Evolution as a worldview and basis for being good

Philosophy
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I’m slightly breaking the rule of cross-posting, but there ten-thousand threads about evolution and microtubules and math as the basis of everything, and most of them are hijacking something else, so, either I ban everyone including myself or I try to start this conversation here.

Richard Carrier has one of the few complete books that lays out the scientific history of the universe as we know it and builds on that to provide reasoning for why we should act for the greater for other living creatures, not the least of which are people that you know. I’ll look for more links, but I’ll start with this one that was published before that book came out. He refers to it in the article. As Carrier often does, he builds his view by responding to someone who has a messed up view.

Defending Naturalism as a Worldview: A Rebuttal to Michael Rea’s World Without Design » Internet Infidels

So, he has to start by defending the existence of a naturalistic POV, and that it’s not self-defeating, and not scientism. In other places, Carrier spends many words elaborating on the idea that naturalism is best because it works as opposed to magical thinking which doesn’t. When he talks about discovery of properties, says,

This method entails that “to do science” we not only can but must imagine facts and conditions obtaining in the world, reason from them to conclusions about what would be observed if that model were true and what would be observed instead if that model were not true, then look to see which observations bear out. If the former, then we have ‘confirmed’ to some degree the imagined facts and conditions–even without observing them directly. This is how we discovered atoms, for example, long before we could ‘see’ them in any sense of the word. This is how all science is conducted.

Nothing about neuroscience or having a deep understanding of the pageant of reality add to this. Not for me anyway. This covers how math extends observation and how we can go about finding answers to any difficult problem laid before us.

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A less defensive discussion, more dialog can be found here

The Cognitive Commitments of Naturalism – A Dialog | Naturalism.org

I haven’t read this in totality, but it’s not hard to find simple responses to the discussions we have here,

In other words, it is certainly true (and has to a modest degree been scientifically proven) that “we can only see the world through our conceptual ‘glasses’” but this does not entail, and in fact given the totality of observations made it doesn’t even strongly imply, that, e.g., “causality is just a concept we use to give meaning/interpret some phenomena.” Causality certainly is a concept that we do use to give meaning to or interpret some phenomena, but it is not just a concept, but is a theory that seeks to explain what we observe and so far explains what we observe better than any other theory known.

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See your next post #2… :thinking:

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The book, Sense and Goodness Without God, covers this in more detail, but he addresses the is/ought problem in the second article. Basically, there are brute facts and they don’t have moral judgments, but once we start discovering the world, we can say if we want something then we ought to act a certain way.

Morality is simply the proposal that there is an overriding end shared by all people (universalism) or within distinguishable groups (relativism), and just like an end in medicine (curing patients) or engineering (surviving earthquakes), this “moral end” would entail normative propositions (either for everyone, if universalism is true, or for categorized groups, if relativism is true). Since “moral end” is already defined by all cultures as an end that supercedes all other ends, then it is true by definition that moral ends exist, because everyone will have some end that for them supercedes all others in importance. And if we recognize that a person may think differently who is fully informed of all the relevant true facts and reasoning coherently from those facts, true moral facts would consist of what a person in this state would acknowledge as true, rather than what a person thinks is true at any given time, which establishes moral facts as physical facts in the same way as for medicine and engineering.

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For me, that sounds about as sensible as insisting that learning about history provides nothing . . .

Oh and.

Evolution as a world view.

So are we discussing “Evolution”
or are discussing “world views”

Is it important to appreciate the difference between the two?

Namely,
Evolution being the physical reality we exist within, no matter what any of us things about it.

World Views being the product of our minds. Etc.,etc…

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I think you need to answer that question. You’re the one who keeps bringing it up in over half of the other threads and insisting it is important. But you can’t say why. If you want to have a deep understanding of evolution, that’s cool, it’s part of reality and it’s a huge part of why we are here, but how you decide what’s true, how you arrive at the place where it’s clear that evolution is the best explanation we have so far, you need that to get you there.

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No stop turning this on me. Why not explain what you mean.

I can’t make it any simpler and straight forward than that, now your turn to try a little harder.

