You could have just asked: "If intelligence endows evolutionary success, why is there only one intelligent species?"

It's a very odd question. Firstly--and without worrying too much about definitions--intelligence is a spectrum or a continuum, and it can be observed in many animals, especially among mammals and birds. Secondly, adaptations are adaptive in particular environments. Bacteria are very successful and they don't need intelligence for it. So "the belief that intelligence is a [generally] favorable evolutionary development in organisms" is not one that is held by biologists.

It seems that while intraspecies population (of humans to be specific) indicates that intelligence is a desirable trait to develop in the game of survival, interspecies population tells an entirely different story. — TheMadFool

Better put it like this: intelligence worked for humans and to varying degrees for some other species, but wasn't required for the success of many other organisms. Thus your mystery disappears, no?

And if you think humans are successful ... according to wiki, the average yearly worldwide number of individuals of the cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus is (2.8 to 3.0) × 10^27.

Price tag can be very high. But your choice of course. — Hippyhead

Yes, my grandfather had Parkinson's and increasingly severe dementia over a period of 15 years. In those circumstances, I would think fighting to the bitter end would lose any meaning.

Honestly, what scares me is that I try to time my departure too closely, and blow it. And then spend the next 12 years staring at the ceiling unable to move. 12 years that will feel like 2,000. My sister doing this right now. No end in sight. Could be 20 more years to come before it's over. Can you tell I'm terrified? — Hippyhead

I hope you find a way to deal with it, even if it involves defining waves out of existence.

I had an uncle who was mowing the grass on a hot 4th of July and had a heart attack. They said he was dead before he hit the ground. Now that's the way to go about things. — Hippyhead

I'd want at least a second or two to think, "ha, this isn't such a bad way to go". Or, "It's July 4th, why didn't I just relax by the pool?" (I'm not American but my birthday is July 4th, so it all checks out :cool:)

Yes, I do, would agree that such abstractions as we are exploring here will have limited emotional value. That said, I've been considering this for years, and for this nerd it does help create a different mental image than "when I die I lose everything".

There can be very practical implications of such a different mental image, to the degree it's possible to attain. As example, my mother died a very long hard death from Parkinsons because she wasn't a philosopher or religious, so she had nothing but the common "fight to the bitter end" philosophy to guide her. If they should tell me I have Parkinsons, I'm convinced my next step would be to get my affairs in order and then put a bullet in my brain. Part of this is a very ordinary fear of pain, and another part a sense that, um, the ocean is where I come from.

In agreement with your sentiment above I will remind you of the posts I shared above regarding how religions typically understand that this level of abstraction has limited practical use, and so they reach for other more accessible language. But philosophers tend to hate such language, so I am attempting to speak here in the local dialect, if you will. — Hippyhead

Yes, I think I understand. I also seek the right attitudes for dealing with these things, but for me, metaphysics doesn't help. Regarding my own death, often I think I would like to be a fighter to the bitter end, like your mother, but sometimes I think a peaceful equanimous death would be better. The significance of these things has a kind of autonomy and may as well be dealt with--this is ethics--whether they are illusions or mere patterns, or whatever.

I happened to be reading an interview with Daniel Dennett, in connection with another thread I've been reading along with, where he talks about his views on ontology and uses the word "pattern", as you do:

We have got all these atoms, and then we have the patterns that we discern among these atoms and four dimensions: space and time. Now the question is: Do the patterns have ontological significance? And for me the answer is: That's what ontology is. What other criterion could you ever use? What other reason could you ever have for your ontological presuppositions? — Dennett

I think we can interpret this as saying that it's precisely the patterns that can be said to significantly exist, rather than matter without form. This might also be Aristotle's view, namely that things exist as compounds of matter and form.

Ok then, please continue and share what you feel an appropriate definition would be — Hippyhead

Let's instead take seriously the position that people and waves and other such composite objects don't exist, that patterns in general don't exist. There might be a few philosophers who agree. I don't agree with it, but I'll go along with it for now.

Does it then follow that people don't die? I think not. Surely what follows is that dying describes the destruction of a pattern, or the conclusion of a patterny process, even if this isn't the end of any thing's existence.

If this is right, then there is little comfort in knowing that nothing has ceased to exist. It just means that existence wasn't the important thing all along.

Of course, the idea that our constituent existents will find their way into other patterns might be appealing, but it doesn't really detract from the seriousness of death.

