So how do birds migrate then, if nothing as complex as the desire to journey to a specific other place on the earth for a set period of time before journeying back again could never evolve without language? — Pseudonym
So humans, like all other animals, at one time had a set of genes that coded for the innate desire to raise young, if we hadn't have had we would have become extinct. You're suggesting that at some point in our evolutionary history, we lost that set of genomes entirely but immediately (it must have been immediate otherwise we would have become extinct within one generation) it was replaced with a convergently evolved set of genomes coding for complex language functions which allowed us to develop cultural preferences for raising children, just in time to save the human race from extinction. — Pseudonym
1. What would have been the competitive advantage of the mutation that replaced our genetic sequences coding for an innate desire to raise young? Presumably, not having answered my religion question, you believe in evolution by natural selection. Whatever it was must have been an incredibly strong influence for the new mutation to have swept through the entire species, but I can't quite see how it would have given anyone a competitive edge over those naturally invested in raising young. — Pseudonym
2. If there was a competitive advantage to not having a desire to raise children, how come it was immediately replaced with a cultural desire to have children, wouldn't those cultures have faded away almost immediately as a result of whatever competitive force was driving this massive shift in genetics? — Pseudonym
3. When did this sea change in our genetic coding take place. It must have been after complex language and culture because it needed to be replaced immediately with the cultural urge to have children in order to avoid extinction, yet paleobiology has yet to turn up any significant change in the human genome since then. Is this something you predict we're gong to find out in the next few years of genetic research? — Pseudonym
4. You mention convergent evolution, but this refers to the novel arrival of features via two evolutionary paths, what you're proposing here would not be an example of this. We've established that it is a biological necessity that humans had a genetically innate desire to raise young at some point in their evolutionary history. What you're proposing here would be the the novel emergence of a trait already present in the organism, but emerging as a result of a different force and then entirely supplanting the original gene(s). This is, to my knowledge, completely unprecedented. Are there other examples of this happening in the animal kingdom you're working from, or is this the first time this has happened in evolutionary history? — Pseudonym
What distinguishes a teleological explanation is that it explains phenomena by the purpose it serves rather than by assumed causes.
— praxis
Yes, so that can't be a scientific explanation; a scientific explanation JUST IS an explanation in terms of causes, NOT purposes. — gurugeorge
the point is, so long as one is strictly following the materialist/mechanistic metaphysical point of view that distinguishes modern science from the older scientific understanding that was based on classical philosophy, there can be no real purpose. — gurugeorge
ook at a baby human versus that of many other mammals. The baby human is the most defenseless. Why? Very few innate behaviors. Also, the epigenetics and the learned behaviors of other animals also have an instinctual component that is not driven by the much more generalized learning process that humans posses via linguistic/conceptual brains. — schopenhauer1
A scientific investigation could begin with the hypothesis that the purpose of a birds wings is flight, for example, and the scientific method could be applied to this teleological supposition. — praxis
The way you say "real purpose" tells me that what you mean by "real teleology" is having an meaningful ("real") goal as opposed to a meaningless ("as if") goal. — praxis
Since you asked, Schop, I agree with Pseudonym that you seem to be trying to draw too sharp a line here. It doesn't make sense to argue that Homo sapiens abandoned neurobiological instinct for socially-constructed desires. Sure, socially-constructed desires radically change things for humans. Yet the underlying biology continuity still exists and we can argue that linguistic culture largely serves to amplify that evolved instinctual basis rather than to somehow completely replace it. — apokrisis
Humans are born more helpless - their brains a mass of still unwired connections - because we happened to become bipeds with narrow birth canals trying to give birth to babies with large skulls. The big brains were being evolved for sociality and a tool-using culture. So babies had to be squeezed out helpless and half developed, completing their neuro-development outside the womb - a risky and unique evolutionary step. But also then one with an exaptive advantage. In being half-formed, this then paved the way for the very possibility of complex symbolic speech as a communal activity structuring young minds from the get-go. It made it possible for culture to get its hooks in very early on. — apokrisis
