What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)

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BartolomeusRex
pawnwhacker wrote:

You are welcome.

 

   Now, explaining what I meant could take many paragraphs. The book is written by a neurologist. Basically, where Descartes erred is that he can "know" nothing. Then he has an "a priori"...I can "think". From there, he "proves" soup to nuts all the way up to God and angels.

   His basic premise was false. (And, no, I'm not saying he couldn't think. Hint: But you do first need a brain in order to be able to think. So, "I am (have a brain), therefore I think"...but he had it backwards. Also, he went on to "prove" his relgious beliefs from this premise. No actual proofs needed...omphaloskepsis at its finest.

There is a problem with this refutation. Descartes started by doubting in everything (including science, religion, time, space, his body and finally his own existence). But when he did so, he found out, that there is one thing in which he cannot doubt, and that is doubt itself (I doubt, therefore I exist is more accurate altough less interpretation of Cogito, ergo sum.) as that would be contradictory. It is purely logical and it doesn't even matter if human has a brain or not.

I agree though that his proofs from there on can be quite dubious.

Elroch

I'd quite like to use an analogous argument to demonstrate the existence of the Universe by showing certainty of non-existence was untenable. Hopefully this would lead to a Universe with uncertainty. Smile

This might be so if the fundamental entity is something like logical propositions.

BartolomeusRex

Isn't science also based on logic?

pawnwhacker

   Barto, you (and Elroch) agree with my assessment concerning Descartes, from the perspective of his inferring from the point of "I am" and then "proving" God, Saints, Angels, the kitchen sink.

   At first, he could prove absolutely nothing. Then once he realized he could think...from there he could "prove" everything (by navel gazing...he is the third on that statue complex that I posted above).

   But where you and Elroch disagree with me is the "I think, therefore I am" (ergo sum cogito part). As I said, I could write lengthy paragraghs about what I said.

   I would suggest that you read the book that I referenced. It is written by a famed brain surgeon. He will explain to you why thinking requires a brain. If Descartes had said: "I have a brain, therefore I can think" (meaning "I am, therefore I think", then the author and I would have no argument with that portion of the pithy (although we both would with his poor logic proving God, Saints and Angels out of nothing...when he even initially claimed that he "knew" nothing). Descartes' science is akin to e99's and hapless's/...true...lol.

   Here is just one of the book reviews. Check the book out at Amazon...even read several reviews. It won't cost you anything or take much time.

   College students are fascinated with this cogito ergo sum...they take it as a revelation and some kind of science and logic. All it is is hooey.

   Here, try one of the reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1MCUOJLZ3N1ZW/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R1MCUOJLZ3N1ZW

BartolomeusRex

What is required to think is completely irrelevant here. Descartes's point is that it "I don't think." is impossible and if I think then I must also exist. And I really cannot agree that his logic in proving God and things is poor and back then many scholars agreed with him. You could as well say that Newton is stupid because his theories weren't perfect. Philosophy developed a lot since his times.

einstein99

Bow wow!😅

gopher_the_throat

bobyyyy - aren't dark matter and energy about the same thing as magic? We can't see them or interact with them but we need them to make our theories work out just like a magic wand.

pawnwhacker
BartolomeusRex wrote:

What is required to think is completely irrelevant here. Descartes's point is that it "I don't think." is impossible and if I think then I must also exist. And I really cannot agree that his logic in proving God and things is poor and back then many scholars agreed with him. You could as well say that Newton is stupid because his theories weren't perfect. Philosophy developed a lot since his times.

   Totally disagree. And don't be so bold as to tell me what I would have to say about Newton.

   You still don't get it. Descartes was a religious man, first and last. His saying he could know nothing and then prove everything about his religious beliefs was disingenuous.

pawnwhacker
bobyyyy wrote:

"ID, by contrast, is supposed to involve an agent at least as intelligent as a modern genetic engineer"

Let's call ID what it really is, a magical being with magic wand.

You are trying to explain science to a dip**** who thinks magic is real. You might as well be talking to an extremely stupid dog.

   I can't disagree with you. You are absolutely right. And I said essentially the same thing on the very first post on that "certain other thread".

BartolomeusRex

Don't go ad hominem. Who he was and what he believed are completely irrelevant here. All that matters are his arguments. And I think that my analogy with Newton is completely correct.

pawnwhacker
gopher_the_throat wrote:

bobyyyy - aren't dark matter and energy about the same thing as magic? We can't see them or interact with them but we need them to make our theories work out just like a magic wand.

   I would add that gravity, electromagnetic force, an atom and its sub-atomic particles, photons, dna and much more seems like magic.

   But it is an apple that science has been biting into with startling results. Can you imagine if you were to go back just a few hundred years and show someone a photograph? Magic! A hundred years ago and show a clothes dryer? Magic. (Yeah, we still had clothes lines when I was growing up.)

   Where will we be if or when science unravels all the magic? Who can say. Maybe God will strike us all dead before He allows that to happen.

pawnwhacker
BartolomeusRex wrote:

Don't go ad hominem. Who he was and what he believed are completely irrelevant here. All that matters are his arguments. And I think that my analogy with Newton is completely correct.

   You perplex me. You are claiming that I wrote an ad hominem about Descartes? 

   I already told you precisely why his "argument" was invalid and referred you to a book written by a scientist and brain surgeon as to exactly why.

