Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional, brain study shows

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Craig Weinberg

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Nov 29, 2012, 2:31:25 PM11/29/12
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The study showed that within 60 milliseconds, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (also known as TPJ area), located in the back of the brain, was first activated, with different activity depending on whether the harm was intentional or accidental. It was followed in quick succession by the amygdala, often linked with emotion, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (180 milliseconds), the portion of the brain that plays a critical role in moral decision-making.

There was no such response in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex when the harm was accidental.

 http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2012/11/28/moral-evaluations-harm-are-instant-and-emotional-brain-study-shows

Seems like being able to tell the difference between an accident and free will is a top priority for human consciousness. Under .06 seconds. That's more than three times faster than it takes to recognize an emotion in a human face.

Alberto G. Corona

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Nov 29, 2012, 4:05:24 PM11/29/12
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There are other examples of abilities optimized for speed. At the functional level, a module for fast processing of logical rules involved in cheating detection (or breaking of deontic rules ) has been discovered:


Apparently, the purpose is to react quickly to avoid further damage and/or to react with the appropriate puhishment to disuade the agressor/cheater from making more damage.

2012/11/29 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
ident an



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Stephen P. King

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Nov 29, 2012, 8:05:32 PM11/29/12
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Hi Craig,

    This is interesting as it shows the importance of distinguishing accidental from intentional acts. The former need to response as they where, in a sense, unavoidable since there is not way to avoid such in the future, but the latter can be avoided by some subsequent action. This seems to point to a built in understanding of causality and probability in the 'hardware'.
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Onward!

Stephen

Craig Weinberg

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Nov 29, 2012, 11:14:06 PM11/29/12
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Exactly. It seems to me that this relatively instantaneous awareness of the situation as a meaningful gestalt runs completely contrary to what we would expect in a comp world, where determinations of agency should be a long, esoteric computation. If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Craig

Alberto G. Corona

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Nov 30, 2012, 3:37:35 AM11/30/12
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This speed in the evaluation is a consequence of evolutionary pressures: A teleological agent that is executing a violent plan against us is much more dangerous than a casual accident. because the first will continue harming us, so a fast reaction against further damage is necessary, while in the case of an accident no stress response is necessary. (stress responses compromise long term health)

That distinction may explain the  consideration of natural disasters as teleological: For example earthquakes or storms: The stress response necessary to react against these phenomena make them much more similar to teleological plans of unknown agents than  mere accidents. 

Hence, it is no surprise that the  natural disasters are considered as teleological  and moral . For example, as deliberated acts of the goods against the corruption of the people, or currently, the response of "the planet" against the aggression of the immorally rich countries that deplete the resources.


2012/11/30 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>

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Craig Weinberg

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Nov 30, 2012, 9:49:53 AM11/30/12
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On Friday, November 30, 2012 3:37:35 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
This speed in the evaluation is a consequence of evolutionary pressures: A teleological agent that is executing a violent plan against us is much more dangerous than a casual accident.

Only if there are teleological agents in the first place. There are some people around here who deny that free will is possible. They insist (though I am not sure how, since insisting is already a voluntary act) that our impression that we are agents who can plan and execute plans is another evolutionary consequence.

The problem with retrospective evolutionary psychology is that it is unfalsifiable. Any behavior can be plugged into evolution and generate a just-so story from here to there. If the study showed just the opposite - that human beings can't tell the difference between acts of nature and intentional acts, or that it is very slow, why that would make sense too as a consequence of evolutionary pressure as well. You would want to be *sure* that some agent is intentionally harming you lest you falsely turn on a member of your own social group and find yourself cast out. This would validate representational theories of consciousness too - of course it would take longer to reason out esoteric computations of intention than it would take to recognize something so immediately important as being able to discern emotions in others face. That way you could see if someone was angry before they actually started hitting you and have a survival advantage. Evolutionary psychology is its own built in confirmation bias. Not that it has no basis in fact, of course it does, but I can see that it is psychology which is evolving, not evolution which is psychologizing.
 
 
because the first will continue harming us, so a fast reaction against further damage is necessary, while in the case of an accident no stress response is necessary. (stress responses compromise long term health)

Yes, but it's simplistic. There are a lot of things in the environment which are unintentional but continue to harm us which we would be better off developing a detector for. There is no limit to what evolution can be credited with doing - anything goes. If we had a way of immediately detecting which mosquitoes carried malaria, that would make perfect sense. If we could intuitively tell fungus were edible in the forest, that would make sense too.


That distinction may explain the  consideration of natural disasters as teleological: For example earthquakes or storms: The stress response necessary to react against these phenomena make them much more similar to teleological plans of unknown agents than  mere accidents. 

The study shows the opposite though. It shows that we specifically and immediately discern the intentional from the unintentional. The top priority is making that distinction.
 

Hence, it is no surprise that the  natural disasters are considered as teleological  and moral . For example, as deliberated acts of the goods against the corruption of the people, or currently, the response of "the planet" against the aggression of the immorally rich countries that deplete the resources.

It's not a bad hypothesis, but I see the more plausible explanation being that by default consciousness is tuned to read meta-personal (super-signifying) meanings as well as personal and sub-personal (logical) meanings. Except for the last few centuries among Western cultures, human consciousness has been universally tuned to the world as animistic and teleological. The normal state of human being is to interpret all events that one experiences as a reflection on one's own efforts, thoughts, etc. This is why religion is such an easy sell to this day. By default, we are superstitious, not necessarily out of evolution, but out of the nature of consciousness itself. Superstition is one of the ways that the psyche detects larger, more diffuse ranges of itself. Intuition taps into longer views of the present - larger 'nows', but at the cost of logic and personal significance.

More on the failure of HADD here: http://s33light.org/post/1499804865

"I submit that this Hyperactive Agency Detection Device is a weak hypothesis for explaining the subjective bias of subjectivity. To me, it makes more sense that religion originates not as mistaken agency detection, but rather as an exaggerated or magnified reflection of its source, a subjective agent. Human culture is nothing if not totemic. Masks, puppets, figurative drawings, voices and gestures, sculpture, drama, dance, song, etc reflect the nature of subjectivity itself - it’s expression of character and creating stories with them. "

Thanks,
Craig

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 10, 2012, 5:09:25 AM12/10/12
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Craig: The evolutionary Psychology hypothesis are falsifiable




2012/11/30 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>

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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 11, 2012, 2:04:00 PM12/11/12
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On Monday, December 10, 2012 5:09:25 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
Craig: The evolutionary Psychology hypothesis are falsifiable

Your link is just a Google search which shows that there is no consensus on whether they are falsifiable. Why do you think that they are falsifiable? I have made my case, given examples, explained why evolutionary psych is so seductive and compulsive as a cognitive bias, but why am I wrong?

Try it this way. Let's say we are measuring the difference in how long it takes to recognize a friend versus recognizing a stranger and we find that there is a clear difference. Which would outcome would evolutionary psych favor? I could argue that it is clearly more important to identify a stranger, as they may present a threat to our lives or an opportunity for trade, security, information, etc. I could equally argue that it is clearly more important to identify a friend so that we reinforce the bonds of our social group and foster deep interdependence. I could argue that there should be no major difference between the times because they are both important. I could argue that the times should vary according to context. I could argue that they should not vary according to context as these functions must be processed beneath the threshold of conscious processing.

Evolutionary Psychology assumptions can generate plausible interpretations for any outcome after the fact and offers no particular opinions before the fact, and that opens the door for at least ambiguous falsifiability in many cases.

Craig

meekerdb

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Dec 11, 2012, 2:06:32 PM12/11/12
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On 12/11/2012 11:04 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Try it this way. Let's say we are measuring the difference in how long it takes to recognize a friend versus recognizing a stranger and we find that there is a clear difference.

Yeah, we don't recognize the stranger.

Brent

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 11, 2012, 3:24:54 PM12/11/12
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Does somebody stop being a stranger just because we recognize seeing them more than once?

Craig


Brent

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 11, 2012, 3:46:23 PM12/11/12
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Yes, I  sent a search link for you to know the opinions about it.

in EP this your example does not offer a clear hypothesis. But there are others that are evident.  It depends on the context. for example , woman have more accurate facial recognition habilities, but men perceive faster than women faces of angry men that are loking at him. I think that you can guess why.

The alignment detection is common in the animal kingdom: somethng that point at you may be a treat. it


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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 11, 2012, 4:03:57 PM12/11/12
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On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:46:23 PM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
Yes, I  sent a search link for you to know the opinions about it.

in EP this your example does not offer a clear hypothesis. But there are others that are evident.  It depends on the context. for example , woman have more accurate facial recognition habilities, but men perceive faster than women faces of angry men that are loking at him. I think that you can guess why.

It's the guessing why which I find unscientific. It helps us feel that we are very clever, but really it is a slippery slope into just-so story land. There are some species where the females are more aggressive ( http://www.culture-of-peace.info/biology/chapter4-6.html  ) - does that mean that the females in those species will definitely show the reverse of the pattern that you mention? Just the fact that some species have more aggressive females than males should call into question any functionalist theories based on gender, and if gender in general doesn't say anything very reliable about psychology, then why should we place much value on any of these kinds of assumptions.

Evolution is not teleological, it is the opposite. Who we are is a function of the specific experiences of specific individuals who were lucky in specific circumstances. That's it. There's no explanatory power in sweeping generalizations which credit evolution with particular psychological strategies. Sometimes behaviors are broadly adaptive species-wide, and sometimes they are incidental, and it is nearly impossible to tell them apart, especially thousands of years after the fact.

Craig


Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 11, 2012, 4:41:04 PM12/11/12
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You are mixing species. The human specie has his nature. The sea horse, as fine as it is, has another. human males are more aggresive for the same reason that sea horse females are aggressive too: the other sex does the heavier effort in caring for the eggs and thus are the scarce resource for which the other sex has to fight and is the less prone to risk taking, something that is evident by a short game theoretical reasoning.  As simple as that.

I was not present in the holocene or whathever in the creatacic  during the millions of years when sea horses switched slowly their male female roles, but this reasoning can be done here and now with the same accuracy.

Evolution is not random . It has rules. Evolutionary biology has made wonderful discoveries about animal behaviour. E.O Wilson the founder of sociobiology predicted that if a mammal would be found that has social insect organization (with a single reproductive Queen) It would be in tropical humid climate and living in the underground. Sorty after, a specie of rodent according with this description was found.


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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 11, 2012, 5:00:36 PM12/11/12
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On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 4:41:04 PM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
You are mixing species. The human specie has his nature. The sea horse, as fine as it is, has another. human males are more aggresive for the same reason that sea horse females are aggressive too: the other sex does the heavier effort in caring for the eggs and thus are the scarce resource for which the other sex has to fight and is the less prone to risk taking, something that is evident by a short game theoretical reasoning.  As simple as that.

It's not that simple at all. Human males vary in their aggressiveness from individual to individual, family to family, culture to culture, and situation to situation. Had a comet wiped out Homo sapiens from one part of Africa which had more aggressive males, then we might now identify females with aggressiveness. Even in the last few years gender has changed significantly as males have become more feminized in certain ways and females have be come more masculine in certain ways. Certainly some of what you are saying has truth to it, but it's neither a reliable nor particularly important way to derive truth. It's a simplification which really is inseparable ultimately with eugenics - which I don't say to put the idea down as immoral, only to show that mechanistic views of anthropology are inherently and inevitably fallacious.
 

I was not present in the holocene or whathever in the creatacic  during the millions of years when sea horses switched slowly their male female roles, but this reasoning can be done here and now with the same accuracy.

You make it sound like gender roles are something which exist as some kind of objective property. Gender is an invention of evolution. Its roles are situational and relativistic. Whether what is secreted by a gland is more egg-like or more sperm-like really has no inherent role attached to it. Males take care of the kids in some species and in some families. Sometimes nobody takes care of the kids.
 

Evolution is not random . It has rules. 

The rules are called natural selection. They aren't rules though, they are consequences of actual experiences and conditions, some intentional, some unintentional.
 
Evolutionary biology has made wonderful discoveries about animal behaviour. E.O Wilson the founder of sociobiology predicted that if a mammal would be found that has social insect organization (with a single reproductive Queen) It would be in tropical humid climate and living in the underground. Sorty after, a specie of rodent according with this description was found.

I'm not knocking evolutionary biology, I'm knocking what Raymond Tallis calls Darwinitis - the compulsive application of generic evolutionary simplifications to all features of human consciousness. Just because we enjoy beautiful mates doesn't mean that the mating function can somehow generate beauty to optimize its activities.

Craig

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 11, 2012, 5:33:26 PM12/11/12
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2012/12/11 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 4:41:04 PM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
You are mixing species. The human specie has his nature. The sea horse, as fine as it is, has another. human males are more aggresive for the same reason that sea horse females are aggressive too: the other sex does the heavier effort in caring for the eggs and thus are the scarce resource for which the other sex has to fight and is the less prone to risk taking, something that is evident by a short game theoretical reasoning.  As simple as that.

It's not that simple at all. Human males vary in their aggressiveness from individual to individual, family to family, culture to culture, and situation to situation. Had a comet wiped out Homo sapiens from one part of Africa which had more aggressive males, then we might now identify females with aggressiveness. Even in the last few years gender has changed significantly as males have become more feminized in certain ways and females have be come more masculine in certain ways. Certainly some of what you are saying has truth to it, but it's neither a reliable nor particularly important way to derive truth. It's a simplification which really is inseparable ultimately with eugenics - which I don't say to put the idea down as immoral, only to show that mechanistic views of anthropology are inherently and inevitably fallacious.
 
There is no feminization nor masculinization other than we would see in any other specie responding to different situations. 

Oh ah, I understand. This is not the right use of evolution, that is, on the left side of politics. Because I say, and natural selection says that men and women have a nature instead of having none -so the leftist friends can engineer man at   their arbitrary pleasure- , I´m being eugenesist (??) and a bad guy. 

I see that the times when EO. Wilson was insulted, aggressively molested and expelled from universitary conferences are not over. Still the same rejection for the same ideological reasons. 

I was not present in the holocene or whathever in the creatacic  during the millions of years when sea horses switched slowly their male female roles, but this reasoning can be done here and now with the same accuracy.

You make it sound like gender roles are something which exist as some kind of objective property. Gender is an invention of evolution. Its roles are situational and relativistic. Whether what is secreted by a gland is more egg-like or more sperm-like really has no inherent role attached to it. Males take care of the kids in some species and in some families. Sometimes nobody takes care of the kids.
 
Gender is an invention of evolution?  the whole you are.  Wether evolution is or not the invention of a Creator or not, evolution (natural selection) gave us a nature. I´m sorry for the liberals, but this includes everything in you. You can reject to look straigh at it and  look at the exceptions,  some of them flawed, some of them easily explainable, but the science will stay in front of you waiting for you to look at it.
 

