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.
May be fit enough to reproduce, but may be less fit than others. Fitness is relative , it’s not a binary fit/not fit thing
You introduced the idea of a “continuum” in order to defend CharlieM’s comment that
“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.”
— which is obvious nonsense.
But a fanatic devotion to defending obvious nonsense in order to avoid conceding anything at all to an opponent is pretty much what I’ve come to expect from creationists.
In any event, there’s a clear and obvious difference between
(1) subsequent to abiogenesis, and for the past 3.4 billion years up to and including the present day, every organism has resulted from mitosis or meiosis of previous organisms
which is obviously true
and
(2) human beings have always existed in some form or other for the past 3.4 billion years
which is obviously false.
Evolution is not about objective, medical fitness. it is about which alleles become dominant in a population. For the most part, it matters little whether you or your sibling or your first cousin have descendants.
Occasionally it matters. New mutations find their way into populations, but it can take thousands of generations for one to become important.
I think I understand that. That’s what I meant before here.
Any corrections are appreciated, of course
I don’t think it’s obvious nonsense. It’s a very odd way to say it, and Charlie may believe something nonsensical behind that odd phrasing, but it can be interpreted merely to mean that humans have an ancestry of continuous populations stretching back to the beginning. The fact that mutations are discrete (no intermediate between guanine and adenine) doesn’t seem like a significant challenge to the notion that ancestry is a continuum. I’m assuming Charlie would agree that a lot of those ancestors should not be considered human, though I’m not sure that assumption is correct.
Kantian Naturalist,
You can quibble with what Charlie said all you want, but it is still a continuum from bacteria all the way to us-if one believes in evolution.
If that is the point you are trying to argue with me, you are clearly wrong; you can’t even get your side to agree with you on this one.
If you go back to the OP, Steiner (according to Davy) held that every biological ancestor of Homo sapiens, across the 3.4 billion years from abiogenesis to the present day, was a human being in precisely the same sense that a human being is a continuous biological development from zygote to biological death.
I don’t see any way of putting a positive spin on that claim.
Again, if Steiner wants to believe that because of his a priori commitment to Neoplatonic emanationism and he wants to cherry-pick the fossil record so it makes him feel better, that’s on him. We still don’t have anything that would be accepted by the majority of biologists. Yet CharlieM claimed that they would.
I wonder what these folks think about abortion.
Every cell in the human body, except possibly bacterial cells and red corpuscles, is a potential human being.
Your statement assumes that humans are more evolved than humans. Which demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about evolution.
I am late to this thread so I appologize in advance if I am repeating what has already been said.
The facts are that our conciousness can be destroyed, suspended and/or altered by physical changes to the brain. The arguments for a non physical conciousness boils diwn to near death experiences, which have been replicated through physical experiments, and free will, which is impossible to prove exists. Every action we take and every thought we have, is preceded by chemical changes in the brain. Sounds to me like physics all the way down. I have yet to hear anything from Carlie, William, Mung or Phoodoo that amount to anything more than opinion and desire.
But its not just the difference between me and a scientist, it is the differnce between scientist and scientist, lay person and lay person. There were and are some very intelligent people, including scientists who interpret the evidence in a similar way to Owen Barfield and John Davy. That matter is a product of mind and not vice versa.
This is not how Rudolf Steiner sees things. For him the world we perceive is not a reality, it is half-reality. By adding the concepts which belong to our percepts we re-attach what we, in the first place, because of our organisation, have held apart.
Steiner explains how we experience reality thus:
If you understand what Barfield’s final participation is all about, you will realise that it is the process by which we begin the journey back to reality., only this time in full self-consciousness.
Congratulations on your ability to decipher that nonsense. Wouldn’t a billion-year old ancestor of Homo sapiens also be a frog, a potato, a paramecium, and a diatom in precisely the same sense? How does Steiner reconcile that ancient human being simultaneously being a frog, potato, paramecium, diatom, and every other eukaryote too?
Atoms are humans also, as are electrons and quarks.
Configuration means nothing.
Say what now?
Now that was a serious pile of deepity. I was most struck by this quote:
I believe I can translate that much, at least, into English: “If you don’t agree with me, it’s because you’re stupid.” Cool.
