Tags
ascent/descent, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Immanuel Kant, intimacy/integrity, Mencius, Mou Zongsan, perennialism, Śāntideva, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, Xunzi
I’m returning today to the idea of perennial questions: questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy, where both sides of a debate keep getting articulated in many different places. The key feature of these perennial questions, to my mind, is that they are large: they cannot be narrowed down to a single precisely defined question within a single philosophical subfield, of the sort that analytic philosophers aim to ask, but extend their ramifications across multiple fields of theoretical and practical inquiry.
So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.
But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? I think there’s value in limiting the number of questions we treat as perennial – in being prepared to say “those are different aspects of the same question” or “those are different ways of asking the same question” rather than allowing the questions to proliferate randomly. But that’s not to say the number of questions should be limited to merely two – though it’s certainly interesting to consider the two as axes on a single graph.
For there are other questions which are similarly widespread and have similar ramifications. A little while ago I pointed to Mou Zongsan’s distinction between “perfect” and “separation” theories; these map onto the distinction I discussed earlier between ātmanism and encounter, but Mou effectively tries to show that ātmanism-encounter is its own perennial question, distinct from the integrity-ascent and intimacy-descent positions they might seem to map onto.
Other perennial questions are significantly better known than the debates I have discussed above. One of these is human nature: the question that finds its most classic expression in the ancient Confucian debates between Mencius and Xunzi, but is also well expressed in the West in Rousseau and Augustine, among others. So too, I suspect it is at the heart of the changes in Buddhism as it moved from India to Mencian China. At its heart, this is a metaphysical question about what human beings are and what makes them so – a question which is also open to at least some empirical verification or falsification. But it is also an ethical question. If human beings are naturally good, they need far less ethical correction, need to watch themselves or be watched far less, than if they are systematically prone to error and wrongness. It extends into soteriology: a good human nature makes sudden liberation more plausible. And at several points the recent debates over “common sense” extended this question into epistemology. To what extent are human reasoning processes naturally good enough to lead us to the truth, and to what extent are they so prone to error that they need regular and systematic correction?
Then there is the similarly metaphysical question of free will – much less subject to empirical verification. The empirical methods of natural science assume that the world is made of causal processes whose workings can be ascertained; this very assumption begs the metaphysical question at issue. But it too has significant ramifications in ethics and politics. Free will is a fundamental assumption behind the characteristic organizing concepts of modern liberalism: rights, respect, autonomy. The idea that individual choices are to be respected qua choices – as opposed to their being instrumental to other goods like happiness – implies that something about these choices gives them a different status from other phenomena in the universe. So you can’t get even close to a Kantian ethics without free will – but consequentialist ethics can do fine without it. I’m told that Fyodor Dostoevsky even saw this point as the fundamental difference between the worldviews of Protestantism and Catholicism: Protestants sacralize individual autonomous choice even if it leads to overall misery; Catholics want an order that produces general happiness even if it leads to tyranny over individual choice. (Whether his characterization was accurate, let alone whether Eastern Orthodox churches provide the appropriate synthesis he thinks they do, is a separate topic.)
The idea of free will has been particularly important in the West, but it has not been limited to that context. It is important enough to Śāntideva that he spends several difficult verses refuting it. Very much like Nietzsche, Śāntideva believes that the idea of free will is harmful and dangerous because it leads us to blame others: their actions have causes just like a stomach upset does, so we should not get angry at them any more than we get angry at our stomach bile. And I think points of view like Śāntideva’s tend to frame the left-right axis in Canadian politics, and in other countries where God is not a serious political issue. The right believes criminals make free choices, and so deserve their punishment, while the left seeks to reduce the causes of crime; and if people’s fates in society largely come down to their free choices, then the government has less of a duty to help those whose fates turned out poorly.
The questions I’ve listed – ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, ātmanism/encounter, free will, human nature – hardly exhaust the list of perennial questions either. In future weeks I’m hoping to examine others. But I’m returning to the idea of perennial questions now because I suspect that it may form part of a highly fruitful method in cross-cultural philosophy. Too much cross-cultural philosophy so far has been dominated by the idea of a philosophia perennis, a single universal philosophy shared across cultures. That idea is usually taken to refer to some sort of Advaitic mystical monism, a single cosmic truth that can be known through mystical experience. And while ideas of that sort are indeed present in many cultures, they’re rarely all that widespread. Most people do not believe this so-called perennial philosophy. Moreover, there’s an odd parallel between that sort of perennialism and the view of “common sense” recently advocated on this blog by Thill Raghunath and others. Though Thill describes “common sense” as excluding “religious” ideas (which I suspect includes the “perennial” mystical monism), he shares with the perennialists a common view of human access to truth: all humans, across cultures, share an innate faculty which allows them access to truth, but most humans access this faculty so little that they are enmeshed in delusion. (As I noted above, epistemologically this seems to put both Thill and the perennialists on the side of the human nature debate that stresses our natural goodness.)
What is truly universal to me in philosophy, it seems, are not the answers but the questions; and that is why I think the cross-cultural study of philosophy should devote more time to these questions. To the extent that the answers are universal as well, it seems to me that multiple and contradictory answers are universal: both mystical Ascent and a “common sense” Descent are found across cultures. The student of cross-cultural philosophy should pay attention to both sides.
In August I will be taking some vacation time with my wife and my friends. So there will be no blog post next week; posts may be sporadic for the rest of the month as well.
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I’ve been thinking of ways to accommodate the idea of perennial questions with a more nuanced approach to cross-cultural philosophy than the old “all is One in all cultures” approach of neo-Vedānta or the New Agey idea that all religions are paths to the same mountain top. It’s obvious that multiple traditions end up with similar questions and answers, but we also want to be careful not to just say that they’re all the same. I think the similarities come about because we’re all human beings with similar cognitive apparatuses. There are only so many paths we’re able to take given our abilities and limitations. However, there are real cultural differences, which tend to make for different emphases even in similar issues.
I think there is an epistemological perennial question about what I’d call “ultimate justification.” It starts innocently enough with everyday (dare I say “common sense”!) language-games of justification and eventually some philosophically astute (and/or child-like) person will ask what justifies that and so on until you get to some sort attempt to justify the justifiers. I’ve thought about applying the idea of memes to this and other philosophical issues, because there does seem to be some sort of underlying structure in the ideas themselves. Also, applying memes to philosophy would give some way to think about what is likely to catch on in a tradition in terms of its ability to reproduce itself in the minds of other philosophers.
Although I appreciate Dawkins’ yeoman efforts in promoting public understanding of the science of evolution, I think that his attempts at “original thinking” have spawned two notable absurdities: the “selfish gene” and the “selfish meme”.
The “selfish gene” is just a ludicrous category mistake. Genes cannot be meaningfully said to be selfish or unselfish or indifferent. They are not the sorts of entities which can bear those ascriptions.
A similar ludicrous category mistake infects his idea of a meme. A meme is anything which is transmitted from one person to another by means other than the biological, e.g., ideas, concepts, theories, explanations, gestures, etc.
What is gained by using a fanciful word to refer to these things? Everyone knows, and, yes, it is commonsense knowledge, that people communicate and propagate their ideas, etc., to others. So what is really the point in using a fanciful word to refer to this commonplace truth?
Here Dawkins’ attempt at original thought goes seriously awry. In just the way he succumbed to anthropomorphism about genes, he now succumbs to anthropomorphism about memes.
According to Dawkins, memes mysteriously acquire powers of intelligence and agency! They can migrate from one mind to another, act like parasites, find ingenious ways to replicate and propagate themselves, and turn our host minds into instruments of their machinations!
All this is sheer nonsense, of course. It is one thing to say that I am developing some ideas on common sense, expressing them on this blog, responding to criticisms and caricatures and so on. This is all intelligible.
It is entirely different and obviously bizarre to say that some ideas of common sense have “colonized” my mind and are using it in clever ways to propagate themselves!
In fact, that’s the sort of thing you can expect a victim of schizophrenia to say! LOL
Dawkins takes up these objections in The Selfish Gene (where he readily admits it’s a metaphor) and others, such as Dennett, take them up elsewhere. Not that their answers are conclusive, but theories about “selfish genes” and memes are at least a bit more subtle than they initially appear.
It should be obvious to any careful reader of The Selfish Gene that Dawkins really believes that genes have powers of intelligent agency. In fact, he states and repeats that organisms are simply the “vehicles” designed, built, and manipulated by genes to produce more of their own copies. So, his disavowal that he does not mean that genes are “conscious, purposeful agents” is hollow and is at odds with his actual claims and their implications.
In any case, his claim that genes are “selfish” only in the behavioral sense is still a piece of egregious nonsense, all the more when you consider his central reason: the propensity of genes to self-replicate.
If I produce more copies of myself, this can’t possibly be “selfish behavior” even in Dawkins’ sense of maximizing my own chances of survival at the expense of the chances of others. The odds I face in surviving do not get reduced even by an iota merely because I have produced more copies of myself, not to mention increasing my chances of survival at the expense of others’ chances.
So, to call self-replication “selfish” in the “behavioral sense” of “maximizing one’s chances of survival at the expense of others’ chances” is a misnomer.
The nonsense in all this gets magnified a million-fold when it is extended to “memes”. As I said, talk of ideas taking charge of our minds and manipulating them for their own propagation is straight out of the dairy of a schizophrenic. I don’t care who advocates such bizarre notions.
There were “subtle” theological arguments in medieval France on whether the Virgin Mary at Church X is superior to the Virgin Mary at church Y. But it’s all claptrap anyway. Of course, it provided livelihood and “intellectual prestige” to participating theological “thinkers”.
Nonsense can be subtle. Sure!
Examining bizarre ideas takes it toll! Pl. substitute “diary of a schizophrenic” for “dairy of a schizophrenic”!
Common sense tells us that human beings have, and consistently actualize, their propensities for being selfish and unselfish, sometimes in unpredictable ways.
When the proud and conceited “Queen of the Sciences”, to use Descartes’ description, pretends to possess something exceeding this simple truth of common sense, the result is often patent falsity or nonsense, e.g., “psychological egoism”, “Gene egoism”, etc.
Common sense tells us that human beings have, and consistently actualize, their propensities for being selfish and unselfish, sometimes in unpredictable ways.
When the proud and conceited “Queen of the Sciences”, to use Descartes’ description, pretends to possess something exceeding this simple truth of common sense, the result is often patent falsity or nonsense, e.g., “psychological egoism”, “Gene egoism”, etc.
I can’t speak much for Dawkins. However, I think we can safely say that once we create and attach to a concept of self, the odds of survival are zero.
I agree that Dawkins’ arguments present themselves too literally. I strongly dislike the “meme” idea; while the term has proven useful, I think the concept impedes understanding, because idea propagation is not truly much like genetic propagation. However, I think the “selfish gene” idea clarifies more than it occludes. Dawkins’ novel point was to focus on understanding evolution in terms of genes, instead of organisms. You can quibble with his choice of words, but that underlying idea works, and works well.
Is free will really a perennial question? I suppose it comes up in Śāntideva in some form, but I don’t think free will – at least as it appears in the West – was a major issue in classical Indian philosophy. It was certainly not the huge issue it has been in cultures with Christian and Islamic religious backgrounds. Karma requires moral causation, not absolute freedom. I suspect most Indian philosophers assumed a sort of compatibilism, but I haven’t really looked into the issue.
This is a good point, Ethan. It definitely matters for Śāntideva, but I’m not sure how much it matters for anyone else in India – or China, for that matter.
Shantideva’s point seems to me to be different from the question of free will in Western philosophy. Shantideva is addressing the very practical implications of Samsara — when humans are bound by habit to reflexive attraction to some objects (desire), aversion to others (aggression) and ignorance of others — then it is easier to see that they are not free. They are deluded and appropriate objects of compassion — particularly when you consider that these kleshas (emotions) are suffering.
However, Shantideva was a principal advocate of efforts to cultivate virtue. Even on a relative level Shantideva understood that it is possible to choose a path that develops causes and conditions that lessen suffering. And, from the point of view of enlightenment, while samsara may be a closed system — it is a systenm that is based on a faulty concept that collapses when light shines on it. So, from that point of view, there is absolute liberation (liberation that is not the opposite of bondage). Humans even have sufficient freedom that they can take what is by nature free and open and by experiencing fear believe that they are limited.
