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Posts tagged evidence for evolution
Book Review – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett
Feb 11th
The four aitia… That is what Aristotle used as tools of mind in order to fully understand all that is understandable about anything in the universe. For example, you want to know what a hammer is? Well, you’ll just have to ask yourself what is the material cause of this object, or what is it made of; that’s an easy answer: it’s made of wood and iron, maybe cured steel or another high rigidity/resistance metal. After this, you’ll have to ask yourself what is the formal cause of this object called hammer, or what is its architecture, its design, how do all its elements hang on to each other, and what are its most inner workings; for a hammer this shouldn’t be a hard question to answer: the wooden rigid stick, which is tailor made for grabbing with one or two hands, is firmly attached to the metallic compact solid mass which represents the hammer head that comes in many forms and sizes depending on what the hammer was designed to do. And here we are at the third question we might ask about this object, and that is what is its efficient cause, who or what natural or artificial industrial process created this object; that’s an easy answer, right?! Yes, a interesting answer for an interesting question, but not as interesting as the last aitia…
What is the final cause of this object? What’s it made for? Well, even though it was designed for a specific purpose like driving nails, forging metal, fitting parts, and breaking up objects, its reason d’etre could be as various as human nature. Who hasn’t heard about Hell’s Angels favorite weapon, the ball pean hammer?! It’s as sexy and dangerous as it can be useful in the house. This reason d’etre, the purpose, the meaning of things stays at the heart of Dennett’s undertaking. Even though we start with hammers and simple things we will finally dodge the most sacred of mysteries… the origin of man, the meaning of life. How will Dennett manage to derive meaning, purpose from nature’s red in tooth and claw, that’s an answer you’ll find by reading the book. Here, we will skim through the ideas of the thinkers that lived before Darwin which laid down the most beautiful but least understood – by friend or foe – scientific theory that ever existed. Beautiful, but what dreadful implications to our human existence it had!
Hell's Angels Ball-Pean Hammer
For reasons easy to understand, much of the answers about the origin and the meaning of life have been bedeviled by naive assumptions and too much irrational wishful thinking. The why questions have been replaced by how questions with the hope that maybe the answer to the latter one would somehow yield a spark of intellectual brilliance that would solve the conundrums of the first… but what a coward way to avoid answering the main problem this treacherous and avoiding road would prove to be!
How did the thinkers before Darwin explain the complexity of nature? John Locke goes at the heart of what many of today’s uneducated users of science and technology still think it’s common sense. Consider for example his following phrase: “So if we will suppose nothing first, or eternal: Matter can never begin to be: If we suppose bare Mater, without Motion, eternal: Motion can never begin to be: If we suppose only Matter and Motion first, or eternal: Thought can never begin to be. For it is impossible to conceive that Matter either with or without Motion could have originally in and from itself Sense, Perception, and Knowledge, as is evident from hence, that then Sense, Perception, and Knowledge, must be a property eternally inseparable from Matter and every particle of it.”
The simple error in logic of the above statement muddled the meme complex of explanations that tried to explain the reason for man’s existence and for the causes of life and complexity. The fact of the matter is that to assume that something complex must derive from something more complex than the thing we’ve started to explain leads of course to a God that has a creator, this assuming we’re not going to throw away the logic in the middle of the argument; that is, the God of God has a God and so on ’till eternity. What is that? Plain bullshit, if you ask me !
So, we needn’t use this kind of recursivity because the scientific evidence proves that nature works the other way around: complex things evolve from things that are not so complex. It’s more like a construction project coordinated by blind and purposeless forces in which cranes build by nature assemble less complex natural systems into more complex ones that have greater degrees of freedom. We don’t have to postulate sky-hooks, that is, god given metaphysical helping hands that defy scientific explanation, because there is a lot that we can explain without taking this road. As Darwin put it, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.
DARWIN’S DANGEROUS IDEA – Check Reviews on Amazon.com
DARWIN’S DANGEROUS IDEA – Check Reviews on Amazon.co.uk
Much of Dennett’s book is directed at explaining the above logic, but don’t worry; things start to get more fiery in the end once we start to reverse engineer the most complex of cranes: the memes and their most intricate and time consuming effects on the human mind : the quest for meaning, purpose and the perfect ethical algorithm. This i think, is the most interesting part of the book. Dennett deconstructs the erroneous assumption/intuition that makes us think there is a real meaning, a real purpose in life, a perfect ethical course of action that anyone can take. The reality is that there is no real meaning just like there is no real self, (see here), there is no real purpose in life just because there are no sky-hooks; there are cranes that serve distinct natural systems that have distinct interests which will more than likely conflict with each other. Just like Richard Dawkins put it, in this battle “blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Do you want to go deep down the rabbit whole? Then read this book !