Evolution is not random . It has rules. 

The rules are called natural selection. They aren't rules though, they are consequences of actual experiences and conditions, some intentional, some unintentional.
 
They are called phisical, laws, game theory, computation science, evolutionary game theory, fitness landscapes, genetics, genetic drift, multilevel selection.... Of course the productos of evolution are historical, but the laws tell you what combinations of characteristics are not possible whatsoever.
 
Evolutionary biology has made wonderful discoveries about animal behaviour. E.O Wilson the founder of sociobiology predicted that if a mammal would be found that has social insect organization (with a single reproductive Queen) It would be in tropical humid climate and living in the underground. Sorty after, a specie of rodent according with this description was found.

I'm not knocking evolutionary biology, I'm knocking what Raymond Tallis calls Darwinitis - the compulsive application of generic evolutionary simplifications to all features of human consciousness. Just because we enjoy beautiful mates doesn't mean that the mating function can somehow generate beauty to optimize its activities.

The appreciation of beauty is clearly an adaptation. We perceive as beatiful what was adaptively relevant for our survival in the past. This happens with our higher and lower capacities. For that matter we have a common architecture of the mind, and we share the same (adaptive) concepts so we can communicate in abstract ways about beauty, love, freedom,  loyalty and so on. 


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Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 11, 2012, 6:06:15 PM12/11/12
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This has profound philosophical implications. At last the introspection of Plato and Aristoteles  was the first attempts to systematize the knowledge of the functional architecture of the human soul, later knowm as the mind.  Unconscious brain computations appear in the conscience as intuitions. This is the Nous of the greeks.

 All the notions  of  concepts like Justice in introspective philosophers like plato and Aristotle are guided by these unconscious processing, within functional modules that we all share, and work the same way in all of us, and this is why these concepts configure the very reality that we perceive. They are there because they were designed by natural selection to cope with social interactions in the past.  And this is why in response to our natural sense of justice, there is a Natural Right among other natural institutions.


2012/12/11 Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com>



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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 11, 2012, 8:23:51 PM12/11/12
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On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 5:33:26 PM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:



2012/12/11 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Tuesday, December 11, 2012 4:41:04 PM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
You are mixing species. The human specie has his nature. The sea horse, as fine as it is, has another. human males are more aggresive for the same reason that sea horse females are aggressive too: the other sex does the heavier effort in caring for the eggs and thus are the scarce resource for which the other sex has to fight and is the less prone to risk taking, something that is evident by a short game theoretical reasoning.  As simple as that.

It's not that simple at all. Human males vary in their aggressiveness from individual to individual, family to family, culture to culture, and situation to situation. Had a comet wiped out Homo sapiens from one part of Africa which had more aggressive males, then we might now identify females with aggressiveness. Even in the last few years gender has changed significantly as males have become more feminized in certain ways and females have be come more masculine in certain ways. Certainly some of what you are saying has truth to it, but it's neither a reliable nor particularly important way to derive truth. It's a simplification which really is inseparable ultimately with eugenics - which I don't say to put the idea down as immoral, only to show that mechanistic views of anthropology are inherently and inevitably fallacious.
 
There is no feminization nor masculinization other than we would see in any other specie responding to different situations. 

There is a lot going on with feminization and masculinization in humans (and apparently in some amphibians and reptiles too) in recent years. I'm not sure what situations you are referring to, but if you aren't aware, gender no longer a binary distinction, especially for the under 30 crowd.
 

Oh ah, I understand. This is not the right use of evolution, that is, on the left side of politics. Because I say, and natural selection says that men and women have a nature instead of having none -

The nature of men and women is precisely what has evolved. Are you postulating some gender-spirit which operates outside of evolution, guiding it into perfect divine forms?
 
so the leftist friends can engineer man at   their arbitrary pleasure- , I´m being eugenesist (??) and a bad guy. 

No, I made a specific point of saying that I am not accusing your view of being bad or immoral, just simplistic to the point of being factually incorrect. Eugenics isn't wrong just because it is evil to pass judgment on the unborn, but because heredity is not an adequate explanation of human identity.
 

I see that the times when EO. Wilson was insulted, aggressively molested and expelled from universitary conferences are not over. Still the same rejection for the same ideological reasons. 

No ideology here, only scientific questioning based on real experiences rather than assumptions.
 

I was not present in the holocene or whathever in the creatacic  during the millions of years when sea horses switched slowly their male female roles, but this reasoning can be done here and now with the same accuracy.

You make it sound like gender roles are something which exist as some kind of objective property. Gender is an invention of evolution. Its roles are situational and relativistic. Whether what is secreted by a gland is more egg-like or more sperm-like really has no inherent role attached to it. Males take care of the kids in some species and in some families. Sometimes nobody takes care of the kids.
 
Gender is an invention of evolution?

Are you questioning that? You are aware that some species reproduce asexually, and that many species exist without pronounced sexual dimorphism. If we had evolved from nudibranchs instead of primate ancestors, we, like them, would be simultaneous hermaphrodites. In that case, we could be living on a planet where the whole idea of gender is inconceivable.

 the whole you are.  Wether evolution is or not the invention of a Creator or not, evolution (natural selection) gave us a nature.

It's circular to say that NATURAL selection precedes NATURE.
 
I´m sorry for the liberals, but this includes everything in you. You can reject to look straigh at it and  look at the exceptions,  some of them flawed, some of them easily explainable, but the science will stay in front of you waiting for you to look at it.

Sounds like some ideological mumblings but I'm not sure what they mean or what they have to do with clarifying the role of evolution in psychology.
 
 

Evolution is not random . It has rules. 

The rules are called natural selection. They aren't rules though, they are consequences of actual experiences and conditions, some intentional, some unintentional.
 
They are called phisical, laws, game theory, computation science, evolutionary game theory, fitness landscapes, genetics, genetic drift, multilevel selection.... Of course the productos of evolution are historical, but the laws tell you what combinations of characteristics are not possible whatsoever.

All laws and theories are a posteriori analyses of what we can observe and simplify, not a priori templates which are inevitable in all possible universes.

 
Evolutionary biology has made wonderful discoveries about animal behaviour. E.O Wilson the founder of sociobiology predicted that if a mammal would be found that has social insect organization (with a single reproductive Queen) It would be in tropical humid climate and living in the underground. Sorty after, a specie of rodent according with this description was found.

I'm not knocking evolutionary biology, I'm knocking what Raymond Tallis calls Darwinitis - the compulsive application of generic evolutionary simplifications to all features of human consciousness. Just because we enjoy beautiful mates doesn't mean that the mating function can somehow generate beauty to optimize its activities.

The appreciation of beauty is clearly an adaptation.

Circular reasoning. You are saying that beauty exists because we appreciate beauty.
 
We perceive as beatiful what was adaptively relevant for our survival in the past.

A seductive over-simplification. By that logic, we should see poison plants as remarkably ugly and manure as gorgeous, as it provides fuel and fertilizer. Even if there were such a correspondence without exception though, it explains absolutely nothing about how or why beauty would appear. It is like saying that a rock would be attracted to rolling downhill.
 
This happens with our higher and lower capacities. For that matter we have a common architecture of the mind, and we share the same (adaptive) concepts so we can communicate in abstract ways about beauty, love, freedom,  loyalty and so on. 

Yet we feel more compelled to focus on our personal preferences than we do in generic commonalities.

Craig
 

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 12, 2012, 10:46:27 AM12/12/12
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Well. I have not all the time i wish for this. You keep saying that "there are othes species where..." Yes. And there are atoms that are radiactive. What are two species to do one with each other?. As a minimum, For the next half million years, men and femenine sea horses will be more agressive and risk taking than their opposite sex. This is guaranteed by the pace that evolution takes to change a large set of coordinated genes. The people like you that accept the innate , natural -selection driven nature of animal behaviour but reject it form men are victims of a heavy prejuice. I don´t know if this is political or religious or both. I like to go to the bottom of the motivation of a discussion,. sorry if this is inconvenient. And I want to know in the name of what the existence of a species-specific nature is worht the title of eugenesist.

You can demote this at your please, keeping telling about spiritualism or that  there are partenogenetic frogs and there are  planets with no blue skies. There are frogs that sing, by the way. I don´t kniow if this would help to make a point in your argumentation.

Both of us have have put clear our standpoints.


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Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 12, 2012, 10:59:38 AM12/12/12
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If your prejuice comes from a religious standpoint you have nothing to worry about. Think that God made evolve the human soul as well as the body. it does not change your common sense nor your beliefs.  If, in the contrary, the prejuice comes from a liberal standpoint, you have much to worry about natural selection. A lot.


2012/12/12 Alberto G. Corona <agoc...@gmail.com>



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Roger Clough

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Dec 12, 2012, 11:56:39 AM12/12/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Anything goal-oriented is teleological, which is what
the word means. And the goal of life is to survive.
So evolution is teleological.
 
In other words, life is intelligent.
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/12/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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2012/12/11 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>




2012/11/30 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
"I submit that this Hyperactive Agency Detection Device is a weak hypothesis for explaining the subjective bias of subjectivity. To me, it makes more sense that religion originates not as mistaken agency detection, but rather as an exaggerated or magnified reflection of its source, a subjective agent. Human culture is nothing if not totemic. Masks, puppets, figurative drawings, voices and gestures, sculpture, drama, dance, song, etc reflect the nature of subjectivity itself - it抯 expression of character and creating stories with them. "

Thanks,
Craig

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Telmo Menezes

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Dec 12, 2012, 2:21:04 PM12/12/12
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Hi Roger,

Anything goal-oriented is teleological, which is what
the word means. And the goal of life is to survive.
So evolution is teleological.

Sorry but I don't agree that life or evolution have a goal. That would be a bit like saying that the goal of gravity is to attract chunks of matter to each other. You could instead see life as a process and evolution as a filter: some stuff continues to exist, other stuff doesn't. We can develop narratives on why that is: successful replication, good adaption to a biological niche and so on. But these narratives are all in our minds, we ourselves looking at it from inside of the process, if you will. From the outside, we are just experiencing the stuff that persists or, in other words, that went through the evolutionary filter at this point in time.
 
 
In other words, life is intelligent.

Suppose I postulate that the goal of stars is to emit light. Are they intelligent? If not why? What's the difference?

Terren Suydam

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Dec 12, 2012, 2:48:31 PM12/12/12
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Hi Telmo,

I agree with everything you said. However, a goal is something that can only be formulated in some kind of mind - it's a mental construct. So to say "life has a goal" makes no sense, *except* as the implicit statement that e.g. "we interpret that life's goal is to survive". All goals are interpretations... e.g, "the goal of a thermostat is to regulate the temperature" is still an interpretive statement, because there is a level of description of a thermostat that is perfectly valid yet yields no concept of regulation.

So then the statement that "the goal of life is to survive" is ok... so long as we acknowledge that goals are always in the mind of the interpreter.  

Terren

Craig Weinberg

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On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 10:46:27 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
Well. I have not all the time i wish for this. You keep saying that "there are othes species where..." Yes. And there are atoms that are radiactive. What are two species to do one with each other?.

All species are only variations on the same organism.
 
As a minimum, For the next half million years, men and femenine sea horses will be more agressive and risk taking than their opposite sex. This is guaranteed by the pace that evolution takes to change a large set of coordinated genes. The people like you that accept the innate , natural -selection driven nature of animal behaviour but reject it form men are victims of a heavy prejuice.

I'm not a victim of anything, as far as I know. It's interesting how you always bring it back to a personal attack when your arguments fail to yield any insights. It sounds like you are making an argument for Social Darwinism, which is of course, fraudulent and a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology. Survival of the fittest means only survival of the best fit to ecological conditions, not that the meanest toughest bastard always wins. Just ask the dinosaurs.
 
I don´t know if this is political or religious or both. I like to go to the bottom of the motivation of a discussion,. sorry if this is inconvenient.

It's not inconvenient, it's exposing the left-brain driven defense mechanisms which come up in debates. Faced with a more reasonable argument, some lash out personally, looking for some motive based on blood or character defect so they don't have to face the possibility that they might be wrong. It doesn't bother me though, because I debate these issues because I am interested in the root of the issue, not the root of the personality of those who I am debating with.
 
And I want to know in the name of what the existence of a species-specific nature is worht the title of eugenesist.

I don't understand, but it sounds like you are asking why I would say that ideas about inherent gender qualities rooted in immutable evolutionary truths are eugenic. If it isn't clear to you then there is nothing that I can tell you which will help you see.


You can demote this at your please, keeping telling about spiritualism or that  there are partenogenetic frogs and there are  planets with no blue skies. There are frogs that sing, by the way. I don´t kniow if this would help to make a point in your argumentation.

Both of us have have put clear our standpoints.
 
Sure, although I think that your standpoint is from the 19th century and has been factually discredited since then.

Craig

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 12, 2012, 3:41:47 PM12/12/12
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On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 2:48:31 PM UTC-5, Terren Suydam wrote:
Hi Telmo,

I agree with everything you said. However, a goal is something that can only be formulated in some kind of mind - it's a mental construct. So to say "life has a goal" makes no sense, *except* as the implicit statement that e.g. "we interpret that life's goal is to survive". All goals are interpretations... e.g, "the goal of a thermostat is to regulate the temperature" is still an interpretive statement, because there is a level of description of a thermostat that is perfectly valid yet yields no concept of regulation.

Exactly right. The difference between teleology and teleonomy (evolution) is that teleonomy is the accumulation of unintentional consequences. Even if the goal of life were to survive, that goal has nothing whatsoever to do with natural selection. I'm sure that the dinosaurs wanted to survive as much as the mammals who superseded them.

Teleology is about initiating sequences and carrying them out voluntarily - sometimes in spite of consequences or in direct opposition to them. Teleology is the defiance of evolution - it is artificial selection over and above natural selection.

Craig

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 12, 2012, 3:43:15 PM12/12/12
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On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 11:56:39 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Anything goal-oriented is teleological, which is what
the word means. And the goal of life is to survive.
So evolution is teleological.
 
In other words, life is intelligent.

Just repeating my comment above:


The difference between teleology and teleonomy (evolution) is that teleonomy is the accumulation of unintentional consequences. Even if the goal of life were to survive, that goal has nothing whatsoever to do with natural selection. I'm sure that the dinosaurs wanted to survive as much as the mammals who superseded them.

Teleology is about initiating sequences and carrying them out voluntarily - sometimes in spite of consequences or in direct opposition to them. Teleology is the defiance of evolution - it is artificial selection over and above natural selection.

