History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
Comments on Biocentrism Demystified
reece sullivan said,
December 17, 2009 at 12:11 am ·
Stephen,
Would you elaborate on various flavors of idealism; I’m familiar with Berkley, of course, but don’t know how he differs from others, or rather, how others differ from him. Also, what’s your take on panpsychism? I’ve found it attractive, but have just started doing some reading on it.
————————————- Read the rest of this entry »
IT SEEMS BIOLOGY (NOT RELIGION) EQUALS MORALITY
I was perhaps overly hasty in dismissing Hauser’s work today in a previous post. His thesis makes a good deal of sense, and shows a strong resemblance to Kantian thinking on morality. The problem I have is, not the suggestion that our sense of morality has ‘evolved’, but the assumption that this evolution must be Darwinian. If Hauser is so confused as to put his thesis on the doorstep of Darwin then his work deserves to be condemned, and probably for cowardice since I am suspicious that Hauser is a fake Darwinist.
The problem with all this is underestimating the full complexity of human evolution, which requires first an explanation of evolving consciousness, and much else.
Further, since we have cited Kant, the question of the ‘freedom to act ethically’ arises, and this is always factored out by scientific students of morality. The complicated deliberations of Kant on the basis of morality and freedom has been replaced with a shark’s game of ‘science’, and the inability of the participants to even speak freely or in violation of the Paradigm.
One has to be suspicious that Hauser is lying to get ahead and achieve some place in the science public.
That’s unethical.
If religion is not the source of our moral insights — and moral education has the demonstrated potential to teach partiality and, therefore, morally destructive behaviour — then what other sources of inspiration are on offer?
Read the rest of this entry »
Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’
A Critical Guide
Series: Cambridge Critical Guides
Edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
Harvard University, Massachusetts
James Schmidt
Boston University
I notice that Cambridge has come out with an book of essays on Kant’s essay on history. I can feel sure they are trying to neutralize my interpretation of Kant’s essay in World History And The Eonic Effect. This essay is unmentionable in polite scholarly circles where the issue of Darwinism is too hot to handle and the dangers of dissent on evolution make something awfully close to lying, really really bad for Kant scholars, the case here.
My interpretation is open to confusion itself, since I am not a Kantian interpreting Kant, but attempting, with the use of the first paragraph of his famous essay to demonstrate the real significance of Kant and transcendental idealism for the study of history and evolution.
Kant’s essay is ambiguous, and his perspective contradicts itself as he throws the question into the future, and yet seems to answer his own question with another wrongheaded idea, asocial sociability.
I think that the correct meaning of what Kant said is illustrated by a study of the eonic effect. But try telling that to the cadre of brain dead academics, among others Kantians. I will have to review this book at Amazon and expose the situation, with a plug for my own book.
Check out:
Kant’s Challenge
It is amusing to google on the ‘teleomechanists’, only to find that I am the main commenter on this subject, and the book by Lenoir on this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=teleomechanists
Kant scholarship is, I fearfully suspect, being devious on this issue for the simple reason that they don’t want to bring the Darwin establishment down on their necks, and thus are deep-sixing the fact that Kant could not have been a Darwinist, and in fact produced what is nearly a critique in advance of Darwin’s idiocy.
We live in a stupid society that has lost the use of Kant, as the endless round of academic bookdealing continues, to no avail.
Every stage of the Darwin debate involves one or other of the classic metaphysical snafus depicted by Kant, in the triple zone of ‘divinity, soul, and free will’ issues (or their antitheses).
Visions Of A Ghostseer
Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the “God beyond God.” The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.
But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth (“Existence is suffering”), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.
This rubbish from Armstrong is suspicious: Armstrong seems to have made a strategic choice to defend monotheism even though she doesn’t really believe in anything. Her remarks on mythos and logos are especially suspect, in suggesting that this ‘mythos’ routine is her own stance on the question of divinity.
Why not, pray tell, adopt a mythos and logos approach to Darwinism? Nope, we don’t do things that way, and in this case the mythos/logos hype becomes transparent.
