78 thoughts on “Are We Living in an Existential Vacuum?”

1. To me, it sounds like nonsense.

   I can understand Frankl having such thoughts while a prisoner of the Nazis. I cannot imagine what might cause CharlieM to have such thoughts.

2. The idea that humans don’t live (to a large extent) by instinct and tradition seems to have no basis in reality, as far as I can see.

3. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was listed as one of the ten most influential books of the 20th century by the Library of Congress.

   My dad, who was with Patton’s Third Army, walked through Buchenwald per Eisenhower’s orders to a number of American units because he wanted US soldiers to understand the full significance of their service. Soldiers who had spent months in combat were reduced to tears at what they saw, smelled and heard.

   As today’s politicians and pundits flippantly and cynically toss around epithets describing their opponents as Nazi, fascist, racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, Marxist, socialist, ad nauseum as “raw meat” for their base, they become exemplars for our collective loss of respect for our fellow human beings and the razors edge upon which humanity lives.

   Boomers, millennials, Gen x, y, and z–all of us–need to grow up, pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start treating each other with a modicum of manners and civility and show some appreciation for what has been given us instead of participating in the endless cacophony of complaining and bitching about everything under the sun.

   Life’s meaning is staring you right in the face….

4. chuckdarwin:
   Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was listed as one of the ten most influential books of the 20th century by the Library of Congress.

   My dad, who was with Patton’s Third Army, walked through Buchenwald per Eisenhower’s orders to a number of American units because he wanted US soldiers to understand the full significance of their service. Soldiers who had spent months in combat were reduced to tears at what they saw, smelled and heard.

   What happened to us that we seem to have lost politicians of commitment, sincerity, and stature?

   As today’s politicians and pundits flippantly and cynically toss around epithets describing their opponents as Nazi, fascist, racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, Marxist, socialist, ad nauseum as “raw meat” for their base, they become exemplars for our collective loss of respect for our fellow human beings and the razors edge upon which humanity lives.

   Deserves quoting.

   Boomers, millennials, Gen x, y, and z–all of us–need to grow up, pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start treating each other with a modicum of manners and civility and show some appreciation for what has been given us instead of participating in the endless cacophony of complaining and bitching about everything under the sun.

   Life’s meaning is staring you right in the face….

   Learn the lessons of history? That would be a start.

5. CharlieM,

   I didn’t realize you were paraphrasing Frankl, so was growing a little concerned for your well-being when reading the first paragraph. I was quite relieved when I discovered my mistake.

   It’s up to you how you want to give your life meaning, but I remember a time when you excused yourself from a discussion thread on this site because your grand children were visiting and that made me smile.

6. Neil Rickert:
   To me, it sounds like nonsense.

   I can understand Frankl having such thoughts while a prisoner of the Nazis.I cannot imagine what might cause CharlieM to have such thoughts.

   Which thoughts? The thought of being in an existential vacuum or the thought that there are ways out of this predicament?

7. faded_Glory:
   The idea that humans don’t live (to a large extent) by instinct and tradition seems to have no basis in reality, as far as I can see.

   Admittedly we haven’t entirely escaped from these things. It is a process in which we gradually shake them off like a butterfly struggling out of the chrysalis. It is an ongoing trajectory.

   Take breathing as an example. With its head submerged in water, a dog will instinctively hold its breath (as will a human baby), but try training a dog to hold its breath. It can’t be done. Yet we have some control over our breathing as a conscious act of will.

8. chuckdarwin:
   Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was listed as one of the ten most influential books of the 20th century by the Library of Congress.

   My dad, who was with Patton’s Third Army, walked through Buchenwald per Eisenhower’s orders to a number of American units because he wanted US soldiers to understand the full significance of their service. Soldiers who had spent months in combat were reduced to tears at what they saw, smelled and heard.

   As today’s politicians and pundits flippantly and cynically toss around epithets describing their opponents as Nazi, fascist, racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, Marxist, socialist, ad nauseum as “raw meat” for their base, they become exemplars for our collective loss of respect for our fellow human beings and the razors edge upon which humanity lives.

   Boomers, millennials, Gen x, y, and z–all of us–need to grow up, pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start treating each other with a modicum of manners and civility and show some appreciation for what has been given us instead of participating in the endless cacophony of complaining and bitching about everything under the sun.

   Well said! 👍

   chuckdarwin: Life’s meaning is staring you right in the face….

   The problem as I see it is in recognizing what I take to be life’s meaning and then having the integrity and strength of character to live by that meaning and thereby overcoming my inner conflict. This takes courage.

   It is so easy for me to follow my own desires and wants, to seek out my own pleasure. Thomas à Kempis:

   We will that others be straitly corrected, but we will not be
   corrected ourselves. The freedom of others displeaseth us, but we are
   dissatisfied that our own wishes shall be denied us. We desire rules to
   be made restraining others, but by no means will we suffer ourselves to
   be restrained. Thus therefore doth it plainly appear how seldom we
   weigh our neighbour in the same balance with ourselves.

   It isn’t enough to gain an understanding of the right path to take. It is the hardest of things to actually take that path. Which one of us could be so courageous as Socrates in following our convictions no matter where they lead? Not me.

9. Corneel:
   CharlieM,

   I didn’t realize you were paraphrasing Frankl, so was growing a little concerned for your well-being when reading the first paragraph. I was quite relieved when I discovered my mistake.

   Generally I am more happy than depressed. But it’s a happiness tinged with guilt, when I witness all the suffering in the world. Much of the time I just do what pleases me. And so I am conflicted.

   Corneel: It’s up to you how you want to give your life meaning, but I remember a time when you excused yourself from a discussion thread on this site because your grand children were visiting and that made me smile.

   It is very easy for me to love my grandkids.

   But I think the way we are raised and educated in society these days has tended to breed mistrust, conflict and hostility more than love and understanding among people. I’m sure you agree that having differences of opinion shouldn’t of necessity lead to hostility.

   Knowing I made you smile makes me smile. 🙂

10. Frankl is not trustworthy. He writes as if he was able to survive the Holocaust because of his will or personality. That is a nice little exaggeration on his part.

    I recommend contrasting Frankl’s quite self-serving account of his time imprisoned by the Nazis with Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, along with Jean Amery’s At the Mind’s Limits. (I also think that the accounts of Levi and Amery are usefully compared with Susan Brisson’s Aftermath, which describes the process of coping with the lingering psychological trauma of an incident in which she was raped, beaten, and left for dead.)

