Text 4150, 222 rader
Skriven 2006-07-18 10:45:00 av Robert E Starr JR (4623.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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On Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:22:36 -0700, "Vorlonagent"
<nojtspam@otfresno.com> wrote:

>
>"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
>news:tutlb254fojs61c8unms3lhhptfkcu9bop@4ax.com...
>
>>>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.
>
>As Mickie-D's has adequately shown, taste and nutritional value have been 
>successfully decoupled for a while now.
>
>Cooking is about manipulating a food to taste better and that has nothing to 
>do with optimizing its nutritional value to the body.

That's not really true, because taste is our evolved mechanism for
finding foods of high nutritional value. And note that I said "we do
make the [mechanics of metabolism] a central concern, even though
we're seldom aware of it." That something is a central concern doesn't
mean that we always get it right in every detail. But you will do a
lot better on a diet of Big Macs and shakes than you will on a diet of
sawdust and dirt, so the mechanism is still doing most of what it
does.

What has happened, unfortunately, is that we've developed foods so
concentrated that they're outside our design parameters (speaking
figuratively, of course). They trigger desire as they should, but
they're so rich that we ingest too many calories before they trigger
the sense of satiation that would prevent us from eating more.

>>>> 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.
>
>The difference is interpretation.   I see "bug".  You see "feature"

The way I see it, rationality and objectivity, while valuable and of
ever-increasing importance, aren't the only determinants of human
behavior. There's another kind of truth that's represented
symbolically and fictitiously. And that kind of truth is of great
importance to all of us, even those of us who don't believe in a
deity. Among other things, it's the central truth of art.


>>>>>>>>>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.
>
>No.  it can give you a good probability *estimate*.  There's a difference 
>and it's not small.
>
>Science is at best 20-20 hindsight.  It can tell you to some degree of 
>resolution what worked yesterday or when the last measurments were taken. 
>Insofar as those measurements are valid today it can make a corresponsingly 
>good approximation.

I'm not sure why you refer to hindsight. Science is about predicting
the future on the basis of the past. So I think is thought in general.

>> 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.
>
>At the moment, that's a statement far more composed of faith than fact.

I very much disagree. It's composed of thought and observation. A
toaster has emotions. Ask yourself what emotions are, and you'll reach
the same conclusion I did.

>>>> 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.
>
>It can?  Prove it.

No prediction about empirical phenomena can be proved. I am merely
following Occam here.

>> Conversely, doesn't science occur in the living?
>
>Sure.  But science isn't alive.

No, but I'm not sure why that matters; it's still the converse.

>> 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 does not represent any part of our psyche.  It is a tool used by a 
>part of our psyche to make sense of the world.

Sure, and being such, it represents the part of our psyche that makes
sense of the world, does it not?

-- 
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
                                                                               
     
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