Craig



2012/12/11 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>




2012/11/30 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
"I submit that this Hyperactive Agency Detection Device is a weak hypothesis for explaining the subjective bias of subjectivity. To me, it makes more sense that religion originates not as mistaken agency detection, but rather as an exaggerated or magnified reflection of its source, a subjective agent. Human culture is nothing if not totemic. Masks, puppets, figurative drawings, voices and gestures, sculpture, drama, dance, song, etc reflect the nature of subjectivity itself - it� expression of character and creating stories with them. "

Thanks,
Craig

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Telmo Menezes

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Dec 12, 2012, 4:27:11 PM12/12/12
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Hi Tarren,

Yup, we're in agreement.

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 13, 2012, 6:47:19 AM12/13/12
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Dear Craig,
You have much to learn about evolution. there have been a lot of developments since Darwin. You adhere to a caricature that is outdated. Almost everything can drive to totalitarianism, The idea that nothing is innate drives to totalitarian social engineering. the idea that men are different because they are genetically (innately) different drives to Eugenesism. But I can not see how  the idea that men are genetically (innately) equal could could drive to eugenesism.

By the way, unless you are a variation of the primeval bacterias (are you a dolphin?) different from my specie,  you will agree that the fast moral evaluation mechanism that you posted at the beginning of this discussion comes as the result of something.  If you reject natural selection as the process that conform the human psichology as an adaptation to the social and phisical medium, What do you think that produced this remarcable moral ability in humans (and only humans)  apart from natural selection. The god of diversity? Gaia?  randomness?  State planned education?.  

2012/12/12 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>

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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 6:47:19 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
Dear Craig,
You have much to learn about evolution. there have been a lot of developments since Darwin. You adhere to a caricature that is outdated.

Dear Alberto,

You make a lot of assumptions about me and what I should do. I try to avoid doing that. It's not polite and it is misinforms others.
 
Almost everything can drive to totalitarianism, The idea that nothing is innate drives to totalitarian social engineering. the idea that men are different because they are genetically (innately) different drives to Eugenesism. But I can not see how  the idea that men are genetically (innately) equal could could drive to eugenesism.

I don't know about genetically equal, but I would say that all humans are innately potentially equivalent. What might be initially a disadvantageous inherited trait may very well turn out to generate a compensating intentional trait (i.e. Napoleon), or might find them at an advantage in a different set of conditions which arise (i.e. the King of England likes the sound of your name and promotes you from hunchback latrine boy to Lord Hunchbacque.)

I'm not so much concerned about what the effects of the truth might be, or which truths should be avoided to be safe. If anything, that is the most common impetus for fascism - to herd other human beings like cattle in the direction that you deem wise for them. Who appointed you or me shepherd?


By the way, unless you are a variation of the primeval bacterias (are you a dolphin?) different from my specie,

(FYI 'species' is the singular form of species. The word specie refers to currency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specie )

you will agree that the fast moral evaluation mechanism that you posted at the beginning of this discussion comes as the result of something.

Yes, it comes as the result of the nature of awareness and intention as more primitive than biology.
 
 If you reject natural selection as the process that conform the human psichology as an adaptation to the social and phisical medium, What do you think that produced this remarcable moral ability in humans (and only humans)  apart from natural selection.

I think that our range of contemporary human capacities are the result of countless feedback loops of personal interactions and events on many levels simultaneously and sequentially. These range in frequency from the sub-personal to the personal to the super-personal and include many genetic and environmental factors. As far as the moral ability in the article, I don't know that it is more pronounced in humans than in other species, just that it is more pronounced in humans than it should be if you believe that free will is an illusion.
 
The god of diversity? Gaia?  randomness?  State planned education?.  

Sense.


Sensibly,
Craig
 

Roger Clough

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Dec 13, 2012, 8:32:10 AM12/13/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Teleology or intending from inside toward a goal is the science of final causation,
to use Aristotle's term. Because from inside, it requires intelligence. Such is life.
Or driving a car.
 
Science or determinism deals with effective causation (pushing from outside).
No self-directing intelligence is needed.
 
 
 
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Roger Clough

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Dec 13, 2012, 8:40:49 AM12/13/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Since evolution is evolution of living creatures, who must have the desire
to live and grow and mate, it is goal-oriented, and thus at least
partly teleological. 
 
Teleonomy (I had to look it up) is defined as only "apparent" puposeful-ness.
How do those that assign telonomy to evolution know that it is only
apparent ?  That sounds like a dodge to me.
 
Do you feel that your life is only "apparently" purposeful ?
 
I say that if life appears to be purposeful, it IS purposeful.
 
If you think you're having fun, you're having fun.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Roger Clough

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Dec 13, 2012, 8:43:03 AM12/13/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
What drives to totalitarianism is the lust for power.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain study shows

On Thursday, December 13, 2012 6:47:19 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
Dear Craig,
You have much to learn about evolution. there have been a lot of developments since Darwin. You adhere to a caricature that is outdated.

Dear Alberto,

You make a lot of assumptions about me and what I should do. I try to avoid doing that. It's not polite and it is misinforms others.
 
Almost everything can drive to totalitarianism, The idea that nothing is innate drives to totalitarian social engineering. the idea that men are different because they are genetically (innately) different drives to Eugenesism. But I can not see how  the idea that men are genetically (innately) equal could could drive to eugenesism.

I don't know about genetically equal, but I would say that all humans are innately potentially equivalent. What might be initially a disadvantageous inherited trait may very well turn out to generate a compensating intentional trait (i.e. Napoleon), or might find them at an advantage in a different set of conditions which arise (i.e. the King of England likes the sound of your name and promotes you from hunchback latrine boy to Lord Hunchbacque.)

I'm not so much concerned about what the effects of the truth might be, or which truths should be avoided to be safe. If anything, that is the most common impetus for fascism - to herd other human beings like cattle in the direction that you deem wise for them. Who appointed you or me shepherd?


By the way, unless you are a variation of the primeval bacterias (are you a dolphin?) different from my specie,

(FYI 'species' is the singular form of species. The word specie refers to currency. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specie )

you will agree that the fast moral evaluation mechanism that you posted at the beginning of this discussion comes as the result of something.

Yes, it comes as the result of the nature of awareness and intention as more primitive than biology.
 
 If you reject natural selection as the process that conform the human psichology as an adaptation to the social and phisical medium, What do you think that produced this remarcable moral ability in humans (and only humans)  apart from natural selection.

I think that our range of contemporary human capacities are the result of countless feedback loops of personal interactions and events on many levels simultaneously and sequentially. These range in frequency from the sub-personal to the personal to the super-personal and include many genetic and environmental factors. As far as the moral ability in the article, I don't know that it is more pronounced in humans than in other species, just that it is more pronounced in humans than it should be if you believe that free will is an illusion.
 
The god of diversity? Gaia?  randomness?  State planned education?.  

Sense.


Sensibly,
Craig
 

2012/12/12 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 10:46:27 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
Well. I have not all the time i wish for this. You keep saying that "there are othes species where..." Yes. And there are atoms that are radiactive. What are two species to do one with each other?.

All species are only variations on the same organism.
 
As a minimum, For the next half million years, men and femenine sea horses will be more agressive and risk taking than their opposite sex. This is guaranteed by the pace that evolution takes to change a large set of coordinated genes. The people like you that accept the innate , natural -selection driven nature of animal behaviour but reject it form men are victims of a heavy prejuice.

I'm not a victim of anything, as far as I know. It's interesting how you always bring it back to a personal attack when your arguments fail to yield any insights. It sounds like you are making an argument for Social Darwinism, which is of course, fraudulent and a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology. Survival of the fittest means only survival of the best fit to ecological conditions, not that the meanest toughest bastard always wins. Just ask the dinosaurs.
 
I don磘 know if this is political or religious or both. I like to go to the bottom of the motivation of a discussion,. sorry if this is inconvenient.

It's not inconvenient, it's exposing the left-brain driven defense mechanisms which come up in debates. Faced with a more reasonable argument, some lash out personally, looking for some motive based on blood or character defect so they don't have to face the possibility that they might be wrong. It doesn't bother me though, because I debate these issues because I am interested in the root of the issue, not the root of the personality of those who I am debating with.
 
And I want to know in the name of what the existence of a species-specific nature is worht the title of eugenesist.

I don't understand, but it sounds like you are asking why I would say that ideas about inherent gender qualities rooted in immutable evolutionary truths are eugenic. If it isn't clear to you then there is nothing that I can tell you which will help you see.


You can demote this at your please, keeping telling about spiritualism or that  there are partenogenetic frogs and there are  planets with no blue skies. There are frogs that sing, by the way. I don磘 kniow if this would help to make a point in your argumentation.

Both of us have have put clear our standpoints.

Sure, although I think that your standpoint is from the 19th century and has been factually discredited since then.

Craig

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Alberto G. Corona

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so awareness and intention are before biology, so you seem to admit a teleology before life, like me. I don`t find this incompatible with natural selection (or evolution, as left-leaning people likes to call it). You seem to admit natural selection up to a point but you reject it when we are talking to sensible human things like the sexual roles. You enjoy the fact that NS made female hyenas to behave in some politically correct ways (it seems). but you reject that NS selection make female humans behave  as is in almost all the rest of the animal kingdom. That´t funny.

.

2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
doing



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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 13, 2012, 8:59:50 AM12/13/12
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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:32:10 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Teleology or intending from inside toward a goal is the science of final causation,
to use Aristotle's term. Because from inside, it requires intelligence. Such is life.
Or driving a car.
 
Science or determinism deals with effective causation (pushing from outside).
No self-directing intelligence is needed.

I agree with that, although to be precise, effective causation is not so much a pushing as a falling or flowing. This is why evolution is effective causation. There's no intelligence there. Some species die out, others live on. The species themselves have intelligence, but that doesn't always give them an evolutionary advantage. Sometime the stupid ones sleep in their caves while the tiger kills off the smart ones hunting in the jungle.

Craig

Hi Roger,



2012/12/11 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>




2012/11/30 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
"I submit that this Hyperactive Agency Detection Device is a weak hypothesis for explaining the subjective bias of subjectivity. To me, it makes more sense that religion originates not as mistaken agency detection, but rather as an exaggerated or magnified reflection of its source, a subjective agent. Human culture is nothing if not totemic. Masks, puppets, figurative drawings, voices and gestures, sculpture, drama, dance, song, etc reflect the nature of subjectivity itself - it� expression of character and creating stories with them. "

Thanks,
Craig



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Roger Clough

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Dec 13, 2012, 9:08:16 AM12/13/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Evolution is made by living beings. The "by"
implies intelligence, however minimal. IMHO life
differs from nonlife in that it has at least minimal intelligence
(local control, autonomy, the ability to tell friend from foe,
to mate, to search for light, to eat, to defecate, to
communicate among its cells, to tell pleasure from pain,
to move in the proper direction, etc.  Eg Bacteria are
very busy little creatures who somehow manage
through intelligence (even though minimal) to survive.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Craig Weinberg

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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:40:49 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Since evolution is evolution of living creatures, who must have the desire
to live and grow and mate,

A lot of living creatures don't mate. While I agree that life is about desire as much as evolution, I don't see the two as related. Creatures evolve with or without desire. Everything evolves. Crystals evolved from minerals.
 
it is goal-oriented, and thus at least
partly teleological. 

Everything is partly teleological.
 
 
Teleonomy (I had to look it up) is defined as only "apparent" puposeful-ness.
How do those that assign telonomy to evolution know that it is only
apparent ?  That sounds like a dodge to me.

It's not my idea and it's not a new one either. http://philpapers.org/rec/LAGTRO

I don't think that was the paper I read actually, but the one that I did read was compelling in making the distinction between the two. It's unshakably obvious to me now. Teleonomy is a quant game. Teleology is everything else.

 
Do you feel that your life is only "apparently" purposeful ?

No, but my life has nothing to do with reproduction or natural selection.
 
 
I say that if life appears to be purposeful, it IS purposeful.
 
If you think you're having fun, you're having fun.

I agree, of course, but evolution isn't having fun, and it's only purpose is diversification and consolidation. You are conflating the mechanics of natural selection with the progressing quality of life. They are only tangentially related. You are aware, I assume, that some mammals evolved to go back into the sea. It's not always a forward arrow. Some species devolve qualitatively.

Craig

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 13, 2012, 9:14:53 AM12/13/12
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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:43:03 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
 
What drives to totalitarianism is the lust for power.

People don't always know that they lust for power. They can also think that they are saving the world, or helping people restore their former glory. Nobody rolls out of be thinking 'I have a lust for power...it's time to become a totalitarian.'

 

2012/12/12 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
I don� know if this is political or religious or both. I like to go to the bottom of the motivation of a discussion,. sorry if this is inconvenient.

It's not inconvenient, it's exposing the left-brain driven defense mechanisms which come up in debates. Faced with a more reasonable argument, some lash out personally, looking for some motive based on blood or character defect so they don't have to face the possibility that they might be wrong. It doesn't bother me though, because I debate these issues because I am interested in the root of the issue, not the root of the personality of those who I am debating with.
 
And I want to know in the name of what the existence of a species-specific nature is worht the title of eugenesist.

I don't understand, but it sounds like you are asking why I would say that ideas about inherent gender qualities rooted in immutable evolutionary truths are eugenic. If it isn't clear to you then there is nothing that I can tell you which will help you see.


You can demote this at your please, keeping telling about spiritualism or that  there are partenogenetic frogs and there are  planets with no blue skies. There are frogs that sing, by the way. I don� kniow if this would help to make a point in your argumentation.

Both of us have have put clear our standpoints.

Sure, although I think that your standpoint is from the 19th century and has been factually discredited since then.

Craig

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Telmo Menezes

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Dec 13, 2012, 9:24:20 AM12/13/12
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Hi Alberto,

so awareness and intention are before biology, so you seem to admit a teleology before life, like me. I don`t find this incompatible with natural selection

But it is. The big achievement of Darwinism (and the more complete version, moden synthesis) was to explain the origin of biological complexity without requiring some pre-existing, guiding intelligence. It follows directly from lower levels of abstraction (physics->chemistry->biology). You might disagree with Darwinism, and that's fine. But we're not talking about the same thing anymore.
 
(or evolution, as left-leaning people likes to call it).

Natural selection is the mechanism, evolution is the phenomenon. No politics there, just scientific ontology.
 
You seem to admit natural selection up to a point but you reject it when we are talking to sensible human things like the sexual roles. You enjoy the fact that NS made female hyenas to behave in some politically correct ways (it seems). but you reject that NS selection make female humans behave  as is in almost all the rest of the animal kingdom. That´t funny.

There I agree with you.
 

.

2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
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Craig Weinberg

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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:48:45 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
so awareness and intention are before biology, so you seem to admit a teleology before life, like me.

Teleology and teleonomy both predate life. They are what time is made of.
 
