The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick! -Charles Darwin
Most people now realize that sexual attraction is in the mind, even though we often forget this insight in practice. The growth of phone sex and online sex is testament to the ability of imagination to titillate as much or more than actual human contact. And the presence of pornography in all cultures throughout history is an ongoing reminder that people can be turned on by the strangest things and certainly don’t need a live human being for this purpose.
Tam Hunt
There is a much deeper principle at work here, however; one that is highly relevant to this series of essays on “absent-minded science” (which is what I call the modern habit, in a number of different fields, of expelling mind from legitimate scientific explanations). Sex is central to human existence and that of other animals. But its centrality extends far beyond the animal world. This is the key theme of this fifth installment of this series.
Why is sex so central to our lives? The facile answer is that it’s because we need sex to reproduce. But this is only partly true. I’m going to delve into what sex is, as a general principle, and its role in evolution.
Natural selection is the key agent in Darwinian evolution. Natural selection is the label we give to the idea that traits that confer some reproductive advantage will obviously spread. But Darwin didn’t stop there. His second major book focused in part on sexual selection, another agent of evolution. “Sexual selection” is the bridge between Darwin and Lamarck and sexual selection is Lamarckian through and through. (This is not generally acknowledged by today’s biologists; it may in fact be a novel interpretation. Darwin was a Lamarckian in many ways, but this is not commonly known).
Sexual selection is the term Darwin gave to the idea that certain traits appear to be detrimental to survival and/or foraging for food – such as the peacock’s tail. However, if such traits help an organism find more mates and have more offspring the trait may still spread because its benefits outweigh its disadvantages. Mate choice (primarily female choice because males are generally the aggressors in most sexually-reproducing species) is key to sexual selection.
Natural selection is supposed to be a general theory of evolution, which means that it should be applicable in all times and all places and tell us something about how and why populations and species evolve.
To be a general theory of evolution, however, it seems that a theory must possess at least the following features: 1) applicability in all times and places; 2) capability to make predictions that are testable; 3) falsifiability, which means that if predictions are tested and found to be false then the theory as a whole may eventually be rejected under the weight of sufficient counter-evidence.
Sexual selection is arguably a more general theory than natural selection. Historically, these two selective forces have been presented by biologists as parallel forces, but with natural selection as by far the more important force. In reality, of course, there is no “force” behind natural selection. It’s just physics and chemistry in action, so when we talk about natural selection as a force or an agent, it’s reification of a sort at work. Rather than being an actual force, natural selection is just a label for the collective forces of nature acting on organisms with various traits.
Sexual selection is different, however, because there really is supposed to be a selective agent (a force of a sort) at work, which may not be explained wholly through physical and chemical forces – if these forces ignore mind in nature. This goes back to Parts I through IV of this series of essays: It requires that we consider whether or not mind (and thus choices made by minds) can in fact be explained through current physical and chemical theories.
I argued earlier in this series that current physical theories cannot explain mind because the constituents of matter are defined by modern physics as wholly mindless. We are thus left with a system of physics that excludes that which is most real to each of us – ourselves, our own minds, subjectivity itself – which surely should be included in an adequate theory of physics and, by extension, biology.
I argued that this impasse requires the inclusion of mind, in a highly rudimentary form, in all forms of matter, a view known as panpsychism or panexperientialism. Panpsychism holds that as matter complexifies, the tiny bit of mind in each tiny piece of matter complexifies and eventually reaches our highly complex type of mind due to the highly complex matter that comprises our brains and bodies.
This raises the question: How did we and other life forms like us reach such a high level of complexity? How did we evolve? This is where evolutionary biology and the philosophy of mind intersect.
If we acknowledge that all matter has some degree of mind, no matter how small, we realize that choice must also be inherent in all matter. This is the case because the essence of mind is the selection (choice) between alternatives made available through perception. One of today’s preeminent physicists, Freeman Dyson (professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, the same institution where Einstein resided for a number of years before his death in 1955) makes this point explicit: “[T]he processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when made by electrons.”