It means if you haven't read the article and have nothing to say about it, scram!

Note to all participants: this is a reading group and I'll begin deleting comments from those who haven't read the article or who make no attempt to engage with it. @RogueAI, take note.

All right...

I think that what I'm saying, or at least tried to say, is that everything observable is patterns in energy, and that the patterns have no existence (weight and mass) of their own. And I'm certain I'm hardly the first person to say this, but am just expressing things already said many times in my own particular language. — Hippyhead

Nobody says that only things with mass exist, I don't think. Well, you do, but it seems eccentric. So as far as I can make sense of things, what you're saying is that everything observable is patterns in energy, which have no mass. Well, okay, if you like.

Why morn the end of the wave when the water and energy have gone nowhere? Yes, the pattern is gone, but it never existed in the first place. — Hippyhead

Because it's the wave that I observed, that I loved, that was part of my world, and that is gone. I don't give a shit about the water and energy. You see the problem? It's patterns that are significant, even if you define them out of existence.

Existence usually means 'to stand out'. Thus a thing exists if it stands out from its background. This would be why Schrodinger notes that as well as what exists there is 'the canvas on which they are painted'. For a Venn diagram a set does not exist unless it stands out from the blank piece of paper.

The waves 'exist' because they stand out. The ocean does not stand out but is what existents stand-out from. Existents are phenomenal, having only a dependent-existence, therefore are not truly real. What is truly real is the background but this does not exist in the sense of 'standing-out'. Thus nothing really exists. — FrancisRay

I like that way of talking about existence, but you don't make much use of it. If waves do exist, i.e., they stand out phenomenally against a background, then you cannot say that they do not exist without redefining "exist". You seem to do that when you say that things that exist "are not truly real" (whatever that means), and take that implicitly to entail that they don't exist after all. Why? It must be because you think that to exist is not in fact to stand out phenomenally against a background--which I guess is why you use the quotation marks around "exist"--but rather is to be "truly real" and to appear to stand out, which is by definition impossible.

So you began by offering an interesting way of thinking about existence, but then immediately dismissed it because it's phenomenal and not "truly real", without explaining what this means or why it should justify a dismissal.

I didn't say anything about forms — Hippyhead

You did.

C'mon, give me a little break, you're sinking in to automated rejectionism mode. — Hippyhead

No, I really do think your definition of existence is wrong, and obviously so, and I don't think it's a popular view either in philosophy or on the street.

EDIT: I've just remembered that there is a view in philosophy called mereological nihilism, according to which you and I and waves, and anything else that's made of smaller bits, do not exist: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/#Eli

Seem the same thing to me. — Hippyhead

So you agree that forms and patterns are the same thing, but you've said that forms of energy or matter can be destroyed, after saying that patterns cannot.

I'm using the general man in the street definition, has weight and mass — Hippyhead

Did you ask this man in the street if light and gravity, governments and currencies, species and rectangles, love and beauty, pieces of music and rivers exist? Anyway, to my knowledge there is no such philosophical position on existence as the one you mention.

My nitpicking is to try and make things clear and coherent, but aside from all of that, maybe you're a modern-day Heraclitus: all is flux, you never step in the same river twice.

What we value is thought. — Hippyhead

If by "we" you mean philosophers, yes sure, but when I said "we" I meant people, and people value more than mere thought.

Einstein says that energy can't be either created or destroyed, so ok, yes on that one. But the water could conceivably be boiled away from every planet in the universe, the atomic structure could be dismantled entirely etc. Does this satisfy your question? — Hippyhead

I don't think so. So according to you, it is not just matter and energy that exist, but matter and energy that has taken various forms, e.g., water? What is the difference between a form and a pattern? What makes a water molecule different from a wave, such that one exists and the other doesn't? You've mentioned "our definition" of existence a couple of times now, but this is far from a settled question in philosophy, and you haven't been explicit about it. Why would anyone agree with a scheme in which matter and energy cannot be destroyed, but molecules can, but waves and people can't?

Anyway, let's say that we cannot die and waves cannot be destroyed. Where does that leave us? Why is that better than saying we die while the matter and energy that we were made of remains? How is that any different? What we value, in fact what we're actually talking about when we talk about death, destruction, and even existence, is the patterns. All you've done is redefine the words involved.

EDIT: This all seems to me rather like when people say that solid things are not really solid (which is a misunderstanding of physics or misuse of language).