Darwin did NOT make it clear that divinity is not a divine personality. His theory is false, can’t explain evolution, can’t explain life, and says nothing at all about the origin of the universe.
The question of suffering is a tough one, but only for Christians. Schopenhauer addressed the question with a perspective that would be non-Darwinian. Armstrong brings in Buddhism and the first noble truth. These buddhists were theists.
I cannot see, although I am not a theist, why atheists get so upset over creationism (apart from finding it false!): in good Kantian fashion the antithesis they embrace is as suspect.
The irony here is that the Big Bang looks to some now like a ‘relative transformation’, not an absolute beginning. Frankly, although I would not waste time defending the thesis, the universe looks like a string theory tinkertoy and almost a kind of macro-technology. It is probably false, but certainly thinkably defensible as a floating question for the future that an agent of ‘will’ inconceivable to us is involved in these cosmic productions.
For heaven’s sake, in a mere ten years, Google has produced computation environments at the level of the petabyte able to answer queries from a whole planet simultaneously.
I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about ‘cosmic entities’, if any exist, that could mimic divinities.
That said, I don’t believe a word of it, but merely as a dialectical exercise try to critique deadpan Spinozism as useless alternative.
Beware of such statements, of course, it is certainly not a belief on my part, but the point is that dogmatic anti-creationism forgets that physics creates its own kind of inverted creationism. Why should that be some absolute, in a world of Kantian exposes of the all these mind games.
As Kant made clear, this is the stage at which transcendental idealism becomes your own option. The question of space and time begin to impinge on the neuroscience of mind, and mind on a reality that transcends space and time.
This book has been traveling in comments, and I sat down and went through it again: it is actually very close to Kant indeed, almost a rediscovery, but on its own terms, and I therefore caution against too close an identification. But clearly Kant anticipated the framework of Biocentrism quite a while ago!
The book Biocentrism can help to both see the connection to Kant and to keep him separate from physics. The book is helpful on getting unstuck from the strong realism of Einstein’s special theory of relativity which tends to consolidate the bastion of realism when the reality is the opposite.
In general, the question is, how does this framework solve our Darwin problem. Answer in another post!
We were asked yesterday for an introduction to Kant. I cited a link to Amazon for Korner’s short Kant, a classic you can get second hand for almost nothing there.
The problem with Kant is that you will be driven to try and sit down and do The Critique Of Pure Reason straight on. In fact, that can be the wrong approach, since you have to go through a large number of very difficult things to get to the main idea, which is actually clearly stated in the Dialectic section.
It is the paradoxes and antinomies that really make Kant’s thinking clear.
I recommend a book linked below by Bryan Magee, who is actually a fan of Schopenhauer, but who discusses all the issues from Kant onward very simply, and does so in the context of modern philosophy.
Here’s the link:
Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper
More on space-time issue in Kant
Stephen P. Smith said,
November 3, 2009 at 6:28 pm ·
Here is a re-write of the above, and my take on space-time as represented by geometry.
An approach that offers interesting results is the method of construction as professed by intuitionist mathematics (e.g., Brouwer`s mathematics). Construction may require the activity of measurement, and what is generally required is a time dimension where watching an internal clock permits measuring the duration of activity. With the addition of one spatial dimension it becomes possible to measure distance and distinguish distance from duration. Distance is measured by laying a rigid body end to end. With the addition of a second spatial dimension it becomes possible to distinguish constructed distance from constructed straightness. Straightness becomes the shortest distance between two points. With the addition of the third spatial dimension it becomes possible to distinguish intrinsic straightness that is limited to a surface manifold from extrinsic curvature that embeds the manifold.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment on 3 silly beliefs held by critics of silly Xtians
Your perplexity is absolutely to the point and represents one of the major philosophical debates in the last two centuries. Let me note that while Kant went out of his way to reconcile his views with ordinary realism, admitting the real existence of space and time, Schopenhauer berated him for not accepting the full implications of his transcendental idealism.
So, who knows? The question is obviously very deep.
I am going to get a copy of The Matter Myth again and respond to that.