Of course this evolutionary account is disputable. But it seems the best causal view to me. And while it says that there was undoubtedly some evolutionary tinkering with the instinctual basis of human cognition - we know babies have added instincts for gaze-following and turn-taking, stuff that is pre-adaptive for language learning and enculturation - you would have to be arguing for a more basic erasure of instincts that are pretty fundamental for the obvious evolutionary reasons that Pseudonym outlined. — apokrisis
It is natural that animals would have an innate desire to procreate - have sex. And it is natural that animals would have innate behaviours that are particular to whatever parental nurturing style is their ecological recipe for species success. — apokrisis
However we can make reasonable guesses about what the human instinctual basis was, and remains. Certainly a desire to have sex and an instinct for nurturing are pretty basic and hormonal. Which is enough to keep the show on the road so far as nature is concerned. — apokrisis
Now arguing in the other direction, I would agree that this hardwired biology is not of the "overpowering" kind popularly imagined. Culture probably does have a big say. As society becomes a level of organismic concern of its own, it can start to form views about what should be the case concerning procreation. The drivers might become economic, religious and political - these terms being a way of recognising that society expresses its being as economic, religious and political strategies. — apokrisis
And likewise, society might wind up turning individual humans into largely economic, religious or political creatures. We might really become incentivised to over-ride our biological urges as a result of the direction that cultural evolution is taking. This may get expressed in terms of the full variety of r vs K strategies. We might get the range of behaviour from Mormons or other cultures of "strength through big families" vs the economic individualism which turns supporting a family into a financial and personal drag (with the individual now becoming, in effect, a permanent child themselves - never wanting to grow up and so creating a new dilemma for the perpetuation of that society, as is big news in Japan). — apokrisis
So, despite your protestations to the contrary, your very evidence indicates you believe cultural learning is largely the vehicle for which humans procreate and follow a preference to raise children. — schopenhauer1
I already agreed that sex is the "basic" instinct via the general tendency to prefer physical pleasure, but that is not the same as literally the conceptual idea of "I prefer to raise a child" which involves much higher cognitive understanding and cultural ques than mere physical pleasure. — schopenhauer1
Based on your own response, the score is:
Cultural learning- 4
Instinct- 1 — schopenhauer1
Err, no. — apokrisis
Well when you shift the goalposts that way, then claiming that there is an "I" that has an innate preference is of course what would be countered by a social constructionist point of view on the subject.
You are now framing it as a personal choice. Which in turn demands a Cartesian model of a choosing self.
The argument was about this "self" being unwillingly forced to procreate due to evolved instinct vs being unwilling forced to procreate by some social necessity. And your emphasis either way is on the unwilling. Yet either way, it might be a willing inclination in being an intrinsically rewarding or pleasurable action - the rewards of having sex and then raising a family being something that both biology and sociology would have reason to celebrate. — apokrisis
I mean everyone knows that we respond to social economics. You either have a lot of kids, or try to avoid having kids, depending on the economic equation as you see it.
And even my pet fish - dwarf cichlids - can make that kind of decision. They lay eggs and then either eat them or protect them, depending on some instinctive judgement about the situation in their tank.
So really, the same evolutionary logic is at work, just at a higher level of sophistication. — apokrisis
Anti-natalism depends for its grounding on some kind of anti-naturalistic metaphysics. It arises from being disappointed by the Romantic promise that being alive has transcendent meaning, and then Enlightenment physics saying no, life is transcendently meaningless.
Well as you know, I just reject that metaphysical framing. I take the natural philosophy route on all questions. And that accounts for the issues here with ease. — apokrisis
I don't know, looked pretty much like you unwittingly agree, — schopenhauer1
The "I" is largely socially constructed, agreed then. — schopenhauer1
However, what you cannot do is a sleight of hand where something that is "intrinsically rewarding" now counts as instinctual. — schopenhauer1
The decision to have less kids due to hard times, is a calculus based on the very linguistic-cultural brain that can do this sort of rationale. — schopenhauer1
What I am trying to do is show that raising a child is a preference like any other preference- it just happens to be a popular one because of cultural pressures. — schopenhauer1
Beyond the obvious physical pleasure involved in sex, the preference for actually procreating is simply in the imagination, hopes, preferences, of the individual just like any other goal that is imagined, hoped for, preferred, etc. — schopenhauer1
A scientific investigation could begin with the hypothesis that the purpose of a birds wings is flight, for example, and the scientific method could be applied to this teleological supposition.