I don`t find this incompatible with natural selection (or evolution, as left-leaning people likes to call it)

Hahaha, I wasn't aware that the very term evolution was now politicized. Actually it looks like Darwin preferred another term:

Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=evolution

So the reason that evolution was not Darwin's choice is precisely because he understood that it is not teleological.
 
. You seem to admit natural selection up to a point but you reject it when we are talking to sensible human things like the sexual roles.

Yes, natural selection only shapes things that already exist, it doesn't bring awareness or qualities of awareness into existence.
 
You enjoy the fact that NS made female hyenas to behave in some politically correct ways (it seems). but you reject that NS selection make female humans behave  as is in almost all the rest of the animal kingdom. That´t funny.

I think it's funny that you think I'm citing some evidence supporting a left wing agenda. I'm only showing you that gender is not written in stone. It's something that most people are already aware of - although if you are over 60 then you have an excuse.

Craig
 

Roger Clough

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Dec 13, 2012, 9:48:11 AM12/13/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Stones don't desire and they don't evolve.
Living creatures do.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Subject: Re: Re: life is teleological

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/na1BaHI69V4J.

Roger Clough

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Dec 13, 2012, 9:54:05 AM12/13/12
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Hi Telmo Menezes
 
To be purposeful you need a self or center of
consciousness to desire that goal or purpose.
The key word is desire. Stones don't desire.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Subject: Re: life is teleological

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 13, 2012, 10:13:03 AM12/13/12
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You said it:
."...in part because it (evolution) carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea"

Evolution is descriptive, is the fact. natural selection is the theory that explain it. A scientific theory impose constraints with what may and may not happen. For example, child caring and risk taking at the same time may not happen.

That´s why progressives prefer the term evolution rather than  natural selection. They want no constraints for his will of the transformation of themselves and their society according with its will.






2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>

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Roger Clough

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Dec 13, 2012, 10:43:59 AM12/13/12
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Hi Alberto G. Corona
 
It's much simpler than that, I think.
Progressives hate everything resembles anything
held to be good, beautiful, or true.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-13, 10:13:03
Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain study shows

You said it:
."...in part because it (evolution) carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea"

Evolution is descriptive, is the fact. natural selection is the theory that explain it. A scientific theory impose constraints with what may and may not happen. For example, child caring and risk taking at the same time may not happen.

That磗 why progressives prefer the term evolution rather than 爊atural selection. They want no constraints for his will of the transformation of themselves and their society according with its will.






2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:48:45 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
so awareness and intention are before biology, so you seem to admit a teleology before life, like me.

Teleology and teleonomy both predate life. They are what time is made of.

I don`t find this爄ncompatible爓ith natural selection (or evolution, as left-leaning people likes to call it)

Hahaha, I wasn't aware that the very term evolution was now politicized. Actually it looks like Darwin preferred another term:

Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=evolution

So the reason that evolution was not Darwin's choice is precisely because he understood that it is not teleological.

. You seem to admit natural selection up to a point but you reject it when we are talking to sensible human things like the sexual roles.

Yes, natural selection only shapes things that already exist, it doesn't bring awareness or qualities of awareness into existence.
You enjoy the fact that NS made female爃yenas to behave in爏ome politically correct ways (it seems). but you reject that NS selection make female humans behave 燼s is in almost all the rest of the animal kingdom. That磘 funny.

I think it's funny that you think I'm citing some evidence supporting a left wing agenda. I'm only showing you that gender is not written in stone. It's something that most people are already aware of - although if you are over 60 then you have an excuse.

Craig


.

2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
doing



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Telmo Menezes

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Dec 13, 2012, 11:30:40 AM12/13/12
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Hi Roger,

 
To be purposeful you need a self or center of
consciousness to desire that goal or purpose.
The key word is desire. Stones don't desire.

Ok, but what I'm saying is that purposefulness is not present in evolutionary processes.

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 13, 2012, 11:33:37 AM12/13/12
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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 10:43:59 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Alberto G. Corona
 
It's much simpler than that, I think.
Progressives hate everything resembles anything
held to be good, beautiful, or true.

Then your thoughts are simple-minded indeed.

Gandhi, MLK, Einstein were haters of goodness, beauty, and truth? Progressives aren't artists or musicians?

You can believe in black and white demagoguery if you like..that's exactly what Progressives want to leave behind.

Craig

 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-13, 10:13:03
Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain study shows

You said it:
."...in part because it (evolution) carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea"

Evolution is descriptive, is the fact. natural selection is the theory that explain it. A scientific theory impose constraints with what may and may not happen. For example, child caring and risk taking at the same time may not happen.

That� why progressives prefer the term evolution rather than �atural selection. They want no constraints for his will of the transformation of themselves and their society according with its will.






2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:48:45 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
so awareness and intention are before biology, so you seem to admit a teleology before life, like me.

Teleology and teleonomy both predate life. They are what time is made of.

I don`t find this�ncompatible�ith natural selection (or evolution, as left-leaning people likes to call it)

Hahaha, I wasn't aware that the very term evolution was now politicized. Actually it looks like Darwin preferred another term:

Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=evolution

So the reason that evolution was not Darwin's choice is precisely because he understood that it is not teleological.

. You seem to admit natural selection up to a point but you reject it when we are talking to sensible human things like the sexual roles.

Yes, natural selection only shapes things that already exist, it doesn't bring awareness or qualities of awareness into existence.
You enjoy the fact that NS made female�yenas to behave in�ome politically correct ways (it seems). but you reject that NS selection make female humans behave �s is in almost all the rest of the animal kingdom. That� funny.

I think it's funny that you think I'm citing some evidence supporting a left wing agenda. I'm only showing you that gender is not written in stone. It's something that most people are already aware of - although if you are over 60 then you have an excuse.

Craig


.

2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
doing



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Stathis Papaioannou

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Dec 13, 2012, 9:32:12 PM12/13/12
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On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Free will is an illusion only if you define it in a logically impossible way, neither determined nor random. Since everything is either determined or random, if something appears to be neither then that must be an illusion. In any case, it is important to know if someone has intention to cause harm because that may be indication he is more dangerous to you than someone who causes harm accidentally. Whether the intention is driven by deterministic or probabilistic processes in the brain is not really relevant.


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Craig Weinberg

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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 9:32:12 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Free will is an illusion only if you define it in a logically impossible way, neither determined nor random.

Let's look at your suggestion. IF YOU (choose to) define it

What does that mean? How does it work? It sounds like it isn't random right? So it must be determined? So are you saying "Free will is an illusion only if it is defined by forces utterly outside your control in a logically impossible way..."

Well that doesn't make sense either, does it? Who is this YOU that you are talking to? Why do you think that the author of these words would have any more insight into how this 'YOU' might define something than the author of your words?

The dichotomy of random vs determined is not the only possible logic, and it is not a useful logic for understanding participation and will.
 
Since everything is either determined or random,

It isn't. My choices are not determined, nor are they random. They are varying degrees of intentional and unintentional with deterministic and possibly random influences which are necessary but not sufficient to explain my causally efficacious solitude and agency.
 
if something appears to be neither then that must be an illusion.

Illusions are a figment of expectation. What you call an optical illusion, I call a living encyclopedia of visual perception and optics. Something can only be an illusion if you mistakenly interpret it as something else.
 
In any case, it is important to know if someone has intention to cause harm because that may be indication he is more dangerous to you than someone who causes harm accidentally. Whether the intention is driven by deterministic or probabilistic processes in the brain is not really relevant.

If intentional threats were deterministic or random then it would be indistinguishable from any number of naturally occurring threats. The prioritizing of intention specifically points to the importance of discerning the difference between threats caused by agents with voluntary control over their actions and random or deterministic unconscious physical processes.

Think about it,
Craig
 


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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 13, 2012, 10:00:30 PM12/13/12
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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 9:32:12 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Free will is an illusion only if you define it in a logically impossible way, neither determined nor random.

Think of it this way. Determined and random are the two unintentional vectors which oppose the single intentional vector. Why is that so hard to conceptualize? You are using it right now to do the conceptualizing...

This is why our brains don't give a rat's ass whether physical causes are ultimately random or determined, but discerning whether physical causes are intentional or unintentional us a matter of *the highest possible importance*.

Can you see what I mean? Because I understand what you mean completely and see clearly that you have one eye shut and one hand tied behind your back.

Craig

Stathis Papaioannou

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Dec 14, 2012, 12:34:48 AM12/14/12
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On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thursday, December 13, 2012 9:32:12 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Free will is an illusion only if you define it in a logically impossible way, neither determined nor random.

Let's look at your suggestion. IF YOU (choose to) define it

What does that mean? How does it work? It sounds like it isn't random right? So it must be determined? So are you saying "Free will is an illusion only if it is defined by forces utterly outside your control in a logically impossible way..."

Well that doesn't make sense either, does it? Who is this YOU that you are talking to? Why do you think that the author of these words would have any more insight into how this 'YOU' might define something than the author of your words?

The dichotomy of random vs determined is not the only possible logic, and it is not a useful logic for understanding participation and will.

You're perhaps conflating the feeling with the physical processes underpinning that feeling. I feel all sorts of things, but I don't feel neurotransmitters and action potentials. No conclusion can be drawn from what I feel about the physical processes. Consider that the ancient Greeks did not even realise that the brain is the organ of thinking. So when I say "I feel my actions are free" that means something, but it does NOT mean that my brain processes are neither random nor determined.
 
 
Since everything is either determined or random,

It isn't. My choices are not determined, nor are they random. They are varying degrees of intentional and unintentional with deterministic and possibly random influences which are necessary but not sufficient to explain my causally efficacious solitude and agency.

I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is nothing in what I feel that would provide me with any certainty that my brain is not being manipulated by someone by remote control, for example. That possibility is entirely consistent with my subjective feeling of freedom.
 
 
if something appears to be neither then that must be an illusion.

Illusions are a figment of expectation. What you call an optical illusion, I call a living encyclopedia of visual perception and optics. Something can only be an illusion if you mistakenly interpret it as something else.
 
In any case, it is important to know if someone has intention to cause harm because that may be indication he is more dangerous to you than someone who causes harm accidentally. Whether the intention is driven by deterministic or probabilistic processes in the brain is not really relevant.

If intentional threats were deterministic or random then it would be indistinguishable from any number of naturally occurring threats. The prioritizing of intention specifically points to the importance of discerning the difference between threats caused by agents with voluntary control over their actions and random or deterministic unconscious physical processes.

That it is voluntary control has no bearing on the question of whether the underlying processes are determined or random. 

 
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Stathis Papaioannou

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Dec 14, 2012, 12:39:59 AM12/14/12
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On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:00 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, December 13, 2012 9:32:12 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Free will is an illusion only if you define it in a logically impossible way, neither determined nor random.

Think of it this way. Determined and random are the two unintentional vectors which oppose the single intentional vector. Why is that so hard to conceptualize? You are using it right now to do the conceptualizing...

The dichotomy is intentional/unintentional, not intentional/determined-or-random. It could be intentional and determined, intentional and random, unintentional and determined or unintentional and random.
 
This is why our brains don't give a rat's ass whether physical causes are ultimately random or determined, but discerning whether physical causes are intentional or unintentional us a matter of *the highest possible importance*.

Yes, that's what I have been saying. We care about whether something is intentional or unintentional, and unless we are engaged in discussions such as this we don't even consider whether the underlying physics is determined or random. 
 
Can you see what I mean? Because I understand what you mean completely and see clearly that you have one eye shut and one hand tied behind your back.

Craig

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Craig Weinberg

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On Friday, December 14, 2012 12:34:48 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Thursday, December 13, 2012 9:32:12 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Free will is an illusion only if you define it in a logically impossible way, neither determined nor random.

Let's look at your suggestion. IF YOU (choose to) define it

What does that mean? How does it work? It sounds like it isn't random right? So it must be determined? So are you saying "Free will is an illusion only if it is defined by forces utterly outside your control in a logically impossible way..."

Well that doesn't make sense either, does it? Who is this YOU that you are talking to? Why do you think that the author of these words would have any more insight into how this 'YOU' might define something than the author of your words?

The dichotomy of random vs determined is not the only possible logic, and it is not a useful logic for understanding participation and will.

You're perhaps conflating the feeling with the physical processes underpinning that feeling. I feel all sorts of things, but I don't feel neurotransmitters and action potentials. No conclusion can be drawn from what I feel about the physical processes. Consider that the ancient Greeks did not even realise that the brain is the organ of thinking. So when I say "I feel my actions are free" that means something, but it does NOT mean that my brain processes are neither random nor determined.

You're assuming that the physical process is "underpinning" a feeling. I am saying that although it is counterintuitive, it will ultimately make more sense if you think of the physical process as the rendering or representation of that feeling in public space. The feeling is the actual presentation - it has meaning, purpose, content, life... the physical process associated with it is just a flatland slice which is publicly accessible at any given moment in time. The private feeling contains experiential richness from your entire life, it is inseparable from the totality of it, but the mechanical correlate is an entirely orthogonal presentation. It has no history, only archeology. It has no meaning or purpose, only conditions and positions. There is no life there, only layers and layers and layers of biochemical activity. These are the shapes associated not just with one person, but also with the entire history of evolutionary biology. By contrast the interior correlate references the entire history of anthropology, of culture, art, religion, philosophy, language, etc. The two views are related, but not directly - not mechanistically like everyone assumes, but in a mutual form-content single involuted surface type relation, only relying on metaphor to bridge the explanatory gap, not technological production.

I have considered everything that you are saying, and have done so for a long time. You don't realize that you are talking consciousness for granted when you visualize the brain, neurons, etc. You disqualify naive realism with a double standard, hypocritically selecting the thoughts we have about neurotransmitters and action potentials as separate from other kinds of thoughts and feelings that we have. You claim not to trust awareness, but then have absolute faith in your awareness of science. You have justifications based on consensus of experiment and observation - but this is a consensus of the same capacities which you call into question. Neuroscience, by your view, would have to be merely action potentials and neurotransmitter activity, nothing more. You have used the authority of your own psyche to question that authority absolutely. That's a contradiction and it is why we can never escape the primacy of consciousness.

 
 
Since everything is either determined or random,

It isn't. My choices are not determined, nor are they random. They are varying degrees of intentional and unintentional with deterministic and possibly random influences which are necessary but not sufficient to explain my causally efficacious solitude and agency.

I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is nothing in what I feel that would provide me with any certainty that my brain is not being manipulated by someone by remote control, for example. That possibility is entirely consistent with my subjective feeling of freedom.

