I’m assuming that you have answered that it is not designed, its is accidental. Is it as accidental as a river? A pebble, or is there something more to it?
" the only design in the nest is the one we are able to see"
Obviously the bird repairs his/her nest, so there is a sense of order and disorder. He/she makes decisions regarding materials, dimensions and location. This would seem not only to include a design but also a form of premediation. Or are you dismissing this altogether. A nest is the same as a pebble.
“A blackbird could not suddenly start building the nest of a crow.”
People can say the same of Man. A 13th century Icon painter cannot start painting like an African tribesman of the 19th century, can he?
We do not have experience of any underlying reality, we have no experience of atoms or matter. All we have experience of is the veil of perception which intimates to us what might be (but most certainly isn’t).
However, though we have no actual experience of this dead and inert nature, we do have experience of something that leads us to the conception of this thing. In fact, I would assert that the underlying reality is probably not dead and inert, that the scientific view of the world is vastly misdirected. We attach concepts that we have experienced, such as a living breathing animal becoming a dead animal, to our concept of the underlying reality.
When I say benefit the self, what i really mean is lead us to a greater propogation of the pattern that is us. Not because of any moral reason, i do not believe in morality. Simply because those patterns that are capable of replicating themselves succesfully lead to more versions similar to themselves, whereas those that fail at this do not. And so the succesful replicators spread, and become entirety. These patterns can be energy, genes and concepts. They all seek their own propogation, and seek to do so with as few flaws in this propogation as possible. However, because their method of propogation is flawed, they create different patterns. Some will be more capable of succesful propogation, some not. Those that are more capable outcompete those that are less capable, and so it simply happens, whether we morally agree with it or not.
Altruistic actions are some of the actions that can lead to a further propogation of patterns. There is much science to show that reciprocity is enforeced in the human species, because it benefits the propogation of all those patterns that enter into the behaviour, especially those at the top of the chain. Those at the top of the chain are also conceptual patterns (not just genetic), ones which say ‘benefit me, and you might get something in return’.
I think you should check out Gregory Bateson, for whom information is the difference that makes a difference. There is no privileging of one piece of information over another. Information is its effect in a particular assemblage. As Noneedforaname points out beautifully,
“When I say benefit the self, what i really mean is lead us to a greater propogation of the pattern that is us.â€
The information that we receive is information germane to our assemblage. Nature is the entire pattern, of which we are sub-pattern. The differences that make up “art†are generated by the nature of our pattern, itself dependent upon larger patterns that have made us, i.e. Nature.
So, there is no difference between the Acropolis and a pebbly beach?
And no difference between the nest of a bird and the house of a man?
We, (human intelligence,) see design in nature where there is none. We invent nature. Take a spiral. A form seen everywhere in nature. There is no purposeful directed design in it. It just so happens that the blind laws of nature acting upon matter result in accidental forms the human mind then goes on to imbue with significance. Man takes the accidental shell form and employs it deliberately with design.
But a snail? Are you going to say that the snail intelligently sets about building its shell? But that is impossible. The shell is not separate from but part of the snail. And its nest is part of the wren. It is purely natural and has no significance beyond its functional end. The bird has no sense of order or disorder and makes no conscious decision regarding materials. The building of its nest is, ‘hard-wired,’ into the bird. It is not separate from bird-ness as a whole. The bird does not rub its head in spring and make up its mind to build a nest. Its behaviour is automatic.
The intelligence in man, his rational choice, distinguishes him from the animals, plants, and minerals, in other words, from mere physical existence. It is this nature, specific to man, that differentiates him from other creatures. It is this intelligence that enables him to escape from the prison of mere existence in which all other life is locked up.
Perhaps not. But art has moved on from, ‘primitive,’ icon painting and, ‘primitive,’ African masks. And, speaking of the C19th. I feel it is time this C19th idea of nature was shaken off. Wordsworth sums up the general sentimental view in his poem “A Wren’s Nest.â€
“Among the dwellings framed by birds
In field or forest with nice care,
Is none that with the little Wren’s
In snugness may compare.â€
This represents a move away from science to mysticism.
Are you saying that there is a vast terrain otherwise known as, ‘underlying reality,’ and we make conceptual, ‘maps,’ of it, so to speak? What, then, this underlying reality is the ultimate ground of all being? But it itself is ideational. Or do these, ‘conceptual maps,’ revolve and take turns as this illusory ultimate ground of being? Things do depend also on where you situate yourself in relation to the world. The idea of an underlying reality is theoretical, a way of gaining understanding. It is an analogue, in a sea of analogues, but has no substance in and of itself.
Is this your theory or are you repeating the doctrines of another?
Whether you profess to, ‘believe,’ in it or not makes no difference. Such words are from the lips and your actions will display what it is you really profess.