Dyson is saying that what physicists normally interpret in electron behavior as pure chance – randomness – is better interpreted as choice. Choices can be fickle, so what seems to be random is in fact a result of unpredictable choices by these tiny entities. Thus, even electrons make choices – but very very simple choices compared to the infinity of choices possible to our advanced human consciousness. Choice at the level of the electron is apparently limited to how the electron will manifest and move in the next moment. Particles such as electrons are not static, timeless entities. Thinking of the fundamental constituents of reality as unchanging particles is the fallacy of “substantialism,” which Alfred North Whitehead’s panpsychist “process philosophy” attempts to correct.
If choice is inherent at the level of electrons, a universal principle of evolution is made apparent. I call this universal principle “generalized sexual selection.” The essence of sexual selection is choice – generally female choice, as Darwin described in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man. Darwin recognized that many traits, such as the peacock’s tail, could not be explained strictly through natural selection. Rather, Darwin argued that female choice resulted, over many generations, in pronounced features in males, who compete vigorously for female attention.
To be entirely clear, the peacock’s tail is not considered adaptive because its weight and size make it harder for male peacocks to escape predators and to forage for food. But if its disadvantages are outweighed by increased mating opportunities for the male who carries and displays to advantage the showy burden, it will continue as a trait in male peacocks.
Darwin’s division of natural selection and sexual selection into two distinct agents of evolution, which continues to this day in biology, is not, however, warranted when we think through the better interpretation of what’s really going on.
The simple structure of neo-Darwinian natural selection has just two parts: 1) random variation of traits results from random mutation of genes and through sexual recombination; 2) those traits that confer a survival and reproductive advantage will obviously increase and are thus “selected.” (Again, there is not really any “selection” going on, but the end result is “as if” there was some selection process).
What I call “generalized sexual selection” (GSS or “giss”), re-frames this argument as follows: 1) Variation in traits comes about through random mutation and through (usually) male competition for mating opportunities and striving more generally for self-improvement, which can sometimes be incorporated into the germ line of the male; 2) Choice (usually female) is the selective agent that leads to greater reproduction of those males with the traits most desirable to the females, who choose them, who incorporate the male germ line into their own by mating with them.
In other words, variation is not always random – it is sometimes directed, with increasing mating opportunities as a significant motivation, and the urge to survive and other urges surely at work also. Perhaps more importantly, selection is not blind, it is conscious through the choices made mostly by females.
I call this theory generalized sexual selection because it applies to situations that don’t involve sex in the traditional sense. Most species on our planet don’t reproduce sexually. Bacteria, for example, often reproduce asexually, as do protists. And even many vertebrates reproduce asexually, such as certain species of lizards and fish. However, bacteria are constantly exchanging genetic information, which is a rudimentary kind of sex, defined at this level as the mixing of genetic information from at least two entities. This type of sex is known as “horizontal gene transfer” because it occurs without simultaneous reproduction.
Here’s the main reason GSS applies beyond traditional sexual reproduction, though: The terms “male” and “female” are not as clear-cut as we generally assume. And in GSS, “male” refers to any genetic donor and “female” to any genetic recipient – as Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan describe in their 1986 book, The Origins of Sex. Thus, a bacterium that gives some genetic material to another is a male and the recipient is a female. These roles can and do change on a regular basis, thus the “gender” of each bacterium changes regularly. What is important, then, is not gender per se but actions.
The principle extends even deeper, however, when we consider further the panpsychist notion of matter. If all matter has some degree of mind or subjectivity, then GSS applies to literally all matter, not just biological forms. This is the case because the most sophisticated panpsychist thinking, that of Whitehead and his intellectual descendants, recognizes that each of the ultimate constituents of matter – what Whitehead calls “actual entities” – contains both “mental” and “physical” aspects. They are two sides of the same coin. Physical and mental aspects of each actual entity (the Whiteheadian “atom”) oscillate with each step forward in time.