Of course that's possible. In fact it is a common psychotic delusion. Indeed, we are complex and have many competing aspects of our self with different agendas. The reason why it doesn't make sense however, is why would any process exist which creates an epiphenomenal person such as you. By extension, that is the problem with mechanism and functionalism as well. If you have a perfectly good computer which operates a robot navigating a physical world whose purpose is to survive and reproduce, what would be the advantage of generating an internal representation delusion to some made up 'person' program when the computer is already controlling the robot perfectly well. It would be like installing an chip inside of your computer to simulate an impressionist painter who actually paints tiny paintings for a made up audience of puppets to think that they are looking at. Even then, you still have the Explanatory Gap/homunculus problem. You still ARE NO CLOSER to closing the gap as now you have an interior 'model' which has no mechanism for perception. You have just moved the Cartesian Theater inside of biochemistry, but it still explains nothing about how you get from endogenous light to endogenous eyes which see images through biophotons rather than are simply informed of their quantitative significance directly and digitally.
 
 
 
if something appears to be neither then that must be an illusion.

Illusions are a figment of expectation. What you call an optical illusion, I call a living encyclopedia of visual perception and optics. Something can only be an illusion if you mistakenly interpret it as something else.
 
In any case, it is important to know if someone has intention to cause harm because that may be indication he is more dangerous to you than someone who causes harm accidentally. Whether the intention is driven by deterministic or probabilistic processes in the brain is not really relevant.

If intentional threats were deterministic or random then it would be indistinguishable from any number of naturally occurring threats. The prioritizing of intention specifically points to the importance of discerning the difference between threats caused by agents with voluntary control over their actions and random or deterministic unconscious physical processes.

That it is voluntary control has no bearing on the question of whether the underlying processes are determined or random. 

There is no underlying process. The public exterior view is biased to present all things as unintentional (determined or random), the private interior view is biased to present all things as intentional or unintentional. I am talking about a fundamental ontological fold in the cosmos itself which supersedes both math, physics, information, understanding, experience, etc. This is the bottom layer of all possibility in all possible universes. This is what sense is made of. The prime juxatposition. You are making Descartes mistake and presuming a substance-space model as primary. His dualism was not deep enough - it has to be total. Then it can be rehabilitated into a continuum-spectrum of juxtapositions in between spatial exterior bodies and temporal interior privacy. Dualism is deeper than 1+1=2. More primordial than anything else. That's why it is not going to help to look at a picture of a brain or a meter reading - those things are all part of the experience - your experience and many other experiences on every layer and scale. You can't find the shoebox inside of the shoe.

Craig

 
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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 8:06:31 AM12/14/12
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On Friday, December 14, 2012 12:39:59 AM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:00 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, December 13, 2012 9:32:12 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
If free will were, after all, an illusion, then there would really be not much of an advantage in discerning intention to cause harm from a simple propensity to cause harm.

Free will is an illusion only if you define it in a logically impossible way, neither determined nor random.

Think of it this way. Determined and random are the two unintentional vectors which oppose the single intentional vector. Why is that so hard to conceptualize? You are using it right now to do the conceptualizing...

The dichotomy is intentional/unintentional, not intentional/determined-or-random.

They are the same thing.
 
It could be intentional and determined,

No, that equates free will with determinism. Intention means there is a teleological agent who is experiencing that they are causing the process to occur, regardless of the public correlation to other sub-personal and super-personal levels of causality. Intention is personal and it runs inside to outside.
 
intentional and random,

No. That equates doing something 'on purpose' with doing something 'by accident'. Our entire legal system is devoted to enforcing judgments, including the death penalty, based on the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive in principle. That doesn't make it a scientific fact, but it should be a hint that if science has no idea why it is an anthropological universal to consider it this way, then there must be more to it.
 
unintentional and determined or unintentional and random.

They are identical. Determined (as in pre-determined by event or law) is always unintentional and random is virtually synonymous with unintentional. You could intentionally do something that seems random to you, but that's pretty shaky - unlikely really given human psychology. To the contrary, as psychologists in the 20th century found out, random responses can often reveal more about the psyche than intentional descriptions.

 
 
This is why our brains don't give a rat's ass whether physical causes are ultimately random or determined, but discerning whether physical causes are intentional or unintentional us a matter of *the highest possible importance*.

Yes, that's what I have been saying. We care about whether something is intentional or unintentional, and unless we are engaged in discussions such as this we don't even consider whether the underlying physics is determined or random. 

But you don't seem to know what intentional is, nor do you seem to acknowledge or care that you don't know.

Craig

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 14, 2012, 8:14:01 AM12/14/12
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I may be between both of you.
I don´t think that the hate in progressives is constitutive or inherent. 

I think that his hate of what is held a good beatiful and true is a consequence of his belief in a more perfect ggood, bbeatiful and ttrue, and our currently held concepts are an obstacle. 

I put double initial letters because for the progressives there is no Good, Beatiful and True, but a progress with no end.

Conservatives, like me, believe that God Beatiful and True exist, and our lowecase conceptions reflect them.



2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
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Alberto.

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 8:25:52 AM12/14/12
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On Friday, December 14, 2012 8:14:01 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
I may be between both of you.
I don´t think that the hate in progressives is constitutive or inherent. 

I think that his hate of what is held a good beatiful and true is a consequence of his belief in a more perfect ggood, bbeatiful and ttrue, and our currently held concepts are an obstacle. 

I put double initial letters because for the progressives there is no Good, Beatiful and True, but a progress with no end.

When should progress have ended? 1950? 1850? 200 BC?


Conservatives, like me, believe that God Beatiful and True exist, and our lowecase conceptions reflect them.

Human beings like me have seen the evidence that Conservative attitudes prevent progress and try to contribute to recovering progress from regressive, fear-based oligarchies.

Craig

Alberto G. Corona

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Dec 14, 2012, 8:54:39 AM12/14/12
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2012/12/14 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>



On Friday, December 14, 2012 8:14:01 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
I may be between both of you.
I don´t think that the hate in progressives is constitutive or inherent. 

I think that his hate of what is held a good beatiful and true is a consequence of his belief in a more perfect ggood, bbeatiful and ttrue, and our currently held concepts are an obstacle. 

I put double initial letters because for the progressives there is no Good, Beatiful and True, but a progress with no end.

When should progress have ended? 1950? 1850? 200 BC?
 
Dear Craig:

One thing is material progress and progress in knowledge. Another thing is the progressive worldview. The second is what we are talking about, I guess.

I can not believe that you are so brainless as to mix  both


Conservatives, like me, believe that God Beatiful and True exist, and our lowecase conceptions reflect them.

Human beings like me have seen the evidence that Conservative attitudes prevent progress and try to contribute to recovering progress from regressive, fear-based oligarchies.

This response is the hallmark of a progressive worldview, and adhere perfectly to my definition: Hate to the established and aim to his destruction because it is an obstacle for something better that still don´t exist. But no matter what is it, progress will bring  it. That´s their core believef.

That´s why the progressives hate any constraint, any law any definition that fixes things once and for all.

Of course Craig, this is not against you. I love you. It is against the progressive belief, which is a destructive one.  Accept conservatism and be happy ;). Just a joke.

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Alberto.

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 9:29:02 AM12/14/12
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On Friday, December 14, 2012 8:54:39 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:



2012/12/14 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Friday, December 14, 2012 8:14:01 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
I may be between both of you.
I don´t think that the hate in progressives is constitutive or inherent. 

I think that his hate of what is held a good beatiful and true is a consequence of his belief in a more perfect ggood, bbeatiful and ttrue, and our currently held concepts are an obstacle. 

I put double initial letters because for the progressives there is no Good, Beatiful and True, but a progress with no end.

When should progress have ended? 1950? 1850? 200 BC?
 
Dear Craig:

One thing is material progress and progress in knowledge. Another thing is the progressive worldview. The second is what we are talking about, I guess.

I can not believe that you are so brainless as to mix  both

If only I could believe that you had the equivalent capacity that you cannot have the one without the other.
 


Conservatives, like me, believe that God Beatiful and True exist, and our lowecase conceptions reflect them.

Human beings like me have seen the evidence that Conservative attitudes prevent progress and try to contribute to recovering progress from regressive, fear-based oligarchies.

This response is the hallmark of a progressive worldview, and adhere perfectly to my definition: Hate to the established and aim to his destruction because it is an obstacle for something better that still don´t exist. But no matter what is it, progress will bring  it. That´s their core believef.

Without it, there can be no progress. You want to enjoy the fruits of progress from past progressive efforts while denying those same efforts validity in your own time. That seems hypocritical to me, but then, my view of conservatism generally agrees with the recent study which found as follows:

"Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

  • Fear and aggression
  • Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
  • Uncertainty avoidance
  • Need for cognitive closure
  • Terror management

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/07/22_politics.shtml 


That´s why the progressives hate any constraint, any law any definition that fixes things once and for all.

That's because it is their job to represent the reality that nothing in the universe is fixed once and for all - except the universe itself.
 

Of course Craig, this is not against you. I love you. It is against the progressive belief, which is a destructive one.  Accept conservatism and be happy ;). Just a joke.


Haha. thanks, I love you all too. Is there a similar study by a conservative university which suggests that progressives have 'beliefs' which are destructive? Or are there any universities with a Conservative reputation which you would not be ashamed to mention? Most Conservative studies seem to be conducted by well funded hate groups, er, think tanks. ;) Not really a joke, but intended without offense.

Craig

Bruno Marchal

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Dec 13, 2012, 12:05:38 PM12/13/12
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On 13 Dec 2012, at 15:08, Roger Clough wrote:

Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Evolution is made by living beings. The "by"
implies intelligence, however minimal. IMHO life
differs from nonlife in that it has at least minimal intelligence
(local control, autonomy, the ability to tell friend from foe,
to mate, to search for light, to eat, to defecate, to
communicate among its cells, to tell pleasure from pain,
to move in the proper direction, etc.  Eg Bacteria are
very busy little creatures who somehow manage
through intelligence (even though minimal) to survive.

I agree on bacteria. Yet I think to introduce an artificial cut between all the organic machines, which are mainly billions years old sophisticated natural nanotechnology and the piece of wood in our hand. "Artificial machines" is an indexical: it is artificial for us, not for God or even Nature.
Then what is relevant for the mind and consciousness is the genuineness between numbers dreams and the number reality, as it is *very* rich.

Both the mechanist hypothesis, and data collect from observation suggests a multi-reality wave or matrix (worlds or dreams, ... this might be a question of vocabulary, or perhaps not).

Then when you listen to what the (mathematical) machine already says, you can decide that they are not zombie, despite still rather disconnected from reality there is already a thinking person there. That's what the logic of self-reference suggest. 

The first incompleteness theorem suggests that machine's can be "limited" somehow, but the formalization in arithmetic needed to get the second incompleteness theorem reminds us that, somehow, the machine already knew this.

That creates the departure between belief, knowledge and truth. That's why they are Supreme Windows, and God get lost when identifying itself (too much) with such a Supreme Window. 

Bruno

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 11:10:08 AM12/14/12
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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 12:05:38 PM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 13 Dec 2012, at 15:08, Roger Clough wrote:

Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Evolution is made by living beings. The "by"
implies intelligence, however minimal. IMHO life
differs from nonlife in that it has at least minimal intelligence
(local control, autonomy, the ability to tell friend from foe,
to mate, to search for light, to eat, to defecate, to
communicate among its cells, to tell pleasure from pain,
to move in the proper direction, etc.  Eg Bacteria are
very busy little creatures who somehow manage
through intelligence (even though minimal) to survive.

I agree on bacteria. Yet I think to introduce an artificial cut between all the organic machines, which are mainly billions years old sophisticated natural nanotechnology and the piece of wood in our hand. "Artificial machines" is an indexical: it is artificial for us, not for God or even Nature.

But it is more-than-artificial for the instruments which we have assembled as a 'machine'. The mechanism is being imposed from beyond the native sensory capacities of whatever substances we are using as components. The programs are alien. It's like when viruses hijack our cells for their purposes - it is unnatural to us and causes involuntary changes in our experience which we have no real way to integrate constructively.
 
Then what is relevant for the mind and consciousness is the genuineness between numbers dreams and the number reality, as it is *very* rich.

For numbers to dream, they would need to have consciousness to begin with...which would require a homuncular regress of meta-numbers and their meta-number dreams.
 

Both the mechanist hypothesis, and data collect from observation suggests a multi-reality wave or matrix (worlds or dreams, ... this might be a question of vocabulary, or perhaps not).

That's what you get for collecting data from the world of the body and attributing it to the world of the self.
 

Then when you listen to what the (mathematical) machine already says, you can decide that they are not zombie, despite still rather disconnected from reality there is already a thinking person there. That's what the logic of self-reference suggest. 

How do you know it isn't confirmation bias? Pinocchio is not a zombie, it is a puppet.

Craig

Roger Clough

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Dec 14, 2012, 12:02:30 PM12/14/12
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Hi Alberto G. Corona

I think every generation tries to overthrow the old,
but it's not an individual psychology-based effort,
it's tribal, political, sociological, the tools with
which we identify and understand ourselves.

All of us join tribes as we grow up to help identify ourselves.
It's a short-cut an alternative to doing psychotherapy.

I'm in the Christian-Conservative tribe. But I used to
be agnostic-liberal because I worked with such
academic types. It was dangerous to be a chiristian
conservative. Now I'm retired and the "real me"
is allowed to come out.

Tribes cannot understand or don't want to understand
other tribes, it's not only unsafe, it's impossible,
we speak different languages, so our arguments fall on
deaf ears, the result usually being change of subject
or no answer at all.




[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/14/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen

----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Alberto G. Corona
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-14, 08:14:01
Subject: Re: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brainstudy shows


I may be between both of you.

I don't think that the hate in progressives is constitutive or inherent.


I think that his hate of what is held a good beatiful and true is a consequence of his belief in a more perfect ggood, bbeatiful and ttrue, and our currently held concepts are an obstacle.


I put double initial letters because for the progressives there is no Good, Beatiful and True, but a progress with no end.


Conservatives, like me, believe that God Beatiful and True exist, and our lowecase conceptions reflect them.






2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg



On Thursday, December 13, 2012 10:43:59 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Alberto G. Corona

It's much simpler than that, I think.
Progressives hate everything resembles anything
held to be good, beautiful, or true.

Then your thoughts are simple-minded indeed.

Gandhi, MLK, Einstein were haters of goodness, beauty, and truth? Progressives aren't artists or musicians?

You can believe in black and white demagoguery if you like..that's exactly what Progressives want to leave behind.

Craig




[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/13/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen

----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Alberto G. Corona
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-13, 10:13:03
Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain study shows


You said it:
."...in part because it (evolution) carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea"



Evolution is descriptive, is the fact. natural selection is the theory that explain it. A scientific theory impose constraints with what may and may not happen. For example, child caring and risk taking at the same time may not happen.


