Technological advances quite often pushes science into making new discoveries.
But technological advances are also said to be pushed by societies needs,
such as the printing press didn’t inspire the intellectual revolution.
It was the foment of ideas and the need to communicate that drove the invention of the printing press. And so, on . . .
Exactly what I just said. I ask questions about the evidence, the experiments, and the experts drawing conclusions. I read the studies and watch the discussions and dialogs. You ask me why I’m ignoring it.
Are you asking why I don’t accept Noble’s conclusions on face value?
Okay, there is some dynamic there, the desire to communicate and the invention of ways to communicate. I don’t see “need to communicate” as a cultural shift though, more like a part of human nature.
I’m having a really hard time explaining that Noble and by extension myself are not saying that you can do away with determinism. Determinism is the basic principle on which science works. The problem is the order of thought. First the random event then the selection. From a biological perspective you can think of determinism as reproductive fidelity and what allows for evolution random events. It turns out that it is a much harder concept to grasp than most people think. It is why I pick on logic. Logic like intelligence is baked into the system. The problem is that we think in abstractions. Abstractions are the deterministic or reproductive fidelity part of the system. They gain there utility by being unvarying closed systems. For example communication breaks down when definitions shift. Imagination is the random mutations on which everything else depends. Imagination comes first and then selection. The mistake that Noble made in his discussion as I said is assuming that the immune system evolved to evolve. When it encounters something new it doesn’t ask to be free from determinism the necessary mutations are already in the system but hidden by complexity. The same is true of logic. What we see is a reliable deterministic system but it just loops until some random input allows it to evolve.
When you say you are
What you are really saying is that complex chaotic systems cannot be addressed by top down design. It is the same thing that Dennett and Wolfram are saying. Dennett when he says that consciousness is something of an illusion and Wolfram by developing a new kind of math that uses bottom up design. It is a very simple concept that is evolutionary in origin. That is why I keep using the example of Darwin he didn’t discover evolution it was an already well understood process in domestication, what you may call unnatural selection. All he had to do is take that well understood principle and apply it to nature. But it was rejected because randomness is always rejected because we can’t function in a non deterministic world, a world without reproductive fidelity. lausten for our purposes is the reproductive fidelity of abstractions. But we don’t live in an abstract world. We live in a world that we call civilization that is dependent on reproductive fidelity but that reproductive fidelity ultimately comes through interaction with physical reality that isn’t entirely deterministic.
Genius as I have said is in the reduction but now it is challenged by Quantum computing that uses a more natural process. A process that avoids reduction for the most part and evolves solutions without comprehension.
The fundamental problem here is ego or hubris. If we don’t love ourselves we can’t love nature. That is why I said there is wisdom in traditional virtues that we have lost. Making ourselves gods is the problem that thinkers like Nietzsche created. From there you get the Nazis. A man like Hitler that in some sense didn’t love himself. What Noble is saying is that we have the agency to love ourselves. It is built into the system. We just need to drop the hubris that says we are our own creation. We don’t create so much as we discover. We are not gods or Ubermensch.
So yes you are right that if we love nature we are loving ourselves and that is healthy. In the past the idea of god allowed us to love ourselves but when that was gone we no longer could love ourselves. There is wisdom in your view that most people seem unable to grasp. But I’m an engineer, so I see the world entirely as a top down process. It is kind of an autistic profession as is science. You need that autism to maintain reproductive fidelity. The key is when do you need imagination or random inputs and when should you avoid them.
Just saw this in the internet. Some time, a couple years ago, you started down this path where you talk about what everyone should do and if only. It’s a fantasy. Life is a struggle. I’ve never settled on one viewpoint, not for more than a few years. Why should I expect anyone else to.
There are only a few “needs” to communicate and that is is for procreation, defense, and social order (delegation of labor).
The tools are 
Bing Copilot:
- Types of Signals: Animals use various types of signals to communicate:
- Visual cues: These involve visual signals and are common in animals with sight. Birds, for instance, often use visual communication1.
- Auditory cues: Sound-based communication, such as bird songs or animal calls, falls into this category.
- Chemical cues (Pheromones): Secreted chemicals trigger responses in other individuals of the same species. Pheromones play a crucial role in social insects like ants and bees.
- Tactile cues: Touch-based communication, such as grooming or physical contact, helps animals convey information.
- In some cases, signals can even be electric!
- Evolution and Natural Selection:
- Communication behaviors, including the capacity to learn these behaviors, arise through natural selection.
- Heritable communication behaviors that enhance an organism’s survival and reproductive success become common within a population or species.
