The Human Question

Sketch here b/c late. My human desire, agency. My desire/reason/interactions as rational. Desire for knowledge as being open to reality in all its factors. A desire I share with all rational beings. Key point: discuss how we would judge and interact with a possible alternative rational life form: community/standards higher than culture/moral standards transcending dna preservation etc. would govern such interactions (and judgments). Something desired in community with them. Arg That community having a source (platonic) that is itself an agent. Leader of ultimate rational community. Somethin' like that...

Amazing how Atkins talks dismissively to McGrath about the latter's belief in God as wish fulfillment, and then makes a colossal faith-like act in the ability of science to know all that is. Amazing too how Atkins denies that the universe has a meaning or purpose, and then displays at every point in the discussion, a craving for unbounded knowledge of what is. That atheist is so purpose driven . Then again, Atkins also distinguishes between cosmic purpose (which he denies) and individual desires (which I think he would not deny having), such as the desire to know. But acknowledging the desire to know...(thanking Giussani for help in phrasing this)... reality in all of its factors is not really different from admitting that one has a purpose in life. A purpose that one has not chosen, and in that sense, a natural purpose. Humans see human purposes from the inside. We can suppose that only humans have natural goals, in which case on is engaging in exceptionalism--an ironic...

...meme theory or intelligent design? (that is, which is harder to test) That is, which proposal is less likely ever to come up with a testable hypothesis? Another question: doesn't meme theory show a basic ignorance of the difference between social science and natural science? For it tries to gain an understanding of cultural phenomena (shared thoughts, practices and goals) by comparing them to the kinds of things you might find in the bottom of a test tube. Well those are two different sorts of cultures! Who needs to thematize meaning, intentionality, evidence and TRUTH (especially universal and necessary truth)? Let's drop all of those themes from our study of religion and society: let's instead treat cultural patterns like viruses! To borrow from HLA Hart, this is like trying to understand a traffic signal by noting patterns of stopping and starting but ignoring the possibility that the light functions as a sign: self-stultification. To this criticism one mi...

Pinker uses the fact that a person with a severed corpus callosum will show signs of being of two minds, as it were. One side will act according to one inclination and the other according to another. The side responsible for saying why one acts as one does ingeniously fabricate a pseudo holistic account. I can't get into the details now, b/c it's a while since I heard it, but it's a very worthwhile argument against the position I hold. My question to SP would be, however, as follows: since we use neurons not only in the brain but also in the stomach (to help direct churning activity), does he think that our stomach thinks? Perhaps the maxim "follow your guts" has special significance for Pinker... Furthermore, in basing his theory of mind on this exceptional case, Pinker is behaving like the Chinese astronomers who noted only the exceptional events (e.g., super novae), not the regular ones. He still needs to give an account for the normal unity of human th...

After going through both a book each by Pinker and Dawkins, I note that neither of them talks about emergent properties. Any materialist who notes emerging properties is like the scribe whom Jesus said "was not far from the kingdom of God." In other words, it leads one out of reductionism, and in my opinion, is the first step in a path away from materialism. Apparently Pinker and Dawkins don't want to go in that directions, so they are careful not to take the first step.

When Pinker brings up the infinite creativity of the human mind, his reductionist way of handling it is to use the word "combinatorial": to put it in computer language (not his) it's the nearly infinite number of different combinations of 1s and 0s that accounts for our ability to invent. Such a way of describing creativity leaves out of consideration the intentionality involved therein. If so then humans are creative because they have a really good randomizer, i.e., machine for generating original combinations of 1s and 0s. Actually, it's very easy to create something that is capable of producing an endless variety of 1s and 0s. Surely the fact that humans are creative has to do with more than that. Surely it has to do with the fact that we are turned toward the world in an exceptional way, that we thematize and question being itself, that we can seek truths applicable always and everywhere: what combination of 1s and 0s does he think are sufficient to generat...

R Dawkin's strongest arguments against intelligent design point out how badly engineered bodies seem to be. Examples include the following: 1. the vagus nerve, which starts from the brain and wanders needlessly through the body (around the heart) before comiing back up and linking to the trachea (the length of this nerve is most notably excessive in the giraffe, points out RD); 2. the vas deferens, which starts at the gonads and then circles needless around the bladder on the way from gonads to penis [I wonder if the inefficiency here has to do with the parallel role played by correlate in females]; 3. the human back [I wonder if those stone age guys in New Guinea have backaches: perhaps it's our chairs that are unintelligently designed]; and 4. the eye, which places the nerves inside the area where light must pass, creating an obstacle course for signals [I need to recheck each of these examples to see if I've accurately represented them] and creating a blind spot in th...

Let's take it as a given that 98% of human dna is similar to that of a chimpanzee. For those who believe that it is a spiritual dimension that makes humans different, the closer this % is to 100, the better supported is the claim that genetics does not suffice to account for the differences between humans and their closest neighbors on the tree of life. It is worth pointing out that a 2% difference in (non-junk) dna doesn't necessarily imply a similarly low level of phenotypic difference. To think that it does is to take dna as a kind of model or image of the human body. But it isn't: it's a set of instructions on how to grow, or as Richard Dawkins says in The Greatest Show , it is more like a cookbook than a blueprint. An even more creative simile by RD: a set of instructions for "auto-origami." In such a case, a slight difference in the instructions can yield a great difference in the final product. Think of a cake without baking soda. That might ...

