Interbane wrote:What does it mean to reflect the universe to itself? I honestly don't know what your meaning is here. And that humanity is the crowning glory of evolution follows from reflecting the universe to itself?

Interbane, this idea of self-reflection of the universe is a way to explain the Biblical concept of humanity as the image of God in a purely atheist framework. Through language we, as complex collections of stardust, have the power to reflect the universe to itself. How I see it is that a physics or biology textbook is a reflection of what is really there in the universe. Humans are how the universe has coalesced in a specific complex location, so in our act of reading a scientific text, the universe (reality) is reflected (represented as an image) to itself (the reader). As far as is known, this reflective activity is unique to human rationality, suggesting that the evolution of rational language is a quantum leap from animal evolution. This is the agenda Dawkins hints at with his discussion of memetics, the operation of evolution within culture.

there is no such thing as a "why" in this case. It's a ridiculous question. It's like postulating the umpteenth dimension. Our minds can conceive of it, but that doesn't mean this conception is a part of our universe.

My point was that Dawkins is deliberately provocative in using the term ‘Why?’ in the title of the first chapter. Your dismissal of the question is an assertion that ultimate questions can have no definite answer so should not even be discussed. Heidegger makes the point that the question ‘Why are there entities rather than nothing?’ seems to be meaningless but actually opens us up to a sense of our contact with the whole of reality.

the principles are no more a part of the universe than we are. They are like a fiction novel or an ant. The rules which govern evolution may be universal, but we aren't, and our phenotypes aren't.

I’m still getting my head around the concept of the phenotype, and haven’t yet been able to find a copy of The Extended Phenotype. At issue, as I see it, is that (to paraphrase Tolstoy’s first line from Anna Karenina), successful phenotypes are universal, while unsuccessful phenotypes fail in their own way. Your assertion that “Using our rationality, we can create these binding principles” seems to me to fundamentally misconceive the process of scientific discovery and logic. We do not (or rather should not) make up principles for living in an arbitrary way. Instead, we articulate principles which we discover through observation of reality. In evolutionary terms, we build upon precedent, and do not invent new systems divorced from the past.

If love is no more universal than a beaver dam, you have nothing to go on.

But if love is a natural quality embedded in the universe, or at least an essential principle for human evolutionary success, then it is significantly more universal than any object.

You're creating guiding principles to be used in support of your desired global principles.

I’m not creating any principles, I’m just asking what principles humanity needs to live by in order to sustain a global civilization. My view is that stripping the supernaturalism out of religion by means of evolutionary logic in order to retain the natural core of spirituality is a vastly more productive path than the fruitless opposition to all religious concepts.

There may be a guiding principle behind the construction of a phenotype which is universal, but the phenotype itself is not.

A phenotype has infinite variation, like fingerprints or snowflakes, but each of these examples obeys universal characteristics. Fingerprints are always on fingers, and snowflakes are always made of snow. The values that support human flourishing might be thought of as like the anatomy of the finger which is expressed differently in each person but has the same universal structure.

In merging science with religion, you're starting to wade into "figurative language" territory. These global values that we want everyone to accept can be arrived at by using reason, just like we can arrive at the conclusion that we all must use less energy or recycle (these are generic, but it suggests my point). We have no need for an overarching behind the scenes hypothesis which validates our use of these values.

Darwinian evolution is just such an overarching hypothesis. The assumption that life is good suggests that adaptive values are good and maladaptive values are bad. Your example of energy is based in a Darwinian framework of how humanity can adapt to a warming planet. Figurative language can be useful, for example discussion of whether terms such as God and salvation can have an adaptive content. What I am looking at is using evolutionary thought to help reconcile such figurative concepts with scientific knowledge.

RT: “Interbane, this idea of self-reflection of the universe is a way to explain the Biblical concept of humanity as the image of God in a purely atheist framework."

But Robert, it doesn’t make sense. This is the problem my friend Johnson has always had with philosophy. There is a lot of language we have that is ambiguous and intangible, allowing philosophers to span a rational gap between concepts rooted in reality, but the bridge of rationality has no anchor to reality itself. I can conceptualize what you mean by mentioning a self-reflection of the universe as an explanatory device, but there is no foothold on reality with this concept. Where is the proverbial mirror that would do the reflecting? What would be reflected, an image? A concept? This is all simply a manipulation of language without any foothold on reality.” We are able to make models and illustrations of reality, but you have to understand that this doesn’t equal a reflection, and to use the word “reflect” works wonders to confuse the issue. I would ask that you use more specific wording, otherwise your ideas have no purchase.

RT: “How I see it is that a physics or biology textbook is a reflection of what is really there in the universe.”

This is grasping at straws to find a foothold for your bridge of rationality. Any reflection our textbooks give are in the form of an incredibly paraphrased and condensed collection of data that must have the human brain as a medium for it to make sense.

RT: “Humans are how the universe has coalesced in a specific complex location, so in our act of reading a scientific text, the universe (reality) is reflected (represented as an image) to itself (the reader).”

That complexity has arisen on our planet doesn’t indicate it was a purposeful incident. It happened within the laws of nature, it was inevitable here, as it likely is inevitable in other locations of the universe. The rarity can be paralleled by the rarity of supermassive black holes. Certain celestial phenomena are more rare than others, but this doesn’t exclude the formulation of life from this scale of rarity. To be correct, you must assume that it’s impossible for life to arise elsewhere in the universe.

You’re also mixing metaphorical language with figurative language all within one sentence. Although poetic, it’s entirely nonsensical. Any representation we have accumulated of the universe by the blueprints of physics aren’t “reflected” back at the universe. Those are instead pieces of objective knowledge which are only relevant when the medium of a human mind is used to translate them. The orbit of an electron around an atomic nucleus is more accurately representative of how the moon orbit’s the Earth than any textbook depiction(a physical manifestation rather than ink and paper).

