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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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the definitions of design all imply intent.
No, they do NOT. Not in evo biology. FAIL.
Have your biologist friends sign on - where perhaps they can mediate - or else "do the hard work" as Largo so aptly/rhetorically puts it (ad nauseum re his "no-thing" drivel).
Works by Dawkins, Wilson, Coyne, Pinker are hardly substandard literature (which your latest post somehow implies). Insofar as you think such, it's a bad habit of mind, and I'd suggest you change it.
.....
Heck, you could probably just google something like "design by natural selection" or "purpose of the eye" or "design of a bird wing" or even "design of an Arctic Tern wing" (all by what? evolution, that's right; unless your Mike Huckabee of AR or his ilk); and if you want limit yourself just to evolutionary bio reads. There you go. Do the hard work, Ed. ;)
FAIL.
Now the $64 question is... Are you man-scientist enough to admit it. That given language what it is, the different contexts (e.g., disciplines or fields) in which words can be used, terms can have different meanings; and specifically in our case "design" can have meaning apart from intent or goal-based effort.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Since the Novum Organum of Francis Bacon, teleological explanations in science tend to be deliberately avoided because whether they are true or false is argued to be beyond the ability of human perception and understanding to judge.[2] Some disciplines, in particular within evolutionary biology, continue to use language that appears teleological when they describe natural tendencies towards certain end conditions. While some argue that these arguments can be rephrased in non-teleological forms, others hold that teleological language is inexpungeable from descriptions in the life sciences.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology
Statements which imply that nature has goals, for example where a species is said to do something "in order to" achieve survival, appear teleological, and therefore invalid. Usually, it is possible to rewrite such sentences to avoid the apparent teleology. Some biology courses have incorporated exercises requiring students to rephrase such sentences so that they do not read teleologically. Nevertheless, biologists still frequently write in a way which can be read as implying teleology even if that is not the intention. These issues have recently been discussed by John Reiss.[13][page needed] He argues that evolutionary biology can be purged of such teleology by rejecting the analogy of natural selection as a watchmaker; other arguments against this analogy have also been promoted by writers such as Richard Dawkins.[
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Heck, in for a penny in for a pound, I guess. So I'll spend more time I don't have just to see if any of this can get through to you this day...
It is not incorrect in evolutionary science to speak of the "design" of an eye or the "design" of a gull wing or the "purpose" of a heart or the "purpose" of macrophages or the "purpose" of an action potential as part of the body's control system. Or, it is not incorrect on Healy's part (though I'd have to go back for specifics if it's an issue) to say that we humans are "designed" for this earth biome and not for those on Mars or Venus. Or that a specific insect's mouthparts are "designed" for a specific orchid.
re: design in lieu of design by natural selection (cf: design by the gods, design by God of Abraham)
I suppose one could say it's so-called "shorthand" in communicating. But that happens in all fields, all activities, even climbing. (biner for carabiner, rap for rapping, second for the follower) But note this is hardly ever a problem when one's not in mixed company. (In this case we could imagine a biologist in the company of fundamentalist theologians, where "design by natural selection" wouldn't be clear, wouldn't be as obvious, as "design by the God of Moses" so more care would be needed. Of course.)
The point: given the so-called "poverty of language" esp, most who are up on their evo science get this, the context and all, most aren't "confused" by the other meanings of "design" and/or "purpose" as many in the general public are (with religion and theology/theism likely on their mind-brains).
Finally, everything said about "design" or "purpose" could also be extended to "belief" and "truth" as well (your past problem areas). When scientists in their fields use these terms, or when popularizers of science like Bill Nye or Neil de Grasse Tyson or from your venue L Krauss or S Weinberg use these terms in unmixed company so to speak, it's never a problem - so why is for you? Food for thought this lazydog day.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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it is a poor habit of thought to abandon precision in language, especially where the terminology is misleading, and the more so when you wish to argue using loose terms and then claim that those you are debating are being overly rigorous.
morphological "design space" is something different than "design" and has a rather specialized meaning.
more later, however..
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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I live next door to the evolution professor at OU.
One day we were talking about evolution, speciation, etc., and I said something along the lines of Dawkin's "selfish gene" description.
Oddly, he disagreed with me. He said that complexity in humans is important and unique. In the future fossil record there will be microwave ovens, for example. He thought that that was pretty cool.
To me, this is sort of foolish. As far as survival of a species goes, microwave ovens may not end up being an evolutionary advantage of humans.
The most successful forms of evolution are the ones that keep the organism reproducing for a long period of time. It could be a bacteria or a giraffe.
If you really boil natural selection down to its roots, the "success" of a species has more to do with successful reproduction than anything else. In that sense, humans are nothing special. I find it hard to believe that we will survive for a million years considering how we are finding it more and more difficult for us to deal with the changes in our ecosystem that we have brought. Although we are nigh a unique species on the planet in terms of our ability to alter, for good or bad, the entire planet, this may not turn out to be that great of an adaptation.
Evolution is a simple idea, and elegant. Once you understand a few simple ideas, you will see that a diverse ecosystem forces evolution.
I shake my head over the fact that so many people refuse to believe in evolution. The fossil record is blatant. It cannot be refuted.
Religion is a very strong dogma. Too bad about that. Some ideas cannot even be entertained because of a few sentences written by someone 2000 years ago. The sentences just CAN'T be wrong, so toss out anything else as heresy. Our ability to delude ourselves regarding ideas this simple and true is a great hindrance to our ability to work together as a species for the common good of ourselves and our planet. Too bad about that.
Ed is correct that our ability to communicate ideas and information with each other...precisely...is one of our greatest strengths. However, I don't think that arguing over the definition of design, in this sense, is very important. Design, as a word, in its most sinister case, is used to imply a designer. It is a foothold for religious dogma. Neither Ed or HFCS is a proponent of the word design in that sense.
Mother nature doesn't care.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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it is a poor habit of thought to abandon precision in language, especially where the terminology is misleading
Agree as written. Now take into account context and training and company. It is not imprecise languaging to speak of the "design" of a gull's wing as opposed to the "design" of a puffin's wing. Not when you don't have theism or theistic phily on the brain. Not when you're in unmixed company.
(Yeah. It would be confusing to a confused theist, perhaps. Tongue in cheek.)
You seriously do not get this?
Of course the deep deep irony behind all this is the "precise" language of academic philosophy (of which you have some experience, if memory serves), the big deal it makes of it. Yet, today, look how cumbersome, hobbled, it is precisely because of it. It is so "precise" in its convolutions of expression, it's become more or less irrelevant in the wake of science and science communications. Nowadays it only impresses those, shall we say, minimum readers or mediocre readers or amateur readers who are (instead of seeing through it) baffled/dazzled by its aged rhetoric.
Wake up.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 5, 2014 - 02:46pm PT
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This is thinking that has cognitive antecedents that can be thought of has having dropped out of conventional sequence, with the intercession of a large gap between the last relevant thought and the sudden insight.
Ward, we understand that any answer arriving out of sequence has cognitive antecedents and that the mind has been "primed," so to speak, to source the info that seemingly drops out of the blue. But in those interludes between "relevant thoughts," that seemingly lead to an out-of-the-blue answer, these interludes are marked by an open focused LACK or ABSENCE of conscious, narrow focused discursive processing, so to to call this "thinking, when no discursive processing is currently is involved, makes no sense.
Another thing is, Fruity is a staunch literalist, so arguing nuance with him is like trying to get a duck to whistle. For example "no-thing" is really just another way to say space or absence of sense data or discursive processing. This can only be called "drivel" if you have no sense of space, absence, potentiality, and so forth. Trying to convince someone of such qualities is absurd because the person simply lacks the mental ponies to handle nuanced material. So it goes with the undisputed Gomer Pyle of this thread, a position Fruity rightfully earned through his own thorny, bumbling face plants.
JL
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Back to those out of the blue ideas.
The best idea that I've had came from a massive dataset that I hadn't looked at in years. I was working on something completely different. All of a sudden a light bulb went off and I pulled out my old work and there it was, hiding in plain sight. The first well was bad ass.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Fruity is a staunch literalist, so arguing nuance with him is like trying to get a duck to whistle.
You know, you're responsible for the tone on this thread. Going way back now. You and your lapdog. (Woof.) If you weren't around, or even if you just got serious and humbled yourself before science, its expertise and achievements, I can imagine a few climbers on the West Coast - who actually are educated and trained in science - could have some meaningful discussion on these exciting topics. Now wouldn't that be something.
But climbing authority and "no-thing" rhetoric rule.
