Continuing a discussion I and one or two others were having in the thread vincent-torleys-disappearing-book-review it is of little surprise that those responding to what I said, along with many of the posters here, regard consciousness as a product of matter. I believe that it is the other way round. As with Owen Barfield and John Davy, I came to this conclusion many, many years ago, and for me like them, Rudolf Steiner was a big influence in solidifying this view. Here is an extract from an article about Owen Barfield from Richard A. Hocks
Barfield’s precoccupation with the history of consciousness is different from even the most saturated analyses of the past, such as Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. Barfield maintains that, in any thoughtful consideration of evolution, it is both more reasonable and more illuminating to hold that mind, or consciousness, precedes matter rather than the reverse–though not individualized mind or self-consciousness. Not only does the origin of language point toward this supposition but also the content of the great myths, indeed even the very archetypes that a thinker like Jung explores so deeply yet without ever considering that that they might inhabit the world “outside” the human head–or a vast collection of human heads. In other words, evolution for Barfield begins with mind as anterior to matter, as a given “field” out of which, as it were, matter compresses. Barfield’s thesis herein does not merely challenge the Darwinian argument; in a sense it turns that argument on its head: for not only does mind precede and bring matter into being, and a form of intentionality replace chance-ridden natural selection, but the very same physical evidence used in support of the received position is never directly challenged or discredited, but interpreted differently…
Here are some words from John Davy (pseudonym, John Waterman) who gives an overview of Steiner’s thoughts on the evolution of physical life better than I ever could:
John Davy:
The evolution of man, Steiner said, has consisted in the gradual incarnation of a spiritual being into a material body. It has been a true “descent” of man from a spiritual world into a world of matter. The evolution of the animal kingdom did not precede, but rather ;accompanied; the process of human incarnation. Man is thus not the end result of the evolution of the animals, but is rather in a certain sense their cause. In the succession of types which appears in the fossil record-the fishes, reptiles, mammals, and finally fossil remains of man himself-the stages of this process of incarnation are reflected.
Steiner asks us to conceive of the form of man as originally an “imagination”, an archetypal Idea created by exalted spiritual beings, and existing spiritually, devoid of physical substance. Physical evolution records the preparation of a physical vehicle fashioned in the image of this archetype, in which the spirit of man could live.
The gradual shaping of this vehicle was a long evolutionary process. The spiritual powers could not produce a ready-made human body any more than parents can give birth to an adult child. A kind of spiritual embryology had to guide the development of the body of man.
This physical vehicle, Steiner says, accordingly passed through several distinct stages.These include a fish-like stage, a reptile-like stage, before the gradual emergence of the final human form. At each stage, the spiritual human being was able to unite more closely with his physical vehicle. But it was not until quite recent times-the Tertiary in geological terms-that the physical vehicle began to match the archetypal Idea sufficiently to allow the human spirit to enter into it.
What, then, is the relation according to Steiner between the evolutionary stages of man and the physical fossils found in the earth? The fish-like stage of the human body described by Steiner only contained physical substance in the most tenuous way. It must be thought of as a largely spiritual entity with only the most delicate and scarecly substantial physical elements-rather as some of the frailer jellyfish live in the sea like insubstantial ghosts, more that ninety-nine percent water, with only the most diaphanous membranes to give them form. Certainly, there was no question of this early human stage containing sufficiently mineralised matter to leave fossil remains.
On the other hand, the existence of such a delicate physical-spiritual vehicle provided an opportunity for other spiritual beings to incarnate. The fish “archetype” could enter fully into this tenuous vehicle and carry it down to earth. This meant filling out the body with physical substance, coarsening it, giving it firm bones and hard scales. In this way, the fish appeared in the fossil record. They reflect the fact that man was passing at that time through a fish-like stage, and simultaniously represent the incarnation of the fish “type” on earth. The same applies to the reptiles, and-in a more complex way-to the mammals. The animals have thus diverged from the line of human evolution, and plunged sooner and deeper into an involvement with the earth. Instead of the animals being the ancestors of human beings, man is the ancestor of the animal.
Now this is very brief and crude sketch of some very complicated and difficult aspects of Steiner’s account of evolution. It would lead too far to discuss here the origin of the “animal” archetypes and their relation to man. The question I want to consider is whether this central concept of incarnating spiritual archetypes can be related to the current scientific view of evolution.
