I do think it would be a mistake to make no distinction between the retinotopic map of an object our consciousness accesses and the physicals object its self in the world. I would argue that science demands it by virtue of how it says visual perception works
— Restitutor

Not all science of perception makes this assumption.
Francisco Varela contrasts the old representational realist model of perception with the enactivist approach, in which perceiving is not representing but guided action: — Joshs

I Just watched a bit of a video of enactivist and Francisco Varela which means i understand the last sentence. I just don't understand how the quote relates to it. I don't understand how it can be argued that retinotopic maps and objects that reflect light are two different things.

inactivist argument is "Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing else: you lay down a pay in walking" (Antonio Machado, borrowed by Varela). Honestly, sounds a little mushy. The didn't seem to be saying no information captured by any sense organs is in any way representative of anything using the common meaning of represent, and retinotopic maps aren't a thing.

I am down with the idea we create the frameworks that our reality is built out of. Everything is a construction of the mine, models within models and it is all contextual and there is likely to be all sorts of environmental feedback, giving rise to evolutionary psychology. Taking that to sense organs do no present the brain with any information that could in any way be said to be representational seems plainly wrong.

Husserl doesn’t presume an ineffable world beyond our experience of it. There is no veil between the world and our experience of it. We are always in direct context with the world via some mode of givenness ( recollection, perception, etc). Three is no original territory our constructions model or map. — Joshs

Husserl isn't sacred to me and i don't mind being at odds with him. This said i don't think what i think and what you highlight Husserl as thinking to be as dissimilar as you may be suggesting. Much of it may be reconciled by different ideas about the the word ineffable. In one sense the world is ineffable as we can not directly commune with it, by which i mean you can't bring the physicals external world into you brain or mind for that matter. The best we can do in terms of communing with the fundamental reality is to extract information from it and model that information it the physical structure of our brains and then commune with that representation. For me, the representation of fundamental reality can have as much "truth" to it as any representation of anything can. This would mean that we can commune with fundamental reality through extracting information and making models out of the information, it is just that can't directly. commune with fundamental reality in the absence of these models. The word directly being important.

I do think it would be a mistake to make no distinction between the retinotopic map of an object our consciousness accesses and the physicals object its self in the world. I would argue that science demands it by virtue of how it says visual perception works.

I almost agree, with this caveat: Descartes' principle error was in regarding res cogitans as an object, something that could be conceived of in an objective manner. Husserl's primary objection to Descartes lies in the latter's approach to consciousness. Descartes regards consciousness as 'res cogitans' (thinking substance) and the material world as 'res extensa' (extended substance). Husserl, a phenomenologist, argues that this perspective wrongly subsumes consciousness under the same category as physical objects - by treating it as objective - thereby neglecting the inherently first-person nature of conscious experience.

Husserl contends that consciousness should not be treated as an object within the world but rather as the precondition for the appearance of any such objects, that through which everything objective is disclosed in the first place. He emphasizes the intentionality of consciousness — its inherent nature of being about or directed towards objects, and how it constitutes the meaning and essence of things rather than merely perceiving them as physical entities.

This critique is fundamental to Husserl's phenomenological project, which aims to return to the 'things themselves' by examining the structures of experience as they present themselves to awareness, free from either preconceived theories or scientific assumptions. This is the 'phenomenological epoché' or reduction. — Wayfarer

I enjoyed reading this. I think Hershel and by extension you are making lots of good points that i agree with. I agree that what consciousness is made out of (in my opinion information) “should not be treated as an object within the world but rather as the precondition for the appearance of any such objects, that through which everything objective is disclosed in the first place”. I would say that information offers a better framework for this than res cogitans.

The way i arrange the ideas discussed together is best talked about initially as an analogy. Imagine a “documentary movie” that blends some truth with some conspiracy theory.

On one end of the spectrum, you can imagine somebody who is naïve and who very much believes the narrative of the movie, getting very emotionally invested in it. On the other end of the spectrum maybe you have a knowledgeable person who sees the claims made by the movie are inconsistent with observations and the knowledgeable person also has the ability to generate a narrative about how the producer of the movie is making money from people clicking on the internet link. Both of the movie watchers are watching the same movie that really does exist, it is equally real for both of them.

Evidently the movie that blends “some truth with some conspiracy theory” analogies to what we conceive of as reality and the movie narrative analogies to the narrative we generate about reality. A naïve realist of a philosopher, like the naïve movie watcher will take their internally generated narrative as essentially true and as such they will tend not to like you casting doubt on its validity. It is impossible for the naïve movie watcher or philosopher to separate fact from fiction unless they are prepared to be skeptical about the narrative. It is impossible to be skeptical about your own internally generated narrative unless you are operating from an abstract perspective.

It is my opinion that it is literally impossible to separate fact from fiction from a first-person perspective. From an abstract perspective we can see how, even when we are sitting still we are moving as we are on the surface of a ball (the earth) moving through space at hundreds of thousands of meters per second. This understanding would be impossible if we were not able to adopt an abstract, non-first-person narrative. Imagine explaining this to somebody non-neurotypical who literally couldn’t adopt anything but an embodied first-person perspective.

To be clear I am using the word narrative deliberately. I would argue that people literally generate what I call a narrative model of the world which encompasses, explains and rationalizes all the other models of the world we generate, such as our visual model of the world. Our first-person narrative model seems likely to have evolved first as cognitive less complex animals have it. A first-person narrative model however only lets you see the world from your perspective and so is limited and works best for bottom-up control of behaver. In more cognitively complex animals with humans being the best example, narratives from other peoples, or from an abstract perspective can be generated which excels in creating a framework for top-down control. The first-person narrative we generate is about survival and it is best understood in the framework of evolutionary psychology, understanding our first person narrative of things like lust, fear anger and love in the context of a mechanistic abstract narrative.
Looking at the world through a first-person perspective is only ever going to give you a self-portrait generated by our psychology which is itself is a product of the demands of evolution. If you use this perspective, you will see only what your psychology what you to see. By using an abstract scientific perspective based on predictive narratives (predictive narratives make provable predictions) we can generate a portrait of ourselves which is undistorted by our egos and psychologies. Michael Gazzaniga talks about narrative generation in split brain patients in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJKloz2vwlc&list=PL8AD2B712B1A0578F&index=3

Getting back to Hershel and the think in its self. I would suggest there is an ineffable world which exists and is sometimes called fundamental reality, sometimes called the quantum foam. As the word ineffable suggests we do not have direct access to this world. All we and other organisms can do is represent this world using different models of varying complexity. Humans have several very complex conjoined representative models which together make up a very large portion of what we call consciousness. This is epitomized the fact that we have a retinotopic map of objects in the world in our brains. This video about retinotopic maps really speaks to what I am saying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhFJIgeY-ZY

I also like how Joscha Bach thinks about a lot of it. And these are my favorite videos of his.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdJCFEqFTU&list=PL-zlSLDa0oJp1vAGAbhIaDwMz2Og4rzsg&index=4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5nJ5l6dl2s&list=PL-zlSLDa0oJp1vAGAbhIaDwMz2Og4rzsg&index=5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3K5UxWRRuY&list=PL-zlSLDa0oJp1vAGAbhIaDwMz2Og4rzsg&index=6

There's an entire massive website, The Information Philosopher, Bob Doyle, which is devoted to this idea. It's a constant reference point for me, I guess you know about it already but for the record it's here https://www.informationphilosopher.com/ . The index of carefully curated articles about individual philosophers and scientists is a fantastic resource. — Wayfarer

I hadn't herd of Bob Doyle all the website but i will defiantly check them out. I don't get to talk about this with many people normally so its really great to get suggestions from well read people such as yourself.

That analogy can be extended though. If you have an item of information - say, instructions, or a recipe - that can be represented in any number of languages, or encoded in any number of media (digital, physical, and so on). Provided the information is faithfully replicated in each transformation, then the information stays the same, even if the material form of its presentation is completely different. That is the sense in which meaning can be understood — Wayfarer

I very much Agree with your wider point. I do think there are some finer points in there that may profit in re-thinking slightly. It could be suggested that the information in a record is not the same as the information being produced by the sound waves you get from playing the record, you may said that the information in the record can be processed by the record player into specific sound waives that contain the specific information that were captured by the wax record. In this construction the information in the record would be different to, but encode for the information in the sound waves.

Really, i think this all comes down to a what your definition of information is down to a degree of precision for which we don't normally think down to meaning reasonable people could be forgiven for disagreeing.

Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it. We could have chosen a different way of modeling it , but so far this way is quite useful for us. It may not always be so. Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary. — Joshs

I agree with most of what you are saying. I make use a lot of information as noted in a more recent post which i regard as being what our minds are made up from. The part i would disagree with the last sentence. Scientists do represent biology mechanistically, this is what our understanding of biology is based on. I agree don't describe psychological phenomena mechanistically but i would suggest that this is for two reasons 1) Describing psychologically important concepts mechanistically is something most people find psychologically distressing 2) a failure of imagination regarding how to explain psychological phenomena mechanistically. The "different descriptive vocabulary", is in my opinion somewhat disingenuous people are just talking about there psychology's using different descriptive vocabulary, they are sometimes implicitly but mostly explicitly making ontological claims about the nature of the psychological phenomena. These ontological claims go the the core of how we think about and justify our beliefs about psychological phenomena so they are in no was incidental to the discussion. I am interested in how we should change the ontologies of psychological phenomena to make them consistent with a mechanistic universe and what the effects of doing this would be..

Do you have an opinion of how information exists, mechanistically or otherwise, only an abstraction or something physical? I've noticed some physicalists use information as an abstraction without identifying a means for it to physically exist.

An observation would be that information has specific content so how would you bridge the mechanistic with specific information content? — Mark Nyquist

I very much love this question. I think that information is really key to understanding mind/brain and key to what information is, is how information relates to physical matter. The core of what I am saying I would describe as accepted science. The framing of what the science says information is as “information-matter dualism” is my framing and I make no claims of intellectual support from anybody for it.

You put your finger on the fact that physicists use the word information differently to normal people. They are multiple different but related meanings of the word information. For physicists’ information is any discernable difference by any measurement you can make of anything. This means that the consequence of matter existing in different places and in different states is that information simply comes along for the ride. If you simplify the universe down to Conway’s game of life, pretending the alive (white) squares are atoms. The information in the system in this analogy would be the relative placement of the white pixels relative to each other. To copy all the information in the system would involve copying the placement of all the white pixels relative to each other. Sabine Hossenfelder describes information as everything you would need to know to make an exact copy of you down to the level of the exact placement of every subatomic particle. If you vaporized your computer hard drive the information is everything you would need to make an exact copy down to the placement of every subatomic particle

This video is of somebody else saying what I said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a35bKt1nuBo Sabine Hossenfelder book “existential physics” also covers it.

You will notice that a physicists view of information is agnostic to if the information that we are looking at has any pattern we can discern or if any such pattern is useful. Using the definition physicists use, TV static has information in it. From a less abstract, more practical human perspective we don’t count it as information unless we can see some kind of pattern in it that seems like it may be of some value to us, which is fair enough from an evolutionary perspective.

Information from the human perspective is still based on the fact that information is the relative position of everything to everything else. Aristotle observed there are two distinct things about wax which are its substance and its shape. The substance and the shape are obviously related, but they are equally obviously not the same thing as you can change the shape without changing the substance. The shape is effectively a product of the placement of all the particles in the wax relative to each other. As Aristotle molded wax in his hands while thinking about the duality between substance and shape inherent in the wax he was shifting the relative position of one atom compared to the other, changing the shape of the wax. Given that shape is a product of the placement of the atoms relative to each other shape is a type of information. Shape is also a type of information that has meaning for construction and many other things making it something non physicists see as containing information.

The first wax records were made by taking a horn, putting a diaphragm at the end of the horn, putting a needle on the diaphragm and spinning the needle across the wax. When you talk or play music into the horn the diaphragm goes up and down, the needle goes up and down which causes the needle to bite into the wax to different degrees according to the specific characteristics of the compression (sound) waves entering the horn and pushing down on the diaphragm. Information in the soundwaves is captured in the exact shape of the groove of the needle cuts into the wax. The shape of the groove cut into the wax is a representation of the sound wave that made it.

After a mold is created from the wax record shaped by the needle, vinyl records are made by getting a molten ball of plastic and pressing it between the molds changing the physical shape of the molten plastic by changing how one molecule of plastic lines up next to another molecule of plastic. The information in the original wax is preserved in the mold making process and is subsequently locked into to every molten glob of plastic pressed between the molds. In this way the information in the original soundwave can be duplicated highlighting that information, unlike matter can be given away repeatedly without ever losing the original information. A record can be copied millions of times from the mold, with the mold changing the shape of molten plastic. An idea, a concept or a skill can in the same way be transferred from the teacher to hundreds of students by changing signaling proteins in the brain by post translationally modifying them with the addition or removal of phosphate being a common example. This work is what Eric Kandel wone the Nobel prize for, he studded it in sea slugs but we create memory in exactly the same way. This is what is happening in your brain as you are read this. As it is with the wax record it is with the brain except in the brain it is the shape of protein altered by posttranslational modifications rather than the shape of groves in a wax disk. Obviously this means that I am claiming mind is made out of information and the brain is made matter. The caveat is that the mind is dynamic, form moment to moment which is reflected in the dynamic nature of the information contained within the brain.

Other instances of what I am calling information-matter dualism I have not eluded to include objects such as cogs, cams and other objects such as the information inherent in the angle of the ball arms relative to gravity in a centrifugal governor. It is worth looking at the documentary about automaton and thinking about information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nt7xLAfEPs as you are watching. Another very good documentary about information is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioP0N4zYJeA They talk about what information is. They have a great example of information in the context of Jacquard machines that weave patterns in fabric accordance to information held in punch cards. It is very clever and a precursor to computer programing.

I have already talked through why I disagree with substance Dualism in a previous post, it is simply not compatible with science, or the observations made by scientists. The truth is however, there is a rather good, scientifically grounded substitute for res-cogitans if you are prepared to sacrifice one of the three key claims made about it. The key claims Descartes made about res-cogitans were 1) it is non-physical 2) it is independent of physical matter 3) it is what our introspective experiences are constructed out of. The thing you obviously realize is that the concept of information is integral to the description of the world provided by science and in this description, information is non-physical in the sense information isn’t made out of physical matter. This is consistent with Descartes’s first claim. In addition, our introspective experiences are inherently informational by any definition of the word informational. This is consistent with Descartes’s third claim. This means that the only difference between res-cogitans and information is the second claim as information is very much not independent of physical matter like is clamed for res-cogitans. This means that to make dualism fully compatible with science all you need to do is stop claiming res cogitans is independent of matter and start calling it information. A phrase that seems appropriate to summaries my view on the relationship between matter and information could be described as information-matter dualism. So that’s what I think, information-matter dualism is how I personally frame what science says about information.

Sorry it was such a long answer. I could have written 10x more. I didn’t even talk about information held in the physical structure of DNA and how that works.

Thank you for the question. I would love to know yours or anybody else thoughts.

I couldn't agree with you more. Emergence has a tendency to be used as a magic wand. Your point is very well talk, as is your highlighting of the fact that is is real even if it does get abused.

Thanks i will read the paper. Thank you for suggesting it.

Honestly, what we define as the word machine as is semantics and distracts from the core reality. The core reality is that both organic and non-organic machines are simply conglomerations of unthinking atoms mechanistically obeying the laws of physics to generate what ever emergent properties the machine generates.

Intellectually doesn't matter if if you use a narrow human centric view of the word machine like wayfarer does and then and use it at as a metaphor or you use the word machine more broadly but not as a metaphor. The statement above still stands.

Unfortunately the word machine is however rhetorically important as calling human a machines is the only thing that seems to make people realize that science says biology is just as mechanistic and deterministic as any object engendered by a human.

Not being as such, but of the objects of experience. Questions about what objectively exists are different to questions about the nature of existence, which are much broader in scope. — Wayfarer

You are confusing what you would like to be for what is.

Yes physics talks about what objectively exists but that doesn't mean it isn't saying anything about the "nature of existence". You just don't like what it is saying.

Standard physics and science in general is saying the nature of existence is mechanistic and deterministic. Science says this ever time a scientists makes a production based on the belief that the nature of the world and everything that exists in it is mechanistic and then make an observation consistent with that prediction. This happens thousands of times a day.

Science is screaming at us that the fundamental nature of existence is mechanistic and deterministic but because this isn't what you want to hear you don't listen.

Evidently quantum mechanics is probabilistic rather than deterministic with the deterministic world emerging from this probabilistic world. If you want to argue that the world is probabilistic at the most fundamental level this is fine by me.

