Fear of death.

water and soil? nope.

the continuity of self might itself be an illusion.

this book isn't as great as one might hope, but it makes a version of this argument: http://www.amazon.com/Self-Illusion-Social-Creates-Identity/dp/019989759X

the late great, what is your problem with the phrase "the ways in which evolution might have guided"

is it the word "guided"? i agree that suggests a kind of agency that the processes of evolution cannot have.

but i do think it is best to understand the functioning of the brain as essentially adaptive. even if the specific form it takes can produce maladaptive aspects and a fuck ton of exaptations that can't be "explained" in terms of evolution.

when we speak of the way that evolution "guides" the development of biological systems, we are using a common personification to get across a (hopefully) familiar idea. environmental pressures inadvertently "select for" and "select against" (yes, again) certain traits, in the long run shaping biological systems to their environment. my suggestion is that top down cognition - something like awareness - is a characteristic that has probably been selected for. given what we know about biological life, this seems a reasonable hypothesis, though it's by no means proven.

in saying that evolution is the "best scientific framework for thinking about the nature of biological systems", i did not mention that i was talking specifically about the factors that have caused biological systems to be as it seems they are. i sort of hoped that would be clear. evolution is a big part of how we talk about this: the forces that have caused biological systems to assume their present structure and seeming "purpose".

the problem w/ that thinking is that the process of evolution is not clear to us nor does it have a beginning and end

it does not shape biological systems to their environment, because the environment can change much more rapidly than animals can

you can't just look at an animal (or plant or whatever) in an environment and say "well, that animal must have evolved to fit this niche" and work backward

and another key point is that we're not evolved to match our environment but rather just to pass on genes most successfully in a particular environment

it's very tempting to look at things and look at their environment and then try to figure out how they might have evolved to match that environment but that's not actually how the science of it works

water and soil? nope.

― the late great, Friday, July 13, 2012 1:19 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, plants do need water. and they do draw nutrients from the soil. if we're bogging down in where the bulk of a plant's nutrient intake does in fact come from vs. the conceptions of some strawman medieval farmer, then it's time to prune this tangent. we fault an analogy because it it bad, not because analogies are bad in general.

if i were trying to prove something by saying, "no, look, the mind is just like a computer, see?" and then going into specifics about the nature of computers, then you'd have a point. as it is, i'm at a bit of a loss about why you're hammering this.

proof dogs have language
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui9Mm63zpfE&feature=related

xpost

jesus christ man, we fault analogies because they're not deductive tools

how are you NOT saying "the mind is just like a computer" on this thread is what i want to know

pretty sure my dog has an immortal soul, i see it when i look in his eyes

it's very tempting to look at things and look at their environment and then try to figure out how they might have evolved to match that environment but that's not actually how the science of it works

umm, yes it is. that's at least part of it, and it's exactly what darwin was doing. ideally what we do is to look at the record of changes in environment and see how and in what way they correspond to changes in biology, but both approaches are part of a scientific approach. the former helps us generate hypotheses, and the latter helps us test them.

holy shit man you need to go back to your biology books

btw i just wanted to address something that popped up for a second upthread

http://livelovelearnbreathe.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/i-do-believe-in-magic.jpg

seriously dude, i don't really know how else to put it. you just opened a gigantic can of rong.

i think it's not really on topic anyway though

The song "Okay, Let's Talk About Magic" just came on my shuffle.

late great I can't tell if you understood my store analogy with your response.

jesus christ man, we fault analogies because they're not deductive tools

i burn my hand on a fire. i come to another fire. i worry that i might burn my hand if i touch it. i have this worry because though the new fire is not the old fire, i surmise based on certain correspondences that they are of a type, and i further suppose that because of this, they might share the hand-burning characteristic. this is both an analogy and a useful deduction derived from one. analogies are deductive tools. they are not 100% reliable deductive tools, because things that seem alike in certain respects are not necessarily alike in other respects. that's okay, because i'm not trying to prove to anyone that the brain is effectively a computer.

how are you NOT saying "the mind is just like a computer" on this thread is what i want to know

i am observing certain correspondences. i am not using those correspondences to make other types of analogy-driven assumptions. from what i can see, cognition of all sorts (both conscious and not) is in many respects a stimulus response system. that's the root of my argument. it proceeds logically from there, but not because i am trying to enforce some correspondence to the computer model.

holy shit man you need to go back to your biology books

you've done this more than once. if you have an argument, by all means make it. if you don't, just let it drop. i'm just gonna assume you misunderstood...

Science deals with approximations that change over time, so there is no risk ever in being proven wrong. Because proving things wrong is part of the process! There is often no capital-T truth for all time declared.

This is about right - there are falsifiable claims (IE theory X says Y should happen and if Y doesn't happen then theory X is wrong) and then there's "Well we've tested this 1,000,000 times and it's been right every time, it's safe to build stuff around it"

People don't give religion this leeway. They say it is wrong because it should be the capital-T truth and the flaws in doctrine are all examples why the whole thing is irrelevant.

Religion doesn't claim it though - it is the truth but it is not susceptible to disproof.

no, cause i don't want to explain speciation and cladistics and tell you all about the voyage of the beagle

anyway that's inductive reasoning my friend, not deductive

xpost to contenderizer

it would be as much of a rabbit hole w/r/t consciousness as getting into the hows and whys of computer programming

ftr:

darwin developed his theory (at least in part) by looking at animals and noticing that they were well-adapted to the peculiarities of their environments.

in studying the evolution of biological forms, we look at the fossil record not just for changes in anatomy, but for evidence of changes in environment that might have something to do with those changes in anatomy.

that's all i said in the post you freaked at, and it's all true.

anyway that's inductive reasoning my friend, not deductive

come on, you're splitting hairs now. the incident of the first fire is inductively used to generate a conclusion about fires in general. the general conclusion is deductively to generate a theory about the second fire. there's no point in getting hung up in silly minutia like this.

no, cause i don't want to explain speciation and cladistics and tell you all about the voyage of the beagle

the conceit of this is breathtaking. there's been no need in the discussion to go into speciation and cladistics. but we can talk about whatever you want, if you want.

but see, you're saying things that aren't true!

darwin developed his theory by noticing similarities, not differences, and a lot of the differences he found - tortoise shells, for example, on the different galapagos islands - didn't correlate to environmental factors, finches beaks' aside

similarly in california we observe very different salamanders in the north and south of california but very similar salamanders in the northern coast and northern inland forests, which we explain by nothing the existence of an ancient ocean in the central valley which once connected the populations on the northern coast and northern inland, and a historically inhospitable hot and dry range that separated northern and southern salamanders

all of this is based in patterns of coloration and markings on different species of salamanders and not on adaptations to different environment

anyway i don't feel like i'm getting caught up silly minutiae here, do you?

i think we need to bring the discussion back to how we can cheat death by storing engrams on dried coconuts.

the problem w/ that thinking is that the process of evolution is not clear to us nor does it have a beginning and end

it does not shape biological systems to their environment, because the environment can change much more rapidly than animals can

going back a while, the process does not have to be clear to us, or have a beginning and end, for us to speculate productively about its mechanics. it's not a field of complete mystery.

and we understand, when we speak of evolution, that both the gene pool and the environment are in constant flux. to say that biology "shapes itself" to environment in response the pressure exerted by natural selection, we're not suggesting that a perfect balance has or can be struck. we're simply describing general workings of the mechanism. i don't pretend i'm putting forth an ironclad argument when i suggest that conscious awareness likely provides (or provided) some survival or reproductive advantage, some competitive improvement that was selected for in the human population. it's just a speculation, a hypothesis that i know will be all but impossible to test.

Getting sued by a robot for pouring hot oatmeal on its head was where I realized this thread got really intense.

ok i get what you're saying contenderizer

i feel like what keeps happening on this endless merry-go-round of a thread is that i keep saying "wiggle room for magic!" and people come back at me w/ unconnected bits of *unimpeachable science* (computers, evolution, EEGs) on which they hang the "no room for magic!" argument, via this tricky slight of hand of "we can explain x w/o magic which we then extend to y by drawing analogies between x and y"

i guess for my part i always get really sad when i look at comments boxes on articles about stuff like higgs bosons and evolutions because they are full of deep thinkers who seem to enjoy worrying and harassing people for their engagement w/ the magical, immanent, sublime, etc aspects of life

and i always think "jeez, how sad, why would anybody want to pick on these people like that, much less use poor paraphrases of what they saw on discovery channel last week to tear them down"

see that's an argument by analogy too though

i feel like what keeps happening on this endless merry-go-round of a thread is that i keep saying "wiggle room for magic!" and people come back at me w/ unconnected bits of *unimpeachable science* (computers, evolution, EEGs) on which they hang the "no room for magic!" argument, via this tricky slight of hand of "we can explain x w/o magic which we then extend to y by drawing analogies between x and y"

yeah, i like that. and i see why were at cross purposes. i'm not trying to shoot down magic, though i'm more likely to cling to what sounds "science-y" than to leap off after the mystical.

fwiw, i think there's an almost ridiculous amount of room for magic and the unknown in most things. science does a good job of backing up its claims, which inclines certain people to sneer at anything spiritual or magical, but as someone (ledge?) was saying upthread, science can't claim to know anything about what it doesn't directly measure. to say that a molecule has this mass or size does nothing to deny its possession of a soul.

i'm about 60/40 on consciousness being data processing rather than straight-up magic, but no more than that...

i will tell you what, i'm definitely more comfortable splitting hairs on science than on magic

i'm glad nobody's asked me yet what i think consciousness is, or what this screen is that i seem to feel everything around me projected on to (my "me") if it's not just a handy illusion created by a busy computer in our heads

i would have to throw up my hands and say "... magic?"

you are all robots and i pour oatmeal on all of yous

I know people baulk at the term 'magic' but you're right, it absolutely is. And it's the lens through which we see everything. I suppose that's how we so easily overlook it, it's so familiar, so transparent. It's so easy to look through we forget it's there at all.

While we're in the market for tortured analogies.

felt like i crossed a hurdle of maturity when i moved from asking "why are these scientists, philosphers and other intelligent people i respect not die-hard atheists?" to "why are these scientists, philosphers and other intelligent people i respect not die-hard atheists?"

if you know what i mean

and not to call anybody immature, maybe i just mean a hurdle of understanding

If you really meant to repeat the same question then I really don't know what you mean!

one quasi-magical way to think around the brain-as-computer thing is to conceive of life as nothing more than the urge towards. the urge to move towards food, light, warmth, reproductive opportunity, love, god, whatever, etc. the life urge = the towards-ness urge.

if we break it down that way, then the little ameoba-animal doesn't have to be a soulless machine "gathering data about its environment", it can instead be a little guy who knows nothing but a desire to be towards the light. though he's got no language or even thought, really, it's like the light is a shining happy face and he's all set when he's pointed at it, in the slough when he's not.

that model makes conscious awareness inseparable from life, no matter how simple the life. life is happy when it's getting what it's supposed to be towards, unhappy when it isn't, and everything else is just elaboration on that. doesn't seem that much less reasonable than the gradually self-aware computer model.

i just mean i moved from "what's a matter with these people" to "what might they possibly know that i don't?"

it's kind of like that mark twain joke - i'm not sure how it happened, but somehow my father got much smarter when i moved from my 20s into my 30s

i'm still a die-hard atheist yo!

both of my parents are "scientists" and so are many of my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc

i was raised in a deeply religious family, though there was never any sort of fundamentalism at play, and they adhere to a fantastically vague and pluralistic religion in the first place

i was always fascinated that they could be scientists and still entertain these very vague and "magical" notions, but as i've gotten older, it's seemed less superstitious and more self-evident

there's this article about an anthropologist asking otherwise rational evangelicals why they had a personal relationship with Jesus. It turned out it was because they were literally hearing his voice. so she figured out the reason.

LOL

xps: i've found it increasingly easy to square a perception of a sort of open-ended, non-doctrinal "magic" with my fundamentally materialist atheism as i've aged. the world is the world, and that parts of it that science covers are clearly highly scientific. the rest is or at least can be something else.

magic isn't the right word though, not for me. it's too heavily coded. "the whole of things" works better, as it puts its arms around both what can be nailed down and what can't.

weird part is that i still consider myself an atheist. i feel i'd be lying if i said i wasn't. it's important to me.

at the same time, if you ask me whether or not i believe in god, then i feel i have to say i do. even Jesus. yes.

i should find the doublethink troubling, but i don't. at all. but i don't hear anyone in my head. feel kind of ripped off, tbh.

i jokingly tell people im a "spiritual materialist"--in that i dont believe in any religion or God or benevolent spirit but i dont think any of this shit is real either.

lol

you have to practice to hear jesus.

here's article for more info:
http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=54818