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I didn’t say neuroscience and the pageant of reality provide nothing, so I don’t know why what I said would sound like that.

Maybe, but that seems narrow. You can’t have evolution as a theory without the worldview of empiricism, naturalism, and scientific methods. Maybe my bad for putting that in the title. I meant evolution in the broad sense, starting with hydrogen atoms evolving into stars.

See the immediate above

They are definitely two different things. “Worldviews” is a category. Is this an important question? I’m going to set it aside for now.

Same as above. I wouldn’t put it that way. Physical reality is about as broad as you can get. Evolution is a theory.

This is what I’ve been trying to engage for two years, and you just abbreviate now, don’t even try. Of course it’s our minds, what else would it be?

To summarize the thing you responded to; we imagine facts, we reason, we observe and compare how they all match up. If our observations match what we reason about the facts, then there’s a probability we are understanding reality.

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Well there is Physical Reality, the stuff of matter, and here on Earth biology and life.

Your Physical Reality is that you inhabit a physical body that has a bloodline of nearly half a billion years, and yes your body possesses the internal knowledge gained over those hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary development. (learning as much as any accumulation of knowledge/ability is learning.) Some call it instinct, call it what you will, it is what it is.

The other part of that equation is that all roads in modern neuroscience lead to the conclusion that, as with all other living creatures, our sense of aware consciousness, (in humans evolved to a self-awareness beyond that achieved by other creatures. Though aspects of our self awareness is found in other creatures.), is the product of your body - dealing with its outside environment and circumstance.

This awareness compels a different attitude towards oneself and how one processes their own thoughts, it

This is what you wrote:

Well before endeavoring on this intellectual adventure it seems to me it’s advisable to get a realistic appreciation for who you yourself are. That means grappling with the fact that your thoughts are formed by your body/brain.

https://www.naturalism.org/worldview-naturalism/cognitive-commitments

In championing a worldview, we are necessarily forced to defend some version of its presuppositions and implications, and to do this we must engage in argument and analysis. The question is, how deep are we obligated to go in this defense? How many objections, replies, counterarguments, and technicalities must we take on before we’re satisfied that we’ve got a tenable worldview? What are our philosophical responsibilities, and how do we balance them with the practical matter of applying our beliefs to our lives and culture?

There’s no obviously right answer to this question …

But there’s no clear stopping point at which we can declare that the inquiry is over, that our view is secure from doubt. …

Oppositely, supernaturalism can perhaps be understood as entailing explanatory opacity : having prior metaphysical or ontological commitments (e.g. to god, the soul, contra-causal freedom) blocks access to transparent, rational, evidence-based explanations. So, perhaps it’s the inversion of epistemic and ontological priorities that most basically distinguishes naturalism from supernaturalism.

Oh wait, I’m not allowed to complain, because it’s the same old stuff. But your article opened this can of worms, so I’ll ramble.

This is intellectualizing - wonderful stuff, love it, right now I’m hosting a 20 year old Swiss distant cousin, who grandparents hosted me when I was twenty where I got to know his dad when dad was 10-13. Listening to him tell of his travels and the people he’s connected with at Youth Hostels - I’m reminded of how wonderful it was back then being in dynamic endless discussions with interesting people and spending all night “fixing the world” but in the morning we were still the same lost/seeking souls running around trying to make sense of ourselves.

I managed to slog through about half of that exchange you shared, and like I’ve said before, it’s wonderful fun stuff, but how do all those word get to the essence of what it means to be human? If I had the day all to myself, I’d finished it, but the day awaits. Still, for instance what’s a person supposed to do with:

Second, provisional knowledge is not the same thing as provisional fact. That our belief that causation exists and operates a certain way is provisional does not mean that causation itself is provisional. There is a categorical difference between epistemic probability (the probability that what we believe is true) and physical probability (the probability that something will actually happen, e.g. that atom A colliding with atom B will cause B to move in manner C).

How does a regular human who’s busy living, process those words in a way to get something tangible out of 'em?

For me, that paragraph has be reduced to recognizing I am embedded in an absolute physical evolved world - this desk I’m looking at, is the same physical object, no matter who’s looking at it, be it human, animal or bug or anything else.

It is how each of us processes and perceives that object, that is what varies - because each of us only knows our own reality within the framework of one’s body’s needs and awareness. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

For me a foundational awareness of my body as the vehicle that produces my mind and thoughts, has lead to an inescapable deep understanding of my body as the product of Earth’s evolutionary processes (that half a billion years worth of evolving bloodline) and that my thoughts are the cumulative result of all the days and experiences of my life. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

You say that’s irrelevant, but I can’t fathom such a suggestion, because understanding oneself is foundational to living a personally successful life, and navigating life’s endless surprises and disappointments, heart aches and successes.

I don’t dismiss the intellectualizing, but without a solid foundation of self awareness, it’s a lot of handwaving, where nothing actually gets resolved.

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You can use whatever whiny language you want. I wish you would just make your case. You’re saying we first have to understand how our brain/body works then we’ll have some insight that will help us relate to the natural world. But you don’t connect the knowledge to the insight.

What I mean when I say “Nothing about neuroscience or having a deep understanding of the pageant of reality add to this,” is we have spent centuries proving the value of the naturalistic POV and that’s what led us to the current science of brain, evolution, and seeing ourselves as connected to nature. It’s not wrong to study biological evolution, but it doesn’t change the worldview of naturalism, it verifies it.

To clarify my title, I meant “evolution” beginning with the big bang, gases becoming minerals, those becoming cells, that becoming life, with us as a very recent arrival. But, again, you only need that summary, you don’t need to know the details of any particular science to get the naturalistic worldview. Or, to put it another way, you don’t need to know the mechanisms of how a brain works to have thoughts.

And, now I have a real life to live today. Later dude.

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But you do need to realize that it is your own body/brain creating your own thoughts without any recourse to metaphysical thinking!

Along with a deep recognition (appreciation) that you are an evolved creature, the product of this Earth.

With out that mental frame work none of the rest of it can make sense and we wind up with all this hand waving and truck loads of ultimately pretty, but empty, words to impress each other with how smart we are, rather than actually grappling with the obvious fact as they are being presented to us, via our sense.

This muddled thinking also keeps us focusing on the wrong questions and challenges. Such as why are such gluttonous self-destruct pigs, with such casual ease? Or why does a bat feel like a bat? (because it freak’n inhabits a bat body! ) or Pinker expounding on how human violence is reduced - yet get real, look at how much countries spend on weapons of mass destruction and training troop loads of murders. Or our billionaires obsession with their frivolous space races and tourism, while destroying our very life support systems and ignoring our cities/bridges/highways infrastructures’ vulnerabilities. It is this fuzzy thinking that makes construct progress absolutely impossible. As this past century has made abundantly clear.

We pay no heed to our obvious intimate connect to and dependence on the rest of life upon this Earth a long with Earth’s general health, which we are upending to no end. This inability to grasp (or is it to admit) who we are, has crippled our ability to look at our selves and recognize our self-destructive tendencies. Without that, our ‘keep our hands off my stash’ thinking will seal our doom.

Try talking to a kid about the future heading our way

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This sounds to me, pretty much the same as inthedarkness. He says we have to face the void, the meaninglessness, doesn’t say why, but if you disagree with him, then you haven’t faced it, so whatever you say is no good.

I have more to say from yesterday’s. Hang on a minute.

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I agree Richard is a long form blogger. I’ve said that. That’s why I almost always pull out relevant quotes and summarize. I also don’t like that he usually addresses someone way off the mark, but that’s what’s out there, and I still like his stuff. His Sense And Goodness is not a long book and still stands out in the crowd for connecting science based reality to basic advice on how to live.

Now, you. How did you reduce anything? You took my post, ignored the quote, picked a different one about provisional facts, then suggested something vague about a physical evolved world. What do you “embed” in it? We live here, we came from here, why come up with complexity like “embedded” and why should I care if a bug is looking at my desk? You complicated it. Of course we all have different perceptions, how does that reduce anything? How is that not complicated? And your body being a vehicle that produces the mind? Why that analogy? I could keep going with all your statements in post #9.