But plainly that is a fact of neither mechanics nor physics but if biology. In all of what you’re saying ‘machines’ are a metaphor. Furthermore you’d never learn about genetics by studying physics, the fact you can call on ‘emergence’ as a kind of universal ad hoc gap filler notwithstanding. — Wayfarer

No, this is basic science you just don't understand it in anything like a sophisticated way. The fact you call the idea of emergence a "ad hoc gap filler" is profoundly ignorant. All scientists believe in emergence and the fact that you don't explains why you are so profoundly confused about how physics and biology relate to each other.

Physics gives rise to chemistry and chemistry gives rise to biology, this is all that is meant by emergence. To say emergence doesn't exist is to say chemistry isn't a product of physics and to say biology isn't a product of chemistry. Intellectually you have to know, if you change the laws of something like quintom electro dynamics (physics), you would change chemistry and there for change biology.

An atom is simply the product of quarks and electrons following the rules layer out in the standard model. Molecules are just atoms following the rules of quintom electro dynamics. Biology is simply a lode of molecules we call protein, RNA and DNA interacting through rules of charge and thermodynamics as it relates to hydrophobic and hydrophilic interactions. All of it is mechanistic and all of it relates back ultimately to the laws of physics.

You seem to think that there is some great sacred divide between biology and everything else and there isn't. Biology is just chemistry that is dependent on the catalysts and such produced by the template called DNA. The template does allow for new rules to emerge and some of them are both complicated and very powerful such as evolution but evolution isn't magical, it also has to follow the mechanistic rules of physics.

You don't seem to get the fact that we know how biology works to a level of detail that strips it right back down to chemistry and we know how chemistry works that strips it right back down to physics. You are just profoundly ignorant of this science, preferring dusty quotes from out of date scientists.

Did you watch the video about ATP synthase? You need to understand we are build out of many sextillion of molecular machines. These things are millions of times smaller than anything that you can even see but they operate mechanically. This is what makes life special and capable of generating properties that clunky made made machines can't. It is this rather than you bizarre idea that that biology is somehow unrelated from physics and doesn't operate causally.

The scientifically grounded notion of information is also important in understanding biology and i think that you may be interpreting the role of information in biology as making it non-causal or non-mechanistic. The information in the DNA of an organism for example is important and generate properties that are hard to see as mechanistic but information is integral to modern notions of physics.

Descartes acknowledged all animals to be "beast machines" except us. Its soooo incompatible with science.

“By convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality, there are atoms and the void”. Democritus (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC).

Not relevant to the issue though. The mechanistic model of nature comes from early modern science not Greek philosophy as such — Wayfarer

Democritus even says introspective experience is generated by atoms. (he did believe atoms moved mechanistically).

'Metal'. Machines are manufactured artifacts, whilst humans and other animals are organisms. Organisms and machines have many fundamental differences, organic processes and mechanical processes have many fundamental differences. Organisms have the ability to grow, heal, mutate, learn and evolve, which machines do not have. — Wayfarer

I gave you real definitions from a real dictionary saying what a machine is. All you have done is crafted an artificially narrow definition of a word that contradicts dictionaries but proves your point. Find a dictionary that says a machine is defined in the way you define it and then we will talk.

What are these fundamental differences? What you have done is cherry pick a whole load of emergent properties. Saying humans have properties that non-human machines don't just doesn't prove your point. Lots of classes of machines have specific emergent properties other machines don't. Growing is simply an emergent property the same way flying is an emergent property. A few hundred years ago you could have included flying on your list of what machines can't do and organisms can. Even now there are emergent properties on your list that robots can do. Machines certainly learn for example, it is called machine learning. Although i don't know of machines can physically evolve, there are lots of examples of programs that control robots being designed to evolve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbyQcCT6890.

where the idea of the universe as 'machine like' originated. — Wayfarer

Democritus was before Descartes.

No, if you don't think the world is mechanistic science isn't the problem, the facts are the problem

The fact that a Urbain Jean Leverrier predicted the location of Neptune based Newtonian physics equations is the problem.

The fact that from a genetic test you can say that a one nucleotide change will or won't cause cystic fibrosis is the problem.

The fact that the whole modern world, including the computer you are using was built based upon experienced reality that the world behaves mechanistically is the problem.

No, it make it a model for scientific analysis of the nature of being, which is better.

It is better than a model for philosophical analysis of the nature of being because it is much more likely to represent reality, rather than just representing the way we would like reality to be, with your scientifically indefensible belief in substance dualism being case in point.

Did you look at the ATP synthase YouTube video?.

Yes, modern physics, is a useful abstraction, but it is a useful abstraction that represents fundamental reality well enough to make incredibly accurate, specific and counterintuitive predictions so don’t just dismiss it. It is more than just abstract.

The fact that some people 400 year back formalized the old idea of a material and immaterial world and dressed it up as science doesn’t make what they say correct. There were plenty of people in Descartes time that weren’t buying what he was selling. Princess Elisabeth for one.

You have probably been told things like substance dualism breaks the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but you probably don’t care even though it is a rather important law. Also, people have probably pointed out that the fact that head trauma, tumors, etcetera will affect everything and anything about your introspective experience, including your sense of self, suggests that your mind (rez -cognizance) isn’t independent of our brain (rez-cognizance).

The reason I am not substance dualism is because it is very unlikely to be true because it is very bad science. Extremely few people who understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics (physicist) or understand modern neuroscience are substance duelists and I care what these people think more than I care about what a “scientist” that died 400 years ago and had no insight into how the brain works thinks. If you were seriously interested in the truth in this matter, you would believe somebody like Michal Gazzaniga over Descartes. I recommend Gazzaniga’s Gifford lectures. They will blow your mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dadT-14FkSY&list=PL8AD2B712B1A0578F

I think the idea of Dualism is broadly correct, but it does needs to be modified to make it fits with established scientific fact with substance dualism simply doesn’t do.

But it's not. There are machine-like elements, to be sure, but at the basis, humans (and all other creatures) are organic and not mechanical. They don't operate solely according to the abstractions of physics, in addition there is a much more sophisticated level of activity that occurs even on the level of cell division and growth. The machine metaphor is just that - a metaphor - and you could argue that it's a metaphor that's gone rogue, that is, escaped from its enclosure and wrought havoc in culture at large — Wayfarer

Sorry to highlight but this section of your answer is kind of lazy. You quoted the stuff about the musculoskeletal system, ignored the bit where I highlight less superficial parts of the body that said were mechanical (ATP synthase) and then tell me that once you get past musculoskeletal system is all organic and not mechanical. Of course, the body is organic. It is just that it is also mechanical when you look down at it with high enough resolution. The videos below explain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUrEewYLIQg&t=303s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUHJhskW00

It’s obvious I am not saying the body is a machine in the naïve, narrow and stereotypical way a child may see a machine. I am saying the body is machine in the sense that every aspect of what is does is mechanistic and things that are purely mechanistic can be called machines without abusing the term machine. If your definition of a machine is something made of mettle and is designed by a human we are not machines but that isn’t the definition of a machine

Oxford dirtionary “an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.”

Or

“any device that transmits a force or directs its application.”

Saying people don’t “Operate solely according to the abstractions of physics, in addition there is a much more sophisticated level of activity that occurs even on the level of cell division and growth.” I am the director of a Lab at a rather prestigious scientific institution. A staggering amount of information we have on how the body works at the smaller scale says it is all 100% mechanistic obeying physics 100% of the time. There isn’t even a hint of anything happening that isn’t 1000% explained by the laws of physics. Biology is just as mechanistic as movement of the motion of the planets.

It is difficult to convey how much we know and at what detail we know it to laypeople without just using superlatives. Laypeople really have no idea (sorry laypeople). We for example know the structures of over 100 thousand proteins. We very frequently know what they do and how they do it. Look at the video about ATP synthase. We have the crystal structure for the vast majority of it know how it works mechanistically.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pro.4038#:~:text=On%20January%2020%2C%202021%2C%20there,in%20the%20last%205%20years). –

“On January 20, 2021, there were 153,400 and 13,253 protein structures, respectively, determined by x-ray crystallography, by solution and recently solid-state NMR, and 6,814 by electron microscopy (a rapidly increasing number in the last 5 years)”.

I don’t know how to prove how much we know as scientists now as you need to be immersed in it. I can’t just quote you the entity of the scientific literature. All I can do is show you something like ATP synthase and say we have the same kind of information on masses amount of other systems and they are all just as mechanistic.

