 2 different categories of evolution with each other ,otherwise we should be able to predict social, cultural, economic, political , ethical , ....developments with total accuracy , if we take into consideration the very mechanical deterministic nature of the biological evolution we would apply to those different human areas :
Well, the mechanism is very different. There is conscious design or at least guess work in marketing a product. Natural selection involves random mutations that may or may not be beneficial.
And I'm not sure I would call biology completely deterministic or predictable. It could be argued that if you "re-started" the Earth with the exact same chemical conditions, you might not end up with the same kinds and numbers of species that exist today. There is no proof that an octopus or an aardvark exists because it had to. The weird variety of life that exists or has ever existed on Earth seems to suggest that many biological outcomes were possible. Maybe there's no way way to prove that either. But I would say that evolution is not necessarily more predictable than political, economic, or social events.
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author=cheryl j link=topic=48671.msg416612#msg416612 date=1377041873]
I just think that both the biological evolution and the other kinds of evolutions : economic, intellectual, cultural, political, spiritual ,....are 2 different categories of evolution which occur at different levels and with other different set of "rules" : so, we cannot just copy and apply biological evolution to the non-biological evolutionary processes ,otherwise that would be just like confusing 2 different categories of evolution with each other ,otherwise we should be able to predict social, cultural, economic, political , ethical , ....developments with total accuracy , if we take into consideration the very mechanical deterministic nature of the biological evolution we would apply to those different human areas
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Quote from : Cheryl :Well, the mechanism is very different. There is conscious design or at least guess work in marketing a product. Natural selection involves random mutations that may or may not be beneficial.
Materialistic evolutionists consider the following as a "fact " they have never been able to prove it to be true as such though : that human consciousness was just the product of the evolutionary complexity of the human brain = the evolved brain created consciousness = emergent property theory : that 's why they justify that "fact" that they can apply those mechanisms of the biological evolution to economics, religions, cultures, intellect , politics ....
What do you think about that evolutionary biological genetic approach of society, cultures, consciousness, ethics, politics, economics ...?
And I'm not sure I would call biology completely deterministic or predictable. It could be argued that if you "re-started" the Earth with the exact same chemical conditions, you might not end up with the same kinds and numbers of species that exist today. There is no proof that an octopus or an aardvark exists because it had to. The weird variety of life that exists or has ever existed on Earth seems to suggest that many biological outcomes were possible. Maybe there's no way way to prove that either. But I would say that evolution is not necessarily more predictable than political, economic, or social events.
Materialistic evolutionists , especially some mathematicians , think they can predict everything , considering the alleged deterministic mechanical nature of the universe :
That mechanical deterministic Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm in science is history though , as my above mentioned links show concerning the maths of chaos ...
But , many materialists just stick to that outdated and largely refuted mechanical deterministic world view : they cannot do otherwise in fact , considering the very mechanical deterministic nature of materialism itself by the way .
Darwin's theory of evolution is all about the mechanical deterministic "blind ", random, purposeless, ...nature of the biological evolution also ,so, in the sense that any mechanisms of evolution can only repeat themselves in their corresponding environment factors ,exactly like programmed software in a programmed computer .
What do you think about all that ?
Thanks, appreciate indeed
Kind regards
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The "corresponding environment factors" include geological states which incorporate chaotic behaviors (plate tectonics, volcanism ...). The species which evolve are those that are successful, and they compete with other successful species for the available resources. You couldn't reproduce the results if you tried; ergo - natural selection.
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A depressingly common fallacy is that there is a "theory of evolution". Evolution is an observation that things change with time. There are many theories that purport to explain how a particular evolution occurred but the only common thread in biology is that there is a random element in genetics, and some variants are better adapted than others to survive and prosper in a particular ecological niche. Indeed Darwin said so, and no more than that. Since the biological environment is itself partly biological, interactive, bounded, and significantly unpredictable, there is no usefully predictive theory of biological evolution.
Human systems, in contrast, are mostly depressingly predictable. Unfortunately economists, politicians and generals, the very people whose predictions affect our welfare and happiness, are supremely incompetent at prediction - or indeed anything else, for the most part.
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The "corresponding environment factors" include geological states which incorporate chaotic behaviors (plate tectonics, volcanism ...). The species which evolve are those that are successful, and they compete with other successful species for the available resources. You couldn't reproduce the results if you tried; ergo - natural selection.
yeah, ok : deterministic mechanical biological evolution in the sense that certain mutations , evolution ...can take only place under certain circumstances ...and not under others ...
P.S.: I do not buy that "random " ,"blind " ..character of evolution ,simply because that makes no sense , not even in maths .
There are no such things such as random, coincidence, accident ...
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A depressingly common fallacy is that there is a "theory of evolution". Evolution is an observation that things change with time. There are many theories that purport to explain how a particular evolution occurred but the only common thread in biology is that there is a random element in genetics, and some variants are better adapted than others to survive and prosper in a particular ecological niche. Indeed Darwin said so, and no more than that. Since the biological environment is itself partly biological, interactive, bounded, and significantly unpredictable, there is no usefully predictive theory of biological evolution.
There are no such things such as random , coincidence ...come on: see above .
Human systems, in contrast, are mostly depressingly predictable. Unfortunately economists, politicians and generals, the very people whose predictions affect our welfare and happiness, are supremely incompetent at prediction - or indeed anything else, for the most part.
"Human systems", as you put it , or social,economic, ethical, political ,cultural...developments are not absolutely predictable ,come on : the theory of chaos had kissed that absolute and outdated predictability and determinism goodbye ...
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I strongly advise you to understand the meaning of "random" before dabbling in science.
31415 is not a random sequence: it is the digits of pi, and the next digit is entirely predictable if you know the source.
31415 is a random sequence: it is the throws of a die and the next digit can be any number from 1 to 6, if you know the source.
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..the theory of chaos had kissed that absolute and outdated predictability and determinism goodbye ...
Not quite - chaos theory involves systems that are deterministic but not predictable.
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..the theory of chaos had kissed that absolute and outdated predictability and determinism goodbye ...
Not quite - chaos theory involves systems that are deterministic but not predictable.
Did you watch "High anxieties-the mathematics of chaos " from topdocumentaryfilms.com docu i provided you with in the other thread ?
Why don't you tell me also ,while you are at it, how on earth can the mechanisms of the biological evolution be applied to the non-biological evolution ...absolutely ?
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I strongly advise you to understand the meaning of "random" before dabbling in science.
31415 is not a random sequence: it is the digits of pi, and the next digit is entirely predictable if you know the source.
31415 is a random sequence: it is the throws of a die and the next digit can be any number from 1 to 6, if you know the source.
Ho, ho, hold your wild horses ,cowboy :
I talked about random as something "outside " of the existing variables, which therefore cannot exist thus
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What, then, is your definition of "random"? It's a common word in science and mathematics, but you assert it is meaningless or at least not realised.
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Did you watch "High anxieties-the mathematics of chaos " from topdocumentaryfilms.com docu i provided you with in the other thread ?
Yup; I saw that one, and several others, a while ago (about 5 years ago). The books will give you more detail - I recommend 'Chaos' by James Gleick, 'Complexity' by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and 'The Jungles of Randomness' by Ivars Peterson for a rounded coverage of the field - although I hear Mandelbrot's 'Fractals and Chaos' is pretty good, and he is the original source...
Why don't you tell me also ,while you are at it, how on earth can the mechanisms of the biological evolution be applied to the non-biological evolution ...absolutely ?
The biological mechanisms of ENS can't be applied (not directly, anyhow), but the underlying principle - replication with variation followed by selection; rinse & repeat - can be seen in many areas where change over time is characteristic; e.g. manufacturing, music, philosophy, software, even science itself. Not sure what you meant by 'absolutely'.
BTW, quantum mechanics contradicts your assertion that, "There are no such things such as random , coincidence ...". Radioactive decay is the canonical example of randomness, and coincidence is just two independent events occurring at roughly the same time or place.
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Why don't you tell me also ,while you are at it, how on earth can the mechanisms of the biological evolution be applied to the non-biological evolution ...absolutely ?
I'd be interested to know where you draw the line between biological and non biological. Culture and history and economics are the result of human interactions and behavior, and human beings are animals. Therefore, they are in that respect biological phenomena, however complex and unpredictable.
For some reason this topic made me think of a CBC radio segment about whether or not scientists should try to bring back extinct species like the wooly mammoth. Regardless of the answer to that question, it's really quite bizarre to contemplate in terms of evolution - one species going extinct and another species evolving with a big enough brain and the ability and motivation to extract its DNA and bring that species back into existence.
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Culture, history, economics, politics, call it what you like, they are manifestations of the product of individual biological need to optimise, exploit and dominate the local environment, convoluted with the herd requirement to collaborate.
For a simpler example, consider small cats, which live and hunt alone, and dogs, which survive better through pack hunting. If you herd a few cats together they may establish a dominance structure, but they won't collaborate. The social order of a dog pack is complex, evolving, and task-dependent, just like apes: the alpha male may intervene in disputes but tactical decisions are taken by those best suited to the task.
Where herds are purely defensive (deer, chickens...) the internal social order is less fluid and the role of the alpha male becomes more of a president than a chairman.
Regrettably, British society seems to be moving towards the chicken model, dominated by cats.
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Why don't you tell me also ,while you are at it, how on earth can the mechanisms of the biological evolution be applied to the non-biological evolution ...absolutely ?
I'd be interested to know where you draw the line between biological and non biological. Culture and history and economics are the result of human interactions and behavior, and human beings are animals. Therefore, they are in that respect biological phenomena, however complex and unpredictable.
You did not respond to my question though , even though you were trying to sort of reduce man to just biological processes :
It's much easier to say that there is actually no line to draw between biological or non-biological processes , then to try actually to draw that existing line .
How , on earth, and once again , could those biological processes give rise to the human non-biological ones then ?
I do not agree with this exclusive biological approach of man via the natural selection ,simply because Darwin's theory of evolution via the natural selection is exclusively biological : why , on earth , is it extended to human non-biological processes which occur at different levels and with different set of rules = human biological evolution and the human non-biological evolution are 2 different things though .
It's pretty obvious that there is a line we can draw between biological and non-biological processes such as : culture, spirituality, ethics and morality , politics , economics ...
The human biological and human non-biological processes are 2 different categories of evolution which do therefore occur at different levels and via different set of rules = we are not just biological processes = we are not just animals , to put it simply .
Non-human living organisms do seem to have some forms of "culture" in the shape of some primitive "development of tools " , some sort of primitive "societies " ,some sort of 'ethics " .....but they cannot be compared to the human ones, not even remotely close = we are unique in that and other sense thus , despite what materialistic scientists mainly try to prove .
For some reason this topic made me think of a CBC radio segment about whether or not scientists should try to bring back extinct species like the wooly mammoth. Regardless of the answer to that question, it's really quite bizarre to contemplate in terms of evolution - one species going extinct and another species evolving with a big enough brain and the ability and motivation to extract its DNA and bring that species back into existence
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When scientists will be able to do just that , if ever , then we will talk about that .
I do not think that extinct species can be brought back to life again , just via their DNA though : there is much more to them also than just DNA .
But then again, who knows , i might be wrong , i just think i am not .
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Did you watch "High anxieties-the mathematics of chaos " from topdocumentaryfilms.com docu i provided you with in the other thread ?
Yup; I saw that one, and several others, a while ago (about 5 years ago). The books will give you more detail - I recommend 'Chaos' by James Gleick, 'Complexity' by M. Mitchell Waldrop, and 'The Jungles of Randomness' by Ivars Peterson for a rounded coverage of the field - although I hear Mandelbrot's 'Fractals and Chaos' is pretty good, and he is the original source...
Ok, i should learn about that as well .Thanks .I am not expert on that either .
I just think of randomness as something coming out of the blue, from "outside " of the existing variables ...though= cannot therefore exist as such .
The very concept of the theory of chaos or butterfly effect exclude absolute determinism or absolute predictability in the universe,not to mention that they ,per definition, exclude any so-called theory of everything as well : i thought the biological evolution and therefore applying the mechanisms of the biological evolution to the non-biological ones absolutely is total non-sense , the more when we acknowledge the fact that even biological evolution itself via the natural selection is unpredictable and non-deterministic,so .
Why don't you tell me also ,while you are at it, how on earth can the mechanisms of the biological evolution be applied to the non-biological evolution ...absolutely ?
The biological mechanisms of ENS can't be applied (not directly, anyhow), but the underlying principle - replication with variation followed by selection; rinse & repeat - can be seen in many areas where change over time is characteristic; e.g. manufacturing, music, philosophy, software, even science itself. Not sure what you meant by 'absolutely'.
BTW, quantum mechanics contradicts your assertion that, "There are no such things such as random , coincidence ...". Radioactive decay is the canonical example of randomness, and coincidence is just two independent events occurring at roughly the same time or place.
There are indeed some common underlying principles between biological and non-biological processes , but there is no reason to apply those biological mechanisms to the non-biological ones ...absolutely , once again .
I mean thus by absolutely : always and without any restriction= without pre-conditions .
Therefore,it makes no sense whatsoever thus to apply those mechanisms of the biological evolution to the non-biological processes , just because they both happen to share some common underlying principles : Get it ?
Biological and non-biological processes of man at least are 2 different categories of processes , which do occur at different levels via different set of rules , even though they seem to share some common underlying processes ;
Otherwise , just tell me what "governs " or how is human thought , behavior , consciousness, feelings , emotions , ethics , politics , economics,art , literature , imagination , intuition ,history ,cultures, religions, thoughtstreams ....are "governed " by the exact same mechanisms of the biological evolution via the natural selection ...as some lunatics such as Dawkins and co. seem to think it is the case,in the absolute above mentioned sense .