That we are the crowning glory of evolution is also a terribly arrogant statement. Everyday I see stupidity I wish the rest of the world were more intelligent than I. We must use legal systems to keep in check the failings of our morality(which I believe to be evolutionary). We are far from holding any crown. Our ability to paraphrase reality and describe it may be a recently emerged phenomenon, but it is little more than manipulation of our environment. Artwork can be said to better reflect reality than much of the hocus pocus that passes for philosophy amongst laypeople. But again, such things aren't reflections. They are simple, crude, paraphrased, compressed representations of what we observe our environment to be.

RT: “Your dismissal of the question is an assertion that ultimate questions can have no definite answer so should not even be discussed. Heidegger makes the point that the question ‘Why are there entities rather than nothing?’ seems to be meaningless but actually opens us up to a sense of our contact with the whole of reality.”

I take this to mean nothing more than that we are sentient creatures with senses and rationality. It is circular. This doesn’t also indicate that there is a question of “Why” that is answered by anything other than evolution. This is the third or fourth time I’ve posed this question, but you haven’t answered it. It's not that I think such questions have no definite answer, it's that you're asking "who is concrete", without realizing the presumption inside the question that concrete is a who(the appropriate question is "what is concrete" unless it has been state prior that Concrete is a proper name.) The question simply doesn't make any sense. The only way it can make sense is if you "create" an answer, which I think you're attempting to do.

RT: “At issue, as I see it, is that (to paraphrase Tolstoy’s first line from Anna Karenina), successful phenotypes are universal, while unsuccessful phenotypes fail in their own way. Your assertion that “Using our rationality, we can create these binding principles” seems to me to fundamentally misconceive the process of scientific discovery and logic. We do not (or rather should not) make up principles for living in an arbitrary way.”

That is precisely what we’ve done in creating our legal system. Not to say that there aren’t underlying reasons why some principles are more effective than others. The difference is that you’re suggesting these underlying reasons are somehow integrated within the fabric of the universe. This bypasses and ignores exploration into human motive. Empathy is a moral mechanic which has helped us to survive, so has been evolutionarily beneficial. As a precedent, this is more fundamental to our development of principles than anything the bible has to offer. Such evolutionary heritage helped inspire what is in the bible. Again, the precedent doesn’t reach back through our history only to stop at religious documents, it goes far beyond them. There are reasons the authors wrote what they wrote within the bible, and it most certainly wasn’t divine influence.


RT: “But if love is a natural quality embedded in the universe, or at least an essential principle for human evolutionary success, then it is significantly more universal than any object.”

I meant to say that love isn’t a natural quality embedded in the universe. It is a survival mechanism we possess which influences us to protect our young, our tribe mates, and our extended family. As the brain has grown, so have the unforeseen consequences of our evolutionary heritage. We can commit suicide, and we can love an ideal. Think on that sentence a bit.

RT: “I’m not creating any principles, I’m just asking what principles humanity needs to live by in order to sustain a global civilization.”

I was under the impression you had the majority of this answer, but were instead attempting to find a way in which these principles were somehow of the same type as the laws of physics. If an ant has greater survivability with larger pincers, it is due to the size of the granular sand of it’s current environment. If humans have greater survivability(with whatever trait), it is due to our environment and the dynamics of associated species. Like I’ve mentioned before, which you casually dismissed, any attempt to show love as a fundamental part of our universe is dashed on the rocks when we consider possible sentient species that could thrive without it. You have no oranges to compare your apples to here, so there’s nothing to keep the speculation in check. My speculation is every bit as valid as yours until we make further discoveries. These discoveries will only be hampered by the inclusion of religious principles, since they are static and can only extend as far as rational interpretation allows.

RT: “My view is that stripping the supernaturalism out of religion by means of evolutionary logic in order to retain the natural core of spirituality is a vastly more productive path than the fruitless opposition to all religious concepts.”

But you’re not stripping the supernaturalism away. You’re replacing it with ambiguity. I’m not against concepts such as loving they neighbor and turning the other cheek, but I disagree that they are religious concepts. People returning to prior locations is a concept that existed before Arnold Swarzenegger said “I’ll be back!” On top of claiming the origin of such concepts as loving thy neighbor lies with religion, you’re also attempting to find a context within which to validate religion as the only method of delivery of such concepts, by tying love with God and showing this connection to be universal.

RT: “A phenotype has infinite variation, like fingerprints or snowflakes, but each of these examples obeys universal characteristics. Fingerprints are always on fingers, and snowflakes are always made of snow. The values that support human flourishing might be thought of as like the anatomy of the finger which is expressed differently in each person but has the same universal structure.”

DNA for fingerprints. The laws of physics for snowflakes. Language for knowledge. The values that support human flourishing apply to the here and now. Is that all you’re doing is trying to express a humanist philosophy for our current point in our evolutionary journey, as well as our current environment? Such values would change with time, crabs don’t have fingerprints. The laws of physics are one or two levels more fundamental than the universality of DNA, as I’m sure you’re aware. There can be other such biological “universals” different than DNA, but we don’t know them as DNA is all we have on this planet. There is no orange with which to compare our apple. The laws of physics, however, undergird both DNA and snowflakes, and to propose the idea that our principles are as universal as the laws of physics are to ignore the intermediaries, such as DNA for organisms. Whatever the memetic evolution of survival principles leads to, it will be of the class that is DNA, not any more fundamental (such as the laws of physics.) You can’t use ambiguous wording to make it appear so.

The primary flaw in your journey is that it’s motivated by religious text. Such text is primitive and will no doubt contain disjunctions between the espoused concepts and our physical reality. If you’re at an impasse, it may be that you chose the wrong origin from which to start your journey.