The fact that there are emergent properties that relies on the functioning of lots of molecular machine, such as cell division say nothing about if the human body is a machine. Machines can do thing that require multiple parts working together. We know a massive amount what is happening during cell division, down to the individual molecules. We know how memory works, down to individual molecules for example. This is not a good objection against the mechanistic nature of the human body as lots of machines have lots of parts that work together.

You think that the idea humans are machines is a metaphor, but I tell you as a scientist, the vast amount of information we have about the human body says we are as mechanistic as a computer and the atoms within us obey the laws of physics just as the atoms in any machine does.

Please understand, you do not have enough of a scientific background to understand how mechanistic science has shown the human body and all “life” to be. You also need to reassess where you are getting your information from.

You can ignore the philosophical reality of this by denying it or by saying its just a metaphor. You may even need to believe that it is true, but it isn’t true.

OP? what's that

I think that anything that refers to introspective experience + notions are fundamentally understood by people and the notions we have of them are fundamentally wrong. If we want to be correct we need to change them in a way that is naturalistic and fits with the fact they are generated by machines. Joscha Bach does a lot of this if you know the guy. If we are machines this has to be true and we are certainly machines. I just don't see why every atheist doesn't agree with me.

I don't have a problem with what you said.

Yes we don't know that anybody other than ourselves is conscious and i guess that relates somewhat.

Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it — Joshs

This is fine, and i agree with on the whole, it just make the question meta physical rather than answering it. Ye by

Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary.
saying something is mechanistic we are just generating a representation of the ineffable like we do with every word we utter.
— Joshs

Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary — Joshs

This statement is a really problem for me as it is just un-true. The difference between what i believe the "self is" and "free will is" and "consciousness is" compared to what most people believe isn't just different descriptive vocabulary. Science says humans are mechanisms and what we think and feel are products of that mechanism, most people do not believe this and vocabulary isn't the problem.

I don't think the rest of what you said answered the question i posed.

Ok, cool.

The first statement you made was

morality comes from religions — Rafaella Leon

I ask a question

What do you mean by this statement? — Restitutor

you then make the statement

To believe that human morality, even the highest and most substantial, is in no way dependent on religion, or necessarily linked to it, is a fallacy. — Rafaella Leon

This is a rather cheap rhetorical trick often called a straw man argument. Instead of answering the question you were asked, you simply made your own statement (purposefully absurd) and then you said the statement you made was a "fallacy". Do you actual have any actual justification for the statement that morality comes from religion?

ll civilizations were born from original religious outbreaks. — Rafaella Leon

You are a fan of making big statements that are not justifiable. Where is there any prof of this, where did you get from. Even if all civilizations were religious it doesn't mean civilization was born from original religious outbreaks. it just doesn't follow logical. It seems quite possible that people could have been religious long long long before they become a civilization. you are just saying stuff.

There has never been a “secular civilization” — Rafaella Leon

depends how you define it, there are plenty of modern countries were the majority of people aren't actuary religious. But who cares?

For an atheist, there is not even the concept of truth, in the end everything is relative to them — Rafaella Leon

Linguistically how the heck placement of the word relative does not significance change the first half of the sentence. Would you actually care to justify this sentence?

all “secular morals” are just an excerpt from previous religious moral codes — Rafaella Leon

Justify this statement, were you there? are there any written records? is there any anthropological evidence or do you just think that if you say it confident enough people will believe you? I personalty suspect "moral" and "immoral" actions came first and then at some point these acts started to be seen as positive or negative by our fellows and we let each other know what we thought of each others actions first with proto language, and eventual started to attach words that signified our approval and disapproval of other peoples actions, these words would be the ancestors of the modern words moral and immoral. Probably sometimes after we started developing these words we probably started up with proto religion but who the hell knows. This is based on what we observe in chimps now and in theories of language development. The idea of god is just a more complicated and abstract concept than, (in cave man speak) that bad, you bad for doing that bad thing.

The atheists morality is only good because their conduct schematically — and externally — coincides with what the principles of religion demand, that is, that the very possibility of good lay conduct was created and sedimented by a long religious tradition whose moral rules, once absorbed in the body of society, began to function more or less automatically. — Rafaella Leon

You say the strangest stuff. Its like you have only heard about atheists in some antiquated written by somebody who had never actually met an atheist and had an anti-atheist agenda.
The actual deal is, people are religious have an intellectually unjustifiable belief in god which they use to justify their intellectually unjustifiable belief in moral absolutes. The all the vast majority of atheists are doing is skipping the belief in religion wail maintaining their intellectually unjustifiable belief in moral absolutes. Only very few atheists (like me) neither believe in truth or moral absolutes. I have taking the trouble to inquiry, and this thread is just one strand of my enquiry.

Religion has undoubtedly helped shape and codify morality but there isn’t a shred of evidence that morality is dependent on religion. There are plenty of atheists that have a strong sense of morality and many people who profess religion that are deeply immoral. Sweden the second least religiose countries in the world and yet it takes care of its poor and needy better than almost any other country in the world. On the other hand, the Republican party that constantly professes religion is suing to allow insurance companies to discriminate against people based on pre-existing conditions. If I was one of people that the bible professes we should love and treat charitably I would chose living in Sweden over living in whatever dystopia the religiose republicans would create.

The idea that over the longer term there will be a problem is kind of possible I suppose but there is no evidence for it. It seems much more likely that atheists will just keep on with their intellectually unjustifiable belief in moral absolutes and we will just keep on keeping on.

Morality comes from religion is quite a statement. What do you mean by this statement? For this to be true religion must be older than morality which doesn't seem very likely. I can see the argument that religion co-evolved with morality but not there was no morality and then religion happened and then suddenly morality.

For an atheist, there is not even the concept of truth — Rafaella Leon

This seems fanciful. Are you saying that if you walked up to antitheses and asked them what truth was they wouldn't have an understanding of what the concept was. Have you ever met an atheist or are you just having a laugh? Do you not think atheists don't own dictionaries or are we just to stupid to be able to process basic concepts?

metaphorical screaming. I have a romantic sole.

Ozymandias
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I have very much enjoyed our discourse and thank you for it.

I am by nature, training and profession a Scientist, an immunologist working on treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. I prize logic because, in science this is what gets results.

I am of the opinion that the world is quietly screaming at us that nothing really matters, and we use religion and frequently philosophy to convince ourselves not to believe what is relatively obvious. The last sentence you wrote seems to be well aligned with this viewpoint.

My world view is undoubtedly cynical, it is also fundamentally nihilistic, it is also likely to be very counterproductive from an evolutionary stand point. I know I probably sound smug, but the truth is I would very much like to be persuaded I am wrong.

I will read through the link you sent me.

I wish you all the best and thank you again for the back and forth.

I can’t help but think we are operating from different metaphysical perspectives. I am a rather extreme materialist who thinks everything is just atoms bouncing around. 80% of what we think is really is just our brains making shit up and for the other 20% it’s a legitimate representation of reality. The flickering uncertain light of predictive hypothesis our only access to knowledge both in the everyday and in when trying to gain access to less obvious realties.
I would never characterize what you think but I am confident what I wrote above isn’t it. It would be good to know your metaphysical perspective is and what your justification for it is. I am totally interested.

I think the problem with that approach is this: that there is no biological difference between criminals and saints. — Wayfarer

Very much not meaning to be rude but this statement is not scientific. People have a life time of memories and experiences all encoded in their brain through short term and long-term potentiation. Science says that memories are encoded into the brain on cellular and molecule level, same with opinions, beliefs how they understand the world. There connectome will be so different. There are conservatively 10 trillion synapses joined up in an utterly unique way, the number of possible arrangements for 10 trillion synapse has to be more than the number of atoms in the universe. In a sense, no two similarly objects could be more different, not when you look at the mount of variations on the theme possible.

The eyes of somebody who is color blind looks the same as the eyes of somebody who is not at every scale except the molecular, but would you deny their lack of color sight results from a difference in their eyes?

I think you're looking to evolutionary theory for things it was never intended to provide. It is an account of the evolution of species - it's not an ethical theory, per se. As I've said, even a lot of ardent Darwinists, like Richard Dawkins, recognize that Darwinism, and social Darwinism, are terrible bases for ethical philosophy. — Wayfarer

I apologies for being lose with my word chose early on as it has created confusion. To say our belief in morality is purely a result of evolution is not true, I am not at odds with Dawkins
I think the brain as an organ evolved the capacity to have thoughts and beliefs by the process of evolution and for evolutionary reasons. I believe we have evolved certain drives which are based on carat and stick of pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings and emotional states. I would describe this as evolutionary underpinnings of Morality.

