Evolution is one of those marvellously flexible words that can be applied to almost any sense of things improving or changing for the better. — Wayfarer

Usually an increase in complexity is involved. Technology is more complex than ever before, which helps us find yet more technology. Artificial intelligence is becoming exponentially better, and it will presumably begin (if it hasn't already) be used in the development of yet more artificial intelligence.

The greatness of Darwin is explaining how something complex can arise from something simple. This is perhaps 'the' general of form of the wonderful, which also touches on climbing the entropy gradient.

And the reason, so I'm suggesting, that we cannot see the substratum is that it doesn't exist at all.

But post boxes do. — Moliere

:up:

As I see, the whole shebang about subtratums (the 'Real' beneath 'Appearance' and 'Mentality') is an awkward response to the fact that we be mistaken, say something about the world that we later withdraw. Add in a little scientism that takes the scientific image as an analogy of version of the The Substract (Occulted Real), and you get a stew of something like scientistic mysticism.

Hegel's Absolute Idealism is not at odds with Indirect Realism. — RussellA

Here's Hegel.
***************************************
It is natural to suppose that...it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it. The apprehension seems legitimate...

This apprehensiveness is sure to pass even into the conviction that the whole enterprise which sets out to secure for consciousness by means of knowledge what exists per se, is in its very nature absurd; and that between knowledge and the Absolute there lies a boundary which completely cuts off the one from the other.

For if knowledge is the instrument by which to get possession of absolute Reality, the suggestion immediately occurs that the application of an instrument to anything does not leave it as it is for itself, but rather entails in the process, and has in view, a moulding and alteration of it.

Or, again, if knowledge is not an instrument which we actively employ, but a kind of passive medium through which the light of the truth reaches us, then here, too, we do not receive it as it is in itself, but as it is through and in this medium.
...
If the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error.

As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge ...it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true — a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phintro.htm

Both the Indirect and Direct Realist agree that at the least this "world" exists in the mind. The disagreement is whether an identical "world" exists outside the mind. — RussellA

???????????????????????????????????????
Perhaps you can find those that call themselves 'direct realists' that do this, but to me this is the wrong way to go and misses what's good in 'my' take on direct realism.

I think Heidegger's "being-in-the-world" as a unitary mode of being is revolutionary. — Arne

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Perhaps he's making Hegel more explicit (?), so he had his sources, but his fusion is so coherent and direct that it cut through the noise.

Definitions therefore are poor substitutes for a skill, namely the ability to use terms successfully, an ability that does not rest on definitions but on shared meaning. — Jamal

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Skill looks like the right focus here. Inspired by Brandom and others, I think of applying concepts as a skilled labor, mostly inarticulate cando knowhow, manifesting sensitivity to and respect for the discursive norms we are always already thrown into, which make asking for definitions or after their value possible to begin with.

In my view, it's helpful to emphasize the larger context in which definitions matter. We make and evaluate claims about the world, including what we should do within in it, as part of a community. I claim that it's only because they are used in claims that concepts matter.

In this circumstance, our ability to flexibly use terms is superior to our ability to comprehensively define them. — Jamal

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It's as if we 'are' this skill, and part of that general skill involves the delicate and fragile art of tentative definition. From a 'Hegelian' perspective, concepts are always in flux, slowly drifting. We change the object being clarified (language) as we use it to articulate its own character.

the word “explication” derives from the Latin for “unfold,” and I think this is a good way of thinking about what philosophy does. — Jamal

Beautiful metaphor ! Making It Explicit. If we named global Geistware Shakespeare, we can name the philosophical module Hegel, in honor of someone who made making it explicit explicit to itself. 'Hegel' is that part of spirit (cultural software) which articulates the character of articulation itself.

Concepts are open — Jamal

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The reminds me of discussions of genesis versus structure. That concepts are open make genesis possible. As individuals we can get lucky with a new metaphor which gets adopted becomes relatively literal, hardens like cooling wax. Or we can add to the machinery of metacognition by seeing that maybe the inferential relationships of claims are what make concepts within such claims meaningful, etc.

