The Human Question

...and looks at those who are as being afraid of dying. Perhaps eternity is scary... like the ocean... to those who are comfortable on the land.  Do we look down on those who long to sail as cowards?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2015/08/atheism-remarkably-childlike-atomistic-faith.html

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.                                                                         —Daniel J. Boorstin

For quite a while, scientists said that DNA functions as information.  More recently, however, this claim has been marginalized.  There are certainly patches of DNA that encode for protein molecules in a digital manner.  In a manner that reminds me of the way a computer processes 1s and 0s, except, I guess, there are four basic bits of information rather than just two.  That sounds like information to me.  But more recently, scientists have been talking about patches of DNA consisting not of coding for proteins, but of instructions on how to combine the proteins coded for.  The latter sort of DNA patches are call CIS regulatory mechanisms. Okay, I have only a primitive grasp of all of this, but it seems to mee that the CIS regulatory areas are to protein coding patches like the ingredients of a cookbook recipe are to the instructions about whether to add those ingredients in a bowl or whether they should be chopped, julienned, boiled, baked or the like. ...

When Dawkins clarifies what he means by the term "gene" in the title of his work, he states that it refers not an to individual but to a whole population of genes of a certain type.  He then proposes that we apply a metaphor as a kind of shortcut for understanding the conclusions of mathematical genetics: imagine that the gene is an individual trying perpetuate itself by competing with its allele and cooperating with other genes in producing a vehicle that will behave in such a way as to enable the genes to survive to the next generation. According to this heuristic, those genes that are most ingenious at producing effective survival machinesl will tend to become predominant in a population. This metaphor is, in my opinion, a great device for giving a basic idea about population genetics. But Dawkins also uses it to make a philosophical point, and in doing so seems to change the subject in a manner that is misleading. He talks of individual genes using an individual organis...

Richard Dawkins'  The Selfish Gene  proposes a new way of looking at biology, one that reverses the relationship between genes and organisms.  Whereas biologists have tended to look at the organism as central and genes as interesting inasmuch as they affect the lives of organisms, Dawkins proposes that we look at genes as central and at organisms inasmuch as they contribute to the perpetuation of genes. He initially proposes this shift in the form of a mere metaphor: what would a gene think and do if it could deliberate about ways in which it might perpetuate its form?  Well, it would look at the organism as a vehicle that it, alongside with other genes with whom it is cooperating, could use to make it to the next generation.  A survival vehicle.  It would look at the organism as a "lumbering" robot that it could use to manipulate its environment so that opportunities and dangers to self-perpetuation could be dealt with.  The book begins by employing t...

Daniel Dennett has an interesting rebuttal to Frank Jackson's argument for qualia.  Jackson's argument takes the form of a story about Mary, who--although she has lived in an environment devoid of color since her earliest days--has nevertheless become the world's foremost scientific expert on color, studying the outside world through a black and white monitor. Once Mary leaves the confines of her achromatic environment for the normal, colorful world, she will finally get to see blue things.  And, Jackson tells us, she will discover something that she hadn't previously known through her scientific studies.  If that is so, then there is more to color than what science can measure and report, and that something more is called qualia. Dennett counters in Consciousness Explained  that if Mary knows absolutely everything there is to know about this color and our perception thereof, then she already knows, in terms of physics, how blue differs from yellow even before...

Among the Disrupted

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwVariousHonderichonSearle.htm

He says there's no beginning or end of time, for we move in a circle: we are always coming back to where we (or one of our dopplegangers) have been before. Okay, this is all hearsay, but I still want to mull over it. This eternal return provokes a question:  is the same "I" here that was here eons ago?  If one replies yes, then it seems that time as we conceive it normally is illusory. A more adequate grasp of time recognizes that there is nothing new under the sun.  Or rather, it is only because we are limited to seeing things "under the sun" that anything seems to be new.  Ironically, Hawkins, a materialist, attributes to science a God-like grasp of nature, a perspective through which he sees -- rather abstractly -- every actuality that will be and/or has already been as if it is present to him.  Wow! What an irony: a man who claims that you and I are nothing but dust in the wind also claims to have a kind of infinite gaze.  Might not the very fac...

In  Consciousness Explained (1 hour 22 minutes into the audio),   Daniel Dennett give four objections to his materialism.  He describes these as four reasons against the reduction of the mind to the brain or as reasons for believing in "mind-stuff." The four reasons are the claims that nothing in the brain could... 1. ...be the medium in which the (imaginary) purple cow is rendered; 2. ...be the "I" in "I think therefore I am"; 3. ...appreciate wine, hate racism, love someone, be a source mattering; 4. ...act with moral responsibility More on this later.  Meanwhile, it's worth noting that his description of the objection to materialism as belief in "mind stuff" is the sort of straw man that a reductionist would find quite natural: he finds it so natural to think materialistically, that he thinks anti-reductionists must be positing a different kind of matter.  It may be true that dualism does posit something like "mind stuff"...

In Freedom Evolves , Daniel Dennett uses Benjamin Libet's experiment as a basis for arguing that  we are not free.  That is because Libet's experiment shows that the brain gets ready to act about a third of a second prior to our becoming consciousness of our choosing to act.  Because a non-mental process precedes and makes highly probable the mental process, the will is neither spontaneous nor free.  So the argument goes.  After having made this point, Dennett adds in passing that the buildup in the readiness in the brain (i.e., the build up of the action potential) is not always followed by the movement of the  hand: sometimes, at the very last fraction of second the test subject decides not to move at the last fraction (and I mean fraction) of a second. Searle points out that since this build up of action potential in the brain is not always followed by hand movement, one cannot rightly say that the former necessitates the latter.  I would agree an...

David Chalmers proposes protopsychism as part of an attempt to give an account of how it is that we have minds--an attempt to locate consciousness within nature.  I think this move and the positing of panpsychism are both motivated by the recognition of the need to overcome the assumptions that create the false dilemma of dualism vs. (reductive) materialism. These two approaches get to the heart of the problem: they recognize that as the non-living things in the natural world are thought of as consisting only of the quantifiable, we won't be able to make room for cognition without seeming dualistic.  Those who recognize this problem respond by inserting something more than the Democritan quantifiable back into nature so sensation won't seem so radically different from the non-living things that humans and other sentient beings sense. The Aristotelian approach is, I propose, less exotic, and less of a target for those ready to wield Ockham's razor.  It consists of affi...

To Teilhard de Chardin the human form arose naturally from its antecedents through evolution, yet that necessity has its ultimate origin in divine providence. The question of how this relates to the Genesis story is not my concern here: I am instead interested in how it relates to the philosophical claim that there is something in human operations transcending what can be done by other animals. For example, humans can know everlasting truths.  To have such knowledge (in the most robust sense of the word "knowledge") could not be mere perception, imagination or expectation.  But if the human form arose naturally from simian antecedents, then it would seem that the human way of cognizing would be nothing more than a highly developed imagination, etc.  Since human cognition is as different from imagining as an infinite ray in geometry (which we cannot properly imagine) is from a finite line segment (which we can), then it follows that it is problematic to say that the huma...

Dennett suggests that Conway's game of life can model the workings of organisms and thereby show that they are machines .  But this game (which consists of a computer program controlling how black squares cluster together and interact, with these squares forming somewhat life-like interacting clusters of spots) might also be able to model a perpetual motion machine (we'll call this "Conway's Machine").  If it can, then (given the fact that such a machine would violate the second law of thermodynamics) something is wrong with applying this game to nature, and the claim that it can model life is undermined. I wonder if the Democritan view of nature (which I like to call "geometry in motion") goes hand in hand with acceptance of the applicability of Conway's game to nature (that is, one it true if and only if the other is as well).  If so, then the Democritan view of nature is likewise undermined by the possibility of a Conwayesque  model of a perpetu...

Materialists deny the existence of an immaterial necessary being while affirming that matter itself operates as it does necessarily.  They posit the laws of nature as the source of this necessity. Aquinas argues for a self-necessary being in an interesting manner: starting with contingent beings, inferring that there must be at least one necessary being, distinguishing derived from underived necessity, and finally inferring the existence of a self-necessary being, i.e., one with underived necessity.  Also worth noting is the fact that part of this argument is said to commit the fallacy of composition. What I'd like to  do here is explore (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "invent") an analogy between the two ways of thinking.  My starting point is the suggestion, made by Sean Carroll and other scientists, that we are in a multiverse. Here goes... Suppose there is a multiplicity of universes, each with its own laws of nature, and that these universes...

I think it's Dawkins who states that atheism should be easy for a monotheist, for a monotheist has already gotten rid of many gods: he only has to get rid of one more. Suppose I tell Dawkins that he really should have no problem with celibacy.  After all, as a monogamist, he is already foresworn the possibility of having many wives: he just has to get rid of one more!

He describes what it's like for a statement to be true (he says in many more words that a statement is true when it corresponds to reality) and assumes that he's given an account also of what it's like to believe   that one's statement is true. They are not the same. To believe that one's statement is true is, in part, to expect it to be consistent with other truths that one and others also know.  It is to expect that others who have an adequate knowledge of what you claim to know will concur in their judgment because of what they perceive and understand. There is a tacit awareness of the an open-ended duration of time and a community of rational beings that is larger than one's possible experience. Does a calculator have all that?  Does a computer?

It occurred to me recently that any position that seems to suggest dualism is dismissed as "spooky." It seems that such a dismissal would be quite effective because of the way that it links the immaterial to ghosts and ghosts to superstition. But what about the opposite of spooky?  Would that be beautiful?  Is materialism beautiful? I don't think that reducing a whole to its parts is beautiful.  Useful, perhaps, but not beautiful. (For future revision: discuss engineering, it's beauty, here.  Then contrast with nothingbuttery). Perhaps beauty is experienced only when one is looking holistically.  If holism is (in different ways) opposed to both dualism and materialism, then perhaps we should say that both of the two latter positions are spooky.

Sam Harris seems to be a master of disinformation when it comes to history, but I trust him when he says that sociopaths, "do not experience a normal range of anxiety and fear, and this may account for their lack of conscience." (p. 97 in  Moral Landscape ). My thought:  that dovetails well with the notion that we can, in a manner of speaking, perceive emotions (interestingly, Aquinas says something like that in his commentary on Aristotle's De anima ).  For seeing someone else in a different situation than our own, we imagine an emotion-laden situation and somehow in virtue of our own capacity for feeling we -- without inference -- see that situation as painful, pleasant or whatever for the other.  I suppose, then, that if one lacks such emotions, that person will fail to perceive those emotions in others.  Nor shall that person be concerned about the presence of something that he or she can't perceive. Just a hunch: perhaps sociopaths lack those emotions b...