I don’t think there is a gene for morality or a gene for any particular moral or immoral act. Daniel Denneett in his book “From bacteria to Bach and back again” laid out in painful detail the process by which thoughts/ideas which he called memes get passed from one person to another in a process which in some ways that fits with the wider and none non-literal usage of the word evolution. His thesis is analogous to the conception of a market place of ideas and is difficult to disagree with. I think this on top of our brain’s machinery and in accordance with our basic drive’s accounts for the concept of morality.

People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children — Richard Polt

Great question and nicely put. I would say there is likely to be a massive amount of randomness, biology can’t control everting. It also shouldn’t be over looked that nature can at times like to encourage verity, verity can sometimes be a good things. I guess you aren’t an immunologist (I am) but your body has HLA proteins that binds bits of viruses and shows them to your immune system. HLA proteins can hold onto bits of some viruses but not bits of other viruses. If our HLA proteins can’t display the virus bits we are quite likely to die or get very sick. There is more variation within a person and a population in their HLA protein than in any other protein known in humans. This verity helpful because it means people and whole societies are less likely to all die from the same virus. This is an example of heterogeneity or verity being a good way to ensure at least one of your descendants survives which ever virus future circumstance throws at them. It may be the same with people’s behavior, verity may well be a good thing. If there is verity in the way you descendants behave in response to a crisis there is more chance one of them will survive the crisis and pass on your genes.

I think that under certain circumstances the altruistic will be the ones that survive and in others circumstances the selfish will survive. Both at times can be the better survival stratagem so both ideas exist. Sheep and wolves have different behaviors, but they are both evolutionary successful, why can’t the similar dynamic apply within the same species.

Quite a good book, from what I read about it, with the caveat that Buddhism doesn't need endorsement by evolutionary psychology. As you say, individuals can work to overcome the selfish tendencies which appear to be the consequences of evolutionary drives; but by what star do they set their compass when they do that? — Wayfarer

When I am engaging in philosophy I try not to worry about moral judgment or what people shouldn’t and shouldn’t do I try and look for patters. It may be use full to conceptualize altruism and selfishness as behavioral niches analogues to evolutionary niches. A single individual will gravitate towards different behavioral niches at different times according to different circumstances, different individuals due to genetic makeup, circumstance, what they are good at and what memes they adopt will have different propensities towards different behavioral niches. What happens in practice is that ideas such a morality try’s to push people into the more cooperative, rule following, behavioral niche, and this is certainly were I spend most my time, I set my star to what most people sets there star to, trying to get ahead but trying to get ahead wail following most of societies rules most the time.

The point about the evolutionary paradigm, generally, is that it has a sole aim, which is successful proliferation. Actually there's a saying in evolutionary biology that all creatures are driven by the Four F's - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction. So the question is, do these circumsribe the horizons for h. sapiens? Or can we see further than that? And, if so, to what? — Wayfarer

I would quibble with your initial sentence. There is no “aim” and if it there was it would be better put as continued existence rather than replication, replication is simply one of the methods by which the sequence baked into DNA continues existing. I would put it in much starker terms. Sequences that give rise to properties that result in the continued existence of the sequence continue existing. Sequences that give rise to properties that do not result the continued existence of the sequence stop existing. This means the only sequences in existence had and frequency have the ability to give rise to properties that are capable of maintain their existence. I think this construction is closer to what is fundamentally true.
With respect to the for F’s, the similarity between people in a nightclub who are “on the pull” and some brightly plumbed bird bouncing around trying to impress a mate is blindingly obvious. I guess we are subject to the four F’s. The only things is that humans, in our incredibly complex society can attack these goals obliquely, pursuit of knowledge and understanding can be related back to the 4’F’s. Essentially the answers to your last two questions in the quote is no and nothing and I do struggle with that. On a good day I am an Epicurean and on a bad day I am a nihilist.

nor do need to appeal to him to compare our experiences and come to an unbiased consensus on what is moral. — Pfhorrest

I like how you put this, very simply put and very correct. I think the simplicity of the statement belies how radical a statement it is and how it goes against what most people think of as morality. Even atheists i have spoken to seem to like to think of morals as absolute especially once you start naming specific things that are considered immoral, I mean, you could in principle get relay edgy. If you walk up to somebody in the street and tell them that that (insert edgy immoral act here) isn't innately immoral and the only thing that makes it “immoral” is that most people agree that it is immoral, 95% of the people will disagree with you and a fair few of them will start backing slowly away. If you get edgy enough it could go really badly.

Also, the statement, although in my opinion both elegant and true is a little bit free floating. You are relying on the fact the statement seems intuitively correct. Putting the statement in the context of evolution, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience etc is going to help some people agree and may allow for a further insight and deeper understanding of both Morality and its correlates.

We don’t need to appeal to God to compare our experiences and come to an unbiased consensus on what is real — Pfhorrest

People generally agree that green objects are really green and you will be fine if this is what you believe this. If you want to get down to it though, the reality is that no object has ever been or will ever be green, science tell us the notion of a green object is absurd. Objects we perceive as green simply reflected photons in the eye with an average wavelength of 550nm. We transduce the information from a photon into electrical energy and the presence or absence of neurotransmitters, building this into a model in our brain which has a subjective property we label as green.

Just as green is a subjective representation of the fundamental nature of the world so is a lot of what we have in our heads. In addition to the representations we have in our heads we have concepts that aren’t
even reflections of nature, not the same way color is anyway, these concepts are far more artificial. One of my favorites is meaning, meaning comes total from within, we label the representation of the world we have in our heads with this internally generated meaning stuff and go about the day believing meaning to be an objective reality wail it doesn’t represent anything objective about reality at all.

Most people won’t come to an unbiased opinion because evolution biased us massively to reach evolutionary helpful conclusions about what we consider true. It is evolutionary helpful to believe meaning exists, and to believe morality is objective. What we consider to it, what we conserve of as basic reality is a construct created buy our mind, and “reality constructs" that have the propensity to replicate predominate for fairly obvious reasons.

What appears to be true is often massively contradicted by science and in such cases I would go with what science.

Morality isn’t “a reality” in any sense, but it is every bit as objective as reality — Pfhorrest

I love this statement, from my metaphysical perspective this is quite a beautifully worded tautology that highlights the intellectual continuity of a purely materialistic point of view, very cleaver.

I guess I set the terms of the debate around atheism because I wanted to avoid theological debates. I wanted to avoid theological debates because I am not religious and therefore don’t consider the basic premise valid. Its not a mystery the basic construction that religious people use to undergured their belief in morality.

I also don’t personally don’t think that there is any logical framework in which supporters the idea of morality as an objective reality. In my view of the world believing in morality as an objective reality requires at least a little non-scientific thinking.

When i wrote the question i was hoping to find out if A) it was general accepted amongst atheists that morality wasn’t an objective reality and B) weather or people believe in morality as an objective reality despite being an atheist.

Very few people despite posting have nailed there colors to the mast

I think the basic reality is that this whole subject quite generates strong feelings, I know it does with me. We are asking questions about truth and morality, things that we are driven to care about.

In the case of me I am in a way suggesting that truth and morality should be contextualize in the light of scientific evidence in a way that undermines what people generally thing of them as being. It is not irrational to find that it generates emotions, I find it upsetting if I am being honest.

I would encourage people to minimize emotive language although I am not necessary the best example of this myself (I can’t help being provocative at times and I apologies for it). I think we generate more us full representations the universes underlying nature when we adopt a more abstract perspective and drain the emotion out of it.

A hero of mind is Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who despite living in what is now moderate Italy in the 1500's he was able to break free of the god and human centric view of the universe and suggest all the stars to simply be similar to our sun except further away. Same could be said of Copernicus. Both men were prepared to take them selves out of the center of the picture in order to better represent reality.

I wouldn't see it as "Is there any reason that the individual should be content with being a slave to the evolutionary process?". We want to satisfy our hunger, we want to have sex, we want to acquire things and do things that help with survival and pass on our genes. To overcome this "slavery" would involve being able to ignore the imperatives evolution sets up. It would involve not desiring food when hungry, not desiring sex when horny, it would involve not reacting to fear when scared, not reacting with angree words when offended. Monks through meditation have been able to do this to different extents so in a seance monks are overcoming there "slave to the evolutionary process"

I would suggest reading "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment" which looks at Buddhist beliefs in the context of evolutionary psychology. You can also probably find Robert Wright talking about it on youtube but i would recommend the book.

