GDR writes:
In a sense though, by that way of thinking all atheists are really agnostic.
Indeed. Atheists are a rational bunch. And uncertainty is a key component of rationality. I wholly subscribe to the following view (as I suspect do most atheists): Bertrand Russel writes
"To my mind the essential thing is that one should base one's arguments upon the kind of grounds that are accepted in science, and one should not regard anything that one accepts as quite certain, but only as probable in a greater or a less degree. Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality".
GDR on Robert Wright writes:
I think his language if anything leads to his self-proclaimed agnosticism or deism.
You interpret it as deism because of the language he uses. But I would ask what
exactly is his self proclaimed agnosticism actually directed towards? Something that meets any conventional conceptual meaning of "god"...? I would be very interested to know what it is he explicitly is claiming to be agnostic towards.
GDR writes:
Straggler writes:
Firstly - What do you think he means by "deity"....?
An intelligent prime mover with purpose.
Can you show me where he explicitly says that with reference to some supernatural-conscious-intelligent being rather than something like the Platonic existence of non-zero-sum logic?
GDR writes:
Yes, but he goes beyond that and thinks that there are indications that a deity actually exists.
I am prepared to accept that Wright is more agnostic to such a possibility than I. But I have seen nothing other than conflationary terminology on which to base such a conclusion. Can you provide a link to where he says this explicitly?
GDR writes:
Sure but even in the Platonic sense there is some form of external intelligence with purpose which fills the bill for a non-specific deity doesn’t it?
How can an intelligent being exist "Platonically"....? Objectively derived concepts - Perfect circles, arithmetic, Pythagoras theorem, arguably some form of ethics - Can exist Platonically. But how can a conscious intelligent being exist Platonically? It makes no sense.
GDR writes:
If you are extrapolating his argument for love to altruism I think that is a stretch. I understand altruism is a zero-sum-game where the benefactor is the loser and the recipient is the winner. A non-zero-sum situation with kin is not the same thing.
Which is exactly what I have (admittedly rather facetiously) called the "Big Mac Effect" arises. We evolved in closely genetically related communities. An environment where altruism makes absolute genetic sense. In exactly the same way that our desire for high fat food makes sense because of food scarcity in our evolutionary past. The fact that we are still "designed" to be altruistic in a globalised community consisting of billions of people is no different to the fact that we are still "designed" to seek out highly calorific food types in a time when such things are prolific (and indeed detrimental to our wellbeing). If you think Wright's treatment of altruism is any different to his explanation of love you are sorely and desperately mistaken.
Wright writes:
Within a small, closely related population, an indiscriminate altruism could indeed evolve. And that's true even though some of the altruism would get spent on people who weren't relatives. After all, even if you channel your altruism precisely toward siblings, some of it is wasted, in evolutionary terms, since siblings don't share all your genes, and any given sibling may not carry the gene responsible for the altruism. What matters, in both cases, is that the altruism gene tends to improve prospects for vehicles that will tend to carry copies of itself; what matters is that the gene does more good than harm, in the long run, to its own proliferation. Behavior always takes place amid uncertainty, and all natural selection can do is play the odds.
Given that Wright is an evolutionary psychologist it would be amazing if he were subscribing to your non-genetic (but rather mysterious) origin of altruism wouldn't it?
GDR writes:
I think, and I emphasize think, that he is saying that there are two streams to evolution. There is the biological side and there is the social side, and that the two work together in tandem. The non-zero-sum argument makes a great deal of sense.
Wright isn't really arguing that there are two streams to Darwinian evolution. He is arguing that the non-zero-sum logic that gives rise to the genetic propagation of things like love, altruism and compassion are amplified by things like technology to include an ever increasing number of equally self-interested entities. Here is the love quote cited previously with the logical extension of his argument included. But you
have to accept the genetic self-interest component before any of the rest of his non-zero-sum argument makes any sense at all.
Wright in The Evolution Of God writes:
Indeed, the whole Darwinian point of love is to be a proxy for this logic; love gets us to behave as if we understood the logic; the invention of love, in some animal many millions of years ago, was nature’s way of getting dim-witted organisms to seek a win-win outcome (win-win from a gene’s-eye view), notwithstanding their inability to do so out of conscious strategy. And at that point the seeds of sympathylove’s corollary, and a key ingredient of the moral imaginationwere planted. Then, having been spawned by this biological non-zero-sumness, sympathy could be harnessed by a later wave of non-zero-sumness, a wave driven by cultural, and specifically technological, evolution. As interdependence, and hence social structure, grew beyond the bounds of familyand then beyond the bounds of hunter-gatherer band, of chiefdom, of statethe way was paved by extensions of sympathy. This sympathy didn’t have to involve its initial sponsor, love; you don’t have to love someone to trade with them or even to consider them compatriots. But there has to be enough moral imagination, enough sympathetic consideration, to keep them out of the cognitive category of enemy; you have to consider them, in some sense, one of you.
Is the link between the evolutionary origins of non-zero-sum logic moral components (love, altruism, empathy etc.) and their expansion through cultural/technological progress to include more and more genetically-self-interested entities now clearer to you?
GDR writes:
But the cranes had to start somewhere.
Simple beginnings from which complexity evolved. That is the entire "crane" concept.
GDR writes:
You are saying that I am fine with the idea that super-intelligence exists out of nowhere, but you believe essentially the same thing.
Not at all. See above.
GDR writes:
All the objective evidence just points to the fact that intelligence and consciousness exist.
Utterly untrue. ALL of the objective evidence indicates that such things are the product of evolved complexity and NOT things that just come from nowhere.
GDR writes:
There is no evidence that indicates whether or not a prime mover exists that set all of this in motion. That is a purely subjective conclusion.
It isn't at all subjective to conclude that intelligence is an emergent property of evolved material complexity rather than something that "just is".
The evidence for one far far outweighs the evidence of the other.
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