The biological concept of “adaptive radiation” is, in fact, an expression of this process of incarnation. When a new generalised type appears in the fossil record its full possibilities are still hidden, so to speak. From Steiner’s standpoint, we see an animal archetype gradually incarnating, establishing a closer and more intimate contact with the earth. Adaptive radiation expresses the gradual emergence on the earthly scene of an archetype in its full complexity.
This suggests that the genetical concept of a flow of random mutations into the hereditary constitution of a species is too limited. Many people have found it difficult to imagine that a random process could produce all the fantastic adaptations found in the animal kingdom. The difficulty, most biologists say, is imaginative rather than logical, and they discount it. For in theory, a random mutation process, given time, could produce all the necessary adaptations, just as a team of monkeys with typewriters might eventually hammer out Hamlet by chance. Furthermore, they might produce it sooner if they were rewarded each time they produced a coherent word, and rewarded still more generously for each iambic pentameter. In the same way, natural selection could steer a random mutation process towards a coherent end. Fisher has described natural selection as “a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability”.
Nevertheless, the fact that monkeys could theoretically type Hamlet does not mean that Shakespeare was a monkey. The random mutation theory allows virually anything to happen. But the fact that it allows this does not prove that what happened necessarily arose by random mutation. The concept of evolution by accident is sometimes made by biologists to seem more compusory than its logic-or lack of it-really justifies.
But curiously enough, because the theory so anarchic and can “explain” almost anything, biologists have now come to talk of adaptations in a way which sometimes sound more Lamarkian than Darwinian. For instance, P. M. Sheppard in; Natural Selection and Hereditary; writes of the evolution of the horse thus: “Life in open country favoured swifter, larger animals which were more easily able to see and avoid their predators. Consequently, selection favoured an increase in body size and a reduction in the number of toes, for this gave greater speed. At the same time the teeth also became larger and more durable, a necessary change to allow for the greater volume of food taken by a larger animal.”
The horse, in fact, got what it needed. The imagination may balk at the idea that the genetic constitution had ready by chance, and at the right time, all the complex variability needed to allow the appropriate changesto take place. But genetic theory leads us to expect improbable events. And by permitting almost infinite possibilities, it puts itself in an impregnable position.
The trouble with a theory which can explain everything is that it does not really explain anything. In fact it does no more than offer one way of imagining how the horse could have evolved. Some biologists seem to argue that the very improbability of the evolution of the horse proves the theory is correct. They should look to their logic.
The real virtue of neo-Darwinism, to my mind, is that it has focused attention on adaptations. The theory predicts that practically every feature of an animal should have some function, should make sense in relation to its environment. This has led to a tremendous revival of field studies, and scientific naturalists have been discovering more and more of the extraordinary beauty and subtlety of animals’ relations with their environment. Even what appeared to be purely “decorative” features of birds or fishes, for instance, are gradually being shown to be intimately related to the animals’ pattern of behaviour. Thus while the theory has as its foundation mere random events, it has led to a much more meaningful understanding of the way animals actually live.
Such natural wisdom in animals’ lives is just what would be expected if they were an expresion of spiritual archetypes. Such archetypes would nowhere establish a senseless relationship with the earth. Every feature would have purpose and meaning, however subtle and elusive. Thus the real clash between Steiner and science, as far as this aspect of evolution goes, is the question of the source of variability or inner plasticity of a species. According to science, this is the flow of random events. According to Steiner, it is a stream of wisdom flowing from the archetype into the physical animals, and gradually manifesting in adaptive radiation.
There is , however, another aspect of evolution which is something of a problem for orthodox theory, and which Steiner’s descriptions illuminate. For evolution has not been only a matter of adaptation and specialisation. There has also been “progress”, or what Huxley calls “improvement”.
New kinds of biological organisation have appeared in the fossil record. The water-living fish are followed by the land-living reptiles, and they are followed by the warm-blooded mammals.These are major changes, not simply adaptations. Sheppard (op. cit.) calls them “inventions”.
Now there is no specific provision for this kind of biological reorganisation in genetic theory. In fact, it seems to run counter to expectation in some respects. For the essence of natural selection and adaptation is gradual specialisation, and closer ties with a particular environment. But a major reoganisation is inconceivable for a specialised creature.
Yet the main steps from fish to reptile, and reptile to mammal, seem to have been accompanied by an “escape” from specialisation. The early representatives of a new group in the fossil record are generalised, and then gradually undergo adaptive radiation. (The early reptiles later gave rise, for instance, to a host of specialised crawling, flying, running, swimming and climbing forms.)
One of the most interesting ideas put forward by biologists to account for such escape from specialisation is “neoteny”. This idea starts from the fact that the young of many animals show fewer specialised features than the adults. If a juvenile stage were to become prematurely able to reproduce, a new “juvenile” and less specialised line of creatures might result. Neoteny actually occurs in some animals today-for instance, the Mexican axolotl-an apparently adult creature-in actuality a neotenous form of the North American salamander. Professor Alistair Hardy has suggested that this process “seems likely to have provided some of the more fundsmental innovations in the course of evolution”.
The principal biological advances are thus considered by Hardy to have been facilitated by a kind of rejuvenation in its literal sense-a “making young again”. Now Rudolf Steiner’s account of evolution indicates that the emergence of a new “improved” group of animals into the fossil record is the result of a new divergence from the human line of evolution. The principal divergences gave rise to the main phyla-fishes, reptiles and mammals. And each represents a major biological advance-from water to land (reptiles), then from cold blood to warm-blood (mammals). These steps reflect important advances in the preparation of the human body.
According to Steiner, the human line retained its youth longest, so to speak. It held back from involvement with the earth longer than the animals. But as each phylum emerges into the fossil record, it still bears within it some of the “youthfulness” derived from its recent connection with human evolution.
Man as he is now still expresses physically more of this youthful quality than any of the animals. Many of his physical features (for instance his hands) are extremely unspecialised and versatile. He is not forced by his anatomy into such specialised relationships with his environment. It is no accident that young animals sometimes seem more “human” than their adult parents. They carry a kind of physical memory of a time when they were closer to man. This effect is at its most dramatic in apes and monkeys. An infant ape looks surprisingly like a very ancient and senile man. But an adult ape is completely an animal. Growing up, in animals, still reflects the original growing away from the human form.
Man’s relationship to the apes and monkeys is thus the opposite of that normally assumed. The apes are creatures which descended to earth just before man. They took hold of the almost human form and carried it prematurely into too deep and specialised a connection with the earth.They are literally “descended from man”.
Anatomists have often noted the resemblance between man and the “foetal ape”. According to science, man is a kind of neotenous or juvenile monkey. According to Steiner, the trajedy of the apes is that they are, in a sense, prematurely senile men at birth. Their growing up carries them deep into the animal world.
The “descent of man” to earth has separated him more and more from his spiritual origins. And physical evolution has been accompanied by a profound spiritual evolution, an evolution of human consciousness. Its effect has been that man has lost direct awareness of the spiritual worlds out of which he is born. But he has gained self-consciousness.
This process of withdrawal into a physical body and into a central point-like self-consciousness has given rise to our essentially dualistic outlook today. Man experiences himself as a detached onlooker, observing a separate “outer” world. This, according to Steiner, represents the deepest incarnation of the human spirit into the body. The descent of man is complete.
But evolution, Steiner says, has now reached a turning-point. The ascent of man is beginning, and the first step is that man will gradually begin to carry his “objective” consciousness into a new relationship with the spiritual world. The fruit of this process is to be true spiritual freedom. Such an experience of freedom, however, has only become possible by passing through the present experience of spiritual isolation.
How has this transformation of the evolutionary process been achieved? Through the Incarnation of the true Archetype of Man, in whose image we aare created and whom we call the Christ. This event was the turning-point of the evolutionary process.
Without the intervention of the Christ Being, according to Steiner, the descent of man would have continued. The human spirit would have been mastered by the processes of incarnation. Man would have been irrevocably entangled in the earth.
Through the events on Golgotha, the Image of Man, that original Imagination which had gradually descended into physical embodiment, was redeemed. Good Friday is the final Descent of Man. On Easter Sunday, the turning-point of time, the metamorphosis of the whole evolutionary process is achieved.
Through the redemption of the human form, the way is open for a redemption of human consciousness. But this cannot be achieved by a divine intervention, for ths would deny just that spiritual freedom which is the purpose of human evolution. Man must undertake the spiritualising of his consciousness by his own efforts and his own choice. But if he makes the choice and the efforts, he will not be left alone. He will receive, in Christian terms, the gift of the Holy Spirit. After Easter will come Whitsun.
Steiner’s central purpose was to set man’s feet firmly on this road. And he maintained that while many of the things he said might still seem strange to the present age, this would be less so as time went on. Just below the surface, so to speak, human consciousness is evolving. The climate of human thought is already completely different from Darwin’s day.
It is, therefore, not unexpected that there should be some striking echoes of Steiner’s account of the significance of evolution in the work of a “scientific humanist” like Huxley.
Modern biology is, of course, still deeply imbued with nineteenth-century assumptions-but there are signs that it is beginning to struggle hard to free itself. Steiner’s view of evolution offers a tremendous liberation to the human spirit, whose effects would work creatively throughout society. In many ways neo-Darwininsm is much nearer to Steiner than would have seemed possible at the beginning of this century. If this essay can accelerate this trend, even slightly, it will have achieved its purpose.
A short series which gives a nice precise of the thoughts of Barfield in the book “Saving the Appearances” begins here on Youtube.
I don’t see how a evolutionist can have spirtuality evolving out of the material mind.
Be consistent.
Its obvious to me we are immaterial souls that leave the material body fully intact in thinking.
Was jesus just a material mind? NO! His mind was irelevant to him except the memory.
AHA. They can’t find the conscience goo in the skull. They never will.
The soul is invisible.
Well maybe you should waste some more of your time and watch the other 4 videos in the series.
So talk about adaptive radiation producing specialists, the pentadactyl limb being the least specialised in humans, apes looking less like humans as they mature; none of these count as evidence as far as you are concerned?
And John Davy says the same thing about neo-Darwinism in the op:
I would say that the point he is making is more relevant.
And the evidence IMO points to life being guided to evolve towards conscious beings. I am frequently reminded that bacteria are more successful life forms than humans.
Multi-cellular conscious beings are unnecessary for the successful colonisation of the earth. But life takes the much more difficult path in order to produce beings that demonstrate increasing consciousness and self awareness. This could not have been achieved without life’s bacterial and vegetative base. Our survival depends on these lower life forms, they provide an environment suitable for us and ensure that we can take up the necessary nutrients.
Lower life forms are ideally adapted for living, growing and multiplying. Higher life forms are ideally adapted for consciousness. If the orthodox interpretation of the forces of evolution were true then earthly life would consist of bacterial like organisms and no more. i.e. the most successful life forms on the planet.
I’m not very keen on labels.
You think that science advocates the subject/object dichotomy? Why is that?
From my understanding, it’s quite different — I understand science as giving us some important tools for overcoming the subject/object dichotomy.
But we might have somewhat differing understandings of “the subject/object dichotomy”.
If you think that the difference between you and a scientist lies in nothing more than different “interpretations” of “the same evidence,” then you are committed to the idea that there is no evidence which could get you or the scientist to change your mind.
No reality, no truth — just “interpretations”. That’s no different from saying that “everyone has their own truth”, which is the same as saying that there is no objective truth at all.
You can eschew whatever labels you like. It doesn’t change the fact that you are a relativist.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/
We’re subjectivists, each and every one. God bless us all.
The clue is in the word – “un”conscious. We have various states of consciousness. In dreamless sleep we are unconscious, we are more conscious while dreaming and even more conscious when awake. But even in the waking state we are mostly unconscious. Are you always conscious of your breathing? Or of your blood circulating? Are you conscious of everything going on in your environment?
Just as we experience lower states of consciousness, do you think it is possible to experience higher states of consciousness? If not, why not?
It takes 3 more videos before the deepity ‘cashes out’ as bad apologetics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMUFGG3xnPY&feature=youtu.be&t=5m6s
How do any of these support your notions? You will have to explain, and anyhow you are wrong about at least two of them. Adaptive radiations produce both specialists and generalists. The pentadactyl limb is not the least specialized in humans. Apes look less like humans as they mature because humans are neotenic.
More relevant to what? I know of nobody who argues that the improbability of the evolution of the horse proves the theory is correct. I don’t even know what “the very improbability of the evolution of the horse” means.
Hate to sound like a broken record, but do you have any evidence for this interesting contention? I doubt it. Once more you take a single lineage (ours) and assume it’s the purpose of the great tree of life. That’s nothing more than your wish to be important.
You say that because you don’t know what the orthodox interpretation of the forces of evolution is. Bacteria certainly are successful. Then again, things that eat bacteria are also successful. As are things that eat them, and so on. Different environments, different selection. One size doesn’t fit all. What you’re doing here is opposing your theory, for which you can provide no evidence, with a strawman evolutionary theory carefully designed to predict things we don’t see. That isn’t a valid argument.
In the words of Keanu Reeves, “Whoa.”
Patrick,
So if someone were to say to you, think of anything you want, its is your belief that it is merely an illusion that you can choose what to think of, because in fact it is the state of the chemicals swirling around your head that force you to make one and only one choice. It just seems like a choice to you?
And if you decide to go hug your kids, or talk to them about their day at school, you don’t ACTUALLY have the choice to do this; if the state of the chemicals are in the right position it will happen, and if they are not it won’t, there is really nothing you can do about this (even though it seems to you like you made that choice), is that it?
John Harshman,
Actually, according to evolutionary theory, EVERYTHING that exists at this moment and time on the planet is successful, by the definition of evolution.
It is not possible for an individual to not be successful in evolution. The only things that have never been successful are those which never existed, and since we don’t know the things that never existed, we can not call them unsuccessful.
More bullshit from John, that he probably thinks no one will contest.
There is a condition where some humans become neotenic (it means juvenile like with age) but it is not true all that humans as a race are neotenic.
And even if this were true, why would it be that humans were like this and apes aren’t? Aren’t we all just apes? Is he claiming that there was a selective advantage for old people to look like children? But this selective advantage is only true for humans, for chimps, no such advantage? Anytime people start using the “it must be some kind of sexual selection” bullshit rationalization for things, you know you are in for a whopper.
The fairy tales of evolution continue.
How on earth does the fact that Barfield, by rejecting the God of George Berkeley suddenly becomes, in your mind, a conveyor of bad apologetics?
All that this tells me is that you do not understand his argument.
What about dying before reproducing?
We don’t. It can’t be proven that our experiences is all that exists, just as it can’t be proven they aren’t.
Nevertheless, in that experienced world, consciousness seems to be the product of physical brains. Whether those physical brains really exist, or are themselves imagined, is besides the point.
The lack of a deductively certain refutation of solipsism is not a deductively certain proof that solipsism is true. It is not even an indication of it. It is an irrelevancy concerning the fundamental nature of consciousness.
Unconsciousness is a state of consciousness? Total nonsense. It is the absense of consciousness. The absense of consciousness is not another FORM of consciousness. That would be like saying not playing soccer is a way of winning champion’s league.
You are either conscious or you are not, it doesn’t matter what the qualitative or quantitative contents of you conscious experience is. The fact that it is possible to completely lose the conscious state, yet for your matter to persist and later regain conscious experience is a problem for the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter.
Have you ever thought about why when a man loses his hand, and later gets it surgically reattached, he does not have an experience of being his hand, but instead the part of the body that corresponds to the head?
Yet according to this panpsychist nonsense you are pushing, the hand should be equally capable of being conscious. But I’ve never heard of a person who thought he was his hand, or his liver, rather than his head.
Not only do I not think that is possible, I don’t know what that means. I read the words but they have no referents in my understanding of the world.
What is a “higher” state of consciousness? It seems to me that whatever you experience, you’re still just conscious or not.
And this is the result of the kind of thinking that modern humans have made into a habit which is very difficult to escape from. Living forms are seen to be static in the same way that inanimate objects are viewed by classic physics. From our limited subjective point of view they are imagined to be things that are out there in the form we see before our eyes.
But if you consider human beings and other living forms in their living, dynamic reality, there is much more to them than a single form in the time and place from which we study them. Every biologist who believes in universal common descent will have to admit that humans have existed in some form or other, not just in the last few million years, but since the beginning of life on earth.
Just as we as individuals have existed as a single cell, a uniform mass of cells, a water dwelling multi-cellular creature, and so on up to a bipedal, warm-blooded, thinking being, so the same is true for humankind as a whole. We are not just a skin of paint, we are part, and always have been a part of the very structure which makes up the whole. This cannot seriously be disputed.
Look at life from its very beginnings to the present day and tell me which creature do you think has in essence changed the most over that period and why you think that your choice is a suitable candidate.
My point is that there is no evidence whatsoever for any “immaterial” component of consciousness. All the evidence we have demonstrates that consciousness is a product of a physical brain. If you contest that, you’re going to need more than a simple belief in libertarian free will.
I don’t think that’s true — that we have evidence that consciousness is produced by the brain.
What we have is extremely strong evidence of correlations between changes in first-personal subjective experiences and changes in third-personal neurophysiological states.
We are beginning to get a handle on how neurophysiological processes ratchet up into larger and larger assemblies of assemblies of assemblies . . . . in order to get to cognitive processes like perceiving, moving, and remembering.
But we’re a long way away from being to explain rationality in neurocomputational terms, and I am quite frankly doubtful that we ever could.
Likewise, I see no hope for the thought that neurocomputational models are ever going to yield an explanation of immediate first-personal feeling or awareness — what philosophers like to call “qualia”.
That said, we also have no evidence that anything like continuous subjective experience can exist independent of some living organism or other.
I want you to carefully read this sentence you wrote and explain to me what it means.
You are claiming that every single biologist who accepts universal common descent will admit that the species Homo sapiens has existed in some form or other for the past 3.4 billion years.
You said above that thinking is a hobby of yours. I would like to see some evidence of it.
Patrick,
Well you still haven’t answered. Do you believe in a free will to make a decision?
Doesn’t matter, before you died, who knows if you were going to reproduce or not. Not everyone that has the capacity to reproduce reproduces. So, until you die, you were successful, because you lived.
Kantian Naturalist,
Perhaps he is saying, “At what point is something considered a human?” Its all just a continuum right?
No, it isn’t.
Ah, you don’t believe in universal common descent either!
Cool.
It isn’t? Explain.
It’s a pointless, subjective question, with the added problem of the undefined, probably meaningless term “essence”. Even if we had a measure of “changed the most”, by definition there would be a species that had changed the most, but that wouldn’t make that species special. Remove that species and some other species would have changed the most. Would that species now be special by virtue of its new status?
If our criterion were size, the blue whale would be the winner of “changed the most”. It also went from the ocean to the land and back again in addition to that incredible size increase. Why isn’t it the winner of the “changed the most” contest? You are soaked in anthropocentrism all the while you accuse others of unconscious bias.
I’ve asked you repeatedly for evidence to support your various claims. When do you intend to start responding?
As far as I can tell the relative fitness of a certain allele can be calculated by determining how much more, or less, individuals with that allele reproduce. Experiments can be set to put selective pressure on particular things, like phage infectivity, and determine if organisms with certain alleles outcompete those without it by differential reproduction.
Studying large enough populations, bu virtue of the Law of Large Numbers, eliminates the random factors that may kill carriers of beneficial mutations before reproducing.
No, again, because fitness is about reproduction, not mere existence
Evolutionary fitness.
Evolution is not about individuals. Evolution is about what happens in populations. It is a description, not a recommendation or a moral calculus.
Evolution is a problem for some theists because it describes a cruel system. The 19th century phrase was nature red in tooth and claw.
I guess the problem I have with criticisms of evolution as heartless is that the description doesn’t change if you substitute front loading or intervention for natural selection. It’s still pretty fucking heartless.
I was going to suggest my older daughter as the winning “creature”–but you’ve convinced me. The blue whale edges her out.
Changed the most might mean sequence change, in which case all organisms would be candidates.
But according to them Jesus’ incarnation is the difference maker. Problem is Jesus only counts for three, but how many bacterial flagellum have been poofed into existence since the beginning of days?
Hate to brake it to you guys, but bacteria’s Christs beat Jesus by a large margin. It’s not even close
Evolution is just a means to provide well behaved, flagellum fearing bacteria with warm digestive systems to live in comfortably
Same evidence, different interpretation.
If she sees this, you might have to do some explaining.
Glen Davidson
There are sequoias. One might object that a lot of a large sequoia is dead, but that dead wood isn’t non-functional, any more than our nails are functionless for being non-living.
Then again, P. falciparum (and relatives) were autotrophs merrily photosynthesizing and bothering other organisms little, then went the whole parasitic route. Jesus carefully designed it for that role, too, check out Behe if you doubt it. Pretty dramatic change it seems to me.
Mitochondria and chloroplasts changed a whole lot, too, becoming eukaryotic organelles, although they went smaller, not larger.
Anyhow, I think that if one goes for “amount changed,” humans are hardly the greatest candidates, except from a rather anthropocentric view.
Glen Davidson
I think that when anti-evolutionists ascribe to evolutionists a commitment to a biological continuum, when they imagine is a flat or smooth fitness landscape, so any species can evolve with equal facility into any other species at any time.
When I deny that evolution is a continuum, I am denying what anti-evolutionists imagine evolutionists to believe, not denying what evolutionists actually do believe.
Evolution isn’t a continuum, if by a continuum one means a lack of differentiation. (Think here of “the space-time continuum”.) There are, as it were, “quanta” of evolution — namely, species.
I know that there’s a lot of argument about different concepts of biological species, and I’m hesitant to weigh in on a subject that many here know better than I do.
Nevertheless, my inclination (shall we say) is to side with Michael Ghiselin’s view that species are logical individuals, though spatio-temporally extended ones, just as sports teams are. It seems to me that this is the right way of thinking about what it is for a species to be a population rather than a single morphe that is multiply instantiated in different clumps of hyle or a class that has members.
Since species are real qua spatio-temporally extended individuals, it’s not the case that it all becomes a big undifferentiated continuous mush. That’s precisely why we can say that anatomically modern Homo sapiens came into existence between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, although preceded by archaic Homo sapiens, earlier species of Homo, earlier species of hominids, and of hominoids, anthropoids, primates, mammals, tetrapods, vertebrates, chordates, metazoans, animals, eukaryotes, and Earthly organisms.
I don’t suppose anyone here has read The Ancient Origins of Consciousness? I might get into it either during winter break or next summer, if it’s any good.
Kantian Naturalist,
Shorter (IMO, anyhow), it’s that it’s not all “just a continuum.”
It’s a continuum, but it’s more than just that, too.
Glen Davidson
Yeah, I don’t think this is what even Phoodoo was talking about. The continuum in question is the sequence of generations within populations. Even during rapid evolutionary change, even during punctuation events, if you think there is such a thing, one generation differs little from the preceding one, and there is a smooth time series connecting every modern species to its ancestors as far back as you choose to go. Species can be considered real individuals only if you ignore the time dimension, because if you looked closely enough H. sapiens would grade insensibly into H. heidelbergensis, and so on back as far as you like.
It depends on how fine-grained the temporal resolution is, sure. But since no individual is a genetic duplicate of either of its parents and there are some mutations every generation, there’s some discontinuity as well as continuity no matter how fine-grained you go.
That’s my understanding, anyway. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
The trouble with that assertion, is that we do not have useful criteria to determine “is X material”?
My inclination is to deny that consciousness is a product of the physical brain. Or, for that matter, to deny that consciousness is a product. Thinking of consciousness as a product seems to be pretty close to “Cartesian theater” thinking.
Yes, you can connect someone up to a scanner, and look at the scanner output. Even then, you cannot limit it to the brain, for what the brain is doing depends on what the body is doing and what the world is doing.
What you see on the scanner, is looking at life from the outside. I take consciousness to be looking at life from the inside. I don’t see it as a product or as some special feature that has to be produced.
I find it interesting that we have no useful vocabulary for discussing such phenomena.
The behaviorists tried to invent one, but it hasn’t caught on.
So we continue to talk past on another.
The continuity is implicit in reproduction. There are mutational changes in every generation, but there cannot be change that prevents reproduction. At least not change to the population.
dazz,
What about before one reproduces, they are not fit yet?
Who said anything like that? You are just throwing in ad hoc nonsense.
Whether or not the continuum is smooth or not, whatever the hell that means, is irrelevant; if one believes we went from a common ancestor all the way to us, then that is OF COURSE a continuum .
You can make up objections and use your own meaning of words all you want, but continuum already has a meaning, that doesn’t change because of your desire to turn the clear into the completely obfuscated garble.
Completely agree.
The first-person and the third-person are different perspectives (‘language games’?).
Reducing the subjective to the objective or conversely seems fool-hardy to me. In fact, the desire for a single unified perspective from which everything makes sense is something like the desire for a God’s-eye viewpoint. It’s precisely in this respect that reductive materialism seeks to take over the intellectual role once played by theology — a point first made by Nietzsche, I believe, though forgotten again and again by subsequent naturalists.
There is a vocabulary for describing subjective experience. It is called phenomenology. It was developed at the beginning of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, and subsequently expanded upon by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and many, many others.
Today neurophenomenology is a really interesting research program that takes seriously the correlations between neurophysiology and consciousness without trying to explain how one of them “causes” the other.
Is kerosene not flammable till it burns?
dazz,
Right, so an individual is also fit BEFORE they reproduce, right?