All of this seems to me to be quite different from the Western concept of free will where it is that assumed that there is an actor who is either free or not.
Jim, are we thinking of the same passages here? I’m talking about Śāntideva’s discussion in verses 22-33 of Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter VI, where he tries to refute the view that people are the creators of or should be blamed for their bad actions. Such a view, he thinks, leads to anger and hatred. His view seems quite parallel to Nietzsche’s on this issue – as does the target he is addressing, a view that people are responsible for their bad actions and should be blamed for them.
We are talking about the same thing — although I didn’t have those specific passages in mind.
It is interesting. The chapter you cite is on the paramita of patience, which in Buddhist thinking is the antidote to anger. So Shantideva is using logic to help himself (or the reader) to work with anger. And the object of Shantideva’s or the reader’s anger is someone else who is angry. The notion is that the person who is angry is not in control. The anger results from a coming together of conditions — external conditions and karmic seeds (best thought of as habits of mind). A traditional Buddhist image for this is a man with his arms tied on the back of a blind donkey (conscious but out of control).
I don’t think that this is quite what a Western philosopher would mean by lack of free will. The Western notion of lack of free will seems to me to be more absolute, colored by abstract concepts like predestination. But you understand this better than I do — I could be wrong.
Shantideva, I think, is simply talking about habit — in the same way that you might say that a drug addict lacks free will. But exactly because the anger is a result of causes and conditions, it is impermanent. And that means that anger can be worked with in a hundred different ways (including avoiding the external conditions that trigger anger, employing logic as Shantideva does to change the rigid concept of an object of anger as a solid, fixed enemy, cultivating habits of compassion, or simply wearing down the habit of anger by neither acting on the anger nor suppressing it).
So I don’t think that Shantideva is saying that there is lack of free will in any absolute sense.
I’ve been reading The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley which is certainly not reducible to a wishy washy happy clappy monism. It’s a matter of the refraction of universal insights through various cultural milieus. To get that sense the proper scale in the mapping is vital, too close and the detail obliterates comparison, too far and there is nothing but amorphous mass.
Amod is right to doubt the Advaitic view of universalism which is no more than well meaning nonsense. When you examine what they have to say they are distinctly sectarian and very keen to draw the boundaries between themselves and all varieties of the besetting sin of ‘dualism’.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the great late 20th Century Buddhist teacher, was a sponsor of Buddhist / Christian dialogue and participated in several conferences with Christian monastics. In the 1970s, he was staying at Karme Choling, his retreat center in Vermont, and invited some of the clergy from the area over for tea. The meeting included discussion of religion and compassion and common threads in Buddhism and Christianity, with the local pastors sitting in arm chairs in the living room balancing tea cups on their knees.
As the story goes, after some time, one of the Protestant ministers got carried away with the sense of commonalities between the two religions and wanting to smooth over differences said something to the effect that Buddhists and Christians really believe in the same thing. Trungpa Rinpoche at that point, put down his teacup, turned to him and in a voice full of distain said: “Fuck you!”
This mediocre, theatrical, aberrant, and abusive “joker” is a “great Buddhist teacher”? One can only feel sorry for the state of “Buddhist wisdom” and the intellectual and moral condition of its purveyors if it has come to this.
For an exposure of his charlatanry by Geoffrey Falk, go to
http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsamplechapters/trungpa.asp
Here is a sample behavior expressing the incomparable “wisdom” of this self-styled “Vidyadhara”:
“At the Halloween costume party during an annual seminar in the autumn of 1975, for example:
A woman is stripped naked, apparently at Trungpa’s joking command, and hoisted into the air by [his] guards, and passed around—presumably in fun, although the woman does not think so (Marin, 1995).
The pacifist poet William Merwin and his wife, Dana, were attending the same three-month retreat, but made the mistake of keeping to themselves within a crowd mentality where that was viewed as offensive “egotism” on their part. Consequently, their perceived aloofness had been resented all summer by the other community members … and later categorized as “resistance” by Trungpa himself.
Thus, Merwin and his companion showed up briefly for the aforementioned Halloween party, danced only with each other, and then went back to their room.
Trungpa, however, insisted through a messenger that they return and rejoin the party. In response, William and his wife locked themselves in their room, turned off the lights … and soon found themselves on the receiving end of a group of angry, drunken spiritual seekers, who proceeded to cut their telephone line, kick in the door (at Trungpa’s command) and break a window (Miles, 1989).
Panicked, but discerning that broken glass is mightier than the pen, the poet defended himself by smashing bottles over several of the attacking disciples, injuring a friend of his. Then, mortified and giving up the struggle, he and his wife were dragged from the room.
[Dana] implored that someone call the police, but to no avail. She was insulted by one of the women in the hallway and a man threw wine in her face (Schumacher, 1992).
And then, at the feet of the wise guru, after Trungpa had “told Merwin that he had heard the poet was making a lot of trouble”:
[Merwin:] I reminded him that we never promised to obey him. He said, “Ah, but you asked to come” (Miles, 1989).
An argument ensued, during which Trungpa insulted Merwin’s Oriental wife with racist remarks [in return for which she called him a “Nazi”] and threw a glass of saké in the poet’s face (Feuerstein, 1992).
Following that noble display of high realization, Trungpa had the couple forcibly stripped by his henchmen—against the protests of both Dana and one of the few courageous onlookers, who was punched in the face and called a “son of a bitch” by Trungpa himself for his efforts.
“Guards dragged me off and pinned me to the floor,” [Dana] wrote in her account of the incident…. “I fought and called to friends, men and women whose faces I saw in the crowd, to call the police. No one did…. [One devotee] was stripping me while others held me down. Trungpa was punching [him] in the head, urging him to do it faster. The rest of my clothes were torn off.”
“See?” said Trungpa. “It’s not so bad, is it?” Merwin and Dana stood naked, holding each other, Dana sobbing (Miles, 1989).
Finally, others stripped voluntarily and Trungpa, apparently satisfied, said “Let’s dance” (Marin, 1995). “And so they did.”
And that, kiddies, is what they call “authentic Tibetan Buddhism.”
“Trungpa insulted Merwin’s Oriental wife with racist remarks.” What a joker!
Kenneth Rexroth got it right when he said:
“Many believe Chögyam Trungpa has unquestionably done more harm to Buddhism in the United States than any man living.”
Chogyam Trungpa R. was not a “self-styled” Vidyadhara. He was awarded that title in a proclamation by the Sixteenth Karmapa.
And there is one more fact about the events that you describe. Merwin and his friend decided to remain at the program for another month receiving teachings from Trungpa Rinpoche.
If that is a fact, one can only infer that the victims hanging around this abusive alcoholic were masochists. He was a cult leader who suffered from serious delusions of grandeur and the people who abjectly subjected themselves to his abuses were cogs in a vintage cult apparatus.
Jim,
I wonder if you would have returned for the so-called “teachings” if he had done the same thing to your wife and teenage daughter if you had one? I remain in mortal dread of an affirmative answer from you.
Nothing infuriates me more than acquiescence in the face of falsehood and delusion masquerading as truth and enlightenment.
The abusive alcoholic Trungpa’s “true legacy” was manifested in full glory in the form of his “dharma heir” Osel Tendzin. Here are some facts pertaining to Trungpa’s chosen “dharma heir”:
“Other behavior was troubling as well. As one scholar who has studied the community noted, Tendzin was “bisexual and known to be very promiscuous” and “enjoyed seducing straight men” but the community “did not find [this behavior] particularly troublesome.”[10]
Not all his partners were unwilling; one scholar noted “it became a mark of prestige for a man, gay or straight, to have sex with the Regent, just as it had been for a woman to have sex with [Trungpa] Rinpoche.”[11]
However, at least one student reported that Tendzin had raped him.[12] As a former Vajradhatu member attested, “a chilling story had recently been reported by one of Michael[13]’s teachers at the Buddhist private school. This straight, married male was pinned face-down across Rich’s desk by the guards [the Dorje Kasung] while Rich forcibly raped him.”[14]
It was revealed in 1989 that Ösel Tendzin had contracted HIV, and for nearly three years knew it, yet continued to have unprotected sex with his students, without informing them.[15][16] He transmitted HIV to a student who later died of AIDS.[17][18][19]
Others close to Tendzin, including the board of directors of Vajradhatu, knew for two years that Tendzin was HIV positive and sexually active, but kept silent.[20] As one student reported at the time,
I was very distressed that he and his entourage had lied to us for so long, always saying he did not have AIDS. I was even more distressed over the stories of how the Regent used his position as a dharma teacher to induce “straight” students to have unprotected sex with him, while he claimed he had been tested for AIDS but the result was negative.[10]
Stephen Butterfield, a former student, recounted in a memoir:
Tenzin offered to explain his behavior at a meeting which I attended. Like all of his talks, this was considered a teaching of dharma, and donations were solicited and expected. So I paid him $35.00 to hear his explanation. In response to close questioning by students, he first swore us to secrecy (family secrets again), and then said that Trungpa had requested him to be tested for HIV in the early 1980s and told him to keep quiet about the positive result. Tendzin had asked Trungpa what he should do if students wanted to have sex with him, and Trungpa’s reply was that as long as he did his Vajrayana purification practices, it did not matter, because they would not get the disease. Tendzin’s answer, in short, was that he had obeyed the guru.”[21]
Yathah Guruh, Tathah Sishyah! (Like Guru, like disciple!)
I feel sorry for this karmapa and wonder whether he knew anything about the meaning of “Vidyadhara” and Trungpa’s abusive antics.
I am sure you are aware that in many cases of abuse, the victim continues his or her relationship with the abuser on the grounds that the abuse was really motivated by love. Substitute “wisdom” for “love” here and you have the rationalization of the joker Trungpa’s abusive antics. This rationalization also explains the acquiescence of his followers in his abuses.
The best response to the “pseudo-Rinpoche” would have been to throw tea at his face and punch his face, but Protestantism is not conducive to such manly virtues!
I. “At its heart, this is a metaphysical question about what human beings are and what makes them so – a question which is also open to at least some empirical verification or falsification.”
What makes the question about “what human beings are and what makes them so” a metaphysical question rather than an empirical question? I suppose we would have to clarify the distinction between a metaphysical question and an empirical question to answer this.
And if it is a metaphysical question, how does it also become subject to “some empirical verification and falsification”? (Without empirical verification and falsification, we would be unable to distinguish between tall tales, fantasy, lies, and truth.)
If an empirical question is a question which can be settled by observation, experiment, statistical data, and expert testimony based on the preceding three sources, then the question about “what human beings are and what makes them so” is an empirical question in just the way the question about “what tigers are and what makes them so” is an empirical question.
If someone claims that human beings have a “soul” or that they have a “buddha nature”, we should ask: what is the empirically observable difference between having a soul or “buddha nature” and not having it? If there is no difference, then the claim that human beings have a “soul” is cognitively vacuous.
Once the difference is clearly specified, we can then examine the hypothesis of the soul or “buddha nature” in terms of our existing knowledge about human beings.
Common sense, shaped by evolution, has already furnished us with a great deal of knowledge about human nature, but this doesn’t mean that we always act in accordance with it. We flout this knowledge and act contrary to it under the influence of irrational beliefs and irrational desires and aversions.
Thus, there is an analogue, in the context of common sense knowledge and action which goes contrary to that knowledge, to the problem of Akrasia in the context of moral knowledge. I think the problem of Akrasia in ethics is just a particular manifestation of a general problem of weakness of will, ensuing in choices and actions contrary to what we know, in human nature. Perhaps, Amod can address this issue in a future post.
II. “Though Thill describes “common sense” as excluding “religious” ideas (which I suspect includes the “perennial” mystical monism), he shares with the perennialists a common view of human access to truth: all humans, across cultures, share an innate faculty which allows them access to truth, but most humans access this faculty so little that they are enmeshed in delusion. (As I noted above, epistemologically this seems to put both Thill and the perennialists on the side of the human nature debate that stresses our natural goodness.)”
The terms “truth” and “delusion” need clarification. Since they are “intensional” in their very nature, we need to clarify what they pertain to. Truth about what? Delusion concerning what?
I am talking about truths pertaining to the world we live in. Human beings anywhere on this planet who are without cognitive disability have access to truths about this world they live in. Without such access, they would not survive and organize their lives in certain ways.