As part of my journey out of Christianity, I listened to Aron Ra’s videos on the history of evolution, I listened to the Kansas fake trial about evolution, I read The Selfish Gene, basically gave myself the education that I had forgotten or didn’t get. It helped, no question. Then I got more interested in neuroscience and how thoughts form and what exactly an emotion is. That of course crosses over to free will and instinct vs knowledge. You know all this, but I feel I need to review it because you keep saying I dismiss things or say they are irrelevant. That’s insulting to what I post here and makes me wonder why I invest in any kind of relationship with you. You don’t seem to pay much attention.

What I didn’t find in any of that exploration was a path from “I am an evolved being in this universe” to “this is how I can explore this universe as an evolved being”. Knowing the age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years and not 6,000, makes a difference. But I read articles about how it might be older, and that doesn’t do anything for my worldview. If homo sapien sapiens are a 200,000 year old species or a 300,000 year old species, it doesn’t change my sense of who we are. So, that’s irrelevant, but that we can look at our ape cousins and learn something, that’s quite relevant. You make zero effort to sort those sorts of things out in our dialogs.

When Carrier goes on and on, he often loses me, I set aside phrases like “a categorical difference between epistemic probability and physical probability” and think maybe I’ll get back to them someday, but I don’t think they are intangible. I don’t find very much from him that I think I could refute, even if I had the time and required references. I find his thought process trackable; from the kinds of questions I have about anything to answers about how we are able to discover everything. He talks about reason as a fundamental building block of how we interact with a sidewalk or a question about spacetime. Telling me my body produces my mind and thoughts doesn’t get me there. You tell me, “understanding oneself is foundational to living a personally successful life” as if I’ve never heard that before. You say we need a “solid foundation of self-awareness”, but then you don’t provide one. Carrier does.

I gave this summary

I didn’t see a response to that. I didn’t ask you to read the entire article, I suggested it only needed to be skimmed. But you went fishing for complexity and spoke to that. So, we’re not even talking about the same thing at this point.

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I tend to agree with CC.

When you know how we got here, it clears up a lot of the mystery why we are here.

Not “made in god’s image”, but one more expression of evolutionary processes, just like every other animal on earth. There is no purpose to our existence, other than what we make of it.

Our brain is a fortunate product of a mutation and allows us to enjoy our existence.

So, instead of moaning about “I don’t understand”, like inthedarkness, let us celebrate what we do understand.

“Stop along the way and smell the roses”

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Never argued about that.

You know I’m way past that.

Yep

I do that. CC is the one who tells me I’m missing something and what I should or shouldn’t celebrate.

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Disagree. When you know how we got here, you know how we got here. Why is a very different question. Likely a silly question.

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What exactly are you disagreeing with?
We should start with asking “how”, don’t you agree with that?

And if we know the how, would that not help in establishing the why?

If we know that the matter in the universe self-organizes into complex patterns, there won’t be a need for a creator god, no? The “how” determines the “why”.

The how: 2 + 2 = 4
The why: It’s human symbolic mathematics, based on Universal logic.

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Simply pointing out that why is not answered automatically by how. We know how we have hair in our nose but not why. You can make up an answer to that by saying, “Well, it filters the air we breathe.” That’s an explanation to how it’s useful, but doesn’t answer the why. Why do we have hair around the anus? To filter our crap? Why, in nature is often silly simply because evolution never cares about why.

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You determined something is NOT needed. Does the “how” of our origins tells us there isn’t a “why”?

Then what?

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[quote=“coffee, post:18, topic:11045, full:true”]
Simply pointing out that why is not answered automatically by how.

Read my original statement again.

We know how we have hair in our nose but not why. You can make up an answer to that by saying, “Well, it filters the air we breathe.” That’s an explanation to how it’s useful, but doesn’t answer the why. Why do we have hair around the anus? To filter our crap? Why, in nature is often silly simply because evolution never cares about why.

Natural selection does not bother with non-existential problems. That is why we see an infinite variety of shapes and colors. They are all viable properties that do not affect survival abilities.