You have my sword. — Thorongil

I'm honoured.

And though I used to be one of those who defended pornography, I've changed my mind about it now. I think it really is changing the way people relate to each other, and not in a good way.

With regards to the mainstream media, in some cases, rightly so. Need I provide examples? — Sapientia

No need. You're right, but it's a baby/bathwater thing. It's one thing to dismiss Fox News, but it's another thing to dismiss work by professional journalists in favour of sensational conspiracies peddled by YouTubers.

There is also a post-ironic kind of discourse that only occurs on the internet, and that can really become your bread and butter once you get the hang of it, and make every other mode of human interaction look like socially retarded trash, or culturally dated. — The Great Whatever

What exactly do you mean by this TG? I ask because I'm instinctively one of those who agrees with statements like this from BC:

We all need to get out more to mingle, mix, socialize, gossip, agitate, organize, argue, make love, make war, make peace--real stuff, not virtual reality. — Bitter Crank

Yet it feels a bit too easy to think like this, as if I'm falling back on prejudice. It's facile to say that virtual relationships are eroding real relationships and it's the end of civilization, even if there's some truth in it. I'm interested in an alternative attitude, one that embraces quite different ways of living and interacting.

I like the easy access to (most) information provided for by the Internet. — OglopTo

I do too. It has certainly enriched my life. I wouldn't have been able to read and discuss philosophy without it.

Another way to do it could be to set up a permanent group dedicated to reading something each month, and once you're in the group, you gotta do it. And members would take it in turns to choose the reading material. Come to think of it, that's kind of like a regular reading group isn't it?

It's a cunning plan. The democratic charade makes people think they've made a decision even if their choice doesn't win, and once they've made suggestions and voted, they feel more committed to taking part. I'm just manipulating the masses for the greater good of the Forum. >:)

More seriously, I very much doubt the previous readings would have been as successful without the formalities.

Why? might be a good question, but asking Dawkins why there is life is a bit like asking a military historian why there is war: given that there is war, he wants to know how it works. Which is to say that evolutionary theory doesn't even address the question. Indeed, even aside from the "why" question, as fields of study I think the origin of life is quite distinct from evolution.

To what extent evolutionary theory lends weight to the dethronement of meaning as understood in Christian faith and doctrine is another matter. I happen to think it does, but there have been Christian evolutionary scientists.

So here's a potential list for the poll:

Peter Sloterdijk, "Rules for the Human Zoo"
GEM Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy"
Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit"
Otávio Bueno, "Is Logic A Priori?"

Any more suggestions?

That last one looks like a good contender.

Suppose that someone wanted to prove, through empirical evidence, something like chance, or the randomness of random genetic mutations, how would one proceed? — Metaphysician Undercover

The question is why the existing empirical evidence doesn't satisfy you. I mean, considering the fact that significant work and thought have gone into these issues since Darwin, I would think the most fruitful approach here in tackling the philosophical problems is to discuss what the existing evidence does and does not prove.

I see that direction in evolution has come up, as supposedly being inconsistent with Darwinian theory and supportive of Lamarck. I'll let others argue against this, but I thought it might be worth pointing out that the arch-materialist villain of the piece, Richard Dawkins, is one of those who argues for the notion of progress in evolution, against those like Stephen Jay Gould, who as far as I can tell are in a minority, who characterize apparent progress as a statistical anomaly--for example, he sees bacteria as the most successful organisms, and they haven't changed much.

I think the key popular books here are The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins, which @Wayfarer has mentioned already, and Gould's Full House (re-titled "Life's Grandeur" in the UK). Though they disagree, both books are thoroughly Darwinist.

This is useful too: http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/5/451.full

Looks good, but I can't find an accessible copy of it.

Yes, and Darwin liked the term so much he started using it himself. These days I think it's more apt to mislead.

Good idea. I don't think it's blatantly obvious at all. In the context of genetic mutation it means that whether a mutation is beneficial or not does not affect the probability that it will occur. However, it seems that some mutations are more probable than others, so the terms "random" and "chance" can be misleading even when applied in the way that is often thought to be correct.

