Evolutionary strategies/behaviours and culture

[gorski]

1) I've found your style abrasive and condescending from the get-go, tbh. That may not be your intent, I can accept that.

2) And nor am I going to trawl through old posts to *prove* you became intemperate with me sooner, and I with you later; or vice versa.

3( It's not about winning, it's about communicating. Please understand then, that I will not, in future, respond to posts of the rolly-eyed sarcasm kind

1) It may well appear that way to some. I can live with that.

2) You should. You might meet yourself. That may be a good moment, even though an uncomfortable one, for the way you see yourself. I feel like you're evading the issues here, yet again. Very slippery. You attacked me first. Openly and nastily. Unwaranted. And I know you know that.

3) To me it was bleeding obvious: I praised you at every turn, thanked you and then... You MUST know you attacked me personally first. Hence, I think it is justified to state it like that. You just can not show me I said anything of the "f-off sort" and whatnot to you. I didn't feel like that about you and I didn't behave like that towards you! I respect people who help me out of their own free will and in their own spare time. I try to reciprocate as much as humanly possible.

As for your interpretations of my "tone" and so forth... Oh, well, you should see how immature techies [and there are many who have no social skills, no understanding of the other, having been with PCs and Playstations for most of their lives] "normally" sound when you come to "their territory"... That really IS a nightmare of monstrous proportions... way too frequently to be by pure chance... Don't misunderstand me: there are many I consider great guys, not at all immature but the quantity of posturing in that world is just unbelievable. Just read the .nfo's to start with and then some other hackers/crackers forums etc. That is a minefield...

I will give you one thing: I have a problem with not speaking my mind openly and honestly, yes. I say what I think and think what I say. I try to be transparent, so people around me know they don't need to play the typical power game shit with/around me. I don't attack unless I really openly attack. I don't "like" unless I really do like and show it in no uncertain terms...

In England that is a curse. Most people here [in my and just about any other foreigner's mind, whomever I met and talked to openly, plus many an honest Englishmen] never or very rarely do that and hence they keep "interpreting" each other's "carefully chosen words" to perversion, reading loadsa of their own issues and content into other's actions/words. I'm sick of that, quite honestly! My English friends and acquaintances keep telling me they have a serious problem "reading each other", too because everything seems so bloody convaluted and in ten layers of wrapping and so forth...

The "manners" issue here is mostly the power game problem. Not about "being kind" or not - but much worse than that... IMO.

 

[gorski]

It's a debate that comes up time and again. Ultimately, i suppose, we are asking "Are the scientific theories we come up with about us; or are they about "it", the physical world (whatever that is)".

It's on all the time. And you cannot separate the two. That's the point. Kantian "revolution" would teach you that, if you had the time to study it, especially if you continued to Fichte and Hegel, not to mention Marx and co. later on...

 

[Jonti]

I don't accept your characterisation, your lofty view of me from some "objective viewpoint". That's actually a good thing, for it means I will keep in mind your comments, and be careful in my use of language (and I am very skilled in english, plus a little naughty, so you may have cause to pull me up *occasionally* -- only occasionally because I am sincerely interested in talking with you.) But all that is *not* what I want to discuss anyway.

Please, just saying "if you only read x,y.z you'd understand" is not debate. I can say the same kind of things to you; anyone here could.

You know a very great deal about some matters; and I know something of science and her ways. I'm interested in what you have to say, in your own voice, in response to what I say to you. And vice versa.

Talk to me like a fellow adult, please.

 

[Jonti]

It's on all the time. And you cannot separate the two. That's the point. Kantian "revolution" would teach you that, if you had the time to study it, especially if you continued to Fichte and Hegel, not to mention Marx and co. later on...

Doubtless.

But my choice of reading these days is more likely to be Oliver Sacks or Stephen Jay Gould, or for philosophy David Chalmers and other 21st century philosophers of mind. So you'll just have to do your best

What do you mean, "you cannot separate the two?" I can certainly tell the difference between my imaginings, and what is real. Not to be able to do so is a sign of madness in a person, if not in a philosophy.

