Evolit: Week 6--Individual and Cultural Evolution

I am still a little bit obsessed with the idea that a skyhook can only "hang" things from it while a crane can be built on top of.  Building things on top of the crane is easy enough to understand but the hanging part needs a little clarification.  Beliefs that are based on skyhooks are top-down beliefs.  In the physical sense this is because they are mounted in the sky and gravity naturally pulls all that are attached to them towards earth; in the metaphorical sense they are also top-down beliefs.  Skyhooks such as religion are based on an incorruptible ideal (the hook) on which many more worldly beliefs have been hung.  We discussed the issues of attempting to build cranes on top of skyhooks but it is also interesting to think what would happen if you tried to build a crane to a skyhook.  At a certain point the crane would reach the beliefs hanging from the skyhook and the whole structure might appear solid.  The issue occurs when one tries to build on top of the skyhook, assuming the whole structure has the support of the crane.  Instead there is hidden fundamental jump that must occur from crane to skyhook.  I believe that this is what Dennet is against.  He does not seem to attack religion itself. but rather those followers who are standing on top of a skyhook and calling it a crane.   

I think Dennet's talk of abolishing skyhooks is misguided. I think what he really wants is to get rid of blind faith and a stubborness that does not allow for consideration of other ideas. More than anything, I think he just wants people to reject religion and accept evolution).

Getting rid of skyhooks doesn't really fly with me. I mean, I said it in class and I'll say it again, we need skyhooks. Skyhooks are what enable us, humans, to look toward the future. Back in the early 1900's, when science fiction was gaining popularity, writers were scoffed at for looking to the stars. For projecting humans to the moon.

And we reached the moon some odd decades later. Without that "skyhook," humans would never have even entertained the notion of space travel.

The same can probably be said of cloning, any kind of genetic manipulation, hybrid cars, or robots. These were ideas people just through around at first, dreaming about the possibilities, hanging up their skyhooks. Eventually, those skyhooks became cranes.

I know that in class we said that the problem was not that skyhooks existed, but that individuals tried to build upward off of skyhooks, to use them as a foundation for other ideas. 

That's probably true. But, regardless, we should not get rid of skyhooks. We depend on them to make life interesting. I would suggest questioning the line between reality and fantasy (COUGHVAMPIRESCOUGH), and allow room for speculation... but don't tear all of the skyhooks down.

...Because I really want a flying car.

I am very interested in Dennett's talk about human brains. He argues that they are different from all other animal brains because we can conceive the future. I wonder if this is true. It seems to me that animals always make decisions based on the future. Why do dogs respond to invisible fences? Because they know what will happen if they cross the line. Maybe I am misinterpreting Dennett's observation as to the difference between human and animal brains. Dennett then introduces the idea of artificial intelligence. The more I try to distinguish between human and animal brains, the more I wonder if the differences are as large as humans assume them to be. Animals have their own languages, and their own cultural patterns.

Well, I feel that people have equated Evolution as analogous to a crane and God to a skyhook and are not comfortable replacing them with each other.

 We have multiple faiths who worship different Gods and these different Gods have been used inorder to explain the human diversity so far. No one group has to really justify for their God being true while another’s is false. This multiplicity of religions has to lead to the concept of superiority and inferiority of races. And this concept of superiority is what humans are scared of losing because evolution is one standard concept. It doesn’t vary from one race to another. It doesn’t differentiate in a manner that can be controlled and manipulated for anyone’s convenience. This is what in my opinion has kept people who can accept and understand evolution from doing just that. It isn’t the question of how much we need skyhooks or God or Religion , it is about how we can use the idea of skyhooks and God to appease ourselves.

"Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear."

This quote, profound as it may seem (or seem to be trying to be) is actually from cult film Empire Records.  It does seem to effectively sum up one of the arguments we had in our small group this past thursday, though.

 We accessed, in class, Dennett's reference to the fact that many authors claim that ideas "simply come to them" or that their characters take on a life of their own independent of the thought of the author his or herself. This of course brings to mind the frustrating chicken-or-the-egg style dilemna, "which thought came first? Where did they originate? If all thoughts are just memes, creations of other thoughts, where did the first thought begin?"

I'm bothered, of course, by the assertion Dennett seems to be making that creativity doesn't really exist. I follow his reasoning and I see his point, but the idea that nothing we could ever come up with would be original or truly creative is very worriesome and disheartening. The fact that we can't really explain where the firs thoughts came from kind of helps that difficulty. Sometimes I'm glad we can't explain everything. I"m not sure I like that fact about myself.

 

 

Dennett believes that "skyhooks" are destructive and that they should be gotten rid of all together. I have not read far enough to know why he believes getting rid of "skyhooks" would make the world less destructive, but it was mentioned in class that he may be against "skyhooks" because there are various kinds of "skyhooks", which people argue about. From class, we now know that by "skyhooks", he is referring to religion (the hand of God is holding the skyhook). Therefore, he wants to get rid of religion because the differences in religious views have caused destruction in the world. Dennett seems to think that by getting rid of religion, there would only be one belief of life origins, evolution. However, I do not necessarily think that getting rid of religion and believing in only evolution would create less conflict. I feel that even evolution would contain different beliefs within it because it is a theory and not a fact. It does have more evidence to support it, but the evidence is still unclear and can be interpreted in different ways. As a result, destruction may still be present.

I thought Daniel Dennett's use of memes, genes analogues of cultural evolution, is confusing, and that his "cranes of culture" (chapter 12) is a desperate argument against intelligent design. Dennett believes that memes are invisible, like genes, and are carried by the human language instead of DNA and RNA in genes. This develops into a weak analogy against the use of skyhooks, explanations that require a miracle, in evolutionary biology. Although Darwin's Dangerous Idea has yet to convince me to abandon religion, it is a fascinating book and I have learned more about the theory of natural selection. 

The more I read Dennett, the more I realize that I am having trouble trusting him and making the connections he wants us to make.  When beginning to read Dennett, I was a little bit suprised by his initial comment that those who do not believe that natural selection is a very real process are ignorant.  I understood this to be a very nonfoundationalist statement.  However, the more I read, the more I begin to wonder if Dennett is himself a foundationalist.  He makes numerous statements throughout the text that to me scream foundationalist.  I may not fully understand where Dennet's statements fall along the nonfoundationalist-foundationalist continuum because perhaps, I  myself have not fully understood the term foundationliast. Does a foundational story needs to have a foundation in the beginning? Or does it need to be working towards a final foundation? Can it be either one or does it have to be both? Does a foundational story need to be unchanging or can it be a changing story with a foundation? I know we had discussed foundational stories a while ago, but I did not realize why I was having so much trouble believing Dennet until I realized perhaps, I still have not defined what it means to be a foundationalist.

I am also having trouble understanding where Dennett's argument is going and what his ultimate conclusion will be.  When first beginning to read Denett, I was excited by the statement he makes on page 22 in the introduction.  Dennett asks his audience, "Do you want to follow me? Don't you really want to know what survives this confrontation? What if it turns out that the sweet vision-or a better one-survives intact, strengthened and deepend by the encounter?"  I was excited by this because as someone who is having trouble reconciling my reiligious upbringing with my scientific intuition, Dennet's welcome to follow him in this confrontation implied to me that after considering both sides of this confrontation, as readers we would come out with a renewed idea of what evolution means to us-not necessarily Dennet's idea, but one in which we are able to reconcile our own ideas with those that we are taught to be scientifically accurate.  In other words, maybe I was hoping for this confrontation to serve as the "universal acid" that Dennet refers to.  Maybe I was hoping that somehow this confrontation would change my vision of evolution into one that is "less fragile" as Dennett says.  However, I find that Dennett does not really provide us with a confrontation, but rather numerous reasons and metaphors proving that natural selection has to be a real process.  Although I definitely agree with Dennet and find many of the metaphors he uses to be extremely helpful, I also can't help but feel like I was misled.  

As has already been mentioned by several people already, Prof. Dalke's discussion gorup tried to define foundationalism. We came up with something along the lines of a grounded idea, but even that didn't really seem to sit well with everyone. I believe that it is a very difficult term to define or even to replace with another word as we also attempted to do in class with little success. I think that foundationalism should maybe have a looser definition than just  grounded or something fixed, eternal, and un-changing. Something about those definitions rankled about; they felt a little too set in stone. So I decided to look up the term foundation on the online Oxford English Dictionary. It is defined at length but I found the following to be most helpful in forming my idea of foundationalism: 1) the action of founding or building upon a firm structure;the state or fact of being founded and/or 2) The action of establishing, instituting, or constituting on a permanent basis. On the basis of that definition, I think that foundationalism is some idea or theory that can be built upon like a foundation for a building; something that can be permanent in some way if left alone, but not necessarily unchangeable, because I don't really believe that anything is completely unchangeable.

Thursday’s small discussion group was all over the map in terms of discussing Dennett’s ideas. Two seconds before we dispersed, Professor Grobstein asked if a skyhook could be suspended without a suspender (God, an intelligent designer, etc.). I said yes, and then he said you have until Tuesday to prove it. Well, I can’t prove it but I do have a theory.

 

My theory is that Darwin and Dennett among others are and were incredible forward thinkers and were purposefully inserted into ‘our’ world, the earth, in order to assist in an enormous scientific experiment. We are nothing more than a diorama suspended by some unknown or alien world. These unknown beings are trying to figure out their evolutionary process but unlike us have the ability to configure a diorama of miniature real and unreal things and organisms to be able to watch and perhaps manipulate their evolutionary process and determine first-hand how they themselves have evolved. We are all actors in a gigantic scientific experiment.

The first question I thought of was: what came first the chicken or egg? It's a simple question that no one really knows the answer too and that is exactly the type of thinking that we are following in Dennet's case. And of course, many others have thought about that simple question that seems to be plaguing our discussion on a very very fundamental level. We will never know where the first idea came from because there is no truly real and definitive answer to everything. As individuals, we can only believe in a story that sits best with our individual philosophies and critical rubric of evaluation.          

I like the quote by Nietzsche that "truths are illusions that forget that they are illusions". We choose to believe in these illusions because without it we wouldn't be held accountable against or to anything. We choose to believe this narrative of Darwin's because we, as humans, can rationalize it and have some visual evidence that can substantiate our claims. Believing in a higher power as the creator of everything and as a cause for everything, takes a great amount of will and security- attributes that most people possesses but simply, not enough to allow us to be complete secure in leaving it to something out of our hands. It has been engrained in our minds that "we can put anything that we set our mind to" or that "our destiny is in our hands"- phrases like this force us to push the boundaries that something else is in control of us. Is that not the reason why we sometimes find the extreme religious right so fascinating? Isn't that why shows like "Big Love" are so highly viewed? We are fascinated by those that believe so much in a higher power because maybe deep down we know that we can't handle believing that truths are illusions so we choose, subconsciously or consciously, to believe.

 

In Prof. Dalke's discussion section we spent a reasonable amount of time attempting to define foundationalism and from my understanding of the word it is meant to convey something fixed, eternal, and resistant to change. Non-foundationalism, on the other hand, refers to something adaptive and responsive to change. From these definitions it seems that religious beliefs and belief in a higher power would fall under the foundationalism category while biological evolution would fall under the non-foundationalist category. Yet the laws of nature are unchanging, fixed, eternal- are these considered foundationalist as well? 

 I don't agree with Dennett's idea of greedy vs. non-greedy reductionism. Dennett claims that greedy reductionism is using all skyhooks to explain things which leads to gross oversimplification whereas proper reductionism uses all cranes to explain things. I feel like Dennett's use of the term "greedy" is too subjective because those who he deems "greedy" reductionists would probably view the proper reductionists as the true "greedy" ones who rely so much on rationality and are very dismissive of skyhooks. It is alarming how much Dennett opposes sky hooks. I believe we discussed in lecture how sky hooks are still necessary in some situations. In fact, sky hooks can even lead to the discovery new cranes. There are many things in this world that were previously thought of as impossible until further investigation led to a new discovery.

In class on Thursday, Paul asked whether the fact that something created us, such as God, mind, intelligent design, what have you, gives us meaning. This drew a distinction in my mind between knowing something created us and therefore having meaning, and believing something created us as a route for obtaining a personal sense of meaning/ cohesive narrative/ inspiring worldview. Why isn't it possible to ascribe to a creation story with full knowledge that it is a fantasy, never intending or thinking it to be literally true? Nietzsche writes that "truths are illusions which have forgotten that they are illusions." I think it is fully possible to believe in an inspiring story and live by it while openly acknowledging that it is not or cannot be proven to be empirically true. Science has seeped into the culture to the point where even something like religion has to prove itself, which misses the point entirely. Religion is metaphorical.

I think the problem that Dennett is addressing is people who believe the creation story as literally true, to the point where it becomes a harmful idea because wars are fought and people are killed over a story. The problem with Dennett, however, is that he doesn't see evolution, too, as a story that isn't literally true. He certainly acknowledges that evolution can be useful or harmful, but he never really considers that it might be a false or at least not a completely accurate way of looking at the world - indeed, for him, people who are of this opinion are woefully ignorant and hopeless. Thus, it seems he is trying to set out with a heavy agenda - to prove evolution, to get people to believe in it rather than promoting it as a helpful new paradigm that can shed light on everything it examines.

I think it is possible for people to see evolution as an accurate narrative for describing events in natural history, while still creating their own inspiring stories or assembling their own meaning for life. Why does meaning have to depend on something 'true'? We can, and must, have useful or inspiring illusions - this is probably the best our species will ever be able to do. To think, like Dennett does, that we know the limits of what is possible is purely arrogant and entirely refutable - no human knows what life will look like in 100 years.

Dennett seems to try to apply evolution to culture and individual changes as a way to make change seem as much of "crane" work as possible, because Dennett's major goal is to get rid of skyhooks.  However, in my session on Thursday, we looked at the Library metephor Dennett used.  We came to the conclusion that since the library had infinite, unchangable information, it would technically be foundational, but also that if evolution is just the path of an organism through this library, that Dennett was in fact explaining evolution with a skyhook.  It's really interesting to me that Dennett didn't realize this when he was writing, unless later on in the book he had some plan to avoid this issue all together.

Another thing we talked about in our session how if Dennett wants to get rid of skyhooks, what about religion? I couldn't think of anything Dennett had specifically said about religion, but upon flipping through the book again I found on pages 153-155, saying that "...Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quiet beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies." He then compares talking about religion like playing tennis without a net, and spends the majority of the section talking about how religion is crazy.  I think this is a really bold move on Dennett's part not only because he talked trash to one of the oldest institutions in the western world, but he seems to act like some of these religious crazies that he is trying to say are wrong.

In our group discussion we talked about Dennett's purpose or what he wanted to lead us to believe.  It all came back to skyhooks vs. cranes.  Dennett wants to completely stomp skyhooks and never hear anyone using a skyhook as an explanation for some idea.  Although that may be a good place to start we decided that skyhooks were useful because they can lead us to explorations and figuring out if a goal or fantasy can be turned into reality.  Probably a good example was the landing on the moon which many though impossible but became possible.  In order to keep skyhooks we need to remove the second world that it is hanging from, a.k.a heaven.  Then once removing this second world what does the skyhook hang upon. Is it our minds, thoughts, ideas, or do the skyhooks just defy gravity and hang on nothing?  I guess I'm betting on our thoughts what we can imagine is what the skyhook represents.  Although some of our ideas may not be based upon anything it still can become a reality in time.  Although I still need to think over the idea of skyhooks and its basis to then figure out what it hangs upon.

About Dennett, I feel that we are now stomping his beliefs.  He has written this book to try and explain his thoughts on evolution and yet can just make me more confused with each metaphor.  Although I have enjoyed his ideas I guess it is his tone that turns everyone away from his ideas.  Throughout our discussions we have found some useful metaphors but many that are contradicted by what their definitions really mean, for example algorithms.  I guess I'm trying to figure out how we can put our prejudices aside, forget about his tone and try very hard to understand his thoughts.  Then again it is our prejudices that have lead to some very interesting discussions.