And as it is, it's hardly worth it.
Alas.
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Jstan: You have attempted to explain this as a Socratic device.
I have?
To you, Ed, and others (but no one in particular), I am saying what many others have said. Culture, games, sports, business, science, ethics, and even religions have all been created to involve ourselves in something. They are creative efforts to whilst away our time. People feel compelled to fill space, but space doesn't need filling. Space is all that you could ever want or need if you simply became aware of what it is. Buddhists call it, IT, the dharmakaya, the ground of all that is and that is not. It's my understanding that it is the answer to the question posed by this thread: "What is Mind?" Mind is space. Look and you will see it.
Atoms, energy, neurons, geological strata, theories about language and mind are just some of the things we make up (project into existence imaginatively) to fill space. Everyone seems to need something or another to occupy themselves. It was Pascal, I believe, who said that all of humanity's problems result from the inability to sit quietly and still in a room alone. As you know, he was not the only person to have made that claim. The notion can be found in every culture and time that I've heard of. (Funny, that.)
How else can I say it to you, Jstan? If you simply give up all of the little conceits that you involve yourself in to make yourself feel useful, proud, accomplished, worthy and instead learn to be quiet and still in your mind and heart, you will find absolutely everything--except there won't quite be the "you" you think you are to find anything.
I don't mean to be paradoxical or ironic or confusing, but most likely everything I'm saying probably seems completely counterintuitive, stupid, and maybe absurd. I don't mean for that to happen. It's just the way IT is.
It's nothing magical, mystical, or strange. It's the most obvious thing that is in front of everyone at every single moment. In everyday parlance, it's simply experience--YOUR experience. Subjectivity.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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these interludes are marked by an open focused LACK or ABSENCE of conscious, narrow focused discursive processing, so to to call this "thinking, when no discursive processing is currently is involved, makes no sense.
Reminds me of an old cowboy movie the other night when a Gabby Hayes type character ,unknowingly about to be ambushed by Apaches ,pointed to a barren landscape and claimed:
" let's go...there ain't no Injuns up there"
BTW the gap I referred to is not absent "discursive" processing. Base reported that he is sometimes driving or taking a shower. These activities hardly leave behind meditation footprints on brain readings. One can be recalling old Aunt Sally's muffin recipe and suddenly have a creative solution to a long standing problem.
These gaps are merely temporarily absent relevant antecedents to the problem at hand. That's why I emphasized the word "relevant" in my prior post.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Mike's description kind of reminds me of a page of a book.
The words are the only thing we notice while reading, yet the physical pages of the book are what the book is....a bunch of cellulose. If you disregard content, you are free to examine a pound of cellulose fibers.
So..this empty space between thoughts that you describe,
Are you saying that we need to disregard content and instead concentrate on the empty page itself?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 5, 2014 - 03:32pm PT
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Ward, discursive thinking, though sometimes not entirely linear, always tends to follow a certain thread. You don't usually get answer to a question about France, for example, but playing the harmonica. Nor yet you don't usually improve your off width climbing by paddling up slabs at Suicide. "Thinking" always carries the notion of intentionally staying focused on a given subject. "Let me think about that." And "that" is always this as opposed to that.
When that thread is broken, and you are taking a shower, say, or listening to music, and an answer comes into your mind totally unrelated to what you are doing at that moment, it can hardly be called "thinking" which sourced the out of the blue insight. THis does not mean that you were brain dead since the last time your thought, rather the thought was answered was not being entertained at the moment of insight.
And Homer Fruitcake Simpson, your posing as a scientist is about as transparent as a lie as Roger Clemens fibbing about steroids. But I understand your belief that only scientists have worthwhile things to say about everything. This is simply how your mind works. Positing this as objective reality is of course your intention, and what makes you the undisputed buffoon of this thread - we can easily see why.
JL
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Largo, you're trying to move the goal posts around now.
Originally you stated:
these interludes are marked by an open focused LACK or ABSENCE of conscious, narrow focused discursive processing, so to to call this "thinking, when no discursive processing is currently is involved, makes no sense.
Now you concede it's thinking all along, i.e. discursive processing , just not relevant thinking ---as I have established earlier. You not only contradicted thine self but your solution to that inconsistency is to offer up an ad hoc definition for "thinking":
Thinking" always carries the notion of intentionally staying focused on a given subject. "Let me think about that." And "that" is always this as opposed to that.
Nice try. But you know as well as I the above is a narrow definition of thought intentionally leaving out the various types of free association , to name just one. This also unnecessarily conflates thinking with strict rationality ; we all can readily concede that thinking consistently violates rational foundations while still remaining thinking, or thought.
In any case, having a sudden insight about a long standing problem while simultaneously considering Aunt Sally's muffin recipe ---is not associated with what you attempted to characterize earlier as a species of non discursive "...when no discursive processing is currently involved"
Aunt Sally would not like that.
Gotta go work out .see ya later if anyone's around.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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They are creative efforts to whilst away our time. People feel compelled to fill space, but space doesn't need filling...
Well, good luck with that. With the "just do nothing" philos of which you seem so proud, you're mighty lucky to be living in this (temporary) age of modern comfort and accoutrements. Were it another, I could imagine my clan or nation (or even a chimp's, lol) getting whiff of yours just over the horizon and conquering you and yours, taking as spoils your goods (females).
Yeah, you got it all figured out.
I hope in your next life you come back a puffin on the western shores of Norway. Amidst black-backed gulls. Then you'll know the necessity of what it is to fill your day. ;)
Or a Shiite female in some Sunni region of past or future ISIS, lol!
“Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.” -Einstein
A toast in this hour to those who not only appreciate civilization (cf: those who take it for granted) but try to advance it.
.....
Really, jgill, that is so vain. Talk about no-thing. If you think I'm bloviating in regard to any nature or science issue I've posted about, then point it out, otherwise show a little more substance than your commrade in yogurt for brains.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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And Homer Fruitcake Simpson, your posing as a scientist is about as transparent as a lie as Roger Clemens fibbing about steroids (JL)
fyi, I left neuroscience 25 years ago to take up evolutionary psych and evolutionary ecology (HFCS)
I've wondered about this. Credentials, papers, etc.? He could clarify this and refute your accusation with a single post.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Credentials, papers, etc.?
I post up undergraduate degrees in engering and biology and graduate work records in neuroscience, then what? Then I'm credentialed in Largo's mind? in his Lapdog's? Then things change? For the better?
For this "gross materialist beaker boy"?
LOL!!
I'm left to wonder after all these months and months of posting after the Big Guy if you and MH2 can get Largo out of mind for even a day, lol!
Where would his "mind" thread be without the constant bumping of his affectionate loving coterie? Down in the dregs, long forgotten, years ago, 200 posts max probably.
"Whatever you say, Boss. You say jump, I'll jump." :)
I'll repeat it here in this post...
Really, jgill, that is so vain. Talk about no-thing. If you think I'm bloviating in regard to any nature or science issue I've posted about, then point it out, otherwise show a little more substance than your commrade in yogurt for brains.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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evolution is a design process with a purpose
No your not ready to say this yet. your still trying to figure out how YOU would build the universe. God distinctly had a purpose for Creating the universe for a time such as now. First came the universe, then came earth, then came water and ALL seeds for life. God putting All materials and laws into place and spinning them into motion, and allowing the "chips to fall where they may" is the design process. evolution IS JUST CHANGE! the opposite of God. God never changes!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Yeah, and then there's go-b and blu.
LOL!
Hey, which God, Blu? Would that be Amon-Re (ancient Egypt) or Apollo/Artemis (ancient Greece) or Jehovah/Jesus (Hebrew)?
Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Forgive me.
I need to be "credentialed" in theology (I need to show my papers) before I can even think about asking this question. So high-level as it is. Sorry. Sorry for the impertinence. Carry on.
.....
EDIT for BELOW:
Well, jgill, you and your boyfriend will probably get your wish. I'm having to set aside climbing soon for a spell; hopefully that'll be enough change in life to disincentivize this brain science student (I will always be that) from clicking on the forum page only to see this pathetic "mind" thread. Imagine that! Yes a "sayonara" would be just dandy, let's hope I'll be able to stick it, eh? :)
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Where would his "mind" thread be without the constant bumping of his affectionate loving coterie? Down in the dregs, long forgotten, years ago, 200 posts max probably (HFCS)
Start your own thread if this one is so distasteful. Why in the world do you keep coming back, after deleting your posts? Leave us to banter like we do and start a serious thread about mind and consciousness. Sayonara.
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