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Two tips on critical thinking – Always asking questions and how to get the right answers
Oct 9th
Blessed be the evolution of language and the environmental triggers which contrived its architecture! Language made possible the appearance of coherent, highly social, and clever groups of hominids acting as a single intelligent entity which could more easily foresight mother nature’s squeamish evolutionary roadblocks. As an individual that was part of that group you could more than likely increase your chances of survival by communicating complex information with the other members of the tribe; this complexity in the transfer of information could have only be achieved by the knack of language architecture. Tool building skills, hunting skills, food gathering skills, and cultural memes, you could easily have access to by learning to use the already evolved language circuitry of your brain.
Although some may see language just as a tool used in order to communicate to others the already complex thinking dynamics of our brain, conversely, we can easily find reasons to ponder on language’s gift of speeding up and stimulating thinking instead. What if language’s talent was to spark the creativeness, to provide “food for thought”, to create the architecture of thinking? What if real thinking was non-existent before the evolution of complex language? What if the evolution of language was the main cause, the main artificer, for the appearance of highly intelligent hominids and not the other way around? Or could it be that I’m exaggerating by completely reversing the real state of affairs, thus being sucked in another “Chicken or Egg?” evolutionary conundrum? Either way, language still remains a major fuel source for our brain without which brilliant minds and creative thinkers would be as rare as hen’s teeth.
The thoughts we have, the good ideas, the bad ideas, the sometimes wonderful stories we have to tell, they’re all smeared in the voluminous neuronal circuitry of the brain by specialized content fixation mechanisms, that, by the nature of brain’s architecture and wiring, we could rarely get them to coherently coalesce, to fully aggregate with one another using its internally operating mechanisms. The real way they sex each other is by means of language. Say, two ideas belonging to the same mind need to merge with each other but the current neural wiring makes it impossible for them to meet; so, one of those ideas is transferred verbally into someone else’s brain, it is processed, and then the result of that computation, that is, the same idea but slightly altered, easily molded into another format is then returned into the brain of the communication initiator. Now, because the idea is now slightly modified it may more easily find a neural path leading to the idea which it was impossible to reach a few moments ago. (see illustration).
Now, if talking to others helps us gather our thoughts, clear our mind, and spark creativeness, then why shouldn’t talking to oneself achieve the same tactical benefit? In 1960, E.M. Forster cleverly summoned the above : “How can i tell what i think until i see what i say?“. In 1991, in Consciousness Explained, Dennet said that “pushing some information through one’s ears and auditory system may well happen to stimulate just the sorts of connections one is seeking…“; by talking to oneself your thoughts become more coherent, more interconnected, and more importantly they become the artificers of new thoughts, new ideas, sometimes brilliant ones.
So how should one talk to himself in order to bootstrap the all-too-needed creativeness software? More than likely simply mumbling nonsensical words will not spark the plug of any creative thinking, but maybe asking questions relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve will perhaps have this desired effect. Aristotle had four questions that he used to ask about everything there was: the four aitia. He wanted to know the material cause of something, that is, the stuff from which that entity is made of; the efficient cause or what brought about the entity into existence; the formal cause or questions about that entity’s architecture, structure, or shape; and the final cause, that is, what is the purpose of the entity in the world. From so simple questions, forms of inquiring so manifestly complex and lucrative will easily start to evolve in your brain.
If asking questions may be the correct way to get the engines running, how are we to be able to speed up this process and manage not to get stuck unwillingly into a mental cul de sac? If the answers to the questions we address to ourselves are not readily available how are we to appease our mental hunger? As I’ve stated in a recent article, following a sufficient amount of channels of information and at the same time maintaining a good dose of skepticism towards all these dispensers of memes and temes, even though that dose’s measure will have to be tuned to the credibility of the source, will give you the gift of being one step ahead in the race to find out the truth.
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Book Review – “The Selfish Gene” written by Richard Dawkins – We’re slaves of the genes, programmed by memes, no god supervenes
Jul 4th
Why are people? The title of chapter one properly defines the reason for this book’s existence. Why their worries, why their struggles, fears, lovings, hatings? What is our purpose on this planet and ultimately in the universe? Why all the bad things in order to feed our visceral hunger for pleasure? Why does the phrase “nature red in teeth and claw” make such a perfect opening epigram for any biology book?
Naive lily-livered eschewers run all their lives on the treadmill of ignorance diverting their thinking from the answers to the above questions, beguiling themselves to some hopped destination where all things must be about peace, pleasure, and the good of man. Call it heaven, nirvana, ultimately the reason for all this life of struggle. These are the theists not famished at conception with the love for the real truth, be it white, gray, or black. They will never have the guts to face reality, they will always be driven and controlled by emotions. And what do you expect to happen when you have individuals with this kind of agenda up their sleeves? The Bible, brain-washed children, a general milieu of malevolent ineluctable set of memes from which society can have no hope of freeing its fettered limbs from the leashes of nature. And in the middle you have the people who didn’t have the time to make up their minds, and this book is for them in particular.