Robert, I think our discussion here got lost in the mix. I apologize if my posts have come across a bit harsh.

Interbane wrote: Plato .. didn’t account for how neurons store a facsimile of real world information, in much the same way as a set of blueprints store the structure of a building.

Leaving aside the issue that Plato lived 2500 years ago and had not heard of neurons, I would caution against simplistic critique of his theory of ideas. I’ve been pondering the relation between Plato’s essentialism and Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene. In both, we see an argument that the reality is not the material instance, but the eternal information that is encoded in the instance. Okay, Dawkins does not view genes as eternal, but they are the next best thing, as blueprints for life that exist for millions or even billions of years. For Plato, the idea (his term usually translated as Form) is the blueprint for its instances. So eternal concepts such as love, good, truth, justice and equality exist as intertemporal information. For both Dawkins and Plato, genes/ideas are not one-off blueprints, but realities whose existence is in their permanence. Both have a similar intuition of deep time, with Plato’s celebrated definition of time as ‘the moving image of eternity’ directly seen in Dawkins’ theory of living things (I hesitate to use the word creatures given its theological roots) as the temporal machines used by the eternal replicators which are our genes.

The ideas that feel so real are real to us because we are the “decoder” mechanism by which to understand the arrangements of neurons.

Sorry, but this is a falsely reductive claim. The example that springs most vividly to mind is the way that confidence affects the status of financial markets. The herd instinct of traders is not just an ‘arrangement of neurons’ but a social and political event with momentum and effects. It is the effect in the real world that gives ideas their force. The example of the stock market applies throughout human life, with ideas gaining purchase because of their real world effects, not because of a mind-brain identity.

Ideas are real first in the sense that they are a structured purposeful arrangement of neurons, and second in that the data they store can be rendered, and are a facsimile so through rendering, translate into an object or process.

But what leads to some neuron arrangements being adaptive and others not? It is the reality of the ideas as having meaning and purpose against human intentions. Now. I’ve just been reading Dennett who rubbishes the concept of an intention, so obviously I’m a heretic against his materialist positivism. Maybe your description of rendering facsimiles addresses this theme of intentionality of ideas, but this is all rather difficult material to define precisely. In any event, giving primacy to the neuron is like defining a complex cultural phenomenon in terms of physics, perhaps technically correct but really missing the point of the actual use of the term.

RT: “Materialists tend to say that the transcendental imagination has no role in constructing the world. However, this view rests on an inadequate theory of the meaning of the term ‘world’. Like the relation between Son and Father, ‘world’ cannot be understood simply as meaning ‘planet’, because it is constituted by our worldviews.”

What is thought of as transcendental imagination is only one rung on an infinite ladder of causality. For that reason, it is not transcendental.

Sorry again, but your first sentence here does not make sense to me. I can’t see how the metaphor of a ladder with rungs relates to transcendental imagination, which for Kant was our necessary ideas of space, time and duty, for Heidegger was the claim that care is the meaning of being, and for Plato arose from the claim that knowledge is virtue. The transcendence of these claims does not rest in a supernaturalism, as in magical religion, but in the assessment that they are necessary deductive truths, synthesising a core perception of the nature of reality.

People who believe in magic see what philosopher Daniel C. Dennett calls the “hidden layer” of the mind. It is this ‘hidden layer’ that is too complex for us to understand at this point, but that doesn’t mean we eventually won’t.

Perhaps I would replace your term ‘see’ by ‘imagine’. Rational people do not believe in magic, but consider that all unexplained events have a natural cause. I would be interested in your views on the content of the supposed ‘hidden layer’.

There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the output does not proceed from input. That we can’t understand the workings of the brain in between does not mean this is where transcendentalism occurs.

The issue here is that you are assuming a cultural definition of transcendental as equated with supernatural. However, in Kantian philosophy the term means something quite different, associated more with the autonomy of pure reason. This is how I used it. The claim is that philosophy can tune in to universal truth through logical intelligence. This sort of a prioristic thinking jars against the empirical temper of science, but, I would argue, is actually at the centre of human cultural evolution. Going back to my assertion that world and planet are not synonyms, the point is that we need a transcendental vision to properly assess the relation between world and planet.

In fact, the lack of any evidence to suggest transcendentalism makes this hypothesis a perfect candidate for the law of parsimony (yes, there are principle guidelines to using parsimony).

I agree, which is why supernaturalism should be excluded from transcendentalism. Parsimony suggests that all events are compatible with the laws of physics. The transcendence of the human mind from its material conditions can be interpreted against the long causal chain between the material base and the ideal superstructure. Parsimony is about making base and superstructure compatible, not explaining the ideal solely in terms of its material causes.

Without the need for any magic within the human mind to explain the observable effects of our actions, we can fully do away with the riffraff.

Here I am in furious agreement with you, except that you include in your term ‘riffraff’ the whole of metaphysical language, whereas I would say lets recognise the mythic power of that language and retain and redefine it against a scientific framework.

With the advent of modern science, if you read the works of philosophers of the mind such as Dennett, you’ll find that Plato’s and Jung’s ideas are perhaps useful at times, but do not assimilate the more modern scientific findings and works of philosophy from all across the globe. Philosophy has advanced tremendously in as little as the last 50 to 100 years, and to stick with more antiquated understandings of reality is to lack the humility to dismiss whatever ideas you have attached to them, and realize we’ve made progress.