If evolution isn't driving our behaviors then what is? Do you not see any role for evolution at all in any human behavior? I would go for something like evolution + idiosyncrasies driving by lots of randomness.

what are your thoughts?

I can't quite tell if you agree or disagree, i am thinking you agree maybe?

If you look at all the different mechanism that seeds use to distributor themselves, sometimes they are surrounded by fruit. other times times the have little helicopter wings or fluff. Would anybody deny that these packages that hold the plants DNA are evolved, that there dimensions are controlled by the genes.

We are a a very similar proposition, we are just the packaging for our DNA, the host that allows for there replication. It makes sence that genes wouldn't just control what our bodies look like bout would control behavior, or at least create a the framework within which we can indoctrinate each other with useful ideas. The wood peckers beak wouldn't be worth much it it didn't like to peck.

It seems to be a relay coherent explanation backed up by lots of evidence.

I evidently am sold on the idea but i would admit i find the implications a bit of a mind fuck. I was wondering what other people thought about the implications.



good times

“What I'm saying is that particle physics begins with putting aside any ideas about such questions as 'morality and truth'. They are not directly relevant to the discipline. I made that point, polemically, with respect to Newton and Galileo, who are very much the forefathers of modern physics. But at the outset, at the very beginning of modern science, all such issues were put to one side, or left out of the reckoning. “Why, then, should 'our idea of morality and truth' fit in with a model which really has nothing to do with them?”

Newton would undoubtedly have been on your side in this conversation but i am not having this conversation with Neuton, why do you think truth and morality has nothing to do with science?

You seem to be subtle suggesting that if we feel the need to make modern theories consistent with Newtonian physics we should honor Newtons belief in where the boundaries of science should liy. I would anwer, Newton theory of mechanics is a well founded predictive hypothesis that actually predicts stuff and his presumed views on where the boundary of science should liy are unjustified expressions of opinions. I will act in accordance with the former but not the later.

My wider point was, you shouldn't come up with a model of morality that is inconsistent with science. If a duelist could explain how dualism is in any way consistent with particle physics then i might consider becoming a duelist. They can’t and this suggests eather dualism is a bad model or particle physics is a bad model. Being rational, my money is on the predictive hypothesis that doesn't predict anything being wrong.

“Scientific models are fallibalist, subject to constant revision. Why, then, should they be regarded as authoritative with respect to "morality and truth"?”

Ok, my argument goes a little deeper than we have gone so far. I would argue that everything we perceive about the world we preserve through representational models. Science says, whether we know it or not we do not directly experience anything and to directly experience anything is impossible. Our mutual friend Socrates was sooo right with his whole allegory of the cave thing, geneouse.

In a world where we can only gain access to fundamental realities of things through representation, capital T truth and certainly become less useful concepts as they are things that we can’t functionally gain access to. This obviously doesn't mean we are completely lost in the world, we just need to think in terms of representation and probability. It is kind of sukky but you play the hand you're dealt.

This construction dissolves the distinction between representational scientific models and the representational models of everyday experience. With this construction not just going along with models would turn you into a full blown Sceptic . This probabilistic model actually fits very well with the Sceptics views in fact.

I will give you an example of everyday representational models. You pick an apple in your hand and look at it, your brain is creating a representational model of the apple you have in your hand. As we eat the apple we combine what it looks like, the weight of it in our hands, the taste on our tong and signals from our olfactory bulb together to build our probability based, representational apple model.

The model in our heads is made out of neurons, the apple in our head and mouth is made out of molecules of apple. The apple doesn't have the property of green; it simply reflects photons that have an average wavelength in the range of 550nM for example. People who have a full complement of cone receptors will represent the apple as green in their brain model, people who have genetic mutations that lead to color blindness will often represent the apple differently. A butterfly that can see ultraviolet wavelengths and has different machinery in its brain and will represent the apple differently with its tiny butterfly neurons.

Our model of what we think is an apple is also subject to revision just as scientific models are, we may pick up something that looks like an apple bite it and then revise our model of what we are holding, deciding that it is in fact an imitation apple made out of wax.

Despite the model of the world in our brain being fallibalist it is however really quite useful in many instances, when it generates a model of a lion you probably best run. Also just because the model isn’t certain it is still worth paying attention to the probabilities. It may not be certain the car will hit you but you should still get out the road.

You can have multiple different models of the same thing that are each useful in different ways, highlighting subtly different aspects of the same underlying reality. There are multiple different representations of the London Underground and depending on if you are a passenger or a city planner adding a sewer line, you may want different maps. Both maps simply represent a different underlying reality of the same entity. Decimals and fractions are also different ways of representing the same underlying reality.

You have every right to question the representational models generated by scance, just as Pyrrho questioned the representational model generated by our eyes. I will however say to you what i would have said to him, you are essentially right, but practically speaking we probably should just make use out of what is useful.

I would also argue that if everything is a representative model then even the idea that Morality and truth exist is fallibalist. If you are saying not everything is a representative model then you are A) saying we do have direct access to the underlying nature of reality and you are B) saying your boy Plato's allegory of the cave is wrong.


Most people would however agree that the universe is expanding and it used to be incredibly hot and dense. These are very very hard problems physicists are trying to solve. — Restitutor

“Hence the point about Socrates. Many of the fundamental questions that the character of Socrates wrestled with - about the nature of truth, beauty, justice, self-knowledge, death - remain central questions of philosophy, regardless of the "astonishing advances of science".

I would agree that questions about nature, truth, beauty and justice, self-knowledge and death remain central questions, I just don’t necessarily agree that they can’t on principle be placed into useful representational models.

Also the concept of morality fits sooo perfectly with evolution, if you want i could explain why if you want?. — Restitutor

It doesn't, though. Even the ultra-darwinists, such as Richard Dawkins, recognise that evolutionary theory is a crap basis for morality, although they don't come to terms with what such a basis might be. The only 'morality' that comes out of evolutionary theory is survival of the fittest - which is already redundant, as all it says is, those who are best adapted are those who survive and procreate. The fact that evolution is commonly assumed to provide a complete account of human nature or a basis for morality is a popular myth.


I wasn’t necessarily being particularly strict with the turn evolution, I meant it both in its more specific and wider sense.

This is all a little complex so hold on.

A problem with the idea of evolution is that it generates the misconception that the forces that apply in evolution operate for the good of the host animal and this is not always the case. The forces of evolution are better thought of as operating on the gene level rather than the organism level. Bees are good examples.

Bees exhibit very simple behaviour which is quite directly controlled by their genes. Bee’s exhibit selfless behaviour, they will fight and die for the hive. Why would a bee sacrifice itself for the hive, does it have morels? No. The reason for this is that the mother bee saddles its offspring with genes that benefit her and her ability to reproduce. The reason this works evolutionary is because sequence of nucleotides in in genes that control workers selfless behavior is also present in the mother, if the worker bee give its life to save the hive it in reducing the chance that it passes on the selfless genes from very low to zero, but it increases the chance that its mother will pass on the sequence that represents the selfless genes. On balance the worker bees' selfless behavior increases the chance that the selfless gene is passed on even if it is passed on by his mother rather than him. The gene really doesn't care who passes it on from an evolutionary perspective as long as it gets passed on.

A mother of most animals will exhibit behaviour that protects it young even risking its own life. Again the selfless genes that are controlling the behaviour are all about the chance that somebody passes on the gene, it doesn't care who. If the chance the mother dies is increased by 10% but the chance that it's 5 babies survive increases by 20% then that is a win for this behaviour controlling selfless genes evolutionary fitness.

The same narrative applies to siblings, nieces and nephew, cousens and aunties, as these are all likely to have the same selfless gene and if the selfless gene instructs you to risk your life to save your own family there are more copies of the selfless gene in the world and the gene as a unit proves itself to be evolutionarily fit.

Evidently it’s nowhere near as simple as this in humans, for a start genes don’t directly control behaviour in humans. I would say genes support and encourage certain type of behaviour to greater and lesser extents depending on the behaviour. Genes have a massive part to play in our fear and nurture responses, the fact we generally like certain types of food and get horny, genes don’t affect what color sock we wear though.

Many behaviors are simply learnt and then reinforced through social conditioning. Importantly this is underpinned by gene driven behaviours such as desiring the approval of others and companionship and physical intimacy. Concepts and ideas that drive useful behaviour tend to spread through the marketplace of ideas and tend to get passed on through teaching our young and telling stories and maybe just threatening people to toe the line or else. This process is in many ways analogous to evolution. Just like genes, ideas that don’t benefit the host directly or indirectly disappear. There are however lots of ideas that don’t benefit the hosts' survival directly but benefit them indirectly by benefiting society as a whole. The fact that an idea is good for the community quite obviously is likely to increase the chance of the idea surviving and being passed on.