According to the theory, you can not be destroyed because, as a pattern, you don't exist. — Hippyhead

But things that exist cannot be destroyed either, as you stated. My point was that you seem to be assuming that to be destroyed, you have to exist, even while saying that such things that exist--matter and energy--cannot be destroyed either.

So maybe nothing can be destroyed? But you did claim that patterns are created, when you said that a wave was "a pattern created by energy applied to water". But surely something that can be created can be destroyed, no?

So I cannot be destroyed because I'm not the kind of thing that cannot be destroyed? :chin:

This again? Time to move on, HH. Work on improving your own posts.

This does not look promising, The Opposite.

ok

Well that's the grown-up assumption as far as I'm concerned. That debate is silly, in my opinion, but that doesn't mean I'll delete or move such a discussion. Sam's discussion was along those lines but as I recall it wasn't put in the Lounge, despite being crackpottery.

How do I get a NDE thread onto the main page? I'm not sure if it's considered a philosophical area. — The Opposite

By writing a good opening post. The topic can be approached philosophically, but even purely psychological, neurological, or anthropological approaches are fine too. I'd be less sympathetic to a discussion in which people actually took these studies to be evidence of an afterlife.

If you're going to complain about someone publicly, I think you should be specific. I don't see any evidence of unmodlike comments over the past few days. In any case you could flag the comments that you don't like, or tell me about them privately.

Street is a very good moderator. So far, that outweighs his less obviously beneficial idiosyncrasies.

I'm closing this now.

Cool post :up:

:up:

I read "Quining Qualia" this morning, to try and work out what Dennett was saying and make some contribution to this discussion, but then realized that it had nothing to do with what people are talking about here. I suggest a reading group.

:up:

I was a bit startled to see that everything I had written on this site, even my own photo, was showing up for anyone to read without anyone signing into the forum website. I don't blame the administrators of this site. It merely shows that Google, in England at least, is watching us at all times. — Jack Cummins

Like all public websites, this one can be accessed by web crawlers like Googlebot, and it gets crawled a lot because it ranks highly and changes frequently (this is why the Google search engine is so useful.) Only posting comments is confined to authenticated users, not reading them.

If you're concerned, we could change your username now and within a few days or weeks, any connection between your real name and this website will disappear, because the relevant pages in Google's index will be crawled again, and the old name effectively overwritten. Probably.

Sorry for going off topic people.

Which I think clearly, if inadvertently, highlights the basic philosophical contradiction within Dawkins' view, which is that what an Aristotelian would call 'efficient and material causes' are the only real causes. It is precisely the idea of 'final cause' - 'the reason that something exists' - that has been eliminated, in Dawkins' understanding. And so effectively, that he can't even understand why someone would ask such a question. — Wayfarer

That's fair. Or he might be saying that there is no use looking for a "why" in the way that we look for causes in science (or even religion), and that we have to use our own intelligence and our eminently reasonable liberal values to decide on our own existential purpose. In which case, he might not be entirely rejecting final causes, but merely separating them from science.

All the posturing, spite and confusion on this thread are ideological in nature. — Olivier5

I think this is about right, but it applies to both sides. Very disappointing.

The reason Midgley was furious about Gene the Shellfish was that it described human beings as slaves to their genes. Such full biological determinism is eminently ideological -- it tells people that they are not free -- and it's an ideology with dark history (eugenism, racism, slavery, nazism, etc.). — Olivier5

It's true that The Selfish Gene is partly ideological—I think that all popular biology is inescapably ideological—but it's in the realm of Hobbes rather than Hitler, and with a certain liberal and "scientific rationalist" understanding of the Enlightenment. It has little in common with Nazism.

Because what you miss in the passage above is that Dawkins's moral and political message is that, thanks to our unique intelligence and scientific society, we are not slaves to our genes, that we are free—precisely the opposite of what you imply he's saying.

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. — The Selfish Gene

There have been very few submissions. Maybe just one or two aside from my own, and they were not what we're looking for. I'm as surprised about this as you are. I suppose that those who are able to write good articles would rather publish them elsewhere.

I didn't even know you had sent it. In our private conversation, you just went silent, giving no indication of what you were going to do, and I rarely check infoatthephilosophyforumdotcom . I've posted it in the editors' private area, so maybe someone will read it now. Thanks for the contribution.

reMarkable seems to be first and foremost an e-writer, rather than an e-reader. That would put me off if I was looking primarily for a reader. Looks great though.

