Feser’s Aquinas can be adequately summarized as “Aquinas does not believe the obviously wrong things you think he does! He believes different, more complicated, and more subtly wrong things.”
This is, of course, salutary. There is a tendency to assume that people who believe things that seem wrong to us are stupid and have failed to notice the obvious flaws in their reasoning. However, St. Thomas Aquinas was much much smarter than I am; his ideas are complicated and nuanced and the only reason he is wrong is that he didn’t have science yet.
Feser argues that final causes, or teleoi, obviously exist. He points out that it is quite impossible to talk about biology without talking about final causes: if you can’t say “the purpose of the heart is to pump blood” or “the purpose of the penis is urination, sensation, penetration and ejaculation”, you are going to have a really hard time talking about human bodies.
The problem– and this is entirely not Aquinas’s fault, and only a little Feser’s– is that biology does have teleoi. Human bodies are in fact designed by a tremendously powerful optimizer for a purpose.
The problem is that the tremendously powerful optimizer is “evolution” and the purpose is “to have the maximum possible number of grandchildren.”
This is, to put it lightly, not a very satisfying ground of morality.
That gets into the second problem of teleoi– why should I pay attention to the teleoi at all? Feser doesn’t really address this, presumably because his moral sense says that he shouldn’t murder people, should pray regularly, should donate to charity, etc., and his interpretation of the teleoi says the same thing, and so he doesn’t have a problem. But my moral sense says “you should be vegan and give lots of money to charity”, and my interpretation of the teleoi says “are you NUTS? You’re taking money from your children and giving it to STRANGERS? Who can’t even repay you? And what if you NEED those calories you’re turning down?”
And I’m kind of inclined to say fuck the teleoi.
But if I can say “fuck the teleoi, I’m doing what’s right”, then the teleoi cannot possibly be the objective, rational ground of morality.
Another example is Aquinas’s distinction between causal series ordered per accidens and causal series ordered per se. Causal series ordered per accidens work the way that having children works: I exist because my mother gave birth to me, but if my mother died, I would continue to exist. Causal series per se work the way that pushing a cart works. If I stopped pushing the cart, then it would stop moving. Per accidens causal series can continue as far back as you like: it is theoretically possible that I could have an infinity-times-great grandmother. Per se causal series have to end: the cart is moving because my hands are pushing it, my hands are pushing it because of muscles in my arm, the muscles in my arm are moving because of signals from my nerves, and so on. Aquinas believes, therefore, that there has to be an uncaused causer; this being is God.
However, I think this mistake is a simple failure of reductionism. It certainly looks to me like I have to push the cart for the cart to move, but that’s not what’s really happening. What’s actually happening is that my atoms are bouncing against the atoms in the cart, transferring force from my hands to the cart, in accordance with the laws of classical mechanics. (Well, what’s actually happening is quantum mechanics, but I don’t understand quantum mechanics and am not going to venture a guess about how it works.) In reality, every causal series is per accidens and none of them are per se and there is no need to ground anything in God.
The larger issue here is the fallibility of pure reason. Feser says that his philosophy is like math: you start from uncontroversial premises that everyone agrees on, and then you build a larger system that says things you’d never imagine came from the premises. The problem is that humans are regularly wrong about uncontroversial things that everyone agrees on. Our intuitions evolved to deal with things sized somewhere between a tenth of an inch and a few dozen miles, but the universe stubbornly insists on consisting of things lightyears apart or yoctometers wide. Quantum mechanics makes no intuitive sense; astrophysics makes no intuitive sense.
And we are expecting Feser’s uncontroversial premises that make intuitive sense to be true… why, exactly?
Math is simpler, because its premises have been carefully refined to involve as little extraneous detail as possible. Even a statement like “carts stop when you stop pushing them” is a lot less specific and less well-defined than a statement like “if a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles.” You can ask what a straight line is and get a real answer– extends infinitely in two directions, has no width or breadth– whereas what a cart is, as we saw, presents innumerable difficulties. (And, of course, you can come up with consistent non-Euclidean geometries, many of which are useful for describing the universe despite our strong intuitions about parallel lines and the crossing thereof. Feser does not seem to have considered developing non-Aquinasian ethical systems.)
Toggle said:
Okay, so, RNA world.
RNA world is the reigning Reasonable Hypothesis about abiogenesis (the origin of life). It basically just points out that mRNA can have both a nucleotide sequence and a protein-like structure, and that the molecule folds in to different shapes depending on the nucleotide sequence. So minor mutations in the arbitrary nucleotide sequence have immediate functional consequences- it’s a single molecule that’s subject to natural selection. Given that, it’s pretty reasonable to expect that mRNA or something like it acted as an intermediate step between chemistry and biology.