But, prior to our development of design, and the coining of the word ‘design’, there were no instances of design in the cosmos, right? — Wayfarer

God or the demiurge was a designer, right? So we are already used to projecting our own creativity beyond us. Evolution was hard to personify, of course, but someone or other found the metaphor useful and applied it. Now it sticks. The blind watchmaker. Pretty clever really.

Only insofar as they serve the purposes of evolutionary theory, which is to survive and reproduce, and no further. — Wayfarer

Once minds such as ours originate, they themselves become the possibility of memetic and technological evolution, till all three work together toward an exponential increase in human knowledge power. We are now at the dawn of yet another technological revolution, on the verge of creating beings like ourselves in many ways, in some surprisingly human ways simply better than us. We are creating little gods in our own image, and I don't see why they won't become big gods. I understand that people are ecstatic or disgusted about this or just scared. But I don't see any definite gulf between it and us in the long run. If there was ever a time to think reconsider doubts about Darwin, it may be now.

Just had to commend the use of Nirvana on a philosophy forum - not an easy task, well played. — Isaac

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Does the word have any referent, outside the activities of h. sapiens? — Wayfarer

I'd say it does now, by the usual metaphorical extension of our language.

In fact, Darwin (and others often forgotten) explained 'purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.'

So it's not the denial of purpose but finally an explanation of the complex in terms of the simpler and not in terms of the yet more complex and mysterious. Some who were attached to that previous 'explanation' felt that such purpose had turned to dust in their hands. It wasn't real unless God had made it.

Any religion has something to fear from scientific discovery is not worth respecting in my view — Wayfarer

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He's critical of the idea of neodarwinian materialism purely on philosophical grounds, elaborated in his later Mind and Cosmos. — Wayfarer

I've read it and was disappointed. I don't remember it very well, but think I found it too dualist or Cartesian. And what of this ?

entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics

Does he mean explainable in principle ? He must. Does he think a single cell isn't explainable in principle via chemistry and physics ? A single neuron ? Where's the threshold ?

Maybe it all adds up, after millions of years, to an Einstein and a Darwin.

Connected by what, and how? Evolution itself is not an agency, it doesn't 'do' anything. People speak about 'the wonders of evolution' nowadays, but natural selection is filter, not a force. — Wayfarer

One needs randomness too. These days we have the tools create our own simplified Natures in which we can follow evolution closely, for instance :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XEklaH9k6k

.

The problem of intentionality, meaning, and purpose is a very deep one, although, as Thomas Nagel observed, much of the debate about it is shaped by the fear of religion: — Wayfarer

This is a twoedged sword, because clearly religion has had much to fear from science in general and perhaps from the theory of evolution most of all. In any issue that matters to people (that isn't too boring and dry), it'll probably always to be possible for either side to accuse the other of motivated reasoning. We can't let ourselves get stuck at that level.

It's not 'enquiry' that is at issue, but subordinating the subject within the scope of the objective sciences. It's intrinsically demeaning to declare that really, humans are confabulations of unconscious processes that only appear to be intelligent due to the requirements of survival. — Wayfarer

The intelligence is no less real though for being evolved. It's Darwin's genius that he (and others) made the case for how astounding complexity could emerge from a much simpler situation.

Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we’re here. No buffalo knows it’s a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we’re members of Homo sapiens, and it’s the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations.

It’s this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what’s it made of? It’s made of neurons. It’s made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.

There's definitely a connection there - Dennett not only forgets being, but wishes to eliminate it altogether. Which I think is actually the motivation for eliminativism - it's to avoid the responsibility of facing up to what Eric Fromm describes as 'the fear of freedom'. Better to pretend you're a robot or an animal. — Wayfarer

That's not so plausible, as I see it. Humans are left more free if they emerged from something simpler than they are, more without an example and (worryingly) without any force to catch them if they fall. Dennett pretty clearly is a kindly intellectual. To my knowledge he doesn't wrestle with the problem of the meaning of being, but that's not an easy one to touch. Even Witt and Heid say that (basically, at times) it may be nonsense, unsayable, beneath or above metaphysics/logic/science. I found some quotes that you may not have seen, that may add context (because you may be biased here?)

