That brings up a point about personality. What is personality? How is it constructed? — schopenhauer1

Personality is personal memory/experiences. It is a point of view constructed by your mind based upon what it has learned. It would be the same for all forms of life differences only in kind.

Let me add, I am very much a naturalist in terms of science essentially and materialist explanations are what I see to be the best structures of explanation. — schopenhauer1

The problem with materialist explanations is that they are without any notion of cause in the sense of the reason why something exists, other than the material reason. In the case of neo-Darwinian materialism, this manifests as the attitude that humans are wholly and solely the outcome of evolution which, doctrinally, is an unguided process, with no aim other than successful reproduction. So it actually tends to undercut the very kind of understanding that you are contemplating in the OP. Materialism adopts the language and rhetoric of philosophy, but its conclusions are strictly anti-philosophical.

The rock bottom core of our "human problem" is that we are animals who imagine that we have transcended our animal nature. — Bitter Crank

In many of the various mythological anthropologies, the station of human life is unique because of the opportunity it provides for transcendence. Buddhists believe that, insofar as we remain 'driven by passions', then we're doomed to endless existence in the 'round of Samsara'. Whereas in human form alone we are able to see beyond the merely biological.

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance. — Henri Bergson

Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance — Henri Bergson

Of course, which road leads to knowledge and which road leads to the veils of ignorance isn't agreed upon. And never mind the road, we aren't agreed on the destinations, either. One road goes this way, the other road goes that way. Where do they end?

the merely biological — Wayfarer

Life arising from the mud and persisting? Cyanobacterias still going strong after 2.8 billion years; the chambered nautilus, 500 million years old. Sturgeon, 200 million years old. We, derived from fish, discussing our evolution. Merely biological? Much more than mere.

"Nothing is mere."

How I'm rushing through this! How much each sentence in this brief story contains. "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth. I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on.Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is mere.

I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

There is a tendency for "just so" stories. Everything becomes an instinct rather than constructed via the virtual world of concept formation. We have to be careful what to delineate as a true instinct and what is culturally-linguistically based in our behaviors and habit-formations. We are so ready to place ourselves as "just another animal" that we often overlook the complicated way that linguistic-minds shape us. Let me add, I am very much a naturalist in terms of science essentially and materialist explanations are what I see to be the best structures of explanation. However, I don't jump the gun in explanations that reduce assumed instinctual behavior into instinct when in fact, it may just be a cultural trope that is so embedded and assumed, it seems like instinct. — schopenhauer1

So the question becomes whether we are still engaged in a generally natural game? Despite developing the new "mind-expanding" thing of conceptual thought, are we still essentially thinking in ways that are being shaped by evolutionary forces?

Your goal of making a metaphysical-strength argument in favour of anti-natalism requires a particular answer on that. So where is the specific evidence?

Now it is the case that being conceptual creatures, we have progressed to the point where even our own existence - individually, or collectively - becomes something we can question the value of.

But then that in turn raises the question of how we value the alternatives that we can imagine?

Is there a way we actually do value them - ie: one that speaks to a practical evolutionary logic. Or some other metaphysics?

So the whole instinct vs cultural deal is waste of time here. We know we are an evolved blend of the two. They have both been constrained by the same general Darwinian forces. Nothing much has changed in terms of the overall game being played.

The question now is have they become unstuck in some meaningful fashion. Have we become so enlightened about certain metaphysical facts that we should volunteer to strike ourselves from the evolutionary record? If that is your case, then present the argument.

Another possibility is that modern culture has predictably reached a super-organismic status. The good old days of small hunter-gather tribes which had a happy collective balance has been surpassed first by agrarian empires, then by industrialised nations, and now by globalised social media. Individuals have been reduced in status in some - arguably - catastrophic fashion where the only logical response is to bring the whole procreating enterprise crashing down.

Again, if that is your case, then make that argument.