Firstly, of course you're right that selective breeding results in phenotypic changes that are non-random, because which ones survive depends on decisions made by the breeder. But the mutations that result in these changes are random in just the same way as they are in natural selection. Secondly, "survival of the fittest" has not been a popular phrase in Darwinian theory for a long time, partly I think because the notion of survival is misleading in the way you describe, especially when combined with a misleading notion of fitness. But in any case fitness in biology just means reproductive fitness, and what is crucial in the theory is the survival of the traits, not the survival of individuals. Life-span has never been emphasised in the theory in the way you suggest it has. Note also the importance in evolutionary theory of sexual selection, which is precisely about, as you put it, "those physical traits and behaviours which prove to be desirable to a reproductive partner".

Evolutionary biologists agree with you that evolution is not random and is not a matter of chance, but crucially this doesn't entail either that chance has no role in the process, or that there is any purposeful direction of the process.

Perhaps a combined reading with The Art of the Deal? ;)

Time for a financial report.

Cost of site to run: $49/month
Current PayPal balance: $108

Subscriptions for $5/month: 3
Subscriptions for $10/quarter: 4

A couple of members made some generous one-off payments too, and failing that I've put the required money in myself.

In the beginning, PayPal recurring payments were not integrated into PlushForums and subscribing was just a matter of making a one-off payment, though it did set those members to Subscriber status within TPF. I think if recurring payments had been integrated in the beginning, we would have more active subscriptions. I'm hoping some of those people who "subscribed" in the beginning, but whose subscriptions are now inactive because of the upgrade, will let me know so they can subscribe again (thank you to those who've done that).

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/367/subscribe-to-tpf

At some point in the future we'll probably have to move to the next pricing plan, which is $75/month. The main thing causing the move will probably be storage, uploaded files taking up most of that, but I can't seem to find the storage usage screen in the admin dashboard that they added a few months ago. Maybe they removed it again. We can delete unused files if we want to, but I want to avoid that (nothing is really unused unless it's related to deleted posts). Anyway, I'll find out how close we are to our limit and update this post.

The cost of the articles site is $29/year. When it comes time to renew it, I'll probably do so, but my single article is beginning to look very lonely.

I think I already understand the idea of natural selection. [...] — John

Yes that's pretty much the idea. Now we're left with your claim that the analogy with selective breeding is very poor, and your claim that natural selection is a trivial idea that was known about long before Darwin. Questioning the first claim I've tried to show that the analogy is a good one, but I haven't convinced you. I don't know what to do about the other claim except direct you to learn about the history of evolutionary thought, hence the link.

I think I've said all I can, so I'll duck out now and maybe the discussion will recover from this long digression. Sorry about that, Michael and others. :-#

Are you claiming that people had not known about heritable traits for centuries, if not millennia before Darwin? How long do you think selective animal breeding has been going on? Are you claiming that people would not have noticed that unfit animals tend to be less likely to survive than fit animals? The (I think fairly uncontroversial) claims that people had known about heritable traits and that they had noticed the tendency of less fit animals to fail to survive more often than fit ones are the basis of my "baseless intuition". — John

Even if people did know about these, it doesn't amount to the concept of natural selection. So I see no basis here at all.

If you are not claiming either of these then what do you think is the significant advance in thinking Darwin made other than his conjecture about the origin of species (which is irrelevant to any analogy with selective breeding, since the latter does not produce species change so far as is known)? — John

The advance is natural selection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection

I don't want to boringly repeat myself, but I think the idea that "selection pressures influencing the distribution of traits in populations" would have long been well understood because the heredity of traits had long been acknowledged (selective animal breeding likely goes back thousands of years) and it is an obvious step from what would have been the common observation that unfit animals are less likely to survive, to the idea that if you don't survive long enough you won't reproduce and pass on your heritable traits. — John

If you think the basic idea of natural selection was obvious and unoriginal, then I'm not surprised you think Darwin is overrated. But you're simply wrong, notwithstanding your vague feeling that it's been known about for centuries. Just because you think it's obvious doesn't mean it has always been obvious.

I reread what I wrote, but couldn't see anything which I thought should lead you to you think I have "conflated the two concepts yet again", I'd be interested to know, though. — John

Here:

To summarise, in the environmental selection case the physiological changes themselves are produced by random (contingent because purposeless) processes, whereas in the selective breeding case the physiological changes are very definitely directed towards an end. — John

You're contrasting physiological changes that occur in nature with those that occur in selective breeding. You say the former are "produced by random processes", but the latter are "directed towards an end".

If "produced by random processes" you're referring to mutations, then you're attempting to draw the distinction I criticized earlier (in summary, my criticism is that because random mutations are equally important in both cases, your distinction is a category error). But if you're referring to selection itself as somehow random, then you're wrong about: natural selection is not random. Or maybe you don't really mean random but just mean to emphasize the blind, purposeless nature of natural selection, in contrast to directedness, in which case we've already been through that: yes, because of this difference the analogy is slightly misleading if you take it to imply a guiding hand, but so long as we keep this in mind the analogy works well.

So you're doing at least one of these: conflating randomness with purposelessness, conflating mutations with selection, repeating yourself, or making the basic mistake of thinking that evolution is random. But it's difficult to know for sure because it's not clear what you're trying to say.

Thanks for clarifying John (though I think you might be conflating the two concepts yet again in your last sentence).

I agree it's important to keep in mind that natural selection is not directed towards an end as it is in artificial selection, but that's kind of obvious if you pay attention to Darwin's argument and doesn't really detract from the power of the analogy. The point of it is that there are selection pressures influencing the distribution of traits in populations, leading to the formation of species in one case and breeds in the other--no matter whether those selection pressures are directed or not.

If you think that I have said something which is "bad mistake" or which implies something I haven't "owned up to" then please point out the particular words you are referring to. — John

Here you bring up the contrast, not between the directedness of selective breeding and the blind process of natural selection, but between the directedness of selective breeding and the randomness of mutations:

The point is that it is here, with this notion of 'randomness', that the analogy with selective breeding fails, because the changes brought about in the lattere are very carefully planned. — John

And I've already explained why this is a mistake. Random mutations happen in both cases, and the difference is in how those mutations are selected, or if you prefer, how they come to survive and get passed on.

Also you're assertion that those who do not like the analogy do not understand is, frankly, insulting. I also don't think that what you claim the analogy shows is anything other than trivial because I think it is very implausible that intelligent people would not already, for thousands of years prior to Darwin, have understood very well that people and animals may be more or less well or ill suited to survive under different conditions. — John

That this was a fundamental mechanism of the creation of species, in the way that selective breeding is the mechanism of the creation of breeds, was utterly new to science and thought. Just what is it that you think Darwin actually discovered, if anything?

But to answer your direct question: the analogy shows us that the traits that come to define species do so because the bearers of those traits survive to pass them on owing to their suitability to the conditions, i.e., the prevailing selection pressures. If you think this is trivial, you have the analogy to thank for that.

This doesn't hold because in the case of selective breeding there is no question of survival advantage but merely of which animals are chosen to breed. So the direction of the breeding program is foreordained and this is not analogous with the Darwinian model where there is no goal. — John

I have to pull you up on this John. You made a bad mistake in your last post, irrelevantly contrasting the randomness of mutations with the directedness of selective breeding, but you haven't owned up to it, and here you just return to your original position, which I already addressed.

I see why you don't like the analogy and I can appreciate that. After all, the very problem with it that you've pointed out can sometimes be slightly misleading for people getting to grips with evolution, especially if they don't study it very deeply. Even so, it strikes me as the best analogy I have ever seen, and my suspicion is that those who treat it contemptuously--rather than critically--just don't really understand it.

So far there has not been even an attempt to define what that might mean. — andrewk

I attempted it.

No, the analogy does not fail, because while the mutations themselves may appear randomly, those which bestow advantages do so owing to the conditions, whether they be imposed by human preference or by nature. The mutations that a human breeder selects from are random too. The idea is not that selection is random, but that mutations are random.

And this is the purest anachronism:

I think it must have already been obvious to intelligent people long before Darwin that organisms that are more suitably equipped to survive in particular environments will be more likely to survive. — John

Yes, but the analogy takes account of that. Whereas the selection of the traits you want in your pigeons is deliberate, the selection that drives evolution more generally is not directed, i.e., it is natural selection. One can see why Darwin thought it was a good analogy despite this fundamental difference.

The first Superman comic came out the same year Seabiscuit beat War Admiral. It means that there's something Super that's latent in every regular everybody. — Mongrel

This.

But I think @Wosret's picked up on something in the air. If heroes give every regular everybody something to live up to, then some will fail, and isn't the experience of failure now seen in some quarters as something that people need to be protected from? I'm thinking of the notion that seems to be popular in education and parenting, that in a kids' athletics race, for example, everyone's a winner just for taking part, and you're amazing just for being you, and so on.

I see it as an ontological difference, and I don't think there are that many of them. 'Ontological' means 'pertaining to the meaning of Being' - it's not, as is often casually stated, the analysis of 'what exists'. So I think there's an ontological discontinuity, which actually is revealed in the fact that humans are referred to as 'beings'. The problem with this view, however, is that current philosophy and science doesn't accomodate ontological levels, as far as I can see; this is because it postulates matter~energy as the only real substance or existent. — Wayfarer

Yes I agree it's an ontological difference, because I think to be human is to be historical. But of course you're right to point out that I'm reluctant to say what I think the ontological difference most fundamentally is, because I don't like having to choose between history, society and personhood.

And when I said it's about what matters to us, I wasn't being entirely relativist. I have an opinion on what ought to matter, and on what ontology ought to be primary, even though I'm hazy as to how to put it. As for ontological levels, note that we do have the concept of local ontologies.

I see. Your question was more specific than I assumed. Broadly speaking I'd agree that abstract thought and thinking about thinking are unique and indicative of a difference in kind, but I don't know how comfortable I am with the implication that the mere sensation/abstract thought dichotomy is the central or underlying discontinuity between humans and animals.

Not to derail the discussion, but why do you think selective breeding is a very poor analogy?

I think the problem is encapsulated by the title of this discussion. "Regarding intellectual capacity: Are animals just lower on a continuum, or a distinct difference?" If the distinct difference between human and non-human animals is better put in terms other than intellectual capacity, then would this not be of interest here? Assuming it would be, the title reveals a restrictive assumption, namely that it's all about intelligence and the brain.

I think we can describe the difference biologically, in something like the way that @apokrisis and @Wayfarer have sketched out, but beneath these descriptions there is a deeper conception of human uniqueness directing the investigation, as if we already know what we're looking for. The biological descriptions do not stand on their own, because any biological capacity can be regarded as--and indeed biologically is--just another species characteristic alongside other unique capacities such as the dance of the bee, the problem-solving ability of corvids, or sonar-directed flight. What gives the biological descriptions sense in this context is that we are already looking for what makes us different. But crucially there is nothing here that rules out the conclusion that we are not very different after all. Because in a sense, we're not.*

Which is why I want to describe the difference differently. To begin with, it's more than a "distinct difference"; it's a radical discontinuity, and it has to do with society and culture, history and personhood. Framed in terms of intellectual capacity, discussions often end fruitlessly in debates surrounding intellectually disabled people, infants, and so on. The argument from marginal cases is made to show that humans are not unique in attaining moral status, and although I disagree with its conclusion, it does expose the fallacy of thinking that we can divide humans from non-humans according to certain properties of individuals, as if we grant rights on a case-by-case basis, checking off a list of characteristics, such as intellectual capacity, before we decide to treat a being as a person or not. If we rather see a human as a social person bound up in a culture, the intellectual capacity of individuals drops out of the picture and the intellectually feeble can be seen as part of the moral sphere, the sphere of persons.

History is important here too because it shows that how you understand the question of human uniqueness differs according to what you're interested in. You can discover that humans and animals are on a continuum if the continuity is what you're interested in, that is, if you restrict your enquiry to (ahistorical) biology. There certainly is a continuum in that descriptive context, and you can dismiss the discontinuities if you think they are not fundamental. Everyone would surely agree that our ways of life have changed in important ways over periods of time in which no significant evolutionary changes took place--this is history--so to avoid the conclusion of a discontinuity you would have to dismiss history as unimportant to what we fundamentally are.

So it's about what matters to us. Whether we decide on an overarching continuum or discontinuity depends on which level of description is deemed most overarching. If we see human beings primarily as moral and political agents with the capacity to change the world on the basis of reasons, we will see a discontinuity (this is not to say we cannot arrive at a discontinuity some other way). But if we see human beings as defined by neural capacities, or as determined billiard balls or hostages to their genes, then we will be tempted to see history, reason and morality as just another evolutionary endowment.

* Or, to the extent that a different kind of biology can include or gear into sociology, anthropology, and linguistics without the reductiveness of evolutionary psychology, biology itself could embrace human uniqueness. I guess that's where @apokrisis's approach comes in.

What you can take the old transcendental idealists to be saying is that roughly, life is like a video game in this way. The sense in which the unseen world is 'there' is the sense in which the material off the right side of the screen is 'there. — The Great Whatever

Yes, Michael could have been talking about Kant when he said...

Personally I think at first glance it's an elegant union of realism and idealism, gaining from their respective strong points and accounting for their respective weak points. — Michael

Similarly for the 'object' in scholasticism, the object, curiously enough, was that which was strictly correlated to a knowing being. The object, far from being 'the thing out there', always meant the intentional object or the object of 'intention'. The esse objectivm ('objective being') is that which strictly exists for awareness. As Paul Bains comments: "For [Duns] Scotus and [John] Poinsot, something was an 'objective being' to the extent that it existed in awareness. The sun and the sea were 'objective beings,' but so were unicorns - they also existed 'in' our awareness. So, within experience, all beings were by definition objective beings. However, not all of them were physical things or events." (Bains, The Primacy of Semiosis).

That in Kant, the relation between object and subject was reversed (to roughly what we know them as today) was something of a sore point for a few thinkers of his day, who complained about the confusion sown by the reversal. — StreetlightX

Since your description of the scholastic conception of objects and the objective looks a lot like Kant's result in the CPR, he probably wasn't guilty of the reversal, and could even be said to have effected a restoration of at least the objective side of the dichotomy.

But maybe this is because the distinction that Kant inherited from his precursors and that we use today was in a way latent in the scholastic distinction, in that modern philosophy could isolate according to its interests, from the wider scholastic conception of the subject, that subject that could intend an object, i.e., the subject of experience, thence 'subjective' as we use it today.

By the way, if you just see a "Thank You" page when you follow that link, then the system thinks you're already a subscriber. This is probably because you contributed a one-off payment back in the early days, which at the time made you a subscriber according to how the system worked before PayPal's recurring payments were integrated into the software. Your profile page might be showing your subscription as 'cancelled', which I think happened automatically when the subscription integration was upgraded.

So if you want to contribute more money and all you see is the "Thank You" page, just send me a message to let me know and I'll remove you from the Subscribers user group, after which you'll be able to revisit the link and subscribe (which will put you back in the Subscribers group with an active subscription).

4th on google.com and 3rd on google.fr.

I've added the ignore thing to the latest list of like-to-haves. It turns out I already asked them for it, back in November. I'll ask again, but I'll wait a while to gather some more requests.

See here: http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/30/feature-requests/p1

To exist, by definition, means to be different. I am not you. You are not me. If society is to work for all of us, then it must provide an work for these differences. Difference is exactly what we cannot remove if we are foster human potential. It is to take out the people or understanding of people society is supposed to be providing for and protecting. Our instinct must not be to place people (i.e. difference) apart from society, but to place them within it, treated as they ought to be. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Again, I don't want to indulge in name-calling, but I really have to say it: you can hardly get more traditionally conservative than this. In particular it reminds me very much of Roger Scruton, my favourite conservative (of course I disagree with most of what he says). Providing for? Protecting? As they ought to be? Really? It's straight one-nation conservatism.

I just noticed that Andy Shaw has since written another of his handy guides:

A handy guide to the Greens for the under 10s

I've a feeling this one may prompt you to have an even bigger rant. ;)

Yeah, I really like the whole notification system in general.

Marxist don't share this approach. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But some think that despite the shallowness of classical liberalism and its self-serving focus on property and formal freedoms, its emancipatory potential, such as it is, is under threat from identitarianism. From this point of view--my own, obviously--identity politics is conservative. And this is not just mud-slinging: one can see much in common between, for example, the identitarian notion of group rights, and communitarian conservatism. The reification of group identity is a related example: both the identitarian Left and traditional conservatives treat the individual as essentially black, white, etc., where these are understood as cultural essences. For both, the instinct is to slot an individual in his/her/etc place. Whether this is punching up or down is not in end fundamentally important, because they are reciprocally bound in the preservation of difference and the limitation of human potential.

But you and I are not going to agree on that, I know.

The classical liberal is considered "conservative" because they do not accept the distinctions of identity which allow the description of many social issues. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But there are those on the Left, such us many Marxists, who do not accept identity politics either. I guess you would then say they're conservative, I don't know, but if so then your idea of what it is to be conservative has diverged from mine.

I know a lot of left-wing people and read a lot of left-wing journals and stuff, and although the piece is a caricature of a certain type of left-winger, I think it's an accurate one, of a type that has come to dominate the left (even if it's a minority). And if you think Tim Minchin and Bill Hicks are funny, well, there's no accounting for taste!

It's true that conservatism is relative, and changes over time, but I think it's more complex. The Left has mostly abandoned the progressive and emancipatory in classical liberalism, without properly confronting its central conservatism, which is economic.