It’s certainly true that the power of life in the evolutionary sense is in the combination of genotype and phenotype. Rooting phenotype in an arbitrary alphabet (DNA, and RNA) allows bodies to be reconfigured with much more flexibility and complexity than the next-most complicated things in the universe, minerals and whatnot. And rooting genetics in an embodied phenotype gives that alphabet external forcing and allows mutations to be directed rather than purely random. So, a dead world became a living world at roughly the moment that it gave physical context to grammar.
This matters when you talk about Aquinas, Christianity, and teloi because RNA is a word made flesh. Like, literally. It’s poetic, but not metaphorical at all. I don’t have to put it in quotes.
It’s fairly easy for us to say that evolution is amoral, or evil if w’re inclined to project morality on to nature. But for Aquinas’ sake, I think we can also ask the deeper question- what does it imply about our universe, if a word made flesh brought life to the world? Metaphysics doesn’t really have a ‘solution’ in the sense of logical and empirical reasons for believing specific things. But I find it remarkable that syntax, of all things, ends up having such remarkable powers in our reality. Per Aquinas, it suggests that logos is fundamental in some very profound ways.
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Nita said:
RNA is a word in the same way that a string of beads is a word — that is, maybe if you squint, but drawing conclusions about the nature of universe from this fact might be a little too much.
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thesilencefromwhichitcomes said:
I have a similar intuition coming from a different angle. I tend toward the reductionistic, but it seems to me that abstractions have some kind of reality of their own. The very notion of abstract similarity is mysterious to me, and I’m not quite ready to call it an artifact of cognition because there seems to be some fundamental abstract similarity in the universe (e.g. the applicability of mathematics to countless diverse phenomena). The idea of “word made flesh” seems deeply connected to this (although I count the fact that the phrase comes from Christianity as mostly incidental).
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veronica d said:
Right. I like to say that computational structures and the isomorphisms between them exist in a mind-independant way. Which is to say, the Church numbers are an actual *thing*, and are the same thing as Peano arithmetic, which is the same thing as the finite ordinals/cardinals in ZF, which is the same thing as…
Well, you get the idea.
Anyway, I am asserting that math over finite sets “works,” in that there is a correct answer and any other answer means you (or your computer) made a mistake.
(Regarding infinite sets, I prefer to take non-terminating computable sequences as fundamental. From those you can get much, but not all, of analysis. You can get Cauchy sequences and delta-epsilon and co-induction and so on. What you do not get is computable equality, so you need to posit equality as an additional concept, which I am willing to do.)
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Toggle said:
@thesilence
Among mathematicians, it’s my understanding that ‘Platonism’ means that you assert the independent reality of mathematical concepts. (This was really confusing when I ran across it the first time, but it’s a perfectly reasonable word for it.)
This gets exceptionally interesting when you talk about metalogic and the limits of computation (Godel, Lob, etc). I mean, what is it exactly that Godel was studying? Surely the completeness theorem is more than a form of art criticism. But logic isn’t ‘real’ in the sense of being a construct of matter and energy either. So we struggle to talk about it- there’s no physicist that proposes math works because our region of space is intersecting some n-dimensional “integer brane”.
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Ginkgo said:
“But I find it remarkable that syntax, of all things, ends up having such remarkable powers in our reality. Per Aquinas, it suggests that logos is fundamental in some very profound ways.”
You are describing “structure” or “information” (the way physicists use the term.) structure or information don’t be conscious or have agency.
You mention grammar and use language as a metaphor. That is apt. Language is an almost completely self-organizing system, constantly changing without any agent making the changes. No one invented English or Chinese.
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Toggle said:
In some ways, yeah. There’s an important difference in that syntax implies an open-ended flexibility that ‘mere’ information does not. I compared biology to mineralogy. Minerals have a tessellating structure, and this structure can be represented in a linguistic format if you have the inclination, but it would be a bit weird to say that quartz has a syntax.
Nucleic acids, on the other hand, are arbitrarily extensible polymers with the specific role of encoding a structure using symbolic representation. To my eye, there’s something going on there that is not fully captured by words like ‘structure’ and ‘information’. A given genetic sequence really does ‘mean something’, because it both describes and causes a phenotype. That’s very different from an arbitrary representation of the structure of olivine, which will not produce new minerals no matter how many errors it contains.
Actually, my specific use of ‘syntax’ came from my thinking about Scott Aaronson’s description of the completeness theorem- he said that it ‘extracted semantics from syntax’. That may be a good description of the qualities I’m trying to highlight in living chemistry. A word made flesh is a domain where form and meaning get all tangled up and interdependent.
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Ginkgo said:
“he said that it ‘extracted semantics from syntax’. That may be a good description of the qualities I’m trying to highlight in living chemistry. ”
That’s very interesting because that’s another parallel with language.
Traditionally there has been a supposedly unbreachable wall between syntax and the lexicon, the piece of a language that is semantically condition. Chomsky for instance has always insisted on this.
