Skip to main content

evolution, eidetic variation, rationality, reality, moral truths

Apply this thought experiment both to truths of math and to truths of ethics.

Thanks to your reason, and in some qualified sense perhaps also to evolution, you possess a truth that you know is true, even though you grant that your knowledge of it could be improved with time.

Do you think that another being, evolved differently might be able to recognize the same time and most definitely could not think it false?  Even if that being is far superior in knowledge?  Do you think, in other words, that reason itself, however it comes into being, is an openness to reality in all of its factors so that some truths would be either knowable or their contradictories could not be "known" to be true AND that the superior rational beings would have to know it... then your knowledge is in a sense not a function of evolution in the sense of being caused by it.  Rather, the truth is REAL and transcendent: evolution only serves to bring us closer to it.

Not also that the affirmation of the quasi-absolute nature of this truth also involves an openness to infinite reason.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....