Sadly, Interbane, that is crap. Dennett, and Dawkins for that matter, see that symbols have been used to chain people in ignorance, and call for the abolition of symbolic language as a way to free people’s minds. That may be fine for a scientific elite, but the mind-brain identity thesis which is at the core of this so-called modern philosophy does not engage with the cultural reality of mind, which as Jung and Plato saw, sits primarily in symbolic archetypes. So your claim about progress is highly contestable. A good example here is the symbol of the Christian cross. By focussing on its scientific stupidity, Dawkins ignores its symbolic power and potential. I don’t accept your apparent claim that analytical philosophy, as generally practiced, has clearly advanced, but rather see that it has often trapped itself in an irrelevant backwater. The hostile attitude to Plato and Jung often amounts to bigotry, with a fear that any thought outside a beloved positivist tradition should be attacked as barbarians at the citadel, as for example Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies. Admittedly, some of Jung’s claims about synchronicity are wrong, but this has to be seen within a speculative agenda that is highly rational overall. Whitehead’s definition of philosophy as ‘footnotes to Plato’ deserves a lot more credit than is given by his aggressive attackers, whose agenda is to subordinate thought to empiricism.

It isn't a debate any more than it is wishful thinking on the part of some to use the 'elbow room' that older philosophers give to wiggle in a way in which magic can be a part of our reality. Quite frankly, such thinking would have been dismissed centuries ago if there weren't a motivating ends (religious and superstitious thinking) by which to develop those means (transcendentalist thought).

Again, you wrongly assume that because most transcendentalist thought has been imbedded in false magical and superstitious traditions that those errors are intrinsic to the idea of transcendence. They are not. It is impossible to formulate a transformative ethics without accepting the transcendent autonomy of human reason. The need here is to find themes within older traditions that are essential for contemporary progress, and extract them from their obsolete contexts. Empiricism stands as a sterile antithesis to the older rational idealist traditions, where what is needed is a creative synthesis.

RT: "In both, we see an argument that the reality is not the material instance, but the eternal information that is encoded in the instance."

I highly doubt Dawkin's would argue that genes are not part of the material instance. They are most definitely a part, but they hold a unique position within that part. The problem with Plato's forms is, again, the fact that it is neurons that hold these "forms", since we cannot have a neural facsimile of every single variation of tree on the planet. We have a generic visual of a tree, and this generic visual is precisely what a Platonic form is. Plato was philosophizing about the workings of his own brain without realizing it. To think it is anything more is superfluous and tainted with ulterior motive.

RT: "Sorry, but this is a falsely reductive claim. The example that springs most vividly to mind is the way that confidence affects the status of financial markets. The herd instinct of traders is not just an ‘arrangement of neurons’ but a social and political event with momentum and effects. It is the effect in the real world that gives ideas their force. The example of the stock market applies throughout human life, with ideas gaining purchase because of their real world effects, not because of a mind-brain identity."

I would never argue that what is in our brains cannot affect our world vicariously through us. I would also claim that there is such a thing as objective knowledge. We can gain inspiration from reading a passage that written a thousand years ago. It is supernatural thinking that assumes that the form of "inspiration" is instilled into the text. The content of the text can be called inspiring, but that is different from "inspiration" being a form within the text. The binary code for "green" can said to be a color, but we must not confuse the medium and the message.

RT: "In any event, giving primacy to the neuron is like defining a complex cultural phenomenon in terms of physics, perhaps technically correct but really missing the point of the actual use of the term."

I wouldn't say primacy is given to the neuron any more than it's given to a logic gate of a computer. The true beauty is to be found in the arrangement of these items as a whole, in the brains of humans and the CPU's of computers. Even chipmunks have neurons. A complex cultural phenomenon may very well be like the internet. It's so exceptionally complex, but in the end it's powered by electrical and physical processes, and interactions between different processing entities. There are some things which cannot be accurately paralleled. For example, a computer is yet uncapable of rendering what "love" is. The human brain has different capabilities, with emotions being an example. When we have a feeling of love, there are empirical changes in the brain. This is important to note. It suggests that this feeling, just like our thoughts, is created by the brain(in response to the appropriate external stimuli). An ambiguous emotion such as love can even be expressed in response to a pair of shoes. It's not a stretch whatsoever to consider complex cultural phenomenon being an event which manifests based on the workings of many minds. This is, in fact, all there is to it. What did you think is responsible for complex cultural phenomena? I'm not sure I can even consider another viable answer.

RT: "I would be interested in your views on the content of the supposed ‘hidden layer’."

It can be viewed similar to an uninformed person reverse engineering a computer. No matter how much he tries, he cannot fathom how such jumbled input can lead to an ordered and purposeful output. He knows how logic gates work, understands electricity, but cannot grasp the overall structure of the logic gates in how they manipulate data as a cohesive whole. The best he can do is in the mathematical portion of the CPU, he can follow a dozen or so gates and understand they are performing an addition function. Then he stands back and sees a Blue-Ray video playing. The simple additive function which he can understand does not mean he understands how the entirety works together to give such magnificent output. Billions of little additive and other functions combine.

This is a simple analogy. I'd had the thought before I read Dennet, and his phrase sounded good, so I started using it. I would be interested in how Dennet explains it.

RT: "This sort of a prioristic thinking jars against the empirical temper of science, but, I would argue, is actually at the centre of human cultural evolution."

Perhaps I was mixing transcendental and supernatural.

If philosophy can tune in to universal truth, most of what I've read in modern philosophy is bogus. You first have to assume a universal truth exists. I don't. It's unnecessary. To say that it's necessary is to develop a superfluous teleology. Neitzsche used that phrase and I've repeated it all day today, it's fun. Here, it's even fitting!

RT: "The transcendence of the human mind from its material conditions can be interpreted against the long causal chain between the material base and the ideal superstructure. Parsimony is about making base and superstructure compatible, not explaining the ideal solely in terms of its material causes."

What?! What is this superstructure now? This sounds like more supernaturalism. Parsimony is a principle, and could care less about that which is superfluous, such as this superstructure, whatever it is. Robert, this is all simply unnecessary in explaining our world.