It’s provincial and parochial to make this distinction. Edward Vajda pints out that in a lot of languages the distinction between a word and a clause is essentially non-existent.
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Creutzer said:
What does the fact that in some languages clauses can be single words have to do with anything? “word” is a purely phonological concept anyway and has nothing to do with semantics.
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pocketjacks said:
First, physicists thought that matter was the fundamental building block of the universe, then energy. Now it seems like information is.
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Belobog said:
I’m a little confused by your statement that biological teleoi come from evolution. First, do you agree with Feser that everything, even non-biological processes have final causes? Then, since clearly evolution is not conscious, it can’t design things the way humans do or perhaps God does. But then in what sense is survival and reproduction actually the goal of an organism that arose from evolution? It seems to me that neither survival nor death would really be the goal: whatever happens happens. Of course, the species around today chose survival, but it’s a tautology that things that happen to survive happen to survive.
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Protagoras said:
Bah! This isn’t long at all. I mean, sure, the points you do make are good ones, but the title of this post is just false advertising. Makes me think I need to do a review of this book to show you how it’s done.
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Tarn Somervell Fletcher said:
Also, our intuitions are often the product of incidental facts about our environment – My intuitions for the length of ‘quite long’ book reviews are clearly terrible, and if has everything to do with my browsing habits.
It’s possible Feser just didn’t address that because of where he draws the line between meta- and normative ethics, and his books is about the latter?
Also, when you say “But if I can say “fuck the teleoi, I’m doing what’s right”, then the teleoi cannot possibly be the objective, rational ground of morality”, this is the open-question argument (originally by Moore, with various updated versions).
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nancylebovitz said:
I’d have said that the worst thing about teloi as a concept is the assumption that things only have one purpose– that seems to be where Catholic ideas about sex blow up. On the other hand, your description of teloi for the penis lists multiple purposes, so maybe I’m wrong about how the concept works.
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Santiago Tórtora said:
Catholics believe sex has two purposes, actually. Making babies, and bonding married couples. If a Catholic is infertile, for example, they can still get married and have sex.
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thesilencefromwhichitcomes said:
But from what I’ve read it’s still important for Catholics that the right parts are meeting in the right ways for making babies – you can’t have sex just for bonding that couldn’t “in principle” (in a kind of tortured meaning of the phrase) produce offspring.
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Patrick said:
Carts DON’T stop when you cease pushing them. They continue forever until acted upon by an outside force.
Perhaps more importantly, “purpose” isn’t a thing.
It’s like “deliciousness.” We might say that a cake “is delicious” or “has the trait of deliciousness.” But in reality that just means that the speaker, possessed of certain sensory apparatus and aesthetic preferences, has sensations and aesthetic experiences of a particular type when he or she consumes the cake. The cake’s properties are chemical. “Deliciousness” isn’t a thing that inheres to the cake. It describes our relationship to it.
If our taste buds changed, what was delicious would change. Without any change in the cake.
“Purpose” is similar.
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Ginkgo said:
Oh for a thousand likes!
“It’s like “deliciousness.” We might say that a cake “is delicious” or “has the trait of deliciousness.””
Precisely. The same applies to “offensive”. Verbs have argument structures – the number of noun arguments the verb implies semantically, and transitive verbs like “offend” or “delight” necessarily have agents and patients/experiencers. As a verb “offends” sounds odd if someone says “That offends.” (Yeah, okay……now complete your thought please.) But adjectives don’t have that constraint in English, so “That’s offensive.” is a well-formed sentence in English. It’s well-formed (grammatically); it’s just that it’s basically meaningless.
“Privilege” has the same infirmity. Almost every time I have seen privilege ascribed to someone, it has been phrased as some kind of characteristic that inheres in the person as opposed to the conjunction of social norms that it obviously is, e.g. there is no white privilege in China.
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Anthony said:
““Deliciousness” isn’t a thing that inheres to the cake. It describes our relationship to it.
If our taste buds changed, what was delicious would change. Without any change in the cake.
“Purpose” is similar.”
I agree with all of this, but disagree with the assertion that that infirmity and relational-ness renders it “not a thing”.
Organisms respond to formal relations between stimuli, and humans respond to arbitrary relations between stimuli.
For instance, the height of the risers on a flight of stairs relative to our stride length determines how an organism climbs those stairs (non arbitrary, mathematically model-able). We perceive that relative height/stride length and act in relation to it.
So, is that perceived relative property (called an “affordance”, an opportunity for action, loosely) a thing? Does it exist? It seems to me that it certainly exists, but precisely where is problematic, insofar as it is not an inherent property of the stairs (because it’s different for a mouse, or a taller person) or the organism approaching the stairs (because it’s different for different stairs) but rather it exists only in the perception/action interactions of those two things. It’s impermanence doesn’t render it Not A Thing though, because it measurably impacts the world. Not just impacts, but defines the entire behavioural sequence of stair climbing.
And that’s the easy stuff – the responding to formal properties of the world.
Humans can do arbitrary. They can do language. And that’s where it gets very philosophically tangly and difficult. But in principle, I see no reason that linguistic relations between environment, organism, behaviour, and history, wouldn’t have that same set of properties as a formal affordance. “Purpose” isn’t inherent to any object or organism, but describes a relationship between ones private verbal behaviour and observable behaviour in relation to the environment. But that description (itself a verbal behaviour) changes the execution of that behaviour, and changes the behaviour of those responding to it if we articulate it.
Doesn’t that make it a Thing? Impermanence doesn’t render something non-existent, and that it only exists in the realm of human verbal behaviour/relational responding doesn’t render it not useful and important in describing and influencing that set of phenomena. If it moves the world, it must be a thing of some sort.
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Lambert said:
‘No, it is a word. What matters is the connection the word implies.’
–Rama Kandra, Matrix III
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Patrick said:
The phrase “that’s not a thing” was not intended to be philosophically rigorous.
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Anthony said:
That’s fair. I’ve been spending lots of time recently trying to unpick the philosophical thingness of words and relational responding, so I’m primed to go off on ranty tangents about it at the slightest mention 🙂
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Toggle said:
Can purpose be reflexive? That is, can purpose be a relationship between a thing and itself?
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Patrick said:
Considering that “purpose” is a word we made up because it was useful, if it’s useful to use the word that way and people will understand you, then yes. The issue isn’t- IS NEVER- the intrinsic nature of “purpose.” It’s the socially constructed nature of grammar.
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Toggle said:
‘Made up’ doesn’t mean ‘arbitrary’, especially when you stretch it to mean anything not atomic. On good days, words and concepts are a representation of reality with predictive utility, and that fully applies to words that describe relationships. The relationship-between-real-objects-in-the-real-world that we are pointing at with the word ‘purpose’ has, it seems to me, certain qualities that are worthy of discussion.
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Ginkgo said:
“Can purpose be reflexive? That is, can purpose be a relationship between a thing and itself?”
This may help. It discusses how Lushootseed, a Salishan language, handles this issue:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/237134192_Transitivity_and_Causation_in_Lushootseed_Morphology
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Patrick said:
Then you’re wrong. If your goal is to identify the characteristics of “purpose” in some sort of abstract sense and then expect “predictive utility” from other instances of “purpose,” you’re well off track.
That’s classic “map versus territory” confusion. Following that path leads to madness and Catholic theology.
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Lambert said:
I would argue that the information that a thing is purposeful gives a reasonable amount of predictive power: one expects modulaity, parsimony, position in a local maximum of fitness for purpose. I’m sure there are more properties besides these.
Ozy, if WP recognises me with this email address, please delete duplicate post.
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Patrick said:
That’s using definitions backwards. If purpose is defined as those things, then the “information that a thing is purposeful” is just restating that it has those traits.
Lets define a “quarp” as anything having a certain seven properties. It doesn’t matter what those properties are.
You might think that knowing that something is a quarp lets you know that it has those seven properties.
But how would you possibly know whether it was a quarp until after you’ve already determined that it has those seven properties?
What people want to do looks something like this: “I just plain know what is or isn’t a quarp, at least most of the time. I know from the definition of quarp that all quarps have a certain seven properties. So when I know I’ve found a quarp using my power of just plain knowing stuff, I know that I’ve found something with those seven properties.” But that’s not reasoning at all, especially when it comes to linguistic conveniences like nouns that describe relational statuses between other nouns.
The closest you could get to “predictive power” would be something like this: “Patrick says this thing is a quarp, so Patrick is telling me that he believes that it has the seven quarp properties.”
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Lambert said:
But consider the cluster structure of thingspace. Say things often posess many of few of those 7 properties. If you identify an object that has 5 of the properties, it is disproportionately probable that is posesses the other two. Yes, I know you can do the same thing better withou invoking the concept of quarp at all, but as a speed optimisation & compression tool, quarp would serve humans quite nicely.
P.S. Where did my wierd alien mouth and spring leg go?
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Patrick said:
That is an awful lot of less wrong jargon for saying “sometimes jumping to conclusions is useful.” Maybe that’s true, but I can’t bring myself to laud this specific form of jumping to conclusions in a thread about Edward Feser, He Who Most Exemplifies The Flaws In That Plan.
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Ginkgo said:
“In reality, every causal series is per accidens and none of them are per se and there is no need to ground anything in God.”
This is what Nagarjuna called “pratitya samutpada” – dependent origination, because in fact these causal chains are ultimately circular loops of causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
Where he and others differ from Aquinas and others is that he sees no agency in any of this causation, and no need for a persistent being acting to initiate anything.
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Vadim Kosoy said:
> You can ask what a straight line is and get a real answer– extends infinitely in two directions, has no width or breadth
Nitpick: mathematics doesn’t really define every concept. Instead it starts with a finite number of basic concepts which don’t have any definition, postulates axioms about these concepts and then defines complex concepts using the basic concepts and derives theorems from the axioms.
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Vamair said:
I’d say the axioms “are” the definitions. I mean, any set of objects that corresponds to the axioms for vectors are vectors, any set of objects that correspond to the axioms of plane geometry are lines and points, etc.
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Daniel Keys said:
> Math is simpler,
This is pretty funny, because my response was that he seemed hostile to the complexities of modern math. Possibly I just don’t understand his assertion, since we have no real example of the per se series he wants us to be, and thus I may not understand what he means by it. But I really don’t see why the set of integers becomes logically impossible when we replace the integers with continually necessary causes.
In fact, aside from just asserting that causation and/or time doesn’t work this way, I see nothing to prevent an uncountably infinite series of causes preceding a given event. Let the event be the ordinal Aleph5.
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arielbyd said:
Bad example – that’s still well-founded.
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Daniel Keys said:
Yes, but that just makes Feser’s argument logically orthogonal to his thesis. Also, your statement is only true in one direction; we could reverse the order and take 0 as our endpoint.
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anon said:
I’m interested in which posts you tag rationality
I feel like maybe all your posts should be tagged that way, although that would make the tag redundant
Is it rationality because it’s philosophy or because you are taking idea you disagree with seriously?
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Creutzer said:
The word is actually telos in the singular and telea in the plural.
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heelbearcub said:
Not sure if that quote above will format the way I want it to…
I’m confused about the instinct to reduce the evolutionary drive to only direct descendants. Seriously, I see this frequently and it always confuses me.
Our animal is clearly a social-altruistic animal. And it is clear that the animal is that way because it conferred an evolutionary benefit. The genetic trait to help those we recognize as “our” group (even if strangers) clearly benefits the gene(s) that encodes that trait. Broadly speaking, when distant cousins help each other, it provides enough of a genetic benefit to favor that genetic predisposition.
Is there some research I am missing out on that shows this not to be the case? That our social-altruism is actually overcoming genetic traits rather than giving in to them?
Now, I also understand that we have an oppositional tendency to dominate and kill strangers or even just rivals. But these two coexist, rather than one being true and the other false.
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Creutzer said:
Charities – which the quote was about – are about non-reciprocal altruism towards an outgroup. I see no way that this could be evolutionarily beneficial or selected for.
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heelbearcub said:
What if outgroups are only socially constructed?
Do you give to charities that benefit (blue/red/gray) tribe that is your outgroup?
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Lambert said:
Dawkins covers this in ‘the Blind Watchmaker’ (or was it ‘the Selfish Gene’?). There is a benefit to helping one’s kin, but that diminishes as the consanguinuity decreases. For example, it is evolutionarily adaptive to give x utilons of resources to a sibling if they derive 2x utilons of benefit therefrom. 1st cousins require 4x utilons; 2nd cousins 8x etc.
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heelbearcub said:
That is is for all the genes on the whole set of 23 chromosomes.
But I don’t believe it takes nearly that much utility for the genetic markers for altruism to survive.
Consider many sets individuals in dire straits. Those who have the altruism trait survive because they help each other, those who don’t, don’t.
All that is required to broadly have the altruism trait survive is for a sufficiently dire period to occur that altruism is adaptive for. Whatever other traits we have, poorly adaptive as they may be, don’t matter because the altruism gene survives.
Put another way, given a socially cooperative creature that has to have social cooperation to survive, it’s (probably) much cheaper to simply be generally socially cooperative and altruistic then to attempt to develop close kin detection alongside altruism.
In addition, given that mating with only close kin tends to be maladaptive, I would expect that altruism-close kin only breaks down quickly when you bring your mates family into the equation. If you are unwilling to help your mates first cousin and vice versa, that seems generally less adaptive.
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Ginkgo said:
“There is a benefit to helping one’s kin, but that diminishes as the consanguinuity decreases. ”
This is true as far as it goes, but there is more to it than that. In highly social species, humans for instance, cooperation produces a synergistic effect that increases the survival of offspring. Basically the bigger the community (within reason) the more land it is going to be able to grab, the better it will be able to defend itself, and so on.
This is why the slavery-kidnapping-adoption spectrum exists in humans. Even unrelated members stengthen the position of the community.
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Lambert said:
Yeah. It’s still not that clear cut. You ar basically playing the prisoner’s dilemma against everyone, with all the complexities arrising therefrom.
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Ginkgo said:
“You ar basically playing the prisoner’s dilemma against everyone, with all the complexities arrising therefrom.”
I don’t know this reference and I can’t follow your thinking. can you explain it in simple terms to me? (And it will take simple terms!)
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heelbearcub said:
@Ginkgo:
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a thought experiment/basic game from game theory.
Two suspects have been caught by the police. If neither rat each other out (cooperation) they both get a short sentence.
If they both rat, they get longer sentences.
If one rats he goes free and the other has a very long sentence.
If they cooperate, they have a better outcome than if they don’t. But being able to screw the other guy who thinks you they going to cooperate generates YOUR best outcome (but not the best average outcome).
As in many things, cooperation and selfishness are in tension with each other.
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Ginkgo said:
“As in many things, cooperation and selfishness are in tension with each other.”
You are still thinking of this in individualistic terms, as a tension between competition and cooperation when individuals are in opposition, and of course individualism is the default setting in a market, consumerist – bourgeois – society Then there is indeed that tension. But when the competition is between armies for instance, then cooperation enhances competition. There is no tension; In fact they are a self-exciting circle.
Thus Patton’s rant about individualism”
“An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team.
This individuality stuff is a bunch of bullshit.”
– General George Patton Jr
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heelbearcub said:
@Ginkgo:
The tension inherent is evidenced within one army. If a grenade is lobbed into a bunker, it’s better for the unit/army-in-general if someone jumps on it. The average outcomes are improved. But that individual is not better off. That individual is dead. That basic dichotomy is brought in more stark relief the less dire circumstance.
Because most circumstances are not nearly so dire as an army at war, it’s not the best example to illustrate the tension.
And it’s not like Patton was famous for being the most cooperative guy in the army. He was pretty damn competitive.
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Ginkgo said:
“The tension inherent is evidenced within one army.”
Well of course. An army is huge – I am talking about the unit level. When studies look at what motivates soldiers in combat, they routinely come back with the same answer – peer bonds, and not much else.
“If a grenade is lobbed into a bunker, it’s better for the unit/army-in-general if someone jumps on it. The average outcomes are improved. But that individual is not better off. That individual is dead.”
By whose lights? Yours? Irrelevant. By his lights, dying for his friends is a good thing. Do you know what captured Japanese officers said was the most inhuman, heinous mistreatment they received at the hands of the Americans? They were appalled that the Americans prevented them for committing suicide and they had no choice but to surrender. That moral murder they experienced was much worse than any other possible atrocity. That is as personal; as it gets – sometimes the wall between self-interest and serving the collective dissolves, because without the collective the individual cannot exist..
Your values are not universal. That comment displays the same individualism I mentioned before. On the other hand his response probably has a lot of evolutionary conditioning behind it.
“Because most circumstances are not nearly so dire as an army at war, it’s not the best example to illustrate the tension.”
As Sun Zi points out there is no clear line between war and peace. Conflict in one form or another is constant. In any case an army is at war for a small percentage of the time. It has to stay ready for it, but its norms are fitted to the full range of challenges the environment presents.
“And it’s not like Patton was famous for being the most cooperative guy in the army. He was pretty damn competitive.”
You are seeing an contradiction where there is only an opposition. He was competitive, but he surely could follow orders, which is profoundly cooperative. and he damned sure expected cooperation form his subordinates. He despised Montgomery and was deadly competitive with him, but the strategic effect was quite cooperative.
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heelbearcub said:
@Ginkgo:
You are really far afield from how social-altruism is a benefit on evolutionary level, which is where I started this comment.
All of my comments are predicated on the notion that I am responding to Ozy’s comments about teloi, which I understand to be informed by their understanding of evolutionary fitness. In this context, a soldier in an army that forms a moral compulsion to throw themselves on a grenade should be examined not for whether their moral compulsion is “right” or “wrong” but rather in how the ability to form this compulsion pays for itself when examined in terms of reproductive capacity.
My contention (and really, we aren’t disagreeing very much at all), is that the altruistic trait pays for itself in exactly the way that the soldier throwing himself on the grenade benefits the unit. The unit continues on, and units that exhibit this tendency are more successful in the long run than units that don’t. It doesn’t matter that these people aren’t directly related to each other, they all benefit (on average) from the same behavior. If they don’t cooperate, they are all dead.
But take that same unit and put them in peace time (where the risk of someone needing to fall on a grenade is small). Some of the members of the unit will have a more successful set of traits for mating with the opposite sex. In peacetime, the traits of each individual member of the unit are in competition with each other (even if they don’t know it.)
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Ginkgo said:
“My contention (and really, we aren’t disagreeing very much at all), is that the altruistic trait pays for itself in exactly the way that the soldier throwing himself on the grenade benefits the unit. ”
We agree completely on this.
“In this context, a soldier in an army that forms a moral compulsion to throw themselves on a grenade should be examined not for whether their moral compulsion is “right” or “wrong” but rather in how the ability to form this compulsion pays for itself when examined in terms of reproductive capacity.”
I think a decision like that is based on something a lot deeper than any sense of right or wrong.
BTW something similar to what you are saying is the most compelling explanation I have heard yet for the adaptivity of homosexuality. It lowers the ratio of kids to adults in a community.
“Some of the members of the unit will have a more successful set of traits for mating with the opposite sex.”
Your reproductive success is not measured in the number of young you have but of how many they have. that’s where altruism comes in, as a means of strengthening the communal support structure for those kids to reach adulthood.
‘You are really far afield from how social-altruism is a benefit on evolutionary level, which is where I started this comment. ”
It may seem that way, but considering the role conflict has played in determining who gets what resources, the evolutionary impact should be clear. Something else – when it comes to reproductive success, winning wars can make all the difference as far as your sons are concerned. women and girls may be kidnapped or enslaved or become secondary wives, but the men and boys will most likely be massacred.
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heelbearcub said:
@Ginkgo:
You seem to be assuming that I am contending that they stop being altruistic in peacetime. This is incorrect. We are, in fact, social altruistic creatures fairly perpetually. I’m also not claiming that altruism has no beneficial effect in peacetime. I’m was merely trying to show one easy example of how general (non-kin) altruism is evolutionarily adaptive.
Questions: Do you think the only trait that determine the evolutionary success of a human individual is altruism? Or do you think there exist other traits that affect success? Do individuals possess all of the same traits? Or do they possess different ones? Does possessing different traits have an effect on their reproductive success?
I am saying, that within a framework of altruism, individual members have more or less successful characteristics for generating favorable outcomes. When I said successful set of traits for mating, I’m not talking about merely the sex act itself, but general reproductive success. Whatever those traits are, they are in competition.
Generally people do not all behave with the same levels of altruism. If optimal altruism was necessary for reproductive success, full stop, we would see everyone with about the same level.
As to your point about winning resources, this is going right back to the knock-on effects of war (or any other high stress period) and is another great example of how general altruistic behavior (as opposed to kin specific) becomes a generally required trait across humanity.
Actually, if you look at mammals in general, I believe there many, many of them that display non-kin altruism. Co-evolution? Some common ancestor? I don’t know, but it seems to show the general fitness of non-kin altruism as a characteristic.
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Ginkgo said:
“Questions: Do you think the only trait that determine the evolutionary success of a human individual is altruism? Or do you think there exist other traits that affect success?”
Both altruism and competition determine evolutionary success. Our only difference is that you seem to be presenting them as being in opposition and I am presenting them as synergistic. On the atomistic level of individuals, you take is clearly true and on the holistic level of a system or community, mine is right. That’s the only difference in what each other is saying
“Actually, if you look at mammals in general, I believe there many, many of them that display non-kin altruism. Co-evolution? Some common ancestor? I don’t know, but it seems to show the general fitness of non-kin altruism as a characteristic.”
Very good point. The dog-human relationship is one of my favorite examples. dogs will readily offer their lives to defend their human pack members and even humans too, the good ones, will do the same for dogs. That’s just cross species. Intra-species we have many more examples. Adoption is one.
“I’m not talking about merely the sex act itself, but general reproductive success. Whatever those traits are, they are in competition.”
Absolutely true. Think of a harem setting, where only one prince can become emperor, so only one can survive. That incentivizes mothers to try to poison or otherwise destroy each others’ sons to give them a leg up. On the macro level this is the impulse behind the One Child Policy.
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Joseph F. Clark said:
Great post. It emphasizes one point I wish people who argue with Thomists would underline more, viz. that there is no good reason why we should even care about teleoi, if they exist (which they don’t, because Darwin).
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Joe said:
You should follow teleoi because to do otherwise would be irrational. If there is no teleos then there is no purpose or meaning and we all might as well be suicidal nihilists. With out teleos nothing makes sence all is aubsured randomness.
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Joe said:
It’s important to be very skeptical of reductionism.
http://www.strangenotions.com/why-reality-includes-more-not-less-than-you-may-think/
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Protagoras said:
Though I cannot claim to understand your account fully, your definition of “reductionism” appears to be non-standard (speaking as an expert in metaphysics, and also a reductionist). This is something of a problem for many of your points, certainly for their applicability as any kind of criticism of the philosophical or scientific mainstream. Reductionism is admittedly highly contested within the mainstream, but in an attempt to avoid being completely unhelpful, here is a paper by one of the clearest advocates of a form of reductionism, discussing specifically philosophy of mind: http://people.ucsc.edu/~jbowin/Ancient/lewis1966.pdf
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Patrick said:
“It is this: to claim that there is no Santa Claus is to claim that you know that there is no Santa Claus; and that is to claim that you know this universal negative, that you know that there is no Santa Claus anywhere in objective reality, as distinct from subjective reality, or consciousness, or imagination, or belief.
The difficulty is that in order to know that a proposition of this kind is true, we would have to know all of objective reality. ”
You’re presuming that “know” only encompasses Cartesian certainty. For anyone who rejects that, your argument has no weight.
And you’re going to have an easier time proving the existence of Santa Claus than proving that the only coherent concept of “knowledge” is Cartesian certainty.
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Patrick said:
“Now take this second premise—that by science we can know the universe, and combine it with our first premise, that the knowledge of any thing is not one of the parts of that thing, and you get the conclusion that our knowledge of the universe is not part of the universe, but an addition to it, transcending it.”
Leaving aside the soundness of most of your reasoning, you have failed to account for the fact that you are part of the universe. The example you used to illustrate your argument involved Dante knowing a thing about Beatrice. You argued that Dante knowing a thing about Beatrice was a fact about Dante, not a fact about Beatrice. But that only works because Dante isn’t Beatrice, nor a part of Beatrice. If Dante is a part of Beatrice, then the fact that Dante knows something about Beatrice is a fact about Beatrice.
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Joe said:
Protagoras, thanks for the link. I’ll have to look at it more closely when I have time. It’s pretty academic! I’ll just leave this link for you. I think it touches on many of the themes in Ozys OP.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-limits-of-eliminativism.html?m=1
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Creutzer said:
On the contrary, it would be irrational for me to care about telea, if there were such things, to the extent that they are not aligned with my goals anyway.
Also, we are beings with a magical power: we can assign purposes ourselves. We don’t need an external source for them. In fact, all purposes there are exist only because we have assigned them. Such beings are called agents.
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Joseph F. Clark said:
We disagree on the empirical claim that belief in objective purposes are necessary to avoid what you term “nihilism.”
Most atheists reject the idea of strong teleology, and yet aren’t suicidal or anti-moral. For that matter, there are many non-atheists who lack an Aristotelian or Abrahamic concept of objective purpose who also aren’t self-destructive or antisocial, e.g. followers of certain strands of Buddhists and Confucianism.
It seems to be a contingent fact of human psychology that non-sociopathic individuals have varying degrees of care for their conspecifics, regardless of their metaphysical commitments.
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Joe said:
Right Joseph, but the point is even if you don’t recognize teleology in the sence Feser is talking about given the nature of reality it can’t be avoided. Fesers book and philosophy aren’t just one way of understanding the world isn’t the only one that makes the world intelligible at all. Different world views and cultures are sort of blindly groping at an A-T elephant.
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Joseph F. Clark said:
Exactly what part of the teleological worldview is unavoidable? What is it that world cultures groping towards? The metaphysics of telos itself? Or the conception of The Good Life which the telos prescribes?
If the latter, what does assuming a telos teach us about human flourishing that other philosophies can’t?
I hope my questions don’t sound pointed; I honestly want to know what you’re getting at.
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Protagoras said:
There is a need for a kind of teleology in understanding intentionality and meaning, but it doesn’t have to get beyond the kind of teleology found in evolutionary biology. Ruth Millikan does a great job of discussing the matter in Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. Millikan does have the seemingly universal problem among philosophers of being unfair to some of her rivals and opponents, but her positive account is excellent. It addresses quite a number of Feser’s issues. Feser is aware of Millikan’s work, but he never seems to engage it. He just has passing comments to the effect that the teleology Millikan talks about is somehow not real teleology, or is somehow inadequate, but he never makes a remotely substantial case either that anything is actually missing from Millikan, or that his own view has this missing element if it is absent from Millikan.
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Joe said:
Joseph I would encourage you to pick up Fesers books “Aquinas” With all due respect to Ozy they just don’t give the book enough credit. Fesers “The Last Superstion” is also very good and I think gives some subjects more detail. Unfortunately it is overly polemical so befor warned.
Potagoras, I’m not familiar with Millikan. Could you link to something relatively short that hits the high points of her philosophy? I imagine Feser might be ignoring her because if you can see the need for some teleology than failure to recognize all of it must be some kind tactic to avoid theism and everything that goes with it. I would be interested in reading her work.
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Mai La Dreapta said:
This is sort of a lame thing to have as my first comment here. But I can’t help myself: the plural of “telos” is NOT “teloi”, or “teleoi”, or anything like that. It’s “tele”, because Ancient Greek phonology.
(This error is likely not yours, but whatev.)
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ozymandias said:
Argh, really? Two years of Greek is worse than none at all, it seems– if it had been none I would have looked up the plural!
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Creutzer said:
Yup. “telea” is also a possible plural, one that looks a bit less like a typo in Latin script. “tele” is the result of contracting the “ea” to a long “e” (the one written eta).
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heelbearcub said:
Except, teloi is in the dictionary as the plural of telos, regardless of the word origin.
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Bruno Coelho said:
Do you find aristotelian Feser vision even plausible? Seems like he has good arguments, but is very strange to believe old metaphysical arguments.
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