That why progressives prefer the term evolution rather than atural selection. They want no constraints for his will of the transformation of themselves and their society according with its will.











2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg



On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:48:45 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
so awareness and intention are before biology, so you seem to admit a teleology before life, like me.

Teleology and teleonomy both predate life. They are what time is made of.


I don`t find this ncompatible ith natural selection (or evolution, as left-leaning people likes to call it)

Hahaha, I wasn't aware that the very term evolution was now politicized. Actually it looks like Darwin preferred another term:


Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=evolution


So the reason that evolution was not Darwin's choice is precisely because he understood that it is not teleological.


. You seem to admit natural selection up to a point but you reject it when we are talking to sensible human things like the sexual roles.

Yes, natural selection only shapes things that already exist, it doesn't bring awareness or qualities of awareness into existence.

You enjoy the fact that NS made female yenas to behave in ome politically correct ways (it seems). but you reject that NS selection make female humans behave s is in almost all the rest of the animal kingdom. That funny.

I think it's funny that you think I'm citing some evidence supporting a left wing agenda. I'm only showing you that gender is not written in stone. It's something that most people are already aware of - although if you are over 60 then you have an excuse.

Craig




.


2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 12:39:17 PM12/14/12
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On Friday, December 14, 2012 12:02:30 PM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Alberto G. Corona  

I think every generation tries to overthrow the old,
but it's not an individual psychology-based effort,
it's tribal, political, sociological, the tools with
which we identify and understand ourselves.

For me it has always been individual psychology-based. I have never seen the appeal of any kind of tribe, team, religion, national affiliation, etc. It's bad enough that I have to be a human on this benighted orb.

Friends are good. That's all I am interested in.

Stephen P. King

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Dec 14, 2012, 1:21:52 PM12/14/12
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On 12/14/2012 9:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
That´s why the progressives hate any constraint, any law any definition that fixes things once and for all.

That's because it is their job to represent the reality that nothing in the universe is fixed once and for all - except the universe itself.

HEY!

    Demonizing the opposition is not welcome here!


-- 
Onward!

Stephen

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 1:37:35 PM12/14/12
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I never knew my views were so progressive until after seeing them demonized so often on this list. I try to avoid getting into politics online and have only ever responded to repeated trash-talking. The opposition should either refrain from throwing the first punch *every single time* or be ready to get back some of what they never stop dishing out.

Craig



-- 
Onward!

Stephen

meekerdb

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Dec 14, 2012, 1:46:06 PM12/14/12
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On 12/14/2012 5:54 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
This response is the hallmark of a progressive worldview, and adhere perfectly to my definition: Hate to the established and aim to his destruction because it is an obstacle for something better that still don´t exist. But no matter what is it, progress will bring  it. That´s their core believef.

What nonsense.  A strawman man for Alberto to hate.  He wants to see every change as destruction and every change as motivated by hate.  Progress is by simple definition of the word going from the worse to the better.  Every conservative always supposes that they know the one Truth and so it cannot be improved upon; they are the true believers - and that applies to the political left Maoist/Communists as well as the political right Royalist/Papist/Fascists.  They all used their power to consolidate and gain more power.

Brent

Stephen P. King

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Dec 14, 2012, 1:47:11 PM12/14/12
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Dear Craig,

    Can anyone other than you know exactly what it is that you are? No. Therefore whatever is said of you by some other is not true. It is when we think of everything as physical, thoughts become words, words become shouting matches, shouting matches become ... Such childish behavior! Childhood needs to end at some point. We are not just physical, we are much more and should reason as such.
-- 
Onward!

Stephen

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 2:01:52 PM12/14/12
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I agree. I'm not motivated by my personal investment so much as the one-sided disparagement of non-conservative positions on this list. There are only a few offenders, but they never fail to turn every discussion into an opportunity to inject some kind of knee-jerk political stereotype into the conversation. I would never do that, so I don't see why I should politely accept it being done by others. I try to let it pass most of the time,. but why should I have to always be the one?


-- 
Onward!

Stephen

Stathis Papaioannou

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Dec 14, 2012, 7:19:56 PM12/14/12
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On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:47 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is nothing in what I feel that would provide me with any certainty that my brain is not being manipulated by someone by remote control, for example. That possibility is entirely consistent with my subjective feeling of freedom.

Of course that's possible. In fact it is a common psychotic delusion. Indeed, we are complex and have many competing aspects of our self with different agendas. The reason why it doesn't make sense however, is why would any process exist which creates an epiphenomenal person such as you. By extension, that is the problem with mechanism and functionalism as well. If you have a perfectly good computer which operates a robot navigating a physical world whose purpose is to survive and reproduce, what would be the advantage of generating an internal representation delusion to some made up 'person' program when the computer is already controlling the robot perfectly well. It would be like installing an chip inside of your computer to simulate an impressionist painter who actually paints tiny paintings for a made up audience of puppets to think that they are looking at. Even then, you still have the Explanatory Gap/homunculus problem. You still ARE NO CLOSER to closing the gap as now you have an interior 'model' which has no mechanism for perception. You have just moved the Cartesian Theater inside of biochemistry, but it still explains nothing about how you get from endogenous light to endogenous eyes which see images through biophotons rather than are simply informed of their quantitative significance directly and digitally.


You have just presented an argument for why consciousness is a necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour. If it were not so, then there would have been no reason for consciousness to have evolved.
 

--
Stathis Papaioannou

Stephen P. King

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Dec 14, 2012, 7:37:18 PM12/14/12
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On 12/14/2012 1:46 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/14/2012 5:54 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
This response is the hallmark of a progressive worldview, and adhere perfectly to my definition: Hate to the established and aim to his destruction because it is an obstacle for something better that still don´t exist. But no matter what is it, progress will bring  it. That´s their core believef.

What nonsense.  A strawman man for Alberto to hate.  He wants to see every change as destruction and every change as motivated by hate.  Progress is by simple definition of the word going from the worse to the better.

Dear Brent,

    So any change that makes things worse is, by definition, not Progressive and therefore people that propose them cannot be blamed. NICE!

  Every conservative always supposes that they know the one Truth and so it cannot be improved upon; they are the true believers - and that applies to the political left Maoist/Communists as well as the political right Royalist/Papist/Fascists.  They all used their power to consolidate and gain more power.

Brent
--

    Hear Hear!

-- 
Onward!

Stephen

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 7:37:50 PM12/14/12
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Consciousness evolved from awareness, not intelligence. Awareness did not evolve. Evolution is a feature of experience, which is the consequence of awareness. Intelligent behavior is more or less meaningless. It's a outsider's judgment on some observed activity where he projects his own standards of sense and motive onto some context he may or may not know something about. Intelligence is prejudice really.


 
 

--
Stathis Papaioannou

Stathis Papaioannou

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Dec 14, 2012, 7:51:15 PM12/14/12
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On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 12:06 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
It could be intentional and determined,

No, that equates free will with determinism. Intention means there is a teleological agent who is experiencing that they are causing the process to occur, regardless of the public correlation to other sub-personal and super-personal levels of causality. Intention is personal and it runs inside to outside.

 That "there is a teleological agent who is experiencing that they are causing the process to occur, regardless of the public correlation to other sub-personal and super-personal levels of causality" is entirely consistent with with the physical processes being either determined or random. I feel that I am such a teleological agent, but this feeling gives me no clue as to what is happening in my brain. This is why, for most of human history, people did not in fact have any idea as to what was happening in their brains.
 
intentional and random,

No. That equates doing something 'on purpose' with doing something 'by accident'. Our entire legal system is devoted to enforcing judgments, including the death penalty, based on the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive in principle. That doesn't make it a scientific fact, but it should be a hint that if science has no idea why it is an anthropological universal to consider it this way, then there must be more to it.

You can do something on purpose even though the decision is driven by probabilistic processes. The legal system is based on the assumption that the person understands what they are doing and could do otherwise. This is, as I keep saying, entirely consistent with either a deterministic or probabilistic explanation for brain activity.

If I am charged with a crime and I prove that I was sleepwalking at the time I am likely to get off, because I was not aware of what I was doing and because such behaviour is not affected by fear of punishment, either for me or for other potential perpetrators who may learn of my punishment. The judge does not care if my sleepwalking is caused by deterministic or probabilistic processes in my brain, he only cares about the end result on my behaviour.

If I am charged with a crime and it turns out I knew it was wrong but did it anyway because I didn't care and thought I could get away with it I am likely to be punished. The punishment will be a deterrent to me in future and to other potential perpetrators. The judge, jury and general public neither know nor care if this deterrence operates through deterministic or probabilistic brain processes, or for that matter even if it operates through magical spiritual processes.
 
unintentional and determined or unintentional and random.

They are identical. Determined (as in pre-determined by event or law) is always unintentional and random is virtually synonymous with unintentional. You could intentionally do something that seems random to you, but that's pretty shaky - unlikely really given human psychology. To the contrary, as psychologists in the 20th century found out, random responses can often reveal more about the psyche than intentional descriptions.
 
Intentional means I do something because I want to do it, and if I didn't want to do it I wouldn't have done it. This is entirely consistent with the decision being driven by either deterministic or probabilistic brain physics.
 

--
Stathis Papaioannou

Stathis Papaioannou

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Dec 14, 2012, 8:12:24 PM12/14/12
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On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> You have just presented an argument for why consciousness is a necessary
>> side-effect of intelligent behaviour. If it were not so, then there would
>> have been no reason for consciousness to have evolved.
>
>
> Consciousness evolved from awareness, not intelligence. Awareness did not
> evolve. Evolution is a feature of experience, which is the consequence of
> awareness. Intelligent behavior is more or less meaningless. It's a
> outsider's judgment on some observed activity where he projects his own
> standards of sense and motive onto some context he may or may not know
> something about. Intelligence is prejudice really.

So that there can be no confusion, what I mean by "intelligent
behaviour" is behaviour such as looking for food or avoiding
predators. I take "consciousness" and "awareness" as synonymous. When
an animal looks for food I assume that it is aware. The question is,
why did animals not evolve to do this without awareness, since it
would have the same effect of propagating their genes either way? An
answer is that awareness necessarily occurs when the type of behaviour
that would lead us to suspect awareness occurs.


--
Stathis Papaioannou

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 14, 2012, 8:20:49 PM12/14/12
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On Friday, December 14, 2012 7:51:15 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:


On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 12:06 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
It could be intentional and determined,

No, that equates free will with determinism. Intention means there is a teleological agent who is experiencing that they are causing the process to occur, regardless of the public correlation to other sub-personal and super-personal levels of causality. Intention is personal and it runs inside to outside.

 That "there is a teleological agent who is experiencing that they are causing the process to occur, regardless of the public correlation to other sub-personal and super-personal levels of causality" is entirely consistent with with the physical processes being either determined or random.

Yes, the physical process is determined by the teleological agent, either the top level down, or the bottom level up. I don't know about random...maybe in the circumstances that are presented to the agents.
 
I feel that I am such a teleological agent, but this feeling gives me no clue as to what is happening in my brain.

Your brain is carrying out your instructions. That is what is happening in the brain. And you are carrying out the instructions of collections of sub persons. That is what is happening in the brain also. Both.
 
This is why, for most of human history, people did not in fact have any idea as to what was happening in their brains.

And yet, they built civilization even without that knowledge. The human brain is nothing but the vehicle for a human experience. Without us, it is a worthless glob of tissue.
 
 
intentional and random,

No. That equates doing something 'on purpose' with doing something 'by accident'. Our entire legal system is devoted to enforcing judgments, including the death penalty, based on the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive in principle. That doesn't make it a scientific fact, but it should be a hint that if science has no idea why it is an anthropological universal to consider it this way, then there must be more to it.

You can do something on purpose even though the decision is driven by probabilistic processes.

There may not be any such thing as a probabilistic process. That is an analysis from a statistical perspective, not an ontological understanding. Flipping a coin has a 50/50 probability of heads, but there is an actual coin flipping with an actual outcome. That is the concrete reality. The observation of how frequent certain outcomes we care about occurs is not a force in the universe, it has no effects, it is just an understanding that we have about the reality.
 
The legal system is based on the assumption that the person understands what they are doing and could do otherwise. This is, as I keep saying, entirely consistent with either a deterministic or probabilistic explanation for brain activity.

You aren't getting that the brain is a facade. It is a representation. It's reality derives solely from its relevance to our lives, and the lives of other participants in the universe on many many levels.
 

If I am charged with a crime and I prove that I was sleepwalking at the time I am likely to get off, because I was not aware of what I was doing and because such behaviour is not affected by fear of punishment, either for me or for other potential perpetrators who may learn of my punishment. The judge does not care if my sleepwalking is caused by deterministic or probabilistic processes in my brain, he only cares about the end result on my behaviour.

Yes, what happens in the brain is only important if it undermines your ability to exercise sensible intentions.
 

If I am charged with a crime and it turns out I knew it was wrong but did it anyway because I didn't care and thought I could get away with it I am likely to be punished. The punishment will be a deterrent to me in future and to other potential perpetrators. The judge, jury and general public neither know nor care if this deterrence operates through deterministic or probabilistic brain processes, or for that matter even if it operates through magical spiritual processes.

Right. That's why I said nobody cares about what the brain does.
 
 
unintentional and determined or unintentional and random.

They are identical. Determined (as in pre-determined by event or law) is always unintentional and random is virtually synonymous with unintentional. You could intentionally do something that seems random to you, but that's pretty shaky - unlikely really given human psychology. To the contrary, as psychologists in the 20th century found out, random responses can often reveal more about the psyche than intentional descriptions.
 
Intentional means I do something because I want to do it, and if I didn't want to do it I wouldn't have done it. This is entirely consistent with the decision being driven by either deterministic or probabilistic brain physics.

No it isn't, because brain physics has to do with neurotransmitters and cells, not people, places, and things. Brain physics has no capacity to be 'about' anything except itself, just as our lives can only be about our lives and not the function of our brain.

Craig
 
 

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Craig Weinberg

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On Friday, December 14, 2012 8:12:24 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> You have just presented an argument for why consciousness is a necessary
>> side-effect of intelligent behaviour. If it were not so, then there would
>> have been no reason for consciousness to have evolved.
>
>
> Consciousness evolved from awareness, not intelligence. Awareness did not
> evolve. Evolution is a feature of experience, which is the consequence of
> awareness. Intelligent behavior is more or less meaningless. It's a
> outsider's judgment on some observed activity where he projects his own
> standards of sense and motive onto some context he may or may not know
> something about. Intelligence is prejudice really.

So that there can be no confusion, what I mean by "intelligent
behaviour" is behaviour such as looking for food or avoiding
predators.

So amoebas then. Or T-cells.
 
I take "consciousness" and "awareness" as synonymous.