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Dear folks :
I was referring to just that mainstream materialistic biological genetic approach of human evolution via the natural selection that's been applied to the non-biological processes such as cultures, religions,societies, ethics ,politics, economics ...by Dawkins and co ,which does make no sense to me .
That exclusive biological genetic approach of cultures, religions, societies, ethics , economics, politics ...is simply incorrect and appaling , if we take into consideration its historic antecedents in the form of Eugenics applied to races, social Darwinism ...
History repeats itself , in the hands of Dawkins and co . in relation to that exclusive biological genetic evolutionary approach of religions, cultures, ethics ....
Dawkins and co. whose exclusive biological genetic so-called evolutionary approaches of cultures, religions, ethics , societies ....give rise to some social,cultural anthropological , economic political , ethical ... theories which remind me of those previous appaling and racist destructive Eugenics and social Darwinism , in different forms ...
Don't you see what i am talking about here ?
Don't you see that the mainstream science represented by Dawkins and co. at least in that regard can lead to similar outcomes in relation to religions, ethics, societies, cultures, politics, economics ....almost exactly in the same fashion those racist Eugenics and social darwinism in the past did in relation to human races, societies, cultures ...?
That's my core point mainly .
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I just think of randomness as something coming out of the blue, from "outside " of the existing variables ...though= cannot therefore exist as such .
Randomness has a variety of definitions, none entirely satisfactory; in physics it generally means non-deterministic, and this is to do with lack of causal knowledge of the outcome of an event. In general, the outcome of a random event belongs to a known class of possible outcomes, but the specific element of the class of the outcome is not known for certain ahead of time.
The very concept of the theory of chaos or butterfly effect exclude absolute determinism or absolute predictability in the universe
Not so. As I said before, the essential and striking feature of chaos theory is that unpredictable chaos can emerge from deterministic processes, including mathematical functions, e.g. the Lorentz Attractor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor) (you can't get much more deterministic than maths).
There are indeed some common underlying principles between biological and non-biological processes , but there is no reason to apply those biological mechanisms to the non-biological ones ...absolutely , once again .
Therefore,it makes no sense whatsoever thus to apply those mechanisms of the biological evolution to the non-biological processes , just because they both happen to share some common underlying principles : Get it ?
.. just tell me what "governs " or how is human thought , behavior , consciousness, feelings , emotions , ethics , politics , economics,art , literature , imagination , intuition ,history ,cultures, religions, thoughtstreams ....are "governed " by the exact same mechanisms of the biological evolution via the natural selection ...as some lunatics such as Dawkins and co. seem to think it is the case,in the absolute above mentioned sense .
It seems to me that all they're saying is that repeated cycles of replication with variation and selection is a common and recognisable theme across a broad swathe of human activity.
Having said that, there are a number of speculative ideas of 'Social Darwinism', where some attempts have been made to directly apply evolutionary theories to sociology, or economics, or politics, etc., in terms of group competition, and so-on; but as I understand it, although the analogy can be drawn in some particular circumstances or instances, there's no persuasive evidence that it is a reliable description of the way these systems behave. If this is what you're referring to, then as far as I'm aware, the mainstream never took it seriously and has moved on - I believe these ideas are generally thought to be discredited.
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You did not respond to my question though , even though you were trying to sort of reduce man to just biological processes :
It's much easier to say that there is actually no line to draw between biological or non-biological processes , then to try actually to draw that existing line .
How , on earth, and once again , could those biological processes give rise to the human non-biological ones then ?
I do not agree with this exclusive biological approach of man via the natural selection ,simply because Darwin's theory of evolution via the natural selection is exclusively biological : why , on earth , is it extended to human non-biological processes which occur at different levels and with different set of rules = human biological evolution and the human non-biological evolution are 2 different things though .
It's pretty obvious that there is a line we can draw between biological and non-biological processes such as : culture, spirituality, ethics and morality , politics , economics ...
Well, once again, human beings are animals. You cannot call our behavior -culture, economics, even spirituality or art - "non biological". It may be complex and unpredictable, and even awesome, but is just as biological as the migration of birds or the mating habits of moose or the societies of ants or baboons. If human beings are "more than" biological, then I think the onus is on you to tell me what the "more than" is - what it consists of, where it comes from, and how it operates. When I say that, I am not trying to be a smart ass here, but there is no way to scientifically address your question unless you can explain or describe the "more than" biological aspect of human behavior.
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Dawkins and co. whose exclusive biological genetic so-called evolutionary approaches of cultures, religions, ethics , societies ....give rise to some social,cultural anthropological , economic political , ethical ... theories which remind me of those previous appaling and racist destructive Eugenics and social Darwinism , in different forms ...
Don't you see what i am talking about here ?
Not really, no. It seems to me that you're confusing the concepts with their applications. Both concepts in this case are flawed - Social Darwinism doesn't seem to describe how social processes work, and eugenics has ethical and practical flaws (it's not inherently racist - that depends on how it is applied). I can see that it is possible to use Social Darwinism as part of an argument for eugenics, but it's also possible to use a knife to stab someone or religion as an argument for war - it's the misapplication of ideas or tools that is the danger.
As far as I can see, Dawkins & co are not advocating either Social Darwinism (except, perhaps, by analogy) or eugenics; see his response to the accusation here (http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2488). How ideas are applied and abused is the issue - for example, both Islam and Christianity have some admirable underlying principles, but both have been used to justify atrocities.
Perhaps you'd like to make an argument to support or explain your assertions?
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I deplore the term social Darwinism. It is insulting to a good scientist, misleading to the sort of people who discuss it, and an oxymoron cloaked in the fatuous babble of sociology.
Darwinism is an observation, not a policy.
If you want a name for a policy of eliminating nonconformity, call it Nazism, Catholicism, Islam, Maoism, Eugenics, whatever seems closest to the chosen objective and methods. Darwinian evolution has no objective, and the method is inherent in all living organisms.
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I deplore the term social Darwinism. It is insulting to a good scientist, misleading to the sort of people who discuss it, and an oxymoron cloaked in the fatuous babble of sociology.
Darwinism is an observation, not a policy.
If you want a name for a policy of eliminating nonconformity, call it Nazism, Catholicism, Islam, Maoism, Eugenics, whatever seems closest to the chosen objective and methods. Darwinian evolution has no objective, and the method is inherent in all living organisms.
You cannot just deny the historic existence of social Darwinism though ,as a despicable historic misuse or misinterpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution ? Can you ?
Eugenics and social darwinism were in fact serious and real warnings enough from history to make any decent intelligent scientist think a million times before trying to apply biological mechanisms of evolution via the natural selection to the non-biological processes such as religions spirituality, cultures, ethics ,societies, politics, economics ....even though both the biological and the non-biological processes do have some common underlying principles they share with each other .
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I cannot deny that most evil people claim that their actions are inevitable, predestined, commanded by a higher authority, or simply misunderstood.
I do deny that Darwin had a "theory of evolution". He simply reported the observation that things evolve, along with the tautological statement that winners do better than losers. We are now beginning to understand the mechanism of random mutations that allow evolution. This is precisely opposite to the absurd hypothesis of predestination that underlies the cynical rebranding of intentional mass murder as "social Darwinism".
There are no common features between evolution and repression or genocide. Only a moron or a politician could think otherwise.
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When I took philosophy many eons ago, the professor discussed several kinds of fallacies of logic, and one of them was called the "naturalistic fallacy" which is the assumption that just because something is natural, it is also good.
Even if one observes "survival of the fittest" operating in human societies, that does not morally justify not caring for the sick and elderly, it does not justify murdering or causing pain and suffering to those who are deemed less physically fit or less intelligent or less capable in some way. As Alancalverd pointed out, the difference between Darwinism and Social Darwinism is that Social Darwinism was a policy. It was a policy based on a naturalistic fallacy.
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Dawkins and co. whose exclusive biological genetic so-called evolutionary approaches of cultures, religions, ethics , societies ....give rise to some social,cultural anthropological , economic political , ethical ... theories which remind me of those previous appaling and racist destructive Eugenics and social Darwinism , in different forms ...
Don't you see what i am talking about here ?
Not really, no. It seems to me that you're confusing the concepts with their applications. Both concepts in this case are flawed - Social Darwinism doesn't seem to describe how social processes work, and eugenics has ethical and practical flaws (it's not inherently racist - that depends on how it is applied). I can see that it is possible to use Social Darwinism as part of an argument for eugenics, but it's also possible to use a knife to stab someone or religion as an argument for war - it's the misapplication of ideas or tools that is the danger.
As far as I can see, Dawkins & co are not advocating either Social Darwinism (except, perhaps, by analogy) or eugenics; see his response to the accusation here (http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2488). How ideas are applied and abused is the issue - for example, both Islam and Christianity have some admirable underlying principles, but both have been used to justify atrocities.
Perhaps you'd like to make an argument to support or explain your assertions?
You do not seem to get my point :
I know that Eugenics, social darwinism in the past were just despicable misinterpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution .
What i meant was just that i am afraid that approaching cultures, societies, religions or spirituality , politics, ethics, economics, consciousness, feelings , emotions ..via that exclusive so-called evolutionary biological genetic perspective by Dawkins and co. mainly might result in similar outcomes, similar to those of Eugenics and social darwinism in the past .
Get that ?
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When I took philosophy many eons ago, the professor discussed several kinds of fallacies of logic, and one of them was called the "naturalistic fallacy" which is the assumption that just because something is natural, it is also good.
Even if one observes "survival of the fittest" operating in human societies, that does not morally justify not caring for the sick and elderly, it does not justify murdering or causing pain and suffering to those who are deemed less physically fit or less intelligent or less capable in some way. As Alancalverd pointed out, the difference between Darwinism and Social Darwinism is that Social Darwinism was a policy. It was a policy based on a naturalistic fallacy.
I see Eugenics and social darwinism in the past as very dangerous misinterpretations of Darwin's theory of evolution though .
Dawkins and co.mainly can trigger similar outcomes ,similar to those of the previous Eugenics and social darwinism , simply because they have been approaching cultures, ethics, religions or spirituality , societies , consciousness ....exclusively via the so-called evolutionary biological genetic approach
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I cannot deny that most evil people claim that their actions are inevitable, predestined, commanded by a higher authority, or simply misunderstood.
I do deny that Darwin had a "theory of evolution". He simply reported the observation that things evolve, along with the tautological statement that winners do better than losers. We are now beginning to understand the mechanism of random mutations that allow evolution. This is precisely opposite to the absurd hypothesis of predestination that underlies the cynical rebranding of intentional mass murder as "social Darwinism".
There are no common features between evolution and repression or genocide. Only a moron or a politician could think otherwise.
We are not talking about that, that's not the subject of this discussion at least : you are missing the point :
I just said that the exclusive so-called evolutionary biological genetic approach of cultures, religions, or spirituality , societies ....by Dawkins and co, mainly , might result in similar outcomes , similar to those of Eugenics and social darwinism in the past .
Besides, biological and the non-biological evolutions are 2 different things ,which occur at different levels via different set of "rules " ,once again : so, that exclusive materialistic approach of life in general as just biological processes is not only very dangerous , but also incorrect : that materialistic approach has more to do with materialism as a world view than with science proper .
Comprende,amigo ?
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Quote :
"The theory of evolution ,however, has brought despair & anxiety , instead of hope & enthusiasm for life , to the modern world .
The reason is to be found in the unwarranted modern assumption that man's present structure , mental as well as physiological , is the last word in biological evolution , and that death , regarded as a biological event , has no constructive meaning .
The world of today needs a Rumi to create an attitude of hope , and to kindle the fire of enthusiasm for life .
His inimitable lines may be quoted here ;
First man appeared in the class of inorganic things,
Next , he passed therefrom into that of plants ,
For years , he lived as one of the plants ,
Remembering naught of his inorganic state so different
And when he passed from the vegetive to the animal state
he had no remembrance of his state as a plant
Except the inclination he felt to the world of plants
Especially at the time of spring & sweet flowers
Like the inclination of infants to towards their mothers
which know not the cause of their inclination to the breast.
Again the great creator ,as you know
Drew man man out of the animal into the human state
Thus man passed from one order of nature to another..."
........... End quote .
Source : The reconstruction of religious thought in islam by Muhammad Iqbal
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For as long as you think that evolution has rules, you will fail to understand it.
The "assumption that man is the last word in evolution" comes from religion, not science. There is no material evidence to suggest it, only the vanity of fools and their demagogues. Other species have evolved since homo sapiens appeared, and we have no reason to believe that another species cannot evolve within our own genus.
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I cannot deny that most evil people claim that their actions are inevitable, predestined, commanded by a higher authority, or simply misunderstood.
I do deny that Darwin had a "theory of evolution". He simply reported the observation that things evolve, along with the tautological statement that winners do better than losers. We are now beginning to understand the mechanism of random mutations that allow evolution. This is precisely opposite to the absurd hypothesis of predestination that underlies the cynical rebranding of intentional mass murder as "social Darwinism".
There are no common features between evolution and repression or genocide. Only a moron or a politician could think otherwise.
We are not talking about that, that's not the subject of this discussion at least : you are missing the point :
I just said that the exclusive so-called evolutionary biological genetic approach of cultures, religions, or spirituality , societies ....by Dawkins and co, mainly , might result in similar outcomes , similar to those of Eugenics and social darwinism in the past .
