a non-Behean form of irreducible complexity... and an evolution-friendly (and theism friendly) solution to the apparent problem that attends irreducible complexity

I'm thinking here about the relation between desire, imagination and self-movement: how do these arise in animals so that they operate seemlessly together?

The answer to this question shows that an evolutionary theory that is emergent rather than reductive is far less problematic. But since emergent evolutionism is also open to theism (without being subject to the charge of supernaturalism lodged against ID), it follows that openness to theism makes, in this case, for better natural science.

Let's begin

Let's start by separating the problem of motion from that of cognition and appetite: I suppose one can move a la zombie without perceiving or desiring: so one could simplify the problem somewhat. Movement can arise on its own, without the other two. But whence the other two? And how is it that they seem so interwoven with each other and with self-movement?

It is hard (or impossible) to conceive of the interwoven operations of all three as a mechanical process. That's because the source of these three facets of animal life would seem to be three different pieces of DNA relating to 3 different pieces of the human being (three different parts of the brain, I suppose). To put the problem in question form: how do they function as three moments of a complex operation rather than three perhaps mutually influencing processes?

It seems that human (and other animal) life exhibits something better called irreducible simplicity than irreducible complexity.

The above is a problem for a mechanistic view of human nature in the here and now. Let's shift to the problem that the evolution of the same characteristics likewise present to mechanistic evolution (as opposed to emergent evolution).

To those who regard evolution as mere complexification rather than as emergence I would posit the following question: how could one part of the three-part puzzle come into being through random variation without the other two? If it did appear without the other two characteristics, how could such a characteristic increase the adaptivity of the organism? Or wouldn't it be required that all three appear together in order to provide any adaptive advantage? But isn't such a complex pairing many times more improbable than the genesis of one of the characteristics? That is, wouldn't the improbability of all three occurring together initially be the cube of the improbability of any particular one of them coming into being at all?

And then we get to a host of other problems.

But this is all a pseudo problem IF [emergence is true AND--what naturally follows, if] there is something LIKE desire/imagination at the pre-animal level, something that could serve as the basis of the emergence of animal consciousness, desire and self-movement.

But that would imply that even the pre-animal yet animate level of nature operate when moved by something analogous to desire. And a similar analysis could be applied to how the organic arises from the pre- organic.

One could rightfully say that all of nature is... teleological, albeit while using this term in a thoroughly analogous manner.

I am not affirming emergence as much as I am showing that, inasmuch as it is superior to material reductionism, it also brings with it an understanding of nature that looks more Aristotelian (yes, no more stability of forms, but lots of teleology).

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity. He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem. But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones. In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again. They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is in fact different from the one that came before. Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

robot/computers, awareness of causality, holism

For a purportedly cognizant machine to be aware of causality, it would seem (given how it happens with us rational animals) that being aware of its own causal interactions is a necessary condition for its being aware of how causal relations exist in nature. But to be aware of its own causal interactions, the machine would have to have a sense of its acting as a whole, as an individual, and as being acted upon at a whole. It would not suffice merely to register information from this or that outside source: there would have to be a sense of the whole acting and being acted upon. It seems that such awareness requires appropriation and that machines can't do that (at least not in the precise sense that I have discussed in this blog).

The Human Question

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