On the surface physics and Kant don’t seem to match, but there is a close connection, visible in QM. In general, the findings of physics tend to suggest something is strange in the relation of consciousness and matter.
Stephen P. Smith said,
November 1, 2009 at 1:22 pm ·
Kant would note that the brain is only an appearance, and that there is hint of the thing-in-itself that is beyond. Therefore, to attach selfness to the appearance of brain matter is to miss Kant`s point.
The same is true for our ordinary consciousness, the reason yogis point beyond such ordinary consciousness!
13 Design and autonomy
Kant’s critique of teleological judgment in the second half of the Critique of Judgment has an even more complicated agenda than his aesthetic theory. The work has roots in both eighteenth-century biology Read the rest of this entry »
Where do people get those crazy ideas about religion and the supernatural?f
This is a perfectly good question, but we should tit for tat at once with, Where do scientists get those crazy ideas about reductionist Darwinism?
In general Kant is the best on this one: we are confronted with the frustration and inevitability of metaphysics, both at the same time.
The questions about the supernatural emerge in the most natural fashion as a set of false generalizations extending the limits of our basic conceptions.
For example, is their a beginning in time or is there no beginning in time….
Science has no answers here.
Visions of a ghostseer
The framework or Kant and transcendental idealism (which is not transcendental or idealistic) is the only real option in the reductionism/religion collision.
Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism
Is there a science of history?
One of the amusing ironies of historical theory here is the way that Karl Popper, in attacking Marxist theory as ‘historicism’, unwittingly launched a torpedo against the ‘science of history’.
It is essentially the same argument as Isaiah Berlin’s critique of ‘historical inevitability’.
Attacking Marxism is OK, but the science of history?
Scientists shy away from this issue, in part because they can only slink away licking their wounds. And it is the case that the basic contradiction floats backward to put a ‘science of evolution’ (for man) under the shadow of the same contradiction.
All these arguments reflect Kantian reasoning.
The solution, echoing Kant’s Challenge, so called, lies in trying to see how causality and freedom can be related together under the idea of evolution
Does the Death of God Mean the Death of Morality? A Darwinian Response to Nietzsche’s Challenge
Actually not, the ‘death of god’ (a false concept in any case) can be a precondition for a real morality, without the theistic confusion over autonomy criticized by Kant.
Behind all the hot air of Nietzsche’s ‘death of god’ lies the real thing in Kant, who never declared himself an atheist, but who went through the equivalent, and ‘reinvented god’ in a new a more intelligent fashion in his critiques of ethical judgment.
The Science of Freedom
Students of science these days are given a very narrow history of their subject. But real science education should include the history of modern philosophic reaction to Newtonianism, and the paradoxes that are generated by reductionism. Beginning with Rousseau and Kant a counterpoint to modern science arose that tried to clarify the issues that subsequently became suppressed by the rise of scientism.
Visions of a Ghostseer: all of the problems of the Darwin debate were highlighted decades before Darwin, by the philosopher Kant. And in fact the source for his critiques goes back still further to the mid-eighteenth century with his ‘Visions of a Ghostseer’
Arnhart comment on Essentialism and Self
Larry Arnhart said,
September 20, 2009 at 7:35 pm ·
So the human self is beyond “the space-time framework”?
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Could you please explain how something is real although it does not exist in time or space?
Larry, if I could answer that question I would be the world’s greatest philosopher, able to resolve Plationic ideas and the rest of it.
The statement is a variant of a Kantian idea: if the mind constructs space/time, then the mind must (at some level, not totally) be beyond space and time.
It is a classic Kantian issue, with respect to phenomena and noumena. Note that the distinction of phenomena and noumena is not the same as material/spiritual and/or existence/non-existence.
As a trained philsopher you should be less surprised that this issue haunts darwinism. You can be a philosopher or a Darwin propagandist. The latter expresses shock at challenges to scientism. The former knows better and sees the plight of science here.
I, for myself, have often considered the Indian Samkhya here: then the answer to your question might be that some aspects of the self (not the self as such) is material in some sense, yet perhaps beyond space and time. Universal materialism by definition, in that framework can have some kind of ‘existence’, whose status we do not understand.