You can, but I separate them to make the more important distinction. Consciousness is multiple sets of awareness, by my meaning.

When
an animal looks for food I assume that it is aware. The question is,
why did animals not evolve to do this without awareness, since it
would have the same effect of propagating their genes either way? An
answer is that awareness necessarily occurs when the type of behaviour
that would lead us to suspect awareness occurs.

So ribosomes then? Chlorophyll? They appear aware to me. Atoms, electrons.. They respond to collisions, they organize when they have the opportunity. I suspect awareness in every type of behavior.

Craig
 


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Stathis Papaioannou

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On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Intentional means I do something because I want to do it, and if I didn't
>> want to do it I wouldn't have done it. This is entirely consistent with the
>> decision being driven by either deterministic or probabilistic brain
>> physics.
>
>
> No it isn't, because brain physics has to do with neurotransmitters and
> cells, not people, places, and things. Brain physics has no capacity to be
> 'about' anything except itself, just as our lives can only be about our
> lives and not the function of our brain.

Cells and neurotransmitters do their thing and thoughts and feelings
follow. Destroy the the cells and you destroy the thoughts and
feelings.


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meekerdb

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On 12/14/2012 4:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:47 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
 
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is nothing in what I feel that would provide me with any certainty that my brain is not being manipulated by someone by remote control, for example. That possibility is entirely consistent with my subjective feeling of freedom.

Of course that's possible. In fact it is a common psychotic delusion. Indeed, we are complex and have many competing aspects of our self with different agendas. The reason why it doesn't make sense however, is why would any process exist which creates an epiphenomenal person such as you. By extension, that is the problem with mechanism and functionalism as well. If you have a perfectly good computer which operates a robot navigating a physical world whose purpose is to survive and reproduce, what would be the advantage of generating an internal representation delusion to some made up 'person' program when the computer is already controlling the robot perfectly well.

It is necessary that the computer, or any intelligent actor, have an internal representation of itself in order to contemplate and plan its future actions and decide whether it can successfully execute a plan and what the value of the result will be.  This evaluation of plans requires simulation of events including the actor; so the actor must represent itself in the simulation and estimate what its internal states will be - will it have satisfied some goals, will it be damaged or destroyed, will it gain or lose.

Brent

It would be like installing an chip inside of your computer to simulate an impressionist painter who actually paints tiny paintings for a made up audience of puppets to think that they are looking at. Even then, you still have the Explanatory Gap/homunculus problem. You still ARE NO CLOSER to closing the gap as now you have an interior 'model' which has no mechanism for perception. You have just moved the Cartesian Theater inside of biochemistry, but it still explains nothing about how you get from endogenous light to endogenous eyes which see images through biophotons rather than are simply informed of their quantitative significance directly and digitally.


You have just presented an argument for why consciousness is a necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour. If it were not so, then there would have been no reason for consciousness to have evolved.
 

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On 12/14/2012 4:37 PM, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 12/14/2012 1:46 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/14/2012 5:54 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
This response is the hallmark of a progressive worldview, and adhere perfectly to my definition: Hate to the established and aim to his destruction because it is an obstacle for something better that still don´t exist. But no matter what is it, progress will bring  it. That´s their core believef.

What nonsense.  A strawman man for Alberto to hate.  He wants to see every change as destruction and every change as motivated by hate.  Progress is by simple definition of the word going from the worse to the better.

Dear Brent,

    So any change that makes things worse is, by definition, not Progressive and therefore people that propose them cannot be blamed. NICE!

The word I used was "progress" not "progressive", as Alberto used it above: "But no matter what is it, progress will bring  it. That´s their core believef."

Brent


  Every conservative always supposes that they know the one Truth and so it cannot be improved upon; they are the true believers - and that applies to the political left Maoist/Communists as well as the political right Royalist/Papist/Fascists.  They all used their power to consolidate and gain more power.

Brent
--

    Hear Hear!

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Their thing is their 'thoughts' and 'feelings' upon which our thoughts and feelings depend, but their existence depends on our psychological well being also. It's mutual - bottom up and top down. Bottom up is a different dependency than top down though. Bottom up is about survival of the vehicle, while top down is about the signifying purpose. Equally important in one sense, but from an absolute sense, the signifying purpose is essential while the vehicle is the back door.

Craig
 


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Roger Clough

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Dec 15, 2012, 10:00:54 AM12/15/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
By progressives I obviously meant those that act to change things.
Which means overthrowing the way the "good, the beautiful and
the true" are thought to be and commonly accepted as.  Thus one
subverts morality, philosophy and religion, and aesthetics.
It's a form of social darwinism. The dynamics of social change.
 
As with Darwinism, some of these changes have been good.
Einstein, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Van Gogh certainly
brought in good new things.
 
But some are not so good. Nietzsche attempted
to overthrow morality completely, and the poets, novellists,
screenwriters and other artists, etc, have had mixed results,
especially to sexual morality and human decency. Now
young men think nothing of executing a kindergarten class.
 
Twelve-tone music is listenable for a while, but it really has no
unity or beauty.  And popular music has discarded beautiful
melodies and lyrics in favor of whining voices or those singing rap.
 
Now living together without marriage has become the norm for
young people, and we have indiscriminate sex and pornography.
These destroy the basic unit of human existence, the family.
Homosexual marriage also invalidates the meaning of marriage.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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On Thursday, December 13, 2012 10:43:59 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Alberto G. Corona
 
It's much simpler than that, I think.
Progressives hate everything resembles anything
held to be good, beautiful, or true.

Then your thoughts are simple-minded indeed.

Gandhi, MLK, Einstein were haters of goodness, beauty, and truth? Progressives aren't artists or musicians?

You can believe in black and white demagoguery if you like..that's exactly what Progressives want to leave behind.

Craig

 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
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Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain study shows

You said it:
."...in part because it (evolution) carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea"

Evolution is descriptive, is the fact. natural selection is the theory that explain it. A scientific theory impose constraints with what may and may not happen. For example, child caring and risk taking at the same time may not happen.

That why progressives prefer the term evolution rather than atural selection. They want no constraints for his will of the transformation of themselves and their society according with its will.






2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>


On Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:48:45 AM UTC-5, Alberto G.Corona wrote:
so awareness and intention are before biology, so you seem to admit a teleology before life, like me.

Teleology and teleonomy both predate life. They are what time is made of.

I don`t find this ncompatible ith natural selection (or evolution, as left-leaning people likes to call it)

Hahaha, I wasn't aware that the very term evolution was now politicized. Actually it looks like Darwin preferred another term:

Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=evolution

So the reason that evolution was not Darwin's choice is precisely because he understood that it is not teleological.

. You seem to admit natural selection up to a point but you reject it when we are talking to sensible human things like the sexual roles.

Yes, natural selection only shapes things that already exist, it doesn't bring awareness or qualities of awareness into existence.
You enjoy the fact that NS made female yenas to behave in ome politically correct ways (it seems). but you reject that NS selection make female humans behave s is in almost all the rest of the animal kingdom. That funny.

I think it's funny that you think I'm citing some evidence supporting a left wing agenda. I'm only showing you that gender is not written in stone. It's something that most people are already aware of - although if you are over 60 then you have an excuse.

Craig


.

2012/12/13 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
doing



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Roger Clough

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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Conservatives indeed generally resist most
(but not all) change because the changes
are emotionally based rather than logically based,
and so often do more harm than good.
And waste money.
 
We will have to wait to see if I am right or not,
but all of the indications suggest that Obamacare
will be at least a financial catastrophe.
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Roger Clough

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Hi Bruno Marchal
 
Could Double Aspect theory apply to a computer ?
I don't think so, because in that theory mind and
brain are just different forms or aspects of some
hard-to-define "stuff".   I just can't see computer
hardware being another aspect of its code.
 
 
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Stephen P. King

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On 12/15/2012 10:34 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
> Hi Bruno Marchal
> Could Double Aspect theory apply to a computer ?
> I don't think so, because in that theory mind and
> brain are just different forms or aspects of some
> hard-to-define "stuff". I just can't see computer
> hardware being another aspect of its code.
Hi Roger,

Bruno advocates for Immaterialism, not Dual Aspect theory. DA
theory would apply to a computer if it can satisfy the requirements of
organizational and logical closure. Additionally, there is no such thing
as "stuff" or 'substance' in any non-relative sense in DA theory.

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Stephen


Roger Clough

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Hi Stephen P. King
 
As with Berkeleyism, Immaterialism denies the existence of matter.  
 
Leibniz doesn't,  so I'll stick with Leibniz, whose metaphysics 
is a double aspect type or close to that and was taken up
by Kant, also a double-sperspective type.  Modern neurophilosophy
is said to be essentially Kantian. Leibniz is close to
Kant in double aspect about a thing:
 
1) thing "in itself " as perceived mentally (as a monad) from your perspective as a phenomenon.  
2) thing "for itself," as it actually is physically without a perspective (as a scientist would treat it)
 
For Kant, perception occurs through the joining of these two aspects.
 
So the thing isn't an illusion, or hallucination.
Any object as seen by you is only seen  
phenomenologically, that is, "in itself", as  it appears in
your mind, from your perspective.  But as with
Kant, matter  it is not an illusion, it is a "for itself".
You can still perform precise experiments on the object.
 
So I can still stub my toe. I don't know about Bruno.
 
im·ma·te·ri·al·ism  (m-tîr--lzm)
n.
A metaphysical doctrine denying the existence of matter.

imma·teri·al·ist adj. & n.

immaterialism [ˌɪməˈtɪərɪəˌlɪzəm]
n Philosophy
1. (Philosophy) the doctrine that the material world exists only in the mind
2. (Philosophy) the doctrine that only immaterial substances or spiritual beings exist See also idealism [3]
immaterialist  n
 
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Roger Clough

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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
 
Yes, amoebas and T-cells. Anything that has life must have
intelligence and awareness, although it might be of limited extent.  
 
Without life, it couldn't animate. Without awareness and inteligence
to understand that perception, it would not know where to go or
what to do.
 
 
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Roger Clough

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Hi Stathis Papaioannou
 
Anything alive must have consciousness to some degree,
so consciousness always was-- at least to a limited extent.
 
 
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On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 11:47 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is nothing in what I feel that would provide me with any certainty that my brain is not being manipulated by someone by remote control, for example. That possibility is entirely燾onsistent爓ith my subjective feeling of freedom.

Of course that's possible. In fact it is a common psychotic delusion. Indeed, we are complex and have many competing aspects of our self with different agendas. The reason why it doesn't make sense however, is why would any process exist which creates an epiphenomenal person such as you. By extension, that is the problem with mechanism and functionalism as well. If you have a perfectly good computer which operates a robot navigating a physical world whose purpose is to survive and reproduce, what would be the advantage of generating an internal representation delusion to some made up 'person' program when the computer is already controlling the robot perfectly well. It would be like installing an chip inside of your computer to simulate an impressionist painter who actually paints tiny paintings for a made up audience of puppets to think that they are looking at. Even then, you still have the Explanatory Gap/homunculus problem. You still ARE NO CLOSER to closing the gap as now you have an interior 'model' which has no mechanism for perception. You have just moved the Cartesian Theater inside of biochemistry, but it still explains nothing about how you get from endogenous light to endogenous eyes which see images through biophotons rather than are simply informed of their quantitative significance directly and digitally.


You have just presented an argument for why consciousness is a necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour. If it were not so, then there would have been no reason for consciousness to have evolved.

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Roger Clough

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Hi Stephen P. King
 
Liberals also always take anything resembling criticism as personal.
 
 
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On 12/14/2012 9:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
That磗 why the progressives hate any constraint, any law any definition that fixes things once and for all.

That's because it is their job to represent the reality that nothing in the universe is fixed once and for all - except the universe itself.

HEY!

牋� Demonizing the opposition is not welcome here!


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Stephen

Roger Clough

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:10:49 PM12/15/12
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Hi Telmo Menezes
 
Man has no purpose (wise or foolish, it doesn't matter) in life ?
He has evolved, hasn't he ? So man is at least one example of
purpose driving or enhancing evolution.
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
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Hi Roger,

 
To be purposeful you need a self or center of
consciousness to desire that goal or purpose.
The key word is desire. Stones don't desire.

Ok, but what I'm saying is that purposefulness is not present in evolutionary processes.
 
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
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"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Subject: Re: life is teleological

Hi Roger,

Anything goal-oriented is teleological, which is what
the word means. And the goal of life is to survive.
So evolution is teleological.

Sorry but I don't agree that life or evolution have a goal. That would be a bit like saying that the goal of gravity is to attract chunks of matter to each other. You could instead see life as a process and evolution as a filter: some stuff continues to exist, other stuff doesn't. We can develop narratives on why that is: successful replication, good adaption to a biological niche and so on. But these narratives are all in our minds, we ourselves looking at it from inside of the process, if you will. From the outside, we are just experiencing the stuff that persists or, in other words, that went through the evolutionary filter at this point in time.
 
 
In other words, life is intelligent.

Suppose I postulate that the goal of stars is to emit light. Are they intelligent? If not why? What's the difference?
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/12/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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2012/12/11 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>




2012/11/30 Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com>
"I submit that this Hyperactive Agency Detection Device is a weak hypothesis for explaining the subjective bias of subjectivity. To me, it makes more sense that religion originates not as mistaken agency detection, but rather as an exaggerated or magnified reflection of its source, a subjective agent. Human culture is nothing if not totemic. Masks, puppets, figurative drawings, voices and gestures, sculpture, drama, dance, song, etc reflect the nature of subjectivity itself - it抯 expression of character and creating stories with them. "

Thanks,
Craig

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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:19:10 PM12/15/12
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On Saturday, December 15, 2012 10:00:54 AM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
 
By progressives I obviously meant those that act to change things.
Which means overthrowing the way the "good, the beautiful and
the true" are thought to be and commonly accepted as. 

Do you think that when Gandhi inspired the colonized Indian subjects of the British Empire that he was overthrowing something beautiful? That he was changing what was commonly accepted as good?

When progressives went into the American South to fight lynchings and segregation, was that some kind of a perverse new take on what was 'commonly accepted as good'? How about slavery? Was that good and true and beautiful? How about unrestrained abuse of laborers by industry? Also the good old days?

 
Thus one
subverts morality, philosophy and religion, and aesthetics.
It's a form of social darwinism. The dynamics of social change.

Just because there is an existing condition does not make it worthy of support. You are justifying whatever form of tyranny and oppression happened to have come before you and denouncing any attempt to restore liberty. That is just as much Social Darwinism as anything else. It is to say 'whoever tries to change anything is a ruthless bastard, but whoever enforces the existing order or regressing to a previous order is a good and moral person.'
 
 
As with Darwinism, some of these changes have been good.
Einstein, Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Van Gogh certainly
brought in good new things.
 
