A Call To The Humanities To Reclaim Its Concious Self

Exchange 2

Shaun: I read your story. Well written and intelligently developed, so I felt in safe hands, I would be led by stages to an idea. I got the situation from the writing, alien beings raising humans for food and humans finding this natural,  assuming it to be part of how well they were otherwise cared for, with all wants satisfied, meanwhile the aliens are having second thoughts and exploring what this all "meant" and wanting their subject to tell them how the ancient moral humans thought.

But I'm not sure it gave me insight into you. I couldn't make out what I should conclude about your ideas from it. It appeared to say, our "morels" are superfluous, and could be bred out of us without anything of absolute value being lost. That is, it faced readers uncertain of the value of morals with the respective outcomes of choosing between having morals or not having them (modern human livestock or ancient independent humans). OK, I guess that's the point. Secularity leads to loss of basis for morals, religion provides a basis for them. You face secularists with the human nature that secularity would ultimately lead to, a future that you assume would be repelling to anyone. Hence a challenge to find an alternative basis for morals.

In placing high value on morals, under threat from secularity, we'd be close. I can meet that challenge. I believe morals are implicit in the process of evolution, else why would we have them. Morals are, I take it for granted, species-specific, they emerge in the process of our species' evolution. I put it this way: we will automatically adopt as our meaning of life whatever we have been pre-adapted for. By discovering what we've been pre-adapted for, we acquire new "real" meaning. The morals of religions are these meanings given expression in pre-discovery-of-evolution times.

For me morals are an evolution issue. For you I read the story as saying morals are a rationale-for-being-religious issue, and evolution must be seen in that context. Now, that would be a great difference between us. It would also mean to me, that ultimately you must make evolutionary theory secondary to the issue of morals. But:

I could not hold to my religious beliefs, which include putting a premium on knowing and accepting Truth, if I felt that the story about life forming by natural processes alone and then likewise evolving into all forms of life were true. Alternatively, I might then come up with a clever modification of my religious beliefs to accommodate this truth. So, while my religious beliefs play a role in my opinion of Darwinism, I could not continue to doubt it apart from my considerations of philosophy, history, and "scientific facts."

I'm surprised. I believe believers will always find truth defined by religious belief before anything else. What kind of faith can you have that you could find any other standard of truth more convincing? What other standard could be that convincing? A laboratory measurement? A mathematical formula? A neat theory? Is your faith conditional on scientific consensus? A modification of faith, that's more like it. So you'll bend to other standards just as much as you need to maintain faith. I appreciate the warning.

I share your disillusion with evolutionary theory. In my mid-teens I read "Origin..." as a text for practicing oratory, and became converted to evolution as the source of further wisdom about human nature. But nothing happened. Ethology never amounted to much. Evolutionary psychology was awful.

I've seen a whole new (if overlapping) subset of Darwin doubters arise in the ID movement (which, despite its strong creationist ties, includes a number of people who don't believe in Divine creation)

I've kept clear of the Discovery Institute, through I know it contains a subset as you mention. But I'm intent on not accepting the creationist label by having anything to do with them. Any thoughts?

On your responses to my points: Mentions of evolutionary origins in the ancient world had never lead to a tradition of wisdom based on it, I believe--unlike atomism for example. By 1880 Western culture was entirely unaffected by it. All traditions available then were based on alternative origin stories. For me, no philosophy prior to 1840 could be valid, since it must have been proposed without reference to evolution. Kant is a case in point, just too early, presented with the idea in a crude form but had rejected it. All his thinking worthless (not that I've read it).

I don't think the fossil record proves evolution at all, rather I think belief in evolution has guided and provided the interpretations of paleontology.

I think there is enough evidence for some species having followed from other species for the process of extending the process back to a single trunk to have have sufficient likelihood, despite large gaps in the fossil record. Once one abandons special creation to any degree, there is no better alternative than supposing the process of evolution to have been the guiding principle from the start.  Also, both Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck found the process plausible, before any supporting theory had been proposed. So existing evidence and likelihood satisfies me. They process being extended back to a single trunk is not to fit a theory, but a plausible linking up of scraps of evidence.

You seem to think that the story of evolution itself suggests a transcendence of mere physical processes (which would include the chemical ones, ultimately).

YES!!!! To me, my experience of myself strongly suggests that the process generating me transcends today's limits of physics. Or, that phsyics should be defined by what we know to be true of evolved creatures, eg ourselves, that they have properties that to today's physics seem transcendent. My quest is from the study of what must be involved in living creatures evolving to draw outlines of what those properties are, and what they imply about the universe as a whole. For me, conscious experience testifies to realities that must be acknowledged, whether or not they can be accounted for by today's physics. But they are not mystical or spiritual, they are physical realities, just not understood today. We lack the necessary concepts. No reason, though, why we shouldn't try to sketch their outlines so we can take advantage of some of the capabilities we know evolution must engage in.

"What does the cell's almost-perfect system of DNA repair say about the role of DNA in evolution?" By this I was referring to the supposed need for genetic mutation to provide fuel for selection; if mutation is needed why do we have such an efficient repair system, which acts to prevent mutations? And since the system acts in the cell, it will eliminate many potentially beneficial mutations prior to selection getting a chance to work on them. Question: would a 100% efficient repair system, with no mutations at all, be less adaptative than one letting a few mutations get through? Certainly the properties of this repair system will have a far greater effect on the proportion of harmful to beneficial mutations than selection can have. The existence of this repair system, never mentioned in discussions of the modern synthesis, actually throws the whole system into doubt.