RT: "Sadly, Interbane, that is crap."

I think that's the first time you've shown emotion. Sorry to point this out, but that suggests you're being reactive and defensive. I know, it's cheap of me to point this out, but it is kind of remarkable.

RT: "The hostile attitude to Plato and Jung often amounts to bigotry, with a fear that any thought outside a beloved positivist tradition should be attacked as barbarians at the citadel"

Oof, more. Look, I'm not being hostile towards Plato and Jung. I said their ideas are useful at times. I don't "love" the positivist position, if that's even what I am. I'm expressing the truth of things as I see it. Those older philosophers simply got it wrong. Are you suggesting that all modern philosophers are wrong and that Plato and Jung are correct? I know you're not. Such a division of sides isn't able to be done. The ideas intermingle too much. If you feel like you're being attacked, maybe it's time to clamp down on your emotions so they aren't influencing your thinking. Who cares which philosophers are correct? The question should be, which are more likely to be correct! But even that does an injustice, since it links the philosopher to his ideas and presupposes modernity with correctness. But that is not really such a presupposition. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, and we should not forsake that.



Which book by Dennet are you reading?

Interbane wrote:RT: "In both, we see an argument that the reality is not the material instance, but the eternal information that is encoded in the instance."

I highly doubt Dawkin's would argue that genes are not part of the material instance. They are most definitely a part, but they hold a unique position within that part. The problem with Plato's forms is, again, the fact that it is neurons that hold these "forms", since we cannot have a neural facsimile of every single variation of tree on the planet. We have a generic visual of a tree, and this generic visual is precisely what a Platonic form is. Plato was philosophizing about the workings of his own brain without realizing it. To think it is anything more is superfluous and tainted with ulterior motive.

It seems significant to me that we never experience categories (or to use Plato's word, Forms) directly. We really only have evidence for the existence of instances, not categories since, in the physical world, we only ever experience instances. By noticing similarities among a set of instances, we invent categories like "tree" or "house" or "dog". While categories are useful, I also find it useful to remind myself that they're imaginary.

It's tempting to confuse the category with the instances (map with territory) and come to believe that the category can exist independent of the instances, or even that the instances depend on the category. I think that was Plato's mistake and I think it's a common human error to reify concepts like beauty, love, truth, god, souls, etc. I know I do it all the time. How can they be anything objective or real when we can't even agree on what they are?!

Dennett has an article ‘The Selfish Gene as a Philosophical Essay’ in the collection Richard Dawkins – How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. I found a pile of these for $8 in a remainder bin.

Interbane wrote:RT: "In both, we see an argument that the reality is not the material instance, but the eternal information that is encoded in the instance."
I highly doubt Dawkin's would argue that genes are not part of the material instance. They are most definitely a part, but they hold a unique position within that part. The problem with Plato's forms is, again, the fact that it is neurons that hold these "forms", since we cannot have a neural facsimile of every single variation of tree on the planet. We have a generic visual of a tree, and this generic visual is precisely what a Platonic form is. Plato was philosophizing about the workings of his own brain without realizing it. To think it is anything more is superfluous and tainted with ulterior motive.

This discussion touches on some serious hot buttons, since in his new book The Greatest Show On Earth Dawkins directly attacks Plato’s theory of ideal essences as “The Dead Hand of Plato”, suggesting it presents a false static vision which held back the emergence of the true dynamic evolutionary understanding. With great respect, I suspect this analysis is based on a misreading of Plato, and that in fact Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene is quite Platonic.

Your definition of a form (what Plato called an idea) as a ‘generic visual’ provides a metaphor in terms of sense perception that ignores how Plato saw the abstract reason of pure intelligence as a higher mode of intuition than all sense data. The nature of a tree exists as pure information, even wisdom, encoded in the genetic structure of the tree, and independent of human knowledge of it. The Platonic idea of the tree is as eternal as the genes of the tree, and is only imperfectly and partly represented in the human mind.

At issue here is how we understand reality. The Selfish Gene focuses on a description of reality in terms of natural selection, with genetic evolution as the framework for real life. Of course this runs directly against the common sense view that ‘real life’ is just the here and now, and that evolution is only of theoretical interest. Common sense considers people as the main reality, where Dawkins presents a compelling logical case that natural selection is the framework of reality, the unit of natural selection is the gene, and the instance of the gene in a body is a case of the replicator using a machine. The replicator (the gene) is the agent, while the machine (a person) is the tool. The point is that to understand the reality of a person you have to understand how the person is embedded in time. So, Dawkins is already in Plato mode, arguing that common beliefs are delusory and that we need a mathematical logical framework, seen against deep time, to perceive reality more accurately. Like Plato, he is searching for what persists through time to explain what is real.

Re your first point, of course genes are part of the instance, but the instance is only a tiny part of the nature of the gene. Understanding genes as units of information, rather than just as material objects, is essential to see our biological links to fish and bacteria etc, and requires a conceptual paradigm shift from common sense. We know that genes evolve and mutate, but also that some genes have been stable for billions of years. This persistent stability can be ignored when we put too much emphasis on instances as the unit of reality.

Considering Plato’s discussion of justice or equality or love, he argues these ideas cannot be understood just from their instances and usage, but require rational intelligence to assess what is unchanging within all valid usages. Now, Dawkins has a fair point that this theory of unchanging essences became fixed in an erroneous dogma in Christian Platonism. However, Plato himself is much more subtle, and I suspect would have accepted that some essential ideas can change slowly in their meaning over thousands of years, in a similar way to how genes slowly mutate.