The mental aspect of each actual entity is informed by the immediately prior physical aspects of all other actual entities available to it. Each actual entity, in its mental aspect, chooses what information to accept and rejects everything else. Thus, the mental aspect of each actual entity can be considered to be “female” insofar as it chooses what information from the universe around it to include in its objective manifestation – like the female bower bird accepting the attention of a hard-working showy male. By “objective,” I mean the entity is now available as a datum for other actual entities in their mental, subjective, aspects. When the actual entity becomes objective, it becomes “male” insofar as its manifestation now constitutes information for the next round of actual entities to consider in their mental/female aspect. More crudely put, the female aspect receives and the male aspect penetrates. But these aspects oscillate within each actual entity.
Wipe your brow as I wrap up this essay.
GSS is a powerful re-framing of evolution in a way that recognizes the unbroken continuum of the complexity of matter, which is experiential through and through. I won’t delve into further details about the testability and falsifiability of GSS here, but it is my view that GSS presents a more adequate theory of evolution than the prevailing adaptationist view of natural selection – which generally denies the role of mind and choice in evolution.
Who knew sex was so important?
My next installment in this series will explore the current view of natural selection as the key agent for evolution, and its problems, in more detail.
Comments
My, my Mr. Hunt has certainly put a great deal of time into his metaphysical ponderings. It seems though that where he is headed is away from science and toward theology. Ah for the comfort and believing that there is some sort of universal, infinite, and eternal mind out there. Oh to believe that our precious and unique personalities are not just so much electrochemistry and temporal meat. As it is for so many human conceits, the last line of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is appropriate here: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
Eckermann (anonymous profile)
February 7, 2011 at 8:59 a.m. (Suggest removal)
"The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" -Charles Darwin
What's Darwin's hang up? Big deal, it's just a feather.
Here's another thing to consider: since sex usually takes place in relationships, and in this part of the country relationships are far more influences by $$$ due to the insanely high cost of living, our natural urges are being affected by outside influences. (And in this case, one that most would consider taboo)
On this note, a former co-worker who grew up in Germany and who had a close friend from Croatia told me that his friend observed that this area (I don't know if he meant Southern California as a whole or just Santa Barbara) was the only place in the world he'd been where relationships are not determined by natural attraction. (A big generalization I know, but consider the financial factor and it makes sense)
Of course, Mickey and Sylvia addressed the attraction issue head in in 1957 in this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpEA5Q...
billclausen (anonymous profile)
February 7, 2011 at 7:42 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Eckermann, I'm not sure how you draw your conclusion: where in my piece do I mention anything about theology?
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 8, 2011 at 9:50 a.m. (Suggest removal)
"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. "
My sciatic nerve made that up, but then my frontal cortex stole the credit.
Adonis_Tate (anonymous profile)
February 8, 2011 at 10:07 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Panpsychism should be treated as a religion, because its logic is truly on a transcendent plane, of which there are many, of course. So humbling.
Adonis_Tate (anonymous profile)
February 8, 2011 at 11:08 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Look what you've started, Tam, people are beginning to buy into this panpsychism crap and it's getting them so confused that they're using unrelated words like "logic" and "religion" in the same sentence. What are you going to do when they find out you're conning them, when they find out that the universe you're selling them is just as infested with GOD as the one the Christians sold them? And it is infested, Tam, you know it is. You can deny it, you can call it science, you can prop it up with unsupported evidence and unpublished books but in the end your universe will reek of GOD because you let Him in disguised as elementary particles of "mind-stuff". How stupid of you.
shibboleth (Wayne Gilbert Myers)
February 9, 2011 at 6:01 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Tam, either there is a purely mechanical explanation of reality (science) or we have to rely on the belief in some sort of transcendent force that moves things (theology). It appears to me as if you are taking a theological path because you are abandoning materialism. That is ok. We are all free to believe in religion if we want. But it is not science.
Eckermann (anonymous profile)
February 9, 2011 at 8:56 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Eckermann, the dichotomy you suggest is entirely false. It's not materialism or religion. The world is more complex than that. It's not either of these dogmatic extremes (if by religion you mean a traditional theistic religion).
I will in fact have much more to say about God later in this series, so perhaps you were prescient in raising your objection?
But your suggestion that Generalized Sexual Selection is akin to theology is entirely unjustified. The whole point of my piece and this series is to point out that it is NOT scientific to exclude mind from our explanations b/c to do so ignores literally what is most real to us and most evident: our own minds, and the various less complex minds that comprise the universe around us.
Check out Part II of this series in which I quote Schrodinger on "objectivation." Objectivation is the trick that materialism uses to pretend that we can ignore mind and still have an adequate description of reality. But we can't, as Schrodinger points out. It's just a trick, and it ignores that primary reality for all of us is entirely experiential/consciousness/mind. The objective world is inferred (rightly), but we don't know a thing about the objective world itself other than what comes through our senses - which is, again, consciousness and only consciousness.
The problem then, which I've highlighted in this series, is to explain the relationship between the inferred objective world and our own primary reality of consciousness. The panpsychist approach, which leads to generalized sexual selection in biology, is in my view the best explanation we have that addresses this problem.
I don't mind acknowledging that these matters certainly have an element of taste and intuition to them, and are not based exclusively on logic. Is anything interesting based exclusively on logic? Yet materialism, which excludes mind from nature, is patently illogical and unscientific and so it fails on its own terms.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 9, 2011 at 11:12 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Tam, I have read all your essays in this series and have a fundamental disagreement with your argument about "mind." The problem is one of epistemology. That is, how is it that we know anything? Rather than objectivation being the trick, it is actually the illusion of having a mind that is the trick, and a very handy one at that. The electrochemical activity that occurs in my brain that creates the illusion that I have a mind allows me an amazing amount of flexibility in testing out my perceptions to determine how best to operate in the world. The mind is a wonderful adaptation, but that is all that it is. That fact that conciousness is the primary (and only) reality we know, does not mean it is not simply the only lense we have through which to experience the world. Once again, the problem is an epistemological one, a problem of being unable to truly know what it is like outside of ourselves. The best we can do is use our minds to test our perceptions to see if our theories predict things that happen out there. Ultimately though, the feedback is filtered through our minds and colored by that filter. Wittgenstein (who, by the way, was very religious) struggled and struggled with these issues and never to his own satisfaction solved the puzzle. His biggest contribution however was to uncover the fallacies in arguments like yours and mine. We need him here.
Eckermann (anonymous profile)
February 9, 2011 at 1:33 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Eckermann, I'm sorry but you're making no sense. You write, agreeing with my point exactly: "Once again, the problem is an epistemological one, a problem of being unable to truly know what it is like outside of ourselves. The best we can do is use our minds to test our perceptions to see if our theories predict things that happen out there. Ultimately though, the feedback is filtered through our minds and colored by that filter."
But you then attempt to objectivate yet again and deny that there is any mind to explain. This is pure and complete self-contradiction. If all we know is our own mind, how on earth can you hold to the hard-core materialist view that all there is is matter?
Again, we are trying to explain this relationship and it is no explanation at all to simply dismiss mind b/c this is to dismiss literally the only thing we know directly.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 9, 2011 at 3:24 p.m. (Suggest removal)
In a question like the old "tree falling in the forest" question, if there were no human minds in the universe, would it exist? If there were no brains in the universe would it exist? I maintain that the physical evidence indicates that there was matter before there was any type of brain. Just because I have to use the electrochemical meat between my ears to draw that conclusion does not mean there is and was nothing without the electrochemical meat. You may be correct that I am not making sense, but neither, my friend, are you. Assigning the quality of mind to inanimate matter is simply not supported by any scientific evidence that you can produce. Such a supposition is superstition, theology.
Eckermann (anonymous profile)
February 9, 2011 at 10:11 p.m. (Suggest removal)
One last thought: A human mind can be damaged by drugs or accident and diseased by chemical imbalance and Alzheimers. Is the panpsychic mind equally vulnerable? Wouldn't you think that the fragility of the mind is some evidence of its mechanical and material nature? Wouldn't panpsychism imply that the universal mind and, by extension the human mind, being free from the laws of material things, be impervious to influences from the physical world? Just asking?
Eckermann (anonymous profile)
February 10, 2011 at 7:51 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Eckermann, you've seriously misunderstood my position. I'm not a dualist. I'm not suggesting there is some mind separate from matter and that the two somehow mysteriously interact. I am not a Cartesian. Rather, I am suggesting that mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing. Where there is matter there is mind and where there is mind there is matter. Mind is maximally rudimentary in most matter because most matter is extremely unorganized. But as matter complexifies so mind complexifies.
This requires that we redefine matter to acknowledge this reality and I have done so in other work, suggesting that we should use the term "menter" to refer to this dual aspect of reality (dual aspectism is not to be confused with Cartesian dualism).
To be entirely clear: panpsychism is not dualism. Panpsychism is a type of physicalism, a type of materialism, which doesn't dismiss mind as being real (eliminativist materialism) or suggest that it miraculously emerges from matter at some arbitrary point of biological complexity (emergentist materialism).
So mind is not "free from the laws of material things" - it is just as subject to laws (regularities) as matter is because they're two aspects of the same thing. In other words, what is mind to me is a brain to you. And what is a mind to you is a brain to me. It's all about perspective. Mind is the inside of what for all other minds is the outside.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 10, 2011 at 10:22 a.m. (Suggest removal)
So Tam it gets down to this? Wittgenstein was right. We are no longer arguing about anything about which we can really know. "What is mind to me is a brain to you, and what is mind to you is a brain to me." Are we simply haggling over language and the lables that we put on the phenomena about which we speak? We can never know if there is a reality beyond human perception, because we are trapped here in our brains (sort of like The Matrix, if you think about it). So you can assert all sorts of unscientific stuff and argue ad infinitum that logic supports your view and no person can gainsay you. Are there angels in your world, faries, elves, God, the risen Christ? I daresay there is room enough for them all.
Eckermann (anonymous profile)
February 10, 2011 at 7:26 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Modern physics does allow a compromise of sorts with your theory of Panpsychism, Tam, when it speaks of matter's apparent ability to snatch order out of the jaws of chaos given enough time and drawing from it's vast store of material resources alone. If you ask me, this self-organizing component of matter, in concert with other natural processes, was the likely catalyst for the emergence of mind out of lifeless, unreflective matter, not the other way around. However, the idea that physical laws and processes interacted with matter over time to produce everything necessary for the emergence of mind is quite extraordinary in itself, even "miraculous" in the secular sense of the word and, like Panpsychism, seems to indicate an aspect of the universe and it's workings that we don't completely understand. Aside from that though, the similarities, there is one telling difference: Self-organization can be directly observed and squares with what we already know about the activities and attributes of matter while Panpsychism cannot be directly observed and fits into a scientific framework about as well as I fit into speedos. In fact, Y'know what? Now that I've had time to think about it, forget the compromise, Panpsychism is Voodoo. Here's why I think so:
If you've ever seen a snowflake you know how creative matter can be under relatively normal conditions and if you consider the play of forces that drive and maintain the planets in their courses you know the power present in the material realm. Now multiply the snowflake a billion times or more, enough to represent every snowflake ever produced and let your view of the planets draw back to encompass the entire universe and if you're honest you'll have to agree that the amount of complexity, power, creativity and information contained therein (and extending through billions of years) is sufficient to account for "mind" without dragging the "mind" out of it's material, biological context and thrusting it into a completely untenable, transcendent role.
In the end, Panpsychism is simply ego, it is our mind telling us how special it is, pure and simple. And our minds would say that, wouldn't they?
shibboleth (Wayne Gilbert Myers)
February 10, 2011 at 9:17 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Eckermann, the ONLY thing we know directly is our own experience. Descartes got this right. The rest, literally, is inference. Science is entirely inference based on our experience. Everything other than our direct experience is inference based on our direct experience. Thus, the primary task we have at hand is to make the most logical and plausible inferences based on our direct experience. And that is what I have been doing in this series of essays. I have argued that science needs to modify its current dogmatic materialist approach because through excessive "objectivation" it has forgotten that objectivation is just a trick, as Schrodinger wrote in the 1950s, which has some obvious utility but obscures the deeper truths.
To progress beyond many scientific impasses we face today we need to remember that objectivation is a trick and return to the hard problem of explaining how our own direct experience can lead to the most plausible and logical inferences about what "really" exists outside of our own subjective experience and how that inferred outside world interacts and explains our own experience.
So, no, we are not reduced to arguing unprovable assertions. We are elevated to arguing over the most logical and plausible inferences based on our direct experience.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 11, 2011 at 1:53 p.m. (Suggest removal)
shibboleth, stay turned for the next installment in this series in which I argue that "order for free," what you are focused on re snowflakes, etc., should indeed be considered a key explanatory theme in biology. And this point has been made by many thinkers in great depth, including Darcy Thompson and Stuart Kaufmann.
However, these ideas alone do nothing to explain consciousness itself unless we explain the relationship of ostensibly non-experiential matter and mind. And that is what I have been doing in this series of essays. You can't get mind from what is defined as not-mind (matter). You have to adjust your definitions and the most plausible/logical approach is to realize that all matter has some degree of mind - they are two aspects of the same thing. It is highly rudimentary in the vast majority of cases but as matter complexifies so mind complexifies.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 11, 2011 at 1:57 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I don't know, Tam, I keep thinking about a sculpturer working a raw piece of marble. When the piece is completed he can stand back and claim that the finished shape we see was always there and he merely liberated it from the marble in which it had been encased but that's a bit too much to accept, a bit too abstract a claim and yet, how can you refute it?
I see the mind/matter issue in similar terms: Evolution (the sculpturer) carves a mind (the finished piece) out of the gross matter at it's disposal (the marble) and then stands back to admire it's work but Panpsychism steals it's thunder by claiming that the mind was always there and evolution merely exposed it to the light of day. Like the sculpture analogy, how can you refute it?
Nevertheless, I await your next essay and will, as much as I am able, give it a fair reading. Incidently, forgetting this current philosophical dispute for a moment, I admire the fact that you've made yourself available to your readers the way you have and that you are willing to engage in this discussion at all, not everyone would. If I was rude in an earlier post it is only because, well, because what I often lack in hard facts I try to supplement with bluster...a bad habit that seldom bears anything but sour fruit...
shibboleth (Wayne Gilbert Myers)
February 12, 2011 at 1:50 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Tam, I have to admire your tenacity and consistency. But still,my own experience (which you say should hold a great deal of value) tells me that my mind is not so reliable. When I dream my mind shows and tells me thinks that are not reliable for predicting how the world works; yet that is my mind working overtime. It is sort of like the old Zen story about the monk who dreamed that he was a butterfly and and when he woke, was not sure about whether he was a monk who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was now dreaming that he was a monk. People like Darwin and Hawking help me to determine the difference between knowledge and dreaming. People like Shrodinger and Casteneda, while being entertaining and thought-provoking, are not so helpful in that regard.
Eckermann (anonymous profile)
February 12, 2011 at 8:59 p.m. (Suggest removal)
shibboleth, your analogy is very apt for demonstrating why the materialist approach fails. No matter how evolution sculpts matter, if matter is defined as wholly mindless, no mind will ever spring from that matter. The marble that evolution-as-sculptor begins with must have some tiny degree of mind from the beginning in order for evolution to sculpt the highly complex mind we enjoy from the maximally simple minds that comprise the constituents of our biological "marble." Matter should be redefined as "menter," which is a combination of matter/mental, to indicate the fact matter and mind are two aspects of the same thing.
Moreover, the mind present in all matter/menter plays an increasingly prominent role in its own evolution as it boostraps from the most rudimentary organization of macromolecules to viruses to bacteria to eukaryotic cells to multicellular creatures to chordates to vertebrates to primates, and finally to technologically-advanced homo sapiens with the ability to fully direct own evolution.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 14, 2011 at 10:37 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Eckermann, Schrodinger was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was key to the creation of quantum mechanics in the 20s and 30s (look up the Schrodinger equation). So while I appreciate Castaneda's work, it's not fair to Schrodinger to suggest he's more on the woo woo fringe. He was a mainstream physicist who was large-minded enough to realize that crude materialism, with its tendency toward objectivation, missed half the story of the universe: ourselves and other minds.
It is undeniable that everything we know comes through our senses so I urge you to meditate a bit more on what that means and how we can best make inferences about the world separate from our own subjectivity.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 14, 2011 at 10:40 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Mr. Hunt, in your post above you say:
"No matter how evolution sculpts matter, if matter is defined as wholly mindless, no mind will ever spring from that matter."
However, by that logic your quote could just as easily have read:
"No matter how evolution sculpts matter, if matter is defined as wholly LIFELESS, no LIFE will ever spring from that matter."
Of course, we know that isn't true (unless you believe as Aristotle did, in the spontaneous generation of life). It was through time, chance and the fortuitous processes of Evolution that life emerged from gross matter and I maintain that through similar mechanisms mind emerged from life. What you refer to as "order for free" is easier to swallow than "mind for free" because mind for free ignores the natural order of things (simple forms and systems giving way to more complex forms and systems.) and short-circuits practically everything we know about the nature and origins of the universe.
Besides, Panpsychism, no matter how it's explained, still smacks of metaphysics to me for this simple reason: For mind to be so ubiquitous, for it to infuse all matter and thus the cosmos implies a subtle but primary role for it that seems unnaturally deliberate to me, almost staged. I mean, c'mon, a whole bunch of "little fragments of mind" spread all over the place almost screams for the existence of one "BIG MIND" somewhere or at some time in the life of the universe at which point it all dribbles off into theology...
shibboleth (Wayne Gilbert Myers)
February 15, 2011 at 6:48 p.m. (Suggest removal)
shibboleth, what I'm talking about is exactly what you describe as "simple forms and systems giving way to more complex forms and systems." The question is what that "form" consists of. I've argued here that for the form we see around us, and the form that we are privy to most intimately through our own direct experience, to exist it must include mind as a fundamental component. What you're getting hung up on is the idea that "mind" has to be human-like. That is not my position. Mind is, at its root, simply perception (maximally rudimentary in most cases) of the universe around the subject and a choice as to how to manifest in the next moment based on that perception. Perception does not require biological senses. Everything perceives, in a very uncontroversial way, when we realize that even an electron in the deep of space perceives its environment through the forces that act on it - just in a highly rudimentary way. And as Bohm and Dyson (both highly respected physicists) have described, the behavior of electrons suggests there is indeed some rudimentary choice present.
So mind/choice/perception complexifies as matter/menter complexifies. There is no emergence of mind from what was wholly mindless. It's there every step of the way, just in very basic form in the large majority of the universe and complexifying to dizzying heights in organisms like human beings.
As for the emergence of life, I won't go into it here, but life in fact is very similar to mind/consciousness in that there is no demarcation point for where life emerges and thus the better view is that "life" is present in some degree in all matter. This is known as panzoism or hylozoism and is closely aligned with panpyschism. The key difference between "life" and "mind" however is that we can describe life entirely objectively without any a priori appeal to mind (other than recognizing that of course any description by a person includes implicitly mind/consciousness). But mind is, by definition, not objective (it is subjective), and thus we must adjust our explanatory schemes and our ontology to account for mind to a much greater degree than we must for life.
TamHunt (anonymous profile)
February 16, 2011 at 11:49 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Okay, that made sense. I guess I'll sit back and let you drive for a while, Tam, I'll worry about where we're going...um...when we get there...
shibboleth (Wayne Gilbert Myers)
February 16, 2011 at 12:31 p.m. (Suggest removal)