It is in my interest for me to do what I can to perpetuate the use of concepts that encourage behaviours that are beneficial for society as therefor benefit me. We have a lot of concepts that do this, we can call somebody a coward, or lazy or unfair or immoral, we can conversely call them heroes, hard working, fair and moral. Based on which of these useful concepts we label them with their ability to fulfill their evolutionary drive for companionship, for physical intimacy, for a mate and even for food can all be enhanced or diminished. They could be promoted to chief or thrown out the tribe, listened to or ignored, may have lots of opportunity to reproduce or very little. People judged in such a fashion will serve as a warning for others. This reality isn’t a bad system of social control and it is easy to think why tribes that had it kicked the shit out of tribes that didn’t (perpetuating the ideas and the genes that underpin them).

This system of self control isn’t perfect and there is inherent tension between doing what is good for you and what is good for the tribe. The ideas of each man for himself and I don’t give a shit about you have their own “evolutionary” fitness.

Even though morality itself is probably only minimally controlled by our genes directly, morality is very much reliant on underlying predispositions that are controlled by our genes.

How right and wrong i am about this i will let future research decide but i don’t think you could call this potential explanation incoherent.

Everything you say about Morality seems very correct to me and is very well put.

From my metaphysical perspective however i don’t think we are quite getting to what i would consider the heart of the matter.

Let me give you an analogy.

Somebody may ask what North is and the person may answer by point in the direction of north and name all the features that are due north, the answer is correct. The questioner may ask again what is north and the answer may say why it is useful and how it fits into their lives functionally and again the person answering would be perfectly correct.

Although the answerer hasn’t said anything incorrect and has answered the question in multiple ways in a sense he still hasn’t said what north actually is. To understand the north really is you need to build a conceptual model of the earth as a sphere that spins along an axis.

With this model the answer can now answer what North is in a whole new way, it is the direction that points towards the north pole which is simply the name for one side of the rotational axis that the spherical earth is moving around. We could get into models that involve magnetism but you get the idea. I would describe this as knowing what north is from a metaphysical perspective.

Good people like yourself say a lot of very reasonable things about what morality is and this is impressive. I do however believe that the answers are not getting at the heart of the question which I see as what morality is metaphysically.

I would argue that scientific theories of mind and the self and consciousness for the first time allow us to approach the question of what morality is from this perspective, just as the model of the earth as a global helps us understand what north is in a different way.

I understand that people from a different metaphysical perspective may not see this as a valid question although if this is the case they should in my opinion have a good reason why.

I have a dyslexia diagnosis and have struggled with the disability all my life, it is a consent struggle to try and mitigate it. I have never let it hold me back even though it can be mildly embarrassing at times. There are however plenty of people with this disability who are less confident and more easily embarrassed then me and highlighting there spelling in the way you did could affect then negatively. Just something to keep in mind.

I think bragging about your boy Plato burning books is a little odd, the practices has become a little taboo ever since the whole Hitler thing. Just saying!

You can say Socrates is the recognizable the farther of philosophy but wasn't what the pre-Socratic doing definitionally philosophy? correct me if I'm wrong. It seems arbitrary and pointless to me, like calling somebody the recognizable farther of kicking a ball.

I did honestly enjoyed the back and forth even though it seems like we were taking past each other mostly. Sorry, i have been in a bit of a jokey mood and good luck to you to

PS - You do know that Newton was a religious bigot who spent most of his life conducting alchemy in pursuit of the philosopher's stone. I don't think even his biggest fans would suggest he had any special knowledge about the self. Fun fact, one of my son's middle name is Issac, the Principia was a work of genius.

Everything you say about morality i would agree with.

Do you have an answer the question of what morality is made out of or encoded into or how it came to exist.

If these questions are some how wrongheaded, why are they wrongheaded?

If you don't have an answer that's fine.

First, thanks for writing such a fun responce

Models are collections of predictive hypotheses and mathematical formulae.

When a lot of very predictive hypotheses are in agreement the the probability that they are all fundamentally wrong becomes very low. Everything that has been achieved by science, all the technology we are swimming in we have because of our predictive hypotheses.

The most predictive of the predictive hypotheses are probably as close to certain as we are ever going to get. I don’t know under what authority somebody could claim to be more likely to be representing fundamental reality than with one of these predictive hypotheses. Take the second law of thermodynamics as an example.

What is your claim to knowledge based on if not predictive hypothesis?

At the outset of modern science, with Galileo and Newton, the decision was made to concentrate on those attributes of nature which were able to be measured and quantified mathematically. This has lead to enormous breakthroughs in the technical understanding of the physical universe, but morality and capital-T Truth were never part of that. They were put to one side, or consigned to the domain of individual conscience or religion (which in any case was identified as the losing party in the argument.

You say “the decision was made”, you make it sound like Galileo, Nuton and the pope had a meeting and issued a memo that I apparently, in the year 2020 am somehow meant to respect or care about or something. The portrayal of history is not so subtly off and why do you think I care what Nuton thought about the nature of the self is beyond me.

I also don’t understand why you think your anecdote speaks against my point, it speaks against yours. So a few hundred years ago it became quite evident to everybody but the dogmatic, that predictive hypothesis could answer a whole range of questions better than the mystics and philosophers so it got broken off from philosophy to form the sciences. Nurtured by the light provided by predictive hypothesis science has bloomed, bearing us the fruits of human knowledge (picture an apple Iphone hanging off a tree).

We have a broadly analogous situation today. This time we have simply gotten better at science, developed new and powerful ways of asking questions and testing hypotheses which has opened up new arrears to investigation that crazy old Newton thought was only explainable by religious dogma. Even though you don’t seem to be particularly aware of it, scientists and scientifically minded philosophers are asking questions that scientifically disinclined philosophers not long ago considered their domain. If you would read the literature you would see they are doing really quite well. Their tree of knowledge has sprouted, we will have to wait and see if the fruits it bairs are poisonous. Science is again encroaching onto philosophy's patch, it's a repeat, all we are missing are the dogmatics, o wait! ummm…. Seriously though, the war between science and all other claims to knowledge never stopped, there has never even been a ceasefire, it's just that now scances is making advances into new arias.

BTW, studying the illusion of the self is studying nature, studying consciousness is studying nature, studying the concept of morality is studying nature, to studying the concept of truth is to study nature. The idea of something not being part of nature is pure make believe, there is no evidence for it and it runs against all current predictive models. I hope you have never made somebody who is religious feel bad about believing in something there is no evidence for..

But the inconvenient truth of particle physics, was that just when science thought that it was going to drill down to the ‘ultimate particle’, the deepest and most fundamental constituent of nature - it found, to its embarrassment, that it had to account for ‘the role of the observer’ after all. ‘What are YOU doing here!?!’, they asked, but the answer was not immediately apparent in the math.

Your right, I know, particle physicist, what a bunch of idiots. Let's go and ask the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima if they have ever shown any evidence that their fancy models even work.

Is this is your anecdote that disproves science or something. You are simply making fun of people for proving their hypothesis wrong, this is a good thing, proving something is wrong is a type of knowledge, especially if it means getting rid of a model that didn’t work. This is an example of science working correctly, not incorrectly. When philosophy comes up with a bad idea like dualizem it just keeps on going with it regardless of anything. Again, with this example you are making my point for me..

Most scientists worth their salt know that they are just building models and making predictions, they also know there is every chance better models will supersede theres and not all of their predictive hypotheses will prove well founded or predict what we would like them to predict. This doesn't mean that individual scientists aren't smug bastards (take me for example) or refuse to acknowledge it when they are on a losing argument, we are only human after all. Science it not about individual people, individual experiments or even individual models, science is all about the scientific method which over time has tended to make better and better models of the universe that are applicable to more and more arrears of human interest. In the process it will represent more and more of the universes underlying realities. Ye scientist isn’t perfect, it can only ever talk in probabilities and all models are wrong because that is baked into the fundamental nature of being a model but where is the better alternative.

Meanwhile, the whole idea of the ‘big bang’ was vigorously opposed by many scientists when it was first floated, BECAUSE it sounded too much like ‘creation from nothing’. Consider what it is saying - that the entire vast universe, 13 billion odd light years in expanse, appeared from a single point, in a single instant. Even the Pope wanted to claim this as ‘evidence’ for divine creation - something which made the scientist who first floated the idea, George LeMaitre, very uncomfortable. He was actually a Catholic priest, but he believed that you ought never to mix up the two domains of understanding.