Yes, life can be fun. But there are myriad of antithetical examples both in the animal kingdom and in the human society in which life is anything but innocuous. This book is about the truth of these facts and the reasons for it being this way. Its purpose is not to feed the emotional thirst for positiveness, safety, and well being. Its embodied astute goal is to climb the ladder of truth, blithely analyzing the causes and effects, the ontology and systemic organization of nature and its products: Us and all living things that roam planet Earth.
What is this book’s mission? To explain biology’s gears, levers and pulleys, individual selfishness, altruism, behavioral strategies in animals and consequently in us humans, presenting all of these using the gene, that is, the slightly small set of bits from the chromosome that is capable of surviving meiotic division a significant amount of time for it to be considered a long living sequence of DNA, as the single unit of natural selection.
So, although counter-intuitive, the consequences of adopting this point of view apparently transforms us human beings into mere puppets, zombie vehicle robots designed, programmed and polished for eons by our genes in order to preserve their prodigiously long chain of nucleotides. That is, blindly designed, blindly programmed, for genes are only mechanistic stable arrangements of molecules that sprouted in the non-steered, full of ingredients but lacking design, primordial soup; genes are the software that bootstrapped themselves in the Multiverse from shabby tooled beginnings. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, this software began to be assembled by the environmental machinery that is planet Earth some 4 billion years ago.
Therefore, Natural Selection does not select between ecosystems, or species, or groups, or even individuals, but between genes. This so counter-intuitive approach is tantamount, Richard argues, to the cyclic change in perception when one looks at a Necker Cube; from time to time, as you look at the cube, it seems that the point of view from which you look at it changes its position. The same thing happens when we analyze what does the “Necker Cube of Natural Selection” act upon when it selects between structures that need to survive. But unlike in the Necker Cube analogy where any point of view might be the right one to look at, in the case of analyzing natural selection’s inner workings some points of view might be more needless than others. Ecosystems, groups, species, and individuals do not fight for dominance, instead, the structures they emerge from do it: their Genes. There is no act done for the good of species. Instead they’re acts done for the good of the genes, more exactly, for the good of complexes of genes. The genes’ blind, blithe, and most importantly, unconscious acts are iconoclastic image destroyers for the mis-construed whelps of group selection. Let’s analyze this book chapter by chapter.
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Daniel Dennett’s opinion about God, Free Will, Consciousness, and Ethics – Interview by Robert Wright – PART 2
May 9th
This is a very interesting interview taken by Robert Wright, the American journalist, scholar, prize-winning author of best-selling books on popular science including subjects like evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, to Daniel Dennett; Dan is an American philosopher whose research focuses on the philosophy of mind, consciousness, philosophy of science and philosophy of evolutionary biology.
The interview begins with a discussion about God, natural selection, and the probability that evolution could lead to highly evolved intelligent conscious beings like humans.
The subject of Free Will is thoroughly debated. Dan is arguing against the widely accepted – but confusing when we consider this with hindsight – idea that Free Will is incompatible with determinism. He says that every variety of free will worth wanting we can have in a deterministic world. Paradoxically, quantum randomness cannot give us free will, it is just an illusion that it can. The phrase “The future is inevitable in a deterministic universe”, Dan argues, has no meaning. Why? Because the future is going to happen, whatever that is, in a in-deterministic universe also.
So, what we really need to talk about, when discussing the subject of free will, is avoidability (harm avoidance); that is what evolved beings do; they try to avoid harm, and attract what is good, by using “cognitive virtual reality simulators” that train the evolved, but not perfect, agent (human, animal, etc) to properly react to the future possible scenarios that life might face him with (one such cognitive virtual reality simulator is REM dreaming).
Furthermore, Dan says natural selection helps the evolution of free will : Evolution is an explosion of evitability! Freedom Evolves. From order comes freedom.
The other major subject of the debate is consciousness. Dan thinks Consciousness is the state of the brain, that is, the competition or “political fame” (“fame in the brain”) between content fixation mechanisms (daemons or neuronal structures) or more exactly between alliances of these neural structures. This is consciousness. THE PANDEMONIUM! THE TURMOIL! The fight for control. The act of those structures fighting with each other, over and over again, that is what it means for a person to be conscious.
Also, Dan argues against the absurd concept of Epiphenomenalism. That is, “Influenced by the brain, but does not in turn influence the brain” or more explicitly “The functioning of the brain creates consciousness, but consciousness does not have any effect in the functioning/activity of the brain”. Dan argues this is as absurd as saying “Seven ephiphenomenal gremlins exist in an internal combustion engine; there caused by the actions of the cylinders, they cause nothing in return; they are undetectable by any machine or test”. But consciousness is not like that because if the fact that you’re now telling us that you detect your consciousness is an effect of your “detecting it“, then your “detecting it” is an effect of the epiphenomenon and that is ruled out by its definition. So here we have it : Epiphenomenalism is false, therefore consciousness is causal.
Enjoy this brilliant interview! Here is the second part!