You are repeating the doctrines of others. These doctrines need to be very thoroughly digested. Until you have done this the doctrines are not yours.
Art is the entire pattern; the pattern of nature is nested within that of art.
But this is getting us nowhere!
Perhaps part of art belongs as part of the entire pattern. Perhaps also part of nature belongs as part of the entire pattern. Perhaps it all depends on where you situate yourself. Perhaps there is a good deal of overlap. But it is preposterous idea to put nature absolutely before art. It just doesn’t sit there epistemologically. Art has to be the first cause. Art has to come before the Big Bang.
This is another man’s doctrine that you are repeating. I for one am not prepared to get myself stuck in the groove of another man’s ideas. My thought comes from looking into myself and not repeating half-digested the ideas of others.
We can establish that there is an underlying reality, as it is in the very nature of experienced reality that it changes and develops, and relates to things. The nature of this underlying reality is completely unknown, which is why this underlying reality is inconsequential. We can never know how well our own experiential reality correlates to the underlying reality, so even if we were to care about the nature of the underlying reality, we would still be left having to accept and live within only our experienced reality.
It is neither science (in the way the word is now commonly used) or mysticism.
I would assert that the underlying reality is probably not dead and inert because dead and inert are just concepts that we have attached to the underlying reality. To make any claim about the underlying reality is ultimately futile, this is what ‘science’ attempts to do. Science makes the claim that because something has been tested by someone else, that we should accept it. It is just another form of slavery and dependance to objects that exist within our experienced reality. If it is not testable and cofnirmable to the individual, then it has no basis.
The underlying reality is consequential only insofar as we know it is there, after this fact we can ignore it.
It is my belief, whether it has been professed by others before me is neither here nor there. To say that it has been is no rebuttal of it.
i see no reason to believe in morality, whether objective or subjective. Stuff happens, full stop. I am not here making any claim, but rather making a demand on those who do make the claim that morality exists to provide me with some reason to believe in morality. The onus is on those who believe in morality to provide reasons for it’s existence, and so far they have failed miserably.
This is what I believe from having examined and tested these things within my experienced reality.
I am by no means ‘repeating the doctrines of others’, I am expounding my beliefs, which will inevitably have been provided with things to test by others, where those things have stood the test, they have been accepted and integrated into my ‘conceptual map’, as you call it.
You say I have to digest these doctrines of others. This is a nonsense, I do not need to know the entire body of works that expound evolutionary theory in order to understand how any parts of that theory succesfully fit with so far experienced reality. Either way, these are not the doctrines of others, much of what I am saying here is derivations which i have come to independantly and then later discovered that others have previously expressed them. In fact, this is the case with almost everything I believe.
We cannot exclude ourselves from belief just on the basis that someone else has believed it before, this would be ridiculous, and is equally if not more odious than only believing something because it has been previously expounded.
I’d love to believe that art is a product of man who in turn is a product of nature, and that therefore art is a product of nature. But always I am reminded of the fact that without art these things would not be known. It needs must be that only what can be thought and spoken/written of can be said to exist. For, ‘before,’ the advent of man there is no nature, (and no art.) Who hears the tree fall in the forest?
‘Before,’ man there is only chaos. Everything actually occurs at once in a place of no magnitude. It takes man to see equivalences and correspondences and create orders so that he is able to feed himself and, generally, make his habitation in the world.
In speaking of man I am speaking of that part of him that is referred to as, intelligence/logos/prohairesis/wisdom/understanding/cognition/reason/god/mind.
That intelligence/logos. . . , etc., may have had its origins in the, ‘ladder,’ of, ‘matter organising itself,’ (whatever such a general statement actually means when it boils down to it,) can only be surmised, but I’m certain that if such was the case, this, ‘ladder,’ was very soon kicked away and abandoned as intelligence set off on an entirely different journey from that of flesh. (Flesh decays; mind is imperishable.)
Peter
P.S. noneedforaname - I’ll resond to your latest shortly
“Art is the entire pattern; the pattern of nature is nested within that of art.”
You are missing one more layer of reality, and its a big one. Nature, -that is the partly yielding, partly resisting material-, had material bearing upon our development, our “design”. Everything we are is a result of the material constraints of an environment, which is filled with patterns. The patterns we then project upon this environment, shaping it, the very capacity to do so, have all been shaped by the environment, and are an expression of that very forceful influence.
You have mentioned Gregory Bateson. Have you anywhere in his writing seen him privilege Man as the determining factor above all other assemblages? I think you have missed the general themes of his thinking.
Reading between the lines, it seems that you’re trying to get out of a constricting historical mindset.
And that you’re trying also to be objective concerning the issue of the condition of man in his environment.
And your conception of this necessitates the setting up a dualistic theory contrasting, ‘underlying reality,’ and ‘experienced reality.’
Put more simply, one might say that, ‘underlying reality,’ is equivalent to, ‘matter,’ and, ‘experienced reality,’ is equivalent to, ‘mind.’
I believe the eighteenth century English philosopher Locke referred to matter as “something I know not what hidden behind what I see.â€
[quote]
I am not here making any claim, but rather making a demand on those who do make the claim that morality exists to provide me with some reason to believe in morality. The onus is on those who believe in morality to provide reasons for it’s existence, and so far they have failed miserably.[/morality]
But surely moral matters govern man’s relations to, and success or failure in, his environment?
You are amazing. Because I refer to a phenomena does not mean that I accept the prevailing explanation of it. If I say that the Thunderbolts of Zeus are nothing more than the consequence of hot and cold air coming into contact, this does not mean that I believe in Zeus or Thunderbolts kept on Mt. Olympus. Is this the level of your criticism?
If so, please replace all references to Free will and choice by the words, phenomena-otherwise-called-free-will.
If perhaps you are using my quote as some kind of explanation for your inability to understand or thoroughly apply Bateson, whom you have refered to in order to support your argument, clearly the case is not the same.
Pretty much. Except I do not make the claim that the underlying reality is composed of matter, because I do not know what it is composed of. It could be composed of zeros and ones, or monkeys and cheese, or spiritual energy, or the imaginings of some dead god. It doesn’t really matter what it is composed of. Beneath the underlying reality that provides me with my experienced reality, there might be yet another underlying reality. It could, in fact, be infinitely recursive. If science is to be believed, it probably is recursive to some degree. If buddhism is to be believed, it probably is recursive to some degree. In fact, most of the more popular theories seem to argue for some kind of recursiveness to our reality.
Why would moral matters govern this? Patterns that replicate themselves succesfully eventually become more prevalent than those which are less succesful than them. We do not have to bring in some idea of morality to say that some actions are succesful within the environs and some not.
Morality exists to the extent that it is a part of the environment, a concept created by man to rule the behaviours of man, in order to benefit the creators. Morality is a tool, and exists insofar as it is used and spread. It is a creature of thought. So yes, it exists to some degree. But like God, which also exists as a creature of thought, you cannot take it’s existence on face value. The thought-creature God wants you to believe that it isn’t a thought-creature, that it is in fact some kind of Omnipotent being. Morality, equally, is a thought creature that wants you to believe that isn’t what it is, but rather some kind of ultimate law as to how you should behave. It is manipulating you, it’s host, for it’s own survival ends. Probably not consciously, but simply because those strains of morality that do this survive and propogate better than others.
These thought-creatures are parasites, and as a creature that seeks (naturally) to extend and propogate itself, we should be looking to replace parasites with symbiotes.
But that is not what you were doing. Please do not try to deceive me. You were changing the definitions of words.
One may choose between free will and determinism, but free will in that sense is only a choice, it isn’t choice itself. Free will is not a synonym for choice. If it is then what is to stop me saying that determinism is a synonym for desire? What is to stop me saying nature is art and vice-versa. This is breaking all the rules. Why bother even to make any sense at all - toga nasx. Xall ;JJSGld ospa k AFFio aspwut dtrlupti dosx W8 32 ?
I was reading Bateson twenty years ago and remember little of him. I have moved on in the meantime. I did not use him to support but rather as an illustration of my argument.
I was simply referring to what I vaguely remembered of work he had done on intelligence and dolphins.
Peter
Hi noneedforaname!
This is a beautiful post of yours and I enjoyed reading it, but I’m too tired to respond now. I’ll definitely get back to you.
I don’t know what language you are speaking, but choice is implicit in free will:
Merriam Webster:
Main Entry: free will
Function: noun
1 : voluntary choice or decision “I do this of my own free will”.
2 : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention
Encyclopædia Britannica
Choice
in philosophy, a corollary of the proposition of free will—i.e., the ability voluntarily to decide to perform one of several possible acts or to avoid action entirely."
One cannot have the possibility of choice without free will, nor free will without the possibility of choice. Perhaps if you clarify your problem with using these two words to describe the same phenomena, (a problem not shared by Merriam Webster and the Encyclopedia Brittanica), I could better understand you.
Sorry, I cannot indulge you any longer. I thought we were being serious here, but this, ‘underlying reality,’ of yours is mere fancy and your belief in it delusory.
This doesn’t actually tell me anything. It only sounds like it does. It seems to beg the question. (For it is obvious that that which is, ‘successful,’ is going to prevail over that which is, ‘less successful!’)
How do, ‘patterns,’ (what, molecular, ‘patterns?’) ‘replicate themselves?’ What is the process involved? And what decides, ‘successful,’ or, ‘less successful?’
That’s a very cynical view to take!
I like the idea of, ‘thought-creatures,’ though!
Peter
Hi Dunamis,
I am going back to the beginning to straighten things out. You led me down a dead end, and it was an interesting walk for a while, but now I want to get back to reality.
This is what I said at the beginning:
This is all perfectly coherent contrary to your objections. For the, ‘nature,’ that you introduced into the argument was not the same, ‘nature,’ I was originally speaking of,
In addition, now that I have seen how contradictory terms are, for you, interchangeable, I realise why things were going nowhere. We were talking at cross-purposes.
You misrepresented what I was saying. You confused the, ‘nature,’ I was speaking of with another, ‘nature,’ and confused me into the bargain. I was then forced to defend an increasingly difficult position which was not of my own making.
Your argument is a man of straw and therefore fallacious.
I rest my case!
Peter
P.S. If you want to discuss the specific, ‘nature,’ you referred to* I am willing. But I think it should be started in new thread.
The power that creates and orders phenomena? (Also a Stoic term for god.)
P.P.S. I’ll get back to you on your latest thoughts.
“For the, ‘nature,’ that you introduced into the argument was not the same, ‘nature,’ I was originally speaking of”
Both our versions of Nature are constructions. What I was pointing out that your “nature” was unsupportable. One, it presupposed a separation from Man which you cannot disclose. Two, that it implies a general division between the natural and the artificial you cannot even define. (For instance you have been absolutely been unable to categorize the design vs. natural elements of a bird’s nest). What I was attacking was exactly your self-contradicting version of nature. That I provided an adequate substitute (one that did not share these same problems), is not deception (which for some reason you seem to want to insinuate), but a superior explanation for your “accidental” pebble and your stuff-adding Man. The straw man fallacy is when you youself set up an easy to knock down argument, not when you prove that the argument another has set up is made of straw. That you don’t see the weaknesses in your version, categories you take uncritically, is not something I seem to be able to solve.
Any time you want to explain your curious reactions regarding the dramatic difference between free will and choice, and my deceptive use of these terms, feel free to let me know.
If you insist, but you are saying nothing here to convince me of that. I interact with objects in my reality, humans, which have information largely beyond that available to me prior to that, it is not formulated by my personal conscious mind, and so there must be SOMETHING(I don’t care what) more to reality than my personal self.
As you say though, it is a mere fancy. In the sense that I do not believe there is a single thing that we can establish about this underlying reality beyond that it exists and it is the source for some kinds of information, possibly all.
IF we accept there is such a thing as a pattern, and that patterns replicate, and that there is some level of flaw in how their replications emulate the original, then we have to accept the conclusion that patterns of that type will act under evolutionary imperatives. By succesful, it is a combination of suitability to environs, rate of replication, and rate of mutation (and again, whether these last two are suitable to the environs).
If we believe in molecules then yes, molecular patterns. but really, any and all kinds of pattern. Whether this be a design on building houses, concepts, animals, artwork, disease, anything that succesfully replicates by some means in it’s environ. The process varies, and is not consequential. It can be demonstrated by getting some frogs and toads and putting them in a small pond with limited resources. It can be demonstrated by making a simple program on a computer. It can also be demonstrated by doing an experiment with people where you get one person to try and spread one particular doctrine of christianity amongst some christians, and another person to compete to spread a conflicting one (maybe Jesuitism, Quietism, or Jansenism)
I do not believe it to be cynical. Once we are awake to the fact of the processes that rule us, we can react to them. I see it as a wary optimism, note how i believe we can replace these parasitic false concepts with symbiotic accurate ones.
""I repeat, free will is not a synonym for choice. There are subtle distinctions between the two.
A single example will suffice. Would you say, “I free willed breakfast,†or, “I chose breakfast.â€"
I have not used them as strict synonyms -yet they both refer back to the same conceptual phenomena I am attempting to explain; as I have pointed out, “choice” is a corollary of “free will”. It was metonymy. Your example is ridiculous.
Solution: “I exercised my free will in choosing breakfast.”
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. I have no idea what incredible deception (“I am beginning to have serious doubts about your integrity Dunamis”) you think I have attempted to put over on you. The reason why I “switched” from “choice” to free will is that free will is the condition under which choice is made. When you questioned my anaylsis of choice it is natural to move from the corrolary to the proposition from which it is inferred. That you take this as an example of deceptive synonymous use is foolish. That you take this as a loss of integrity is beyond the pale. Make yourself clear. Give an example of a choice that does not imply free will. Give an example of free will that does not involve the capacity to choose.
The larger question is, what subtle distinction are you attempting to point out for what purpose? In other words, what argument are you presenting that rests on the subtle distinction between these two words. (I can’t wait to hear this).