Text 4046, 277 rader
Skriven 2006-07-17 11:13:00 av Robert E Starr JR (4519.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
         * * * and has been forwarded to you by Lord Time * * *         
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@REPLY: <fvhva21hrtqgbmb0u6fir0qno5hjik9a3n@4ax.com>
On Sun, 16 Jul 2006 11:14:38 -0700, "Vorlonagent"
<nojtspam@otfresno.com> wrote:

>
>"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
>news:r0fkb2hp2rer61sjlf8mu080nukrcq9iub@4ax.com...
>
>>>> Seems to me that a goal and a purpose are two different things, in
>>>> that you can have the first without having the second (or, I suppose,
>>>> the second without having the first). Then too, "greater purpose" can
>>>> be local or it can be global. My greater purpose, forex, might be as a
>>>> carrier of DNA, or it might be as a thermodynamically-driven chemical
>>>> reaction that creates order from chaos or chaos from order, depending
>>>> on whether you look at it from the future or the past.
>>>
>>>Sure...If you allow your consciousness to be dominated by trans-self 
>>>species
>>>concerns, or the mechanics of metabolism.  Very few humans make that a
>>>central structuring form of their lives.
>>>
>>>Moreover, would you like talking to them?  :)
>>
>> The interesting thing, though, is that I think we do make those things
>> a central concern, even though we're seldom aware of it. I mean, look
>> at the sales of cookbooks . . . hell, it can be argued that even the
>> sales of cat books are an outcome of our DNA-propagating instincts, of
>> our tendency to nurture children.
>
>Since when was the prime focus of a cookbook the optimized metbolization of 
>the dish in question?  The focus of any cookbook is *taste*.  Some recent 
>cookbooks do try to be dietetc, true but, the object is to make foods that 
>do this for us tasty, not optimise their bodily usage.  Very few people are 
>preoccpied with their Kerbs Cycle.

Whence, then, arises the faculty of taste, or its relationship to
motivation, or our preoccupation with it?

You seem to be assuming that we have to be aware of the reason for our
preoccupation, but I stipulated that that wasn't the case, that we're
not usually consciously aware of /why/ we're fascinated with it. But
notice the way we seek out sodium, up to a point, or sweets, until
we've had too much and they become cloying. Notice our enjoyment of
mildly acidic foods (think Vitamin C) and how the acidity too becomes
cloying (experiment: try drinking orange juice soon after you've taken
a vitamin pill -- note that it tastes too sour). Notice our avoidance
of foods that are excessively bitter (associated with alkaloid
poisons?) and our enjoyment of savory foods, rich in glutamate. And so
forth.

>Otherwise, I could point out that sensability and arguability have no 
>correlation in contemporary society.
>
>
>>>> Or it may be
>>>> something devised by a deity, albeit such explanations tend to be weak
>>>> on what purpose the deity serves herself -- more a putting off than a
>>>> solving.
>>>
>>>You treat the deity as a purely human construction, picking logical nits.
>>>To someone who believes, stuff concering the diety(ies) isn't a 
>>>construction
>>>or at least isn't enitrely.  Strikes me the choice to keep that filter in
>>>place is to never see what a believer sees.  I'd wonder if it would be
>>>possible to even conceptualize what a believer sees.  When I try on that
>>>filter and look back at a beliver, all I see is self-deception on the part
>>>of  the believer, which doesn't grant much respect.
>>
>> I share that prejudice to some extent, but at the same time, I see
>> religion as having a practical role in human survival. In that sense,
>> in the sense that it encodes culturally important behavioral memes,
>> religion seems "real" to me, and worthwhile.
>>
>> I tend to think that religion, art, dreams, daydreams, and hypnosis
>> are intertwined. Religion might be looked upon as art that claims to
>> be completely true when in fact it's only partially true (as opposed,
>> say, to our historical fiction, which generally claims only to be
>> partially true, though people tend to accept it as truer than it is).
>> So from a personal, subjective perspective, I can compare it to the
>> "willing suspension of disbelief" that most people experience to some
>> degree when watching a movie or even listening to music. And to some
>> extent, I think, even those of us who don't ascribe a literal
>> existence to the deity find our intellectual beliefs and emotional
>> responses changing as a result of our exposure to art or to religion,
>> just as we would had we been given suggestions under hypnosis. So for
>> all our vaunted rationalization, we are to some extent affected by the
>> same socially useful meme-sharing phenomenon.
>
>....Then we're agreed?

Depends. What were talking about? :-)

Seriously, yes, to a large extent.

>>>>>> And can't it?
>>>>>
>>>>>You can certainly use science to provide evidence of consequences... but
>>>>>morality judges whether those consequences are good or bad ones.
>>>>
>>>> Why can't science examine what makes those consequences good or bad?
>>>> It seems to me that both psychology and neuroscience have done that,
>>>> as more recently has evolutionary biology and even mathematics.
>>>
>>>Depends on what you're looking for.
>>>
>>>Science as psychology can plumb the depths of why people think what they 
>>>do.
>>>As statistics, it can tell you what percentage of a population believe a
>>>certain way.  As history, it can tell you how belief has evolved over 
>>>time.
>>>
>>>Science cannot tell you what "good" is because that's subjective, albeit
>>>subjective centered in a common region.  As explained above, science can 
>>>map
>>>the region but it cannot make that ah-ha leap to what IS good. 
>>>Scienctists
>>>can make that leap but science, methodological tool that it is, is denied
>>>the ability by the very nature of its Method.
>>
>> I'm not sure that that's so. I gave in another post the example of the
>> incest taboo, which has been refined by science as our understanding
>> of procreation and genetics has improved. And science understands why
>> every society considers their version of the incest taboo to be good:
>> a society that ignored it on a wide scale would become less
>> competitive due to inbreeding.
>
>Plenty of analysis, zero experience.  Makes my point nicely.  See my next 
>comment, which is preserved for reference.
>
>>>Put another way, science can tell you about the story but it can't make 
>>>you
>>>experience it.  "Experience" requires imagination and imagination is not
>>>empirical.

I don't think so. You said 'Science cannot tell you what "good" is
because that's subjective, albeit subjective centered in a common
region.  As explained above, science can map the region but it cannot
make that ah-ha leap to what IS good.' And I don't believe that. In
fact, I think we're giving more and more of that over to science,
though many aren't aware of it, because I don't think that most people
are aware of the mechanisms by which society makes its moral choices:
they persist in believing that it comes from a holy book or deity, or
in the case of those who are less religious from one or another
ideology, Marxism or democracy or capitalism or conservatism or
liberalism or libertarianism or fascism, despite the evidence that
that isn't the case.

>>>>>>>From a scientific perspective, the problem would in large measure boil
>>>>>> down to the role of cooperation in evolution.
>>>>>
>>>>>Only on a large scale.  Just to clarify, your position is that science 
>>>>>is
>>>>>only capable of answering moral questions on an evolutionary level?
>>>>
>>>> I'm not sure what you mean by moral questions. As you point out below,
>>>> science doesn't attempt to assign moral values. It can tell us where
>>>> our moral values come from, examine the process whereby we form them.
>>>> It can even recognize that some acts are moral and some amoral within
>>>> a given context and aid in the refinement of moral strictures and
>>>> judgment, by for example refining the primitive incest taboos into
>>>> modern ones based on a knowledge of genetics. But by the same token,
>>>> science recognizes that moral systems are at least to some extent
>>>> contingent, personal, and arbitrary. It can suggest changes only
>>>> within the context of externally-supplied parameters.
>>>
>>>....Which means science is great at mapping out known moral terrain but
>>>incapable of exploring or reshaping that terrain.
>>
>> I don't think I'd go so far -- see the changes to the incest taboo
>> above, or look at other moral alterations that have come about due to
>> science. I'd say science fills much the same role here as less
>> rigorous observation and thought.
>
>You're telling me about the action, now showing it to me.  Science cannot 
>consider anything besides the facts of a case because is is based in 
>empiricism.
>
>If you want to formulate morality as a statisically averaged mean, science 
>can do that.  If you want to define morality as codified and verified 
>successful survival strategies amassed over time, science can help you with 
>the organization and evaluation work.
>
>If you want to do more than sifting through mouuntians of information, you 
>need some heart.  Science doesn't have any, nor was it ever meant to.  It is 
>a tool.
>
>It's like music.  You can program a computer for social trends and calculate 
>what will sell a million records, then hire a group with those qualities. 
>That's not the same as finding a good band.  You are equating the two.

I submit that science can, in principle if not in practice, find the
good band. It's been some fifty years, for example, since Meyer
noticed the relationship between good music and information theory.
And if you're talking about the "heart," well, science can understand
that too, and could in principle use it to developing the criteria
that allow it identify a good band.

BTW, I'm not so sure that the band and the computer are so different,
except insofar as bands are more sophisticated than today's computers,
which have the cognitive sophistication of insects (no snide remarks
about rap, please). And I don't see any reason why the computer
couldn't be given the same emotional drives as we have.

>> I do agree that for most there's an intermediate step, one in which
>> the scientific findings are dramatized, placed in an emotional context
>> within the imagination to which you refer above.
>
>That "intemediate step" goes by another name.
>
>Life.

But the same thing can be done in silicon. Conversely, doesn't science
occur in the living?

Not that I want to minimize the difference. Science represents one
part of the psyche -- the part that forms an accurate model of the
world around us. It isn't generally placed within the context of
motivation or emotion, although it can analyze motivation, and it
tends towards theory rather than concrete manifestation, e.g., it
"lends to airy nothings a local habitation and a name," whereas
science is concerned with reducing a multitude of local habitations
into airy nothings.

>>>>>>>  Science can't measure
>>>>>>>whether I look at my life as being a good or wasted life.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Again, can't it? At the very least, it could ask (and I'm sure
>>>>>> psychologists have).
>>>>>
>>>>>What measurement would science possibly use to quantify how I measure my
>>>>>life?
>>>>>Anyone can ask...that doesn't make it science.
>>>>
>>>> But asking questions can be a part of science. Psychologists, for
>>>> example, ask them all the time, and I'm sure they've asked questions
>>>> about the very phenomenon you describe.
>>>
>>>The best a psychologist can do is be able to forumlate exactly what and 
>>>how
>>>Carl (or anyone) defines his life.  Again, we're back at being told about
>>>what's going on. Psychology gives me information about the individual not
>>>the experience.
>>>
>>>If I experience a momentary intense connection to God, psychology can talk
>>>about how past experiences might have colored the way I perceived God or
>>>measure how the experience has altered me.  Biophysics could tell me what
>>>was happening in my brain at the time, etc.  Can't tell you beans about 
>>>what
>>>it was like for me to touch God.  Just run analysis on what I say.
>>
>> Carl had specifically mentioned measurement, though.
>
>Talk to Carl about that.

I believe that's what I was doing . . .

-- 
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about
the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a
lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer.
And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett
                                                                               
                                               
--- SBBSecho 2.11-Win32
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