In any case there are plenty of things that are real, but not in space and time: the abstraction of an isoceles triangle: where and when is that in space and time, apart from its realizations as drawn figures?
These issues are not so simple, as you should know. Most regrettably, scientists are trained to be stupid about such classic questions, and trained to do precisely the metaphysical blunders Kant warned against. What a misfortune.
But in general these are the hard questions Kant warns us are not easy to deal with, intractable, and dialectically unstable.
Today’s post on a new Ruse book on philosophy and evolution deserves a Kantian response. Why are these scientists so afraid of Kant? We know why. Kant’s philosophy is a unique challenge to Darwinism (without Kant ever having heard of Darwin).
Kant was were aware of the problems beseting the rise of modern biology. These problems were swept aside in the tide of Darwin’s oversimplification.
These Darwin philosophers are like corrupt cops: instead of trying to clarify the Darwin deception, they became party to it.
Kant’s Challenge
In the last post I referred to Kant’s essay on history: here is the first paragraph. If you read, then reread, this paragraph you will sense that Kant is asking a question. And the discovery of the answer to that question lies in the eonic effect, and more specifically the logic of a ‘regular movement’ in history related to the questions of causality and freedom.
Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.
From Evolving Thoughts: The use of history by philosophers
One thing is clear: scientists, and Darwinists, have abused the study of history. Scientists because they obsessively deny freedom in thinking history is reducible to physical laws, and Darwinists because their false view of evolution is the source of endlessly denied endlessly applied Social Darinism.
The use of history by philosophers should be a question about the philosophy of history, and there the philosopher Kant proposes the clearest outline of that: Kant’s Challenge: http://history-and-evolution.com/whee/chap4_4.htm
The discussion of evolution and ethics is an ironic challenge to human intelligence, with the inexorable conclusion that we don’t have the facts required to produce a theory of ethics or its evolution.
To see the point it is worth considering Kant’s discussion of ‘common ordinary morality’ beginning in his Grundlagen.
He claims to be only trying to explicate that already built in morality. Perhaps he failed. But his point is remarkable: how we act, and how we understand how we act are not the same. The former must have evolved somehow, but how would we say if we can’t quite specify what it is.
Here the Darwinians go astray and get nowhere. At least Kant has an ethical agent, with a will, and a faculty of reason. And Kant has a system whereby the temporal/spatial context of the ‘will’ to do that ethical action is mediated with the space/time framework, etc: transcendental idealism (neither transcendental nor an idealism).
Darwinians clutch at straws with the sole property, altruism, whereby to derive a single virtue mechanically, with no further discussion of agents, will, morality in general, or anything else that is sensible.
It is a clear case of trying to use oversimplifications on problems their would be solvers are unable to really comprehend.
It is thus illegitimate for such people to claim a monopoly on all such knowledge, or to dismiss morality because it doesn’t fit into nineteenth century scientism.
The science community needs to do something here, and stop their pretentious bluff to the effect that they have already solved this problem.
The Darwin faithful are on the attack against Wright, whose confusions over evolution and morality are still not kosher with the Darwinian literalists.
Myers relieves himself of some Nietzschean impatience:
Nope, says I. First, there is no moral law: the universe is a nasty, heartless place where most things wouldn’t mind killing you if you let them. No one is compelled to be nice; you or anyone could go on a murder spree, and all that is stopping you is your self-interest (it is very destructive to your personal bliss to knock down your social support system) and the self-interest of others, who would try to stop you. There is nothing ‘out there’ that imposes morality on you, other than local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you’ve inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions.
Actually, the above is not true, and potentially disastrous as a general public belief; or else misposed around the idea of a ‘moral law’, from Moses to Kant.
Beyond that the ‘ethical’ dimension of the universe, totally invisible to Darwinists, is all-pervasive for those who care to look.
The truth is that we are barely intelligent enough to withstand the stupid smarts of Nietzsche, let alone resolve the tantalizing fragments of Kant and his transcendental idealism, which mediates the idea of freedom (the real point of morality) with that of Newtonian causality.