In summary, communication is essential for animals to find mates, establish dominance, defend territory, coordinate group behavior, and care for their young. Whether through visual displays, sounds, or chemical cues, animals have evolved diverse ways to convey information within and across species12.
Communication begins at very fundamental levels of complexity.
Bacteria communicate via “quorum sensing”, the forerunner of pheromone signaling.
I don’t know how much more off-topic you could be.
In what way? My post was in response to your post about communication in species.
All I did was expand on that comment. If that is off-topic, then your original comment was off-topic, no?
This thread has gone in many directions, but we were clearly talking about cultural shifts in modern humans and the example of the printing press. Not sex or grunting sounds in all animals.
I’m sorry to say that perhaps it is you who is drifting in many directions.
The OP clearly talks about evolution and not specifically about human communication, especially about the invention of the printing press, which is basically a copy of “quorum sensing”, i.e. information distribution in non-brained organisms.
Communication is essential to the cultural ape. Without it cultural evolution would be impossible. Information about the physical environment is communicate by genes in physical evolution and by language in the cultural environment. As I think you have pointed out the genes are not the individual organism, it is much more complicated than that. The microbiome being a possible example. In any case the individual develops in response to both the internal and external environment. The printing press is a bit of cultural evolution that made communication more efficient. It isn’t a one way street however because the culture evolved in response to the evolution of the printing press.
Here we are talking about consciousness. I keep pointing to Dennett’s idea that it is something of an illusion. We can say however that the printing press increased the consciousness of many individuals. You can think of it as an expansion of the sensor system. What we call swarm intelligence. Just as Bee’s gain consciousness of the environment through communication the same process works for humans. lausten keeps trying to shove it back into a reductionist box. Complex chaotic system are irreducible, thus Wolfram’s new kind of science. A reaction to the cultural shift in science.
I wouldn’t get too hung up on the logic because logic only finds solutions within the closed systems that have already been established. That is why the concept of solutions without comprehension is so important. Which I think you have covered with your comment on organisms without central nervous systems.
Everyone is drifting. That’s normal.
You are responding to 200 posts ago
OK, I’m out. Click… 
It’s hard to tell what is drift and what is selection, it gets lost in the complexity.
I was thinking of checking out also but this is in a philosophy forum so we shouldn’t take it so seriously. write4u wants to talk about science. I suspect he thinks the utility of philosophy is fairly minimal. The problem is it would take me a month of serious study to connect the microtubules to anything philosophical. I just don’t have the time.
I looked back at the beginning of this thread. It turned from Metzoan life to intelligence by post #7. Write didn’t seem to have a problem with that. Now he wants to say I’m the one who drifts. I get the feeling he has some other complaint he’s not voicing. Drift all you want. Philosophize all you want. But respond to what people say, it’s just common courtesy.
I don’t know if you meant to do this, but you have smuggled in irreducible complexity. That is pseudo-science. Maybe you mean something else, but I don’t what it is.
And you keep saying that. I don’t know what closed system you mean, since we’re covering all of creation and the limits of the universe. And I still don’t know how you can not get “hung up” on logic. What else is there? “A=A” and “A does not equal B” is not a “closed system”. It’s how our minds work and how we can talk about an apple being an apple, not a banana. As Sam Harris said,
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?
We can talk about feelings, speculations, what might be, or could be, possibilities, kick ideas around, but what is “the concept of solutions without comprehension”?
Yes I did mean to do it and it is at the heart of what we are disagreeing on.
We seem to agree that you can’t function without determinism. The idea that a cause will have a specific effect. It is naively understood by every human being and is probably the basis for intelligence in general, human and non-human. An amoeba expects that it’s “senses”, as binary as they may be, to reliable reflect that food is in direction A and "poison is in direction B. But it’s environment is complex. One of the secrets of life is it reduces complexity by ignoring what doesn’t serve fitness. In this case what isn’t food or “poison”. That process can be elaborated into the complexity of “higher” organism with cognitive abilities and complex senses. Still they only have the senses and cognitive abilities that serve fitness. They still are reductionists.
Science is based on determinism. It can’t be any other way so you are right in a sense that irreducible complexity is pseudo science. But science only works if complexity can be reduced. For example something that the environment can be controlled for experimentation. Here I’m just going to jump to your counter argument and agree that controlled doesn’t just mean in a lab but through mathematical reduction using tools such as statistical analysis. The problem is that it doesn’t work very well for complex chaotic systems. Now you are going argue that well there wasn’t just enough information or facts feed into the system. The problem with that goes back to the cultural shift we have been talking about. What Noble says when he illustrates the wall that science has ran into. More information doesn’t seem to cut it. The ultimate expression of that realization is Wolfram’s new kind of science which I call solutions without comprehension. What made those solutions possible was computers which I’m sure you will agree have no comprehension. Computers work on the principle of evolving solutions as I’m sure you are aware. They use some fancy math but it isn’t the kind that Newton used where the complex is reduced to the relatively simple. Simple at least to people that understand it or not. Now they have found that conventional computers are not very good at complex chaotic systems either. The solution is quantum computers that rely on rapid sorting of random data. In a way mimicking evolution. What is evolution besides solutions without comprehension as Dennett points out. That is why Dennett says that consciousness is kind of an illusion. The thing itself is lost in the complexity.
The problem is that science is based on abstractions. The tools or language it uses are abstract such as math and logic. They don’t actually exist in physical reality. Now I have talked with Physicists and they generally agree that the tools are abstract. But that they reflect physical reality confirmed through experimentation. That seems perfectly right to me. But when you really drill down into it no amount of accuracy and precision is an explanation. As soon as you try to explain it you are back to abstractions.
My argument here is that what is real, where everything starts is randomness. You will note that nothing is more abstract than randomness or as I suggest zero. You can’t escape that any explanation no matter how sophisticated starts with some form of randomness. You can as I have suggested say it is just a place holder for ignorance but you will just be chasing your tail. As an aside god is as good an explanation of ultimate causes as anything else.
The new kind of science, and I think Noble is keyed in on it, is to explain everything as an evolutionary process. A process that is solutions without comprehension. In other words if we want to solve complex chaotic systems we need to employ solutions without comprehension. You can’t just keep assembling a staircase of facts and expect that the solutions will emerge as you reduce down and down to the bottom. I’m going to throw a word at you that I hate, holistic solutions whatever that means but Noble seems to have a good idea what it means. His example was that the answers didn’t emerge from refining gene sequencing. I don’t know if that was a good example or not. We are dealing with new concepts that are hard to process. I do know that what he got wrong is that the immune system doesn’t “ask” for permission to evolve. The random bits were always there they just needed to be selected and I’m sure someone will find out how that selection takes place.
I’m very confident of all this. But keep in mind I’m a determinist by inclination and training. I find very little satisfaction in these new ideas. Besides as I said we can’t function in the real world without the assumption of determinism. You are right that pseudo science can creep in when paradigms are overturned. That is why I offered you the example of Darwin not so much coming up with a new idea but overturning the paradigm that nothing is random. We still don’t know what random is but we know it is a necessary abstraction for understanding evolution. It is another example of solutions without comprehension but more of philosophical one. Darwin wasn’t a scientist so much as a natural philosopher. What he found was that everything as best we can tell is based on randomness within the limits of our understanding.
What is understanding? don’t you just love philosophy, not. Pages and pages of stuff that nobody is interested in but philosophers. I spent my life as an engineer. I broke my back after I retired and I decided to just take a peak at philosophy. Can’t say it did me any good. It sure isn’t going to put meat on my table. Maybe I should go hunting and fishing Maybe that is what write4u is doing.
I wouldn’t say that.
Computers don’t evolve solutions
I didn’t know he said that
Only if you allow it to
Sure. Let’s go with that. Umm, on second thought, no.
Why are you playing this game Lausten?
No I’m asking why you are avoiding some of the basic facts?
You complained about “Lamarckism” and “Epigenetic’s” , then refuse to acknowledge new findings.
B.S.!!! It’s more like identifying how we went so wrong.
You mean like recognizing the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.
Once you honestly grasp it, (rather then the sort of distracting lip service you dump on me, . . . ) Grasp what? Grasp that it really is about the most fundamental observation about our human condition we can make - and that all sorts new perspectives open from that foundation.
Why never drill down on that ? Instead you constantly distract from it, instead brow beating me for not respecting my elders, and the edifice of a philosophical structure that is frankly profoundly self-absorbed and self-serving.
You really hate that don’t you, why else so studiously avoid acknowledging, or addressing it.
Instead you come at me with the basic message, no one likes a party pooper and we are doing just fine, if I don’t believe you I should read up on Pinker. because he’s proven, on the basis some overly-simplified and overly-contrived parameters, that we as a thinking society are doing just fine.
Yet, where’s all this good news about how well we humans have managed the show!?!
How well do we cooperate and share ideas and weight evidence and how do we confront real problems? Everything is fine, we’re building self-driving electric cars, and nuclear is wonderful, we’re going to Mars and climatologists are just guessing, so lets not worry, technology has always saved us in the past, onward, more and faster, that’s the name of the game.
Oh and don’t think about the down side, you don’t want to be a irritating party pooper.
But I dare not call it self-absorbed and self-serving.
Good point Lausten…