RT: "Sorry, but this is a falsely reductive claim. The example that springs most vividly to mind is the way that confidence affects the status of financial markets. The herd instinct of traders is not just an ‘arrangement of neurons’ but a social and political event with momentum and effects. It is the effect in the real world that gives ideas their force. The example of the stock market applies throughout human life, with ideas gaining purchase because of their real world effects, not because of a mind-brain identity."
I would never argue that what is in our brains cannot affect our world vicariously through us. I would also claim that there is such a thing as objective knowledge.

Here, with your term ‘vicariously’ you subtly belittle the philosophical observation that ideas have an objective existence beyond their instantiation in neurons. The meaning and force of ideas as descriptions of real qualities of the universe, or at least of human life, may be expressed in neural activity, but it is wrong in principle to define the source solely in terms of its expression. Part of the trouble is that the neural framework gives no basis to assess the objective reliability of ideas, with a neural fantasy just as real as objective knowledge. Dawkins’ example of genes is a great metaphor for ideas, with the unity of genes across whole phyla providing a much bigger and deeper reality than the observation of particular genes in a cell.

We can gain inspiration from reading a passage that written a thousand years ago. It is supernatural thinking that assumes that the form of "inspiration" is instilled into the text. The content of the text can be called inspiring, but that is different from "inspiration" being a form within the text.

There is nothing supernatural in the claim that authentic inspiration can have a common source, which is what your description of the idea as instilled in the text amounts to. In this example you seem to equate inspiration with the emotional sentiment produced in the reader, without recognising that inspiration can be false or true. One reader may be inspired by The Selfish Gene to seek a deeper understanding of reality while another is inspired by the Bible to proselytise people to belief a range of untrue claims. Both are inspired, but one by truth and the other by falsehood. The validity of their inspiration is not just a function of neural activity, but of objective correspondence to reality.

RT: "In any event, giving primacy to the neuron is like defining a complex cultural phenomenon in terms of physics, perhaps technically correct but really missing the point of the actual use of the term."
I wouldn't say primacy is given to the neuron any more than it's given to a logic gate of a computer. The true beauty is to be found in the arrangement of these items as a whole, in the brains of humans and the CPU's of computers. Even chipmunks have neurons.

True beauty is found in the world, not in the information in brains and CPUs, although of course these have their own beauty. Beauty, like love, is a difficult example though, because its meaning is slippery and subjective. The criteria include consensus about themes such as symmetry and attractiveness and elegance, which have objective meaning independent of the opinions of a particular person. It is this ‘objective meaning’ that Plato defined as the idea of beauty.

A complex cultural phenomenon may very well be like the internet. It's so exceptionally complex, but in the end it's powered by electrical and physical processes, and interactions between different processing entities. There are some things which cannot be accurately paralleled. For example, a computer is yet uncapable of rendering what "love" is. The human brain has different capabilities, with emotions being an example. When we have a feeling of love, there are empirical changes in the brain. This is important to note. It suggests that this feeling, just like our thoughts, is created by the brain (in response to the appropriate external stimuli). An ambiguous emotion such as love can even be expressed in response to a pair of shoes. It's not a stretch whatsoever to consider complex cultural phenomenon being an event which manifests based on the workings of many minds. This is, in fact, all there is to it. What did you think is responsible for complex cultural phenomena? I'm not sure I can even consider another viable answer.

Your claim that the working of minds is ‘all there is’ to culture is purely reductive, rather like the claim that the meaning of a piece of music is the physical vibration of air. Yes, a symphony is heard by vibration of air through sound waves, but it also has a memetic context which can explain why one work is classic and another is not.

Here is where Dawkins’ theme of adaptivity to selective pressures is a powerful analytical tool to understand the nature of ideas. Adaptive ideas prosper, while those that aren't don’t. The evolving emergent complexity of the world provides the selective pressures which constrain the success of ideas. When an idea hits a popular nerve it goes viral, and this depends on factors beyond the neural tools which the replicating meme uses.

Aristotle understood causality in terms of four causes, the material, the formal, the efficient and the final. You are adopting the common scientific fallacy that causation is purely material or efficient, and that formal and final causes do not exist.

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes : “Material cause describes the material out of which something is composed. Thus the material cause of a table is wood, and the material cause of a statue might be bronze or marble. The formal cause according to which a statue is made is the idea existing in the first place as exemplar in the mind of the sculptor, and in the second place as intrinsic, determining cause, embodied in the matter. The efficient cause is the agent which brings something about. For example, in the case of a statue, it is the person chiseling away, and the act of chiseling, that causes the statue. Final cause, or telos, is defined as the purpose, the good, or the end of something. For example, the final cause of a pen is decent writing.”

More later.

RT: "With great respect, I suspect this analysis is based on a misreading of Plato, and that in fact Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene is quite Platonic. "

This is only the case if you're unable to separate the understanding from that which is understood.

RT: "The nature of a tree exists as pure information, even wisdom, encoded in the genetic structure of the tree, and independent of human knowledge of it. The Platonic idea of the tree is as eternal as the genes of the tree, and is only imperfectly and partly represented in the human mind."

The Platonic idea of a tree does not point to a tree's genetic code, just as the Platonic idea of a rock does not point to some embedded mineral, it points to the objects themselves. That the genetic code is also representative of the tree allows the waters to be muddied. An example is in how we understand a "house". We have a generic internal picture of the house, the Platonic form, but there are also blueprints of the house. The blueprints, being a model, are just like our understanding of the house, both are condensed representations of the real thing. What is encoded by the genes is not the 'nature' of the tree, but a blueprint for physical construction.

RT: "The point is that to understand the reality of a person you have to understand how the person is embedded in time."

I can't make heads or tails of this sentence.

RT: "Here, with your term ‘vicariously’ you subtly belittle the philosophical observation that ideas have an objective existence beyond their instantiation in neurons."

But do they have an objective existence? What is their objective existence? What does it look like? Give me an example. What must be distilled is the idea from whatever the idea references. We may have an idea of what beauty is, but that idea is an interpretation of something real.