Besides, biological and the non-biological evolutions are 2 different things ,which occur at different levels via different set of "rules " ,once again : so, that exclusive materialistic approach of life in general as just biological processes is not only very dangerous , but also incorrect : that materialistic approach has more to do with materialism as a world view than with science proper .
Comprende,amigo ?
I don't think he's missing the point at all, and I'm not sure how he could have stated his answer any more clearly or directly.
Blaming Darwinism for Eugenics is like blaming physics for nuclear weapons. This is essentially a medieval view, the idea that knowledge is dangerous because of how it might be used or influence people. And morally, it shifts responsibility from the person to an inanimate object - "if the knife hadn't been there, I wouldn't have stabbed him." Objects cannot act as moral agents.
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For as long as you think that evolution has rules, you will fail to understand it.
The "assumption that man is the last word in evolution" comes from religion, not science. There is no material evidence to suggest it, only the vanity of fools and their demagogues. Other species have evolved since homo sapiens appeared, and we have no reason to believe that another species cannot evolve within our own genus.
That's why i confined "rules " to that .
Second : the man wrote that in the 1930's-1935's , i guess : he was just the man of his age : eugenics and social darwinism in prior periods to his were even worse ...
Third > i just wanted to post those lines of Rumi about evolution ...that's all .
P.S.: It's mainly thanks to the evolutionary spirit of islam that early muslims did discover evolution, centuries before Darwin was even born , as they were able to "invent " science itself and practice it as well , thanks to that Qur'anic epistemology , science as a religious duty in islam, as a form of worship of God in islam at least ...see that other thread on the subject you happened to participate in , ironically enough , in order to try to cure yourself from those silly stereotypes of yours concerning religion , or concerning just islam in this case then .
Good luck undeed..
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I cannot deny that most evil people claim that their actions are inevitable, predestined, commanded by a higher authority, or simply misunderstood.
I do deny that Darwin had a "theory of evolution". He simply reported the observation that things evolve, along with the tautological statement that winners do better than losers. We are now beginning to understand the mechanism of random mutations that allow evolution. This is precisely opposite to the absurd hypothesis of predestination that underlies the cynical rebranding of intentional mass murder as "social Darwinism".
There are no common features between evolution and repression or genocide. Only a moron or a politician could think otherwise.
We are not talking about that, that's not the subject of this discussion at least : you are missing the point :
I just said that the exclusive so-called evolutionary biological genetic approach of cultures, religions, or spirituality , societies ....by Dawkins and co, mainly , might result in similar outcomes , similar to those of Eugenics and social darwinism in the past .
Besides, biological and the non-biological evolutions are 2 different things ,which occur at different levels via different set of "rules " ,once again : so, that exclusive materialistic approach of life in general as just biological processes is not only very dangerous , but also incorrect : that materialistic approach has more to do with materialism as a world view than with science proper .
Comprende,amigo ?
I don't think he's missing the point at all, and I'm not sure how he could have stated his answer any more clearly or directly.
Blaming Darwinism for Eugenics is like blaming physics for nuclear weapons. This is essentially a medieval view, the idea that knowledge is dangerous because of how it might be used or influence people. And morally, it shifts responsibility from the person to an inanimate object - "if the knife hadn't been there, I wouldn't have stabbed him." Objects cannot act as moral agents.
[/quote]
Halloo : i was certainly not blaming darwinism for eugenics and social darwinism : where did you detetct that? , i wonder .
You are putting words in my mouth i can neither taste nor swallow , let alone that they would be mine .
I just said that the current misinterpretations of the biological evolution by Dawkins and co might result in similar outcomes to those of the other previous misnterpretations of evolutions by the "makers " of eugenics and social darwinism : see the differense ? hope so indeed .
Besides, i used the word dangerous relating certainly not to knowledge , but only to those previous eugenics , social darwinism and to the current Dawkinian and co misinterpretations of evolution : get my point ? I think you are intelligent enough to grasp just that , aren't you ?
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It would be a brave man or a fool who asserts that Dawkins misinterprets evolution.
Assuming you are a brave man, perhaps you could enlighten us (and Prof Dawkins) as to the detail of his error?
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It would be a brave man or a fool who asserts that Dawkins misinterprets evolution.
Assuming you are a brave man, perhaps you could enlighten us (and Prof Dawkins) as to the detail of his error?
Dawkins is just a man of his time , and just a product of his materialism as a world view in science , and a product of his own culture , relatively speaking : he's not superman : only very very very few geniuses are able to rise above their own world views , above their social ,mental and cultural constructs indeed.
I am not talking about Dawkins' purely scientific work , i do appreciate and learn a lot from , i am maninly talking about his interpretations of that scientific work of his and of others , about the fact when he crosses the boundaries of science , and especially when he applies his so-called evolutionary biological genetic approach to religions spirituality, ethics , cultures , ....
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We seem to be approaching an answer, for a change. Can you take that big leap and give just one concrete example of where Dawkins has misinterpreted evolution? Remember that evolution is an observation of change, so what we are looking for is a change in, say, a religion, that Dawkins has reported incorrectly or ascribed to some supernatural force.
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We seem to be approaching an answer, for a change. Can you take that big leap and give just one concrete example of where Dawkins has misinterpreted evolution? Remember that evolution is an observation of change, so what we are looking for is a change in, say, a religion, that Dawkins has reported incorrectly or ascribed to some supernatural force.
Well,ok,this is a wide open issue as wide and big as the US Grand Canyon , i will give you just this one relatively detailed example in the form of the main contents of a certain book of Dawkins ,or what i can recall from it at least , because i read that book of his some time ago , for the time being then : that's more than enough :
In his "Selfish Gene " (Dawkins tried in that book of his to apply his so-called evolutionary genetic social theory to altruism , for example , among other things like applying his so-called evolutionary genetic social theory to man , life , society , culture , ethics ,religion ....in general .
Let's just talk about the notion of altruism he talked about in that book of his : he emphacised the fact , from the very beginning, that his selfish gene notion was of course just a metaphor indeed , in the sense that genes are unconscious entities without purpose or intention motive , i agree with that , and that the notion of selfishness or altruism he used were just metaphors as well , which referred to the effects of such notions, to the apparent altruistic behavior of animals , for example, not to the actual philosophical or psychological altruism concept as a motive or intention )...........
In that book of his thus , he talked in great detail about the "fact " that the biological evolution is the only valid explanation of our origins , of man's origins , not of life's origins of course that's another subject evolution does not cover as such indeed , and that all other attempts to explain our origins (He refers here to religions mainly ) , prior to the discovery of evolution must be not only be ignored as such, simply because they are worthless, but they must also be totally discarded .
Then, he tried to explain what evolution is and how evolution works .
After that , he went straight to mentioning some scientific studies of his and of of others on the subject of "altruism " ( He was only interested in the effects of altruism on the group , in the apparanet altruistic behavior of animals though, not in altruism as such , as a motive or intention , once again ) ...
Anyway: he mentioned those studies concerning the effects of the apparent altruistic behaviors of animals ....on the group , and he found out via many convincing facts about the "altruistic " behavior of animals in that regard in their wild habitat mainly : he mentioned also studies regarding birds , ....which "proved " the fact that the apparent altruistic behavior of animals ....was in fact just selfishness in disguise = which means that the individual animals' ...behaviors cannot be regarded as beneficial or otherwise to the group = he disproved that way that group theory in the sense that the individual animals ....would behave for the best interests of the whole group = they seemed to behave just in their own interests thus ...That's some sort of a phenomenological approach which is only interested in the effects of certain phenomena : but those were just interpretations of Dawkins in relation to the behaviors of animals ..., the latters can also be interpreted otherwise .
In short : he proved that that apparent altruistic behavior of those animals was just selfishness in disguise in fact : ok, there is nothing to say about that,except the above : that was good scientific work indeed : fascinating even : but the interpretation of those studies by Dawkins is not the only "valid " one : but that was just related to the apparent altruistic behavior of animals ...not to their actual altruistic "intentions or motives " we may never know anything about ,assuming they have ones , in the first place to begin with .
The real problems start to rise when he applies his so-called evolutionary genetic social theory to man : human family , human societies , cultures, religions, ethics ... :
His reasoning was as follows :
We cannot absolutely say that since there is no real altruistic behavior to be found in animals , and in other non-human living species , therefore , altruism cannot be found in huamans' behavior , no , i agree with this at least .
His argumentation was thus more like :
Since there is no real altruism to be found in animals ' behaviors ....., we can expect to find the same results at the level of man , simply because they all were subjected to the same evolution .
Since altruism as such does not exist in nature , then it's pretty logical to assume that altruism does not exist as such at the level of man as well , simply because man also went through the same biological evolution via the natural selection and DNA : H
e then addressed man, the human family and how kids behave in relation to their parents by unconsciously black-mainling their parents in order to get awards , love ....how parents behave with their kids, how and why they invest in them for unconscious selfish reasons under the unconscious camouflage illusions of love , care ...a long story thus which means that altruism does not exist in the behaviors , societies or cultures ...of man as well , that that apparent altruism of man is just selfishness in disguise as well ...
Then afterwards , he applied his so-called evolutionary genetic social theory , in the sense that evolution via DNA and the natural selection shapes all living species, to ourselves , including to our religions as just survival strategies , to the apparent altruistic behavior of man , and to ethics , societies , cultures, intellect ...
He develops what he coined it to be called "memes " to try to "explain " the evolution of cultures, thoughts ideas,societies, cultures ...= "memes " as so-called units of ideas or units of thought that evolve in the same way the genetic replication via evolution does , the gene as the biological unity of evolution by the natural selection thus ,....
He talks about the biological or neurological origin of religion , for example , and how religion came to exist that way via evolution, religion as a survival strategy ....while saying that the biological nature of religion cannot be understood as something innate to man , not in the sense that it validates religion at least ...= as a materialist and atheist , he cannot acknolwdge the fact that man ,man's behaviors , cultures, societies, religions , ethics ....have indeed 2 sides : the biological and immaterial , he reduces them all to just biological processes.
In short :
He concluded that altruism had never existed neither in nature nor in the whole history of mankind , and therefore we should try to develop it in ourselves and in the next generations = a paradox = since all our evolution and behavior , thought , cultures, societies , ethics ..... are shaped by the genetic biological evolution via the natural selection, we logically have no say in that , how can we then develop something voluntarily in ourselves and in others , via our free will , if everything is determined by evolution then ? Free will has even no place in evolution :
Dawkins , as a materialist of course ,thinks that man is all about just biological genetic processes shaped by evolution ...so, he contradicts himself in many ways , when he copies the behaviors of non-human living species to man that way , an approach or so-called evolutionary genetic social theory of his which extends the biological evolution of man to man's non-biological sides of consciousness, altruism, behaviors, societies , altruism , cultures , religions ....
He should just confine himself to the material physical biological sides of life , man ...instead of applying the mechanisms of the biological evolution to the non-material sides of the behavior, consciousness, cultures, religions, societies ...of man .
I'll talk to you about Dawkins' further misinterpretations of the biological evolution later on, after you read the above :
Deal ?
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So Darwinism is fine as long as we restrict our discussion to things like the pancreas, but the brain, human behavior individually and in groups, is off limits, either because it "might result in similar outcomes , similar to those of Eugenics and social darwinism in the past" or because, Darwinism simply can't, and never will be able to, fully explain these supposedly immaterial, ethereal processes? Is that your position?
In regards to altruism, is it possible that Dawkins could have just been wrong or short sighted in his attribution of altruism to expected reciprocity, but not necessarily wrong in attempting to study it in terms of evolutionary biology? There are many human traits or behaviors which would not appear to provide much selective advantage, musical ability being one of them, yet some biologists believe they may be fortunate by-products of other cognitive functions that were selected for.In addition, there are benefits and explanations for altruism besides expected reciprocity.
The biological basis for empathy and altruism may have its roots in brain processes involved in learning. Cells called mirror neurons light up in your brain when you witness a person performing an action, as if you were actually performing that action yourself, whether lifting a teacup or throwing a baseball. If I witness you do something that results in pain and injury, I can learn from your experience without having to injure myself, but in order to make my observation truly memorable and negatively reinforcing, I have to "feel your pain" so to speak. But the natural response to pain, ones own and perhaps others, is to try to stop it.
Another advantage to being sensitive to the emotional states of others is if I know how they feel, I can better predict what they will do, whether they will share their food with me or hit me over the head with a club.
FMRI imaging studies can demonstrate empathetic pain. Physical pain causes activity in two specific areas of the cortex. There’s increased activity in the touch sensitive areas of the somatosensory cortex at the top of the brain, and also in a spot in the temporal region. The greater the pain, the greater the activity in both areas. Subjects who are shown pictures of, say, a person having a car door slammed on his fingers, show no activation in the higher region – which makes sense since there is clearly a difference in your body's reaction to having a car door slammed on your own hand and someone else’s - but people still show activity in the temporal pain region. Some people show this effect more than others. The greater the activity in that region on the scan, the more subjects rated the image as unpleasant or painful to view. Sociopaths have been shown to lack an automatic empathic brain response on these imaging studies.
If wanting to help others or relieve their suffering because of our empathic pain response still seems selfish to you, so be it. But I’m glad humans possess this trait, whether endowed by evolution or God.
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So Darwinism is fine as long as we restrict our discussion to things like the pancreas, but the brain, human behavior individually and in groups, is off limits, either because it "might result in similar outcomes , similar to those of Eugenics and social darwinism in the past" or because, Darwinism simply can't, and never will be able to, fully explain these supposedly immaterial, ethereal processes? Is that your position?
Who said that ? You are putting words in my mouth again : i see a pattern here :
Anyway: i just said that the biological genetic evolution via the natural selection cannot be applied to the non-biological processes of man in the absolute sense , especially not in the way Dawkins and co. do just that .
Need some examples ? Shoot.
If thoughts , feelings , love , emotions, empathy , solidarity ....consciousness ...are not immaterial , despite their biological neurological hormonal ...side or basis , then , what are they exactly ? To say that they are just biological processes is meaningless : they cannot be generated by biological processes ,no way : biological processes cannot generate but biological processes , not something entirely different , it's the other way around in fact = Feelings , consciousness, emotions, love ... generate those biological processes after being informed by our senses about their corresponding inputs ,while interacting with them at the same time . i guess.
When i hear some bad news on the phone, for example , i feel sad and can ever have tears in my eyes as a result : my hearing nerves in my ear just conduct those nerve signals to my brain ,which make me , as a person, realise those sensory inputs are "bad" (sensory inputs are neutral in fact = biologically neutral ) , which trigger my biological process that produces my tears .....= The conscious sadness feeling generates the biological process giving birth to my tears ...after the fact that my nervous system informed my consciousness of that input via my ears .
In regards to altruism, is it possible that Dawkins could have just been wrong or short sighted in his attribution of altruism to expected reciprocity, but not necessarily wrong in attempting to study it in terms of evolutionary biology? There are many human traits or behaviors which would not appear to provide much selective advantage, musical ability being one of them, yet some biologists believe they may be fortunate by-products of other cognitive functions that were selected for.In addition, there are benefits and explanations for altruism besides expected reciprocity.
Well, Dawkins and co. just push the logical limits of the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolutions to their logical ends , in almost the same fashion David Hume did just similar things in relation to the empricism of John Locke at least, as post -modernism is the logical outcome or logical limit of modernism = different examples from different areas , in order to make you understand what i am saying .
The other scientists who prefer to stand outside that Dawkins and co . club in that regard are in fact schizophrenic when it comes to the logical implications of that materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution .
Therefore, Dawkins was not making any mistakes : he was just adhering to the real materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution , by pushing it to its logical limits : the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution cannot but conclude , for example, that there is no altruism , no free will, no good or evil as such...
Regarding the latter : i am referring mainly to Spinoza's monism that was later on recuperated by materialism which gave birth to materialistic monism in modern science and elsewhere , in the sense that neither good nor evil do exist as such : what benefits us is good ,and what's not good for us is bad = good and evil exist only in this sense then = a perfectly logical assumption in evolutionary terms = utilitarianism or pragmatism= what's good for us is true , and what's bad for us ,both in the above mentioned sense, is untrue : good and evil do not exist as such or rather they are meaningless in evolutionary terms even thus = meaningless in the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution , to be more precize = Dawkins and co. are in fact the ones who are consistent with themselves and with their materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution thus .
The biological basis for empathy and altruism may have its roots in brain processes involved in learning. Cells called mirror neurons light up in your brain when you witness a person performing an action, as if you were actually performing that action yourself, whether lifting a teacup or throwing a baseball. If I witness you do something that results in pain and injury, I can learn from your experience without having to injure myself, but in order to make my observation truly memorable and negatively reinforcing, I have to "feel your pain" so to speak. But the natural response to pain, ones own and perhaps others, is to try to stop it.
Well, yeah : but if we apply only the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution to what you said ,then, it's pretty logical to assume that neither altruism, nor empathy do exist as such , let alone the rest , including pain, feelings , love , good or bad behavior, free will, consciousness ...= they are just mechanical survival strategies = just illusions , no matter how "real " they might appear to be to us .
Another advantage to being sensitive to the emotional states of others is if I know how they feel, I can better predict what they will do, whether they will share their food with me or hit me over the head with a club.
That's just the instinctive pragmatic utilitarianist reading of empathy though : you have to sort of "read " your fellow humans and the environment well enough , if you wanna make efficient "decisions " based on that reading , in order to act up on them , and survive as a result .
I would share my food with you , i will not hit you on the head haha , do not worry , if my own survival does not get threatened by sharing my food with you though :
I might even share my food with you at the very expense of my own survival , if i can fully grasp and act up on the potential possibility that your survival might be more beneficial to yourself and to others as well , more than my own survival can be = that's a potential behavior the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution can never be able to explain as such , or it would just try to "rationalize " it somehow in the same way we "rationalize " or justify legetimize our bad behaviors by deceiving ourselves that way in the form of trying to find rational justifications and excuses for those bad behaviors of ours , in order to avoid guilt , responsibilty , accountability ...
FMRI imaging studies can demonstrate empathetic pain. Physical pain causes activity in two specific areas of the cortex. There’s increased activity in the touch sensitive areas of the somatosensory cortex at the top of the brain, and also in a spot in the temporal region. The greater the pain, the greater the activity in both areas. Subjects who are shown pictures of, say, a person having a car door slammed on his fingers, show no activation in the higher region – which makes sense since there is clearly a difference in your body's reaction to having a car door slammed on your own hand and someone else’s - but people still show activity in the temporal pain region. Some people show this effect more than others. The greater the activity in that region on the scan, the more subjects rated the image as unpleasant or painful to view. Sociopaths have been shown to lack an automatic empathic brain response on these imaging studies.
Ok, the interesting top docu here below shows similar findings to what you said here above , scientists studying good and bad behaviors , a certain scientist in the video will find out about his own psychopathic "nature " via a brain scan which revealed the same brain patherns psychopaths displayed , while that scientist was lucky enough not to be a psychopath on the reality ground despite that : his own environment played a big role in that :
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/are-you-good-or-evil/
Look, i am aware of the neurological biological , hormonal ...basis of our behaviors , empathy , ....but thye cannot be fully explained just via that evolutionary biological neurological approach , and certainly not via that reductionistic mechanical materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution :
Take the example of someone trying to save a child from drowning in a river , sea ...by risking his / her own life , and by eventually dying in the process : what would be the materialistic so-called evolutionary explanation of that behavior ?
Matrialists would come up with perfectly rational explanations for that behavior , and might even succeed in making it fit into their own interpretation of the biological evolution , by saying , for example, that the person savior, in this case, was just being driven by his biological instinctive evolutionary empathy he / she could not ignore or escape from : the outcome of that behavior can be maximised by the success of the person in question via his / her swimming skills , his / her efficiency and calm ...which make her / him be able to survive after rescuing the child ....but , if he /she would go down , then that would be the result of his / her miscalculations of his / her own ability to survive such a risky attempt ...
But materialists would never say : that person savior was in fact risking his /her life regardless of the outcome ....regardless of his / her potential swimming and other survival skills ...just because he / she cannot tolerate to see a child drowning ...
In short : the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution fails pathetically at many levels, fails to explain progress which is in fact meaningless in evolutionary terms, fails to explain love , empathy , consciousness ....and most of the rest.
Feelings, love , consciousness, empathy . .....do not only have biological , but also non-biological sides ,materialism can never fully explain, just partly interpret in accordance with its materialistic world view ...
If wanting to help others or relieve their suffering because of our empathic pain response still seems selfish to you, so be it. But I’m glad humans possess this trait, whether endowed by evolution or God.
Right : you just put your finger on the core issue of our discussion :
If we just accept the materialistic interpretation of the biological evolution at face value , then it's pretty logical to say that empathy , love , consciousness, feelings , altruism ...are just survival strategies = just illusions in fact , not to mention the inherent intrinsic paradox or contradiction contained in those materialistic so-called evolutionary assumptions , in the sense that if the above are all just illusions , then are therefore all our knowledge , including the scientific one, including our knowledge of evolution itself even ...empathy , love ...via our biological senses thus ,are just illusions and pragmatic survival strategies , we deceive ourselves and others in the process into believing they are real ...........while our senses just give us a representation of reality in the process in fact , our consciousness acts up on , by trying to make sense of them ...
For example , what do my own senses tell me about you ,via just this limited communication of ours ? They just give me a certain representation of reality , my own consciousness tries to make sense of : right or wrong .
I cannot see you , so, i cannot read your body language , for example ,which might give me some additional information about you or about what you're saying , so, i just rely on my own consciousness this limited way to make sense of you, as a person, and of your words .....my own senses cannot fully give me ....even if you were standing in front of me, in real life .
Thanks, appreciate indeed .
Take care
Kind regards
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Why then is the theory of evolution extended to cultures, societies, religions or spirituality , politics, philosophy, economics, intellect, psychology, human consciousness, ....?
If you use a term like evolution in a biology forum it means something very particular: evolution by natural selection.
When you use evolution in a political forum the term is open to many meanings because the word evolution existed before the concept of biological evolution. In this context, you can hardly even accuse the author of misusing a word.
I think people extend it because they don't really understand it. Also, because evolution is widely accepted in science, a paper called The Evolution of Hairdressing seems to have more credibility than one called The History of Hairdressing. I'm sure the author of the first would justify their title by claiming to write about how hairdressing had changed (aka evolved) over time.
cheryl j described it above. I think writers are falling for the "naturalistic fallacy" by misusing the word evolution (with the implication of 'evolution by natural selection').
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...But materialists would never say : that person savior was in fact risking his /her life regardless of the outcome ....regardless of his / her potential swimming and other survival skills ...just because he / she cannot tolerate to see a child drowning ...
Of course they would; they would also answer the question of why he/she can't tolerate to see a child drowning with the evolutionary answer, kin altruism, driven by kin selection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection). There is a strong evolutionary drive to preserve the young, largely because, in family or tribal groups, they are the future, and they are kin - they are likely to carry your genes. Simplistically, the gene lines of groups that didn't have that protective behaviour didn't survive to the present. In the modern world, the child may not be kin, but, in general, the drive to protect is still there.
It doesn't make us robots - we feel these things emotionally, but the underlying drives are rooted deep in evolutionary history.
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Why then is the theory of evolution extended to cultures, societies, religions or spirituality , politics, philosophy, economics, intellect, psychology, human consciousness, ....?
If you use a term like evolution in a biology forum it means something very particular: evolution by natural selection.
When you use evolution in a political forum the term is open to many meanings because the word evolution existed before the concept of biological evolution. In this context, you can hardly even accuse the author of misusing a word.
I think people extend it because they don't really understand it. Also, because evolution is widely accepted in science, a paper called The Evolution of Hairdressing seems to have more credibility than one called The History of Hairdressing. I'm sure the author of the first would justify their title by claiming to write about how hairdressing had changed (aka evolved) over time.
cheryl j described it above. I think writers are falling for the "naturalistic fallacy" by misusing the word evolution (with the implication of 'evolution by natural selection').
Well, for your info :
Dawkins and co. , plus the rest of the materialistic scientists ,philosophers such as Daniel Dennett ....do find it perfectly ok to extend the biological evolution to cultures, religions or spirituality , politics , society ...
The mainstream science do just that ...simply because science is dominated by the materialistic paradigm stating that reality is exclusively material : that life is just a matter of biological processes ...that consciousness is therefore just a biological process created by the brain ...
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...But materialists would never say : that person savior was in fact risking his /her life regardless of the outcome ....regardless of his / her potential swimming and other survival skills ...just because he / she cannot tolerate to see a child drowning ...
Of course they would; they would also answer the question of why he/she can't tolerate to see a child drowning with the evolutionary answer, kin altruism, driven by kin selection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection). There is a strong evolutionary drive to preserve the young, largely because, in family or tribal groups, they are the future, and they are kin - they are likely to carry your genes. Simplistically, the gene lines of groups that didn't have that protective behaviour didn't survive to the present. In the modern world, the child may not be kin, but, in general, the drive to protect is still there
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I will read that link ,later on : that's about siblings,relatives ... though .
There were 2 cases like that in Holland a decade ago, i guess, when i was living there , where 2 foreign kids actually drowned ,because nobody tried to rescue them, even though many people were there to witness those tragedies :those bloody immoral selfish Dutch cowards ....not to mention the famous case when UN Dutch soldiers did deliberately not protect the muslims in Srebrenica from the Serbs ....the latter is another different example of that extremely immoral type of human selfishness ...Why didn't they get driven by that innate so-called evolutionary drive to rescue those kids and people then ?
Why should or would one try to protect a total stranger child from drowning , in the so-called evolutionary terms ? by risking one's own life and maybe by eventually dying in the process ? You tell me .
What evolutionary benefits would that serve ? protecting the next generation ? If i would try to rescue a given total stranger child from drowning , i would not do that ,in order to protect the next generation he/she might represent ...
I would do that , simply because i cannot let any kid drown , mine or that of anyoneelse for that matter,even it that would result in my own death in the process .I was once extremely shocked by a story told by some Moroccans when i was there on the beach: they described how a man drowned in front of many people ,and no one tried to move a single finger to rescue him ...
After the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima , i saw , on a video, the reconstruction of some horrible facts , like the one that shocked me so much when a woman deliberately let her own burning child die , by moving away from her ,while crying : sorry , darling , i cannot help you ...I am so sorry .
It doesn't make us robots - we feel these things emotionally, but the underlying drives are rooted deep in evolutionary history.
No,on the contrary , it does make us some sort of robots : if we would apply that materialistic interpretation of evolution at least , we would only logically conclude that altruism, feelings , emotions, consciousness, love ....are just illusions , just built -in illusions in our systems we get fooled by , no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us .
Get real, dude .
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There were 2 cases like that in Holland a decade ago, i guess, when i was living there , where 2 foreign kids actually drowned ,because nobody tried to rescue them, even though many people were there to witness those tragedies :those bloody immoral selfish Dutch cowards ....not to mention the famous case when UN Dutch soldiers did deliberately not protect the muslims in Srebrenica from the Serbs ....the latter is another different example of that extremely immoral type of human selfishness ...Why didn't they get driven by that innate so-called evolutionary drive to rescue those kids and people then ?
There are many reasons why such drives might be overridden - cultural differences (dehumanising outgroups), conflict between drives (self-preservation+fear vs altruism), group paralysis (each individual expects action from someone better able to respond), genetic & developmental human variablility affecting the strength and expression of these drives, etc., etc.
The Srebrenica was a far more complex situation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre#4_June_and_6.E2.80.9311_July_1995:_Serb_take-over_of_Srebrenica) than the simple urgency of a child drowning, so I wouldn't lump them together. Your simplistic judgement of the Dutch UNPROFOR troops as immoral selfish cowards seems unlikely to be applicable to more than a few of them; I doubt they all coincidentally happened to be immoral selfish cowards, or that they were selected for those traits; so it's important to understand why they behaved the way they did if we want to learn how to avoid that kind of inaction in future.
Why should or would one try to protect a total stranger child from drowning , in the so-called evolutionary terms ? by risking one's own life and maybe by eventually dying in the process ? You tell me .
I already did.
What evolutionary benefits would that serve ? protecting the next generation ? If i would try to rescue a given total stranger child from drowning , i would not do that ,in order to protect the next generation he/she might represent ...
I would do that , simply because i cannot let any kid drown , mine or that of anyoneelse for that matter,even it that would result in my own death in the process .
Because you have a strong kin altruism drive. As I said, the urge to preserve can't automatically distinguish kin, it evolved when that was very likely. It can be emotionally enhanced if you (not you specifically, but people) recognise your own, or suppressed if you have identified them as other, or dehumanised them, or overridden by stronger drives. If you have time to rationalise the situation, you might behave differently.
It doesn't make us robots - we feel these things emotionally, but the underlying drives are rooted deep in evolutionary history.
No,on the contrary , it does make us some sort of robots : if we would apply that materialistic interpretation of evolution at least , we would only logically conclude that altruism, feelings , emotions, consciousness, love ....are just illusions , just built -in illusions in our systems we get fooled by , no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us .
Get real, dude .
Perhaps I should have qualified it as 'unfeeling robots'. Whatever, it's semantic word games; if you need to believe that materialism makes emergent phenomena illusions, then go right ahead.
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I read about an interesting experiment last year that demonstrated that rats would attempt to help another rat if it saw it trapped and in distress and it knew how to free it. How cute is that?
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I read about an interesting experiment last year that demonstrated that rats would attempt to help another rat if it saw it trapped and in distress and it knew how to free it. How cute is that?
Immature rats also emit high pitched (inaudible to us) squeaks when playing together - the patterns and timing of the squeaks is very similar to the laughs and giggles of higher primates when playing...
Rats are also as good as us at decision-making based on multi-sensory cues (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120313190056.htm).
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I read about an interesting experiment last year that demonstrated that rats would attempt to help another rat if it saw it trapped and in distress and it knew how to free it. How cute is that?
There is nothing cute about rats though haha .
Dawkins and co. would say that that apparent altruistic behavior (appearances are certainly deceptive indeed )of those rats is just selfishness in disguise .= Dawkins and co are the only ones who really do make the right materialistic interpretations of evolution though indeed = the rest of those atheist scientists are in fact just schizophrenic when it comes to just that - they do not realise their own contradictory double interpretations of evolution = they talk about evolution in the same breath as they mention love , altruism, freedom ,free will ...as real concepts ,while the materialistic interpretation of evolution is the very negation of those concepts as just survival strategies = illusions in fact .
Dawkins says even that we are just machines robots , driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution , a startling " fact " he "discovered" and wanted therefore to share with the rest of the world haha = if we are just robots machines , rats are even "lower or inferior " machines, even though such judgements of value are in fact meaningless in the materialistic evolutionary terms at least .
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There were 2 cases like that in Holland a decade ago, i guess, when i was living there , where 2 foreign kids actually drowned ,because nobody tried to rescue them, even though many people were there to witness those tragedies :those bloody immoral selfish Dutch cowards ....not to mention the famous case when UN Dutch soldiers did deliberately not protect the muslims in Srebrenica from the Serbs ....the latter is another different example of that extremely immoral type of human selfishness ...Why didn't they get driven by that innate so-called evolutionary drive to rescue those kids and people then ?
There are many reasons why such drives might be overridden - cultural differences (dehumanising outgroups), conflict between drives (self-preservation+fear vs altruism), group paralysis (each individual expects action from someone better able to respond), genetic & developmental human variablility affecting the strength and expression of these drives, etc., etc.
Ok, you can try to rationalize your way to what you wanna say all you want , but ,you seem to be missing the core point of my words :
All those evolutionary mechanisms you were trying to put on the discussion table as "arguments " to support your claims are just that : unconscious purposeless evolutionary mechanisms or just mechanical survival strategies .
As a true materialist , you should in fact stick to the materialistic interpretation of evolution only Dawkins and co are able to provide ,if you wanna be consistent with yourself at least = there is in fact no altruism, no love , no consciousness, no feelings , no emotions,...as such , there are also no such things as good and evil as such either ....= they are just sophisticated pragmatic survival strategies = illusions we get fooled by and we confuse them with reality , in order to be able to ...survive .
Therefore, i think that only Dawkins and co are the true materialists evolutionists , in the materialistic sense at least thus .
The Srebrenica was a far more complex situation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre#4_June_and_6.E2.80.9311_July_1995:_Serb_take-over_of_Srebrenica) than the simple urgency of a child drowning, so I wouldn't lump them together. Your simplistic judgement of the Dutch UNPROFOR troops as immoral selfish cowards seems unlikely to be applicable to more than a few of them; I doubt they all coincidentally happened to be immoral selfish cowards, or that they were selected for those traits; so it's important to understand why they behaved the way they did if we want to learn how to avoid that kind of inaction in future
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I am wel aware of the difference between the "simple " (A drowining child is no simple matter , but i know what you mean though ) case of a drowning kid ,and between the bahaviors of Ducthbat in Srebrenica : i was referring only to that particular immoral coward behavior of theirs as a group though : i know that they might not be all immoral selfish cowards , in the absolute sense , simply because nobody is : you might turn out to display a certain apparent immoral selfish coward behavior under certain circumstances ,and an apparent totally brave one under other circumstances : i know what relativism and context mean ...
It was appaling what those Dutch soldiers did , they might just have been obeying orders ,as the nazis used to say , but one should disobey such orders sometimes ...people should also try not to be influenced by the behaviors of the group or crowd as well ,the psychology of the crowds tries to explain , but that's indeed a difficult thing to do ...
Anyway , that's not the point : the point is : those Ducth soldiers behaved exactly in the same way the materialistic interpretation of evolution tells us they would do, in the sense that those soldiers were just survival machines ,so : if they had some better or higher morality,or higher levels of consciousness shaped by higher world views than theirs , they might have behaved differently , maybe , just maybe ...and that way they would be mocking , refuting , ridiculing ...that materialistic interpretation of evolution, without even realising that fact .
And no, you cannot change the human nature , you can try to improve it while recognizing it as such at the same time, but you cannot change it or suppress it , let alone that you can "justify" the human nature via phony excuses ...you cannot defend the undefensible ....Otherwise , there would be no need for any sort of fair or not Nuremberg or any other trials ...for that matter .
Why should or would one try to protect a total stranger child from drowning , in the so-called evolutionary terms ? by risking one's own life and maybe by eventually dying in the process ? You tell me .
I already did.
What evolutionary benefits would that serve ? protecting the next generation ? If i would try to rescue a given total stranger child from drowning , i would not do that ,in order to protect the next generation he/she might represent ...
I would do that , simply because i cannot let any kid drown , mine or that of anyoneelse for that matter,even it that would result in my own death in the process .
Because you have a strong kin altruism drive. As I said, the urge to preserve can't automatically distinguish kin, it evolved when that was very likely. It can be emotionally enhanced if you (not you specifically, but people) recognise your own, or suppressed if you have identified them as other, or dehumanised them, or overridden by stronger drives. If you have time to rationalise the situation, you might behave differently.
No, sorry , those were just rational justifications for my potential behavior you were trying to develop : those factors you talked about can indeed shape our thought and thus our bahavior ,but i think that the behaviors of people in relation to similar events are more shaped by high morality , high consciousness , high world views ...through which one can try to improve one's human nature without any absolute guarantee of better or of the right behaviors in similar situations ..
It doesn't make us robots - we feel these things emotionally, but the underlying drives are rooted deep in evolutionary history.
No,on the contrary , it does make us some sort of robots : if we would apply that materialistic interpretation of evolution at least , we would only logically conclude that altruism, feelings , emotions, consciousness, love ....are just illusions , just built -in illusions in our systems we get fooled by , no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us .
Get real, dude .
Perhaps I should have qualified it as 'unfeeling robots'. Whatever, it's semantic word games; if you need to believe that materialism makes emergent phenomena illusions, then go right ahead.
You do not seem to be getting my core point yet , unfortunately enough :
If we would apply those materialistic interpretations of evolution, we would only conclude , as Dawkins an co mainly do, that we are just robots machines driven by DNA via the natural selection , a "fact " Dawkins was so amazed by "discovering" that he wanted to share it with the rest of the world haha ,as Dawkins said in his famous "Selfish Gene " :
If we would apply those materialistic interpretations of evolution, then we should only conclude , as David Cooper in another thread does in fact , that consciousness feelings emotions pain ............are just sophisticated built-in in our mechanical systems survival strategies illusions we get fooled by ,and therefore we do consfuse them with reality = no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us .
Come on, dude , get real = you are not even consistent with your own materialism : only Dawkins and co + David Copoper are in fact = a fact which does not make them right about the matters at hand of course .
You're either a materialist or not , you cannot have it both ways .
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Dawkins and co. would say that that apparent altruistic behavior (appearances are certainly deceptive indeed )of those rats is just selfishness in disguise .
Dawkins says even that we are just machines robots , driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution , a startling " fact " he "discovered" and wanted therefore to share with the rest of the world...
You seem to know Dawkins work and opinions intimately - perhaps you could quote what he actually says about these things, so we can judge whether your intepretation is correct; it's easy enough to say 'Dawkins says this', or Dawkins thinks that', but I'd like to see the quotes that support it.
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All those evolutionary mechanisms you were trying to put on the discussion table as "arguments " to support your claims are just that : unconscious purposeless evolutionary mechanisms or just mechanical survival strategies .
Well yes, objectively they are. And our capability to modify those behaviours by deliberative thought is also an evolved trait.
there is in fact no altruism, no love , no consciousness, no feelings , no emotions,...as such , there are also no such things as good and evil as such either ....= they are just sophisticated pragmatic survival strategies = illusions we get fooled by and we confuse them with reality , in order to be able to ...survive .
That's a valid way of looking at it, but it helps to have descriptive labels for these concepts and behaviours, even though the popular understanding of them may be incoherent. And, of course, we necessarily have subjective experience of them - we aren't Vulcans.
the point is : those Ducth soldiers behaved exactly in the same way the materialistic interpretation of evolution tells us they would do...
Circumstantial evidence that it is a useful model then.
No, sorry , those were just rational justifications for my potential behavior you were trying to develop
Yes, that's how discussions on science forums go; you're expected to provide rational justifications for your argument or position.
Arguments from incredulity, anecdotes, unsupported assertions, 'no true Scotsman (materialist)' fallacies, special pleading, appeals to what is 'beyond logic, rationality, and science', etc., may be entertaining, but are insubstantial.
If we would apply those materialistic interpretations of evolution, then we should only conclude , as David Cooper in another thread does in fact , that consciousness feelings emotions pain ............are just sophisticated built-in in our mechanical systems survival strategies illusions we get fooled by ,and therefore we do consfuse them with reality = no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us .
As I said, I think, objectively, it's a valid viewpoint, which helps us understand the origins and basis of our emotions and sense of consciousness, but I personally also put some value on those feelings and sensations because they have subjective personal, social, and cultural relevance.
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there are also no such things as good and evil as such either ...
At last, a glimmer of rational thought.
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Strong Refutation of materialism in science ,materialism as a dogmatic conservative belief or "religion" , especially concerning that materialistic dogmatic magical approach of consciousness , the latter as a so-called emergent property from the complexity of the evolved brain : Enjoy,folks :
Just try to read the following strong refutation of materialism in science which gets confused with science by many people , especially concerning the materialistic dogmatic magical approach of consciousness, the latter as a so-called emergent property from the complexity of the evolved brain ....written by a physicist :
http://www.superconsciousness.com/topics/science/why-consciousness-not-brain
Why Consciousness is Not the Brain
FALL 2010
The Science of Premonitions
Author: Larry Dossey
Excerpted from The Science of Premonition: How Knowing the Future Can Help Us Avoid Danger, Maximize Opportunities and Create a Better Life by Larry Dossey. Copyright 2009 by Larry Dossey. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Physicist Freeman Dyson believes the cosmos is suffused with consciousness, from the grandest level to the most minute dimensions. If it is, why aren’t we aware of it?
For more articles about "Science", Click Here
“We don’t know who first discovered water, but we can be sure that it wasn’t a fish,” the old saw reminds us. Continual exposure to something reduces our awareness of its presence. Over time, we become blind to the obvious. We swim in a sea of consciousness, like a fish swims in water. And like a fish that has become oblivious to his aqueous environment, we have become dulled to the ubiquity of consciousness.
Why Consciousness is Not the Brain - The Science of Premonitions - Larry Dossey
In science, we have largely ignored how consciousness manifests in our existence. We’ve done this by assuming that the brain produces consciousness, although how it might do so has never been explained and can hardly be imagined. The polite term for this trick is “emergence.” At a certain stage of biological complexity, evolutionary biologists claim, consciousness pops out of the brain like a rabbit from a magician’s hat. Yet this claim rests on no direct evidence whatsoever. As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry A. Fodo flatly states, “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. So much for our philosophy of consciousness.”
In spite of the complete absence of evidence, the belief that the brain produces consciousness endures and has ossified into dogma. Many scientists realize the limitations of this belief. One way of getting around the lack of evidence is simply to declare that what we call consciousness is the brain itself. That way, nothing is produced, and the magic of “emergence” is avoided. As astronomer Carl Sagan expressed his position, “My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings – what we sometimes call mind – are a consequence of anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.” Nobelist Francis Crick agreed, saying “[A] person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make up and influence them.”
This “identity theory” – mind equals brain – has led legions of scientists and philosophers to regard consciousness as an unnecessary, superfluous concept. Some go out of their way to deny the existence of consciousness altogether, almost as if they bear a grudge against it. Tufts University cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett says, “We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious.” Dennett includes himself in this extraordinary claim, and he seems proud of it.
Consciousness can operate beyond the brain, body, and the present, as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials affirm. Consciousness cannot, therefore, be identical with the brain.
Others suggest that there are no mental states at all, such as love, courage, or patriotism, but only electrochemical brain fluxes that should not be described with such inflated language. They dismiss thoughts and beliefs for the same reasons. This led Nobel neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles to remark that “professional philosophers and psychologists think up the notion that there are no thoughts, come to believe that there are no beliefs, and feel strongly that there are no feelings.” Eccles was emphasizing the absurdities that have crept into the debates about consciousness. They are not hard to spot. Some of the oddest experiences I recall are attending conferences where one speaker after another employs his consciousness to denounce the existence of consciousness, ignoring the fact that he consciously chose to register for the meeting, make travel plans, prepare his talks, and so on.
Many scientists concede that there are huge gaps in their knowledge of how the brain makes consciousness, but they are certain they will be filled in as science progresses. Eccles and philosopher of science Karl Popper branded this attitude “promissory materialism.” “[P]romissary materialism [is] a superstition without a rational foundation,” Eccles says. “[It] is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . .who confuse their religion with their science. It has all the features of a messianic prophecy.”
The arguments about the origins and nature of consciousness are central to premonitions. For if the promissory materialists are correct – if consciousness is indeed identical with the brain – the curtain closes on premonitions. The reason is that the brain is a local phenomenon – i.e., it is localized to the brain and body, and to the present. This prohibits premonitions in principle, because accordingly the brain cannot operate outside the body and the here-and-now. But consciousness can operate beyond the brain, body, and the present, as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials affirm. Consciousness cannot, therefore, be identical with the brain.
In science, we have largely ignored how consciousness manifests in our existence. We’ve done this by assuming that the brain produces consciousness, although how it might do so has never been explained and can hardly be imagined.
These assertions are not hyperbolic, but conservative. They are consistent with the entire span of human history, throughout which all cultures of which we have record believed that human perception extends beyond the reach of the senses. This belief might be dismissed as superstition but for the fact that modern research has established its validity beyond reasonable doubt to anyone whose reasoning has not clotted into hardened skepticism. To reiterate a single example – the evidence supporting foreknowledge – psi researchers Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari examined 309 precognition experiments carried out by sixty-two investigators involving 50,000 participants in more than two million trials. Thirty percent of these studies were significant in showing that people can describe future events, when only five percent would be expected to demonstrate such results by chance. The odds that these results were not due to chance was greater than 10 to the twentieth power to one.
One of the first modern thinkers to endorse an outside-the-brain view of consciousness was William James, who is considered the father of American psychology. In his 1898 Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, James took a courageous stand against what he called “the fangs of cerebralism and the idea that consciousness is produced by the brain. He acknowledged that arrested brain development in childhood can lead to mental retardation, that strokes or blows to the head can abolish memory or consciousness, and that certain chemicals can change the quality of thought. But to consider this as proof that the brain actually makes consciousness, James said, is irrational.
Why Consciousness is Not the Brain - The Science of Premonitions - Larry Dossey
Why irrational? Consider a radio, an invention that was introduced during James’s lifetime, and which he used to illustrate the mind-brain relationship. If one bangs a radio with a hammer, it ceases to function. But that does not mean that the origin of the sounds was the radio itself; the sound originated from outside it in the form of an electromagnetic signal. The radio received, modified, and amplified the external signal into something recognizable as sound. Just so, the brain can be damaged in various ways that distort the quality of consciousness – trauma, stroke, nutritional deficiencies, dementia, etc. But this does not necessarily mean the brain “made” the consciousness that is now disturbed, or that consciousness is identical to the brain.
British philosopher Chris Carter endorses this analogy. Equating mind and brain is irrational, he says as listening to music on a radio, smashing the radio’s receiver, and thereby concluding that the radio was producing the music.
To update the analogy, consider a television set. We can damage a television set so severely that we lose the image on the screen, but this doesn’t prove that the TV actually produced the image. We know that David Letterman does not live behind the TV screen on which he appears; yet the contention that brain equals consciousness is as absurd as if he did.
My conclusion is that consciousness is not a thing or substance, but is a nonlocal phenomenon. Nonlocal is merely a fancy word for infinite. If something is nonlocal, it is not localized to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, or to specific points in time, such as the present.
The radio and TV analogies can be misleading, however, because consciousness does not behave like an electromagnetic signal. Electromagnetic (EM) signals display certain characteristics. The farther away they get from their source, the weaker they become. Not so with consciousness; its effects do not attenuate with increasing distance. For example, in the hundreds of healing experiments that have been done in both humans and animals, healing intentions work equally well from the other side of the earth as at the bedside of the sick individual. Moreover, EM signals can be blocked partially or completely, but the effects of conscious intention cannot be blocked by any known substance. For instance, sea water is known to block EM signals completely at certain depths, yet experiments in remote viewing have been successfully carried out beyond such depths, demonstrating that the long-distance communication between the involved individuals cannot depend on EM-type signals. In addition, EM signals require travel time from their source to a receiver, yet thoughts can be perceived simultaneously between individuals across global distances. Thoughts can be displaced in time, operating into both past and future. In precognitive remoteviewing experiments – for example, the hundreds of such experiments by the PEAR Lab at Princeton University – the receiver gets a future thought before it is ever sent. Furthermore, consciousness can operate into the past, as in the experiments involving retroactive intentions. Electromagnetic signals are not capable of these feats. From these differences, we can conclude that consciousness is not an electric signal.
Then what is it? My conclusion is that consciousness is not a thing or substance, but is a nonlocal phenomenon. Nonlocal is merely a fancy word for infinite. If something is nonlocal, it is not localized to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, or to specific points in time, such as the present. Nonlocal events are immediate; they require no travel time. They are unmediated; they require no energetic signal to “carry” them. They are unmitigated; they do not become weaker with increasing distance. Nonlocal phenomena are omnipresent, everywhere at once. This means there is no necessity for them to go anywhere; they are already there. They are infinite in time as well, present at all moments, past present and future, meaning they are eternal.
Researcher Dean Radin, whose presentiment experiments provide profound evidence for future knowing, believes that the nonlocal events in the subatomic, quantum domain underlie the nonlocal events we experience at the human level. He invokes the concept of entanglement as a bridging hypothesis uniting the small- and large-scale happenings. Quantum entanglement and quantum nonlocality are indeed potent possibilities that may eventually explain our nonlocal experiences, but only further research will tell. Meanwhile, there is a gathering tide of opinion favoring these approaches. As physicist Chris Clarke, of the University of Southampton, says, “On one hand, Mind is inherently non-local. On the other, the world is governed by a quantum physics that is inherently non-local. This is no accident, but a precise correspondence ...[Mind and the world are] aspects of the same thing...The way ahead, I believe, has to place mind first as the key aspect of the universe...We have to start exploring how we can talk about mind in terms of a quantum picture...Only then will we be able to make a genuine bridge between physics and physiology.”
When scientists muster the courage to face this evidence unflinchingly, the greatest superstition of our age – the notion that the brain generates consciousness or is identical with it – will topple. In its place will arise a nonlocal picture of the mind.
Whatever their explanation proves to be, the experiments documenting premonitions are real. They must be reckoned with. And when scientists muster the courage to face this evidence unflinchingly, the greatest superstition of our age – the notion that the brain generates consciousness or is identical with it – will topple. In its place will arise a nonlocal picture of the mind. This view will affirm that consciousness is fundamental, omnipresent and eternal – a model that is as cordial to premonitions as the materialistic, brain-based view is hostile.
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there are also no such things as good and evil as such either ...
At last, a glimmer of rational thought.
For your info :
I was just referring to that materialist assumption on the subject though,many people do accept as a 'scientific fact " ,which is certainly not (That's just a materialistic philosophical world view regarding good and evil , materialists had borrowed from Spinoza's ethics or monism they turned into materialistic monism in science afterwards ) : the reality and history of this mankind refute just that materialistic assumption regarding good and evil : see the difference ?
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Dawkins and co. would say that that apparent altruistic behavior (appearances are certainly deceptive indeed )of those rats is just selfishness in disguise .
Dawkins says even that we are just machines robots , driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution , a startling " fact " he "discovered" and wanted therefore to share with the rest of the world...
You seem to know Dawkins work and opinions intimately - perhaps you could quote what he actually says about these things, so we can judge whether your intepretation is correct; it's easy enough to say 'Dawkins says this', or Dawkins thinks that', but I'd like to see the quotes that support it
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I did read a lot about and watched many debates ,videos , lectures ...of Dawkins and co,including some regarding Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens,Daniel Dennett , Michael Schermer ,Peter Singer ..., so : video debates with prominent christian scientists and thinkers such as the mathematician and philosopher of science John Lennox, Dr.D'Souza ...
I read Dawkins ' "Selfish Gene ", "River out of Eden", some parts of "The God delusion " ...
I am 1000% sure of what i was saying,without a shadow of a doubt : Dawkins said that in his "Selfish Gene " : his evolutionary views can be traced back to those core roots : the materialistic assumption regarding the alleged mechanical nature of man he believes in so passionately (The latter assumption is a metrialistic one in fact you do not seem to have interiorized well , let alone its implications at the level of ethics , cultures, societies , religions ....) , i lost that paper book i had : the "fact discovered " by Dawkins regarding the "fact " that we are just machines robots driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution ....a " fact " he was so amazed by that he wanted to share it with the rest of the world haha can be easily seen stated on the back cover of that paper book and inside of the book as well .
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All those evolutionary mechanisms you were trying to put on the discussion table as "arguments " to support your claims are just that : unconscious purposeless evolutionary mechanisms or just mechanical survival strategies .
Well yes, objectively they are. And our capability to modify those behaviours by deliberative thought is also an evolved trait.
There is no place for free will, good or evil , emotions , feelings,consciousness ....as such at least whatsoever in the materialistic interpretation of evolution, or rather they are meaningless in the materialistic evolutionary terms : as an alleged materialist , you are certainly contradicting yourself via this sort of magical romantic materialism which is refuted by the "real" materialism represented by Dawkins and co, by our David Cooper .
there is in fact no altruism, no love , no consciousness, no feelings , no emotions,...as such , there are also no such things as good and evil as such either ....= they are just sophisticated pragmatic survival strategies = illusions we get fooled by and we confuse them with reality , in order to be able to ...survive .
That's a valid way of looking at it, but it helps to have descriptive labels for these concepts and behaviours, even though the popular understanding of them may be incoherent. And, of course, we necessarily have subjective experience of them - we aren't Vulcans.
(Objective or subjective labels ,the thought process, free will , consciousness, love, feelings , emotions, altruism , progress ...are even meaningless in the materialistic evolutionary terms,since we are apparently just machines robots driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution = that's the right materialistic interpretation of evolution you do confuse with the explanation of evolution )
As i said earlier , only Dawkins and co club are able to provide the right materialistic interpretation of evolution , as explained above, in the sense that there are in fact no such "things" such as free will, feelings , altruism, emotions, ....= just useful pragmatic survival strategies or built-in in our mechanical systems illusions we get fooled by by confusing them with reality , no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us ,once again =David Cooper was explaining just that to you , in another thread as well , better than i can ever do .
the point is : those Ducth soldiers behaved exactly in the same way the materialistic interpretation of evolution tells us they would do...
Circumstantial evidence that it is a useful model then.
Useful or pragmatic are not always synonymous of the truth though : you do seem to be an utilitarianist and a pragmatic guy , but do not confuse pragmatism or utilitarianism with the real facts ,despite the fact that the so-called rational liberal mainstream modern approach of ethics, society , politics ,economics ....is exclusively pragmatic utilitarianist contractarianist Kantian .
Pragmatism is even dominating in mainstream science itself , thanks to William James mainly .
You did not understand what i was saying : according to the materialistic interpretation of evolution, those Dutch soldiers ' core apparently 'altruistic humanistic " drives would be only overridden, as you put it earlier , by their sense or instinct of preservation , by the influence of the group 's behavior ......
But if they happened to behave differently , via an apparently altruistic behavior by trying to save those powerless muslims from the Serbs by putting their own lives at risk in the process , they would be then just "acting " that way for selfish (unconsciously then ) reasons as well that would not benefit them as individuals = a behavior they should normally not do,as they actually did not = their potential apparent altruism might be just selfishness in disguise , in the sense that the real effects of their apparent altruistic behaviors would be at the cost of their own lives ,for selfish reasons in order to get famous , applauded , celebrated ...as heros = that would be a lethal miscalculated "altruism " if they would die in the process at least (American soldiers in the same case might have protected the muslims against the Serbs ,maybe, not because they might be altruistic , but simply because they come from a confident militarily strong country that can back them up eventually ) = a potential lethal miscalculated selfishness in disguise of those Dutch soldiers which would go against their own survival impulses = Mother Theresa's apparent altruistic behavior was "explained " that way, in the sense that she might have suffered from some pathological form of masochism she might have confused with goodness or altruism ....= there are indeed people like that who do act against their best interests (Most of us do , most of the time then = the assumption that people always do act in their best interests is a largely refuted assumption myth, but that does not exclude or refute the fact that some people do act against their best interests in the benefit of others for real altruistic reasons though ) .
Note that Dawkins' so-called eveolutionary genetic social theory tried to refute the assumption,according to him, that the individual 's behavior is meant to benefit the group : Group behavior theory , the individual's behavior is selfish in fact ,no matter how altruistic it might appear to be ,and no matter how it benefits the group says Dawkins.
That individual selfishness does normally benefits the group ,says Dawkins, as Adam Smith 's assumption goes on the subject , an assumption that was refuted later on by others .
No, sorry , those were just rational justifications for my potential behavior you were trying to develop
Yes, that's how discussions on science forums go; you're expected to provide rational justifications for your argument or position.
What i meant was : you were just using some romantic magical thinking when it comes to those human evolutionary drives you mentioned by assuming they were / are deliberate conscious processes ,while the materialistic interpretation of evolution does see them as just unconscious mechanical traits or drives "calculations or miscalculations " survival strategies .
Arguments from incredulity, anecdotes, unsupported assertions, 'no true Scotsman (materialist)' fallacies, special pleading, appeals to what is 'beyond logic, rationality, and science', etc., may be entertaining, but are insubstantial.
No, it's exactly the other way around : your magical romantic thinking contradicts the materialistic mechanical reductionistic interpretation of evolution : think about that : David Cooper tried to explain just that to you in relation to human consciousness, feelings , emotions ,pain ....in the sense that the alleged mechanical biological system of ours excludes our own understanding of consciousness, feelings , emotions, pain ...as such ,as "real " processes = they are just useful built- in illusions we take for real .
If we would apply those materialistic interpretations of evolution, then we should only conclude , as David Cooper in another thread does in fact , that consciousness feelings emotions pain ............are just sophisticated built-in in our mechanical systems survival strategies illusions we get fooled by ,and therefore we do consfuse them with reality = no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us .
As I said, I think, objectively, it's a valid viewpoint, which helps us understand the origins and basis of our emotions and sense of consciousness, but I personally also put some value on those feelings and sensations because they have subjective personal, social, and cultural relevance.
No, you should just see them as useful pragmatic survival strategies illusions ,as they actually are in fact , according to the materialistic interpretation of evolution ,once again , David Cooper tried to explain to you .
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there are also no such things as good and evil as such either ...
At last, a glimmer of rational thought.
For your info :
I was just referring to that materialist assumption on the subject <snip> see the difference ?
I think you may have missed the sarcasm...
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You seem to know Dawkins work and opinions intimately - perhaps you could quote what he actually says about these things, so we can judge whether your intepretation is correct; it's easy enough to say 'Dawkins says this', or Dawkins thinks that', but I'd like to see the quotes that support it
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... i lost that paper book i had ...
Priceless - the forum equivalent of 'the dog ate my homework'!
C'mon, some Dawkins quotes or it didn't happen :)
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there are also no such things as good and evil as such either ...
At last, a glimmer of rational thought.
For your info :
I was just referring to that materialist assumption on the subject <snip> see the difference ?
I think you may have missed the sarcasm...
No, i did not : coming from him , i would take it as a compliment
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You seem to know Dawkins work and opinions intimately - perhaps you could quote what he actually says about these things, so we can judge whether your intepretation is correct; it's easy enough to say 'Dawkins says this', or Dawkins thinks that', but I'd like to see the quotes that support it
.
... i lost that paper book i had ...
Priceless - the forum equivalent of 'the dog ate my homework'!
C'mon, some Dawkins quotes or it didn't happen :)
I was honest with you, as i mostly always am with people .
I will try to find that book on line and quote it ,later then .
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There is no place for free will, good or evil , emotions , feelings,consciousness ....as such at least whatsoever in the materialistic interpretation of evolution, or rather they are meaningless in the materialistic evolutionary terms
You've confused the categories there - that's either carelessness or lack of understanding. Free will and good & evil are cultural constructs, the others evolved for very good reasons (literally life or death reasons).
only Dawkins and co club are able to provide the right materialistic interpretation of evolution , as explained above, in the sense that there are in fact no such "things" such as free will, feelings , altruism, emotions, ....= just useful pragmatic survival strategies or built-in in our mechanical systems illusions we get fooled by by confusing them with reality , no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us ,once again =David Cooper was explaining just that to you , in another thread as well , better than i can ever do .
Yes, and no; perhaps if I make a simple analogy: consider a magician, an illusionist; he develops a range of illusions, 'The Vanishing Rabbit', 'Sawing A Woman In Half', 'Water Into Wine', etc. Now, these all involve a carefully arranged and choreographed set of activities with real objects. But they are not what they seem. There are things happening that give the appearance of the activities described, but none of the described activities real - the rabbit doesn't really vanish, the woman isn't really sawn in half, the water doesn't really turn to wine. Sadly, many people believe they really happen, via paranormal means. When the magician or the people want to discuss them, they use the names of the illusions to identify what they're talking about.
Useful or pragmatic are not always synonymous of the truth though
Are they ever? Ah, but what is truth?
No, sorry , those were just rational justifications for my potential behavior you were trying to develop
Yes, that's how discussions on science forums go; you're expected to provide rational justifications for your argument or position.
What i meant was : you were just using some romantic magical thinking...
OK, so you said 'rational justification' when you meant 'romantic magical thinking'; it's probably nothing to worry about, everyone has senior moments now and then.
Arguments from incredulity, anecdotes, unsupported assertions, 'no true Scotsman (materialist)' fallacies, special pleading, appeals to what is 'beyond logic, rationality, and science', etc., may be entertaining, but are insubstantial.
No, it's exactly the other way around : your magical romantic thinking contradicts the materialistic mechanical reductionistic interpretation of evolution
You still seem confused - as a response, that's not 'exactly the other way round', it's a complete non-sequitur.
No, you should just see them as useful pragmatic survival strategies illusions ,as they actually are in fact , according to the materialistic interpretation of evolution ,once again , David Cooper tried to explain to you .
I can see them however I wish; but as I said, I think it's a valid viewpoint (are you having trouble following these threads?), I just like to acknowledge the subjective experience.
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Consciousness can operate beyond the brain, body, and the present, as hundreds of experiments and millions of testimonials affirm.
Good heavens! This is almost a beginning of a hint of a suggestion of a definition! Not quite a statement of what consciousness is, nor even of what it does or its domain of action, but at least a positive statement of something.
So perhaps you might enlighten us by reference to one of these hundreds of experiments, that might give us a clue as to what consciousness is or does.
Just one tiny anchor in the sand might make the entire discussion worthwhile.
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Hi, folks :
I am very busy right now, so , i am gonna just mention this following funny fact , for the time being at least :
Dawkins thinks that we are just machines robots driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution , while he also thinks that our mind is independent haha and can therefore "revolt against the selfish tyranny of our genes " ( selfish gene as a metaphor ) ....
Later
All the best
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Whether Prof Dawkins thinks that or not (and I doubt that he confuses machines with robots), it seems entirely plausible that we are entirely mechanistic. Indeed there is no evidence to the contrary (assertion, however authoritative, is not evidence).
Your underlying misunderstanding arises from confusing evolution with natural selection. It's a common mistake among naive readers, particularly of "popular" science journalism. Evolution is an inherent property of a reproducing organism. Natural selection is a function of its environment.
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I'll be honest I have not read everything.
But I would like to point out that the definition of evolution is not the same in all the examples. For example we don't mean the same process when we talk about the evolution of the universe and biological evolution.
For the evolution of the universe we mean the changes that the universe undertook to reach the current stage.
On the other hand biological evolution means how natural and sexual selection.
However I would agree there are some comparisons we can make in subjects such as economics.
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Whether Prof Dawkins thinks that or not (and I doubt that he confuses machines with robots), it seems entirely plausible that we are entirely mechanistic. Indeed there is no evidence to the contrary (assertion, however authoritative, is not evidence).
(Abscence of evidence is not always evidence of abscence.
And who talked about any authority for that matter as "evidence " ? )
You do not even see the intrinsic contradictions or paradox contained in your words :
If we are entirely mechanistic , as you put it at least , then there are no such things as consciousness, feelings , emotions , love ....as such =they cannot rise from mechanical biological processes = otherwise we can make intelligent machines robots which would be conscious , which would have feelings , emotions ...and even love ....
Second : Dawkins really said that .
Your underlying misunderstanding arises from confusing evolution with natural selection. It's a common mistake among naive readers, particularly of "popular" science journalism. Evolution is an inherent property of a reproducing organism. Natural selection is a function of its environment.
The biological evolution occurs via the ...natural selection ,dude.
You should try to enhance or to improve your knowledge of evolution .
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@ dlorde , alancalverd :
I will have to take you with me on the path to that other thread about consciousness , to try to ask David Cooper to help me in making you see my point he happens to share with me ,Cooper as the real materialist here .
@ dlorde : I will respond to your above displayed post in a minute .
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There is no place for free will, good or evil , emotions , feelings,consciousness ....as such at least whatsoever in the materialistic interpretation of evolution, or rather they are meaningless in the materialistic evolutionary terms
You've confused the categories there - that's either carelessness or lack of understanding. Free will and good & evil are cultural constructs, the others evolved for very good reasons (literally life or death reasons)
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(Good and evil do exist both within us and without though ,despite what materialists might say on the subject , from their materialistic world view .
There are in fact no free will as such , no good and evil as such ....= just illusions , if we would apply to them the right materialistic interpretation at least : free will , good or evil ...cannot rise from our mechanical biological systems : Dawkins and co are therefore not the right representatives of the right materialism : only David Cooper is ...here at least .)
They are not different categories , not in the sense that the one comes from Mars and the other comes from Venus at least , no : they are only different categories which take place at different levels of man : the one is biological and the other is a matter of consciousness shaped by the environment and by world views , not to mention that consciousness has a biological sort of basis also it cannot escape from .
What you cannot understand is how consciousness or the mind ( I see the human mind or consciousness as a whole process which contains intelligence , emotions, feelings , imagination ...) can rise from those biological mechanical processes ? or as Dawkins put it , we can "revolt against the selfish mechanical tyranny of our genes " by deliberately modifying our selfish behavior via our free will : how, on earth, are we supposed to do just that , if we are just machines = we cannot have a free will = free will is an illusion ,according to this mechanical deterministic materialistic view of the universe , man, life , nature ...
How did our mind get to become such an "idependent " process which could defy and rise above its mechanical basis then ?
How can't you get just that ?
only Dawkins and co club are able to provide the right materialistic interpretation of evolution , as explained above, in the sense that there are in fact no such "things" such as free will, feelings , altruism, emotions, ....= just useful pragmatic survival strategies or built-in in our mechanical systems illusions we get fooled by by confusing them with reality , no matter how real they might ever appear to be to us ,once again =David Cooper was explaining just that to you , in another thread as well , better than i can ever do .
Yes, and no; perhaps if I make a simple analogy: consider a magician, an illusionist; he develops a range of illusions, 'The Vanishing Rabbit', 'Sawing A Woman In Half', 'Water Into Wine', etc. Now, these all involve a carefully arranged and choreographed set of activities with real objects. But they are not what they seem. There are things happening that give the appearance of the activities described, but none of the described activities real - the rabbit doesn't really vanish, the woman isn't really sawn in half, the water doesn't really turn to wine. Sadly, many people believe they really happen, via paranormal means. When the magician or the people want to discuss them, they use the names of the illusions to identify what they're talking about.
You do not realise the fact that you are the one who's trying to make consciousness rise from our mechanical biological process via that emergence magical trick, like an illusionist who apparently makes a rabbit appear from nowwhere .
Useful or pragmatic are not always synonymous of the truth though
Are they ever? Ah, but what is truth?
Exactly .
The truth is a dynamic process .The Truth with a big T is only to be known after death .
No, sorry , those were just rational justifications for my potential behavior you were trying to develop
Yes, that's how discussions on science forums go; you're expected to provide rational justifications for your argument or position.
What i meant was : you were just using some romantic magical thinking...
OK, so you said 'rational justification' when you meant 'romantic magical thinking'; it's probably nothing to worry about, everyone has senior moments now and then.
No, you were just trying to "rationalize " your claims , as we all ,sometimes, try to rationalize our bad behaviors in order to avoid responsibility, accountability , guilt ..
You were doing just that via magical thinking : get the pic ?
Arguments from incredulity, anecdotes, unsupported assertions, 'no true Scotsman (materialist)' fallacies, special pleading, appeals to what is 'beyond logic, rationality, and science', etc., may be entertaining, but are insubstantial.
No, it's exactly the other way around : your magical romantic thinking contradicts the materialistic mechanical reductionistic interpretation of evolution
You still seem confused - as a response, that's not 'exactly the other way round', it's a complete non-sequitur.
You do not realise that you were using some magical romantic thinking , dude , in relation to ethics , consciousness, feelings , emotions, good and evil ,free will ....= how can they rise from our mechanical biological systems via the natural selection of evolution then ? as social mental cultural constructs ? How ? = only you ,Dawkins and co , as illusionists , can explain just that via some mysterious magical tricks .
No, you should just see them as useful pragmatic survival strategies illusions ,as they actually are in fact , according to the materialistic interpretation of evolution ,once again , David Cooper tried to explain to you .
I can see them however I wish; but as I said, I think it's a valid viewpoint (are you having trouble following these threads?), I just like to acknowledge the subjective experience.
I made a mistake though when i used to say that Dawkins and co are the real true materialists : they are not , in fact : simply because they do think like yourself via that magical romantic side when it comes to mind and body , cultures, societies , ethics ,free will, good and evil ...
The only real materialist here i have seen is : David Cooper :
So, let's just all move to that thread concerning consciousness , in order to have David Cooper's perspectives on these subjects .
Deal ?
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If we are entirely mechanistic , as you put it at least , then there are no such things as consciousness, feelings , emotions , love ....as such =they cannot rise from mechanical biological processes = otherwise we can make intelligent machines robots which would be conscious , which would have feelings , emotions ...and even love ....
You take a very narrow definition of mechanism, and state without proof or evidence, that a mechanism cannot have properties that you won't define. Your game, your rules, so you win. But a hollow victory because nobody else is playing.
Meanwhile in the real world, the French word for a magnet is the same as for a lover. So an entire nation and culture disagrees with you.
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You've confused the categories there - that's either carelessness or lack of understanding. Free will and good & evil are cultural constructs, the others evolved for very good reasons (literally life or death reasons)
They are not different categories , not in the sense that the one comes from Mars and the other comes from Venus at least , no : they are only different categories which take place at different levels of man : the one is biological and the other is a matter of consciousness shaped by the environment and by world views , not to mention that consciousness has a biological sort of basis also it cannot escape from .
Exactly - they're not different in a way I didn't describe, but they are different in the way I did describe. Well done.
What you cannot understand is how consciousness or the mind ( I see the human mind or consciousness as a whole process which contains intelligence , emotions, feelings , imagination ...) can rise from those biological mechanical processes ?
As far as I'm aware, no-one understands that completely. There are many hypotheses of varying plausibility and many opinions about those plausibilities. Perhaps you'd care to share your own hypothesis?
I made a mistake though when i used to say that Dawkins and co are the real true materialists : they are not , in fact : simply because they do think like yourself via that magical romantic side when it comes to mind and body , cultures, societies , ethics ,free will, good and evil ...
The only real materialist here i have seen is : David Cooper :
Aww, you mean I'm relegated to the ranks of losers like Dawkins & co, while David Cooper is now the only True Scotsman Materialisttm?
It seems like only yesterday I was being accused of not following the guidance of Dawkins & co... oh, wait, it was yesterday ;)
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The biological evolution occurs via the ...natural selection ,dude.
You should try to enhance or to improve your knowledge of evolution .
Oh dear me! You really slept through Biology 101, Introduction to Logic, and Basic Common Sense, didn't you? Nor, it seems, have you read anything by Darwin.
Do you look exactly like both of your parents? Obviously not. As a consequence of the inherent instability of DNA, plus the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction, you have evolved.
When environmental pressures are such that only those who embrace logical thought can survive, you will be eliminated by natural selection.
The two mechanisms are not the same, nor even interdependent. But as Darwin observed, the successive application of natural selection to evolving generations results in the differentiation of species.
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The biological evolution occurs via the ...natural selection ,dude.
You should try to enhance or to improve your knowledge of evolution .
Oh dear me! You really slept through Biology 101, Introduction to Logic, and Basic Common Sense, didn't you? Nor, it seems, have you read anything by Darwin.
Do you look exactly like both of your parents? Obviously not. As a consequence of the inherent instability of DNA, plus the genetic lottery of sexual reproduction, you have evolved.
When environmental pressures are such that only those who embrace logical thought can survive, you will be eliminated by natural selection.
The two mechanisms are not the same, nor even interdependent. But as Darwin observed, the successive application of natural selection to evolving generations results in the differentiation of species.
[/quote]
What do you mean the 2 mechanisms are not the same , from the materialistic perspective at least , considering the fact that we are allegedly just machines or robots driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution , as Dawkins says here below :
How can consciousness, the mind, feelings , the thought process...be mechanical, or at least rise from our alleged mechanical biological systems ?
Dawkins says , as well, that we can "revolt against the selfish tyranny of our genes and against the "fact" that we were born selfish " : how are we supposed to do just that , if we are just machines ?
How can the mind ,consciousness, feelings , the thought process , ...rise from mechanical biological systems such as ours then ?
Once again, mind and body are certainly interdependent and do interact with each other .
That said : would you just cut the crap, please , and tell me how the thought process can be mechanical ,or that it can rise from mechanical systems ?
Excerpts from Dawkins ' "Selfish Gene " :
Quote :
"
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
THIS book should be read almost as though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliche or not, 'stranger than fiction' expresses exactly how I feel about the truth. We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others.
" End Quote .
P.S.:
Let's just move to that consciousness thread , instead of wasting our energies on 3 related threads at the same time: consciousness , evolution and the scientific method are related to each other .
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You've confused the categories there - that's either carelessness or lack of understanding. Free will and good & evil are cultural constructs, the others evolved for very good reasons (literally life or death reasons)
They are not different categories , not in the sense that the one comes from Mars and the other comes from Venus at least , no : they are only different categories which take place at different levels of man : the one is biological and the other is a matter of consciousness shaped by the environment and by world views , not to mention that consciousness has a biological sort of basis also it cannot escape from .
Exactly - they're not different in a way I didn't describe, but they are different in the way I did describe. Well done.
What you cannot understand is how consciousness or the mind ( I see the human mind or consciousness as a whole process which contains intelligence , emotions, feelings , imagination ...) can rise from those biological mechanical processes ?
As far as I'm aware, no-one understands that completely. There are many hypotheses of varying plausibility and many opinions about those plausibilities. Perhaps you'd care to share your own hypothesis?
I made a mistake though when i used to say that Dawkins and co are the real true materialists : they are not , in fact : simply because they do think like yourself via that magical romantic side when it comes to mind and body , cultures, societies , ethics ,free will, good and evil ...
The only real materialist here i have seen is : David Cooper :
Aww, you mean I'm relegated to the ranks of losers like Dawkins & co, while David Cooper is now the only True Scotsman Materialisttm?
It seems like only yesterday I was being accused of not following the guidance of Dawkins & co... oh, wait, it was yesterday ;)
See my reply to our alancalverd here above : see that Dawkins' quote as well there about the "fact or truth " that we are just machines or robots driven by DNA through the natural selection of evolution , i did copy and paste from Dawkins ' "Selfish Gene "
In the thread concerning consciousness, i will post some more Dawkins' quotes from that same book of his on the subject ,so, we can discuss that there ,instead of wasting energy on 3 related topics at the same time
Deal?.
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What do you mean the 2 mechanisms are not the same
Exactly that. Evolution is an endogenous consequence of the reproduction of living things. Selection is a consequence of their environment - exogenous.
from the materialistic perspective at least , considering the fact that we are allegedly just machines or robots driven by DNA via the natural selection of evolution , as Dawkins says here below :
How can consciousness, the mind, feelings , the thought process...be mechanical, or at least rise from our alleged mechanical biological systems ? etc.....
You see? Dawkins did not confuse natural selection with evolution, any more than Darwin or any person with half a brain would.
Let's just move to that consciousness thread , instead of wasting our energies on 3 related threads at the same time: consciousness , evolution and the scientific method are related to each other . [/size]
No way! So far, nobody has defined consciousness. and I won't get involved an an argument where nobody knows what anyone else is talking about. No problem with the scientific method: I think we all know what it purports to be, but you seem to have a bee in your bonnet about it being invented by muslims, whereas I have seen it used by a gorilla with no known religious persuasion. Little point in arguing with you about that, but I would abjure you to look more closely at the behaviour of other mammals, and to consider the pre-islamic origins of Chinese medicine, or its use by Aristarchus, 1000 years before the Prophet was born..
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see that Dawkins' quote as well there about the "fact or truth " that we are just machines or robots driven by DNA through the natural selection of evolution...
Quite right; but that doesn't mean we can't identify and label particular behaviours and traits, and attribute certain abstract qualities to them. In fact, as you well know, that's exactly what we have done.
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see that Dawkins' quote as well there about the "fact or truth " that we are just machines or robots driven by DNA through the natural selection of evolution...
Quite right; but that doesn't mean we can't identify and label particular behaviours and traits, and attribute certain abstract qualities to them. In fact, as you well know, that's exactly what we have done.
You do not get it yet , do you ?
How, on earth , are we supposed to be able to accomplish such a magical trick or extraordinary performance , if we are just determined machines robots then ?
You tell me , mr. great illusionist . make my day .
Thanks , bye , gotta go . i spent too much time here i can hardly afford , but it was worth it though , i must add indeed, to be honest .
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see that Dawkins' quote as well there about the "fact or truth " that we are just machines or robots driven by DNA through the natural selection of evolution...
Quite right; but that doesn't mean we can't identify and label particular behaviours and traits, and attribute certain abstract qualities to them. In fact, as you well know, that's exactly what we have done.
How, on earth , are we supposed to be able to accomplish such a magical trick or extraordinary performance , if we are just determined machines robots then ?
What's magical about identifying patterns and abstracting their salient features as generics? We already have neural network based systems that can do that kind of thing.
You may be limiting your capability to follow these ideas by too simplistic a concept of machines or robots. Even non-biological machines can learn and adapt, and be creative.
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Postscript re evolution and selection - just thought of an example whilst walking the dog.
The Smiths have two children, Alice and Bob, both fit and fertile. Parents have no food allergies but Alice is allergic to nuts and Bob is allergic to fish. All perfectly everyday consequences of the endogenous variability of genetic inheritance - evolution.
Now the corrupt and incompetent European Union bans the import of nuts (because Brazil nuts are radioactive) and insists everyone must eat fish on Fridays (because the Pope will excommunicate the EU Commission otherwise). So Bob dies and Alice lives. Environmental selection has taken place, and all the descendants of the Smith family have a genetic predisposition to a nut allergy, but can survive in the EU where the only nuts are in charge.
All Darwin did was to suggest that this is probably what happened to the Galapagos finches.
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see that Dawkins' quote as well there about the "fact or truth " that we are just machines or robots driven by DNA through the natural selection of evolution...
Quite right; but that doesn't mean we can't identify and label particular behaviours and traits, and attribute certain abstract qualities to them. In fact, as you well know, that's exactly what we have done.
How, on earth , are we supposed to be able to accomplish such a magical trick or extraordinary performance , if we are just determined machines robots then ?
What's magical about identifying patterns and abstracting their salient features as generics? We already have neural network based systems that can do that kind of thing.
You may be limiting your capability to follow these ideas by too simplistic a concept of machines or robots. Even non-biological machines can learn and adapt, and be creative.
I am not talking about that : what i mean is mainly : how can the mechanical brain give rise to abstract approaches ?
Get it ?
A mechanical system or mechanical brain cannot generate abstract concepts , abstract approaches ...not in a conscious way .
Le's move back to consciousness thread , once again .
Deal ?
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I am not talking about that : what i mean is mainly : how can the mechanical brain give rise to abstract approaches ?
What, precisely do you mean by 'abstract approaches' ?
A mechanical system or mechanical brain cannot generate abstract concepts , abstract approaches ...not in a conscious way .
What is the 'conscious way' of generating abstracts, and how do you know it's different from how a machine can do it?
Le's move back to consciousness thread , once again .
I never moved away from it. I posted there only yesterday.
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I am not talking about that : what i mean is mainly : how can the mechanical brain give rise to abstract approaches ?
What, precisely do you mean by 'abstract approaches' ?
A mechanical system or mechanical brain cannot generate abstract concepts , abstract approaches ...not in a conscious way .
What is the 'conscious way' of generating abstracts, and how do you know it's different from how a machine can do it?
Le's move back to consciousness thread , once again .
I never moved away from it. I posted there only yesterday.
[/quote]
Look , it would save our energy to just stick to one thread : the one about consciousness .
I did reformulate my above mentioned question to you differently in that thread .
See ya there then .
Let's just "drop " this thread , and focuss only on that other one regarding consciousness.
Deal ? Thanks .
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This thread is closed = I will not respond to any posts here from now on .
Thanks .
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I will take that as an acceptance of my arguments. Delighted to have been of help.
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I will take that as an acceptance of my arguments. Delighted to have been of help.
:)
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This thread = "the brain is more than biology."
Question: "Okay, what is the "more than part?" Answer: "I have no freaking idea or I won't tell you. Prove me wrong." Rinse, Repeat.