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Author
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Topic: Evolution and Specialness of Humanity
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 38 of 316 (249381)
10-06-2005 6:35 AM
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Reply to: Message 18 by joshua221
10-05-2005 7:36 PM
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Uniqueness
Uniqueness in reality is extremely important, allowing "ordinary" people to think of new ideas, and seek truth. To find God. I assume you use "unique" in the sense of "special" here, not as in "genetically unique"; and that you consider EVERYBODY unique by default, not just some elite? Question: if, as a given, 6 billion people are "unique", then what value is left in the "uniqueness"? How could that kind of "uniqueness" be important? I would say being "unique" is necessarily something you can only become. By what you do/achieve.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 18 by joshua221, posted 10-05-2005 7:36 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 39 by Phat, posted 10-06-2005 7:03 AM | | Annafan has replied | | | Message 42 by joshua221, posted 10-06-2005 4:45 PM | | Annafan has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 40 of 316 (249419)
10-06-2005 9:31 AM
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Reply to: Message 39 by Phat
10-06-2005 7:03 AM
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Re: Uniqueness
Annafan writes: Question: if, as a given, 6 billion people are "unique", then what value is left in the "uniqueness"? How could that kind of "uniqueness" be important? Well Annafan, if you had kids, would each one be unique? Would twins be unique? Yes, they would be. But I would love them in the first place because they are my kids, not because I feel it is their uniqueness that "requires" me to value them. Thought-experiment time  : What if we could effectively DUPLICATE a person. I don't just mean "cloning" (because that would not create an exact duplicate) but an actual 100% copy. Like we would have if someone went back 5 seconds into the past to meet himself. If "uniqueness" had any intrinsic value in itself, this would mean that both "instances" would now be regarded inferior to people who didn't happen to have a duplicate running around? lol (I'll address your other post later, btw)
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 39 by Phat, posted 10-06-2005 7:03 AM | | Phat has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 62 of 316 (249709)
10-07-2005 5:29 AM
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Reply to: Message 48 by joshua221
10-06-2005 7:09 PM
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does evolution dictate how we live/ what we live for?
Within evolution, we are products of random events, random bolts of energy producing simple compounds, we are NATURE. We are as the fish swim away to avoid predators, we are exactly alike to the Kindoms of organisms, we are no different aside from brain size, and what that allows us, we fulfill meaningless robotic like movements in order to "SURVIVE", we have nothing to live for except the advancement of the species, and YOU believe that the interactions that it takes to reproduce, and survive are worth living for?? I think you are confusing "background" here with "purpose". Evolution is merely the background against which we live. And I think you are assigning that far too much significance and power. It may be true that evolutionary principles ultimately shape the world and as a matter of speaking always "win" in the end. But it can do so without producing "losers". For example if you decide to not have children, you eliminate yourself as an opponent of evolution, so to speak. But did you, yourself, lose something? No. You were allowed your freedom. That's how I position evolution in my worldview: it does what it does, but it allows for dissident behaviour if you wish. It allows you to have your own purposes. Like others pointed out, the beauty of purpose is that you can freely choose it. What fun are purposes that are being assigned to you by something else??? What HONESTY is there in trying to fullfill those kind of purposes, where's the sincerity?
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 48 by joshua221, posted 10-06-2005 7:09 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 70 by joshua221, posted 10-07-2005 9:34 PM | | Annafan has replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 77 of 316 (250022)
10-08-2005 9:57 AM
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Reply to: Message 70 by joshua221
10-07-2005 9:34 PM
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Re: does evolution dictate how we live/ what we live for?
Purpose in life, does not exist given the backround of evolution. "Purpose" is not like an apple that you can take from an existing tree. You have to plant the tree yourself...
Can't you see how insigniificant humanity is as a result of totally random, and totally unfeeling events towards our lives? "Significance" is also not like an apple that you can take from an existing tree. You'll again have to plant that tree yourself...
We are a species that within evolution needs no purpose, and needs no God. I agree we don't need a God. And that's good news, given there apparently isn't one available. As to purpose... I don't think we need something like an absolute purpose. But we do need the ability to define our own purposes, and there are plenty of examples around of people doing pretty well in that respect.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 70 by joshua221, posted 10-07-2005 9:34 PM | | joshua221 has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 90 of 316 (250375)
10-10-2005 7:07 AM
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Reply to: Message 86 by joshua221
10-09-2005 11:35 AM
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Re: Uniqueness
Raising Children, Volunteering to help the community you are in... Doing these things can provide fulfillment in the sense of actually looking at the effects of what you have done. But when one sees the world as many people do, a world based on survival of species, (evolutionists), these acts are almost fake, without significance beyond a strategy to help or advance the species. The love you have put effort in giving was simply part of an interaction based solely on survival, and it was not given for your feelings or for yourself, or even for the people that you may have helped, it was done for humanity, as a species within a world of millions of other species. For this, the way things that are meaningful, become meaningless, I don't accept the theory of evolution. I still don't see what one thing (evolution) has to do with the other. (meaning/purpose) Evolution is just a mechanism. Simply that what happens when you throw the ingredients of our physical world together. Nature does constantly experiments, natural selection weeds out the failed experiments. You should look at it from the positive side: apparently this mechanism at the very least is flexible enough to allow such things as 'love' and 'altruism'. So how could you keep up that it is opposed to it?