Most likely forms of dreaming gradually evolved along with levels of consciousness;

YES!!!!!  So here we have a phenomenon to be accounted for that doesn't involve our subjective self awareness, that scientists seem to think doesn't need to be accounted for. It emerged probably 100 million years ago, so it predates civilization. And since in us it is associated with conscious experiences, we may assume that was true of its original manifestations, part of what it was "for."  So dreaming poses evolutionists with having to account for something nonphysical back in pre-dinosaur days, definitely part of their jurisdiction. Physicalism says anything non-physical can't affect anything physical. Selection and mutation are purely physical, so they can't operate to "evolve" the non-physical aspect of dreaming. That's why I bring it up. It's a neat challenge to darwinism.

Consciousness is probably a corollary of the evolution of certain forms of intelligence, and appears to be possessed to some extent by several other animals, such as the great apes, whales, and probably other mammals and even some birds. Again, as an evolutionary development, there is probably no clear line dividing some level of intelligent awareness and what we might be tempted to call "true consciousness."

So? It still has to be accounted for in any evolutionary theory.

"What kinds of patterns of connection must already be built into it, and what kind of process must it take to generate those patterns during gestation? How can such information be stored in genes and read out of them to generate tissues embodying those patterns of connection?"... All of this is simply a matter of studying cerebral organization down to the cellular or possibly molecular level, along with genetic and epigenetic factors.

I disagree. I think phenomena involving patterns of connection as intricate as these are inherently too elaborate, no matter whether we understand them in detail or not, to be encoded in a string of single-action genes selected separately for their individual action, as the modern synthesis supposes. These phenomena seem to me to involve processes requiring capabilities many orders of magnitude more "capable" than what we conceive of mutated genes being acted on by selection being able to do.

I'm not sure what you mean by "stirs its own tissues." The cells of its bones and even soft parts all maintain the same positions relative to each other. Besides, as whales evolved in the water, hydrodynamic effects probably contribute to maintaining symmetry and proportion.

I was taught embryology worked through successive patterns of chemical gradients each inducing the next. But chemical gradients are exactly what are destroyed by stirring. Chemical gradients in the early embryo cannot maintain their positions in the face of stirring the way later bones and tissues do. Says I!

computer simulations demonstrating that a few mental rules (or reflexes) in each individual can produce this group behavior

Those I read about involve communications between neighbors spreading across the group. To us the swarm seems to move as one, that is, within the one tenth of a second that we can discriminate. Suppose the swarm is 200 creatures across. Suppose their reactions times are smaller than ours, say each can react to signals in one 25th of a second. For a signal to pass from one side of the swarm to the other will take 200/25 seconds, or 8 seconds. That's 80 times as long as we see it taking. Only in computer simulations can such a rapid spread of signals propagate across that many "creatures."

"What does an evolved creature choosing to become a scientist say about evolution?" Whatever he or she wants to say about it! but seriously...

Come now! You can't be serious. Is there no fundamental difference between the chemicals in a test tube and the scientist next to it evaluating the chemicals' "behavior"? Does the scientist assume his curiosity about cosmology is the consequence of selection for adaptation to the savanah?

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but [this] one thing [I do], forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

I know I cannot fully appreciate the capabilities of evolution, given today's wisdom: but, discounting all pre-discovery-of-evolution philosophizing I strain forward towards the goal of bringing down into human nature some portion of the creative power characteristic of our creator, the process of evolution.

I would make a better evolutionists than you, if I wanted to. Maybe I'm wrong, see what you think of my responses below...

So, given my responses to your responses, how are we doing?

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David: ["Very long post I skimmed" Shaun. Warning!]

the Late Cambrian period”(Nature 429, 288 291, 20 May 2004)
>1st chordates?(very old see 515, 530), 1st fish(old see 530M), 1st cephalopods
>Perhaps 80% of genera become extinct in late Cambrian(see 520M)
500-400M fossils showing telltale signs of rampant sexuality  ...shells of  small creatures called ostracods...(THE
DAILY TELEGRAPH (LONDON), June 09, '99, Pg. 20)
“latest Cambrian” Euthycarcinoid fossil (Nature 430, 554-557, 29 July 2004)
Ordovician period 510/505/500/488.3M 443.7/440/438/430/425M
(See Nature 429, 124 125 (13 May 2004) for most offical dates at that date)
“a period of glaciation on a global scale”(D.F.F. p. 214)
[Heyday of graptolites(still extant as pterobranchs), + corals, brachiopods, cephalopods (500M), echinoids,
bryozoans(all still extant). Number of marine families bloomed from 160 to 530, genera from 470 to 1,580.
The marine taxon Tintinnida has a fairly extensive fossil record...at least to the Ordovician.
Many mountain ranges appear, poss. contributing to explosion of animal groups]
identifiable corals began an evolutionary radiation in the Early Ordovician: included taxa known as tabulate
corals, rugose corals, and heliolitid corals.
FIRST LANDBASED PLANTS, SECOND GREAT EXPANSION AND DIVERSITY OF MARINE LIFE,
JAWLESS FISH APPEAR (but see 530M)