Ch. 8: Biology is Engineering
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 11:49 pm
Ch. 8: Biology is Engineering
Please use this thread to discuss the above listed chapter of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life" by Daniel Dennett.Quality books. Great conversations.
https://www.booktalk.org/
I read an article in the New York Times that shows an actual video of a one-celled microorganism using a kind of harpoon to target and capture its prey, which I believe is another kind of dinoflagellates. Is this agency at work? It's one thing chasing after and catching another. Pretty cool video.Through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to “do things.” This is not florid agency—echt intentional action, with the representation of reasons, deliberation, reflection, and conscious decision—but it is the only possible ground from which the seeds of intentional action could grow. There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level—all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home. The molecular machines perform their amazing stunts, obviously exquisitely designed, and just as obviously none the wiser about what they are doing. . . . Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
I agree completely. I'm appreciating the bits of new and interesting ideas as I struggle with the readings in Part 1 and 2, but I just don't have enough background information to contribute intelligently to a discussion on the subject, although I did find this chapter 8 one of the more interesting ones.geo wrote:I haven't given up on the book, but maybe I have on this discussion. It's very difficult to understand some of the concepts laid out in this book, let alone try to discuss them intelligently.
There are a couple of points I want to underline from Ch. 8. The first is that, until we get to "communicating organizations" (which includes, by the way, internal communication within an individual) all global order must be generated by local rules. That tells us a little about "order" and a lot about "communication." I think it is a very valuable principle.DWill wrote:"There's only so many ways to build a harpoon gun" says the scientist. This is one of the points Dennett likes to make about evolution, that even absent links of descent, there are similarities between animals and plants that are best explained as the emergence of the solutions that succeeded across a number of environments.
It is. It starts to make some of the mechanisms of, say, viral replication, look very realistic, rather than dauntingly complex. And it still presents an interesting challenge for those who want to work out what "local" mechanisms may have gotten the overall mechanism off the ground, and how they worked helpfully without giving the result of the final product.DWill wrote:That really is a remarkable piece of video.
Nicely put, I think. "Nobody home." Which raises the question what kind of communication process, representing reasons and enabling their evaluation, means that "someone is home."geo wrote:Through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to “do things.” This is not florid agency—echt intentional action, with the representation of reasons, deliberation, reflection, and conscious decision—but it is the only possible ground from which the seeds of intentional action could grow. There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level—all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.
Hi Harry, good to see you still batting these ideas around. Please explain what you mean by an "age of accountability".Harry Marks wrote: Nicely put, I think. "Nobody home." Which raises the question what kind of communication process, representing reasons and enabling their evaluation, means that "someone is home."
Not for nothing did religion create an "age of accountability".
Both Roman Catholicism and much of Protestantism have the practical idea that below a certain age a child is not "damned" by their "sin." It's a complex idea to try to explain, but roughly the idea is that a child, up to a certain age (I have heard as young as six and as old as nine), does not reflect on his or her behavior with an internalized idea of responsibility and guilt. You can "get caught" and "get in trouble" but the idea that you are "doing wrong" is still abstract and not something that matters to the choosing process.geo wrote:Please explain what you mean by an "age of accountability".Harry Marks wrote: Not for nothing did religion create an "age of accountability".
Well, all of that is the idea. It helps if we don't try to conceptualize the entire process as internal. The Superego (to the extent that such a thing exists) clearly comes from the strange association between complete dependence on parents and the parental role in educating us as to the rules and moral requirements of living in society. The Transactional Analysis people have documented the tendency to "playact" (unconsciously) when we take a "Parent" role in transactions with others, such as admonishing a co-worker or expressing disgust over the way "some people" behave. The Parent is inside us, and we "act like" that parent. As a result, the Superego is a social process as much as it is an internal element of the mind struggling for dominance.geo wrote:I see one of the purposes of religion (and literature and art for that matter) as trying to make sense of the sometimes warring factions of our brains—the so-called "duality" that has been discussed by philosophers for ages. Descartes postulated the existence of a non-physical mind (consciousness), and Freud coined the terms: Id, Ego and Superego to describe our psyche. Robert Louis Stevenson fictionalizes our conflicted mind in his novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.
I think the best, and richest, approach to dealing with this is in the "Emotional Intelligence" framework popularized by Daniel Goleman. Because it treats the intellectual process as naturally integrated with the emotional processes, and allows for skills of interpretation, empathy and self-calming to play a role in devising strategies and thus increasing skills, it is more open to the dynamics of the natural process than, say, a Freudian model derived mainly from the dynamics of neurotic behavior.geo wrote:In biological terms, you can try to imagine an intellect built on top of the primitive underwiring to understand why we are such conflicted beings. Our modern philosophers have to look at our evolutionary heritage to make sense of our brains, but it is this basic idea—the intellect built on top of the primitive brain—that helps me think about how humans operate.
Humans have that primitive instinct too, but we also have evolved a larger brain that gives us some measure of autonomy and the ability to reason through our decisions. It's not hard to see that the moral and intellectual parts are sometimes in conflict with our more primitive impulses.
Sorry to hear about the hassle. Good luck finishing with the move, and I hope the Kindle gets found without much trouble. I hate being separated from mine.geo wrote:We have had a crazy couple of months. We bought a fixer upper in a nearby town so that we can sell our old house. It has been a very expensive ordeal, moving and packing up books and all that.