But trying to both draw a sharp line between instinctive and encultured behaviour in a way that denies a historic continuity of evolutionary logic is a waste of time. Bad philosophy from the get go.

If you want to argue for the legitimacy of anti-evolutionary ethics, then that is what you should stick to as the focus.

My claim is that most of human behavior originates through linguistic-conceptual thought and not instinct. — schopenhauer1

This claim has to be false since the meaning of the word "most" here is unquantifiable.
Humans more than any other animal are more tabula rasa than any other, yet how could you possibly measure behaviour of self preservation as simply linguistic/cultural, as separate from innate and instinctual sense of fear of death etc.
You can't learn hunger, sex drive, breathing, walking. To what ever degree these 'behaviours' have linguistic and cultural origins they are all innate too. Even the ability to have language is innate; how do you divide the parole from the langue, let alone innate grammar systems and body language from learned behaviour?
No cultural theory can explain some of the most fundamental and universal behaviours of human kind. I am currently watching on TV, Chinese people SMILE. How would you weight this universal against a dictionary? Does a smile count as ONE thing, when its value could mean the difference between life and death?

I would agree that what makes people DIFFERENT is less about genes and much more about environment, culture and learning, but that is to be set against a world of universal human characteristics.
In the nurture vs nature debate, nature is what we all share as a species, and there is precious little difference between a 21stC pale white scandinvian and a black as coal 15thC Australian aborigine when it comes to our natures, but a world of difference in culture and upbringing.

Meh. Feynmann is a legendary character, and probably more brilliant at physics than I will ever be able to fathom. But what I mean by ‘merely biological’, is the overwhelming tendency to view human life through the biological lense - as if the biological sciences are arbiter of what is possible, and what is real, for the human condition. Overall the effect is acidic - it tends to dissolve the imagination into the doings of neurons, genes, endocrines, enzymes, and so on. It is deliberately deflationary to the imagination.

Piaget argued against claims by Chomsky and Fodor for a genetic basis of semantic language content. He didn't deny that capacity for language was innate, but insisted that, beyond a few reflexes(Babinski) , innate patterns don't play a role in human cognitive development. He believed that what organismic evolution and cognitive development share is an organizing principle he called genetic epistemology, the self-organizing assimilative-accommodative circuit of interaction between organism and world.
More recent embodied approaches show how innate affective tendencies (disgust, cuteness) can predispose us to selectively organize cogntion(Jonanthan Haidt).

Notice that the inherited body, via affectivity, doesn't produce meanings by itself or act like a simple instinctive mechanism, but interacts with intention and language to guide meaning-making. It can't tell us what to think or how to act, but it provides part of the background of sense.( I know you know this already. I should really address this to Charleton. )

I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics — Bitter Crank

What’s vastly different between the way the modern physicist sees the stars and the way the ancients did, is that the modern knows what is physically there. When the ancients gazed out on the stars, they saw patterns of meaning. And they weren’t at all conscious of themselves as being observers of what they were seeing, so much as participants in the legends of the creators and ancestors, of which the stars and comets were portents and signs. The Universe was not an ‘it’ to the ancients, but a theatre, an imaginaire, animated and populated by gods. Whereas our scientists have penetrated the mystery, rushed onto the stage, and found only props and curtains, pulleys and wheels. The actors have all long since fled.

Now we want to literally ‘go to heaven’ - in spacecraft! ‘The heavens’ as we understand them, are unthinkably vast interstellar spaces, rocks, dust, stars, radtation and so on. The wan hope of interstellar travel has now become our version of ‘heaven’. But can the frail human frame, which surely compared to those vastnesses is as ephemeral as a dandelion, ever hope to propagate itself by such means?

Piaget argued against claims by Chomsky and Fodor for a genetic basis of semantic language content. — Joshs

Yep. And while Piaget's structuralism is a big step in the right direction, I in fact am in the semiotic or social constructionist wing of the debate by being a Vygotskian on the issue of cognitive development.