    Levi and Amery (along with philosophers such as Adorno and Marcuse) force us to confront the fact that the camps were designed for the annihilation of souls, and were extremely effective at that task.

    Frankl’s narrative is that he overcame adversity by his spiritual commitments. But he was never subjected to the brutality that Levi and Amery were subjected to. They were in Auschwitz for many years; Frankl was only in Auschwitz for a few days between being interned in camps where the conditions were much less extreme.

    He did not survive the camps merely because “he bore his suffering and never lost hope”, but because he was never subjected to the very worst of the camps in the first place. He omits this truth because it would detract from his self-serving narrative.

    ETA: It’s “Carl Jung,” not “Karl Jung”.

11. Kantian Naturalist,

    As someone who survived Vietnam, I attribute it to half a dozen layers of luck. I read Frankl’s book in college, attended a lecture by him, and was not impressed.

12. “The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).”

    There’s a lot to unpack here.

    Firstly, it should be pointed out that Frankl is just distilling a major theme of Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, published in 1941 (five years before Man’s Search for Meaning. It strains credulity that Frankl was unaware of Fromm’s book, since sold quite well on both sides of the Atlantic. So with regard to this specific passage, Frankl deserves no credit at all.

    Secondly, I see no reason to endorse Fromm’s historical narrative, primarily because it is based upon complete ignorance of animal psychology. This is in fact quite surprising, since by 1941 the field of cognitive ethology was already quite advanced, with groundbreaking discoveries established by Kohler (1917). By the 1940s Kohler was one of the most famous psychologists in the world, but I chalk it up to “the two cultures” problem that Fromm was unaware of him.

    In other words, it was known to be false at the time, and even more clearly false now, that “At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is embedded and by which it is secured.”

    Accounts of our existential condition that take this is a premise are historical curiosities, and there’s value in studying them. (I’ve read a good deal of Fromm, and much of it is quite illuminating.)

    But I think it would be a serious mistake to take Fromm, or Frankl, as authoritative about what makes human beings different from other animals.

13. More of an existential Roomba, if you ask me.

14. Maybe off topic, but I would deny that humans have “lost” any instincts.

15. Kantian Naturalist: Frankl is not trustworthy. He writes as if he was able to survive the Holocaust because of his will or personality. That is a nice little exaggeration on his part.

    Are we in any position to judge Frankl? I believe that having a purpose in his life enabled him to endure his 4 years in the concentration camps. He saw it as his mission to help others to find purpose and meaning in their lives.

    Kantian NaturalistI recommend contrasting Frankl’s quite self-serving account of his time imprisoned by the Nazis with Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, along with Jean Amery’s At the Mind’s Limits. (I also think that the accounts of Levi and Amery are usefully compared with Susan Brisson’s Aftermath, which describes the process of coping with the lingering psychological trauma of an incident in which she was raped, beaten, and left for dead.)

    I will look into the works of the people you mention.

    But I’m curious as to why you recommend these as contrasting Frankl’s ideas. At the moment, I don’t know, but could they not be considered as complimenting and not contrasting? Can you point out some of their ideas which would be in opposition to those of Frankl?

    Kantian Naturalist: Levi and Amery (along with philosophers such as Adorno and Marcuse) force us to confront the fact that the camps were designed for the annihilation of souls, and were extremely effective at that task.

    Yes, the annihilation of souls, but to what end? To produce a master race, purified of the contaminating influence of what they regarded as inferior groups. The freedom of the individual was not on their agenda.

    Kantian Naturalist: Frankl’s narrative is that he overcame adversity by his spiritual commitments. But he was never subjected to the brutality that Levi and Amery were subjected to. They were in Auschwitz for many years; Frankl was only in Auschwitz for a few days between being interned in camps where the conditions were much less extreme.

    He did not survive the camps merely because “he bore his suffering and never lost hope”, but because he was never subjected to the very worst of the camps in the first place. He omits this truth because it would detract from his self-serving narrative.

    How do we know the suffering of others? I have known many people who have committed suicide. Obviously, they could no longer find any meaning in their lives. At first glance, as an outside observer, I would have thought that anyone who had been interred in a Nazi concentration camp would have had to endure more suffering than these acquaintances of mine. That would be a shallow judgement on my part.

    I don’t think the experiences of those people should be regarded as a competition to determine who suffered the most.

    Do you have any criticism of Frankl’s work in helping people to find meaning in their lives? Surely this is a positive thing.

    A good example of a person who had every reason to give up but outlived many able-bodied people, was Stephen Hawking. So physically restricted but his life work gave him the spiritual freedom to explore the far reaches of the cosmos. I believe that it was this that sustained him.

    Kantian Naturalist>ETA: It’s “Carl Jung,” not “Karl Jung”.

    Thanks for pointing out my error. I’m sure readers would have known who I meant.

16. petrushka: to Kantian Naturalist,

    As someone who survived Vietnam, I attribute it to half a dozen layers of luck. I read Frankl’s book in college, attended a lecture by him, and was not impressed.

    Don’t feel obliged to answer, but how do you think your Vietnam experience changed you, if at all?

    Do you see it as an admirable undertaking to help others to find meaning in their lives?

17. CharlieM: Are we in any position to judge Frankl? I believe that having a purpose in his life enabled him to endure his 4 years in the concentration camps. He saw it as his mission to help others to find purpose and meaning in their lives.

    I believe that we must judge Frankl, just like we would judge any other person who has written down their ideas and passed them down to us.

    As I see it, it is the obligation of each living generation of human beings to decide how to engage with the accumulated cultural heritage of humanity: what to remember, what to forget, what to criticize, what to create and transform and breath new life into. It is up to us to decide what we shall pass down to those who come after us.

    In response to “are we in any position to judge Frankl?” — yes, we are, because it is our obligation as the human beings who are currently alive — just as those who come after us will judge us. It is only by passing judgment on those who have preceded us that there is any intellectual, moral, or spiritual progress at all. To refrain from passing judgment is to put a stop to all cultural evolution.

    But I’m curious as to why you recommend these as contrasting Frankl’s ideas. At the moment, I don’t know, but could they not be considered as complimenting and not contrasting? Can you point out some of their ideas which would be in opposition to those of Frankl?

    I’ve only read Frankl’s book once, but my general impression is that he thinks that the reason why he survived the concentration camps is because of his willpower, his determination. This suggests that those who were survived but who were permanently haunted by the trauma of the camps just failed to have the right attitude.

    I find that utterly nauseating.

    By contrast, Levi and Amery describe the trauma of the camps, how it felt to be constantly dehumanized, and what that experience did to them. Reading Levi and Amery will help us understand why it is an ethical obligation to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust happens again, not to anyone, ever. Reading Frankl suggest that it doesn’t matter if the Holocaust happens again, because anything is survivable if you just have the right attitude.

    Yes, the annihilation of souls, but to what end? To produce a master race, purified of the contaminating influence of what they regarded as inferior groups. The freedom of the individual was not on their agenda.

    I don’t know what point you’re trying to make with here, since what you say is obviously true but I don’t see how it’s relevant to the discussion.

    Regardless, I don’t think it’s right to say that the goal of the Nazis was to produce a master race. That is, I don’t think that if the Nazis had succeeded in exterminating all non-White people on the entire planet, they would have just said, “ok, mission accomplished! everyone, relax!” I think it more realistic that they would have just kept on killing and killing and finding new excuses to kill. They would have kept on killing long after they had exterminated all the non-White people, all the LBGT people, everyone with a genetic disorder or mental or physical disability. It would have been institutionalized systemic mass death — forever.

    Do you have any criticism of Frankl’s work in helping people to find meaning in their lives? Surely this is a positive thing.

    I completely disagree. After all, Hitler helped the German people find meaning in their lives. What matters isn’t whether people find meaning in their lives, but whether that meaning makes them better people. I am not at all sure that Frankl fits that description.

18. In the book “Man’s Search For Meaning”, Frankl states that he was amongst those, “who have come back by the aid of many chances or miracles, whatever one may choose to call them we know the best of us did not return”.

    He recounts his everyday experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis. He tells of the initial long train journey, how he along with other prisoners were made to give up their possessions, even their clothes, had their bodies completely shaved, and forced to work digging ditches and laying railtrack.

    During a painful forced march to their worksite, Frankl thought about his wife and was immediately hit by a truth, the truth that love:

    “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers, the truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart, the salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way, an honourable way, in such a position man can through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

    For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘the angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory. In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from a prisoners existence to another world and I resumed talk with my loved one. I asked her questions and she answered. She questioned me in return and I answered.

    He had been physically separated from his loved ones but their love meant that he could still be with his wife in spirit and by this means come to understand the meaning of true love and its place in existence.

19. Kantian Naturalist: I recommend contrasting Frankl’s quite self-serving account of his time imprisoned by the Nazis with Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved

    I recommend reading both Frankl’s and Levi’s accounts of their ordeals with an attempt at understanding. We can read their words but we cannot share the experiences of these two survivors. But both carry the same message revealed in the one enduring thing that shines through in the midst of utter deprivation and torment. And it is the selfless love which brings with it, freedom.

    From the introduction to “If This is a Man”:

    Levi does not omit from his story the faint glimmers of light that came on rare occasions to shine briefly out of the evil murk. There is the story of Lorenzo, for instance:

    In concrete terms it amounts to little: an Italian civilian worker brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration every day for six months; he gave me a vest of his, full of patches; he wrote a postcard on my behalf to Italy and brought me a reply. For all this he neither asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward…His humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.

    Lorenzo provided an example of the achievement of true freedom through acts of pure love. He was not shackled by the chains of self-seeking, he demonstrated the true meaning of freedom.

    And from the introduction we read that “The Truce” is a celebration of other men’s uniqueness. And we see the good that comes out of suffering, “In Auschwitz he had learned a new morality, one that had made him more tolerant of the failings of others…”

    In these camps the individuals that had the least freedom were the guards and those in authority that inflicted suffering on the inmates. They were slaves to their own sadistic pleasures or to their obligation to obey orders from without. Through his deeds, Lorenzo was neither under the control of his lower passions nor any external authority. He gave freely out of himself.

20. I’ve just discovered that the full audio recordings of Levi’s “If This is a Man”, and Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, can be found here. Anyone who can’t find the time to sit and read the books might find this a good alternative, although they are long.

21. Kantian Naturalist: He did not survive the camps merely because “he bore his suffering and never lost hope”, but because he was never subjected to the very worst of the camps in the first place.

    You call this the truth. How can you be so sure of all that he was subjected to?

    In “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Frankl recalled a time he and his fellow prisoners were undergoing punishment for a misdemeanor one of their number had committed. The block warden:

    improvised a little talk about all that was on our minds at that moment. He talked about the many comrades who had died in the last few days, either of sickness or of suicide. But he also mentioned what may have been the real reason for their deaths: giving up hope. He maintained that there should be some way of preventing possible future victims from reaching this extreme state. And it was to me that the warden pointed to give this advice.

    God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons—to offer my comrades a kind of medical care of their souls. I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired, but I had to make the effort and use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever.

    So I began by mentioning the most trivial of comforts first. I said that even in this Europe in the sixth winter of the Second World War, our situation was not the most terrible we could think of. I said that each of us had to ask himself what irreplaceable losses he had suffered up to then. I speculated that for most of them these losses had really been few. Whoever was still alive had reason for hope. Health, family, happiness, professional abilities, fortune, position in society—all these were things that could be achieved again or restored. After all, we still had all our bones intact. Whatever we had gone through could still be an asset to us in the future. And I quoted from Nietzsche: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.” (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.)

    Frankl had previously talked about prisoners regularly committing suicide by running into the barbed wire fence which was electrified.

    Can you give a reference for the quote you provided above?

22. CharlieM: Can you give a reference for the quote you provided above?

    I was quoting you.

23. Kantian Naturalist:
    Frankl: “The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism).”

    Kantian Naturalist: There’s a lot to unpack here.

    Firstly, it should be pointed out that Frankl is just distilling a major theme of Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom, published in 1941 (five years before Man’s Search for Meaning. It strains credulity that Frankl was unaware of Fromm’s book, since sold quite well on both sides of the Atlantic. So with regard to this specific passage, Frankl deserves no credit at all.

    I am more interested in what is being said rather than who said it. Can I see the point that is being made in that paragraph and is it a reasonable assessment? Yes I can, and I think it is. This is the case regardless of who gets the credit.

    Kantian Naturalist: Secondly, I see no reason to endorse Fromm’s historical narrative, primarily because it is based upon complete ignorance of animal psychology. This is in fact quite surprising, since by 1941 the field of cognitive ethology was already quite advanced, with groundbreaking discoveries established by Kohler (1917). By the 1940s Kohler was one of the most famous psychologists in the world, but I chalk it up to “the two cultures” problem that Fromm was unaware of him.

    In other words, it was known to be false at the time, and even more clearly false now, that “At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal’s behavior is embedded and by which it is secured.”

    Accounts of our existential condition that take this is a premise are historical curiosities, and there’s value in studying them. (I’ve read a good deal of Fromm, and much of it is quite illuminating.)

    But I think it would be a serious mistake to take Fromm, or Frankl, as authoritative about what makes human beings different from other animals.

    I’ll need to get better acquainted with the works of Fromm. I see no need to take either of these men as authoritative. I do not have to agree with everything either of them proposes. I need only look to see with parts seem reasonable to me.

    Regarding the difference between humans and animals, I can see that physically there is no general difference. Spiritually it is a different matter. I have unique traits that no animal possesses. What individual animal is capable of relating its autobiography in one form or another? What animal would commit suicide out of a feeling of utter despair? I could go on giving examples of our differences.

    I don’t think it is a case of us losing our animal instincts. It’s more a case of having the ability to overcome and act in opposition to our instinctive behaviour through self-control.

    Of course I wouldn’t wish to claim everything is black and white. As in most things there are grey areas and transitional forms.

24. Kantian Naturalist:
    “CharlieM: Can you give a reference for the quote you provided above?”

    Kantian Naturalist: I was quoting you.

    So you were. Silly me. I was looking everywhere for that quote but my own writing.

25. petrushka:
    Maybe off topic, but I would deny that humans have “lost” any instincts.

    I don’t mind if topics are more organic, grow branches and spread out in various directions. In fact I prefer it when they do.

    I agree that “lost” isn’t quite appropriate. It’s more that we can take greater control over our instincts. Anyone looking at a developing child can see how they gradually gain greater control over their minds and bodies. Compare this with the lower animals that, from birth or hatching, act instinctively in decisively purposeful ways without any parental guidance.

    Why do we see this trajectory? During the course of evolution there are instances of individual learning taking over from instinct. Why should this be
    when there are so many cases demonstrating that instinct is perfectly adequate to foster the life of the animal?

    Could it be because instincts are group related whereas learning is an individual activity?

26. A few notes on Frankl: “The Lie of Viktor Frankl could be construed as a hatchet job but makes some important points about how Frankl presents himself in Man’s Search for Meaning and elsewhere. I also recommend “Redeeming the Unredeemable (PDF) for some further context in Frankl’s work before he was imprisoned.

27. CharlieM: Why do we see this trajectory? During the course of evolution there are instances of individual learning taking over from instinct. Why should this be
    when there are so many cases demonstrating that instinct is perfectly adequate to foster the life of the animal?

    I think there’s an interesting question to be posed in terms of “why does learning evolve when it does, and under what conditions does learning evolve?”

    I think the beginning of a helpful answer can be posed in terms of what Peter Godfrey-Smith calls “the environmental complexity thesis”: intelligence evolves when there are lots of easily detectable signals available to the organism that are less than reliable indicators of the nature of the source of those signals. (This is when things get difficult: is that mottled patch over there just sunlit on the branches, or a crouching jaguar? Is that crab-like thing just a crab, or an octopus in camouflage?)

    If the question is, “why are there any intelligent animals? why aren’t all animals as dumb as jellyfish?”, one answer is: intelligence evolved because it could evolve (given evolutionary constraints in how neurons develop) and because it “paid for itself” in energetic terms: in some cases, intelligence was a good-enough adaptation that the animals kept it. (Not always, of course: there are cases of animals giving up on being intelligent. Sessile molluscs presumably evolved from more mobile ancestors, and the tunicate famously dissolves its own brain when it settles down and reaches sexual maturity.)

    A separate question would be about how and why different kinds of learning evolve. Consider the octopus: highly intelligent, very capable learners — yet they learn entirely from their own exploration of their environments. They do not learn from each other — there is no social learning. By contrast, some degree of social learning is the norm for birds and mammals, with lots of differences as to what needs to be learned and what doesn’t.

    (For example, songbirds will not learn to sing the species-specific songs of their species if they are not exposed to those songs while young. They then “teach” themselves to sing by comparing their vocalizations with the stored memory of their species-specific song, until the vocal output matches the stored template.)

    CharlieM: Compare this with the lower animals that, from birth or hatching, act instinctively in decisively purposeful ways without any parental guidance.

    I only quoted this sentence to underscore my fundamental opposition to the very idea of “lower animals.”

    The notions of “lower” and “higher,” or “more evolved” and “less evolved”, are human metaphors only. They do not correspond to anything in biological or physical reality. These metaphors probably have their origin in human social and religious hierarchies — the one with power and authority is “higher”, more “elevated”, over the others.

    Even so, the fact is that social and religious hierarchies probably did not exist prior to the rise of agriculture and permanent settlements. Those go back a mere 13,000 years. By contrast, human beings been around for at least 100,000 years and probably longer. During most of that time, we probably lived in small relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes. We’ve had hierarchies for about 10% of the time we’ve existed.

    Of course, lower and higher can also make sense relative to a peak or summit: one point of a mountain is higher or lower than another, one branch of a tree is higher or lower than another. But evolution is not a mountain: it has no top, no goal. There are no “lower” or “higher” animals.

28. Kantian Naturalist
    Totally off-topic but I just had to follow up your reference to Molusks dissolving brain. In fact they only dissolve 1 of their 2 brains!
    But even move interesting is the process has many parallels with dementia in humans. And we only have 1 brain. I hope this isnt in my future.

29. Also interesting is, as Gould pointed out, about half of all species evolve to be somewhat more complex, and about half devolve into parasites, where the living is easier. Parasites can afford to give up large chunks of whatever they used to need to get by. Including brains.

30. Kantian Naturalist: But I think it would be a serious mistake to take Fromm, or Frankl, as authoritative about what makes human beings different from other animals.

    What, if anything, do you think makes us different from other animals?

31. Kantian Naturalist: I believe that we must judge Frankl, just like we would judge any other person who has written down their ideas and passed them down to us.

    As I see it, it is the obligation of each living generation of human beings to decide how to engage with the accumulated cultural heritage of humanity: what to remember, what to forget, what to criticize, what to create and transform and breath new life into. It is up to us to decide what we shall pass down to those who come after us.