It follows that it is plainly false that “most humans access this faculty so little”. If it were true, they would not survive, remain without loss of limb, and have a societal life in such overwhelmingly large numbers.
What does their alleged enmeshment in delusion pertain to? What are they allegedly deluded about? In any case, unless they suffer from mental disorder or illness, such delusions pale in contrast to the knowledge they do have and in terms of which those very delusions are identified, recognized, and often corrected or overcome.
That we have faculties which provide us access to truths about the world we live in does not entail that those faculties are morally good. In fact, the claim that they are morally good (or bad) is a category mistake.
Persons with good character and those with bad character use the selfsame faculties of perception and reason to commit good and bad deeds respectively, but it makes no sense to say that perception or reason is in itself morally good or bad. A knife is neither morally good because it can be used to extract a bullet, nor is it morally bad because it can be used to stab a person.
Faculties, e.g., perception and reason, are necessary conditions which make the knowledge of morally good or bad dispositions and the expressions of such dispositions in action possible. But they cannot in themselves be meaningfully deemed morally good or bad.
’empirically observable” does not add anything to “observable” plain and simple. Is there a “non-empirical” form of observation? What is it?
Much of this is well beyond me, but two small (hopefully-)discussion-worthy thoughts:
“If an empirical question is a question which can be settled by observation, experiment, statistical data, and expert testimony based on the preceding three sources, then the question about “what human beings are and what makes them so” is an empirical question in just the way the question about “what tigers are and what makes them so” is an empirical question.”
I think the difficulty here is that some things may be outside the bounds of empirical analysis. At least for now, there’s not way to gain direct empirical access to someone else’s sensory or emotional experience. Now, it is entirely possible that advances in our observational (or linguistic) skills will allow us to investigate/communicate these things. But it’s also possible that they never will. Thus, while some aspects of human nature are open to empirical study, others are (at least for now!) not.
“It follows that it is plainly false that “most humans access this faculty so little”. If it were true, they would not survive, remain without loss of limb, and have a societal life in such overwhelmingly large numbers.”
I think you may continue to underestimate the ability of humans to perform adequately on error-laden information and bad decision-making. Evolution is a good metaphor here: just because something made it this far, does not mean it’s beneficial, let alone optimal. “Humans survive and succeed, therefore they must be good at telling true from false” does not hold. One can perform poorly in some ways, and make up for it in other ways.
Our “societal life in… large numbers” actually speaks to this very point. You can get people to doubt their own judgment of basic and obvious perceptual facts (“which line is the longest?”) if you surround them with people who agree on a different answer. To draw an over-broad conclusion, humans succeed by coordinating our behavior, even at the expense of accurately understanding the world.
The attempt to resolve a metaphysical question through empirical analysis is like trying to understand Caravaggio by analyzing paint chips. You might find some useful information, probably not. What is certain is that you won’t even approach an understanding of “what Art is and what makes it so.”
This is true, but also a truism. The difficulty can often arise in distinguishing between empirical and metaphysical questions. We can all find questions that seemed philosophical at some point in history, but in the long term proved more amenable to empirical analysis. (Especially, but not solely, fields like psychology, neuroscience, and genetics.) Not that everything (by a long shot!) falls into this category, but plenty of things have.
Assuming that a given question is fundamentally metaphysical-only is often circular. I can certainly imagine the general form of what an empirical answer to “what is art?” would look like. I agree it’s unlikely that humanity will actually find such an answer, but it’s not inconceivable.
Ben:
Can you give some examples of the resolution by science of questions which were thought to be purely metaphysical? I have a feeling that this particular fallacy arose because Science used to be called Natural Philosophy. Go back to De Anima by Aristotle and the various books of the British Empiricists and point out where ‘external world’ theories have be struck down by advances in scientific knowledge. There is in Metaphysics a core subject that is speculative in nature and is not to be riddled by the sieve of science. To maintain that it is so scryable is a metaphysical position in itself.
Actually Ben you may have been bitten by a meme, the anti-metaphysical one. Should we not allow a metaphor to be adopted? Like there are catchy tunes with a hook there are ideas that on the face of it seem immediately persuasive. Our natural desire for economy of effort and judgement that is not too laboured allows the idea to take hold. Sooner or later that idea will turn up in the magazine section of the Times and the little daimon will utter ‘cave’. The meme metaphor taken under the guidance of a metaphysician is I think harmless.
Yeah, “meman” or the idea that there is a “homunculus” in every meme is also a “metaphor” and extremely “useful” in understanding the power and appeal of ideas. It very usefully explains why some ideas are more powerful than others. This is because the “meman” in these ideas is very powerful and exerts considerable occult powers on our minds. Don’t you dare appeal to puny empirical standards in evaluating such profound metaphysical notions!
“The selfish gene” nonsense has received the drubbing it deserves from Mary Midgley and others. The main explanation for the appeal of this absurd theory lies in the fact that it takes recourse to “voodoo genetics” to attempt to make a case for the absurd denial of the reality of altruism, a reality which simply falsifies Darwinian theories of human existence.
“the reality of altruism, a reality which simply falsifies Darwinian theories of human existence.”
This is germane to the “perennial question” on human nature. Although I accept an evolutionary explanation of the success of animal and human cognitive systems and processes, I think that the attempt to extend Darwinian explanation beyond this to the whole of human life or existence or human nature, e.g., “Evolutionary psychology”, has miserably failed and generated patent falsehoods and nonsense on the human condition.
Ramachandran:
“…to attempt to make a case for the absurd denial of the reality of altruism, a reality which simply falsifies Darwinian theories of human existence.”
This is an aside from the philosophical discussion, but be aware that modern genetics (call it Neo-Darwinian if you will) does not at all deny or contradict altruism. The very simplified explanation is, “it is good for a community to have altruistic members,” in a context where community/tribe/cluster means being biologically related (i.e., sharing genes).
“The very simplified explanation is, “it is good for a community to have altruistic members,” in a context where community/tribe/cluster means being biologically related (i.e., sharing genes).”
I presume you are aware that in these Neo-Darwinian discourses there is persistent confusion on whether altruism (in the ordinary understanding of that phenomenon) really exists or whether it is an appearance of something we would not ordinarily call “altruism”.
Anyway, you are talking about explanations of altruism which inexorably connect it to “shared genes”. The thesis is that altruistic behavior is determined by the extent to which I share my genes with another. The more genes I share, typically with close family members, the more altruistic I will be towards them.
This is immediately refuted by several commonplace facts. Some of these are:
1. Conspicuous asymmetry in the altruism of parents toward children and children towards parents. Children are far less altruistic toward their parents than parents are toward children. This blows away all genetic explanations of altruism.
2. Sibling rivalry.
3. Altruism toward total strangers.
Here come Jabali and Ramachandra at the head of a troop of memes. How would ye read ‘The Daffodils’. “I wandered lonely as a cloud”. Hold it, a cloud is inanimate and therefore cannot have emotions. “Ten thousand saw I at a glance”. No, no, you can’t see 10,000 at a glance, maybe 20, then you saccade from group to group. “They flash upon that inward eye”.
Pure Cartesianism.
As I see it Logical Positivism is a very resistant ‘virus’ that seems to have mutated into its present form of ‘common sense’. In this avatar it’s like those gadgets they sell on the shopping channels that can do everything, sand, cut, rout and scribe but my feeling is that they do nothing well. Make a lot of noise though!
Michael, the noise is all at your end. Are you saying that logical positivism and common sense philosophy cannot distinguish between literal and poetic uses of language? If so, it’s plain noise you are generating here!
Fashionable nonsense is the main staple of livelihood of many philosophers in the West these days. If one has nothing to add to common sense and/or science and is also vain and pretentious enough to resist this truth, “memes”, “selfish genes”, and so on are exactly the sorts of exotic products one will peddle in the “marketplace of ideas”.
What is a “meme”? Anything which is communicated from one person to another non-genetically. This implies that a “meme” can refer to anything cultural, from ideas to “mudras” or gestures.
Now, in light of this, it is meaningless to say that the term “meme” is a “metaphor”. (metaphor for what?)
The central question is: By calling any idea or cultural item a “meme”, what is one adding to one’s understanding? Nothing, it seems!
But the “genius” of Dawkins figured out out a way to turn an item of common and commonplace knowledge into something momentous by drawing an analogy between “ruthlessly selfish” self-replicating genes and the transmission or propagation of ideas from one person to another.
With his penchant for postulating mysterious intelligent agencies which turn human beings into their puppets, e.g., “ruthlessly selfish” genes turning organisms into their puppets for purposes of self-replication, he now advances the mind-numbing “theory” that ideas and other cultural items such as gestures have powers of intelligent agency to such an extent that they can take over human minds and use them for their own replication or propagation.
Thus, the “meme” for “love of all wisdom” (How many “memes” are involved in this complex idea?) has taken over Amod’s mind and has also found an ingenious way of propagating itself by manipulating his mind to create this blog! And it has now colonized the minds of those of us who are participating on this blog. Who knows how it is manipulating our minds right now to further propagate itself?
Michael:
It’s possible, those memes are selfish little propagators! But more seriously, it’s certainly possible I may have a historical misunderstanding of what counts as “metaphysical.” But in my understanding here, the specifics of human nature and behavior contain a lot of ground that was once metaphysical, now scientific. Why do we gamble? Why do we make these mistakes, but not those; why are we subject to these character flaws? (Once philosophical, now neuroscience.) Why do we age? (Once philosophical, now genetic.) In ages past, far fewer things fell under the purview of science; what were they before, if not philosophical?
Hi Ben:
I missed that class where the hard problem of consciousness was solved that somehow the neuronal traffic is at one and the same time thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories and reflections. Does, ‘it must be’, count as an answer? Personally I don’t think so.
When Aristotle thought that the brain was for cooling the body, was he doing philosophy or proto-biology? The latter without a doubt as he was quite empirical, going in for dissection and all that. He considered metaphysics as the science of science, being as such, causality as such and made clear the distinction between those speculations and empirical investigation. In pre-modern times specialism was not the rule as it is today.
Michael:
Note that I didn’t list “consciousness” as among the philosophical problems solved by science! I chose my examples carefully, because they are all from the (not overwhelmingly large) set of things that seem, at this point, better explained by science than philosophy. Some ‘character flaws’ arise from specific cognitive biases related to tradeoffs in what our brains are (and aren’t) good at, gambling is a fine example. The ‘why’ of aging is now pretty well explained by genetics, but I imagine the ‘why’ was once philosophical (or at least religious).
But what is a “metaphysical question”? What makes a question a metaphysical question?
Ben:
You say you “dislike” the meme idea. Why? I presume you will acknowledge that liking or disliking an idea has no implications for its plausibility or implausibility.
You say that that the meme idea has been “useful”. How? Note that “meme” is simply a fanciful term for the commonplace phenomenon of one person or group communicating, propagating his or its ideas, theories, symbols, and so on to others.
It is a truism that individuals and groups use various means to communicate and propagate ideas, symbols, etc. How is it useful to “explain” all this in the manner of a schizophrenic’s language in terms of those ideas, symbols, etc., acting like parasites and using individual minds to propagate themselves?
“I think you may continue to underestimate the ability of humans to perform adequately on error-laden information and bad decision-making.”
What on earth do you mean? Do you mean that a brain or heart surgeon can perform surgery “adequately” on the basis of error-laden information and bad decision-making? Pilots successfully take off and land everyday and even in bad weather on the basis of “error-laden information” coming from the control tower and their own “bad decision-making”? This is so obviously preposterous that I suspect you have not given any thought to what you are claiming here.
It should be obvious that survival requires that your information on matters which augment or undermine it is free from error. Error in these cases means death.
Now this doesn’t mean that survival rules out all errors or is inconsistent with any error. That would be absurd. But it does mean that on matters impacting on survival, the entity which has survived has managed to get things right rather than wrong.
When you drive on the freeway, you make some errors, e.g., not signalling when you change a lane, cutting someone off, etc. If you got away with it, this means that it wasn’t a critical error. But imagine someone saying “I never applied the brakes when I should have on the freeway. And I had no accident.” How likely is that?
Applying brakes based on the distance between your car and other cars is critical to avoiding an accident and saving your life. So, if you have returned home without an accident, it means you know how to apply the brakes and when to do so on the freeway. I presume you already know this. Hence, it is puzzling why you claim to the contrary that error-laden information and bad decision making on critical matters is consistent with survival.
“just because something made it this far, does not mean it’s beneficial, let alone optimal.”
I am not clear what you mean. Are you saying that the persistence of a trait or characteristic does not mean that it is beneficial or optimal for an organism? If so, I agree with you.
But note that this does not entail that the trait or characteristic is harmful or maladaptive either. That would be ruled out by natural selection. So, the trait or characteristic may be an “excrescence” or byproduct or remnant, e.g., our tailbone, having no significance one way or the other for the survival of the organism. Natural selection pertains only to adaptive and maladaptive features.
The fact that natural selection allows for the persistence of traits or characteristics or features which are neither adaptive nor maladaptive does not imply that any trait which has persisted is neither adaptive nor maladaptive.
On the whole, the operation of natural selection implies that an overwhelming number of features of any species which has managed to survive the vagaries of evolution must be adaptive. Hence, from the fact of survival, we can plausibly infer the presence of an overwhelming number of adaptive features.
I think you may have succumbed to an all or nothing fallacy here. If a species has survived over millions of years, it does not mean that ALL of its characteristics are adaptive. But this also rules out the possibility that it could have a significant number of maladaptive features. Rather, it implies that a significant number of its features are adaptive. This is a basic implication of natural selection.
“Humans survive and succeed, therefore they must be good at telling true from false” does not hold. One can perform poorly in some ways, and make up for it in other ways.”
What are you saying? It contradicts elementary knowledge on the requirements for survival!
If you can’t tell correctly in a majority of instances whether you can safely cross a road full of traffic, what are your chances of escaping death or being maimed for life? If you can’t tell correctly whether a tiger or grizzly bear is a threat to your life, what are your chances of survival? If you can’t tell correctly the edible form the non-edible in the majority of cases, what are your chances of survival? If you can’t tell correctly whether the elements of nature pose a threat to your life, what are your chances of survival?
“Our “societal life in… large numbers” actually speaks to this very point. You can get people to doubt their own judgment of basic and obvious perceptual facts (“which line is the longest?”) if you surround them with people who agree on a different answer. To draw an over-broad conclusion, humans succeed by coordinating our behavior, even at the expense of accurately understanding the world.”
You are talking about matters which make no difference to survival. Instead, consider predators, threats from the elements of nature, and so on see whether humans can succeed in surviving merely by coordinating their behaviors at the expense of accurately understanding the world. Start a big fire, or let loose a bunch of lions and get a few people to shout that it will not burn or that the lions are harmless and see how much “coordination” you can get.
Don’t jump down my throat there, Thill. I can start out by saying I “dislike” something as a quick-and-dirty index of my general opinion on it, since I followed up in the same paragraph by elaborating that “I think the concept impedes understanding, because idea propagation is not truly much like genetic propagation.” It it worth our time and space to discuss that point further? I didn’t think so, the “meme” thing is pretty tangential (and one on which we largely agree).
I don’t have the time to write nearly as long and involved a response as your post deserves, but I’ll lay out what I can.
1) I call the “meme” term “useful” based on empirical observation: the word has clearly moved into common usage. People apparently find it handy to have a single word for that truism.
2) We’ve both made our cases repeatedly about the evidence and logic for/against the idea of humanity’s error-prone ways. I can provide empirical counter-arguments to your points (examples where people perform poorly, statistics for road deaths, the amount of cognitive science and redundancy required to design a cockpit safely), but I think we should let this argument rest. You are convinced one way by the logical implausibility of my claim; I am convinced the other way by the empirical evidence for my claim. Let’s not waste energy on this, because we evidently both have our minds made up on the topic. Let’s not turn this into a Classic Internet Argument where we rehash the same things again and again, better to move on to more fruitful topics!
3) “The fact that natural selection allows for the persistence of traits or characteristics or features which are neither adaptive nor maladaptive does not imply that any trait which has persisted is neither adaptive nor maladaptive.”
I think we agree that a persisting trait could be anywhere on the spectrum: adaptive, maladaptive, or neither (or, most likely of all, both). For any randomly-chosen trait, I’d concede that it’s presumably more likely to be adaptive. But that’s probabilistic; we can’t just assume that said trait must be adaptive, just because it exists. Even the language of “adaptive” muddles things, to be honest: traits have costs and tradeoffs, and even something “positive” could probably be better.
4) “If you can’t tell correctly in a majority of instances whether you can safely cross a road full of traffic, what are your chances of escaping death or being maimed for life? ”
I think my position is best summed up by the sentence, “People get killed and maimed in traffic all the time.”
5) “You are talking about matters which make no difference to survival. Instead, consider predators, threats from the elements of nature, and so on see whether humans can succeed in surviving merely by coordinating their behaviors at the expense of accurately understanding the world.”
Think about individual soldiers in an army. Convince and coordinate them to walk into confrontations with masses of armed “murderers”, and the army wins, even though many soldiers die.
“4) “If you can’t tell correctly in a majority of instances whether you can safely cross a road full of traffic, what are your chances of escaping death or being maimed for life? ”
I think my position is best summed up by the sentence, “People get killed and maimed in traffic all the time.””
You can’t logically infer from the truth of your sentence “People get killed and maimed in traffic all the time.” that those people got killed and maimed despite judging correctly that they can safely cross a road full of traffic! The obvious conclusion to draw is that they failed to judge correctly that it is safe to cross.
Nor can you logically infer that the proportion of people who get killed and maimed in traffic is significantly greater than those who don’t.
The simple fact is that the percentage of people who don’t get killed or maimed in traffic is far greater than the percentage of people who do get killed or maimed in traffic. And the simple explanation of this fact is that it is because the percentage of people who make correct judgments on navigating through traffic far outnumbers the percentage of people who make mistakes.
Consider the task of flying a plane successfully. It is certainly a very complex task. If human beings were so prone to error as you imagine, the percentage of failure here would be significantly, if not overwhelmingly, greater than the percentage of successful flights.
What do you think is the truth here and could any reasonable explanation of the percentage of successful flights possibly rest on the claim that such successful flights are consistent with using “error-laden information” and “bad decision making”? No way!
“5) “You are talking about matters which make no difference to survival. Instead, consider predators, threats from the elements of nature, and so on see whether humans can succeed in surviving merely by coordinating their behaviors at the expense of accurately understanding the world.”
Think about individual soldiers in an army. Convince and coordinate them to walk into confrontations with masses of armed “murderers”, and the army wins, even though many soldiers die.”
How are you going convince and coordinate them without recourse to good reasons including reasons of accuracy or plausibility? Certainly, obviously bad reasons or patent falsehoods are not going achieve the coordination you want.
The point is that there are serious constraints on the feasibility of achieving “coordination” at the expense of getting things right. As the saying goes, you can’t fool everyone all the time! Nor is anyone fooled most of the time.
Ben’s tactic seems to be to offer “rebuttals” of the following sort:
Claim: Humans can walk.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: “People stumble and fall all the time.”
Claim: Humans can see.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: “Humans fail to see all the time.”
Claim: Humans can calculate.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: “Humans fail to calculate correctly all the time.”
Claim: Humans can understand each other.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: Humans misunderstand each other all the time.”
Claim: Humans can fly planes.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: Planes crash all the time.
Claim: Humans can drive cars.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: Car crashes occur all the time.
Claim: Humans can think logically.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: They commit fallacies all the time.
Claim: Humans are successful in extending their longevity.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: “Humans die prematurely all the time.”
Claim: Humans can correctly distinguish colors.
Ben’s “Rebuttal”: “Color blindness occurs all the time.”
The flaw in Ben’s tactic of “rebuttal” is to take the proffered claim as a universal admitting no exceptions and then to offer an obvious or unusual exception by way of “rebuttal” or “refutation”.
But the claim, needless to say, was not intended as a universal claim admitting of no exceptions. Rather, it is meant to be a statistical claim based on normal conditions. It purports to assert that something holds true in the majority of normal cases. Hence, the alleged rebuttal by way of counterexample drawn from normal or unusual cases is no rebuttal at all of the proffered claim.
The fact that children, youths, and middle-aged people die “all the time” in America is not a rebuttal of the claim that the life expectancy in this country is 78.7 years (in 2009).
Neocarvaka:
Those are not the claims that people have made. There is a big difference between “People can drive cars” and “People can drive cars well”; between “People can think logically” and “People are good at thinking logically.” Obviously, we can argue about the meaning of words and phrases like “well”, “good at”, and “reliable”. But where I see consistent systematic errors, I don’t apply those adjectives.
In addition, all of my real-world counter-examples are (to me) the gravy. I try to lead with arguments from controlled research, that demonstrate consistent biases and flaws in decision-making, perception and behavior. People say “That doesn’t matter in a real-world situation!”, so I respond with real-world reflections of the same effect. Of course the effect is less clear in an uncontrolled setting where people can compensate for one flaw with another strength.
“I try to lead with arguments from controlled research, that demonstrate consistent biases and flaws in decision-making, perception and behavior.”
It’s a miracle how your “controlled research” and “arguments” based on it remains immune to those “consistent biases and flaws”, isn’t it?
“It’s a miracle how your “controlled research” and “arguments” based on it remains immune to those “consistent biases and flaws”, isn’t it?”
Of course they aren’t, Moore. Scientific understanding gets turned over all the time, as do my opinions! The best we can do is muddle onwards with our current knowledge, and try to improve it, in this as in all other things.
One can only feel sorry for your prospective employees and romantic partners! How could they possibly get anything other than an “unsatisfactory” rating from you? LOL
I think you have been infected by the “meme” for perfectionism: if things are not perfect, then they can’t be good enough to rely on.
But the most glaring flaw in your reasoning is this: in all this harping on mistakes and errors, you assume without question that you are correct in identifying something as a mistake or error!
This degree of assurance in your ability to identify error is paradoxical in the face of your insistence that error is widespread. Wouldn’t error then also afflict our ability to detect it?
If you were consistent, you would acknowledge that the same alleged degree of preponderance of error is present in your very attempts to identify error. But this would undermine your position.
Thill:
1) “One can only feel sorry for your prospective employees and romantic partners!”
Does that make a point in this argument, or are you just trying to go ad hominem? Of course “unflawed human being” is not my goal or desire among employees, friends, romantic partners, or my self.
2) “I think you have been infected by the “meme” for perfectionism: if things are not perfect, then they can’t be good enough to rely on.”
This depends on what we mean by “rely on”. We have to rely on them, and do rely on them, because we have no other option. To rely on something does not mean it’s not still error-prone. (Insert the discussion about the meaning of ‘reliable’ here.)
3) “If you were consistent, you would acknowledge that the same alleged degree of preponderance of error is present in your very attempts to identify error. But this would undermine your position.”
Humility is certainly something I strive for. But that doesn’t mean responding to all arguments with “I could be wrong, therefore I concede the point.” As I commented to Moore’shand above:
“Scientific understanding gets turned over all the time, as do my opinions! The best we can do is muddle onwards with our current knowledge, and try to improve it, in this as in all other things.”
We get into cars every day, despite the odds that we’ll mess up so badly that we die. In that same way, we live our lives (and argue our arguments) despite knowing our own imperfections. You’ve made this point in the past, and I still disagree with it: to be flawed is not to be useless. Self-doubt does not necessitate universal philosophical skepticism.
1) “You can’t logically infer from the truth of your sentence “People get killed and maimed in traffic all the time.” that those people got killed and maimed despite judging correctly that they can safely cross a road full of traffic! The obvious conclusion to draw is that they failed to judge correctly that it is safe to cross.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying: people make bad judgments.
2) “Consider the task of flying a plane successfully. It is certainly a very complex task. If human beings were so prone to error as you imagine, the percentage of failure here would be significantly, if not overwhelmingly, greater than the percentage of successful flights.”
Airplane crashes and disasters are much less common now than they were in the past. Modern flight is supported by many redundant systems, both human and electronic, and cockpits been extensively designed by cognitive scientists (and automated) to avoid the worst of the pitfalls. And commercial pilots are a small and carefully-selected pool: small private planes have much higher crash rates.
But I think the underlying disagreement here is “what counts as bad enough?” Every year, just over 1/10,000 of the entire US population gets killed in motor vehicle accidents. Is that number small (0.01%) or large (33,000)? Does that mean traveling in a car is dangerous, or safe? I would describe it as “dangerous”; it’s certainly more likely to be fatal than many other activities that people consider dangerous, such as skydiving (1/1M), rock climbing (1/300k), or flying commercial air travel (1/125M).
Every day, tens of thousands of people in the US alone people fatally misjudge the risks of getting in their car, of driving at that speed, of other drivers; they forget to take a basic safety precaution, they misjudge the position or motion of their own or another car, they fail to pay attention at the right time. I take this (on top of the many more rigorous controlled experiments) as supporting my thesis that humans make perception/decision errors even in life-or-death situations. If you don’t, then we just have a difference of valuation here.
We surely survive more often than we die, but only the most unfortunate or egregious failures result in death. Do we succeed more often than we fail? Impossible to measure, but sure. It comes back to the same question: “How often does a failure have to occur, to reflect an underlying problem?”
3) “How are you going convince and coordinate [soldiers] without recourse to good reasons including reasons of accuracy or plausibility? Certainly, obviously bad reasons or patent falsehoods are not going achieve the coordination you want.”
I don’t think “good reasons” involving “accuracy or plausibility” are anywhere in the picture, during training in a military boot camp. Soldiers are taught behaviors, skills, and (importantly in this case) group unity. If the yardstick is survival-related decision-making, then your patent falsehood is that it’s a good idea to walk into the path of spears and bullets, horses and bombs. Military training is precisely about coordinating people to do the opposite of what their survival instincts tell them.
Thill:
It will no doubt be a comfort to you that your thinking is in alignment with the Scholastic tag:
Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.
However they move on from that to the elaboration of this material into higher order speculations whereby the ideas of causality, nature , contingency and the soul amongst other things come into play. The idea of the soul or for that matter buddha-mind is not given in sense perception but is a theoretical construct which attempts to pull together the data into a unified whole. One might not agree with those theories and feel entitled to proffer one’s own construction but it in turn will be a surpassing of the data in a manner of speaking.
To Thill on altruism:
Agree with you on all of those observations- I fear you may be thinking of a much more straw-filled vision of evolution. The explanation I gave for altruism was, as I said, much simplified.
As I understand it, shared genes may (with all the usual “we made this up” caveats of evolutionary storytelling) have been the original drive towards development of altruism. But community survival works well too. All human genes are related, compared to the genes in tigers and forest fires; and/or, the behavior, once developed at a “community” level, does not take into account our semi-modern reduced ability to tell who’s related.
There’s actually a common thread to the explanations currently given for altruism and homosexuality: either one seems detrimental to the individual’s reproduction, yet we have them anyways. Leading theories hold that it’s advantageous to the community, to nevertheless have some such individuals/instances.
The point simply being, the existence of altruism does not necessarily come into conflict with modern evolutionary though. I’m certainly not going to deny the existence of altruism, nor declare that altruism requires genetic relationships.
These genetic determinist accounts of features of human nature and existence are false. Common sense clearly shows that.
Note that the explanation is a causal one and the causal efficacy of genes in relation to this or that feature of human nature is independent of belief and knowledge in just the way the causal efficacy of bacteria or viruses in relation to this or that is independent of belief and knowledge, i.e., catching an infection is not dependent on your belief or knowledge about it. Microbiologists also succumb to infections.
The point is that since the causal efficacy of genes is independent of our beliefs and knowledge concerning how whether we share any genes at all or how much we share them with another individual, we should expect altruistic behavior to occur independently of any belief or knowledge of the extent to which one shares one’s genes with another individual. And, of course, if “the shared genes theory of altruism” is correct, we should expect altruism to occur more in relation to individuals with whom one shares more of one’s genes rather than those with whom one shares less of one’s genes.
If I put you in a room with ten people three of whom are your relatives and the rest unrelated to you, and you don’t know that any of them is related to you, how likely is it that you will behave altruistically or more altruistically toward those three individuals rather than the other seven? Not likely at all.
We have plenty of real-life cases in which people have exhibited “ruthless selfishness” towards individuals later known to be related to them, not to mention cases of “ruthless selfishness” toward those already known to be related to them!!
If the amount of genes I share with another has ANY causal power to determine the nature of my behavior toward them, this would not occur at all.
Even in the animal kingdom, this theory is refuted everyday by the overwhelming number of instances of the absence of altruism toward parents and siblings.
So, I think it is simply false that the amount of genes I share with another in itself has any causal power to make me behave altruistically toward them.
And this implies that the genetic theory of altruism is false.
“There’s actually a common thread to the explanations currently given for altruism and homosexuality: either one seems detrimental to the individual’s reproduction, yet we have them anyways. Leading theories hold that it’s advantageous to the community, to nevertheless have some such individuals/instances.”
Yes, no doubt, volunteers who help their communities are disproportionately homosexual or lesbian!
Another egregious falsehood! How many gays and lesbians spend their lives helping their communities, or even immediate families, more than heterosexuals?
1) “…we should expect altruistic behavior to occur independently of any belief or knowledge of the extent to which one shares one’s genes with another individual”
I agree completely. You’re spending a lot of time ranting against something that noone here believes in. Any evolutionary theory certainly needs to take this effect into account, and good ones do. One hypothesis is that these behaviors evolved in a setting where everyone in your community was related to you (a tribe), so our actual yardstick for “are they related?” is determined in practice by “are they in my community?”
This may or may not be wholly convincing, but again, the point is that evolution and altruism are not in some kind of logical contradiction; there are theories of the former that account (or try to account) for the latter.
2) “Another egregious falsehood! How many gays and lesbians spend their lives helping their communities, or even immediate families, more than heterosexuals?”
Okay, seriously, Thill. There’s only so much detail possible in a single blog comment, so there will always be some details left out of a given comment. If something seems wrong to you, perhaps you have misunderstood, or I have been unclear. Consider asking for clarification before leaping to ridicule. The discussions on this blog will be much more productive that way.
My actual point was that having homosexual people creates individuals who aren’t producing children of their own. In other words, the number of productive adults (hunter-and-gatherers, if you will) exceeds the number of baby-makers and -tenders (which both keeps adults busy, and creates more mouths to feed). No behavioral differences are required, other than the lack of children.
Ben, pl. refrain from using words like “rant” to describe rational criticisms. It is inaccurate.
Second, if you are inclined to take criticisms, including reasoned ridicule, of views personally, or tend to think that I am assuming that you invariably subscribe to a view I am attacking, there is bound to be friction in continuing this discussion.
Apparently, you have forgotten the central claim of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are maximizing their own “fitness”, i.e., survival and reproduction, all the time. This is the only game in town according to Darwinism.
In Dawkins’ version, “ruthless selfishness” of the genes in terms of ensuring their own replication is the only game in town.
Homosexuality, voluntary celibacy, suicide, altruism, infanticide, and so on offer conclusive falsifications of that central claim of Darwinism, including Dawkins’ version of it. Anyone who understands the meaning of that claim ought to be able to understand this simple point.
If you abandon the thesis that maximizing one’s own fitness is the only game in town, then you are not talking about Darwinism at all.
By the way, you missed my point on the incoherence in your position on the preponderance of error. The point is that if your thesis is correct, then it is very likely that it is wrong!
Your “controlled research” and “arguments” based on them are also full of errors in terms of your own thesis. But every instance of correct detection of those numerous errors proves the point that we get things right more often than we get things wrong.
On the other hand, if error is so pervasive, then we would also be wrong in thinking that we committed an error. And, by the logic of double negation, this would mean that we got it right after all!
And this is the central issue, for the benefit of those befuddled by these exchanges. I am not denying that we commit errors and you say you are not denying that we get things right. So, we must disagree then on whether we generally get things right rather than wrong.
If this is the central issue, i.e., whether we generally get things right rather than wrong, then every time we recognize an error we got it right that it was an error. And this only supports the view that our ability to get things right, including getting things right by detecting and correcting mistakes, far exceeds our inability to get things right including not understanding whether we have made an error.
Another approach would be to say that whether we get things right more often than not depends on individual variables such as intelligence and factors such as special training and also the cognitive domain in question, e.g., language use, recognition of everyday objects, driving a car, flying a plane, etc. Hence, a blanket claim to the effect that “we” generally get things right rather than wrong or vice-versa is meaningless.
I am inclined to think that there is a basic cognitive domain, the one on which our survival depends and which includes language use, identification of objects and their basic properties, recognition of one’s bodily and emotive states, recognition of other people’s bodily and emotive states, etc., in which, on the condition of absence of cognitive disability, we get things right in an overwhelming number of instances. This is consistent with acknowledging that there are other cognitive domains in which getting things right comes only after considerable and consistent training and correction. But then, even here, the notion of successful correction implies that we can rely on our error-detection processes to work well most of the time.
“Ben, pl. refrain from using words like “rant” to describe rational criticisms. It is inaccurate.”
Thill, I apologize. After getting to the end of your last comment, I retroactively read an elevated tone into the entire text; it seems I was mistaken, and I apologize for it.
“Second, if you are inclined to take criticisms, including reasoned ridicule, of views personally, or tend to think that I am assuming that you invariably subscribe to a view I am attacking, there is bound to be friction in continuing this discussion.”
Thill, exclamations like “Another egregious falsehood!” will always come across the internet with a tone of derision. If you do not intend such a tone, a more measured choice of words will be useful to us all.
Now on to the discussion…
1) “Apparently, you have forgotten the central claim of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are maximizing their own “fitness”, i.e., survival and reproduction, all the time. This is the only game in town according to Darwinism.”
That was the only game in town according to Darwin, certainly. And that’s why I agree with you that classical Darwinism has serious shortcomings. Thankfully, our modern understanding of genetics has moved beyond that, to (try to) include things like group fitness and social behavior.
If I reacted too defensively to your criticism on Darwinism, blame creationists! They use the word “Darwinism” to describe their target when assaulting the entire theory of evolution by natural selection, root and branch.
2) “And this is the central issue, for the benefit of those befuddled by these exchanges. I am not denying that we commit errors and you say you are not denying that we get things right. So, we must disagree then on whether we generally get things right rather than wrong.”
I think it might be more precise to say we disagree on what counts as “generally” in this context. The distillation of my opinion would be: “We get things wrong often enough to be skeptical about claims of the quality of our faculties, but not so often that we can’t act and behave passably well.”
From my position it does not follow either that all conclusions (including this one) must be erroneous. Instead, it leads to a position of humility about the capabilities of any of our faculties, the recognition that they are not as good as we like to think they are.
I think we’ve both said our piece aplenty on that topic, so I’m happy to give it a rest!
Perhaps I am missing something. I do not believe that evolutionary theory has anything to say about “organisms maximizing their own fitness”. Evolutionary theory involves an analysis of systems and relationships of species to their environments to explain the presently existing diversity of life on earth. Species evolve as traits that they possess become more or less advantageous in changing environments.
Viewing evolution from the perspective of a single organism struggling and desiring to “succeed” by propagating itself is unnecessary for evolutionary theory. It is a projection based on a view that organisms have existence independent from their environment and their relationships with other organisms. That is an incorrect perception.
We’re all been speaking a bit loosely on that point, it’s true. It’s not organisms themselves that maximize their own fitness, it’s that the population-environment interaction leads to the selection of certain traits over others. But I think, if you’ll permit us to clean up our language, the underlying questions remain coherent. Are genes/traits more likely to succeed and reproduce, if they lead to behaviors like altruism? Or is a different framework required to explain such behaviors?
I think the former, for reasons much like the ones you describe: it’s not about the individual in isolation. Social environment is part of the environment that affects selection, and there are advantages to producing a more amenable social environment. (“Amenable” being an intentionally loose term there, since it covers a wide variety of ways in which individuals with in the community, individually or as a group, might be more likely to reproduce.)
I don’t understand the need to relate every human aspiration and action to survival. It seems to me that compassion and altruism are well out of the range of what a theory such as evolution is intended or able to address. Humans are about so much more than survival. Is this even a point that requires debate?
However, if you want to posit that man’s highest achievement is to create offspring, I suppose you could make a case that altrusim is a favorable trait because a meaningful subset of women don’t like to date assholes.
Amod’s claims on free will require some discussion.
1. “Then there is the similarly metaphysical question of free will – much less subject to empirical verification.”
If free will is understood in its common sense, i.e., the ability to make choices, especially choices contrary to external and/or internal influences, why would it be “much less subject to empirical verification” whether we can choose between any two options or courses of action X and Y, whether we can choose to do something against our inclinations or desires, and so on? Isn’t it common sense, common knowledge, that we often do so?
There are former addicts and alcoholics who have resisted tremendous inner pressure and chosen not to use drugs or alcohol. As a matter of simple experiment, one can change any long standing habit by choosing to do the contrary or choosing to refrain from the habitual.
Even the purveyors of hardcore determinism can’t meaningfully and sincerely deny these commonplace facts although they often end up wanting to have and eat their determinist cake at the same time, e.g, Dawkins claiming on the one hand that we are “robots” programmed by ruthlessly selfish genes and at the same time urging that we should advocate altruism more actively!
2. “So you can’t get even close to a Kantian ethics without free will – but consequentialist ethics can do fine without it.”
“Consequentialist ethics” like any other ethics contains prescriptions and prohibitions. These would be meaningless if people cannot exercise choices.
No ethics can do fine without presupposing the fact that we can make choices, including choices contrary to causal influences. It would be meaningless to praise or blame someone if he couldn’t have done anything otherwise. It would also be meaningless to urge him to do anything at all if his actions are determined.
3. “Very much like Nietzsche, Śāntideva believes that the idea of free will is harmful and dangerous because it leads us to blame others: their actions have causes just like a stomach upset does, so we should not get angry at them any more than we get angry at our stomach bile.”
But Nietzsche’s project of surpassing one’s humanity without abnegating it makes no sense without free will. Even the ethics of “will to power” requires it. The overflow of strength which is the mark of the healthy cannot occur in robots or puppets. It can only be experienced by beings who choose to embrace challenges and overcome them.
The “idea” of free will also leads us to praise others. And blame and praise are both in order in ethics. If Santideva praises Bodhisattvas or Buddhas, this would be meaningful only if it is NOT the case that they were programmed like robots to do great deeds or achieve “enlightenment”. Further, what would be the point in exhorting us not to get angry if we cannot possibly choose not to get angry?
Thill:
You would be applying the same thinking to free will as you perhaps do to the perception of the external world. Reasoning about it is not required. As Shankara said on the subject ‘might do, might not do, might do differently’. No reason is required to establish it. It is patent. Would that be a correct view of your position?
The next question would be – if no reasoning is required to establish it, can any reason challenge it? May we propose a structural illusion. What I mean is that even though we cannot but see the will as free, it ontologically is not.
Are you asking me to reason and consider this or that about the reality of free will? If I have no choice in the matter, what would be the point of your asking me to think or reason about whether free will is real?
So, any claim to the effect that we should consider this or that aspect or fact already presupposes the reality of choice, of free will.
There is really no problem of free will (in the ordinary sense of our ability to make choices, including choices contrary to causal influences, external or internal) for common sense and our ordinary lives. It is a fact, not a problem.
The so-called problem of free will (Is free will a reality?) arises only if you subscribe to some theory which implies determinism, e.g., that there is an omnipotent and omniscient God, that rigid deterministic causal relations encompass the whole of existence, and so on.
Altruism is a fact, but it becomes a problem (Does it exist? How can it exist? etc) only if you subscribe to some weird theory, Darwinian or Mandevillian, of universal selfishness of individuals, organisms, genes, and so forth.
I think it’s worth considering the theory-dependence of philosophical problems.
Does life present us with any philosophical problems or are these problems generated by past or present philosophical theories?
If we don’t subscribe to any philosophical theory, would there still be any philosophical problems?
I suspect that there were cultures in which there was no philosophy as we understand it, i.e., no questions and discussions about about whether free will is real, whether we can really know the external world, whether we can know what is good and bad, whether the mind is independent of the body, whether there is a God, and so on.
So, why did some cultures develop philosophy and others didn’t?
If there is an intrinsic connection between living in the world as a human being and asking philosophical questions, if philosophy is indispensable for human life, how come these cultures, or rather groups of human beings, did not raise any philosophical questions?
There were good and wise people in these cultures which didn’t have philosophy and, obviously, their goodness and wisdom was not the result of any “meta-ethics” or philosophical thinking about the foundations of good and bad or even “moral education” as we understand it now in the West and in societies afflicted and infected by popular Western “memes” or “mind-parasites”. LOL
For all their traditions of philosophy, what is the state of Western societies now? For all its high flights of metaphysics and “spirituality” for more than a thousand years, what is the state of India today?
How many of the purveyors of “highfalutin” philosophy and theology in these societies, the learned professors, intellectuals, and such, have found the path to living with joy, with delight?
“Moore’s Hand”, when you ask “How many of the purveyors of “highfalutin” philosophy and theology in these societies, the learned professors, intellectuals, and such, have found the path to living with joy, with delight?”, aren’t you assuming that it is possible and feasible to live “with joy, with delight” and that we ought to? That’s a philosophical assumption and belies espousal of a philosophical theory!
The cultures which have no philosophy couldn’t possibly ask your question about “living with joy, with delight”, could they? Would you say that some individuals in those cultures nevertheless lived “with joy, with delight” without even asking the question? If so, asking the question has no necessary relation to attaining the condition of living “with joy, with delight”.
So, those who ask “How can I live with joy, with delight?” are not more likely to attain that condition of “living with joy, with delight” than those who don’t ask that question! LOL
Only a person lacking in joy, delight, in his or her life would ask: How can I live with joy, with delight?
Perhaps, one should ask instead: Why am I without joy or delight? (and more importantly) Why do I need joy or delight?
Moore’s Hand:
Don’t blame the poor philosophers working in the nous mines, they have little effect on the working and wonderings of the greater society in the West. They don’t participate much in political life and hardly if ever pronounce on the evils of the day. The exceptions who glance above the parapet, whom you can glimpse through the machicolations, prove the rule.
Some of the contributors to this blog seem unaware of the serious confusion on altruism in both Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian accounts.
Since struggle for existence, competition for life, is the basic condition of all organisms on this planet according to Darwinism, altruism cannot possibly survive or persist.
Now comes the mauling of the fact of altruism beyond recognition.
If altruism is “explained” (actually it’s explained away) as behavior which results from the imperative followed by every organism to maximize its own “fitness”, it is no longer recognizable as altruistic behavior and is just a delusive appearance of what is actually ruthlessly selfish behavior.
If in its form of “kin altruism”, or altruism toward close kin, it is “explained” as resulting from the machinations of selfish genes to replicate themselves in close kin, it is no longer recognizable as altruistic behavior and is just a delusive appearance of what is actually ruthlessly selfish behavior of genes. So, these sorts of explanations tantamount to a denial of the reality of altruism. It is a delusive appearance of what is actually selfish behavior.
Thus, these are not actually explanation of altruism at all since they end up denying its reality! You can’t possibly be explaining racism if you are ending up saying that it doesn’t really exist!
Altruism, by definition, is behavior which involves an agent sacrificing his or her interests for the sake of others, family, friends, loved ones, the community or group, the nation, and so on.
To “explain” altruism in terms of its being functional for the group or community blatantly begs the question of why behavior which is functional for the group or community occurs and persist at all.
“Group selection” theories now face the problem of explaining selfish and anti-social behavior, not to mention behaviors which bring about the extermination of large numbers of one’s own community! The behaviors of Stalin, Mao, and Pinochet are all refutations of “group selection” theory.
Jabali-
“To “explain” altruism in terms of its being functional for the group or community blatantly begs the question of why behavior which is functional for the group or community occurs and persist at all.”
How so? I’m not sure I see the circularity in “Altruism can be accommodated by evolutionary theories, because populations with altruistic/community-oriented behaviors perform better than populations without.” This kind of explanation does not deny altruism. Nor does it beg the question: it explains the apparently-problematic issue (“why does individual altruism exist?”) with a less-problematic answer (“because individuals in cooperative communities are more likely to succeed”).
That said, you’re correct that it leads to the question of “why is there selfish and anti-social behavior?” A few possible arguments for this are pretty clear, I’ll present the one I think is best. There is a tradeoff between cooperative communities and selfish individuals: the actual best position is to be the one selfish person in a group of altruistic people. But too many selfish people, and the group falls apart. Therefore, communities contain a mix of pro-selfish and pro-altruistic genes, and evolution shapes the balance between these two, rather than eliminating either entirely.
Finally, it’s best to keep in mind that these are biological and evolutionary theories, not philosophical arguments. As such, the explanations and narratives must fit/explain/predict noisy data. Natural variation means there will always be exceptions.
“Altruism can be accommodated by evolutionary theories, because populations with altruistic/community-oriented behaviors perform better than populations without.”, note that “perform better” is vague. Darwinism requires that you speak of the “fitness” of the group in the specific sense of its ability to maximize its survival and reproduction.
Further, if natural selection is supposed to yield traits which are adaptive for the group rather than the individual (the main thrust of group selection theory), then there should be far greater instances of altruism than we actually find. So, why is altruism rare than frequent or commonplace, particularly in animal species, but also in the human species?
Human life is rich enough to encompass a diversity of forms of altruistic behavior. Sacrificing one’s interests for one’s immediate family or social group is not the only one form of altruism.
How do evolutionary theories explain altruism which can go against the interests of one’s immediate family or group? E.g., Germans who worked as spies, at considerable risk to their own lives, for the Allied forces to bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany, or Germans who risked their own lives to save Jews, White abolitionists or civil rights activists who defended, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, the interests of blacks, and so on.
“Further, if natural selection is supposed to yield traits which are adaptive for the group rather than the individual ”
Not “rather than” traits adaptive for the individual, but “in addition to” traits adaptive for the individual. That was the main thrust of my prior comment: there are selection pressures for each, thus each propensity remains and mixes in the population.
“…there should be far greater instances of altruism than we actually find.”
Why is the current amount too little? Would some other specific amount be enough? There seems to be a fair amount of altruism among humans, and similar behaviors among the few animals with more complicated social dynamics (there’s been lots of recent research on vampire bats, of all things). The key point is that evolution is an ongoing process: it’s not like we’re in some kind of optimal or stable end-state.
“How do evolutionary theories explain altruism which can go against the interests of one’s immediate family or group?”
Generally, through a person’s identifying with a different or larger group. For example, seeing all humanity as part of your “group”. It’s the inverse of the genocide thing: quite evidently, who we consider in our “community” is more choice than genetics.
“Yes, but this does not work for the “Joe Shmoe” who goes around shooting people in malls and schools in America.”
And that is where it matters that (A) there is a lot of noise and individual variation, (B) it is an ongoing rather than a completed process, and (C) all traits are tradeoffs. Evolution can tell us about the frequency and distribution of genes, but a one-in-a-million outlier of that distribution can still make the evening news.
Minor aside:
“The behaviors of Stalin, Mao, and Pinochet are all refutations of “group selection” theory.”
You may note that, historically, mass murder is generally accomplished by convincing the people that a certain group (intellectuals, jews, liberals, capitalists, counterrevolutionaries, etc.) are outside or traitors to the community.
Yes, but this does not work for the “Joe Shmoe” who goes around shooting people in malls and schools in America.
I didn’t know that “group selection” also includes the selection of kinds of reasons given to justify behavior. This seems far-fetched. It is behavior which is selected by evolution, not justifications for behavior!
That Stalin or Mao justified their mass-murder policies and decision in terms of what is good for their respective countries does not explain how behaviors leading to the slaughter and deaths of millions of one’s own group has occurred with remarkable regularity in history.
Mooreshand, I was explaining more why nations went along with it, not why individuals did it.
But if you look for evolutionary explanations for every detail of behavior, you won’t find them. I’ll leave the “free will” debate to others, but we certainly have complex individual behavior that’s not wholly genetic. Evolution can explain proclivities and propensities and distributions, but that’s it. It might explain why we like to eat meat, but it won’t explain why you chose the hamburger for lunch today. Similarly, evolution can explain why some people are not at all altruistic, but it can’t explain why they expressed that in a stalinist fashion.
So, ruthlessly selfish behavior, anti-social behavior (not necessarily identical to ruthless selfishness), and altruism are all explained in terms of the same set of “evolutionary” factors?
Would you please clarify what are these underlying factors which (allegedly) causally generate such incompatible behaviors?
It must be gene replication. Right? What else is there?
As to “exceptions” we are not talking about freak occurrences in human life. Suicides, mass murder of members of one’s own group, homosexuality, etc., occur with regularity.
“Evolution can explain proclivities and propensities and distributions, but that’s it.”
Does it really? How do you explain, in evolutionary terms, the fact that humans, like many animals, accept surrender or submission by an opponent individual or group instead of slaughtering that opponent individual or group since acceptance of surrender or submission is not functional for one’s “fitness” or the “fitness” of one’s group because it allows that individual or group to compete to survive, multiply, and threaten oneself or one’s group in the future?
As even E.O. Wilson acknowledged, this is a serious problem for Darwinian evolutionary theory. I dare say that it is one of those many facts of human and animal existence which refute that theory.
I think it would be helpful to identify the central claims of the Darwinian theory of the nature of living beings, inclusive, of course, of human beings, before we can judge whether it refuted by the facts of human life.
“Survival and reproduction is the only game in town for all life.”
Does this sound like the gist of the Darwinian theory of the nature of living beings?
As I mentioned above, I think that viewing evolutionary theory from the supposed point of view of a single organism is a serious distortion. So, it is certainly not true that “survival and reproduction is the only game in town for all life” is a distillation of evolutionary theory.
In fact, all notions of competition and success and progress in the context of evolutionary theory seem to me to be flawed. It creates an overlay of qualitative judgment that is unnecessary for evolution to adequately explain the diversity of life. Everything changes. Climate changes. Food sources change. Species becomes extinct. None of this is a qualitative judgment that one form of life is better or more highly evolved than another.
In evolutionary theory, an organism or a species cannot be understood outside the context of the environment in which it is found. If we took a human and transported her to Jupiter and she died ten seconds later because she was not in her usual environmental context, would you say that she did not succeed or that she could not compete? Of course not. This type of perspective (focus on individual organisms or even individual species) is unhelpful and an obstacle to understanding evolutionary theory.
What are your sources for claiming that “it is certainly not true that “survival and reproduction is the only game in town for all life” is a distillation of evolutionary theory.” This is a matter of understanding a standard scientific theory, not metaphysics.
Darwin himself stated that any variation injurious to the survival and reproduction an organism will be “rigidly destroyed” and that this is the essence of natural selection. He stated explicitly that if you could show that a trait was functional for beauty rather than survival and/or reproduction, it would refute his theory of natural selection.
W.D. Hamilton and Ronald Fisher the seminal figures who developed the genetic theory of evolution do not depart from Darwin’s central claim. They only augment it with concepts drawn from genetics.
Dawkins only popularized the scientific work of Hamilton, Fisher, and Robert Trivers. It is undeniable that Dawkins is a Darwinian! And in his account the reproduction or replication of genes is the only game in town. Not only that, the genes are in control of that game and we only delusively imagine that we are in control!
Your second paragraph seems to echo Gould’s muddle-headed ideas. As you probably know, Gould was an exceptional popular science writer, but made no original contributions to evolutionary theory. Major 20th century evolutionary scientists like John Maynard Smith consider his ideas terribly confused.
Human intelligence is obviously more complex and developed than the intelligence of any animal known to us on this planet. So, there was an incredible leap forward with the evolution of humans.
Let me clarify that I don’t deny that evolution is real and that humans evolved from some other species. This was not Darwin’s original contribution. It was already in the “air” before his work.
But I doubt whether this harping on the reality of evolution is terribly interesting or important except as a refutation of creationism. Humans evolved from species X. How did species X come into existence? It evolved from species Y. What about Y? The farther back we reach, the more speculation and conjecture rule, and the importance of the questions themselves diminish.
What is important is whether the Darwinian theory of the nature of living beings, inclusive of human beings, is true.
“Survival and reproduction is the only game in town.”
According to Darwinism, we survive in order to reproduce ourselves maximally. So, to reproduce maximally is the only game in town.
And it is certainly implied by the theory that any trait or behavior not conducive to the imperative of maximal reproduction would be “rigidly destroyed”. That means if we do find instances of such traits or behaviors, the theory is “rigidly destroyed”.
Whether this is stated in term of individual organisms or genes, or groups of organisms, it is falsified by many commonplace facts of human life. Hence, it cannot be a true theory of the nature of all living beings. And the “caveat” that it applies only to animals but not humans is inconsistent with the premises of the theory. So, it cannot be added to the theory. Thus, the theory is refuted by the facts of human life.
Thill, I’m not understanding. although i am not disagreeing.
I don’t think it is necessary to elevate evolutionary theory to a philosophy of life (not that I think you are saying this — and perhaps you are saying the opposite). In other words, to make individual organisms to the focus and to say that the purpose of an organism’s life is survival and reproduction is just stupid.
Evolution does a pretty good job of explaining species diversity. It doesn’t work very well to explain why music exists or why compassion brings joy to the giver.
Thill:
“And it is certainly implied by the theory that any trait or behavior not conducive to the imperative of maximal reproduction would be “rigidly destroyed””
This reflects an incomplete understanding of the complexities of genetic inheritance, particularly the differences between traits and genes. Let me construct an illustrative example, though the specific numbers are all invented for clarity:
Let’s say evolution favors a balance of risk-seekers and -avoiders. On a 1-10 scale (of seeking), maybe the ideal range is between 4-6. Individuals with a 1-2 are unlikely to find mates, 9-10 unlikely to survive long enough to reproduce.
The important thing is, there are 10 different genes that influence this behavior. Each gene can be in form “R” or form “r”; variant R leads to more risk-taking, variant r doesn’t. Thus, all told, you want individuals with 4-6 of the R variant, and 4-6 of the r variant.
Variability becomes inescapable because each gene is inherited separately. Two individuals of risk-5 (highly successful) mate and have a child. It’s still possible to get an offspring of risk-0! If parent 1 is RRRRRrrrrr, and parent 2 is rrrrrRRRRR, then you have a small but real possibility of getting an offspring of rrrrrrrrrr. The possibility of getting 9/10 of them in the “r” form is vastly higher, and that outcome is still quite bad in terms of the offspring’s reproductive success. 8/10 would be reasonably common,yet still outside of the ideal range for the offspring’s success.
The only way to eliminate shut-ins (too many of “r”) would be by increasing your odds of cliff-jumpers (too many of “R”). In this fashion, some kinds of unsuccessful traits cannot be removed by evolution: they are a byproduct/tradeoff arising from successful traits.
“Human intelligence is obviously more complex and developed than the intelligence of any animal known to us on this planet. So, there was an incredible leap forward with the evolution of humans.”
Dolphins and dogs obviously have an intelligence more complex and advanced than any intelligence possessed by mosquitoes and roaches.
Evolution has clearly produced organisms higher than others in terms of intelligence. This does not imply that every evolutionary line uniformly does so or is progressive in a linear fashion. But it is common sense that dogs are more intelligent than cows or roaches.
The thoughts are my thoughts, good or bad.
“Everything changes. Climate changes. Food sources change. Species becomes extinct. None of this is a qualitative judgment that one form of life is better or more highly evolved than another.”
None of is relevant premise for concluding that there is progress or that there isn’t progress in evolution. What is relevant are criteria for measuring the intelligence of an organism.
Two points.
First, there is no progress in evolution. There is simply a happy fit or an unhappy fit between a species and its environment. Or, if you want to consider progress, you will have to concede that in a sulphur vent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean a tube worm is progress. Certainly it is hard to view complexity (or intelligence) as progress in evolutionary terms because rapid environmental change tends to favor simpler and more flexible life forms.
But best to abandon ideas of progress altogether. The concept is unnecessary and unhelpful in understanding evolution.
Second, in viewing changes in the fit between a species and its environment, changes in the environment are at least equally important as changes in genetics. So a focus on species evolving in a static environment is a limited focus. And there is no no value whatsoever in understanding evolution to view species outside of the context of their environments.
“First, there is no progress in evolution.”
To proclaim this rationally you need a plausible concept of what would count as progress in evolution and then an argument showing that this does not apply to the record of evolution.
What is your concept?
Note, however, that in Thill’s response it has been acknowledged that evolution is not always progressive or progressive globally, i.e., in all its lines.
These oracular pronouncements contradict elementary facts. Are humans more intelligent than chimps? Since they are, the evolution of humans is a case of progress in evolution.
I suggest that you read Darwin’s Origin of Species, particularly the chapter on “Natural selection”, before you make your own “caveats” and claims on evolution.
It would also help to take a look at the writings of E.O.Wilson, Dawkins, and others to understand whether Darwinism holds that survival and reproduction is the only game in town and that everything else is merely functional for that game.
I agree with you that it’s stupid view of human life, but they do hold it. (Not sure if the learned doctors of science would concede, as required by their theory, that their own writings were simply a means to maximize their “fitness”.)
1) Jabali:
“Would you please clarify what are these underlying factors which (allegedly) causally generate such incompatible behaviors?”
As for altruistic vs. selfish, competing pressures for group success vs. individual success. One cheater in a group does great, too many cheaters and the whole group fails. Thus, there are pressures for a balance of social and anti-social tendencies.
As for unselfish antisocialnes, current thinking suggests that it’s the bottom of the curve of “novelty-seeking” tendencies. Once again, evolution favors a certain balance: you want some risk-takers, and some risk-avoiders. When you have those competing pressures, you get a distribution, and thus you get some “unlucky” outliers. Shut-ins cannot disappear, because they are an unavoidable byproduct of successful risk-avoiders.
2) Thill:
“How do you explain, in evolutionary terms…surrender or submission?”
While I’m not aware of the Official Theory answer, I can come up with an idea. I would propose that it’s about making the surrenderer part of your group- relevantly in this case, your reproductive group. In a tribal situation where your group is made up of your relatives, you want to add new blood to avoid inbreeding. People can be another resource to claim.
3) Neocarvaka:
That’s about right, though oversimplified in the way any one-sentence summary must be. There are plenty of caveats, the most important one probably being “In the big picture…”, to avoid the temptation to ask evolutionary questions about individual generations or individuals.
4) And in general:
I’m sure you’re all noticing that these evolutionary explanations start to become just-so stories after a while. Like psychoanalysis, you can keep the underlying theory intact by inventing a new plausible story to fit the new data. The theory becomes hard to refute, but in a way that severely reduces its strength; its hypotheses are not testable, confirmable or falsifiable. This is a definite weakness, a sign of the immaturity (or limits?) of our knowledge. Our understanding of evolution just does not provide the kind of logical rigor that one wants from philosophy!
I’m curious, for those of you who think evolution cannot adequately account for the characteristics of human behavior: Why do you think not? Are evolutionary explanations false at their heart, or merely incomplete/insufficient? What else has created (or covers the gap to complete) the human condition, as it were?
“I’m curious, for those of you who think evolution cannot adequately account for the characteristics of human behavior: Why do you think not?”
It has to do with the freedom of human consciousness and its creativity. Human consciousness and intelligence is not a puppet of “selfish genes”, the libido, biological instincts, class structure, economic conditions, “laws of history” and such.
Hence, any theory which attempts to show that human consciousness and intelligence are determined by factor X or Y will be refuted by one or the other activity of that consciousness and intelligence.
“I don’t think it is necessary to elevate evolutionary theory to a philosophy of life (not that I think you are saying this — and perhaps you are saying the opposite).”
Jim, haven’t you heard of sociobiology and its progeny “evolutionary psychology”? What are they but extensions of Darwinian theory to cover all aspects of human life?
“In other words, to make individual organisms to the focus and to say that the purpose of an organism’s life is survival and reproduction is just stupid.”
Darwin and his followers, e.g., Dawkins, are all stupid then.
“Darwin and his followers, e.g. Dawkins are all stupid then.”
I got carried away. I retract the reference to persons viewing evolution from the point of view of individual organisms as being stupid.
However, it seems to me that speculative extensions of Darwinism to complex social behaviors are questionable. It is similar to the old arguments of the Behaviorists. Because it is found that some behaviors are influenced by pleasure and pain, suddenly it is posited that all behaviors are rigidly dictated by reward and punishment and we are all automatons who are “beyond freedom and dignity”. Speculative extensions of evolutionary theory seem to me to be a similar stretch.
Genes for risk-taking behavior? Is this an article of faith in the new religion of genetic determinism with super-intelligent genes taking the place of super-intelligent Gods?
Ramachandra1008:
1) I certainly agree that human consciousness has a local flexibility that is not entailed in its genetics. For starters, personality and consciousness arise from both nature and nurture; beyond that, there’s plenty of day-to-day complexity/creativity.
But that said, evolution does not try to explain the day-to-day choices of consciousness. Rather, some would argue, consciousness is for exactly the sorts of things where genes don’t help: learning within single lifespans, developing and adapting. It’s not hard to make a case for the development of consciousness from evolution. But as a corollary to consciousness being an evolved characteristic, consciousness is not free from the influence of genetics. Biology constrains our thoughts and decisions and capabilities, in far more and subtler ways than most of us imagine. For example, the New York Times had a neat article this week on how our decision-making prowess varies from hour to hour, depending on simple physiological things like sleep and sugar. I read a study recently that showed that people stereotype more when in a messy environment.
2) I appreciate your leaping to mockery, but “genes for risk-taking behavior” are not some hypothetical article of faith. Increased extroversion (and risk taking) is associated with a stronger response to positive stimuli, whereas neurotic behavior (and risk avoidance) is associated with a stronger response to negative stimuli. When I say “stronger/weaker response”, I am speaking of a neurophysiological difference that has been directly measured in reward pathways of the brain- at least in monkeys and other animals, thus far.
The upshot being, the biology of our brain can have substantial impact on behavior. Being biological, it is surely influenced by genetics and evolution. It’s true that not every link in the chain has been proven (it’s hard and usually unethical to put electrodes into human brains), but the’s more than enough supporting evidence to make this kind of thing a reasonable hypothesis.
It wasn’t mockery. Darwinism, genetic determinism, economic determinism, etc., function as substitutes for religious faith for the “secular priesthood”. The notion that we/organisms are manipulated by genes for their own purposes entails that genes are agencies more intelligent than us/organisms and teleology.
And this is not very different from the religious idea of Gods manipulating us for their own purposes. What other idea involves the notion of beings or entities superior to us in intelligence manipulating us for their own ends? Further, the adherents of these doctrines respond to criticisms of their fundamental assumptions in just the way religious believers do, i.e., by rendering those assumptions unfalsifiable or immune to falsification.
I don’t understand what you mean when you say that “human consciousness has a local flexibility that is not entailed in its genetics.” How is this supposed to be understood either as a paraphrase of “human consciousness/intelligence is free and creative.” or as affirming it with some qualification? Pl. clarify the obscure “local flexibility” here. “Local flexibility” in contrast to what?
“evolution does not try to explain the day-to-day choices of consciousness.”
But “evolutionary psychology”, i.e., psychology based on evolutionary theory, attempts to do something like that.
“consciousness is for exactly the sorts of things where genes don’t help: learning within single lifespans, developing and adapting.”
How do you determine “where genes help” and “where they don’t help”?
It’s not hard to make a case for the development of consciousness from evolution. But as a corollary to consciousness being an evolved characteristic, consciousness is not free from the influence of genetics.”
Give us some examples with explanations of how “consciousness”, in contrast to bodily or physical characteristics, is influenced by genetics. Explain what you mean by “influenced” here. Does it refer to causation?
“Biology constrains our thoughts and decisions and capabilities, in far more and subtler ways than most of us imagine.”
Obviously, I cannot fly like a bird or run like a cheetah or jump from one tree to another like a monkey. So, biology does “constrain” in this trivial sense any thoughts or “decisions” I have or make about trying out those possibilities.
But I think you have in mind something far more subtler than this. So, pl. tell us how biology non-trivially constrains the imagination of an artist, the speculations of a metaphysician, the discoveries of a scientist, and the inventions of an engineer.
A few final thoughts, after I’ve been away from computers a few days, before we let this thread rest in peace:
1) “I don’t understand what you mean when you say that “human consciousness has a local flexibility that is not entailed in its genetics.” How is this supposed to be understood either as a paraphrase of “human consciousness/intelligence is free and creative.” or as affirming it with some qualification?”
Paraphrase. I was agreeing with you, just changing the wording to avoid questions of free will.
2) How do you determine “where genes help” and “where they don’t help”?
Sorry, my phrase “genes cannot help” was a bad choice of words; “evolution cannot help” is a better way to say I meant. Genes cannot change or adapt within a single generation; the processes of evolution will mean that future generations should be better suited to a new environment than you are, but those same processes won’t help you personally when new circumstances arise.
3) Explain what you mean by “influenced” here. Does it refer to causation?”
“Influenced” is a partial causation: one contributing cause, but not necessarily the sole one. To directly duck the question of free will and agency, I would say that our decisions are partly “free”, and partly affected by genetics. Another way to say it would be, genetics shifts the mean/distribution of the options we choose.
4) “Give us some examples with explanations of how “consciousness”, in contrast to bodily or physical characteristics, is influenced by genetics…. tell us how biology non-trivially constrains the imagination of an artist, the speculations of a metaphysician, etc.”
The theoretical answer: to say otherwise is to assume that our brains are capable of all possible thoughts in the universe. If there were aliens or artificial intelligences, they would never be able to think or imagine anything that we cannot (and vice versa). This is speculative, but I’m certainly not inclined to think so. For example, if an conscious AI were possible, what is the relationship between different instances of the same code/program? Such an idea would (again, speculatively) be intrinsic to a different kind of consciousness than ours, and translate poorly if at all into our conceptual space.
The practical answer: We have clear limits on our perceptions, memory, etc. Would a scientist who could remember everything she ever learned, be able to discover different things? Would an artist who could perceive color across his entire visual field, be able to create different works of art? Again somewhat speculative, but I certainly think so.
“To directly duck the question of free will and agency, I would say that our decisions are partly “free”, and partly affected by genetics. Another way to say it would be, genetics shifts the mean/distribution of the options we choose.”
Since you speak of “our decisions”, how do my genes “partly affect” or “partially influence” my decision to watch movie X instead of movie Y or to drink wine instead of beer on some occasion or other?
“genetics shifts the mean/distribution of the options we choose.”
This is unclear in the absence of examples.
There is no need to “duck” the so-called “question” of free-will. There is nothing there to duck and no issue at all, but only a fact obscured by muddled ideas and obvious otherwise. Your very act of composing your post is a solid illustration and evidence of your freedom to choose what to say and how to say it!
Alas, I will continue to duck all questions pertaining directly to free will, because I consider myself insufficiently informed to defend any position on it. Sorry :) Suffice to say, when I refer to “decisions/free will” here, a skeptic can substitute “whatever we do that looks like free will” as desired.
But the rest I can try to explain!
1) “how do my genes “partly affect” or “partially influence” my decision to watch movie X instead of movie Y or to drink wine instead of beer on some occasion or other?”
First off, I think you’ve chosen good examples of things that only have the most indirect effects of genetics. I would presume that your preferred flavors and narratives stem mostly from experiences as a child and adult.
But in general, genetics has minor/indirect effects on almost everything, by influencing your underlying personality. A more introverted person might decide to watch a movie instead of going out. Someone with a non-urbanized background (e.g. Native Americans) will be more susceptible to alcoholism (and that’s probably liver rather than brain). IQ and personality traits show substantial (though by no means total!) genetic heritability.
2) “genetics shifts the mean/distribution of the options we choose.” …This is unclear in the absence of examples.
Hopefully the above has already begun clarifying this. While individual choices are still free, many genetic factors influence the factors that we weigh (consciously or unconsciously) when making a decision. Thus, someone more extraverted will be more likely to choose “no movie”- at least on average, thus a shift in the mean. Someone more risk-accepting or open to new experiences might have a larger variability in their choices and behaviors.
The underlying point is the same as above: we make our choices based on the situations we face, who we are, and Free Will Mojo(tm). The second of those elements, “who we are”, has a significant genetic component.
“But in general, genetics has minor/indirect effects on almost everything, by influencing your underlying personality.”
How are dramatic personality changes, e.g., a “party animal” turning into a hermit, an aggressive person turning into a tranquil yogi, a generous person turning into miserly one or vice-versa, etc., explained in terms of genetics?
In many cases, dramatic or significant personality changes or transformations are constituted by shifts in one’s values or philosophical beliefs. How do you explain shifts in values or philosophical beliefs in terms of genetics?
“How are dramatic personality changes, e.g., a “party animal” turning into a hermit, an aggressive person turning into a tranquil yogi, a generous person turning into miserly one or vice-versa, etc., explained in terms of genetics?”
…
“How do you explain shifts in values or philosophical beliefs in terms of genetics?”
In both cases, my answer is, “Generally, I wouldn’t.” Personality is partly heritable, but only partly; there’s a lot that can and does change. Genetic contribution to specific values and beliefs are tenuous at best (e.g. certain personality types more likely to believe things that support/confirm/encourage their worldview). At most I might propose that “anyone who undergoes such a thing is genetically predisposed to be more open to new ideas”, but that is sheer supposition. “They aren’t explained by genetics” remains the better answer: some things, most especially within-life changes, must arise primarily from experience.
The strength/problem of genetics is that it’s all population-level. Individual exceptions abound, but as long as they remain exceptions rather than the rule, they don’t conflict with the larger statements about the population. Thus, when the link in my last comment explains that personality traits are ~50% heritable, that’s an average across the studied population; many individual will have a less-(or more-)genetically-determined personality.
(As an aside, I’m not convinced that personality changes co-occur with philosophical shifts, except in rare cases. The vast majority of people don’t live up to their philosophical beliefs, after all. But that’s a separate discussion.)
“Suffice to say, when I refer to “decisions/free will” here, a skeptic can substitute “whatever we do that looks like free will” as desired.”
My capacity of choice, my ability to choose, cannot be an “appearance” in just the way my capacity to think and feel can in no way be an “appearance”.
In any case, there’s an incoherence in your saying “a skeptic can” etc. How can she if there is no freedom of choice?
No, really, I’m not getting into that argument! I just don’t have an opinion that I trust enough to defend. Nor do I want to play devil’s advocate, I get in plenty of time fighting for the unpopular side here even when I stick to things I actually believe in.
I appreciate the temptation though :)
Philosophy has to do with finding the truth. What’s popularity or unpopularity of a point of view got to do with it?
It’s a weird claim that free will is an “appearance”. An appearance of what? And what is the reality which gives rise to this so-called appearance and how does it do so?
Moore’s
Why do advertisers spend large sums of money if not to persuade overtly or covertly? Are they stupid? I have to buy a tin to find out what it does exactly. You’re worth it. 62% of 75 women agree. Free will has natural limitations. Your statutory rights are not affected.
Who says that persuasion is incompatible with choice? If you persuade me, either through arguments, images, appeal to force or threats, etc., and I decide to yield, how does this show that I don’t have the power of choice? In fact, it proves the opposite. Advertising assumes that people can be persuaded, i.e., that they can decide to be influenced, by the advertisements.
In any case, it’s silly to argue from examples of successful coercion or manipulation that choice does not exist. One has only to look at counterexamples, e.g., cases in which even the worst form of torture failed to compel confession of guilt or wrongdoing or the disclosure of information.
Yes, choice is not necessarily about resisting influences or pressures, internal or external. It’s also about choosing to yield to them.
Moore’s, Thill,
All the factors that make you decide to buy a certain product may not be available to you, you may not be conscious of them or you are to a certain extent brain washed. Is it not common sense to say in those cases that your will has been subverted to a degree? What would you say to the idea that perfect freedom of the will is a limit case and the Sartrean notion of freedom as a project is a sensible moderate position.?
I don’t understand the fixation on genetics as the basis for all, or even most, human behaviors. Certainly, there is some connection between genetics and some simple behaviors. I understand that studies of identical twins separated at birth show that some common mannerisms will be shared. And perhaps there may even be some genetic predisposition that influences some complex behaviors.
However, the fact is that people change dramatically during the course of a lifetime and, as far as I know, their genetic make up does not. So, unless you have a view that genetics governs not just behaviors but also changes in behaviors over the course of a lifetime, you must accept that genetics has a limited role.
It also seems questionable to me to posit that consciousness is rooted in genetics. Science has enough trouble even locating and defining consciousness that it seems speculative to posit a cause.
“Evolution…doesn’t work very well to explain why music exists or why compassion brings joy to the giver.”
Not so, Jim, according to sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.
“Biology influences behavior.” Unless it is specified what “biology” refers to, what “influences” means, and how the former “influences” the latter, we cannot really judge the claim.
The word “influence” in claims such as “Class structure influences our behavior.”, “Genes influence our behavior.”, “Supernatural beings influence our mental states.”, and so on is clearly a Weasel Word which renders these claims immune to refutation.
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