— praxis
And if it is applied, it will necessarily cancel out the teleological "supposition" and replace it with an explanation based wholly on efficient causes. — gurugeorge
The way you say "real purpose" tells me that what you mean by "real teleology" is having a meaningful ("real") goal as opposed to a meaningless ("as if") goal.
— praxis
Yes, and "real" has nothing to do with "authority." — gurugeorge
Pseudonym thought the same thing - but it's a strawman — gurugeorge
the point is to get your meaning from a story about the Universe that's true, that shows that and how you are knit into the Universe's fabric, so that you feel at home and are justified in feeling at home, not just pretending or putting on a brave face and a brittle smile.
The leading metaphysics of the day doesn't offer that comfort. — gurugeorge
We can look for the final cause or the efficient cause. — praxis
A charismatic leader doesn't even need to be an authority, they can merely appear as one to fool the gullible into swallowing their oh so "real" narratives. — praxis
Yes. You need it to be axiomatic that it has to be an external pressure rather than an intrinsic desire. Yet with a straight face you then also say you are a social constructionist and a naturalist. But if we are socially constructed as selves, then that "pressure" is simply our true being finding its expression. It comes from the self - as much as there is a self for it to come from.
The confusion kicks in because we are then both biological selves and social selves. The communal self we share at pretty basic level. The phenomenological self we share at an even deeper biological level, but also we don't really share at all beyond our capacities for empathy and mirroring.
So there is complexity here again. But don't let it confuse the argument. If you are focused now on the socially constructed self, then you yourself removed the very grounds to complain about any individual preferences being socially constructed.
...
No. You just said that the psychology of that individual is largely a social construction. Indeed, you have been arguing that Homo sapiens represents a complete rupture with nature in this regard. Instinct was set aside and we became totally cultural creatures.
Anyway, having said the pressures were social and external, now you are switching to talk of them being internal and individual. The next step in your faulty argument is to then say that is why these individual preferences are falsehoods imposed on people unwillingly. As if they had some other more legitimate self - an inalienable soul. Which you will then say they can't have - as Newtonian physics and Darwinian evolution proved God is dead and life can have no purpose or value.
You have trapped yourself in a bind - even if not one of your own making, but one that simply recapitulates some bad socially-constructed metaphysics.
So how will you react to that realisation? Will you again go through each point and find that I unwittingly agree with you despite whatever I might have actually said? — apokrisis
We can look for the final cause or the efficient cause.
— praxis
"We" can in the language of common sense, but science can't, it acknowledges only efficient cause as real. (Although as I said, there are some noises to reintroduce quasi-Aristotelian concepts back into science, but it's a fairly recent development.) — gurugeorge
Claiming that a seed causes a tree is no more real — praxis
the tree being the final cause of the seed is not real for science — gurugeorge
What you cannot do is prove what is an innate instinct and what is socially constructed. Do you think "nurturing" is just an instinct or a tendency or preference that an individual may have towards something that originates by being provided the tools of personality/ego/introspection/environmental interaction that comes from a socially constructed mind? — schopenhauer1
Any overriding metaphysics (like your peculiar brand of Peircian triadic semiotics) can be considered romantic. So, I don't think it does much to throw out this label. You are just creating a false dichotomy and then pitting one romantic vision (the interlocutor's) with your own. — schopenhauer1
Peirce would be a good metaphysics to oppose a bad metaphysics like Romanticism or reductionism. But ordinary science is quite good enough to argue against your claim concerning a lack of biological instinct in modern humans. — apokrisis
What kind of content would you predict that a social species with a big natural interest in social dramas might find gripping? Stories of love, hurt, power and status? Stories that really engage their emotions? — apokrisis
But do these preferences come innate or only after being enculturated in a social setting? — schopenhauer1
The default answer on any aspect of psychological being is going to be "both, together, resulting in an integrated whole". — apokrisis
The human brain works more like generalized processor, with the vehicle of linguistic conceptualization as a way of integrating memories, thoughts, images, etc. How can these concepts said to be pre-linguistic (i.e. innate)? — schopenhauer1
Well no, the brain don’t work that way at all. — apokrisis
The decoupling of instinct from general processing is not an easy story. I'd like to see this. — schopenhauer1
Just proof that you have proof. The decoupling of instinct from general processing is not an easy story. I'd like to see this. — schopenhauer1
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