Do Philosophers ever take Evolution into account?

Philosophy
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What does that actually tell you about life? How can you build on that? Or what can you extract out of that?

On the other hand, take a statement that comes out of actual fundamental observations:

“We cannot understand an organism without also understanding its environment.”

Recognizes the significances of the barrier life forms create around themselves.
Recognizes that an organism’s development and evolution is absolutely depend on the environment it’s embedded within. The two are part of the same dynamic inter-connected physically reality.

Or to put it another way:

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action.
On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world.

Or here.

Or lack thereof.
Who is any of us to talk?
Who was Descartes to talk?
Lot of reaching for perfection and absolutes. A superb mind, discipled and organized and steadfast.
But when it comes down to actual science of understanding this physical world - what did he have to offer?
Not his fault, had he lived in a later age, his mind would have had facts to work with, rather than trapped in the jail of his own philosophizing and logic-ing.

He’s remembered for his thinking ability and the conceit that: I THINK THEREFORE I AM - which is really a whole bunch of baloney as most recognized, even as they embrace the conceit.

We are evolved biological observation instruments - we think as an evolutionary consequence of existing in a physical world.
That world will exist long after we are gone.

That’s why I keep arguing with reason and references and attempt to layout my position as rationally as I can. It’s also why I take the time to review your and other contrary arguments.

I’ve never claimed to be unbiased, that doesn’t mean I’m closed to new information.

But if that information simply doesn’t compute with the accumulated knowledge I possess,
such as supposing our consciousness mind and our homeostasis systems don’t communicate with each other, well, what can I say. It doesn’t compute.

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What I have claimed is that at an early age I was given a free pass, that apparently left me immune to religious indoctrination.
I have also claimed that much of today’s philosophizing is haunted and saturated with the hangover of religious indoctrination. Read Descartes repetitive references to God, and perfection and certainty - before rebuking me on this.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Discourse on Method, by René Descartes

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm
“God” is found 30 times

“Soul” is found 18 times

“Perfection” is found 24 times

“Metaphysic” is found 11 times

“True” is found 34 times

“Truth” is found 67 times

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We don’t need to understand the environment at all as long as we have the required survival mechanisms.

Animals don’t understand nature, but all living organisms are physically and behaviorally attuned to nature.

You are reading more into it than it needs .
You are citing billions of years of evolution is if that happened in a day.
The fact is that evolution isn’t complicated at all.
It is a very simple mathematical equation that over time creates complex patterns.
Just look at the evolutionary curve of a simple fractal code.
This is what happens with the evolution of regularly repeating patterns

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Why are you doing this apples and walnuts thing.
Ifn’t one wanted to understand an organism, one would then need to understand the environment it was built for (exists within)!

If we “wanted to understand the environment, or not” is an entirely different matter.

Says the guy that suggests I watch that Hameroff video.

Incidentally Write, what thread did you embed that video into, I can’t find where it’s posted?
Though I’ve watched that video, and done a bit of fact checking.
But that’s for another time.

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You are absolutely right. I read that in haste and gave you a knee jerk response.
Of course it requires knowledge of the environment to understand an organism and why it has specific adaptive qualities to that environment.

I was thinking that the organism does not need to “understand” its environment to have the evolved required survival mechanisms, but that was a bad interpretation of your question. My apologies.

1 Like
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Here it is again.
Mind that I am not so much into the spiritual aspects, even as a universal quantum concept, where the quantum event generates a “bing”, an instance of unconscious cognition, somewhat like homeostasis (balancing mechanisms in connected organic biochemical complexities).

So I just concentrate on the science of anesthesia, at which Dr. Hameroff is a practising expert.

Pay attention to the illustration of brain function @ 8:45

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Do Philosophers ever take Evolution into account?

Yes. If you are talking about modern philosophers, that know modern science and are theorizing based on it. If not, they are pseudo-philosophers. Science is the marriage of the traditional mythological type thinking, asking why, coming up with an answer, AND, logical, empirical, testing of those thoughts, putting them into language that can be understood across disciplines.

Evolution includes the last 10,000 years when science rose and fell around the world. The natural human tendency is to mess with things, make tools, advance crafts, fight about them, and be at the mercy of the environment. Science is counter-intuitive. It took time to develop the values of groups of people over divine rule. It required some of the things we don’t like, like military skills and capitalism.

We’re still working on it. It’s why people say things like “it’s common sense” or “it’s obvious” when they hear something from a rich person who controls a lot of resources. Here are a series of two articles that brought it all together for me.

Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? • Richard Carrier

The Origins of Greek Philosophy » Internet Infidels

Note to Write4: The second article includes the importance of the development of an alphabet with vowels. It allowed people to learn language quicker, and have a language that crossed disciplines. Before that, there was only specialized knowledge that only a few could gain.

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Yes, once we could express abstractly how things worked that’s when “knowledge” increased exponentially.

But as Bonnie Bassler posited, it was the bacteria that first used bio-chemical words for “quorum sensing” (collective decision-making) and being some of the oldest living things, marked the beginning of communication in living organisms.

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Yes, I think it was Firmucutes who said, “we shall sense the quorom and move forward to a new dawn”

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Come to think of it, democracies are founded on the principle of quorum sensing.

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But then you offer up an interesting article, but still, it’s all about the adventures of the human mindscape, the “struggle” between philosophizing and sober science among differ people. Another on the Greek dark ages and origins of their philosophical outlook.

Not a word about evolutionary stage setting, or about human’s animal nature.

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Where is the line between human mindscape and our evolving bodies, which includes the mind. We evolved to be able to use language. Either there is no distinction, or you are moving goalposts.

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One of the deepest and most lasting legacies of Descartes’ philosophy is his thesis that mind and body are really distinct—a thesis now called “mind-body dualism.” He reaches this conclusion by arguing that the nature of the mind (that is, a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely different from that of the body (that is, an extended, non-thinking thing), and therefore it is possible for one to exist without the other. Descartes, Rene: Mind-Body Distinction | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

etc.

Okay, we evolved to be able to use language, your point is?

Don’t understand what you are trying to say, or ask, here.

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Just as quick response for now…

Why are you presenting the dualist narrative? We agree it’s wrong.

Lots of people see the problem and are trying to figure it out.

https://www.consciousentities.com/2018/09/whats-wrong-with-dualism/

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Hmmm, the narrative is wrong, OK but does that make the observation wrong?

Are you disputing the fact of the qualitative material difference between,
physical matter, brain/body -
and the thoughts that emanate from that body?

I look forward to your reading list.

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What facts do you have about the material of thoughts? Who has solved that problem? Where is there a thought in a jar somewhere? What is the entire process of thoughts “emanating”? Thoughts are something different than sensations and the physics of perception, but that doesn’t tell us what thoughts are.

Here’s something I dug up from the archives, back in 2016, before it became imperative to try to figure out how to talk to people who think I’m bent on destroying their way of life.

At 31 minutes Ryan asks where we get morality from. Dan takes 12 minutes, and covers the evolution of humans and the intrinsic desires that motivate us to build a society. He notes it is based on scholarship, but just quickly gives one reference.

My notes:
Evolution doesn’t dictate how we use the skills inherited.
1 Selective pressures vs what we actually have, how did we get them.
2 We thrive best when we are cooperating. We also had some in-group protection, like hate was a strategy, but that’s “how we got here”, not proscriptive of how we should live
The science of Decision Theory. Started with Hobbs, Kant. Rosseau, developed the values, before the math
Why prefer life? Why not be a free rider? 1) Power is good, but it’s more than domination, we developed those powers because we are them, 2) To do that, I need the functioning society and other people, we thrive through empowering each other, it takes less power to destroy things than build things, 3) No need for a divine “ought”, we have practical reasons for decision making.

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That’s the whole point of deeply pondering and appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Mindscape Divide - it isn’t “material” - though it’s produced by the material body interacting with the material world

Heck if you want to be that way, no problems in science have really be “solved” solved. Always be more to learn.

There’s the rub isn’t it? Our thoughts are not like anything in our material world.

Study up on Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms and the Alan Institute, or the Connectome Project, they are learning an incredible amount about how our senses receive and process information - what is the null hypothesis that the flow stops there? It makes no sense. That those impulses then blossom into thoughts that bound back through the system, that seem pretty coherent.

Oh and it’s those experts who are the one’s who have framed the new paradigm, that consciousness is basically the inside reflection of our body/mind dealing with itself and the world it find itself in.

Besides what else makes any coherent sense, that consciousness is somehow beamed down to us from on high, or via Hoffman Conscious Agents, like anything could keep track of all the conscious interaction unfolding at any given moment.

Thanks, I’ll check out that link.

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I only asked because you said it was. I’m trying to nail down what you’re talking about. You want to ponder, but aren’t interested in anyone else’s ponderings.

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I don’t get what I’m supposed to learn from connectome. There are gallery images and talk about the project, but i don’t have the tools to interpret the data

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Here’s something I dug up from the archives, back in 2016, before it became imperative to try to figure out how to talk to people who think I’m bent on destroying their way of life.

Spreaker

028 - Where does morality come from? with Dan Fincke

This week I speak with popular blogger and philosopher, Daniel Fincke. Daniel received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Fordham University in 2010 and currently teaches classes online to anyone who is int

At 31 minutes Ryan asks where we get morality from. Dan takes 12 minutes, and covers the evolution of humans and the intrinsic desires that motivate us to build a society. He notes it is based on scholarship, but just quickly gives one reference.

At about 34 minutes he dismisses the importance of understand where we came and how we developed - for understanding what we have and what we’re going to do with that.

He does point out we are a species that does best when cooperating.

34:50 he doubles down on the dismissal of understanding evolutionary origins

He claims, none of that knowledge tells us how to live.

35:00, no arguing what he says about us existing in a world that can only thrive cooperatively.

37:00 How do we know we should want to flourish
1)

What about someone could still be a free rider

~ We should see power as the ultimate good.
~ But that we should expand out understanding of power.

~ Why develop our talents, because we are our talents

Self interest is in maximizing one’s skills.

40:00 Why then cooperate with the social contract?
For me to succeed I need a thriving society, it’s what empowers me, I have a self-interest in see that it functions as well as it can.

…

He’s an interesting guy, enjoyed listening to him and can appreciate where he’s coming from and it’s okay for what it is,
Still it sure isn’t any where near, my longed for, an example of philosophy incorporating a serious deep understanding of Evolution into their understanding of our self first, and then onto our morals and so on.

He doesn’t mention the fundamental fact that consciousness, (and also living for that matter), is all about interactions. And that lack gets reflected in his attitude. Ego-centric and he brings it to a crescendo at the end of his 12 minutes.

He doesn’t acknowledge that each of us is an evolved biological sensing, thinking organism, born out of the mammalian milieu.

He doesn’t acknowledge that God is a product of our own individual and collective imaginations/thoughts/mindscape.