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 86 by joshua221, posted 10-09-2005 11:35 AM | | joshua221 has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 96 by joshua221, posted 10-11-2005 12:10 AM | | Annafan has replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 101 of 316 (250661)
10-11-2005 5:42 AM
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Reply to: Message 96 by joshua221
10-11-2005 12:10 AM
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Re: Uniqueness
apparently this mechanism at the very least is flexible enough to allow such things as 'love' and 'altruism'. How? Plenty of plausible mechanisms have been suggested, but I don't think ANY of them will be able to satisfy you. I do suggest you check out JustinC's reply.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 96 by joshua221, posted 10-11-2005 12:10 AM | | joshua221 has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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The world "as it is"...
I see the world as it is, a world that is filled with genuine love. (genuine as described in schraf's reply) To say that this love was simply part of evolution's mechanical process would be an insult, and a total understatement, it would defile this love, I don't accept that as truth. I see the world as it is, a God-given wonder. You see the world as it is??? What puzzles me then is why, at the same time, you seem to totally disregard all the misery and evil that is also all too apparant in reality and human behaviour. Musn't it also be "God-given", then? Seeing through the glasses of evolution, we can understand both love and the exact opposite. Seeing through "God" glasses, all sorts of awkward constructs are needed to cater for the negative side of things.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 110 by joshua221, posted 10-12-2005 8:01 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 133 by joshua221, posted 10-13-2005 6:30 PM | | Annafan has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Re: Uniqueness
The only reality that I am "pulling down" is the false reality of your mind. Wait, not of your mind even, of a man's mind embedded in a textbook, unveiled for you to accept with all the physical evidence in the world, but what you lost is life, you lost anything worth anything at all when you accepted Charles' Idea, you lost your uniqueness, and you let it drain away, and here you are arguing against someone who sees really what is alive in the world, and what is truth. Someone who knows that their, AND your life is worth much more than your foolish and fabricated mechanisms, that you learned of and memorized, and believed whole-heartedly, a man's invention gives you a shabby purpose filled with competition of individuals, a virtual rat-race of species. Humanity loses all of it's value, and we become the organisms we can crush with a finger, we become souless, and we lose our dignity. Regain your dignity and honor as a human, and realize that we, You are important, and that you are unique. Life really isn't the way that you and the majority of humans see it, it has more meaning than that of a survival mechanism. Your love is not lost, it has become faded with doctrine. And I guess all of this is perfectly illustrated by the contrast between how compassionate and peaceful we treated each other and other lifeforms BEFORE Darwin, and how heartless and remorseless AFTER?  Gimme a break! Actually, you may find that Darwin was already strongly against slavery and dehuminization of non white-Europeans in his timeframe. Not exactly the mainstream idea at the time.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 112 by joshua221, posted 10-12-2005 8:14 PM | | joshua221 has not replied |
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 162 of 316 (251656)
10-14-2005 5:51 AM
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Annafan has left the thread
If any useful progress is made, let me know...
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 165 of 316 (251667)
10-14-2005 7:29 AM
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some relevant Steven Pinker
This is a fragment of a debate, which can be found in full here: Page not found | Edge.org
... Clearly there can be reasons that some people feel threatened by the idea that the mind is the activity of the brain, and here are my guesses about what they are.
One is that since natural selection is not a process that is guaranteed to produce niceness, many typical human motives will not necessarily lead to ethically desirable outcomes. Much of the research in evolutionary psychology has shown that many ignoble motives have some basis in natural selection. An example is the desire, most obvious in men, to defend one's honor and reputation, by violence if necessary. Another is the characteristically male motive to seek a variety of sexual partners. It's easy to work out why those motives evolved, and there is by now an enormous body of evidence that they are widespread among humans. But people reject the explanation because of what they think is the subtext. If these motives are part of our nature, if they come from the natural world, well, everyone knows that natural things are good -- natural childbirth, natural yogurt, and so on -- so that would imply that promiscuity and violence aren't so bad after all. And it implies that since they are "in the genes," they are unchangeable, and attempts to improve the human condition are futile. I think both parts are wrong -- the first part is so obviously wrong that it has been given a name, the naturalist fallacy, the idea that what we find in nature is good. What we find in nature is not necessarily good; as Richard has put it, the universe is not good or bad, it's indifferent. Certainly violence and philandering and all of the other sins are immoral whether their cause is the genes, or the wiring of the brain, or social conditioning, or anything else. It behooves us to find the causes, but the causes don't change the moral coloring of those acts. Also, the human mind, I argue, is a complex system of many interacting parts. Even if one motive impels people to do immoral acts, other parts of the mind that can subvert its designs. We can think of the long-term consequences, and we can imagine what society would be like if everyone acted on a particular motive. The part of the mind that has those thoughts can disengage the part of the mind that has less noble motives.