Dawkins describes how embryological development is completely local. No master plan: Just many local interactions, each of which is directed by the set of instructions contained therein. Just like a flock of birds flying together so that they look like they are all part of one graceful whole. But they are not: rather, each is following its own set of instructions. True, that set of instructions is the same in kind for each bird. But there is a different instance of these instructions for each bird. Dawkins points out that if you want to simulate the movement of a flock of birds on the 2 dimensional computer screen, you don't write one computer program for the whole: rather, you write one program for one bird, telling it how to adjust to the movements of other birds. Then you clone it for as many birds as there are. This is an elegant argument against the unity of not just an embryo, but of any organism. Dawkins himself doesn't carry it that far, but there is no reaso...

For the first time I am getting a handle on Aristotle's Physics. It seems that he saw the outermost sphere as churning everything within, so that everything would kinda settle down if outermost sphere were not moving. If this interpretation is correct, then I can see how Saadia came up with one of his arguments for the existence of God. For if the universe is finite and the amount of energy is finite, then eventually it's gotta run outa ooompf. But it hasn't yet done so, so cosmos is finite in age. But then again, wouldn't this sort of argument be deistic? And doesn't it require momentum? That would make my take anachronistic (or maybe Sadia was just ahead of his time). Also, Ari's conception of the spheres as churning explains one aspect of movement. From our mundane perspective, spheres cause sideways movement (stars and planets as well as sublunary movement inasmuch as on horizontal plane). Up and down is caused by tendency toward natural place. ...

In The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins describes a decades long experiment in which, after 33,000 generations of bacteria, one of twelve flasks developed the ability to ingest citrate. This required two mutations. The (the A mutation, he calls it) first happened in the 20,000th generation, providing no benefit. But 13K generations later, a second, B mutation made possible something quite radically new. All of the other adaptations were linear, but this one jumped off the charts. He cites this as a result that disproves the impossibility of the arising of structures that have irreducible complexity. Worthy point, but I can't help but wonder whether it actually supports the argument made by Behe, for he argues not that it is impossible, but that it is improbable. The worthwhile question is: what about those other eleven flasks: did they also eventually undergo both the A and B mutations? After 40k generations? 60K? 80K? 120K? 2M? In other words, given the long terms r...

Maybe the plant has a complex way of metabolizing (or is it a metabolic way of doing chemical changes?) Maybe the animal has a metabolic way of perceiving (or is it a perceptual way of metabolizing?) Maybe the human has a perceptive way of understanding (or is it an intelligent way of perceiving?) In other words, the formal achievement of the lower level becomes interwoved with the higher level achievement, so that one modality of action is the material of the higher mode of action.

What sensible quality really is for Aristotle is difficult for us to understand: what we are made aware of via science is the material substrate of sensible quality... not identical with quality itself. Nor is it (in abstraction from the formal aspect) the efficient or moving CAUSE of the perception of quality (yes the cause is ab extra BUT what science measures is an abstraction...)

16,32, 64, 128: I don't know how many cells make up a blastocysts, but Pinker points out that one can be removed to form an identical twin. So far so good. But he doesn't note that there is something orderly about these stages of life in a human: when there is 4 cells, for example, there is some difference in the material. There is, as it were, a top and a bottom. Not just a messy bunchacells: rather, a non-obvious structural unity. Yes, you can take one away and grow a new human. But you may be able to do that with iPSCs some day.

They make use of the fact that a zygote can become two identical twins, and that two fraternal twin zygotes can combine to form parts of one human organism with different dna here and there. I can't answer the second example at this time (in fact, I'm not sure of what it proves), but responding to the first is easy: if one can take the skin cell of an adult and use it for cloning (and the expectation is that some day it will be possible to do this with iPSCs), then the fact that this can be done with embryos does not demonstrate their non-humanity or non-personhood. The modem tollens would go like this: if clonability demonstrated non-humanity of embryos, then it would demonstrate the non-humanity of adults. But it doesn't. Therefore it doesn't demonstrate in the case of embryos.

If thinks about everything then one thinks also about one's act of thinking (about everything). But how does that thought come about? If thinking about everything other than oneself is a physical event, then thinking about that event one seem to be another event. The latter, however, would not be included in the former: thinking about one's thought would not be included in thinking about other than one's thought. So to think about EVERY everything, one would need to think about both. But in such a case, this thinking about EVERY everything would not be thought about. One solution is to have one and the same event include both thinking about X and thinking about the fact that one is thinking about X. In which case, one would no longer be a materialist.

Arisototelian teleology at the level of physics hinged upon the uniqueness of the earth and spheres. Elements of one sort went up, others down based upon their relation to entities that were unique (earth, moon, the set of spheres). Each element therefore had ONE telos, the contrary of which was unnatural. Hidden premise in all of this is that the world as a whole is good, has a purpose or at least an ordered set of purposes. It is ONLY in view of such a presupposition that one could regard this or that motion of this or that element as telic/dystelic, i.e., consonant or dissonant with the goal of that part of nature. Modern science gets rid of this uniqueness. As in Galileo's discovery that the sun has blotches (no more quintessesnce), the planets have moons (no more tendency of all earthy things to move toward the center of the earth. Instead, at the elemental level/level of physics one has a diversity of tendencies to act and be a rest. There is no sense of heirarchy ...

I wonder if anyone else has noticed the analogy between the two: guess I'll google the terms and find out.

When Pinker notes Dawkin's use of the term "self-ish" gene, he is quick to add that it is a metaphor. Yes, but is it an apt one? A self-ish person doesn't share with others: the gene, on the other hand, seems rather "anxious" to do so. Wouldn't it be more on target to compare the gene with a person who strives to share with others? Granted, this person would want to share ONLY its own identity--nothing less and nothing more--but share it does. In such a case, wouldn't the neo-Platonic expression "bonum sibi difusus est" (the good is self-diffusive) be more fittingly applied to genes?