But some are not so good. Nietzsche attempted
to overthrow morality completely, and the poets, novellists,
screenwriters and other artists, etc, have had mixed results,
especially to sexual morality and human decency. Now
young men think nothing of executing a kindergarten class.

Of course, not all attempts at change are good or end up being good. The same goes for attempts to prevent change. There are counter-revolutionaries who are just as bloody as revolutionaries.  The idea that 'young men think nothing of executing a kindergarten class' being related to progressive causes is ridiculous. If that were the case, then progressive Scandinavia, France, Canada, etc would be awash in massacres. Progressives try to eliminate guns, remember?

 
Twelve-tone music is listenable for a while, but it really has no
unity or beauty.  And popular music has discarded beautiful
melodies and lyrics in favor of whining voices or those singing rap.

Again, if you are over 65, I sympathize. I'm 44, so I remember being a kid and what it was like in the 70s when modern art, rock music, and other confrontational aesthetics were still big news. I agree with you that culture has become more and more degraded during my lifetime and I agree that there is something to that beyond just my taste, but really it isn't that important. The decay of Amercian culture is not the result of what happened 50 years ago or even (much worse in my opinion) what happened in the 80s when Reagan era conservatism brought back militarism and overconsumption values. If you want to blame something, blame overpopulation and the corruption of American institutions. The value of human life is indirectly proportionate to how many extra people you have and how imbalanced the society is. Those are the tensions which make money more important than making civilization beautiful.

 
Now living together without marriage has become the norm for
young people, and we have indiscriminate sex and pornography.
These destroy the basic unit of human existence, the family.
Homosexual marriage also invalidates the meaning of marriage.

Living together without marriage, casual sex, and pornography have made life enjoyable and bearable for everyone, not just young people. They don't destroy anything. The meaning of marriage is up to the consenting adults who participate into it - not *you* or your tastes.

If the kind of rigid, backward looking morality that you elevate really was better, and really was God's magic recipe for perpetual happiness...why didn't it stay that way? Do you think that Satan himself could have convinced truly happy married couples to get divorced? That pornography would have been a temptation for people who were well served by this Bronze Age ideal? Progress triumphed over fundamentalism in the 60s because people were educated enough and content enough for the first time to cast off the Calvinist neuroses of the 19th century and grow up and out into a real world full of real choices - not paint by numbers automatism.

Craig

Stephen P. King

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:25:31 PM12/15/12
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Hi Roger,

    Bravo! Nice post!


[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-15, 11:28:27
Subject: Re: Could Double Aspect theory apply to a computer ?

On 12/15/2012 10:34 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
> Hi Bruno Marchal
> Could Double Aspect theory apply to a computer ?
> I don't think so, because in that theory mind and
> brain are just different forms or aspects of some
> hard-to-define "stuff". I just can't see computer
> hardware being another aspect of its code.
Hi Roger,

     Bruno advocates for Immaterialism, not Dual Aspect theory. DA
theory would apply to a computer if it can satisfy the requirements of
organizational and logical closure. Additionally, there is no such thing
as "stuff" or 'substance' in any non-relative sense in DA theory.

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Stephen




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Stephen

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:27:44 PM12/15/12
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On Saturday, December 15, 2012 1:04:11 PM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Stephen P. King
 
Liberals also always take anything resembling criticism as personal.

Conservative debate tactics are to *always* make it personal to avoid talking about the issues respectfully. I have seen this time and again. Look back at your own messages here. Did you post a link about a politically neutral topic and have a Liberal say that you must be a Right Winger and how that makes your thinking clouded by patriarchal racist idiocy? No. That did not happen. Instead, you politicize this for no reason, repeatedly making weird hostile remarks that have no basis in science or philosophy, and then accuse Progressives of taking it personally.

 
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-14, 13:21:52
Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain studyshows

On 12/14/2012 9:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
That� why the progressives hate any constraint, any law any definition that fixes things once and for all.

That's because it is their job to represent the reality that nothing in the universe is fixed once and for all - except the universe itself.

HEY!

�� Demonizing the opposition is not welcome here!


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Stephen

Stephen P. King

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:30:18 PM12/15/12
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On 12/15/2012 1:04 PM, Roger Clough wrote:
> Hi Stephen P. King
> Liberals also always take anything resembling criticism as personal.

Sadly, so it seems.

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Stephen


Quentin Anciaux

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:35:39 PM12/15/12
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2012/12/15 Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net>

On 12/15/2012 1:04 PM, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Stephen P. King
Liberals also always take anything resembling criticism as personal.

    Sadly, so it seems.

I must side with Craig here... what is sad is your ways of debating here.

Quentin


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Stephen P. King

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:37:03 PM12/15/12
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Dear Craig,

    All of these points are instances of taking a particular evaluational frame, making it absolute, and issuing judgements from it. It is what is known, to some, as chronocentrism. It is simply wrongheaded. Unless you put yourself into the context with you are evaluating and then considering the facts as they stand with a set of universal ethical principles, then those judgements and implications cannot be seen as anything more than rationalizations to behave in one way or another.
    We can rationalize any action to be good or bad. Rationalization, pushed too far, allows anything.

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Stephen P. King

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:41:46 PM12/15/12
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On 12/15/2012 1:27 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Saturday, December 15, 2012 1:04:11 PM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Stephen P. King
 
Liberals also always take anything resembling criticism as personal.

Conservative debate tactics are to *always* make it personal to avoid talking about the issues respectfully. I have seen this time and again. Look back at your own messages here. Did you post a link about a politically neutral topic and have a Liberal say that you must be a Right Winger and how that makes your thinking clouded by patriarchal racist idiocy? No. That did not happen. Instead, you politicize this for no reason, repeatedly making weird hostile remarks that have no basis in science or philosophy, and then accuse Progressives of taking it personally.
Dear Craig,

    Please link some examples. Let me present you with a counter-example to your claim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3LnVa7zXgc You might consider Penn Jillette to be a progressive, but he would disagree...


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Roger Clough

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:51:25 PM12/15/12
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How about this:
 
Liberals are utopians, conservatives are skeptical of them.
Sometimes one is right, sometimes the other, but
unfortunately it costs money (usually a fortune) to create a demo.
So liberals need to listen seriously to the conservatives.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: meekerdb
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-12-14, 13:46:06
Subject: Re: Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional,brain studyshows

On 12/14/2012 5:54 AM, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
This response is the hallmark of a progressive worldview, and adhere perfectly to my definition: Hate to the established and aim to his destruction because it is an obstacle for something better that still don磘 exist. But no matter what is it, progress will bring 爄t. That磗 their core believef.

What nonsense.� A strawman man for Alberto to hate.� He wants to see every change as destruction and every change as motivated by hate.� Progress is by simple definition of the word going from the worse to the better.� Every conservative always supposes that they know the one Truth and so it cannot be improved upon; they are the true believers - and that applies to the political left Maoist/Communists as well as the political right Royalist/Papist/Fascists.� They all used their power to consolidate and gain more power.

Brent

Craig Weinberg

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Dec 15, 2012, 1:53:11 PM12/15/12
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I agree with Stephen, nice post.

I think that where my view improves on these is that I see every 'for itself' is also something else's 'in itself', on some level of description, and vice versal. Multisense realism points to that joining and sees it instead as a twisting, a pseudo-separation. In other words, all 'itselves' are nothing but the capacity to pseudo-separate 'for-ness' from 'in-ness', and that capacity is 'sense' participation, and it is the absolute ground of being.

Think of for-ness and is-ness as the collector and emitter, while the base is what makes those two pseudo-separated modalities into a monad-whole.

Maybe Berkeley would have had it right if he knew the extent of the sophistication of the microcosm. He was correct that there is no universally objective 'for itself' entities of matter, but rather for-ness is the underlap of all in-ness of any given participant.

Craig

Craig

Roger Clough

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Dec 15, 2012, 2:07:55 PM12/15/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Ghandi didn't increase anybody's taxes,
which makes everything he did right.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Subject: Re: Progressives and social darwinism

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Roger Clough

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Dec 15, 2012, 2:08:50 PM12/15/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
If you are a liberal, you cannot understand a conservative's motives.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 15, 2012, 2:18:10 PM12/15/12
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I think that they are instances of real world examples. I don't issue any judgments from it - I just ask -

'Was slavery good before Progressive activism changed it'? 
'Were the practices of industry toward its workers good or bad before Progressive activism changed it?
Was colonialism and Apartheid in India, South Africa, the American South, etc good or bad before Progressive activism changed it?

I don't intend to prove to anyone that these things were bad or that they were improved - unlike with Conservative approaches - I leave that up to you. Maybe you say they were better off slaves and second class citizens, or that the wars and changes that followed weren't worth it? Or maybe you say these weren't movements of Progressive activism? Maybe you have a list of your own? That's cool, I'm open to hearing about any of that. I don't see that these examples are somehow disqualified though. That just makes me think that there is no counterargument because their truth is self evident, and therefore 'unfair' to the other side.

It is what is known, to some, as chronocentrism. It is simply wrongheaded.

I know you're not saying that I should make up examples from the future instead or talk from theory right? Examples from the past are wrongheaded? How so?
 
Unless you put yourself into the context with you are evaluating and then considering the facts as they stand with a set of universal ethical principles, then those judgements and implications cannot be seen as anything more than rationalizations to behave in one way or another.
    We can rationalize any action to be good or bad. Rationalization, pushed too far, allows anything.

If we rule out examples from the past - and rule out present day comparisons like the success of Progressive policies in places like Scandinavia and Western Europe versus the failure of Regressive policies everywhere else, then all we have is propaganda made up by Think tanks and our own speculation.

Craig

Roger Clough

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Dec 15, 2012, 2:19:13 PM12/15/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Berkeley had to finally admit that matter is real,
and not an illusion, not because WE see it, but because God does.
But, to revert back to Leibniz, because God sees all things
from all the perspectives of the infinity of monads,
L's view is in the end identical to Berkeley's revised
position.
 
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
Time: 2012-12-15, 13:53:11
Subject: Re: Leibniz is not an immaterialist. Reality is not an illusion.

On Saturday, December 15, 2012 12:41:08 PM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Stephen P. King
 
As with Berkeleyism, Immaterialism denies the existence of matter.  
 
Leibniz doesn't,  so I'll stick with Leibniz, whose metaphysics 
is a double aspect type or close to that and was taken up
by Kant, also a double-sperspective type.  Modern neurophilosophy
is said to be essentially Kantian. Leibniz is close to
Kant in double aspect about a thing:
 
1) thing "in itself " as perceived mentally (as a monad) from your perspective as a phenomenon.  
2) thing "for itself," as it actually is physically without a perspective (as a scientist would treat it)
 
For Kant, perception occurs through the joining of these two aspects.
 
So the thing isn't an illusion, or hallucination.
Any object as seen by you is only seen  
phenomenologically, that is, "in itself", as  it appears in
your mind, from your perspective.  But as with
Kant, matter  it is not an illusion, it is a "for itself".
You can still perform precise experiments on the object.
 
So I can still stub my toe. I don't know about Bruno.
 
im ma te ri al ism  (m-t r--lzm)
n.
A metaphysical doctrine denying the existence of matter.

imma teri al ist adj. & n.

immaterialism [  m  t  r   l z m]
n Philosophy
1. (Philosophy) the doctrine that the material world exists only in the mind
2. (Philosophy) the doctrine that only immaterial substances or spiritual beings exist See also idealism [3]
immaterialist  n
 
[Roger Clough], [rcl...@verizon.net]
12/15/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


I agree with Stephen, nice post.

I think that where my view improves on these is that I see every 'for itself' is also something else's 'in itself', on some level of description, and vice versal. Multisense realism points to that joining and sees it instead as a twisting, a pseudo-separation. In other words, all 'itselves' are nothing but the capacity to pseudo-separate 'for-ness' from 'in-ness', and that capacity is 'sense' participation, and it is the absolute ground of being.

Think of for-ness and is-ness as the collector and emitter, while the base is what makes those two pseudo-separated modalities into a monad-whole.

Maybe Berkeley would have had it right if he knew the extent of the sophistication of the microcosm. He was correct that there is no universally objective 'for itself' entities of matter, but rather for-ness is the underlap of all in-ness of any given participant.

Craig

Craig

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Craig Weinberg

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Dec 15, 2012, 2:26:56 PM12/15/12
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"[By 1994] "Newt World" was now far-flung, from GOPAC to the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee; the Friends of Newt Gingrich campaign committee; a weekly TV show on the conservative cable TV network, National Empowerment Television, and a think tank called the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

Its messages were coordinated with talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and with Christian Coalition groups. [...]

[...]
Mr. Gaylord is one of the brains behind Gopac ... . [He] wrote its how-to textbook, which urges challengers to "go negative" early and "never back off". They must sometimes ignore voters' main concerns because "important issues can be of limited value". The book suggests looking for a "minor detail" to use against opponents, pointing to Willie Horton as a good example. Though it says a positive proposal also can be helpful, it counsels candidates to consider the consequences: "Does it help, or at least not harm, efforts to raise money?" Mr. Gingrich has called the book "absolutely brilliant".

Even more has been written about the most famous Gopac document,

... a memo by Gingrich called "Language, a Key Mechanism of Control", in which the then-House minority whip gave candidates a glossary of words, tested in focus groups, to sprinkle in their rhetoric and literature. For example, it advised characterizing Democrats with such words as "decay, sick, pathetic, stagnation, corrupt, waste, traitors". (LA Times, 12/19/94, pages A31)"
 (from http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/29/002.html)

I have heard Penn speak before. I would say his positions are mostly Right-leaning Libertarian but socially Left-leaning Libertarian. Which part of the video should I watch? Penn's ok. He's a blowhard though. Does he insult Beck? Because Beck is not ok.

Craig


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Stephen

Stephen P. King

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Dec 15, 2012, 2:29:50 PM12/15/12
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On 12/15/2012 1:51 PM, Roger Clough wrote:
> How about this:
> Liberals are utopians, conservatives are skeptical of them.

Dear Roger,

No, All that is different between them is where their respective utopias
lie. Liberals yearn for a future utopia on Earth, conservatives pine
over their utopia in the past.


> Sometimes one is right, sometimes the other, but
> unfortunately it costs money (usually a fortune) to create a demo.
> So liberals need to listen seriously to the conservatives.

They should listen more to each other and stop the childish
recriminations,demonizing and tribalism, IMHO.

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Stephen


Craig Weinberg

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Dec 15, 2012, 2:33:29 PM12/15/12
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On Saturday, December 15, 2012 2:07:55 PM UTC-5, rclough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg
 
Ghandi didn't increase anybody's taxes,
which makes everything he did right.

Sounds like a position Jesus would approve of.

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