Week 6--What does the Philosopher Add to the Conversation?

I had something to add to the end of last Thursday's conversation in Taylor B that I did not get the opportunity to share because of Time's sometimes annoying tendancy to keep moving forward at a constant pace. (The class period ended.)

 Anyway, that's besides the point. We ended the class on a somewhat pessimistic note: if all of our emotions and beliefs and experiences can be explained by the crane method-- if nothing's sacred and no God/ soul actually plays a part in our "spiritual" experiences-- then what's the point of living?

 I bring you hope! I'll use the example a few of my peers shared: looking at your newborn baby for the first time, which apparently feels like being touched on the inside by something greater than the physical world. My advice is to avoid getting too caught up in where that feeling came from because you still felt it and it still made your life worth living. Nobody's arguing that incredibly moving experiences don't or shouldn't move you. Though it makes a lot of sense evolutionarily for a mother to immediately become emotionally invested in her child (she'll take care of him or her better), that doesn't make that feeling less valid.

At the end of the day, who really cares if the physical world or the spiritual world is responsible for the intense high moments that make life worth living? We still feel them, which is enough.

I constantly kept thinking to myself that I should write my post soon because my entire long post had disappeared after one click of my shaky finger before Fall Break.  So I could not stop thinking of my duty for CSEM, and tended to connect Dennett’s concepts to whatever I was doing during Fall Break like OCD person.  During Fall Break, I bought a duvet for my dorm bed.  While I was picking the right color, I thought the duvet was like philosophy that warms + brightens the bed, science.  I appreciated how the author intermingles two branches.  Just like we explored grim fairy stories realizing there is an icky side in life, the author’s attemept to demonstrate his opinion both in philosophy and science appealed my interest.

Philosophy is a good deal to me because that was the best topic for a conversation with my friends during high school.  I was glad to read about Gaia Theory.  Undergoing puberty, me and my friend came up with our own philosophy called ‘Soul Theory’ that I now realize very close to the Gaia Theory introduced in the reading here.   Our Soul Theory is “Universe is a big soul, and we individual soul, as componets of the mother soul, work together as means of living, yielding, sharing, etc, for the common goal of the Universe,  which is Love.”  When I read about Gaia Theory, I was stunned!  So, the rest of the reading became hard for me because whatever the author was arguing on, my enthusiasm about Gaia Theory didn’t go away easily.  So, that was joy while reading this convoluted chapters.

But I came to my senses.  I had to finish the reading and had to get what the author was saying about Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.  So, I went on putting aside my joy.   I found interesting that how Darwin was a smart reductionist who made abstract philosophical ideas into general form.  Okay, the reading was hard for me because there was something interesting here and there so that I had a hard time to focus on a big picture, or the real topic of the author.  When I encountered reductionism, I pondered upon it for like another five minutes.  In this manner, I took looong time to grasp the author’s voice. 

I confess now that I digressed so frequently due to my interest in the small topics mentioned in the reading.  But after I read the entire reading, there was a sense of accomplishment.

As I read Dennett, and his descriptions of those who cling to the idea of Creationism as outlined in the Bible as the end-all-be-all in possible cosmologies, I am reminded of the stubborn unwavering stance of the Church in Galileo's day. Nowadays, Biblical proponents interpret the same passages that seemed to disprove the heliocentric theory in Galileo's day as symbolic language. They no longer claim things like “the sun stood still” as the sun itself literally stopped moving, but rather assert that this kind of language is simply meant to explain how things seemed from the people’s perspective of that day.

As I recall the REVISION that was made to this STORY, I cannot help shake my head at how little the Church has learned. Even today, they attempt to war with Darwin’s increasingly supported evolutionary ideas on the grounds of a story in Genesis- in (I hope very few) more years, those dogged people will make a similar revision to the Genesis account. Hopefully, they will come to realize the danger of emphatic and resolute stances on issues where they do not have all the answers, and I predict the result will probably be that they come to the same conclusion about evolution as they have about heliocentrism and reinterpret the Genesis story as an explanation that was not meant to literally convey how things came to be, but merely illustrate principles.

I do not think the idea of God and evolution are mutually exclusive, but I do think we need to rethink traditional constructs if these two are to successfully synthesize: the stories must continue to be rethought and revised rather than trying to cram a square peg in a round hole. Perhaps we ought to shave off some of those edges before such an attempt is made.

 I am going to be honest- due to lack of general organization and midterms I have not gotten the full way through the text- SO for that reason I do not wish to try and express an uneducated opinion on it.

Nevertheless, there were a couple of things that struck me in our last class....

first of all: we were discussion the concept of language and how the word 'story' has 'airy-fairy' connotations and maybe for that reason feels wrong when used in a scientific context. Well- I think that we need to take that idea a step further. I believe that our philosophical discussions will always be hindered by our use of language- we are linguistically challenged! By talking about 'truth' we imply the existance of falsehood. by cotemplating 'right' we automatically create 'wrong'. There is no way we can discuss these things without contradicting ourselves since our ultimate conclusion is that there is no 'right' or 'wrong'. 

On the same level- and this sounded far more profound in my head- perhaps there is no story until one is told. We recognize the 'storyishness' of our lives in the telling- not in the direct experience. Maybe our very existance isn't a story but it becomes one once we speak about it to others. 

I agree with Madi that Darwin's idea isnt really pessamistic. Personally, I see it as a very optimistic concept because it means there is still room for us to evolve and grow to be beings of even greater ability. I suppose it is partially, too, due to my beliefs. I dont necessarily think that just because God didn't make us the way that the Bible says he did means that he is just not there. Same with Galileo, I still have a hard time understanding how someone can think that just because earth is not the center, God is not watching. Personally, I don't believe in 'God' but I do believe in spirit and those sorts of things, which, I think, is something that can survive even evolution. (though that is a bit of a personal thing, I cannot say it for anyone else)

Something I noted in this reading that went along well with our discussion in class was Dennett's claim that "Human imagination has only a few resources to draw upon when faced with such a mind-boggling question"(25) This reminded me of a paper we discussed last class, where we debated whether the mind was limited. Later, Dennett says that even if Darwins idea was to be rejected and replaced, it would still be something that has "open[ed] new possiblities of imagination..." (83) I think this is really interesting, as it is Dennett's last way of reminding the reader that yeah, evolution is be best and most valid theory we have now, but it is still, and will continue to be, possible that it may change, even though it currently seems unimaginable. Which then brings me back to Flatland, and how A. Square could not imagine 3D, but then it was there, and then Sphere nearly rejected the idea of imagining any further dimensions, but eventually accepted that there is always the possiblity of stretching the imagination.

Getting back to motivations for retelling stories: the passage says that it isn’t the evidence that you see around you; you won’t accept the evidence unless you have some idea of a theory to explain the evidence.

Now, I have a lot of philosophy-related questions.

Does God have a reason for creating things?

Does necessity rule the world? Perhaps people can find meaning in that, like when people of a totally unreligious scientific mind said that meaningful things come from blind, unthinking processes.

I think that the principle of evolution means that somehow, God knew that the universe should not be determined, so he left it open. Did he not know how it would turn out? An algorithm is like a computer program; it’s deterministic and you can predict the exact end result if you have enough calculating power in your head. What would be the point of God starting up an algorithm if s/he knew how it would turn out? Why not carry it all out at once? But there are claims by scientists that the universe is not entirely deterministic. Which I don’t understand, but I think it has something to do with consciousness (and modern physics). If evolution  is nondeterministic, it would make sense that God would allow evolution- so that God could allow it to play out for itself. And as a related question, could it be that God is not all knowing, that God makes mistakes but gradually improves creation? And to what degree is creation the most improved? If you say nature gets more and more coherent and complex, is there no limit to the amount of coherence and complexity possible? If it wasn’t known before, does such intelligence develop over time, and how, if nothing can come from nothing? Is mind infinite in the directions its intelligence can take? How can we conceive of infinity without diminishing each one of the pieces of it?

How do we know the true essences of living things that allow for true classification, beyond the arbitrary categories we can choose? When we consider these things, we interpret the universe as coming from the mind of God, and as such having a unifying order to it, but is that just because we have intelligence, so we can’t think of it in any other way? Human intelligence, or Mind, seems to be linked with God, because Mind is what makes sense of the universe, and isn’t it self-evident that the universe has to make sense, and this quality is eternal and omnipresent?

This may be a bit jumbled and undeveloped, but I can think of these ideas more in the future. I like how the article links science and philosophy to really get you to think.  

I found the reading, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life,” absolutely fascinating.  Throughout my life I have explored the different possibilities of how/why humans came into being, especially since giving birth to my girls.  Since motherhood, I swayed towards the “Argument from Design” (28) and after reading the article I am trying to develop a way to unite or perhaps (?) separate the evolution of the physical nature of a human from the spiritual.

“Evolution was not a process that was designed to produce us, but it does not follow from this that evolution is not an algorithmic process that has in fact produced us” (56). I could not help but think of the sermon by the priest in Galileo.  Old Cardinal: “So you have degraded the earth despite the fact that you live by her and receive everything from her. I won’t have it! I won’t be a nobody on an inconsequential star briefly twirling hither and thither. I tread the earth [. . .] and the earth is the center of all things, and I am the center of the earth, and the eye of the Creator is on me” (Brecht 73). I feel like this IS the biggest problem within the Darwin debate. My feeling on various religions/creation are their central beliefs (whether stated or not) are humans as the sole purpose for the development of the universe by GOD…including in this, animals, plants, stars, etc. to be USED by humans…

If this is what is either consciously or unconsciously taught through various religions, people are definitely going to deny the existence of another valid theory of evolution that would not place humans in the center of everything. This would go against what many of us have been taught for centuries. But, I do not believe because Darwin’s theory on the physical evolution of our species makes sense, that we cannot separate our spiritual evolution. I can develop my “mind” accepting that there are energies that live within and without that have still not been “theorized” as of yet, and be ok with that, because I have faith that there is higher BEING that looks out for me…on some plane.

I don't find Darwin's theory bleak or pessimistic at all. I can see how it can even be used in conjunction with the theory of God. If you see Him as the Deists of the Enlightenment Age saw Him, as the great clockmaker, then it's not a big leap to say that He created Life in the form of a single-celled organism and then sat back and watched the course it took.

Personally, I don't believe in God. I like evidence (what can I say? I'm a crane lover, not a skyhook lover - cranes are real, you can count on them being there), and there's not much evidence that I can see to support His existence.

It's hard to question that Charles Darwin was indeed a product and a force of late-19th-century philosphy, but he is not the end-all-and-be-all. Dennett may have raised a few good points and asked a few good questions, but I still refuse to believe that evolution is the key to the meaning of life. Darwinian evolution, even the modern synthesis, can't, by its nature, explain some of the complex behavior that defines what it means to be human. How does the algorithm of natural selection produce art, literature, music, emotion?

By insisting that the "skyhooks" of religion are no longer valid in any pursuit, Dennet has offered up himself in place of the Strawman that fundamentalist Creationism is so fond of arguing. He even uses the word "Darwinism" and "Darwinist," the enemy's choice descriptors for evolutionary theory and its proponents, as if the science itself were a dogma.

Perhaps I'm just one of those that Dennett portrays as "the forces of containment," "the champions of the pre-Darwinian tradition", those that hold back scientific progress. I'm not a religious fundamentalist, nor a creationist by any means, but I am what seems to be a dying breed: an optimist.

I'm still tempted to read the rest of this book, though. Go ahead, Dennett-- maybe you can still convince me.