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.

***********

If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered , and engaged , you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul.

**********
We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be "informavores", epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
*********
So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed—and Darwin provided—was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn’t count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process.

I agree with Descartes in so far as he takes it that experience is the phenomenon, we are most familiar with out of everything. I drop the dualism, especially the substantive kind. — Manuel

Thanks for expanding, but I'm still not quite clear on your position. Is experience material in your view ? Why is the subject familiar with experience as opposed to simply familiar with the world ? I guess I'm a direct realist in some kind of postHegelian sense. So for me there's no image between us and the world. And there's no pure 'matter' in the sense of secret (we can't get it uncooked) substrate (the matter of physics is, for me, just a piece of the scientific image, itself a piece of the lifeworld among others.)

I wonder though why we would need to build a metaphysics on such a transitory experience of surprise. — Tom Storm

I think (?) the later Heidegger was working on an antimetaphysics, because even I, in my noninitiated state, can see that it slips through all of our conceptual nets -- if 'it' is anything at all, if it's not just nonsense. I just mean (for instance) the radical simplicity of the red of the rose in its redness and thereness, more specifically in the redness and thereness that is not grasped by the public concept, which for just that reason is nonsense, but seems (who could ever tell?) to inspire the hard problem ? What indeed can we hope to build upon that which is more Abyss than Foundation ? But that's perhaps exactly the opportunity, a perverse reversal of the obsession of the clear and the enduring. Risk. Intoxication. The stormy depths. 'Find a girl with far away eyes.'

As you know as well as me, this is great material for working up a cult of personality. We humans love the ineffable, the paradoxical, the esoteric, the grandiose, the mysterious. Give us this day our wizards of the ephemeral and the diaphanous.

Tarkovsky's film Stalker — Noble Dust

:up:

Haven't seen it, but thx for the reference !

Have you seen/ read Stuart Kauffman ? From what I can tell as a nonbiologist, he's got some good explanations for the emergence of complexity (complementing Darwin and others) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWo7-azGHic&t=841s

I don't think he can have it both ways - if we really are robots or blindly-propagating genetic machines, then the only reason to value humanity as such is convention or sentimentality, it has no real basis, because nothing important is at stake. — Wayfarer

That's an old argument against atheism too, but how does God safeguard the importance of human doings ? The threat of his wrath ? The toys he gives us ? But those only matter because we already value ourselves and fear destruction, which is just what one would expect from an evolved creature.
Am I to believe you'll stop loving your family if it's somehow proved to you that there is no god and just Darwinian evolution ? It's absurd, right ?Sentimentality includes love. Convention includes the rational norms that make science and philosophy possible. Why can't the higher evolve from the lower ? How does some alien object or postulate whatnot ground all this when we already value ourselves ? What seal need be set on our selflove to make it enough ?

I've never understood this. How is it strange? — Tom Storm

You like to ask tough questions. :up:

Can it be said ?

Funny you ask this on Easter. When I was a wee lad at grandpa's house on another Easter when I was maybe 10, I wandered alone down to a creek at the edge of the property. Water was rushing down the slate, madly glistening in the sun, and I was shocked by the thereness of all that beauty, shocked to be alive, shocked that something (anything) was. I had other encounters with this shock / wonder, but they decreased with age. Perhaps it's just a feeling. As Wittgenstein put it, it's fucking nonsense to wonder at a tautology. 'Something is here.'

But it's also 'the mystical.' It's maybe also the uncheckable redness or ecstasy that eludes or underflows public conceptualization. Ineffable feeling, but what then can I mean ?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you. — Tom Storm

I see also how appropriate this was in terms of selfmodifying softwhere, our individual beingthrown into a particular duo of tooyoung clowns. I think of my young parents now (as they were when they had me) as children.

Or nothing in particular (which is my position). — Tom Storm

:up:

I'm down with the positronic negativity.

I love that one, yes. I used to quote that one for my wife when her family was trouble.

I think we are whatever we fancy ourselves to be. Or nothing in particular (which is my position). — Tom Storm

:up:

But I'd add that we have the languages we were thrown into, the technology, the political structures. We take a world and a default background self (decency norms) for granted most of the time. The menu from which we choose we did not choose, but we do get to change the menu for the next customer.

Rational norms are the delusions of semantic policemen. — Janus

The only rational norm worth holding to is consistency and then only when the concern is with logic. — Janus

I'm not disagreeing with myself. — Janus

Sorry, officer, that I assumed we were concerned with logic. Carry on my playword fun.

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44214/preludes-56d22338dc954

(except, perhaps Dylan Thomas). — Tom Storm

:up:

Can you briefly explain this curious poetic sentence? — Tom Storm

Joyce has an avatar of his young self say : History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.
Heidegger and Sartre say (or so I claim) that we are the history from which we are trying to awake. This works both individually and culturally. A metaphor that might help here is software that modifies itself. It's only within the constraints or by the instructions of my current code that I can modify that code and be something new, and so on --- in our case with more and more complexity, until the Jenga tower falls and we worship thunder again.

Or it's a convoluted and playful way to say I'm a postFeuerbach humanist of some flavor. We humans are god. The divine predicates are human virtues. We 'eat' our old selves by criticizing what we've been as part of inventing what we will be.

Neurath's boat is another good metaphor. Imagine a boat that is always at sea, so that it must always float. We can change out every part over time, but only piece by piece. Man is underdetermined, has no 'essence.' Existence is the kind of thing that is whatever it takes itself to be. image

Sure there are 'physical' limits and we aren't truly blank slates, but we are 'the' nightmarishly triumphantly softwhere-not-hardware selfdefining animal toolgod. If we don't kill ourselves, we may merge with our technology, modify our genetic code, colonize the galaxy. Hard to say. But of course the innocent optimism of Hegel and Feuerbach is mostly lost now. Technology threatens dystopia and extinction. This gets us into the ghost that haunts Hegel, one strangely named Schlegel ( two brothers who are theorists of Romanticism's infinite irony.) Are we the ironic flowers of the heat death ? Are we coal's trick for getting itself burned ? Dissipative structures who didn't start but surely must optimize the fire ? Are we the gallows humor of the Universe in its hospital bed?

even if I think they won't be able to explain the so called "hard problem" — Manuel

To me the hard problem is maybe a diluted version of the forgetfulness of being. Wittgenstein and Heidegger both discussed something like the strangeness that the world (any world) is here. It's not how it is (this way or that) but that it is. If we insist on a Cartesian framework, then beingthere becomes beingfor (as in being-for-a-subject). But what is this subject ? Did not Descartes assume way too much ? This belongs in another thread I guess, but I wanted to show some sympathy with the spirit of the hard problem if not its letter.

how it arises from matter — Manuel

I guess I just don't accept that we must frame it this way, as something immaterial arising from matter. As mentioned above, there are uses of 'matter' that I find questionable. But I don't want to derail the thread.

I reread The Glass Bead Game lately. Also great. Both are worthy of threads. I'm sure 'the suicides' in Steppenwolf are part of the reason I like the poison theme. Harry's undecidable status (on the edge of respectability, despite his lethal worldtranscending angst, thanks to his social capital -- and the dividends of capital capital he lives on) reminds me of Hamlet.

The deluded endeavour to corral meaning is the reason AP is such a terrible 'medicine'; it produces legions of one-dimensional semantically correct wankers who are in mortal danger of disappearing up their own arses. — Janus

This is accidentally hilarious. Are you trying to replace my boy @Bartricks ? I'm not offended but just a mixture of amused and dismayed. You don't exactly make me reconsider my case when this is what you end up throwing (throwing up) against it.

Rational norms are the delusions of semantic policemen. — Janus

No offense intended (I'm really not angry but just mystified by your new tone), but thus spoke The Great @Janus, who either thinks he can make a case for this bold claim in terms of the very norms he denies or thinks he doesn't need to. I don't mind if you disagree with me, but it's only polite to agree with yourself.

the attempt to isolate the elements will always fail and after the futile process of eliminating error, you'll end up with sand instead of water. — Janus

Let's translate this less flatteringly (I admit this is a parody, an exaggeration .) : ...dude like philosophy is stupid because like you never like get things totally like figured out like dude seriously its pretty much a waste of time just be cool and have fun... Have you forgotten that philosophy is a profound pleasure ? No one is asking for your therapeutic sermon to release them from the infinite task opportunity of getting more clear on the being of the here or what the fuck that even means. It hurts so good to play the game. It squirts glow wood to pay the flame. But do feel welcome to spew it if it puts you in a better mood.

****************************************************************************************
To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3
to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to
sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove
your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of
some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing— hence deplorable. Everybody does it in the form of crystalbluffmadonna, monetary system, pharmaceutical product, or a bare leg advertising the ardent sterile spring.
https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf

I think that Descartes showed that by thinking one proved to oneself that one exists in some form.
Now I come to think of it seems to me that Descartes proves that Language works. — Andrew4Handel

No. That's the problem. Descartes took the voice (language) and its unity (the self) for granted.

In order to understand a sentence language must work (successfully carry meaning). — Andrew4Handel

Language works, yes, but it's not clear we need the vessel metaphor. I suggest that an equivalence class of phrases as tools or flags is just as good. Language is central to my thinking. What is it to be rational ? I claim that it is to conform to various norms, especially perhaps a coherence norms. You aren't allowed to contradict yourself. That, I claim, is what a self is. It's a unity to which we as talking bodies aspire in tribes like ours (and probably all tribes.) 'I' refers to this process or infinite task. The self is like an avatar in social-discursive space, tracked for coherence, including how its deeds fit its words.

Some language like "pain" we understand with reference to our own transparent experiences. — Andrew4Handel

This has been shown to not work, as I see it.

So a cake can look like a dog, a bush at night maybe be mistaken for a dog, a fox maybe mistaken for a dog because they share traits or likeness. — Andrew4Handel

Yes. I claim that we see the world 'directly' but can still make incorrect judgments. We can withdraw judgements. 'I thought it was a dog but it was just a bush.' We don't need 'private images' for this. If the self is understood as a primarily normative entity within the space of reasons, one is not tempted by the screen metaphor --- or to construct reality as something like the overlap of these screens, etc. The thing that makes claims is in the world. 'Seeing a tree' is mystical nonsense until it's integrated into this space of claims for which one can be held responsible (or, at the very least, use in inferences.) Thus spank blank flag.

Why? — frank

Less reductively, I see writing as part of reading, as making one strong enough to read properly. To not write is to live without a mirror and trust that one is handsome.

I'll just smile if you are cute enough to ask me why it's nice to be handsome in this metaphor.

The Jews have the oldest known living culture. Opinions vary about what their secret might be. — frank

I love the old testament. I'd guess it's the great memes. Nietzsche praised some of those war stories as superior to those of the Greeks. I remember finding stuff in Kings as a teen boy and getting completely absorbed. Reading the bible wasn't supposed to be so fun.

Why? — frank

To me it makes sense that we'd evolve to seek status to win mates, secure our offspring's future, etc. Darwin is my boy. Note that I use my social capital in the real world, not just here. This is a joyful scratching post.

To me a deeper question (which may be a pseudoquestion) is why there was a stage set in the first place on which evolution could happen. I do not begin to count 'god' as an answer, for then I'd have a more complicated beginning to explain.

Sure. You can't really dispense with the self though. Unless you want to become a homeless lunatic living under a bridge babbling and being hit in the head by rocks thrown by kids. — frank

:up:

Of course. And I'm an ambitious fucker. I'm trying to drop some fresh memes. I'm not preaching against the softwhere but making it a theme within which to show off and gather prestige coins.

It seems for most it's far more important to be wearing the right badge than it is taking any steps that might demonstrably be shown to actually yield progress in the real world. — Isaac

:up:

I see cosplay in every direction, but I don't deny exceptions.


angel left wing right wing broken wing

I stand behind my claims from behind an impenetrable shield of ambiguity. — T Clark

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