RT: "The meaning and force of ideas as descriptions of real qualities of the universe, or at least of human life, may be expressed in neural activity, but it is wrong in principle to define the source solely in terms of its expression."

Correct, the expression must also be an understanding of or reference to something else. Again, you have to realize the idea is separate from what it references.

RT: "Part of the trouble is that the neural framework gives no basis to assess the objective reliability of ideas, with a neural fantasy just as real as objective knowledge."

The idea references something objective. We can weigh an idea against what it references to gain a semblance of veracity.

RT: "In this example you seem to equate inspiration with the emotional sentiment produced in the reader, without recognising that inspiration can be false or true. One reader may be inspired by The Selfish Gene to seek a deeper understanding of reality while another is inspired by the Bible to proselytise people to belief a range of untrue claims."

It is not inspiration that is true or false. Inspiration is contingent upon belief or understanding. Even if you hold a false belief, it can still elicit inspiration within a person. It is the belief which must correspond to reality.

RT: "True beauty is found in the world, not in the information in brains and CPUs, although of course these have their own beauty. Beauty, like love, is a difficult example though, because its meaning is slippery and subjective. The criteria include consensus about themes such as symmetry and attractiveness and elegance, which have objective meaning independent of the opinions of a particular person. It is this ‘objective meaning’ that Plato defined as the idea of beauty."

Beauty is subjective. There may be common characteristics which we label as beautiful, such as symmetry. However, such a notion is useless without a human brain with which to appreciate the beauty. A symmetrical person is beautiful because symmetry is indicative of good genes. Symmetry may be an objective characteristic, but beauty is not. It is an interpretation.

RT: "Your claim that the working of minds is ‘all there is’ to culture is purely reductive, rather like the claim that the meaning of a piece of music is the physical vibration of air."

I wouldn't claim 'meaning' in music is only the vibration of air. To have meaning, it must be interpreted by a human mind, so the analogy falls apart.

RT: "When an idea hits a popular nerve it goes viral, and this depends on factors beyond the neural tools which the replicating meme uses."

The other factors it depends upon are ways in which it references objective reality. These references, part of the idea, are useless without an interpreter(the brain). A CD is useless without an interpreter.


Everything I've replied to has the common thread of not distinguishing an understanding from what is understood. All the data in our heads only references something else which is objective. I think we can agree here. It is when we exchange ideas that things become confusing. An idea can be exchanged from one person to another across millennia. The idea is transferred from one medium, the brain, to another, paper, then back to the first medium, the brain. While it is sitting there on the paper, it is still only a reference to something else objective. Without an interpreter, it is nothing more than paper and ink.

There are things which may be referenced which are immaterial, such as causality. Causality is real, but the idea, the reference, is only a vague approximation of the real thing within our heads. Beauty is a useless notion without a human mind. There are some characteristics we can agree upon which make something more beautiful. These characteristics are of something objective, such as an object or person or event, but the interpretation that the characteristics are also beautiful is not objective.

RT: "Aristotle understood causality in terms of four causes, the material, the formal, the efficient and the final. You are adopting the common scientific fallacy that causation is purely material or efficient, and that formal and final causes do not exist."

It seems formal and final causes are our interpretations. Would the virgin mary on a piece of toast be a formal cause? Would a cloud resembling a giraffe be a formal cause? Would a good piece of music produced by an algorithm be a final cause? It is our interpretations of these things that defines them as such, and those things which are created by us are no different. Formal and final causes are useless notions without an interpreter. It is the act of interpretation that is unique, it is a method of understanding. Here again we must separate the understanding from that which is understood.

Interbane wrote:Perhaps I was mixing transcendental and supernatural.

Yes, that is a key point I was making, that these terms are generally mixed, but transcendental is a term which can usefully be salvaged from the morass of supernaturalist mysticism, by reference to its use by Plato and Kant.

If philosophy can tune in to universal truth, most of what I've read in modern philosophy is bogus. You first have to assume a universal truth exists. I don't. It's unnecessary. To say that it's necessary is to develop a superfluous teleology. Neitzsche used that phrase and I've repeated it all day today, it's fun. Here, it's even fitting!

This is the nub of my critique of modern philosophy, that its assumption that universal truth is an obsolete and meaningless concept destroys the theory of value. Where we differ is that I argue the positing of universal truth is necessary as a basis for transformative ethics. You insist on the timidity of Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes - “I know nahthink!” By asserting that all claims are subject to doubt, no certainty is possible. This scepticism is the foundation for Nietzsche’s description of a sense of purpose as ‘superfluous’, but I got the impression this assessment was at the centre of Nietzsche’s madness. By taking the modern logic of the hermeneutics of suspicion to its ultimate nihilistic conclusion he lost his mind.

Parsimony is a principle, and could care less about that which is superfluous, such as this superstructure, whatever it is. Robert, this is all simply unnecessary in explaining our world.

The theme of base and superstructure is from Marx - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
Far from being unnecessary, this idea is a useful way to explain the relation between culture and matter. While I don’t agree with Marx’s socialist inferences, this schematic provides an accurate framework for sociology. The problem is that culture seems independent from nature, but is both ultimately determined by nature and able to influence nature.

you're being reactive and defensive.

No, what is at issue here is that you presented the modern critique of Jung and Plato as done and dusted. Asserting that problems in philosophy are long since settled is a way to ignore the effort to critique the dubious presuppositions of mainstream consensus. Plato and Jung offer a method of philosophy that is rejected by the mainstream in their claim of a path of access to absolute spiritual values. This is horrifying for liberal skepticism, but I would argue that the sense of meaning in myth, especially seen in Jung’s analysis of symbol, helps to ground thought in culture, unlike the free-floating conceptions of the mainstream.

