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Re: Intelligent Design vs. Darwin

Lots to think about in Jamie's post! Comments interspersed:

Jamie wrote:
well, maybe death angst isn't the impetus I think it
might be, but for a long time I resisted the notion that
'wars' are the elephant in the tea-cozy when in comes
to technological innovation. Passive peaceful (read:
"self satisfied") cultures rarely advance technically;
stress instigates responce and humans' search for meaning
likely comes from 'mental competence .. under stress'.


I remember someone once asserting that the Crusades were the reason humanity progressed out of the dark ages. He was stating something along the lines of your argument as his reasoning. My counter-argument is that it is more the cross-pollination of cultures than the stresses and realities of war that are responsible. I think wars tend to set humanity back, in general. The wholesale burning of the libraries at Alexandria are a perfect example, as are the deaths of people who could have become great thinkers, at a young age, because of being conscripted or massacred, etc. I also think that wars tend to feed the blind hatred that fuels them, which spreads the hatred to the next generation. Sting wrote lyrics to a song entitled "History Will Teach Us Nothing" (although, I actually don't agree with that sentiment!) that put the idea very succinctly:
Convince an enemy, convince him that he's wrong
Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long
A simple act of faith
In reason over might
To blow up his children will only prove him right

It's almost a surprise that there was mixing of cultures as the Crusades raped and pillaged their way across the land, wiping cultures out, but I guess it's inevitable to find tools that are made differently, houses that are made differently, foods that are different, etc, and to learn from that exposure. Not everybody was a maniac, even if they got caught up in the Crusades as a soldier.

Jamie wrote:
Given your v-ger story, let me amend my contention
to embrace your example: cessation of being is an
unavoidable state that is (typically) beyond an individual's
control. Alternately, coming-into-being is totally and completely
beyond a being's control.

Juxtapose this with the operant reality that sustenence
of life-existence relies significantly with an entity's
competence to -be- in control if its own destiny and security.

I think I understand what you're saying, and I do agree that the fear of the unknown and a sense of being trapped by an inevitable change, such as death, can certainly spur a lot of angst in a consciously aware mind. On the other hand, "control" is such an illusion! Do we ever really have control, of anything? I think we can only define the level of control we have by degrees, and it's never total control. Ever. It just seems like it, locally, sometimes. All we can really do is try to put certain desired entailments in place, and hope nothing interferes. But what if we don't understand the entailments well enough and we put different ones in place than the ones we intended??? (Hmmm... and how do we tell the difference between faulty entailments being responsible for an unexpected outcome or the interference of some aspect we didn't detect? What if it's BOTH-- and they're interacting?!) That's life for you, in this "Best of All Possible Worlds"!

Jamie wrote:
Mind is an evaluation-system, in that light, constantly and
unendingly coping with the energy and information and situations
it resides within and as part of. Chemical responsively or
mind reactively .. continuation of weighted satisfaction ..
with persistence-of-being being the implicit endeavored goal,
induces behaviors that seek that end.

(I won't go into obvious negative-result situations, like moths
to a flame, etc., but they too can be evaluated with a positive
impetus factor as driver.)

I agree with this, but I think you're forgetting a crucial factor which explains why: Life is anticipatory. Of all the myriad complex system organizational types (as far as we know), organisms are the only anticipatory systems. The assumption of a future is built into us-- it's possibly the source, as well as the effect of our internal predictive models. This needs more study. Those models are the source of a lot of entailment for all living organisms and nowhere more so than with human beings-- who have the interactive entailments of not one but TWO anticipatory systems to contend with-- in our own physiology. The human mind is driven to learn, and learning is anticipatory behavior.

The moth to a flame is the victim of its own internal, predictive models, which didn't have any information about fire encoded into them. Most creatures who evolved in an environment which included regular forest or brush fires has instinctive behaviors encoded for recognition and survival of that contingency, but a flame without the attending heat and smoke of a brush fire??? Not. I always found it interesting how smoke is used by beekeepers to make the bees quiet and docile. Their models seem to drive them to stay put if they sense a fire.

Jamie wrote:
If a life form were infinitely competent, it would never
encounter sufficient stress that it would give over any
quantity of its activity time to seek comprehensions
that wouldn't impact its functionings in any way, any how,
anyway. Nothing is gained but such an achieved understanding.
Immortality couldn't be 'improved', and never disqualified.

Well, necessity IS, often, the mother of invention. But I think the environment (food, shelter, companionship) would provide plenty of impetus for that! I also think there needs to be a distinction between immortality and omnipotence or omniscience. Just because we wouldn't die doesn't mean we would be all-powerful or al-knowing. I still think that any organism with a mind is going to be driven to consider all sorts of potentials, regardless of immortality. For example, just because one is immortal doesn't save one from feeling pain.

I've got to go take care of some things, but there's more in this post to discuss, so I'll put the rest of my comments into a new post, a bit later today.

Cheers,
Judith

The rest of Sting's lyrics for "History Will Teach Us Nothing":
If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without a breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast

If God is dead and an actor plays his part
His words of fear will find their way to a place in your heart
Without the voice of reason every faith is its own curse
Without freedom from the past things can only get worse

Sooner or later just like the world first day
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away
Sooner or later just like the world first day
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away
Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away

History will teach us nothing
History will teach us nothing

Our written history is a catalogue of crime
The sordid and the powerful, the architects of time
The mother of invention, the oppression of the mild
The constant fear of scarcity, aggression as its child

Convince an enemy, convince him that he's wrong
Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long
A simple act of faith
In reason over might
To blow up his children will only prove him right
History will teach us nothing

Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Nov 21, 2005, at 10:08 PM, James N Rose wrote:

Judith,

replying in reverse ..

well, maybe death angst isn't the impetus I think it
might be, but for a long time I resisted the notion that
'wars' are the elephant in the tea-cozy when in comes
to technological innovation. Passive peaceful (read:
"self satisfied") cultures rarely advance technically;
stress instigates responce and humans' search for meaning
likely comes from 'mental competence .. under stress'.


Given your v-ger story, let me amend my contention
to embrace your example: cessation of being is an
unavoidable state that is (typically) beyond an individual's
control. Alternately, coming-into-being is totally and completely
beyond a being's control.

Juxtapose this with the operant reality that sustenence
of life-existence relies significantly with an entity's
competence to -be- in control if its own destiny and security.

Mind is an evaluation-system, in that light, constantly and
unendingly coping with the energy and information and situations
it resides within and as part of. Chemical responsively or
mind reactively .. continuation of weighted satisfaction ..
with persistence-of-being being the implicit endeavored goal,
induces behaviors that seek that end.

(I won't go into obvious negative-result situations, like moths
to a flame, etc., but they too can be evaluated with a positive
impetus factor as driver.)

So, I still extend the contention that cognitive recognition
of having or not full-life-competency (having to do with
whether or not we as individuals or collectives can ultimately
and unerringly control our own existence(s)) .. is a major
driver into the hunger to understand what does or might have
such high power/control.

If a life form were infinitely competent, it would never
encounter sufficient stress that it would give over any
quantity of its activity time to seek comprehensions
that wouldn't impact its functionings in any way, any how,
anyway. Nothing is gained but such an achieved understanding.
Immortality couldn't be 'improved', and never disqualified.


As to RR and Aristotle, your dad was a skilled fortunate,
able to dispassionately identify performance essences,
even and especially in embellishing on efficient cause.

I'm coping with a similar trans-analysis of Godel,
who's ideas have the same potential of off-tracking
human thinking.

Long ago I wrote that if an incorporal being visited
this universe and found it inhabited by one and only one
atom, that the dynamics and relationships extant in a single
atom would be sufficient to project and extrapolate from,
the whole possibility of all of a known filled saturated
density populated and inhabited universe such as we actually have.

All qualia and potentials could be extended and derived
from a sublimb analysis of a single atom.

I termed the information content of such an atom (or even
better -- a primordial primordial mote of spacetimematterenergy)
as "the ultimte informationload carrier"; because it essentially
would harbor all real information -and- all potential information,
including yet-to-'exist' ... "emerged information".

All of a universe .. not in a morph-crafted quantum soup .. where
the whole of a universe would reside simply in full content ..
'over there' on the other side of the magic curtain, but here,
resident in a mote of potential, hyper coded into infinitessimality,
able to eventually 'become' because the nature of the mote includes/
included just such potential derivitive and arisable from its
actioning structure.

Efficient cause seems to envolve or evo-volve with patterned
regularity, with improving informational competencies and
performabilities. So such a wonderment -could- be comprehended
as 'intelligent design'; or, it could be comprehended neutrally,
as a "self emersive" universe. Existentially self inventive and
explorative; engaged in self trans-evolution, its efficient causes
arising in the instance of their appearances and not before.

The interplay of likelihoods against preclusions .. with emergents
being .. whatever results the situation(s) allow. And once we have
emergents, the system scurries to validate its own products.

;-)


write ya later ... going to make m'self some survival-dinner,
now that I gave the list my first hour at home. :-)

bye!, Jamie