Re: Making your mind up

rOn Tue, 23 Apr 2024 12:47:39 +0000, *Hemidactylus*
<ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:04:07 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
<me@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

On 2024-04-22 10:36:02 +0000, Martin Harran said:
 

On Mon, 22 Apr 2024 11:39:56 +0200, Athel Cornish-Bowden
<me@yahoo.com> wrote:
 

On 2024-04-22 08:52:51 +0000, Martin Harran said:
 

On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:08:58 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
 

On 17/04/2024 12:14, Martin Harran wrote:
 
snip

 
Another aspect that strikes me is how individual minds can operate
collectively, almost as if a new mind is generated as in mob hysteria
but also in other useful ways; as a management consultant delivering
management development programmes, one of my favourite topics was
showing how collective decisions are generally better than individual
decisions. Although that has long been recognised in management and
business,  I am not aware of any attempt to study it from a science
perspective.
 

 
I read this a few days ago and thought "shhh keep your responses
relevant and focused, don't bring your latest hobbyhorse into every
conversation it's even vaguely reminiscent of" [I ask that you imagine
here Taylor Tomlinson miming the effects of antidepressants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47WXVTpnOyU&t=228s ]
 
But that laudable instinct wore off apparently. You know what book has
some interesting things to say about collective decision-making? "The
Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ! \o/
 
Actually one could argue it has a lot to say about decision-making in
general, it just gets at the problem from a very different angle than
the "how it works in the brain" that you seem to be talking about.
That's why I hesitated on the relevance front. But if a more high-level
discussion of how decision-making might work in its most general form,
that comes up with a very interesting perspective on the relationship of
individual humans to the collective, seems like it might interest you
it's a pretty short and (IMO) accessible book.

 
I've added the book to my list but for somewhat different reasons than
what you have said above. I have long been intrigued by the ideas of
Teilhard de Chardin

 
Have you read Peter Medawar's review of Theilhard de Chardin's book? I
can't find the complete review on the web, though I'm pretty sure it's
there: I've certainly read it, and I haven't got a subscription to
Mind. Anyway, some of the most characteristic parts are quoted here:
https://reasonandmeaning.com/2015/03/20/p-b-medawar-critique-of-teilhard-de-chardin/
 
 
 
I expect you won't like it at all, but others may.

 
Full critique is available here:
http://bactra.org/Medawar/phenomenon-of-man.html

 
Unfortunately my computer thought that link was dangerous, and wouldn't
let me go there. I'll try again when it's in a better mood.

 
I read it some time ago. What I didn't like about it was that it is a
purely polemic attack on Teilhard, I didn't see any *scientific*
contradiction to his ideas. Can you point any out to me?

 
I'll try to do so when I've managed to read the whole review again.

 
FWIW, this article in Naure captures my own thoughts on it:
 
https://www.nature.com/articles/35038172
 
<quote>
Medawar begged to differ [with Teilhard's ideas]: in 1961 he launched
an attack on The Phenomenon of Man ? which by this time had become a
semi-popular classic ? in the journal Mind; an article subsequently
anthologized and often quoted. He successfully demolished Teilhard's
arguments in 11 pages of awesome, sustained invective. Or did he?
Curiously, on close reading there is little real critical substance.
He complains of Teilhard's style (?tipsy prose-poetry?), some
technical shortcomings (?no grasp of the real weakness of modern
evolutionary theory?), but the main substantive issue is Teilhard's
misappropriation of scientific arguments to promote a religious
standpoint (?obscure pious rant?) and so duping a gullible public
(?educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical
thought?). We shall never know what Teilhard thought of Medawar, as
Teilhard died in 1954.
</quote>
 

As I said elsethread, I think Gould an effective antidote to Teilhard.

Why do you think an *antidote* is needed, in what way do you regard
Teilhard's ideas as poisonous?

In regard to Gould himself, assuming you are talking about NOMA, I
don't think he was particularly effective. First of all, I think he
was trying to eliminate conflict that didn't need to be eliminated. Up
until the end of the 19th-century, science and religious belief didn't
just live alongside each other, they were closely intertwined with a
lot of scientific progress being driven by the search for improved
religious belief. I think Gould was reacting to the growth in
fundamentalism, particularly in the USA, but even there I think it was
never mainstream belief and, in any event, the fundamentalists were
never going to listen to Gould. There is of course the other side of
the coin with the arrival of New Atheism and the particular prominence
of 'the four horsemen' but that really came after Gould and again,
like all militants, they too were not going to pay any attention to
what Gould was saying. One of the things I have always detested about
Dawkins is the way he tried after Gould's death to make out without
any evidence that Gould was probably only pretending to be tolerant of
religious belief in order to protect his funding.

Secondly, I think he was doing a disservice to the growth in human
knowledge by trying to completely separate religion and science. There
are very few aspects of life that are rigidly in one area without
overlapping other areas and it is often in that overlapping that we
can find fresh answers for both areas. In trying to understand
anything better, I believe that we get a fuller understanding by
drawing information from a range of different areas; in the case of
understanding human development, I think we should be drawing from
science, philosophy, theology, psychology, and other 'soft' sciences
rather than just relying on 'pure' science with its own limitations.


That is one of the things I like about Teilhard; whether or not his
ideas are correct, he has shown that it is possible to draw from both
science and theology without sacrificing anything from either.

The
drunkards walk against a lower boundary of minimal complexity is one angle.
Upwards from this grade just happens. Bacteria remain nestled there and are
the predominate form of life still. They may enjoy primitive forms of
internetworking (proto-thinking layer) and certainly fileshare using
plasmids and (ironically enough) phages, which helps them counter human
ingenuity of antibiotics.
>
Perhaps forest floor internetworking between trees and mycorrhizae are a
sorta convergence to the grade of thinking layer. I dunno.
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If not for a bolide the non-avian dinosaurs may not have been wiped away
opening ecological paths or niches for mammals to take. There are so many
points where evolutionary outcomes could have differed. That we are here
seems meaningful to us, but not to the universe, even if Teilhard and his
pal Julian Huxley thought the universe becoming self-aware through us was a
profound thought. According to Mayr, Huxley thought humans deserved the
grade (or Kingdom) of Psychozoa which seems somewhat conceited.

I'm working my way through Tomasello's 'The Evolution of Agency' at
the moment. I don't want to say much until I have finished it but this
sentence in the introduction really caught my attention:

"Attending to an extended evolutionary history before the emergence of
modern humans creates a view of human psychology as a kind of layered
onion, with an inner core of basic processes shared by all agentive
organisms, further layers that humans share only with other mammals or
primates, and an outermost layer of uniquely human psychology in all
its dizzying complexity."

I find that recognition of human uniqueness refreshing. It is tiresome
when people dismiss the basic idea of such uniqueness, claiming that
there really is no great difference between a crow using a stick to
get food out of a bottle and me using the computer that I'm using the
moment or that the incredibly complex world developed by humans that I
can see all around me isn't really much different from an ants nest.

There are numerous features and capabilities where the difference
between humans and other animals is completely off the scale plus
human capabilitiesthat don't even exist in other animals. Can you
identify any other species that is, for example, capable of developing
the concept of God whether that concept is based on something real or
something that is totally imaginary? Playing down these differences
harms rather than benefits us in trying to get a better understanding
of what it means to be human and how we got there.

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