 

[gorski]

But you see, to a philosophically [minimally well] educated person that's all ABC and it gives away just how little you have read of any of that essential reading, which makes it a bit daunting - where do I start...? Sometimes it's also very difficult to talk to a fellow pro, if philosophers belong to an obscure school of thought and read it from a very special perspective, let alone like this, from accross the disciplines...

I took you more "seriously" in that regard, if you don't misunderstand me [not meant badly, I just presumed you knew a lot more than you obviously do], so saying something like: "Kant would tell you nicely the differences" is not really meaningless and patronising. And I did a few times... Honestly, I feel like a parrot...

Having said that, I will try to find the good explanation that will not take too long and then we may well start discussing things, as this is one big miss-hit
after the other... it seems...

Imagine me wanting to learn the mathematical side to a specific theory in Physics. Daunting. Where do you start teaching me? I left maths behind a very long time ago...

So, not treating you as a child: it's common sense, even. Teaching stuff like that - that has so much context to consider, too and I need to somehow "jump" over it in a sentence or two - is difficult, if not impossible, to say the least... Authority of knowledge is there for a reason...

I'll ponder and come back to it...

 

[Jonti]

Good, thank you, I look forward to that.

"The world can only have meaning because of our language, our way of looking at the world in the broadest sense, but the grammatical rules are not arbitrary. They're designed by selection for an environment that has certain fundamental pre-existing features, including distance and direction - and non-contradiction. The world does not appear logical because we make it so, but because independently it is so."

 

[Jonti]

Minimal Epistemology

Mmm, crunchy!

 

[gorski]

Ahem. Kant would disagree most profoundly. With a lot of reason... Reason? Never mind.... Later...

 

[Jonti]

To be fair, Kant was never exposed to ideas like this ...

... only for the sake of argument, consider the deep-structure subject-predicate form of sentences whose function is to map affairs in the world. The form appears to conform to a structure of the world in which language evolved, much as the syntax of bee dances conforms to a structure of sameness and difference, found not made, in the environments in which they evolved. The subject-predicate form conforms to a structure of substances that not only instantiate universals from among ranges of naturally admissible universals, but instantiate none that are contrary to each other in this world (as a matter of natural law). The best explanation of why the form is present in all languages is that language evolved to adapt us to our environment, and our environment has this structure.

 

[phildwyer]

Although I certaınly have some problems wıth Saussure, one thıng he dıd achıeve was the defınıtıve refutatıon of the notıon that 'language evolved to adapt us to our envıronment.' It ıs rather the case that language *ıs* our envıronment. I wonder whether Jontı feels he can neglect Saussure as he has Kant?

 

[Crispy]

once again, we run into problems when we categorise things. Language is both environment and an actor in that environment. It's all systems - they're more important than the things.

 

[Jonti]

And we discover systems that are independent of their substrate. Then it is the systems themselves that have the properties, not their constituents. That's what scientists mean when they talk about emergent properties.

 

[Crispy]

exactly

 

[phildwyer]

once again, we run into problems when we categorise things. Language is both environment and an actor in that environment. It's all systems - they're more important than the things.

Yes, that's Saussure's point in a nutshell. The meanings of words is not inherent but relational: determined by their relative positions within the overall structure of language (hence 'structuralism'). But from this he draws the conclusion that language has no natural relation to the objective world, but rather constructs that world as we experience it (hence 'deconstruction'). Language is thus not a response or adaptation to the external world.

 

[gorski]

And the position then is pertified and petrifying. That is the main problem with Structuralism, as seen by many, especially from the Left: the non-historical dimension to it.

 

[Jonti]

The link that Fruitloop posted is well worth a read, imho.

 

[gorski]

There's a helluvalot of label throwing in the article, without much being said at all... Because, he comes from a very specific tradition I believe that sort of "terminology" must be utterly unintelligible to the "outsiders", who otherwise might very well be quite competent in the "theories" he labels one way or the other but ascribes meaning to it all without any proper consideration/interpretation, so we can see where he got his notions from, what is his methodology etc.

Loadsa space in there for a lot of misunderstanding...

 

[Fruitloop]

The link that Fruitloop posted is well worth a read, imho.

Glad you liked it

 

[Jonti]

My attention was engaged from the start of the piece ...

The terminal philosopher thinks there must always be beliefs or other posits that are terminal: they can neither be justified nor criticized by inference from anything further. In any context whatever, reason giving must at some point leave off - not for practical reasons, such as lack of time, energy or resources, but in principle. No further argumentative recourse is possible at this level of fundamentality. The terminal matters must therefore be justified or criticized non-inferentially - that is to say, immediately - or not at all. Most terminal philosophers conclude "Not at all," on the ground that there is no such thing as unmediated knowledge, justification or critique.

This is a very promising start, particularly for people familiar with mathematical knowledge, as it describes the position with ordinary arithmetic exactly. There is no finite set of terminal beliefs or axioms in arithmetic, a fact which has been well understood since Godel's work.

Something as fundamental as number and its rules is not 'terminal'. What chance then, for any systematic philosophical understanding of the world (in which arithmetic holds)?

 

[gorski]

Not at all - "immediately or not at all"??? What on Earth does that mean???

It means nothing much at all, it seems to me...

At least nothing philosophically relevant!

Leave maths behind, when trying to speak of anything essential for human beings, such as freedom etc.

 

[Jonti]

It means the grounds of the system are either immediate in the philosophical sense; or that it has no grounds at all.

The trouble with the 'no grounds at all' claim is that it pitches one straight into the contradictory mire of uncritical relativism, from which vantage point nothing and everything can be justified.

Thanks for the advice/order to leave maths behind when talking about things that are humanly important ... But why do you think maths is essentially non-human? That claim would seem to undermine your own position (which seems to be that nothing is real in itself, but is only made so by humans)?

 

[gorski]

Heh... We do have the terminology for that, too... But someone started using the terminology which hides more than it reveals, IMHO... That's what I'm objecting to...

It's similar to the alleged opposition "idealism-realism" or is it "idealism-materialism" and so on...??

Not so much about a "language" but which "theory" one "belongs to". Loadsa misunderstandings...

 

[gorski]

Thanks for the advice/order to leave maths behind when talking about things that are humanly important ... But why do you think maths is essentially non-human? That claim would seem to undermine your own position (which seems to be that nothing is real in itself, but is only made so by humans)?

It's not possible to speak of freedom/creativity/etc. in mathematical formulas! You won't get very far like that!

There is also no such thing as 100% prediction in all things Human.

Determinism is for sissies!!

More?

 

[Jonti]

Yes, although determinism is a useful concept in the right place (on the billiards table, for one) it is an outmoded concept when it comes to metaphysics. Physics has shown that the universe is "open" in the sense that the world's future states cannot be predicted from its present state, no matter how much information about the present is available.

More?

 

[gorski]

Knock yourself out!

 

[gorski]

Philosophy has shown it much before the Quantum guys, m8... [Soooo sorry to burst your bubble... ]

 

[Jonti]

I didn't mention QM; but yes, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is the killer finding alright.

It's true *some* philosophers have long held that determinism is false; but even today one can find disagreement on the matter. That don't impress me much, as for my kind of philosophy ("natural philosophy") it is useful to understand the way the world actually is ...

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I didn't mention QM; but yes, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is the killer finding alright.

It's true *some* philosophers have long held that determinism is false; but even today one can find disagreement on the matter. That don't impress me much, as for my kind of philosophy ("natural philosophy") it is useful to understand the way the world actually is ...

Of course you'll find disagreement. There are lots of determinists around, me included.

 

[Jonti]

He's all yours gorski. Enjoy!

 

[gorski]

You can only know the world as a Human, not as a God... We are also capable of understanding the notion of Historicity, namely that our ideas are transient, that our "truths" are not obliging to the next generation etc. That we get nothing coming to this world and we have to put our labour/work into it to appropriate anything from it and only then do we get to "know it", not in absolute terms...

And Humans just soooo don't do determinism really well, in the long run... We are soooo much into creativity, freedom, much more than just what merely is...

Fook me, it's 5.20 am... Time to go to bed... again...