Those older philosophers simply got it wrong.

Nothing is simple in philosophy. We often see that simplistic distortions of the ideas of philosophers come to be assumed to be accurate. Part of what I have been saying here is that Plato is actually far more sophisticated than his critics allege.

Interbane wrote:RT: "... Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene is quite Platonic. "
This is only the case if you're unable to separate the understanding from that which is understood.

But the relation between knower, knowledge and known is the hardest problem in epistemology. True knowledge always corresponds directly to its object. If you say that ideas are entirely a property of the knower rather than the known, you destroy the connection between thought and reality. In any case, this question of epistemology is a distraction from the question I raised of the philosophical antecedents of The Selfish Gene, and rests on a misreading of Plato.

The Platonic idea of a tree does not point to a tree's genetic code, just as the Platonic idea of a rock does not point to some embedded mineral, it points to the objects themselves.

No, it does not point to the object, but to the abstraction that is instantiated in the object.

That the genetic code is also representative of the tree allows the waters to be muddied. An example is in how we understand a "house". We have a generic internal picture of the house, the Platonic form, but there are also blueprints of the house. The blueprints, being a model, are just like our understanding of the house, both are condensed representations of the real thing. What is encoded by the genes is not the 'nature' of the tree, but a blueprint for physical construction.

Dawkins asserts, as I read him, that the genetic code does contain the nature of the entity, by providing the information needed for it to grow each time. Because this code persists through many generations, the ephemeral instances are like straws in the wind by comparison. “Form” is an Aristotelian degradation of Plato’s actual term, which was idea. Empiricists are emotionally incapable of thinking in abstract terms, insisting instead that only things are real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_idealism states “Platonism is considered to be, in mathematics departments the world over, the predominant philosophy of mathematics, especially regarding the foundations of mathematics. One statement of this philosophy is the thesis that mathematics is not created but discovered.”
I felt rather vindicated for my defence of Plato in reading this claim, considering the abuse to which Plato is routinely subjected by the ignorant. This observation that mathematics is discovered presents a serious challenge to the claim that ideas are just properties of the brain, as it shows how ideas have objective reality.

RT: "The point is that to understand the reality of a person you have to understand how the person is embedded in time." I can't make heads or tails of this sentence.

No worries, it is quite a complicated assertion. Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene that genes are the units of natural selection and living entities are merely the vehicles of the genes. The longevity of genes is thousands or even billions of times the longevity of organisms. Hence the organism, including people, is just how multiple genetic rivers come together at one moment of their flow. By analogy to a river, we do not say that only the point of the river at which we wet our feet is real, but that the whole river exists. Similarly, the genetic temporal river exists as real in its entirety to date, once we shift to the intellectual framework that accepts the existence of the past. So the ‘reality’ of a person/entity includes its entire genetic heritage, embedded in what Dawkins calls the River out of Eden.

RT: "Here, with your term ‘vicariously’ you subtly belittle the philosophical observation that ideas have an objective existence beyond their instantiation in neurons."
But do they have an objective existence? What is their objective existence? What does it look like? Give me an example. What must be distilled is the idea from whatever the idea references. We may have an idea of what beauty is, but that idea is an interpretation of something real.

Mathematics provides the paradigm, but also shows how our usual term ‘existence’ does not neatly apply to ideas. For example, equality is a perfect idea that sense objects can only imperfectly approximate. The argument as given at Phaedo 74-76 on equality could equally well be given with respect to a number of different concepts (any concept that might have some claim to being an a priori concept. The argument tries to show that we cannot abstract the concept of equality from our sense-experience of objects that are equal. For
a. We never experience (in sense-perception) objects that are really, precisely, equal, and
b. We must already have the concept of equality in order to judge the things we encounter in sense-perception to be approximately, imperfectly, equal.
The argument can be schematized as follows:
1. We perceive sensible objects to be F.
2. But every sensible object falls short of being perfectly F.
3. We are aware of this imperfection in the objects of perception.
4. So we perceive objects to be imperfectly F.
5. To perceive something as imperfectly F, one must have in mind something that is perfectly F, something that the imperfectly F things fall short of. (E.g., we have an idea of equality that all sticks, stones, etc., only imperfectly exemplify.)
6. So we have in mind something that is perfectly F.
7. Thus, there is something that is perfectly F (e.g., Equality), that we have in mind in such cases.
8. Therefore, there is such a thing as the F itself (e.g., the Equal itself), and it is distinct from any sensible object.

The problem with this logic is the description of the idea as a thing. Much better to conceive it as an abstract concept or unit of information, much as the persistence of the gene through time is an abstraction from its instances.

Robert Tulip wrote:a. We never experience (in sense-perception) objects that are really, precisely, equal, and
b. We must already have the concept of equality in order to judge the things we encounter in sense-perception to be approximately, imperfectly, equal.
The argument can be schematized as follows:
1. We perceive sensible objects to be F.
2. But every sensible object falls short of being perfectly F.
3. We are aware of this imperfection in the objects of perception.
4. So we perceive objects to be imperfectly F.
5. To perceive something as imperfectly F, one must have in mind something that is perfectly F, something that the imperfectly F things fall short of. (E.g., we have an idea of equality that all sticks, stones, etc., only imperfectly exemplify.)
6. So we have in mind something that is perfectly F.
7. Thus, there is something that is perfectly F (e.g., Equality), that we have in mind in such cases.
8. Therefore, there is such a thing as the F itself (e.g., the Equal itself), and it is distinct from any sensible object.

The problem with this logic is the description of the idea as a thing. Much better to conceive it as an abstract concept or unit of information, much as the persistence of the gene through time is an abstraction from its instances.

We can use this logic to prove the existence of centaurs and unicorns -- we can form conceptions of them, therefore they must exist.