I left a few hundred books stored in boxes in Scotland when I took up my itinerant life in 2012 and had to get a kindle. I went back to hard copies recently and it has triggered a new enthusiasm for reading, but I'm disappointed at how bad the print quality and font sizes are in many printed books--no doubt my eyesight has deteriorated over the past few years. On a kindle I can adjust the font size, and I have a backlight that doesn't disturb my sleeping wife, so I'm going back to kindle except for books that just feel a lot better in printed form: big complex books and those with pictures or diagrams.

I love buying and possessing books but I'm aware that this probably shallow acquisitiveness disappears when I actually get into reading one. Or rather, it's independent of the experience of reading: the book I'm into is no longer interesting from the acquisitive standpoint, which turns towards other, newer, immaculate and shiny books.

That's how I tend to end up with many more books than I can possibly read. If I didn't live in a foreign country with only a couple of English-language bookshops and no Amazon, I would have lost control of this tendency some time ago.

If they're paperbacks, the books I read do not remain immaculate and shiny. Among other bad habits, I use the page corners--say 20 pages together--to clean my nails.

Take them with you on trips? — tim wood

If I'm going away for a day or two, yes, but not generally when I'm leaving the house. I don't understand how people can walk and read, or even read in public at all. I can't not look at and listen to what's around me. For reading I prefer to be alone in a quiet place where there's no risk of being disturbed, and no extraneous stimulation.

:cool:

Here's something about words that I find interesting, but I'm not sure if you Americans will understand it. When I'm bantering with my brother or my close friends, we will call each other names, and I often reach for American ones like dingus, dweeb, doofus, douchebag/douche, and poindexter (it's not all Ds).

There's an amusing ironic quality to the insults when I use those words, because they're not natural words for us to use with each other. They sound almost corny--we Brits pick them up from old movies and TV, of course--so they undercut the offensiveness of the insults. To use one of those words is to make oneself ridiculous, thereby introducing the classic comedy of a self-righteously angry but ridiculous person.

... I'm not sure if you Americans will understand it — me in this very post

I imagine that Americans might sometimes use British (or Italian or Spanish or whatever) terms in a similar way, but surely the resulting quality, texture, and humour of the insult are quite different?

I think I knew that already.

Yes I know, but I'm generous with my condescending approval.

That's the spirit.

Incidentally, I quite like "scurrilous". It's partly because it makes me think of squirrels and other rodents, I suppose because they're animals that scurry.

The next part that you didn't quote explains this. — Noble Dust

No, it doesn't.

As I said, I didn't start this thread; I only revived it. I dunno what else you want. — Noble Dust

I want to criticize you for bizarrely trying to police this thread.

Cradle — Noble Dust

Very nice. But I could say, inspired by you: may I remind you that the point of this thread is not to just give us a word you like, with no comment about it. T Clark showed us the way, by giving us some words and telling us why he liked them. I'm worried that this thread has devolved into a word-mentioning contest, devoid of actual appreciation. And so on. It should be obvious that this isn't serious; I hope you get the point.

I can; however, this is not what people are actually doing. — Noble Dust

This is a scurrilous accusation. Perhaps dick-measuring is what Sir2u is doing, but I don't see any evidence otherwise. Anyway, so what?

In my case, I chose a word that was obscure to me, but not because I wanted to impress anyone. I was really struck by the word and was quite excited about it. It kind of ... opened up a world to me.

What I'm worried about is... — Noble Dust

Why on Earth would you be worried?

has devolved into a love of impressive/and/or/obscure words — Noble Dust

Maybe you should have posted some rules in bold and upper case, like "Please post words that you love, unless they are impressive and obscure. Only familiar words are allowed. If you break this rule I will throw tantrums."

But pleasing words don't have to be any of these things. — Noble Dust

You can demonstrate this by continuing to post unimpressive and familiar words that you like.

Generally, why can't you just let people post words that take their fancy? Why this weird need for control? Why so serious? You're just spoiling people's fun.

:cool:

It's great. Interestingly, it's based on an earlier piece composed for ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument:



It doesn't have the same power as the version in the Quartet for the End of Time, but it's quite amazing: ethereal and pleasingly strange.

Yeh it's unfortunate that his fanaticism is what came to the fore. He was warned about it several times, so the ban didn't come out of nowhere.

:up: