Bertvan
>>No
>>philosophy should be considered more "scientific" than another, and none
>>should be imposed upon school children (or anyone else) as ultimate
>>"scientific" truth.
Because you put quotes around "scientific," I'm not sure what you mean by
it; apparently not scientific in a literal sense. But, in any case,
philosophy is not supposed to be scientific in quite the same sense that
physics or biology is. Nevertheless, philosophies can be pro or anti-science
in a number of ways, such as by rejecting reason (the most general way),
etc.
<snip>
Bertvan
>> No one is going to "prove" any philosophy.
Chris
Again, the quotes make it seem that you do not mean proof in a literal
sense. But, I will assume, for the sake of this remark, that you DO mean it
literally. Since this is a philosophical claim, I'm wondering if you can
prove it. If you can, then you ARE proving (part of) a philosophy. If you
can't, then why should we take it seriously?
Obviously, not EVERYTHING in a philosphy can be proved, though this does not
mean that not everything can be VALIDATED. For example, I can't prove that
there is Existence (i.e., that SOMETHING exists), because such a proof, to
be valid, would have to start from premises that do not already assume
existence. There are no such premises, because the use of a premise assumes
existence, as well as does the QUESTION of whether there is anything that
exists, not to mention the concept of proof itself. Much of modern-day
epistemological theory founders on the rocks of self-refutation in this way.
Moral: One must be very careful when making such global denials, lest one
deny the possibility of having premises or other basis upon which to base
such a denial.
<snip>
Susan
>"progress" is an invention of the 19th century. It was thought that life
>evolved from "lower" to "higer" and eventually to our wonderful selves, the
>crown of creation. That is not the case. Evolution does not have a
>direction in mind. Species evolve to meet a specific environmental
>challenge (like bacteria that are being starved).
Chris
Actually, this is not quite true. Evolution does not have a direction in
mind, for sure, because evolution as such has no mind. However, this does
not mean that reality does not impose general conditions that DO in fact
give evolution a direction of sorts, because, in the long run, there will
tend to be species that have certain types of traits will tend to have
survival advantages. What direction does evolution evolve in? Simple: It
evolves in the direction of ever-more-sophisticated methods of
preserving/perpetuating/propagating information.
Evolution, ALL evolution, is the evolution of information. For most of the
span of life on Earth, evolution has been mainly the evolution of
information about how to preserve/perpetuate/propagate survival information
via RNA/DNA. Only fairly recently has evolution ITSELF evolved to the point
where evolution is largely exo-genetic, using information storage media such
as books, computer storage, the environment, and so on. Computers reproduce,
using humans, factories, the Internet, and other computers as reproductive
organs, and as they do, they vary, and there is a lot of culling going on.
Software evolves by a similar means.
Evolution does have a direction, both for itself and for organisms: More and
more effective means of doing survival-things with information. One
consequence of this is that, as the survival requirements of information
become more and more sophisticated, the SCOPE of the information needed
becomes more general. The bare replicating molecule in a "soup" needs very
little information. Human DNA, another replicating molecule that uses, among
other things, the entire human body as a means of replicating itself, needs
information on a fairly vast scale. Further, once the means for handling so
much information becomes fairly well developed, IT begins to serve as much
of the environment and replication mechanism of information. In our case,
this takes the form of language, concepts, ideas, philosophies, theories,
and so forth. The "information" that does this is not always conducive to
the survival of the genes, even though it was those very same (or very
similar) genes that gave rise to such a sophisticated information processor
as the human brain to begin with.
Of course, the direction of evolution as a whole is not necessarily the
direction of evolution in local niches. Parasites may "devolve" because,
given their environment, the "devolved" form is a better survivor. And, even
fairly evolved organisms can get themselves "trapped" in evolutionary
dead-ends. But, evolution as a whole will still tend to produce "entities"
that will become informational more and more sophisticated and general
because, in general (other things being equal or sufficiently nearly so),
the organism with the better information will pass that information on
better than the one with poorer information. Even among parasites, the
parasite that has the better information about the host will tend to have an
advantage over the one that has poorer information. The tick that "knows" a
better way to get to, and cling to, the dog, will tend to do better than an
otherwise equal tick that "knows" only much more primitive ways (the tick
that irritates the hell out of the dog won't do as well as the tick that is
able to drill its way in without annoying the dog to the level of scratching
the tick away (again, other things being sufficiently nearly equal)).
In a sense, it's not so much that evolution has a direction. It's that
evolution keeps on "working" at it, and in the process generates more and
more sophisticated "organisms," which does not mean that all of the
previously-existing organisms are deleted. Wherever there's a niche that can
be reached by the means available, it will be reached unless it disappears
too fast. It happens that there are niches for ever more-and-more
sophisticated forms of evolution of information.
This is to be expected in a universe with a basic physics that allows for
fairly long-lasting "zones" of semi-stable structures in an environment of
flux and energy-flow, and for the existence of complex structures made of
simpler ones, these complex structures also being semi-stable (replicating,
but with variations that can be culled for "good" ones, for "keepers" (as
in, "this variation's a keeper")). If information can't change, it can't
evolve. If information can't be stored in stable forms at all, it also can't
evolve; it has to wait until things have "cooled" enough to allow structures
but not so much that structures are unchangeable, if only via imperfect
replication.
Susan is right in one sense: Evolution as such, does not have a GOAL. It is
headed in a certain direction, but not because it is "drawn" in that
direction, but because, while it is "pushed" in every direction, it is able
to actually "move" easily only in certain directions, like the flow of pasta
dough through the nozzle of a rotini-making machine (the "variations" of the
direction of flow that would go through the side of the nozzle assembly are
blocked; the pasta is not seeking the goal of becoming rotini; it's just
that it has to become rotini to get out of the machine and it has to get out
of the machine because it is being PUSHED, not pulled; such is the
"evolution" of a glob of pasta dough in a rotini-making machine). (That has
got to be one of the weirdest simile/metaphors I've ever used.)
In answer to Tim Ikeda's question about how general the evolvability of
evolution is: It is VERY general; I have distinguished at least six stages
(if I remember rightly) of evolution itself evolving as the
information-manipulation and storage mechanisms become more sophisticated. I
don't see any limit to the process in the future, either. Every new means of
storing and manipulating information becomes a new step in the evolution of
evolution itself. We can now routinely create new SPECIES in laboratories,
so even genetic evolution is effected by the evolution of information made
possible by the genetic evolution of the human brain made possible by the
prior genetic information-storage complexity that allowed for large,
complex, multi-organed, giga-celled organisms (e.g., primate bodies), etc.
Evolution evolves because, each time a new and more-effective means of
information-storage/propagation evolves, it tends to bloom until IT becomes
a niche, an environment, for FURTHER evolution of evolution.