Especially all of the philosophy books that point out that Steiner’s full of horseshit.
Glen Davidson
But could they provide meaningful evidence for this?
I’ll note that the answer in fact is “no.”
Glen Davidson
I’m a science bigot, but I think the question of what matter is was inherited by physics about 90 years ago.
Not that physicists have the answers, but they do have more useful questions.
Thanks to CharlieM for bringing Rudolf Steiner to my attention. Whilst I might not be impressed with his philosophy, his architectural skills are noteworthy.
Also Jiddu Krishnamurti.
I’m willing to grant that matter is a product of mind. But I won’t agree with the “and not vice versa.”
Yes, everything that we can say about matter comes to us via minds. But we are not inventing matter out of nothing. Our ideas of matter come from our interactions with the world.
While it is possible that there is nothing that completely fits with our ideas of matter, there is nevertheless something from which we are deriving those descriptions. Our descriptions might be wrong in detail, but they are good enough to be useful to us.
In your rush to criticise Steiner you have actually criticised the words of the poet Robert Hamerling who Steiner was quoting.
<
blockquote cite=”comment-139471″>
CharlieM, to John:
Charlie, in your rush to criticize John, you failed to notice that he did not attribute that quote to Steiner.
Neil,
You’re conflating “matter” with “what we can say about matter.”
See above.
Yeah, I care about that.
Why did Steiner quote him?
Word lawyering.
Glen Davidson
Just for the record, I don’t think either “mind precedes and is the cause of matter” or “matter precedes and is the cause of mind” can be made any good sense of, anyway not in light of phenomenology and contemporary science.
What does make sense — here being extremely dogmatic, even for me! — is to begin by distinguishing between
The epistemological question about how we can reliably distinguish between the subjective, intersubjective, and objective dimensions of our being-in-the-world, the provisional assessments of our cognitive judgments with regard to those dimensions, the provisional criteria used to vindicate those assessments, with an eye towards revising those criteria should need arise;
and
the ontological question of what the world must be like such that it can include, as one of its parts, at specific times and places, cognitive agents capable of performing at least some of the activities briefly canvassed in (1).
For although we cannot separate the ontological and epistemological questions, nothing but confusion will result if we take our provisional inquiry into the conditions of inquiry as a determination of what is fundamental real. We start off in a position where we must conduct an inventory of our cognitive powers, and from there consider what powers we have and what we lack, such that we can consider what lies within our purview and what outside of it.
But in the course of actually conducting inquiry, we inquire both about ourselves and about the world. That in turn may require us to revise — maybe substantially — the self-understanding developed at the outset of inquiry. What we take ourselves terminus a quo is not what we must turn out to be terminus ad quem.
It is also crucial not to allow ourselves to be held hostage by previous stages of inquiry. The very concept of “matter” is not one that finds easy accommodation in contemporary physics, since what we call “particles” are actually fields and not tiny billiard balls. And who is to say what the successor-concept to fields will be in whatever theory replaces quantum field theory when we figure out how to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity?
Likewise, it is by no means obvious that the Augustinian-Cartesian conception of the mind, with its contents immediately graspable by itself and possessing libertarian freedom, is what would be disclosed by a patient phenomenology of the sort developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Even here, within phenomenology itself, there is room for correction and improvement.
The lesson I draw here is that neither the world nor the self is immediately present to us as having the structure that it has, but that in both science and phenomenology we must inquire, in mutual criticism and self-criticism, synchronically and diachronically, to arrive at successively better and better (we hope!) understandings of the world and of the self.
Can you give us an instance of the limb of any other vertebrate which you consider to be less specialized than the human forelimb?
By what criterion is the hominid forelimb less specialized than that of any other tetrapod?
You need a non-anthropocentric criterion of “specialization” in order to make your case here. Sure, humans can do lots of things with our arms — we can grasp, throw, carry, punch, pinch, lift — but we can’t fly, or burrow, or rend.
On the whole “freeing the hands” narrative, this is a nice reminder of how we can assess the evidence a bit differently
<a href=:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248486800410“>Freed hands or enslaved feet? A note on the behavioural implications of ground-dwelling bipedalism
Consciousness is not a fundamental property of all matter, it is the attribute of beings. Hands, brains, heads and livers are not entities that can come into being or exist in isolation let alone be conscious, they are parts of a whole and it is the whole that is conscious.
It’s clear if you look at the evolutionary history of primates that the human forelimb has been specialized for grasping tree branches and fruit, to the point where it’s not all that good at other common forelimb uses among mammals like walking, attack, or digging. Some other primates have compromised between grasping and walking, and I would have to consider their limbs therefore less specialized. Once more, all you’re doing here is playing with words to make humans special and other organisms less special, which I suppose is good for your ego, though for nothing else.
Homo sapiens is the designation we give to our species. We use it for analytical purposes. It is an artificial construct we give to the present stage in the development of humans from our historical origins and on into our future existence on earth.
A snapshot in time is but a part, it is not the reality of the whole.
You can say that if you want, I guess, but then stop pretending that your view is consistent with any of the facts established by scientific means.
So why pretend that the snapshot is the reality of the whole? Why use the name of the snapshot for the whole?
Glen Davidson
By “essence” I mean features of organisms which were not thought to be possessed by them at earthly life’s beginnings. Major changes such as the acquisition of multi-cellularity, ability to breathe out of water, advanced form of locomotion, internal temperature regulation, understanding communication signals, ability to express one’s feelings, creativity, forethought and rational thought and the like. I would not call increase in size a major change.
I started reading the PDF by Hocks. I stopped because by the second page it was perfectly clear that neither Barfield nor he had the slightest understanding of what Darwin was and wasn’t saying, nor did either of them have any understanding of philosophical interpretations of evolutionary theory.
For those curious about such matters, I highly recommend Dewey’s little essay, The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy. Though Dewey’s understanding of Darwinism is outdated in the details, he correctly grasped its full significance as a conceptual revolution.
In his masterwork Experience and Nature, Dewey shows that it is precisely by taking Darwinism seriously and constructing a new metaphysics of nature on its basis that we can sweep the field clean of Cartesianism and Kantianism. The reason for this is elegant and deceptively simple: subject and object are necessarily co-implicated and coordinated because the subject/object relation is an outgrowth of the organism/environment relation.
Just as there is an distinct kind of environment specified relative to every distinct kind of organism — the environment of the mosquito is not that of the bat, though their environments causally impinge on one another — so too, conversely, every specification of an organism entails the environmental features or milieu for that organism.
(We can make Dewey’s thought here more precise by talking about what Gibson calls “affordances”, and we can make affordance more rigorous in contemporary terms by talking about the dynamic coupling of endogenous neurodynamics and exogenous salient patterns, but the point comes through nevertheless.)
As I see it, we can bring Dewey’s fundamental insight into contact with 21st century science at a stroke: the subject/object distinction (not dichotomy) emerges within the order of nature when a far-from-equilbrium autocatalytic system became enclosed within a semi-permeable membrane.
There is no need to posit a Mind as the cause of the universe in order to explain how minds began to evolve within this universe as parts of it.
You like to define words in odd ways. I doubt anyone else uses “essence” in that way. Your ideas of what constitutes a major change are likewise arbitrary and idiosyncratic. And seem chosen, once again, specifically to make humans and not other organisms special. What are you compensating for?
Kantian Naturalist,
Thank goodness someone has a crystal understanding of the philosophical implications of Darwinism.
I mean, if “the subject/object distinction (not dichotomy) emerges within the order of nature when a far-from-equilbrium autocatalytic system became enclosed within a semi-permeable membrane.” then….well, then! You see?
Get it?
Thanks for clearing that up KN. Because I was wondering if we needed a Mind as the cause of the Universe, but now I can clearly see we don’t, I mean, if the subject/object distinction emerges, because the semi-permeable membrane houses an autocatalytic system, that is clearly not in equilibrium, who needs to posit a Mind? It’s actually so obvious, I can’t believe others haven’t already realized it.
Do we need a Mind as the causes of intelligence in the universe? Why no, (notwithanautocatalyticsystemnotinequilibriuminasemipermeable,whichcausesthesubjectobjectdistinctionnotdichotomy-said the cat in the hat)! Silly. Though, were it a non-permeable membrane, I can see why you might think that!
As always you have taken what seems a tough question to crack, laid it out with the ease of a Mr. Rodgers bedtime story’s clarity. Bravo!
The lack of emergence of a subject-object distinction, not dichotomy, from an auto-catalytic system in a semi-permeable membrane within the order of nature perhaps?
phoodoo,
Croutons for your word salad?
As John said, that’s not what anybody else means by essence. Also, it’s ambiguous. Thought by whom and at what time “not to be possessed by them at earthly life’s beginnings”? To give just three of an infinite number of possibilities, thought by cave men back in the day, by evolutionary scientists yesterday, or (as I’m thinking) drummed up by Steiner on one of his spewing days?
First regarding your latter point, “Thought by whom and at what time”. Thought by anyone who believes that life evolved from relatively simple, small beginnings. I would imagine that you see the beginning of life in this way. A rudimentary reproducing, cell-like entity separated from its local environment in only the most basic of ways. Or do you believe that in the beginning life forms were complex, multi-cellular, sel-regulating creatures moving through the environment at will?
Second, regarding essence. If I asked you which organisms possessed features such as consisting of multiple cell types, thermoregulation, higher senses such as vision and/or hearing, caring for offspring; that sort of thing, you would probably reply birds or mammals. Why? Because these are defining features of the type. They are certainly not defining features of bacteria, and I can’t think of any evolutionist who would say that these features appeared at the beginning of life on earth.
CharlieM,
I have no problem with the use of ‘essence’ to mean ‘defining characteristics’: it’s not how it’s generally used these days in philosophy circles (since Putnam and Kripke), but it’s certainly an acceptable use. It’s not however, what you said ‘essence’ meant when asked. You gave that odd definition that I criticized for being both ambiguous and very strange. If you meant ‘defining characteristics,’ maybe that’s what you should have said.
Secondly, in answer to your questions about my own taxonomic views regarding birds and bacteria, I don’t have any. I’m happy to leave those determinations to people who have some idea what they’re talking about. I feel no compunction to pretend to be an expert on such matters. I believe in the ‘division of linguistic labor’ and happily render unto scientists.
Is that horseshit in the philosophical or the colloquial sense?
Philosophy is so fricking cool. You can say anything, I mean anything, and some people won’t laugh at you.
If this site isn’t enough proof of that:
BANK OF AMERICA: There’s a 20%-50% chance we’re inside the matrix and reality is just a simulation
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bank-america-theres-20-50-152845381.html
Philosophy is like evolutionary theory in that everybody thinks s/he’s an expert. Just read one popular book and have, you know, feelings on the issues. That’s apparently Charles’ approach, anyhow.
But, FWIW there are very few people, trained philosophers or not, who don’t laugh at Rudolf Steiner.
Generally, defining features should be both universal in the class and absent outside it. None of these is a defining feature of birds or mammals. Certainly all birds and mammals have the first three, but there are in fact some birds that lack the last. And not one of them is limited to birds and mammals.
More importantly, the only defining feature of any taxonomic group is phylogeny, as any other feature can potentially be lost or transformed in descendants. Taxa do not have essences.
And finally, you are looking at evolution through your personal bias toward some kind of progressive agenda. “Higher” senses? What counts as a lower sense? Once again, everything you do is intended to place you at the pinnacle of evolution. Charlie is the measure of all things.
That’s a blatant distortion (not its more than that, its completely untrue). He was well regarded, if controversial, and 100 years later people still know who he is.
BTW, His clinician partner, Ita Wegman, developed Iscador from mistletoe extract, and it is still used as a cancer treatment to this day. I guess they were just quacks who got lucky.
John Harshman,
There is virtually nothing that is universal about the behavior of almost any class of beings. Are humans societal, nurturing, smart? Symmetrical? Omnivorous? Monogamous? Hunter gatherers?
Another whopper from a guy who says he loves evidence and science.
Same is true of Ayn Rand. That doesn’t mean she’s a serious philosopher.