So I am even less in the innate camp. Except I then argue that cultural evolution is just evolution continuing at a different level of semiosis - a linguistic one as well as a neural and genetic one.

That is why there can be both a sharp division and yet not really any division. All cognition is entrained to the constraint of being functional in an ecological sense in the long run.

Schop's arguments are always directed at supporting the rightness of anti-natalism. That is the real issue of the thread.

And Vygotskian psychology was a natural repost to Nihilism and Existentialism, so continues also to be one against the latest incarnation of the Romanticist's pessimistic tendency.

Materialism adopts the language and rhetoric of philosophy, but its conclusions are strictly anti-philosophical. — Wayfarer

Can you elaborate on this? Also, I don't necessarily agree with a pure neo-Darwinian view of evolution. There are often exaptations that are not selected for and this is especially so in the wide ranging cultural traits humans possess. Stability matters more here. Is there an equilibrium where the species is surviving- whether genetically selected or through more holistic materialist means.

Now it is the case that being conceptual creatures, we have progressed to the point where even our own existence - individually, or collectively - becomes something we can question the value of. — apokrisis

Yes, a major point- humans can do this and are the only Earthly animals to do this.

The question now is have they become unstuck in some meaningful fashion. Have we become so enlightened about certain metaphysical facts that we should volunteer to strike ourselves from the evolutionary record? If that is your case, then present the argument. — apokrisis

Can you clarify what you are trying to say? I see you have some finer point, but it is layered in this quasi-rhetorical questioning. Do you mean to ask whether we as humans can reflect on our own existence, find it wanting, and decide not to continue procreating? In that case, indeed we can do that on an individual level. Of course, my argument all along is not everyone will stop procreating, but rather to get people to question the ends of their own existence, what they are living for in the first place, and to recognize certain aspects of existence- instrumental nature, striving-for-no-ends, etc. These are concepts that indeed are very human due to their self-reflective nature.

You seem to propose some ends- that of an organismic equilibrium (after perhaps "corrections" of extinction) and vaguely have to do with how energy acts and dissipates. But how is seeing humans as acting a way that is part of this super-organism (i.e. cannot help but lead towards some telos) not simply being a self-fulfilling prophecy? In fact, by somehow promoting grandiose notions of participating in the super-organism, this seems more Romantic than many other philosophies you slap with that label. If it is inevitable that the super-organism acts a certain way, then there is nothing we can do, that we are bound to reach some equilibrium that is not of our conscious choosing... thus doing nothing, you are then choosing something and thus fulfilling a self-fulfilling prophecy.. acting as though there are no choices when there clearly are.. see that?

But trying to both draw a sharp line between instinctive and encultured behaviour in a way that denies a historic continuity of evolutionary logic is a waste of time. Bad philosophy from the get go.

If you want to argue for the legitimacy of anti-evolutionary ethics, then that is what you should stick to as the focus. — apokrisis

I don't even know what that means "anti-evolutionary ethics". We can choose not to procreate. That in itself is obvious.

Yes, a major point- humans can do this and are the only Earthly animals to do this. — schopenhauer1

I have no idea what evidence you have to conclude this.

I have no idea what evidence you have to conclude this. — Rich

I guess I cannot show you the mind of other animals, but based on their behavior and the fact that they lack linguistic ability- I can feel confident saying that other animals don't really reflect very much on why they are alive or the value of existence, or other existential questions.

I don't even know what that means "anti-evolutionary ethics". We can choose not to procreate. That in itself is obvious. — schopenhauer1

Is it that difficult? If evolutionary logic defines what is natural, then doing something contrary to that logic lacks a natural justification. You would have to explain why the choice - as a general one you advocate for a whole species - is not merely possible but somehow ethically cogent.

Do you mean to ask whether we as humans can reflect on our own existence, find it wanting, and decide not to continue procreating? In that case, indeed we can do that on an individual level. — schopenhauer1

Yeah sure. If that is your choice, then who cares. The breeders win in the end.

And that choice may be pretty rational if you put economic self-interest at the top of your list these days. Or if you feel that life is complicated enough already.

But it is where you elevate anti-natalism to a general good that your argument is in want of ... an actual argument.

I just like to keep the various different position clear and distinct, not mash them together as you are now doing in your recent anti-natal threads.

Of course, my argument all along is not everyone will stop procreating, but rather to get people to question the ends of their own existence, what they are living for in the first place, and to recognize certain aspects of existence- instrumental nature, striving-for-no-ends, etc. — schopenhauer1

OK. Then that is a change of tune. Great. You are not against procreation itself, you are against a social system with poor general outcomes.

Who could disagree there?

But how is seeing humans as acting a way that is part of this super-organism (i.e. cannot help but lead towards some telos) not simply being a self-fulfilling prophecy? — schopenhauer1

Well it probably is inevitable. But still, at least recognising the true nature of the situation gives a possibility of choosing a different path.

Or more pragmatically, if you view things as already fated by nature, you can make your own life plans accordingly.

In fact, by somehow promoting grandiose notions of participating in the super-organism, this seems more Romantic than many other philosophies you slap with that label. — schopenhauer1

How I am promoting rather than diagnosing?

I guess I cannot show you the mind of other animals, but based on their behavior and the fact that they lack linguistic ability- I can feel confident saying that other animals don't really reflect very much on why they are alive or the value of existence, or other existential questions. — schopenhauer1

Who knows what they may be thinking? Probably nothing like humans and so what? They may have evolved beyond humans and just enjoying life.

Is it that difficult? If evolutionary logic defines what is natural, then doing something contrary to that logic lacks a natural justification. You would have to explain why the choice - as a general one you advocate for a whole species - is not merely possible but somehow ethically cogent. — apokrisis

I mean this sounds like some modern Natural Law Aquinas theory. Natural justification? You are putting the cart before the horse. Humans can have a range of thoughts, actions, and beliefs. If humans can do it, believe it, or think it, then that is something that this species can do, and is ergo natural.

Yeah sure. If that is your choice, then who cares. The breeders win in the end. — apokrisis

I guess if you want to get into it, then there is the idea of counter-factual outcomes- something I know you appreciate. A child that could have been born but didn't, is a true statement in the real world. An outcome with an alternative outcome is something that exists in this world. Whether or not there is a comprehensive species-wide outcome of zero is not relevant here. That is something you are asserting into the argument that was never there- at least from what I am personally arguing (as opposed to perhaps consequentialist-antinatalists or something like that).

OK. Then that is a change of tune. Great. You are not against procreation itself, you are against a social system with poor general outcomes.

Who could disagree there? — apokrisis

Sort of, it is a system that seems to promote the distractions from such existential questions. However, I think people will start to question things more and are doing so. Why are we doing anything is a great place to start. All possibilities become no possibilities... The do nothing no-goodnik or the do-everything-over-achiever. It's all the same.. what is it all about.. The Nietzschean coke-addled.. mountain-climbing, socialite debonair extremist- the eternally reposed, ascetic monk sitting on the mountain.

Well it probably is inevitable. But still, at least recognising the true nature of the situation gives a possibility of choosing a different path.

Or more pragmatically, if you view things as already fated by nature, you can make your own life plans accordingly. — apokrisis

Funny you say that, because that goes the same with procreation. It probably is inevitable but could be different path..

As far as fated by nature, what matters is that we survive/maintain our comfort levels/get bored and need entertainment. Any self-reflecting human with existential curiosity looks at this and wonders, what the hell for.. We know achievement happens, but are platitudes of "exploring opportunities and achievements" really going to be the best we are going to do for the almighty answer for this? I've asked people in other threads to explain Platonic perfection, what a utopia looks like, what does completeness look like, etc. No one usually has a good answer. It is all striving because we are born and can't do otherwise. Well, why cause the striving? It goes beyond utilitarian calculus, and platitudes. It goes to a more profound look at things- one of a holistic perspective.

Who knows what they may be thinking? Probably nothing like humans and so what? They may have evolved beyond humans and just enjoying life. — Rich

Hey, in a way I agree with you. To have a bird's life.

Hey, in a way I agree with you. To have a bird's life. — schopenhauer1

Yes, that is the point. Personally I like the whales or maybe the highest form of life, the great Methusalah tree. Now that's living. Maybe a bit too meditative though.

Yes, that is the point. Personally I like the whales or maybe the highest form of life, the great Methusalah tree. Now that's living. — Rich

Funny how we are admire things that we are not- what looks like simpler ways of life. Lives comprised mainly of instinct or just growth in the case of plants. Whatever seems to diminish the kingdom of self-awareness it seems. As E.M. Cioran said bitingly: “Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.”

Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.” — schopenhauer1

Oh, I think it is quite conscious, just more quiet about it. The most evolved may not have to go around patting itself on the back. Remember, these life forms have been around a heck of a lot longer than humans.

it tends to dissolve the imagination into the doings of neurons, genes, endocrines, enzymes, and so on. It is deliberately deflationary to the imagination. — Wayfarer

I don't find that to be the case. Neurons, genes, endocrine glands, enzymes, neurotransmitters, synaptic gaps, the limbic system, pre-frontal cortexes -- on and on -- All play a role. But neurotransmitters are a means to an end, not the end. Even though neurotransmitters operate in synaptic gaps, and neurons operate both chemically and electrically, and even though genes direct the activities of all this stuff, it is still YOU that have experiences, imagine, compose, write, philosophize, not the glands and synapses. If you are surprised by a snake or a big spider in an unexpected place, you feel (I sure do, anyway) a a shiver of fear. Sure, it's a chemical -- adrenaline -- that causes the shiver, but it's a real snake, a real big spider, and my very real fear.

but there seems to be a difference not only in degree but in type as to how human personalities are constructed from linguistic-conceptual cues combined with genetic predispositions. — schopenhauer1

Don't forget experience -- another factor in us being who we individually are.

The do nothing no-goodnik or the do-everything-over-achiever. It's all the same.. what is it all about. — schopenhauer1

Does it actually feel the same? And is there a balance of the two that feels even better?

You seem to be presuming your conclusions again. What you say does not tally with either psychological science or my own experience.

But perhaps you have proved the case for you?

...what matters is that we survive/maintain our comfort levels/get bored and need entertainment. — schopenhauer1

Sounds a pretty minimal idea of a life to me.

You reduce living to some kind of consumptive activity. You seem to see no role for creation, challenge and variety.

So again you assume your conclusions by speaking of life in as meaningless a way as you can imagine. Rhetoric 101.

I've asked people in other threads to explain Platonic perfection, what a utopia looks like, what does completeness look like, etc. No one usually has a good answer. — schopenhauer1

Utopia is already the wrong answer. Perhaps the dichotomies of heaven and hell, good and evil, just don't apply to nature. Your frame of reference is already wrong.

Don't forget experience -- another factor in us being who we individually are. — Bitter Crank

Yeah that's what I meant by linguistic-conceptual as that is the preconditions for which humans usually experience the world and integrate his/her personality from environmental interaction.

I was sorry to hear that John Shotter died. I was exposed to Vygotsky and Bahktin through his variant of social constructionism. There doesn't seem to be any room in Shotter-Gergen's model for the contribution of bodily feeling in discursively formed meaning, since the immediate site of affect-conceptual interaction would be a single body rather than interspersonal. Of course , one need not treat embodied processes as non-symbolized. They could be thought of in terms of an intrapersonal semiotics.

I think you may be right here, but maybe you can elaborate. — schopenhauer1

Imagine solitary confinement at a jail/prison. Imagine a person living in that environment from the moment of his/her birth with no exposure to society. Imagine him/her then being free at the age of 18. He/she would know nothing about "sex", let alone have the attitude that it is "part of life".

The biology that we classify under sexuality, such as being sexually aroused by certain experiences, might function involuntarily, but everything else, such as what to do when aroused (approach a person and introduce yourself; think about something else and get back to work; rebuke Satan; perform a certain sexual act; etc.) will have to be learned. 99% of what we call "sex" is like the latter--it is learned, not something one is born with.

People unwittingly concede the fact that so much of it is learned when they talk about, oh, teenagers "experimenting" with sex or when they say that if you don't enjoy it you don't know how to do it right.

Humans may be born with a sex drive, but it is a fallacy to jump from that fact to saying that the countless attitudes, understandings, actions, etc. that constitute "sex"--especially sex that is enjoyed--are programmed into our genes to ensure the survival of our species. But not only is it popular to have that questionable--and probably scientifically shaky--ideology, it is popular to use that ideology to justify promiscuity; attack traditions, especially religious traditions; build support for certain policies; etc.

We recognize the wide scope of culture with respect to just about everything else. We recognize that people in some cultures practice communal defecation while in other cultures the thought of defecating in the presence of others, let alone outside of a stall with a toilet to sit on, is never even on 99.9999999 percent of people's radars. Yet, with something as complex and varied as human sexual behavior we like to think of it as all being in our genes.

It is some of the worst narcissism and ethnocentrism you will encounter. Not only can people not see sexuality other than from their own perspective, they say that their perspective corresponds with immutable laws of biology and the entire natural world.

Even though neurotransmitters operate in synaptic gaps, and neurons operate both chemically and electrically, and even though genes direct the activities of all this stuff, it is still YOU that have experiences, imagine, compose, write, philosophize, not the glands and synapses. — Bitter Crank

So, you wouldn't have agreed with Francis Crick, when he said that '“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.' (where 'no more' is pretty well an exact synonym for 'mere')?

Materialism adopts the language and rhetoric of philosophy, but its conclusions are strictly anti-philosophical.

— Wayfarer

Can you elaborate on this? — schopenhauer1

Well, it's a big subject in its own right. Philosophical materialism takes various forms - Neo-Darwinian, Marxist, scientific, to mention a few. But the obvious basis of all of them, is that only material or physical objects are ultimately real. So everything can ultimately (and that word carries a lot here) be understood in terms of material forces described by physics and chemistry. Human characteristics and attributes are said to be supervenient on those fundamental realities, but explicable in terms of them. Life itself is basically understandable in terms of material interactions - physics and chemistry again.

Historically, materialiist philosophies have always existed - Epicurus and some of the Stoics were materialist. Platonists were generally not. Obviously none of the spiritual traditions are. But materialism got a big kick along with the Enlightenment, courtesy of the French philosophes in particular, and later through the work of some very influential theorists, for example Thomas Hobbes. The so-called 'Scottish Enlightenment' which produced Adam Smith and hugely influenced John Locke and also Charles Darwin, was also basically materialist in orientation. Materialism is usually criticized as 'nothing but-ism' - that life and mind are 'nothing but' the output of the 'selfish gene', or neuro-chemicals, or some other entity or substance that can, in principle, be made subject to scientific explanation.

So overtly or covertly, materialism in various forms is hugely influential in the secular West. It is assumed by the secular intelligentsia that life, the universe, and everything, have an explanation which is ultimately findable in terms of the so-called hard sciences, even if many details remain unknown at this time. And this is argued by materialist philosophers of all schools and persuasions, using the techniques and rhetorical skills of philosophy. But the reason I say it's anti-philosophical, is because, if materialism is true, then there's no wisdom (sophia) to be had. We are simply a species of animal, that makes patterns of sounds, that create an illusion of meaning, for the brief moment of a meaningless existence.

So, you wouldn't have agreed with Francis Crick, when he said that '“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.' (where 'no more' is pretty well an exact synonym for 'mere')? — Wayfarer

Once upon a time we didn't know anything about nerve cells and their associated molecules. We knew what we felt, our joys and our sorrows, and we knew who we were. Discovering the mechanisms for sensation, memory, thinking, emotion and so forth (stuff that goes on in and between neurons in the brain) doesn't change who we are or what we feel.

I don't know why Crick, or anybody else, takes the view that we are "no more than" the mechanism.

All sorts of mechanisms are operating when we make or hear music. Music moves us even though we know that music is transmitted by vibrating air produced on various mechanisms. That there is a mechanism doesn't reduce the value of music, does it? We know how pipe organs work; there is a lot of mechanism stuffed into the organ loft. All the electronic and mechanical mechanism doesn't reduce the glory of a great organ, it just makes it possible.

Some confuse the chemical messenger with the message. Parents don't adore their newborn baby because oxytocin is emitted; oxytocin is emitted to carry love. Sure, oxytocin has an effect when sprung on an unsuspecting person in a lab, but the result is temporary.

Just because a passing ship has photographed far distant Pluto, and just because another ship either has left the solar system, or will soon, just because explorers are rolling around Mars, doesn't turn space into some sort of heaven. Mars hasn't recently been the God of War, and Jove hasn't been the big cheese in the pantheon of Gods since... a couple thousand year, give or take a century or two.

Maybe something mysterious is lost when knowledge of the cosmos is gained, but it isn't as if the hard-won knowledge about the cosmos cheapens it. The same for the hard-won (and still incomplete) knowledge about the brain doesn't make the mind just a big calculator that can be taken apart and revealed to be a box of levers, wheels, nuts, bolts, and springs.

But the reason I say it's anti-philosophical, is because, if materialism is true, then there's no wisdom (sophia) to be had. We are simply a species of animal, that makes patterns of sounds, that create an illusion of meaning, for the brief moment of a meaningless existence. — Wayfarer

Did wisdom come through and within human thought or did it come from outside human thought? Aren't we the authors of such wisdom as we know?

I don't know why Crick, or anybody else, takes the view that we are "no more than" the mechanism. — Bitter Crank

Because they're 'philosophical materialists; Crick is a notable one, being a Nobel Prize winner, and co-discoverer of DNA. And the narrative is that science dispels the illusion of anything beyond the physical. That’s why they’re described as ‘reductionist’ - because they reduce the spiritual and mental to the physical. You’re not amongst them, purely as a matter of instinct, whereas I’m always inclined to argue against that attitude. But there are many for whom the scientific account threatens their sense of who and what they are. As I tried to explain in your Against All Nihilism thread, nihilism is a frequent consequence, or symptom, of the dissolution of traditional sources of morality in the acid of modernism and post-modernism. It doesn’t seem to affect you that way, which is a good thing, but it often does have that effect.

Did wisdom come through and within human thought or did it come from outside human thought? Aren't we the authors of such wisdom as we know? — Bitter Crank

Obviously a profound question. You would have to ask yourself, in what does wisdom comprise? which is the basic question of philosophy, if ever there is one. Taking my cue from the Greek tradition, in particular the Dialogues of Plato, I think one starting point might be The Apology.

Is every animal species something more than animal? If it is so, then how can the distinction between humans and mere animals be maintained? — Πετροκότσυφας

Which of the other animals species is able to consider such a question?

Then the ontological difference is: ability to ask such questions. ‘Ontological’ means ‘pertaining to the nature of being’. And humans are language-using, rational beings - just as the OP says.

As a matter of interest, to what category or kind does the word ‘being’ pertain? It would not generally be used in respect of inanimate objects. Elephants, horses, dogs, and so on, are arguably beings. But in normal speech, ‘being’ is usually used to designate human beings.