I think a second discomfort with the biological approach to the human mind is the worry that it somehow makes our ideals a sham or less real. Life would be a Potemkin Village, where there's only a facade of value and worth, but really biology is showing that there's nothing behind the facade. For example, if we love our children because the genes for loving children are in the bodies of those children and so the genes are benefiting themselves, doesn't that undermine the purity or the value of that love? If our ethical ideals, our sense of justice and fairness, were selected for because it did our ancestors good in the long run, would that imply that there's no such thing as altruism or justice, that deep down we're really selfish? I think that this reaction is based on a misreading of Richard's metaphor of the selfish gene. It's not because of what Richard actually said in his book The Selfish Gene, which is crystal clear. But here's how it could be misread: the theory says that one can make powerful predictions about the process of natural selection by imagining that the gene has a selfish motive to make copies of itself. Of course no one ever thought that a gene has real motives in the sense that people have motives, but it this is a valuable way to gain insight about the subtleties of natural selection, especially when it comes to social interactions, and it leads to many correct predictions. Here is the distortion. People think that genes are our deepest hidden self, our essence, so if our genes are selfish, that means that deep down we're selfish. It's an unholy hybrid of Freud's idea of unconscious motivation and the straightforward modern theory of the natural selection of replicators. Now, I think I'm safe to say that it was not intended by Richard, and it doesn't follow from the logic of the theory. The metaphorical motives of the genes are not somehow a more fundamental or honest version of the real motives of the entire person. Indeed, sometimes the most "selfish" thing a gene can do, in this metaphorical sense of selfish, is to build a brain that is not selfish -- not selfish at an unconscious level, not selfish at any level -- even if the genes are themselves metaphorically selfish. When we love our children we aren't at any level of the brain calculating that it will increase our inclusive fitness. The love can be pure and in and of itself in terms of what's actually happening in the brain. The selfishness of genes explains why we have that pure emotion. The idea that morality itself would be a fiction if our moral reasoning came out of some evolved moral sense is also a non sequitur. The fear comes from the fact that we know that many aspects of human experience are in some sense figments. The qualitative distinction between red, yellow, green, and blue, for example, is not out in the world; it's just the way our brain imposes arbitrary cuts in the continuous spectrum of the wavelength of light. Well, if the qualitative difference between red and green is a figment -- it's just the way we're built, it doesn't have any external reality -- could right and wrong also be a figment? Would the sense of worth that comes from pursuing justice and fairness be a sham, just a way of tickling our pleasure centers and making us feel good because of the flow of chemicals or the wiring diagram of the brain? Not at all. This supposed devaluation of morality does not follow from the idea that we have an evolved moral sense. Many of our faculties evolved to mesh with real things in the world. We have a complicated system of depth perception and shape recognition that prevents us from bumping into trees and falling off cliffs. The fact that our ability to recognize an object comes from complicated circuitry of the brain does not mean that there aren't real objects out there. Indeed, the brain evolved in order to give us as accurate a representation as possible of what is objectively out in the world. That may also be true, at least according to some philosophical arguments, for morality. Many philosophers believe that some abstract entities, such as numbers, have an existence independent of minds. That is, many philosophers and mathematicians believe that the number three is not just a figment in the way that the color red is, but that it has a real existence, which mathematicians discover and explore with their mathematical faculties; they don't invent it. Similarly, many moral philosophers argue that right and wrong have an existence, and that our moral sense evolved to mesh with them. Even if you don't believe that, there's an alternative that would make the moral sense just as real -- namely, that our universal moral sense is constituted so that it can't work unless we believe that right and wrong have an external reality. So if you want to stop short of saying that moral truths exist outside us, you can say that we can't reason other than by assuming that they do. In that case, when we get down to having a moral debate, we still appeal to external standards of right and wrong; we aren't reduced to comparing idiosyncratic emotional or subjective reactions.
The final disquiet, I think, that is elicited by the naturalist or biological approach to the mind, is that it robs us of responsibility. If we act only because of ricocheting molecules in the brain, shaped by the genes which in turn were shaped by natural selection -- if it's billiard balls all the way down and all the way back -- then how can we hold someone responsible for his actions, given that there is no "he" that caused them? I agree this is a fascinating puzzle, but I don't think it has anything particular to do with cognitive neuroscience or behavioral genetics or evolutionary psychology. It's a problem that is raised by any attempt to explain behavior, regardless of the nature of the explanation. ...
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Annafan
Member (Idle past 4608 days) Posts: 418 From: Belgium Joined: 08-08-2005
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Message 253 of 316 (253057)
10-19-2005 12:23 PM
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Reply to: Message 231 by joshua221
10-18-2005 10:43 PM
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Re: Brief Summary of my Beliefs, to provide much needed clarity.
But prophex, do or don't you believe us when we say that we don't feel about it this way? Do you think we are not sincere or does it mean that we are deluded or that we refuse to see the "real" implications of ToE? Either this whole negative approach exists only in your head (and the ones of people who think the same way), or it is a reality and somehow we miss the point. In which case we would act counter to your pessimistic scenario(???)
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 231 by joshua221, posted 10-18-2005 10:43 PM | | joshua221 has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 262 by joshua221, posted 10-19-2005 5:07 PM | | Annafan has not replied |
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