What has this got to do with anything, a big bang theory that begins in a true singularity really is still generally acknowledged to be up in the air. We simply have very little information to know how the very early expansion went or what was in existence before the big bang. Nobody really understands the exotic physics that was probably in operation pre-big band. Most people would however agree that the universe is expanding and it used to be incredibly hot and dense. These are very very hard problems physicists are trying to solve. How much less would we know about the universe if it was the philosopher's job to understand it using the method of talking while drinking coffee.

Meanwhile, our earnest advocates of evolutionary enlightenment assure us that ‘ We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.’ Try weaving morality into that story.

That is rhetorically quite neat, “survival machines”, i will have to use that, thanks. Seriously though “selfish molecules”, “robot vehicles blindly programmed”, it's true, just really melodramatically put. You know, just because you say something in the most melodramatic way possible, it doesn't make it any less likely to be accurate. Also saying something in a melodramatic way isn’t the same making an argument against it. Also, don’t you believe in evolution or something because if you don’t that would explain a lot? Also the concept of morality fits sooo perfectly with evolution, if you want i could explain why if you want?.

Go back to Socrates, and study the kind of character he was, the sort of questions he asked, and how he conducted himself. That is the beginning of philosophy.

Dude, if you are going to randomly bring somebody up you should make them a little more obscure than Socratese. Just joking, but I am a little offended for the pre-socratics.

Are we really all that confident that Socrates isn’t essentially just a wonderful character that appears in Plato's books. I love Plato's writing style but i can’t say i really like his philosophy apart from the allegory of the cave which is obviously brilliant, although maybe little dated (joke). Plato through the character of Socratese asked questions that were appropriate for his time, if he lived at a different time he would have asked different questions. Also, I think lots of people asked great questions after Socrates. I wonder if all the stars are just suns but far away, that was a good question.

Two of my favorite philosophers are Democritus and Epicurus, I rather presumptuously consider them spiritual brothers. Democrats coined the term Atom, and Epicurus tried to extrapolate out the notion of an atom into a model of the world and he didn’t even do too bad considering.

I hope I haven't been too rude or offended you too much, I genuinely enjoyed reading your response.

I have read each of your posts found then enjoyable and informative. I now realize that I really tried to go too far too quickly and didn’t adequately lay out my premise. To address your posts I will lay out the bases for my assertions.

I particularly liked the access to truth comment made by Wayfarer. For me the only way we have access to truth is by understanding patterns and relationships “written” into the fabric of the universe. The only way we can do this is by building models/representations of the universe and seeing if these models are A) consistent with other accepted models and B) make accurate predictions. Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggested Einstein’s E=MC2 based model of energy and matter represented a fundamental reality of the universe. Models that make accurate predictions represent at least some truth.. Once you start having lots of seemingly good models that are consistent with each other and make predictions you can see if those models are mutely suppurative or not. This is an interactive process that I enjoy likening to Sudoku. If you are good at it you can gain some access to the universe's underlying reality. It is still all probability based meaning you can’t say anything with absolute certainty but you work with what you have.

We have a lot of reasonably accurate seaming models of the universe that seem to check out, from the big bang to neuronal potentiation being the basis for memory formation. These models collectively are the most intellectually coherent representation of the underlying realities of the world around us. Ideas of what we are, what morality is and what good and the truth is should probably be born out of these models but at the bare minimum they should be consistent with them. Our idea of morality and truth should fit with particle physics, and the big bang theory and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. For an idea to be intellectually grounded it should have an internal logic that is consistent and it should be consistent with other well accepted models and it should ideally look like it could connect onto other models somehow. Nobody likes a free floating puzzle piece.

An extremely brief attempt to do this would be. Big bang happens, gravity coalesces matter into planetary bodies, heavier elements form in the stars which eventually go supernova spreading out heavier elements. Stable chemicals that are prone to forming strands form strands that become subject to prebiotic evolution which after a membrane is acquired becomes plain old evolution. Life becomes more organized and more complex which allows for new abilities, all of which is driven by evolution. Eventually evolution gives rise to a lump of carbon, water and nitrogen that contains 10 trillion synapses organized in a complex fashion. What we get for all this organization and complexity is the ability to generate a representational model of the world around us that we have conchouse access too, this model comes complete with a center of gravity that we call the self (Thomas Metzinger’s model of the self as an ego tunnel is reasonable). Part of our model involves generating arbitrary but evolutionary useful notions of good and evil, moral and immoral. We believe these notions represent an objective truth because, if we didn’t they would lose their motivational power, this would intern result in a loss of their evolutionary usefulness. We use the representational model of the world our brains generate to help us model the future, make predictions and work together cooperatively. Because the model our brain generates makes us evolutionarily fit we are able to replicate the template that encodes us meaning we will persist for a time. We modify the representational model in our brain to suit circumstance by a type of competitive crowd saucing sometime called the marketplace of ideas. Whether it is in a day, a week or a million years, at some point in the future we will become extinct, there will be no brains to generate our evolutionary driven notions of right and wrong, so these notions will evaporate from the universe. The universe will go on without us. Planets will be born and planets will die and stars will collide just as they always have.

You can argue how much evidence there is to support the models my statements are based on and obviously I am missing alot out but hopefully it will serve as an example of an integrated intellectual framework that includes us. As mentioned, trying to build such frameworks is like playing sudoku. If we do this well enough, we can generate new models that allow some access to the fundamental realities of the universe.

Suggesting that truth and the good and morality “just are” is just a statement, there is no internal or external logic, it doesn’t fit in anywhere with well proven models of the universe, it doesn’t provide any hint of information about what truth and the good and morality are. It is the Sudoku equivalent of just putting your favorite number in one of the boxes and not caring that it doesn’t fit with any of the numbers already filled in. It may feel good to have a box filled in, it may give the illusion of progress but it doesn’t mean anything and it is actually counterproductive assuming you care about finishing the puzzle. It's similar to the whole god thing which isn’t even an attempt to follow the patterns that seem to be at play in the universe, it is the equivalent of drawing pictures on a sudoku puzzle and claiming you have completed it.

My point is, if you want intellectual access to the patterns and relationships in the universe that are fundamental to understanding what we are and what the universe is we should probably all start playing sudoku. I am not as knowledgeable as a lot of you about historic patterns of philosophical thought, this is simply me applying the scientific process as I see it to answering philosophical questions. Science has a proven track record of gaining intellectual access to the fundamental realities that govern the nature of the universe as we perceive it + it’s also cool. Are my views outside the mainstream? Is there a logic to what I am saying?.

[url=http://javra]While there are many different ways of addressing these two parallel issues of truth and the good, one such approach is then to uphold that both truth and the good simply are[/url]

I think you have explained what many atheist’s thing about truth, good and indeed morality. People believe that they represent fundamental reality that is both internal and external to themselves and that they “simply are”.

The problem with this is it that it has no intellectual underpinnings, if truth is just something that exists what is it made out of or how is it encoded, how does its existence fit into any reasonably well excepted, analytically grounded model of anything.
Somebody who is religious may say of god that “god simply is”. I don’t see this as being intellectually any more or less rigorous than an atheist saying, “both truth and good simply are”. For this reason, I personally find it maddening when a certain type of atheists berates somebody who is religious for a lack of intellectual rigor.

Although no models explain truth and good as something that exist, there are neurophycological models that explain why we have concepts such as good and truth and why we believe these concepts to represent objective reality even though they very are very rarely used to represent anything that is fundamentally true. These models fit rather well with other models such as evolution and are at least consistent with all other generally excepted scientific models.

An idea of truth and good that is consistent with Thomas Metzinger Ego Tunnel model is where it is at for me. My burning question is, where does that leave us?

You could solve the problem by killing anybody that disagrees with you. I am not suggesting that it would be my approach but it isn't like people haven't done it.

What we consider reality is just a an evolutionary driven model generated by our brains, and us persevering that our continued existence as impotent is just part of that model. Us, generating in our brain the perception that we are some version of impotent is very easy to explain from an evolutionary standpoint.

Take a picture of earth taken from Voyager 1 "The pale blue dot" picture. This encapsulates my thoughts on the matter more eloquently than any words. The pale blue dot that is the earth could get swallowed by the sun, now, tomorrow or in a billion years, what does it matter, who is going to miss us?

This is just the truth isn't it?

https://theconversation.com/the-pale-blue-dot-and-other-selfies-of-earth-39118