You have expressed the view that science uncovers the truth about reality. That’s a metaphysical claim, as I understand it.
I’d generally hold that science provides reliable and tentative models of the world we find useful.
Meaning what, why is evolution capitalised? Are you asking do I think the theory of evolution is true, I’d say yes.
You may find someone here who is interested in big discussions about evolution or philosophy of science. I have no expertise in the subject.
Take care.
It would be more accurate to say that I expressed a view that science is committed to honestly observing our physical reality.
As for “Truth” I try not to use that word. Because it’s meaningless without a specific mutually understood framing.
Considering we exist in a world of billions of creatures, with each being the literal center of the universe for themselves, I mean catch my drift about “truth.” Slipperier than an eel.
Honesty is where my focus is, and yes, science is dedicated to honesty. Even if not all its practitioners are.
I would suggest science offers the discipled measurements and observations, and guidelines — from there human minds must figure out what to do with that, and that is where fidelity to the principles of science matters most.
That gets us back to appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
Science offers windows into the physical world beyond the bubble of our mind. But our minds must work out what to do with the observations.
Does that make sense?
Why capitalize Evolution. First excuse because it is supremely important and where I come from. I also tend to Capitalize Earth for the same reason. They are entities of significance.
“Knowing evolution happened” is a far cry from understanding what happened, and why it matters to understanding who you are, and the world we exist within.
(And frankly, I grew up bilingual and I fell for the German habit of capitalizing everything interesting, then I had high school issues with grammar teachers, bad, bad move that one. Old habits die hard.)
Fair enough
Oh, and actually, I’m interested in finding some people willing to drill down into the problem with Chalmers’ hard problem, in respect to better understand the “Self” and those competing voices within our heads.
I mean we can’t get anywhere without constructive pushback.
Though I am interested in many other topics also.
Perhaps we’ll bump into each other again.
… and that for most everyone here, this is an intellectual discussion grounded in the intellectual/philosophical/theological legacy and traditions of thoughts & writings going back barely over a hundred human generations.
Whereas I come at all this from first absorbing a great deal of Evolutionary understanding, first inspired by my genes and family circumstance, later supercharged by David Attenborough’s epic Life on Earth first broadcast 1979, which I was fortunately able to watch repeated. Then some more with the book in hand, as if it were a school assignment. Then going ballistic thanks to experiencing the child I helped conceive to be born and the petite epiphany of generational regression into the dim past that swept over me.
At the time I was lucky enough (as custodian at a small rural grade school) to have an empty room with two conference tables to layout a piece of continuous matrix printer paper and draw out a timeline, one millimeter to a million years and spent a few weeks populating it with important evolutionary events. That project really drove home the hockey stick like aspect of the pace of development and many other insights. Before having it posted in the main hallway for the kids (it was an amazing little school).
By and by, a couple decades later the resolution of appreciating the "Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide" clicked into place.
Everything I know and experience is perceived and processed through my body. And it is my biological living body/brain that is doing all the interacting with the physical world it is embedded within. Mind is the reflection of the inner dialogue of the most complex creature nature has ever created. I am an evolved animal of Earth’s creation - deep down knowing that within oneself is amazingly liberating and intellectually clarifying.
Why do current philosopher’s ignore that Descartes was writing to appease the Catholic Church, his thinking is neck deep in religious assumptions of human exceptionalism and connection to some All Mighty Deity. His divide between Self and Body does not exist in the natural biological world. Everywhere scientists have looked they document self-aware behavior going on, all the way down to single celled creatures. But that gets left out, while philosophers discuss morality.
Only then did I increasingly turn to philosophy, which has been one heck of a frustrating, at times downright irritating, journey. It’s so saturated with self importance and a base dismissal of learning anything from biology and evolutionary understanding, that I just can’t make peace with it. Though I do try.
Consider this another attempt.
Very well put.
The questions that philosophy posits are all worth asking and it remains the case that philosophers are best placed to answer them with reference to preceding generations of thinkers.
But philosophy is not an exception. It needs to reflect progress in biology, psychology and sociology
A mistake would be to think that because the meaning behind something isn’t defined as an objective thing; it is objectively meaningless. If you are a Nihilist, attributing meaning to your question (objective morality) is left entirely to the individual.
In terms of learning to understand what evolution is all about, it’s as simple as: the past is immutable.
Sure, how we humans retell the past is an entirely different story. That is the arena of our Mindscape, while Earth’s history and future is a question of Physical Reality.
Once the “Living Moment of Now” flashes through your (and collectively everythings) body at the same universal moment (worth some pondering in itself) - what’s done is done there is no going back, no changing that moment. It’s an ultimate reality.
The future, full of bounded-potential - Then Qualia - that is the “living moment of now” as our collective body’s are actually digesting and acting on the sensory-neural-biological and whatnot processes scientists are exploring with ever more detail -
then comes the past.
Life is brutally unforgiving and the living moment never stops racing past us.
This stuff is outside of our metaphysical “reality” and fundamental. How to deal with it?
I don’t know that we have capacity to get to a truth outside of human perspective.
I tend to think of humans as being in the story business. Some stories work well for certain purposes (and audiences) and some don’t. I’ve never really factored in a Kantian-style story about the “really real” versus the less real world of appearances.
Is robust philosophy for you about discovering reality that transcends our tentative and provisional narratives?
I’d say science has done an excellent job of that, for me.
Philosophy is for understanding myself, those various voices and impulses that arise from within myself, for figuring out my place in the world.
Philosophy is also for trying to understand our human condition and why we people are damned self-absorbed and self-serving and blind to the rest of creation - except for our immediate self-interest and self-gratification.
The key for me is a keen appreciation for the Human Mind(scape) ~ Physical Reality divide. All that we know flows from that most fundamental observation.
I think this is just a stage in the development of morality. The final stage will be its focus on everyone. If, of course, we develop it to that level.
I disagree with morality nihilism, However. I am a nihilist regarding the concept that one can be moral culpable. I am a nihilist to the fact that emotions act any objective motivation to our actions. And I am a nihilist to the existence of religious morality, just as religion its self.
I am also a moral realist.
There is objective morality, it simply must be discovered, and we constantly discover it all time. We are constantly going through a process of approximating what I call will, our “best intrest”, our best attempt to figure out what we would desire given complete knowledge and perfect rationality (dispit obviously never perfectly approximating this). These wills form the bases of a system wholy independent of emotion, or particular cultures. And the bases of morality can be found by finding what is held in commen between wills. Which also gives an objective reason to follow such a collective will, since to forfill it generally means forfilling your own best interests.
This is my answer to moral nihilism, by understanding our will, our “best intrest”, we find that we cannot rely solely on ourselves, and so must follow a collective value, that which is shared in common between wills.
It doesnt seem likely that there are objective facts about morality. The Universe doesnt work like that.
We should perhaps focus on what we can do to promote our better qualities
This is where I disagree; there are factors related to us as sentient beings that are objective in that context. The ability to experience pleasure and suffering.
This forms the basis, and the strategy to best fulfill this ultimately leads to morality, since you must rely on others.
There is a best method of fulfilling the will (one’s preferred conditions, in the context of long-term pleasure and suffering) of all sentient beings.
This is what morality means to me.
Yes, i tend to agree but there is a difference between
a) there being better and worse ways of living our lives given the type of creatures are ( and it might be better to have a mature appreciation of the environment) and
b) there being a set of objective rules in the Universe that are revealled to us. Rules that existed before we were put on earth.
I tend towards the first but I am occasionally curious as to whether the second category is conpletely empty or not.