    In response to “are we in any position to judge Frankl?” — yes, we are, because it is our obligation as the human beings who are currently alive — just as those who come after us will judge us. It is only by passing judgment on those who have preceded us that there is any intellectual, moral, or spiritual progress at all. To refrain from passing judgment is to put a stop to all cultural evolution.

    Don’t you think there is a difference between judging people and judging their actions?

    How can I judge another person if I haven’t gone through the experiences which were the driving forces behind their actions. Can I be sure of how I would behave given the same life experiences as them? I say judge the deed and not the person. Perhaps any person who has sadistic tendencies or thinks there is nothing wrong in committing crimes if they can get away with it has been brought up to think in that way. Perhaps they haven’t been as fortunate as me regarding the people responsible for my upbringing.

    It is easy to say, “I would never behave as they do”, from the position I find myself in. Maybe those others weren’t as lucky as me.

    One of Frankl’s keys to a meaningful life is the giving of unconditional love between people. Would you judge that as the wrong thing to aspire to?

32. Kantian Naturalist: I’ve only read Frankl’s book once, but my general impression is that he thinks that the reason why he survived the concentration camps is because of his willpower, his determination.

    So from such scant knowledge, why do you think you are in a position to judge the man?

    Kantian Naturalist: This suggests that those who were survived but who were permanently haunted by the trauma of the camps just failed to have the right attitude.

    I find that utterly nauseating.

    He believed that his survival had a great deal to do with luck. He relates that being too ill to go on a forced march which would have led to his death was the reason why he was still alive when liberation came.

    He did not survive through will power. It was because he felt he had something to live for that he didn’t contemplate suicide. And that inspired him to try to help other desperate prisoners to find reasons why suicide was not the answer. Committing suicide and resisting the temptation to commit suicide are both acts of will. Some may have wanted to commit suicide but did not have the will power to overcome their fear and so they could not see it through.

    Are you judging him for trying to give others hope?

33. Kantian Naturalist: A few notes on Frankl: “The Lie of Viktor Frankl could be construed as a hatchet job but makes some important points about how Frankl presents himself in Man’s Search for Meaning and elsewhere. I also recommend “Redeeming the Unredeemable (PDF) for some further context in Frankl’s work before he was imprisoned.

    I’ll look at your second link when I get the time.

    Regarding you first link, I see that David Mikics criticizes Frankle for the number of times he references Auschwitz compared to the other camps he was interred in. Mikics writes that, “Kaufering, where Frankl spent five months, and Theresienstadt, where he lived for two years, are never mentioned in Man’s Search for Meaning, while the name Auschwitz appears repeatedly”. Frankl mentions Auschwitz a few times when talking about the experiences of prisoners in general terms. When he does talk about it from personal experience it has to do with important moments of his time in confinement. It was the first place he arrived at on the train journey. When there he underwent the initial processes of being stripped of all his belongings including his precious manuscript, He was given his number and the clothing he would have to wear including a shirt which he would be wearing for the next six months. This clothing taken from a previous prisoner who had been killed and so had no further use for them. In the pocket of the shirt he found a piece of paper which would become an important element in his story.

    So his writings about Auschwitz were justified. He might have been there for only a short time, but this time was of critical importance to his story.

    Mikics did write that over his confinement, “Frankl’s suffering was unimaginable”.

34. CharlieM: Don’t you think there is a difference between judging people and judging their actions?

    No, not really. All there is of a person, once they’ve died, is the sum total of their actions, their consequences, and how those actions and consequences are interpreted by others.

    CharlieM: One of Frankl’s keys to a meaningful life is the giving of unconditional love between people. Would you judge that as the wrong thing to aspire to?

    No, I wouldn’t. But I don’t see that as some grand profound truth. It seems pretty obviously true.

    CharlieM: Are you judging him for trying to give others hope?

    I think that hope is morally neutral. Hitler gave lots of people hope. So did Reagan and Trump. Just giving people hope is not in itself morally praiseworthy. What matters is whether what is hoped for is something that is morally good. (One may hope for the painful death of one’s enemies.)

35. CharlieM: What, if anything, do you think makes us different from other animals?

    Humans occupy, and are adapted for, a unique ecological niche: we are obligate cooperative foragers (to use Michael Tomasello’s term). It is extremely difficult for any one individual to fully obtain their means of subsistence and satisfy their needs. (Even if they could as an adolescent or adult, those skills would be based upon what they learned and were taught by others.) Generally speaking, we need to cooperate with others in order to satisfy our material needs.

    This contrasts with other social animals in some important respects. Terrestrial and aquatic social carnivores will deliberately cooperate, but each individual in the group is usually doing the same thing as the others. In human societies, there is a great deal of division of labor: different individuals make different contributions to the provisioning and well-being of the community.

    Among social primates (including the great apes), social interactions are not for provisioning: each individual forages alone, except for when chimpanzees hunt monkeys. (Those are not well-coordinated: they are competing with each other to get the monkey first, and the one that catches it, eats most of it.)

    So, basically, massively coordinated social provisioning — each individual has a distinct function or role in the community, and that’s how the individual contributes to the maintenance of the community over time — is what makes human beings very different from all other animals that we know of.

    As I understand it, the key to human culture — language, art, religion, technology, etc. — lies in how they contribute to obligate cooperate foraging. And the adaptations needed for this niche, such as our large brains, are explained in terms of the cognitive difficulty of massive cooperation (e.g. keeping track of who has done what, who deserves recognition for what achievement, making sure that no one is getting recognition for what they haven’t done, or getting provisioned when they are able to contribute and chose not to, etc.). Social cooperation on the human scale requires being able to detect, track, classify, and describe a huge amount of social information.

    On top of that, there is a huge amount of ecological information that we need to know: what materials are good for making which kinds of tools, what kinds of wood are good for making fires, and how to make them — how to notice where nutritious tubers are growing underground, how to detoxify lots of plants and sometimes animals, how to make clothing, how to trap and hunt different kinds of animals and detect hidden food caches (e.g. eggs in nests, grubs under rocks, etc.) — likewise how to find water in difficult to find places (e.g. cacti) — how to track, observe, and kill prey animals, which includes knowing which ones, under what conditions, which ones are more or less dangerous, and how many to kill without lowering population levels to the point where your children won’t have enough to eat.

    So, our evolved niche involves massive amounts of local ecological knowledge and massive amounts of social information — far more than the ways of life of any other animal, that we know of.

36. Kantian Naturalist:
    So, our evolved niche involves massive amounts of local ecological knowledge and massive amounts of social information — far more than the ways of life of any other animal, that we know of.

    A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, right? Our vaunted ecological knowledge is presently harming the entire planet, perhaps for a very long time, and threatens the existence of our species in the process. Nature has made no secret of what happens when a species outbreeds the carrying capacity of its range. In our “massive knowledge” we choose to simply ignore these lessons.

    Socially, we have constructed one treaty after another aimed at reducing the damage we’re doing. According to relevant metrics, not one of these treaties has so much as made a blip on the damage curve. It seems our grasp of our “massive amount of social information” has some serious limits.

37. Flint,

    I don’t disagree with any of those points! But I’d need to tell a much more complicated story that explains how we got from our baseline evolved niche as obligate cooperative foragers — which explains cognitive evolution in terms of the complexity of the physical and social environments — to our current global crisis.

    One small point though: the problem is not that we lack the scientific knowledge to understand how our actions are causing the sixth great extinction. The problem is in part that this scientific knowledge is not sufficiently broadcast to the non-scientific public, and that it can hardly compete with misinformation in the “public” spheres (all of which are in fact privately owned corporations).

    Another part of the problem is that even when the people who understand the science want something done about climate change and biodiversity loss, we do not have the power necessary to force governments to limit the power of corporations. Profit uber alles and damn the planet (and everyone on it).

38. Kantian Naturalist: Profit uber alles and damn the planet (and everyone on it).

    Well, that and uncontrolled reproduction. Population implosions in nature aren’t due to a profit motive. We have abstracted the same biological imperatives they have, and one form of that abstraction ultimately takes the form of the lust for profits.

    Most of what humans are doing to soil the bed we sleep in, aren’t actually that bad in moderation, meaning natural abuses nature can recover from. You know, don’t pump more water out of the aquifers than normal rainfall can replenish (much less so much we have altered the planet’s rotation!) A global population of humans circa, oh, maybe 1700 or so, and our environment would be able to absorb the things we’re doing to it. A thousand cars in Southern California, OK. A million cars isn’t just a quantitative difference, it’s qualitative.

    If only we could have held the global population under half a billion, the profit motive wouldn’t be a serious issue. As it is, profit is a downstream effect; you aren’t addressing causes, only symptoms.

39. Kantian Naturalist: I also recommend “Redeeming the Unredeemable (PDF) for some further context in Frankl’s work before he was imprisoned.

    I have now read this article by Timothy Pytell. I notice that there are updated versions of this article and responses to it that I’d like to read.

    From the article:

    Frankl: “Man is responsible in view of the fact he cannot retrace a single step; the smallest as well as the biggest remains a final one. None of his acts of commission or omission can be wiped off the slate as if they had never been. Nevertheless, in repenting man may inwardly break with an act, and in living out this repentance—which is an inner event—he can undo the outer event on a spiritual, moral plane.”

    With talk of a spiritual plane I can understand why someone with a materialist worldview would be put off from accepting what Frankl has to say.

    Below Pytell criticizes Frankl:

    Timothy Pytell: Frankl also played down the horrors of the camps. For example, he was once handed a picture of concentration camp prisoners and was asked, “Isn’t this terrible, the dreadful staring faces—everything about it?” Frankl responded: “Why?” I asked, for I genuinely did not understand. For at that moment I saw it all again: at 5:00 a.m. it was still pitch dark outside. I was lying on the hard boards in an earthen hut where about seventy of us were “taken care of.” We were sick and did not have to leave camp for work; we did not have to go on parade.

    Rather than playing down the horrors he was demonstrating the relativity of suffering. Anyone would think Frankl and those in that hut could not have been suffering more than they were. But Frankl tells of a poor man who stumbled into their hut and was then forced back out to endure the horrors he was trying to escape from. Frankl considered himself to be better off than that man.

    Viktor Frankl: The door was flung open, and the snowstorm blew into our hut. An exhausted comrade, covered with snow, stumbled inside to sit down for a few minutes. But the senior warden turned him out again. It was strictly forbidden to admit a stranger to a hut while a check-up on the men was in progress. How sorry I was for that fellow and how glad not to be in his skin at that moment, but instead to be sick and able to doze on in the sick quarters! What a lifesaver it was to have two days there, and perhaps even two extra days after those!

    Images of someone being thankful for lying, sick on boards in a gloomy, earthen hut, must make anyone think of the alternative that had been and were being experienced by those he deemed less fortunate.

40. CharlieM: With talk of a spiritual plane I can understand why someone with a materialist worldview would be put off from accepting what Frankl has to say.

    I don’t know what you think you’re trying to say here.

    But just in case you are trying to suggest that I am someone with a “materialist worldview” and that is why I am “put off” by what Frankl says to say: that is not at all true.

    Firstly, I do not have a “materialist worldview”; secondly, I object to Frankl because I think his text presents a badly distorted understanding of the Shoah. That has nothing to do with my “worldview” (“materialist” or otherwise) and everything to do with my understanding of the historical significance of the Shoah.

    (I use the term “the Shoah” instead of “the Holocaust” because the word “holocaust” comes from a Greek phrase that connotes ritual sacrifice. The systemic ruthless dehumanization and murder of twelve million people was not a ritual sacrifice. Hence I use the modern Hebrew term “the Shoah,” meaning “catastrophic destruction”.)

    The main point from Pytell’s article is here:

    Lawrence Langer, however, has criticized Frankl for failing to recognize that Auschwitz represented a rupture in the values of Western civilization. Frankl, Langer wrote, relied upon Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and others “to transform his ordeal in Auschwitz into a renewed encounter with the literary and philosophical giants” and thus to preserve “the intellectual and spiritual traditions they championed, and his own legacy as an heir to their minds.” More specifically, Frankl’s testimony “avoids the difficulty of altering the reader’s consciousness so that it can contend with the moral uncertainties of the Holocaust.” Frankl’s notion of meaningful suffering, Langer argued, lessened the horror by making the Holocaust seem survivable. Langer also pointed out contradictions between Frankl’s myth of heroic survival and his descriptions of atrocity. It is “as if Frankl himself were unconsciously committed to a dual vision, torn between how it really was and how, retrospectively, he would like to believe it had been.” Reflecting on the pervasive Christian vocabulary in Frankl’s testimony, Langer suggested that “Frankl secretly yearned for a transfiguration of Auschwitz into nothing more than a test of the religious sensibility.”

    A detailed historical investigation of Frankl’s life supports Langer’s critique. The following overview, which examines both his camp experience and the way in which he subsequently “worked through” his trauma, illuminates the way in which he came to his peculiar version of survival.

    Notice: Pytell claims that a close examination of the actual details of Frankl’s life supports Langer’s critique of Frankl: that Frankl fails to reckon with the Holocaust as a epochal break in the fabric of Western consciousness, that he fails to acknowledge the full extent of its evil, and that he constructs a basically self-serving narrative about his own experience. In short: Man’s Search for Meaning is a monument to Frankl’s own ego.

    There is also this: regarding Frankl’s attempts to prevent Jews from committing suicide, he injected amphetamines directly into their brains. Pytell:

    These ethically questionable experiments could be viewed as bordering on collaboration with the Nazis. Not only was Frankl’s research supported by the Nazis, but his actions stood outside a vision of Jewish communal solidarity.

    If Frankl had not been Jewish, I am confident that his “height psychology” would have been co-opted as effortlessly by the Nazis as Jung’s pseudo-psychology was. Perhaps Frankl was aware of that, at some level.

    On how Frankl distorts the significance of the Shoah:

    In using a concentration camp as “punishment” for those who chose suicide rather than capitulation to the Nazis, Frankl appears to suggest that they were cowards and that their deaths serve as examples of the wrong way to die. But by criminalizing the suicidal, Frankl could justify his own experimental research at Rothschild Hospital. The “lesson” also placed Frankl as a moral philosopher in the company of Socrates, Spinoza,
    and Kant. Yet Frankl’s “ascension” came at the expense of the dignity of those who refused to become pawns for the Nazis, and belittled incomprehensible human tragedy.

    From Pytell’s conclusion:

    Frankl was a peculiar representative of the Holocaust. Although his testimony became one of the most popular Holocaust narratives, Frankl used it to promote logotherapy on a global scale. As Langer recognized, it seems as if Frankl was torn between how things really were and how he wished they had been in retrospect.

    We now know that Frankl had worked through his trauma before he dictated his testimony, which presents elements of atrocity as a mere backdrop to his heroic and mythical view of survival.

    My objection to Frankl is how his text works as a literary transformation of the greatest crime against humanity into a mere backdrop to the heroic myth of himself.

41. Kantian Naturalist,

    Wow.

42. Kantian Naturalist:
    “CharlieM: Why do we see this trajectory? During the course of evolution there are instances of individual learning taking over from instinct. Why should this be when there are so many cases demonstrating that instinct is perfectly adequate to foster the life of the animal?

    Kantian Naturalist: I think there’s an interesting question to be posed in terms of “why does learning evolve when it does, and under what conditions does learning evolve?”

    I think the beginning of a helpful answer can be posed in terms of what Peter Godfrey-Smith calls “the environmental complexity thesis”: intelligence evolves when there are lots of easily detectable signals available to the organism that are less than reliable indicators of the nature of the source of those signals. (This is when things get difficult: is that mottled patch over there just sunlit on the branches, or a crouching jaguar? Is that crab-like thing just a crab, or an octopus in camouflage?)

    And that is a perfectly reasonable proposal for anyone to make if they start from a prior assumption. That assumption being that the orthodox view of evolution holds. That there is no intrinsic direction to evolution. It blindly builds on what went before it.

    My assumption is that evolution is directed towards the increasing autonomy and sentient, self-consciousness of the individual. Creatures have gained enough individual intelligence to become conscious creators. And it is obvious from what we do create that this gift we possess is in its infancy. Compares to natural creations ours are very crude and often dangerous to life.

    Kantian Naturalist: If the question is, “why are there any intelligent animals? why aren’t all animals as dumb as jellyfish?”, one answer is: intelligence evolved because it could evolve (given evolutionary constraints in how neurons develop) and because it “paid for itself” in energetic terms: in some cases, intelligence was a good-enough adaptation that the animals kept it. (Not always, of course: there are cases of animals giving up on being intelligent. Sessile molluscs presumably evolved from more mobile ancestors, and the tunicate famously dissolves its own brain when it settles down and reaches sexual maturity.)

    I think we should be making a distinction between the conscious intelligence of individual organisms and the intelligence of the higher group, be that species, genera or whatever. The collective, instinctive intelligence of the group is in many ways superior to the conscious intelligence of the individual.

    Kantian Naturalist: A separate question would be about how and why different kinds of learning evolve. Consider the octopus: highly intelligent, very capable learners — yet they learn entirely from their own exploration of their environments. They do not learn from each other — there is no social learning. By contrast, some degree of social learning is the norm for birds and mammals, with lots of differences as to what needs to be learned and what doesn’t.

    (For example, songbirds will not learn to sing the species-specific songs of their species if they are not exposed to those songs while young. They then “teach” themselves to sing by comparing their vocalizations with the stored memory of their species-specific song, until the vocal output matches the stored template.)

    Comparing groups whose members consist of organisms capable of individual learning (such as any species of octopus, some of which do seem to demonstrate social learning) with groups whose members show no such abilities (such as Escherichia coli), which of these would appear to be the most successful in terms of orthodox evolutionary understanding?

    As Godfrey-Smith pointed out:

    It’s perhaps the biggest paradox presented by an animal that has no shortage of contradictions: “A really big brain and a really short life.” From an evolutionary perspective, Godfrey-Smith explains, it does not give a good return on investment.

    “It’s a bit like spending a vast amount of money to do a PhD, and then you’ve got two years to make use of it … the accounting is really weird.”

    If evolution is blind why haven’t the prokaryotes consumed all the eukaryotes before they had a chance to even establish themselves? I am tempted to think that with such a concentrated food source as any budding eukaryote, the geometric expansion of any group of predatory prokaryotes would continue unabated until they had consumed all the available supply.

    The fact that multicellular eukaryotes do exist is testament to the higher-level innate intelligence that has the ability to organize the members and protect the entity that is the organism. This it does in the face of entities that have the means to outcompete it in terms of reproductive success and group survivability.

    Like a salmon overcoming all obstacles to reach its upstream spawning grounds, individual sentient consciousness of organisms has appeared against all the odds. Against all the obstacles to be overcome on the evolutionary path. That is the miracle of life.

43. CharlieM: And that is a perfectly reasonable proposal for anyone to make if they start from a prior assumption. That assumption being that the orthodox view of evolution holds. That there is no intrinsic direction to evolution. It blindly builds on what went before it.

    Except that this is not, contrary to what is suggested here, a mere “assumption”, let alone one that is “orthodox”: the absence of a direction to evolution is directly entailed by our best empirical knowledge, as grounded in the dialectical process of conjecture and refutation.

    That is not say that I deny all teleology: on the contrary, I take teleology seriously with regard to organismal development and behavior. (Not that it matters, but I’ve published two peer-reviewed papers in academic journals defending this view.) What I deny specifically is that there’s any teleology at the evolutionary level.

    And the reason why I think there’s teleology in organismal development and behavior, but not in evolution, is because there’s compelling evidence of organismal teleology and no evidence of evolutionary teleology.

    My assumption is that evolution is directed towards the increasing autonomy and sentient, self-consciousness of the individual.

    You may assume whatever you wish, but this assumption is a mere article of faith, not based on reason or evidence.

    I think we should be making a distinction between the conscious intelligence of individual organisms and the intelligence of the higher group, be that species, genera or whatever. The collective, instinctive intelligence of the group is in many ways superior to the conscious intelligence of the individual.

    I am skeptical about whether it makes sense to talk about “the intelligence of the higher group” if those groups include “species, genera, or whatever”. The kinds of macro-level intelligence that we observe in social insects is surely fascinating. I think that Huebner is right about what group minds would require, if there are any. But I have no idea if group minds in Huebner’s sense are anything close to what you have in mind here.

    Comparing groups whose members consist of organisms capable of individual learning (such as any species of octopus, some of which do seem to demonstrate social learning) with groups whose members show no such abilities (such as Escherichia coli), which of these would appear to be the most successful in terms of orthodox evolutionary understanding?

    This question makes no sense, since evolutionary theory does not provide us with a metric for “more successful” or “less successful”. I would have assumed you understood that, so I don’t know why you asked a question that doesn’t make any sense to begin with.

    If evolution is blind why haven’t the prokaryotes consumed all the eukaryotes before they had a chance to even establish themselves? I am tempted to think that with such a concentrated food source as any budding eukaryote, the geometric expansion of any group of predatory prokaryotes would continue unabated until they had consumed all the available supply.

    I would recommend acquainting yourself with what is actually known about eukaryote evolution before speculating about what those accounts fail to explain.

    Like a salmon overcoming all obstacles to reach its upstream spawning grounds, individual sentient consciousness of organisms has appeared against all the odds. Against all the obstacles to be overcome on the evolutionary path. That is the miracle of life.

    A pretty metaphor, but a misleading one.

    Was the appearance of individual sentience organisms unlikely? I don’t know — based on what prior probabilities? Is the emergence of sentience “against all odds” in a way that the emergence of photosynthesis was not? If there’s a difference, what’s the basis?

44. Kantian Naturalist:

    A pretty metaphor, but a misleading one.

    A much better metaphor is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Charlie is looking at one tiny facet of all that has evolved and say ing “golly, what amazing marksmanship to hit that target!” But of course, the same could be said of any feature possessed by any organism.

    Was the appearance of individual sentience organisms unlikely? I don’t know — based on what prior probabilities? Is the emergence of sentience “against all odds” in a way that the emergence of photosynthesis was not? If there’s a difference, what’s the basis?

    My speculation is that the advent of life as we know it was highly probable, but the directions life took, ALL of them, are vanishingly unlikely individually. Charlie seems mired in the conception of evolution as being a mighty uphill battle resulting in himself and a lot of failures.

45. CharlieM: If evolution is blind why haven’t the prokaryotes consumed all the eukaryotes before they had a chance to even establish themselves? I am tempted to think that with such a concentrated food source as any budding eukaryote, the geometric expansion of any group of predatory prokaryotes would continue unabated until they had consumed all the available supply.

    As I understand it, one major hypothesis for the capture of mitochondria and plastids as eukaryotic endosymbionts is that the possession of a complex actin-based cytoskeleton allowed proto-eukaryotes to engulf prokaryote prey. Regardless of whether that scenario is correct, it has been established that several early eukaryotes were in fact, bacteriovore (and eukaryovore) predators.

    Hence, to the surprise of nobody, you got things completely backwards again.

46. Flint: A much better metaphor is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Charlie is looking at one tiny facet of all that has evolved and saying “golly, what amazing marksmanship to hit that target!” But of course, the same could be said of any feature possessed by any organism.

    I agree with this in one sense: from a biological point of view, evolution has no predetermined targets or goals.

    At the same time, however, there is something quite intriguing about the distinct kind of self-consciousness made possible by language, culture, and technology. It is, after all, us that are having this discussion about the place of our minds in nature. Not even great apes and cetaceans, for all their cognitive and emotional sophistication, seem capable of arriving at this level of self-understanding.

    I want to say, on the one hand, with the philosophers, that there really is something metaphysically unique about human minds, contrasted with the minds of non-human animals.

    At the same time, I also want to say, with the scientists, that each and every species is unique in its own distinct way.

    As Dobzhansky is said to have put it, “all species are unique, but the human is the most unique.”

    That is not a biological or scientific truth, but it does seem true, nevertheless.

47. Kantian Naturalist,

    Nothing like a history professor analyzing an English professor analyzing a psychiatrist. At least Pytell admits his bias:

    In hindsight I was undoubtedly channeling some of my angry young man oedipal rage at Frankl and also felt I “needed” to make the case against Frankl given his saintly renown. (sociology today)

    I think it’s pretty axiomatic that autobiography is the worst form of hagiography. I mean look at Augustine’s Confessions. Halfway through that insufferably self-centered soul-baring, I was ready to down the hemlock myself…. 😉

48. Kantian Naturalist:

    As Dobzhansky is said to have put it, “all species are unique, but the human is the most unique.”

    That is not a biological or scientific truth, but it does seem true, nevertheless.

    As Keith Moon said, “I’m the best Keith Moon-type drummer in the world!”

49. Flint,

    I read that Ringo Starr was Keith Moon’s favorite drummer. After Keith Moon, that is. Go figure…

50. chuckdarwin:
    Flint,

    I read that Ringo Starr was Keith Moon’s favorite drummer. After Keith Moon, that is. Go figure…

    Yeah, the two could hardly be more different.