It is an interesting trap for redutionists: to assert that there is no moral law. Where is the proof?
Toward a Postdarwinian liberalism
One of the confusions of the debate over evolution is the tendency over time for the parties to that debate to polarize over secularism and religion, itself a false division.
The challenge to evolution is in reality to the pseudo-science created from Darwinism, which is not a religious but a scientific issue. Darwinism has created bad science, with ideological abuse of scientific priniciples. The correction lies in a scientific critique of Darwinian reductionism, not in a right-wing ideology promoting religion.
Beyond that it would help if the challenge to Darwinism sprang from a liberal critique of Darwinian ideology and economics where instead we have a monopoly of conservatives: a veiled conservatie ideology of classical liberalism, and a critique of that that never mentions its economic/ideological aspects but instead invokes religious agendas.
To be sure, religious views provide a reality check, however crude, against the reductionist assumptions of science, which have shown themselves incapable of correction in the dumbing down of scientific cadres.
Christians tend to complicate all discussions by injecting their mythological belief systems into the discussion, thus bending out of shape such terms as ‘design’, or ‘faith’, or ‘miracles’, even issues of ‘ethics’. Battling Christians tends to drive scientists ever deeper into the reductionist trap.
The saddest thing about this is that scientists now claim the enlightenment when they have in fact destroyed it by making a religion of scientism.
Let us remember that the issue of scientism found one great resolution in the work of figures such as Kant who exposed the concealed metaphysics of religion and scientism both, and mediated the Newtonian world view in a fashion that should be easy for scientists to adopt and use. And yet this small gesture is too much for current science. The reductionist absolute found in Darwinian selectionism and its kin is the hybristic ambition of scientists now.
A genuine postdarwinian liberalism already exists and would embrace the culture of modernity and the idea of freedom (against possibly in a Kantian perspective) in relation to the culture of science and the idea of causality. The mediation of these two could create the basis for a genuine secualarism beyond the degenerate scientism of technocratic Big Science and the distintegrating and reactionary religious traditionalism of Christian conservatives.
Visions of a Ghostseer
The previous post today on the confusion created by scientism confronting even such a simple issue as Buddhist psychology illustrates just how limited modern science in dealing with cultural issues.
The link is to our Kant page where the classic effort to deal with this already ancient confusion is discussed.
There is something inexcusable about the slide into reductionism and the effort to recast all of culture on that basis. The issue has been dealt with extensively over two centuries ago, but modern scientists have regressed to the Laplacean arrogance.
We don’t have to put up with it, or with the crippled theories of evolution like Darwinism that arise in that context.
The clue to ‘history/evolution’ lies in the famous antinomy of Kant. The details are elegant.
It is a fine piece of scholarship, but it has not received due recognition. And it is disappointing that Kant scholars won’t pick up on it.
The origins of morality
That the animal kingdom might show at least some intimations of moral behavior is not much of an argument, nor much of an explanation of how morality evolved. The dissent of Collins on this question is therefore not surprising: Darwinists have a severe problem with the question of morality, and the failure to acknowledge this has turned Darwinists into a blinkered species, and arrested progress.
It helps to study ‘historical evolution’, e.g. the Axial Age, and not in the coverup versions of people like K. Armstrong, to see the vast scale of the question, and the complete blindness of reductionist Darwinism to the scope of the question
The Legacy of Darwinism
The illusion of science in evolutionism: the Kantian three strikes–and you are out
The metaphysics of evolution The philosophy of Kant offers a useful benchmark for the examination of evolutionary theories as these impinge on the intractable issues of metaphysics. Questions, he warns, of god, soul or self, and free will are destined to exhibit antinomies that will haunt any universal generalization. We have the Darwin debate in a nutshell, and can see at once that Darwinian natural selection, used as the universal talisman of metaphysical reduction, presumes judgment on unobserved totalities, and is troubled on each of these questions. Questions of divinity founder in the design debate, of soul in the basic definition of self and organism, and free will in the attempts to reduce moral action to the mechanization of adaptationism. Current biology lacks so much as a basic definition of the organism.
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »