Evolutionary strategies/behaviours and culture

[Jonti]

...

As I beleive Einstein is once meant to have commented, even if you can describe all th elhysics of producing the sounds of a Mozart concerto it doesn't tell you anything useful about the music- there are different levels of explanation. Can't find reference for this remark- though am sure I read it recently- was it on this thread?

Isn't it just there are different levels of explanation?

This reminds me of an interesting thought experiment. Imagine a colour-blind neurophysiologist who has only rods -- no cones -- in the retinas of her eyes. She has never experienced any colour. But she has made a life-long study of the neurophysiology of colour vision, and the way the brain responds to visual stimuli.

Can our achromatic neurophysiologist ever really understand what it is to see colour? For that matter, can she really understand Walter de la Mare's poem "Silver"?

Most people would agree she cannot -- that there is an explanatory gap between the physics and neurophysiology of colour vision and the experience of colour. The cod hegelians seem content to point to the explanatory gap and start burbliing like vicars about the noumenal. More serious thinkers are keen to seek bridging concepts for the explanatory gap, so that we can develop a proper understanding of the physics and science of conscious bodies.

 

[gorski]

Erm gorski... where are you?

If only you could know...

 

[gorski]

1) The cod hegelians seem content to point to the explanatory gap and start burbliing like vicars about the noumenal.

2) More serious thinkers are keen to seek bridging concepts for the explanatory gap, so that we can develop a proper understanding of the physics and science of conscious bodies.

Notice how his [and not only his] usual arrogance ["we scientist know it all or at the very least the best by far, so let us enlighten you, poor backward lot..."] slips into all of this in the undertones/by default:

1) He thinks he is an expert on something he never studied in a proper, systematic manner, he never qualified in the subject to begin with, and actually he keeps showing us here, quite freely, he has no understanding of it at all and MOST IMPORTANTLY, he has no intention of ever opening his mind to it even though he never actually studied it properly...

2) This presumes he himself is a serious thinker, which a serious laugh... If only he knew what is a serious thinker is...

 

[Knotted]

1) He thinks he is an expert on something he never studied in a proper, systematic manner, he never qualified in the subject to begin with, and actually he keeps showing us here, quite freely, he has no understanding of it at all and MOST IMPORTANTLY, he has no intention of ever opening his mind to it even though he never actually studied it properly...

But Jonti is not talking about philosophy, he is talking about you. Where he goes wrong is in characterising you as some sort of Hegelian. You are a Popperian with a critical theory overcoat.

I said before that your systematic error is thinking that ideas or theories which are falsified either empirically or 'critically' have no insight. This error still persists - see for example your dismissal of Malthusian arguments in Darwinian theory. Karl Popper (in his earlier days before he became an obscurantist proper with his 'verisimilitude' rubbish) had exactly this sort of attitude. Its as far removed from Hegel's central notion of Aufheban (that's roughly negating while preserving) as you can get.

You are much better and much more clear thinking when you discuss scientific issues than when you discuss philosophy. I'm afraid your strengths and weaknesses don't match your romantic notions of what you think they are. This should not be a problem, you just need to get over your romance with philosophy.

 

[Jonti]

Clarifying? Partly. I'll try and look at this again later. On empirical data though I think you are too extreme. You say it can tell us fook all- I presume you are arguing against the idea that empitrical data can tell us everything by pointing our, rightly enough, that we need different levels of explanation, that we can't explain everything by the data but need an interpretive framework etc, need to acknowledge the possibility of diverse expalanations and so on.

But to say fook all is bending it way too far- we might as well say all experimental data on human beings is completely useless and though I'm not sure you seem to be arguing something virutally indistinguishable from philosophical idealism.

...

I can still remember my bafflement when, as a child, I was required to "complete the sequence" of a series of numbers. True, there tended to be fairly obvious answers -- but heck, the half dozen or fewer numbers given as the base pattern could be a subset of a huge number of different sequences

And perhaps the sequence is actually (determined but) unpredictable, like a snippet of the decimal expansion of Pi. If so, one simply could not say what number should be slotted into which blank space. And how on earth could one tell how the incomplete sequence was generated in the first place?

So I've every sympathy with the naive bafflement at how effective predictive frameworks can arise out of empiricism!

 

[gorski]

But Jonti is not talking about philosophy, he is talking about you. Where he goes wrong is in characterising you as some sort of Hegelian. You are a Popperian with a critical theory overcoat.

I said before that your systematic error is thinking that ideas or theories which are falsified either empirically or 'critically' have no insight. This error still persists - see for example your dismissal of Malthusian arguments in Darwinian theory. Karl Popper (in his earlier days before he became an obscurantist proper with his 'verisimilitude' rubbish) had exactly this sort of attitude. Its as far removed from Hegel's central notion of Aufheban (that's roughly negating while preserving) as you can get.

You are much better and much more clear thinking when you discuss scientific issues than when you discuss philosophy. I'm afraid your strengths and weaknesses don't match your romantic notions of what you think they are. This should not be a problem, you just need to get over your romance with philosophy.

Hahahahahahaaaa!!!!!!!! Here's another "expert"!!!!!!!!

K, I forgot to tell ya: you have chosen well! Your nick, that is. You're all in knots... Slightly confused, shall we say...

Btw, is "Aufheban" a motorway out of Germany... say to Popper's Austria, perhaps?!?

While you're at it, as I already asked you and - of course - you neglected to deal with it: can you falsify the falsification "theory"?!? Heh...

 

[Knotted]

Hahahahahahaaaa!!!!!!!! Here's another "expert"!!!!!!!!

K, I forgot to tell ya: you have chosen well! Your nick, that is. You're all in knots... Slightly confused, shall we say...

Btw, is "Aufheban" a motorway out of Germany... say to Popper's Austria, perhaps?!?

OK Aufhenben.

While you're at it, as I already asked you and - of course - you neglected to deal with it: can you falsify the falsification "theory"?!? Heh...

Don't remember you asking but I think that Feyerabend (sp?) said that you couldn't. I don't really care very much either way, though, as I don't see much value in the theory in the first place.

Popper mistakes the logical conventions of classical logic for logical truths. He thought that any statement followed logically from a falsehood. He also didn't understand what the logical innovations of Brouwer and Heyting were about. His thinking was always simplistic and logically primitive and that triggers my prejudices, I'm afraid.

Plus I don't find anything other than reductive materialism convincing. Any alternative is to invoke magic or to try and build a perpetual motion machine out of mind and matter chasing each other round in cirlces. I always got the feeling that Popper's philosophy was little more than a defence of dualist perpetual motion machines.

 

[Fruitloop]

'Reductionism' as a one-word critique rears its head again. Yuk.

 

[gorski]

So, if I know it and attack it - how am I...???

As I said, you have chosen well!

All in knots!

 

[Fruitloop]

Interesting to note I think that animals also need interaction, socialisation etc with their own kind and their appropriate environment if they're going to develop in the manner that they're designed. Puppies that are separated from their mother early never learn to soft-bite, are anti-social etc, and wild animals bred by humans in captivity can't be release into the wild without just being handy snacks for their better-adapted relations. The only way to overcome this is to school them in some approximation of what they would normally get from their own species.

 

[kyser_soze]

Interesting to note I think that animals also need interaction, socialisation etc with their own kind and their appropriate environment if they're going to develop in the manner that they're designed. Puppies that are separated from their mother early never learn to soft-bite, are anti-social etc, and wild animals bred by humans in captivity can't be release into the wild without just being handy snacks for their better-adapted relations. The only way to overcome this is to school them in some approximation of what they would normally get from their own species.

Is there a difference in this between lizards and mammals? Generally lizards lay the eggs and fuck off don't they?

 

[Fruitloop]

Yep, there's a sliding scale of computation from the nematode to us.

 

[Knotted]

So, if I know it and attack it - how am I...???

As I said, you have chosen well!

All in knots!

Was that really an attack? Does it matter from a Popperian point of view that Popper's falsification theory is not a scientific theory? That's the point - its a philosophical theory and it allowed Popper to space to theorise mystical non-reductive nonsense.

Also it should be remembered that Popper attacked Darwinian evolution for not being falsifiable. Least bad theory and all that.

Besides I've not claimed that you are an orthodox Popperian. Just that you are much closer to Popper than you are to Hegel or Kant.

 

[Fruitloop]

Is there a difference in this between lizards and mammals? Generally lizards lay the eggs and fuck off don't they?

Lizards dudes get to have two cocks and fuck off as soon as business is concluded.

 

[kyser_soze]

Bizarrely, I was thinking about this thread when I was reading a Metro story about beetles this morning - now there's a genus that has got the evolution thing pwned...there are examples of them EVERYWHERE, even places where no other things live, and the little fuckers are there.

 

[Fruitloop]

The class insecta make up half of all the known organisms living at the moment, and will almost certainly survive whatever we do to ourselves/each other.

 

[gorski]

Interesting to note I think that animals also need interaction, socialisation etc with their own kind and their appropriate environment if they're going to develop in the manner that they're designed. Puppies that are separated from their mother early never learn to soft-bite, are anti-social etc, and wild animals bred by humans in captivity can't be release into the wild without just being handy snacks for their better-adapted relations. The only way to overcome this is to school them in some approximation of what they would normally get from their own species.

And I think that should be qualified: some animals [most of the time higher up the evolutionary chain, as it were] and even then - only up to a point...

Edit: didn't see the relevant objection before I wrote this...

 

[gorski]

Besides I've not claimed that you are an orthodox Popperian. Just that you are much closer to Popper than you are to Hegel or Kant.

That's a tall order, sir: it presumes you're an expert, way up high, high up there, with the real experts, judging like that...

 

[Jonti]

Why God loves beetles

Bizarrely, I was thinking about this thread when I was reading a Metro story about beatles this morning - now there's a genus that has got the evolution thing pwned...there are examples of them EVERYWHERE, even places where no other things live, and the little fuckers are there.

"WHEN the late biologist J B S Haldane was asked what his studies had told him about the Creator, he quipped that God 'had an inordinate fondness for beetles'.

"But why? After decades of puzzling by evolutionary biologists over the underlying reason for the planet's abundance of beetles, the answer has at last emerged from a multi-disciplinary study conducted by Prof Brian Farrell.

Haldane's teasing remark, supposedly made half a century ago to a group of theologians, was 'always at the back of my mind', says Prof Farrell, a 43-year-old evolutionary entomologist at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Now, after five years of toil, he believes he has the answer. His reasoning appears in the current issue of the journal Science, in a paper entitled Inordinate Fondness explained.

"He argues that the staggering diversity of beetles can be blamed on their fondness for a leafy diet - half of all beetles nibble plants - and the blossoming of the first flowers around 100 million years ago.

"The study is a classic, says Prof Thomas Eisner, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University, Ithaca. 'Charles Darwin would be proud. And it shows what happens if you eat your vegetables.' "

Read on ...

 

[kyser_soze]

That's great:

Eat your greens, avoid extinction.

 

[gorski]

What about the scavengers, then?

 

[kyser_soze]

What of them? There are scavenger beetles too...

I think the main lesson we can take from the beatle is adapt to as many possible living conditions as possible, breath through your skin, and learn to eat anything

 

[gorski]

Including your own kind...

 

[urbanrevolt]

messed up on edit -can't retrieve for some reason

 

[urbanrevolt]

Yep, after only who knows how much of Philosophical, Social, Economic and Political development of emancipatory kind and thousands of years of our yearning and struggle to achieve......

Achhhh... Yeah, right... Just an assertion, I just plucked it out of thin air [after some 27 years of studying it and being a part of a movement that worked precisely on that and even risked a bit trying to achieve it etc.] and it has nothing to do with anything... It was just sucked out of my little finger... just like that... Ech...



You see... You're already heavily "primed" to accept it. A safe pair of hands, a proper positivist, as it were... The "slight of hand" and a little slip this way and then that way and before you know it - it's all "natural"... the "competition" as the primary mover in Nature, so then in Human Society, also -> hence domination, exploitation, greed and destruction and whatnot are just perfectly normal and healthy, that is how "Nature" is and so...

FYI, that is something Spinoza would die for [a proof that we can explain at least a large part of that which is deeply Human via maths]...



Let me respond like this: the very fact that you are asking such a question in such a manner, with a straight face [I presume] is seriously indicative of just how deeply this civilisation is in it... Who knows if we'll ever be able to get out of it... The "calcule" of it all...

That is what Critical Theory in some of its biggest authors used to substitute Reason for [Understanding instead of Reason, calling it "Instrumental Reason"] - this clearly "lower" capacity of ours to simply "calculate" within the merely given, the [by and large] spatial [rather than temporal] intelligence, i.e. getting to the cheese here and now, and not even want to look beyond, be creative, risk, aim higher and question... Reducing our behaviour to "calcule" is really a sign of a Scientific mind!

Where's Phil when one needs him?



Not if you are going to explain "a large part of human behaviour" by ALGORITHMS!!!



WOW!

I knew it... Slight of hand and before you know it - off we go to determinism... at least for "a large part of our lives"... You really haven't thought this through, have you?



Don't think so. He said many things. But then again, he was a determinist and couldn't figure out anything outside of it...



Sure. One is yours. Between a Marxian [say, Ernst Bloch] or Critical Theory [the development from Horkheimer/Adorno/Benjamin and co. to Habermas and co.] or Praxis Philosophy [the Zagreb School] and yours - I know which one I'm opting for and why...

OK I'll try again- briefly.

Your whole argument comes across as pompous and arrogant. Look at how many books I've read! For 27 years!

It's just ridiculous- you produce no argument of your own.

Some scientists do indeed try to be far too reductive and assume all social phenomena can be read off physics and maths. Your reaction though is way over the top and based purely on amystical retreat rather than any attempt at reason- or you say- read these 500 books before I deign to speak to you.

It's no argument at all- or one of which a medieval scholastic would have been proud.

There's an interesting review here which touches on some of these issues.

http://permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=507

 

[gorski]

- pompous and arrogant.
- you produce no argument of your own.
- Your reaction though is way over the top
- based purely on amystical retreat rather than any attempt at reason

UR: "Hmpf, mummy, I wanna be right, I know I am so sound, everybody should love me, I'm doing everything right, just like you and the teachers taught me, so why isn't he agreeing with me?!? I am so sound and agreeable but he just refuses to... It must be him, he is so obstinate! He doesn't wanna play... Boo-hooo..."

me: Because what you are saying is crap, m8! Shallow, half-baked, boring old nonsense one keeps hearing from the telly! What an adventurer with a burning in his soul, yearning excruciatingly for truth, wherever it may be, wherever it may take you!! Imagine Darwin being so "sound" in his time, trying to reach a "consensus" with the prevalent nonsense of the day. We'd still be under the Church's thumb, teaching her dogma to our kids... But that's most people and especially "scientists" for you - a pioneer does something and then they take it over... to make another religion out of it... How very sound of you!!!

I think, it's back to the drawing board for you. At least if you don't wanna die of boredom and "soundness"...

When you put the amount of time and effort into it all, like I did, and I don't mean just studying the issues, but much more that that I mean ON THIS VERY THREAD, answering to people, bit-by-bit, not just "briefly" and lazily [how very English of you! ], explaining my position carefully, digging into the issues and asking the awkward questions, which btw are largely being evaded and circumvented, since seen as "difficult" - ONLY THEN will you be in a position to tell me that I have not produced an argument of mine!!! What a git!!

Talking about "pompous and arrogant": this is a typical English arrogance and superiority complex, not to mention hypocrisy for you! You don't wanna work on something BUT you MUST be RIGHT!!! Because you're "sound" and because the "truth" must be "somewhere in the middle"! How sad and boring. Make sure you get yourself a nice English girly for a wife, m8! [Boy, how I hate this English-style tantrum throwing!!! Hehehehe!!!]

As things stand this "argument" of yours is as pompous and as arrogant to the bone as they come!! I have written a lot here and even did it partly again - especially for you! And what do I get? You do the "briefly" stuff... Ridiculous! Lazy bones!

Moreover, because you have produced no argument of yours [At all!!!!! ALL YOU SEEM TO BE DOING IS REGURGITATING STUFF OF THE POPULAR MYTHOLOGY KIND!!!] I find it RIDICULOUS that people like you accuse me of something of the sort!!! After all it is you who have NOT worked on it CRITICALLY in any sense of the word - that much is obvious. And I did. And I didn't get scared to think it through properly! Moreover, I have spent some time explaining my position in some detail, dealing with other people's questions and "objections" carefully and point-by-point! So, it's all a laugh, hollow and empty, whatever you just said!

Reason is NOT calcule, Reason means a comprehensive, critical judgment, something that is a foreign land to you! That should be taught to you by a good, critically minded [well versed in "Continental Philosophy"], proper Philosopher! You know about Reason about as much as I do about IT programming, that much is obvious!

Indeed, the only mysticism here is of the "scientific" kind, namely that we should be open to the possibility that one can explain large portions of that which is essential to Humanity with maths etc.

Laughable!

 

[Knotted]

There's an interesting review here which touches on some of these issues.

http://permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=507

Definitely interesting. I haven't really got a handle on what Steve Rose is saying, it seems quite subtle but anyway this review helps.

But at the same time I'm left a bit puzzled. I'm a bit mystified that they think natural selection is deterministic for a start - it plainly isn't. Also the review has a very different falvour to this one:
http://permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=1547
Very different attitude to the Selfish Gene there.

Also I just don't believe that there is a great tendency amongst either scientists or social commentators to explain everything in terms of genetics - genes for alcoholism etc. Maybe I'm just not paying attention but I don't understand the motivation for this polemic.

 

[urbanrevolt]

Reason is NOT calcule, Reason means a comprehensive, critical judgment, something that is a foreign land to you! That should be taught to you by a good, critically minded [well versed in "Continental Philosophy"], proper Philosopher! You know about Reason about as much as I do about IT programming, that much is obvious!


Laughable!

eason is not calcule- sure. Who said it was?
OK I take it back when I say you most likely have interesting things to say and are probably interested in debate. I guess you have interesting things to say but can't be bothered actually saying them- still no argument apart from 'I've read loads and you are stupid!' style argument-

I suppose human consciousness is infinitely flexible but back in the real world there's a way out of the infinite regress you have clearly become entangled in.

I was wrong. Anyway if you ever want a real debate instead of insult let me know!

Knotted- I think you're right there's been a bit of a change between the two reviews. It's not as if there's a line on it- though I think the reviews are written by the same person, though I may be wrong on this.

I'll have a look at the arguments in more detail later- gotta go now.

On genetci determinism I think you may be right it's not as common a position as some like to believe. However, it does I suppose exist e.g. Watson in the recent Africans, intelligence and genes debate.

 

[Jonti]

It is hard to be delicate enough about the Watson gaffe.

Watson is now a very old man, and likely not as aware of subtlties and nuances as he used to be. He was little more than a figurehead for his institute -- now he is not even that. This is a sad story of a man in his declining years, no more than that.

 

[ViolentPanda]

What of them? There are scavenger beetles too...

I think the main lesson we can take from the beatle is adapt to as many possible living conditions as possible, breath through your skin, and learn to eat anything

The main lesson we can learn from a beatle (as opposed to a beetle) is that it's better to be George than John, Paul or Ringo.