Sponsor |  lerryn | Nov 11, 2004 11:18am | Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Falsely assuming that an earlier event caused a later event for the mere reason that it happened earlier. "Over 95% of all heroin addicts in the US have previously used marijuana. Therefore marijuana leads to heroin." (Substituting "milk" for "marijuana" neatly exposes the preceding.) |
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Sponsor | | homebase | Nov 11, 2004 11:24am | 19 - lerryn (love your photos, btw),
I don't think we can say we know a monkey will never be able to do those cognitive feats. If aliens visited planet Earth 30 million years ago, do you think they could tell we would be where we are at today? Maybe they could, I don't know. Point is, some of our ancestors had an intelligence level on par with a monkey. We split off from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee about 7 MYA (million years ago).
Do you have an idea how the intellect of a species can evolve? It's not magic. A cycle was set up. Our ancestors were arborial. This gave us clasping hands, and rotater shoulders. We were a social species, so we developed complex minds good at interpersonal relationships, understanding heirarchy, keeping a file of information on each other member of our group, and even political strategizing. Perhaps at this point, we were already using tools. We had hands and shoulders that were good for tool use. Tool use required brain power, and so those who had better brain power, were better tool users, which increased their survivability, maybe gave them some meat to eat. Meat is a much higher concentration of energy than vegetation - which gave the brain more energy to process information, which helped with tool use, etc. A cycle that fed on itself. There were other drivers of the human intellect. Chicks like big brains. Their choice of the smarter guy, over the generations, leads to smarter and smarter generations.
Basically, we crossed some threshold in our cognitive abilities. Some combination of cognitive abilities like short term memory, pattern recognition abilities, the ability for many mental processes to be handled by the subconscious, etc. Plus we developed more tools, like a complex language, culture, writing, specific ideas, and disciplines like science, math, and philosophy. We made art, and began to think about our world in different ways. It was a natural process.
I don't know, I don't see why we couldn't discover exactly how our universe works. I'm a Philosophic Naturalist, and I'm optimistic. If the universe is made up of fundamental components with specific properties, resulting in a singular system of interaction we call the universe, I see no reason why we couldn't one day understand our universe completely. It should be a math problem.
The evolution of our intellect may get a 'prompt jump' when we start implanting computer chips in our brains. Or maybe when we decypher our genetic code, and figure out how to improve ourselves. Or if we invent a machine to do our thinking for us.
Were you thinking of something in particular that science cannot investigate?
20 - mr popo. I believe in Causality. Quantum physics may not be wrong, but it does not explain everything. Maybe a Theory of Everything will explain the spooky action at a distance. Perhaps in a different dimension, the two 'places' are the same place, so the info is only 'travelling' in our dimensions. I have no idea. Anyone up on M-theory? |
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Sponsor | | Morosoph | Nov 11, 2004 6:13pm | 18 homebase: I'm saying more than humanism is normative; I am saying that in being normative, it distorts the world. Humanism is about "being human", as much as it is about being good to humans, and "being human" is in fact used to mean something close to that which is defined by religions prevalent within society. Humanism shapes our beliefs about the world, as nested within our religious inheritance are such concepts as the golden rule and equality before god, which have the effect of shaping our expectations: we expect others to be like ourselves because of our mental training. For example, the golden rule forms an unconscious generalisation that we as all the same after making many comparisons. This assumption cannot be true, for otherwise evolution could never have happened. Evolution requires differential survival of a diverse population. Don't get me wrong: I'm not promoting social Darwinism, at least not normatively; I'm saying that what we inherit from religion subtly distorts the world that we see.
I agree that humanism is a good thing, and I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from becoming a humanist, but I do think that it is an ideology that is not entirely naturalistic. The ideology underlying humanism is partly because of the degree to which we're socialised, but the expression of our unstopped, natural, and creative drives is in some ways more animal, and in order ways more abstract than this socialised middle way.
The existentialist may or may not envisage this larger whole. I invoke a larger whole, certainly, especially when I consider the benefits of diversity, but every piece of diversity; every individual is specialised. Some might be broader in scope, some narrower. As long as the values throughout the (world's) population do not suffer major discontinuities (one of the problems with nationalism BTW), the resulting social system should have healthy, robust properties. Thus I see no need for overarching and universal values. A diversity of values can in fact be healthier, and help the population as a whole see things both more broadly, and in more detail (due to the presence of "specialists").
I agree that I was unfair on Atheism. A simpler point is that any label that we attach to ourselves must create a measure of filtering. We do not see what we don't expect. For example, strong evidence for synchronicity would be put down to chance too readily by one opposed to the paranormal. Far from thinking up subtle tests, they'd be motivated to reject further evidence which met the same standard, just as they'd rejected what they experienced. This is nothing specifically to do with Atheism; it's human nature.
The Golden Rule is a mixed blessing. I said earlier that it induces a subtle distortion of reality through the underlying assumption of sameness; it has other flaws too, but it is superior to "an eye for an eye" type justice, which can motivate us out of fear, and quite possibly even one of its apparent flaws may be a good thing in that the psychological expectation of getting something back (we associate getting something from someone every time that the golden rule guides us to give to them) it fact trains us in "tit for tat", which is a known good strategy in game theory.
If we follow Spinoza's example, Philosophical Naturalism is about there being a single substance in the universe. He calls it "god", which makes him a pantheist. You could call it "mind", and I certainly see quantum theory as very mind-like given its various emergent forms (to predict the behaviour of a molecule, you cannot do it well by breaking it up into constituent parts, but need to look at large-scale dynamic "resonances"), and "spooky action at a distance" (which has, as MrPopo pointed out, been demonstrated. Layman's explanation of Bell's Theorem). However, the main point is that there are not two fundamental separate substances such as mind and body, which makes sense if you consider this: if there were more than one fundamental substance, how would they interact with one another? Interaction requires degrees of interaction, or "distance"; a metric of some sort, or there is no non-trivial interaction, and this requires something like "space" which is more fundamental than what one considered to be fundamental originally. Thus if one assumes god, it has to swallow the universe whole and be one with it, which is a dreadful problem for Christians, as the evil must then be part of god!
Oddly, I feel differently about justice than you do! I worry that we have too much of it. In fact (in slightly trolling mode (-:), I wrote an article about it on Slashdot.
Re: "Fulfilling one's natural self", I agree that it sounds pretty Nietzschian, but we can also take a softer, more Taoist reading of the same concept: one "finds the Tao", and thus acts fluidly, naturally, freely. I in some way wanted to evoke the spectrum of meaning, but for both Nietzsche and Lao Tzu, unstopped free action is essential. For Nietzsche, he sees it as essential to art; for Lao Tzu, it is the way to deeply moral and healthy living.
Whilst human society is the new human environment, that does not make human society healthy to us, nor necessarily to our art. Indeed, we are more vulnerable than ever to fads, mass hysteria, peer pressure of all sorts. When society was less dense, we had a hope to observe nature for long enough to rid ourselves of that which is merely propagates readily, and is socially pleasant, exchanging it for those things that stood the tests of time and prolonged reflection. Naturalism is surely the reassertion of nature over society, and philosophical naturalism is the overcoming of the steady distortion of truth through socialisation. One may still not have the truth, but one's mind is in a better shape to perceive it. |
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Sponsor | | Morosoph | Nov 11, 2004 6:18pm | I would argue, with Paul Feyerabend, that there is no scientific method. I'm not saying that there is no science, and no standard of superior reasoning, but that there is no method that is fixed for all time. The tools with which we measure need science to interpret the results, thus science is fundamentally self-referential, and a shift of ideas can cause us to have to reinterpret those results, so that there is no simple path of falsification. Rather, different threads are in competition with one another, and far from being falsified, each theory is improved through experiment and theoretical attack from other threads. Some ideas do eventually fall into the past, but others rise up again. Richard Feynman got his Nobel prize in Physics when he intuited a theory that had been rejected earlier, which he reworked in the light of new evidence, for example.
The mind does not divide nicely into logic and illogic, and we find that what was considered logical a couple of centuries ago to be laughable now. Economists make "logical assumptions" that they don't need to, concerning human nature, such as a consistent conception of selfishness. A weaker assumption of values that may or may not be selfish, but pull in a consistent direction does as well (supply and demand is unaffected), and stops one thinking stupid things, such as that free software cannot work, or that without strong patent laws, nothing gets built.
Having said all that, science is a very powerful tool indeed, and it is worrying indeed that the current American administration is riding roughshod over it. Journalistic "balance" doesn't help either! It seems that we have a big problem here: one of both keeping science open-minded, and focusing the population's and authority's minds upon scientific orthodoxy, at least for the purposes of policy-making!
Homebase, MrPopo, Lerryn: The point about Bell's theorem is that breaking Bell's Inequality demonstrates that locally-acting causal theories cannot work, and what's more, Bell's Inequality has been broken by experiment. We live in some kind of weird universe, even if we don't know exactly which one! In the light of the kinds of weirdness that we have to accept, breaking causality is amongst the least weird. In place of cause and effect, we say that the universal waveform has a strong predisposition to render a given observable given an initial observation. This means that we have to replace mechanistic statements with statistical ones, and strange statistics at that: probabilities interfere with each other strangely, as the probability of an event is proportional to the amplitude of a complex waveform describing the state, squared. It is this strange non-linearity that gives us the LASER, as photons being in a similar state to one another accumulate into a strong wavefunction, whereas if the photons are misaligned, they tend to cancel each other out, and thus the waveform, being weaker, is less probable.
Naturally the world might be strange in some other fashion, but even if QM is not the final answer, Bell's Inequality is still broken, and there's no route back to a simple neo-Newtonian universe.
Lerryn: Now that I've got around to reading your post, I see that you've made some of the points that I have here, but in plainer language. Sometimes, I write too obscurely, I feel. |
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Sponsor | | lerryn | Nov 13, 2004 11:07am | | well i am not a scientist or have any scientific training so maybe im looking in from the outside and seeing a plainer (simpler) picture! as someone training to be a lawyer all i have is logic and scepticism, hell there is another topic! |
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Sponsor | | homebase | Nov 14, 2004 11:28am | Morosoph - I couldn't agree more that religion distorts the world that we see, that our definition of 'being human' is cultural, and that mainstream modern culture is largely affected by religion. But this applies to more than just our definition of 'being human'. It applies to the definition of any concept, even Nature. Christianity, for example, paints Nature as something separate from humans, as something to conquer. So, couldn't someone make the same argument for an ideology revolving around Nature?
Diversity - We cannot make the assumption that a population is necessarily diverse simply because of the evolutionary advantage. The genetic diversity of a species is mostly a function of the age of the species. Whenever a new species is created, it always starts with a particular (set of) offspring. At this point in time, there is very little genetic diversity within the new species. The longer the species is around however, the more genetic diversity develops across the population, and the better equiped the species will be to deal with whatever Nature throws at it. Modern humans have very little genetic diversity compared to other species - chimps for example. The reason is that our species is relatively young.
Golden Rule - I'm not as bothered by the assumption of sameness in the Golden Rule. It gets the leeway for its practicality as a moral guideline. Hopefully you would agree, that there is some degree of sameness, and some degree of difference, between you and another person. I would expect a moral guideline to focus more on the degree of sameness, than the degree of difference.
Now, whether or not humanity should have overarching moral principles is another question. I like your point that a diversity of ideologies is healthy for humanity, but I think we are naturally going to get a diversity, no matter what. I don't have anything against the idea of an overarching moral principle, per se, because I think they are needed. The reason - our unstopped, natural, and creative drives have been honed for a specific social organization - small tribes. Our natural drives reflects a balance between drives that primarily benefit the self, with those that primarily benefit to the group, optimized for life in small tribes. We have undergone a drastic change in our organization, one that connects more people together, one that increases individual specialization, and therefore increases our dependence on each other. So, I believe a strong argument can be made for a moral principle that may sometimes conflict with our natural inclinations.
I believe there are times to trust in the wisdom of evolution, and times where we should use our intellect to climb up and over. As human understanding grows, we just might be able to reason our way to a better way.
Scientific Method - I agree there is no method that is standard for all time. Improvements are welcome.
Causality - The interference you cite, suggests Causality to me - probably a mix of causes, property interacting with property, effect combining with effect, an intersection of causal waves. Our 'probabilities', our 'statistical' statements, may be nothing more than the result of how frequently the various causes are present.
I do have faith in Causality, but there is tremendous evidence in its favor. To me, it seems much more likely that, instead of Causality being broken, we have a lack of understanding of the properties and the interactions present. Even a child knows the best answer to the question "Why?", is "Because".
Reference - I expect we are not looking at things the right way. Human understanding will surely make at least one more conceptual shift. We might need to change what we use as reference, like Einstein did when he made time variable, and the speed of light constant. Take this idea of 'locally acting' causes. Are we unduly limiting ourselves here? What is local?
Justice - Ya know, I think a parent would do well to teach their child that Life is not fair. The earlier that one gets this message, the easier will be the first major trajedy.
I liked your piece on Justice. Not sure where I presented my ideas on Justice - I'm not even sure what they are. But I agree with you that human 'justice is a product of the human mind'. And I too, strive for leniency. My justification for leniency deals with human nature, and the way the mind makes decisions. I particularly liked your point that we should focus on poverty, not inequality. We need to keep clear that inequality doesn't mean injustice.
I think concepts such as 'Justice' and 'rights', even as purely human constructs, serve a useful purpose in the operation of society that benefit both civilian and civilization.
It seems the problems arrive when too much value is placed on anything, whether is is Justice or even Freedom - Freedom is important as well, but we can't overdo it: 'Don't let any overarching moral principle infringe upon my freedom to swing sledgehammers at people'. |
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Sponsor | | Morosoph | Nov 28, 2004 10:41am | Homebase: You can certainly say that an ideology that revolves around nature would distort the world, but that is not what I am talking about when I talk of naturalism. Rather, I am talking of overcoming the bias that socialisation induces into our thinking. That is: I am not hypothesising a golden "balance of nature", but am rather advocating a certain rawness in contrast with ideology.
You misunderstand what I say when I talk about diversity. I am saying that a doctrine of equality must distort what we see, for there could never have been evolution were this to be the case. Such a doctrine must therefore distort the truth, if we are to accept evolution as being an accurate model of our origins. If you wish to challenge evolution, that is fine, but we're on different grounds then. Given evolution, there must have been diversity, or else there would have been nothing for evolution to work with.
I agree that there is little genetic difference within the population, but this is a ridiculously poor metric, as our genetic material acts very clearly non-linearly. Intuitively, we'd say that the difference between a chimp and a human is more than 1%. For example, consider our respective IQs or variations in body mass. Given the context of the golden rule, we're talking of how we differ socially, which has both an environmental and a genetic element, and the genetic element is highly leveraged, so that a 1% change in the DNA can mean a vastly different outcome.
Naturally I agree that there is a degree of similarity between people, but my contention is that this is not a necessary element of a moral framework, and whereas it might help one to advance ones interests better within society, it fails when considering the larger framework over any sensible time-scale. New ideas have originators, and an ideology based upon sameness is far more hostile to new ideas than a more liberal ideology (for example). Assumptions of sameness do not recognise the dynamics of social change fully, and indeed hold them back. For a conservative who sees even most change as harmful, this might make sense, but for someone more open to new ideas, it is a nonsense. I would hold that a society without a diverse set of opinions would instead settle upon a pretty low common denominator, such as an assumption of universal selfishness, which they would then nest their understanding of trade within. A society with greater diversity would even see the advantages of trading with the selfish to advance greater causes, but in this case selfishness would instead be nesting within trade as one of a number of criteria for trade.
I hold that the golden rule is selfishness is disguise - enlightened selfishness to be sure, but selfishness nonetheless.
I agree that our natural drives have evolved in a context of small tribes, but they have not evolved for the tribes, but rather for the genes and 'memes' that sustain such drives. We now live in a context that strongly limits our drives, and we are not healthier for it. This context is one where ideas are readily propagated without staying put, that is: the ideas are not held to account before they can spread; their only criterion for persistence is a propensity to propagate, based on factors such as inducing fuzzy feelings. Much of modern society does not serve its members, or even society in the abstract, but rather the ideas that are being propagated themselves! Prevalence is therefore not proof of goodness. The one context where there was enough stickiness to hold evolutionary factors accountable we now reject since it is not "modern".
I agree that principle will frequently differ from natural inclination, but really what I am attempting to do is to change the framework within which we decide what our principles should be, and to refer back to society is to miss why the challenge is being made in the first place. I also believe (as it happens) that we stunt ourselves so as to form an inferior society by restraining ourselves too readily; we do not allow people to be diverse and find a way in which they can learn to relate to one another whilst retaining their identity. Rather, we make our lives easier (but not better in terms of life's rewards) by requiring people to be the same, and allowing a few exceptions so as to contain nonconformity.
Causality - I tend to avoid asking "Why?". I think that it is a very human question, but it reveals more about human psychology than about the universe. The answers to such questions tend to be religious. Even if they are scientific in character, they reveal faith, rather than structural understanding. "How?" it almost always a much better question, although it has its own problems. I observe casualty, but I do not believe personally that this is a fundamental law, any more than the second law of thermodynamics is. Our faith in 'hard' casualty, I would warrant, has religious origins. For everything to be caused, rather than emergent, is the context in which we readily invoke gods for the unseen. Emergence is far more subtle, though, for we can find systems having properties which were not "intended" by any of the parts. In the human sphere, for example, an outcome need not be caused by an accumulation of human will, good or bad, and this means that much of the ill-will that many hold toward their political opponents is in fact unfair.
'Don't let any overarching moral principle infringe upon my freedom to swing sledgehammers at people'.
How can I stop you? Locking you up after the act doesn't undo it. Personally I think that you should have the freedom to swing sledgehammers at people, for the alternative is to not have sledgehammers at all, or to render people incapable of doing so. Personally, I believe that giving you a lobotomy is disproportional to the risk. |
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Sponsor | | homebase | Dec 9, 2004 4:02pm | Perhaps an assumption of sameness is not necessary for a moral system, but I'd be interested to hear what you say IS necessary for a moral system. Certainly a person who values reciprocity, and recognizes what society and others do for him, could turn out to have similar morals. Is the focus on the similarity really a distortion? This similarity is significant (and surely someday, quantifiable). In my moral system, I recognize the degree of similarity with other animal species as well. I don't deny the differences between our species and others, or the differences between people, but to me, the base similarity merits sufficient reason to be concerned for their welfare. Afterall, I could have just as easily been born them, instead of me. I didn't choose to be me, just like they didn't choose to be they.
We have similar brain structures, emotional systems, neurotransmitters.. and I recognize myself, in them.
I think it might be a stretch to say that a loose moral guideline, floating in the air like the Golden Rule, 'requires people to be the same' or is 'hostile to new ideas' or constitutes 'a doctrine of equality'. It does focus on the degree of similarity to serve as a moral guideline, but it does not necessarily disregard, or even discourage difference. I certainly would not want to inhibit new ideas in society, but I am not convinced the Golden Rule is guilty of inhibiting new ideas. I agree though, there are drives to discourage difference within society. I think the Golden Rule is a tool to teach empathy, which I consider to be a powerful component in a healthy human society.
I agree with you, and Nietzsche, regarding the disguised selfishness of the Golden Rule, or any moral statement. We make statements of morality because we do not wish for ourselves, or those we care about, to be the recipient of behavior outside those boundaries.
We ARE given evolution, but the mechanisms through which it works, the precise model, is up for debate. Are these adaptations really for the benefit of the gene, or for the individual, or for the species, or maybe for all of them. Any gene is only going to be successful in the context of the rest of the gene sequence, in the context of the individual as a whole, and in the context of the species and environment as a whole. A gene is successful only if it makes the individual a more successful reproducer (adaptations that improve the individual's general fitness also make the individual more successful at reproduction).
Some of those drives you speak of, are drives that prompt us to develop moral systems. Some of our drives, are grouping drives - drives that appear to be benefitting the group (not the individual) - but this is a round-about path to benefitting the individual (and the gene). A more fit group will be a benefit to the individual, increasing his fitness and ability to reproduce.
Is evolution at the level of the gene? The individual's fitness is improved by the gene, yet the gene only has a (let's say) 50-50 chance of being passed on. The individual has benefitted from the adaptation, but the gene may not get passed on.
Emergent phenomena ARE caused. They are caused by the system, made up of the components and the interaction of those components. In regards to Causality, questions of Why or How are indistinguishable. I consider 'Fundamental Laws' to be the result of human psychology. I think of it in terms of fundamental elements, their properties, systems and their emergent properties. What we bracket and view as Causality is really just these elements and systems interacting according to their properties, which we describe as following some natural law. I consider my belief in Causality to be better than the form of faith we find in religion. It's more akin to what we find in science, when there are competing theories, but we choose one. We look at the evidence and make a leap the rest of the way. However, like in science, the theory is only to be believed as a Provisional Truth, as the best we got, until we get something better. We look for new evidence - for or against. This is different from religious belief.
Though I am not convinced of your charges against the Golden Rule, (maybe you can convince me), I admit a possibility the Golden Rule could have adverse effects in the way it trains people to think. What is your alternative? What is this framework you speak of? |
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