BartolomeusRex

No I don't. Before I'll have read that book this topic will be long gone and the review I read (positive and negative ones) didn't gave me the impression that author has no idea about philosophy, so could at least point out where Descartes goes wrong (where emotions come in and stuff) and stop saying that he is stupid because he is religious (which is clearly ad hominem).

pawnwhacker
BartolomeusRex wrote:

No I don't. Before I'll have read that book this topic will be long gone and the review I read (positive and negative ones) didn't gave me the impression that author has no idea about philosophy, so could at least point out where Descartes goes wrong (where emotions come in and stuff) and stop saying that he is stupid because he is religious (which is clearly ad hominem).

   The author of Descartes Error, Dr. Anthony Damasio, is a brain surgeon...a scientist. Philosophy is just opinions, often based on fluff, superstition and neurotic thinking. Nothing more.

   Dr. Damasio, when writing that book, had absolutely no intention of giving an ad hominem to Descartes. He rigorously explains what a brain surgeon knows about the brain. The topic of the brain is every bit as intriguing as the theory of evolution. Much is still a mystery. But that book would have provided you with facts instead of philosophical mysticism.

   I'm glad that you finally informed me as to how I slandered Descartes. I was absolutely puzzled when you said I had issued an ad hominem attack. Now I know what you are perceiving.

   You are offended that I attacked religion when I supposedly attacked Descartes. No...no...don't slime me like that. My point was that here we have a man who "can know nothing" and from that basis goes on to "prove everything", which includes both secular and the mystical.

   And where did I ever say that Descartes was stupid? He was quite intelligent.

pawnwhacker
BartolomeusRex wrote:

You could as well say that Newton is stupid because his theories weren't perfect. Philosophy developed a lot since his times.

   No, you are the one who could say that I could say that Newton was stupid. This is not my opinion about Newton at all.

   Science has indeed developed a lot since Newton's time.

   But philosophy has not developed a lot since Descartes time.

   Don't you know that philosophy is dead?

MindWalk

The problem is that you cannot show that a brain is required for thought without first making some assumptions. You have to assume that your basic thought processes are at least reasonably reliable in order to trust any of your conclusions--*any* of them--as anything more than wild guesses. And if you're going to make statements about physical reality, you have to assume that there is an objectively existing reality of which you gain reasonably reliable information (via your senses). There are other assumptions, too--principally having to do with the veridicality of memory--but those will suffice to make the point.

Beginning from doubt of everything and then concluding that the only thing he cannot doubt is his own presently-experienced mental phenomenalizing--his presently-experienced thinking, feeling, imagining, being aware, and so on--is perfectly reasonable.

Descartes's biggest errors came from his religiosity and from a certain lack of rigor in his application of his method of doubt. He believes that God exists and would not mislead him, and his reasoning goes downhill. He even situates the soul in the pineal gland, for no particularly good reason.

It's typical of theists to start off reasonably, rationally, and rigorously, but to become less so as they argue to their favored God's existence and characteristics. The Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne does much the same thing in his The Existence of God.

gopher_the_throat

Cogito ergo sum bardus

pawnwhacker

   Very good assessment, MindWalk. Many are those who take Descartes premises as prima facie evidence when in fact he created flawed conclusions in his syllogisms due to faulty premises.

   I would add that I didn't abhor (I use that word because I can't "hate" inanimate things) philosophy. In fact I thoroughly enjoyed philosophy and thrived at it when I studied it (ancient times ago). I got a 5.0 grade, even though 4.0 was the maximum (the professor in Philosophy 101 gave me an A++, a 5.0...he said that he very rarely dispensed with such a grade but I had earned it).

   In earlier times, philosophy and religion were the only way that we could make understanding of reality and the human condition. Since those times, we now have atomic microscopes, atom smashers, space-borne telesopes, photon counters, spectrum analyzers, MRI, X-ray machines, atomic absortion, mass spectrometers, etc.

   That's what killed philosophy.

    Of course, there was also the great philosopher Hume who is said to have killed philosophy with philosophy (just as e99 is trying to kill science with science but in his case, failing miserably).

    Aristotle and the caves, Pascal's Wager, Descartes cogito ergo sum...all dead. I enjoy saying that? No. I am a scientist (of sorts...lol), I stuck a voltmeter across the load and found it to be 0.

   I just came across this ditty: 

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf/axioms/axioms/node4.html

Elroch

My view of this sort of thing is a simpler (and more detached) one. I don't regard the definitions or the propositions in this (or most other areas of philosophy) as being adequately defined to make any serious manipulation of them meaningful or reliable. 

Descartes' type of reasoning is not much superior to that of Aquinas in a qualitative sense. The similarity is that they take vague concepts and treat them as if they were like the unambiguous sorts of things that are dealt with in, say, axiomatic geometry, using appealing and natural sounding assumptions that are themselves not entirely clear.

The consequence of this fuzziness of reasoning is that philosophy has achieved so few hard results that stand the test of time compared with the sciences and mathematics. It's because the foundation of many of the branches of the subject is not solid.

Another observation is that when a branch of philosophy becomes solid and rigorous, it is generally the time to consider it as something other than philosophy. Smile

However, I have no doubt whatsoever that pawnwhacker knows a lot more about the subject than I do. Perhaps he can change my opinion by example!

Elroch

It would be possible to apply the scientific method using just instantaneous observations as data. All statements about the world need to be re-expressed as complex statements about instantaneous observation and tested systematically.

But more sensible is to observe that the reason we exist is partly that our senses and our conceptualisations are not nonsense: their usefulness and genuineness is in many cases related to the fact that we exist. These are things that have evolved biologically and evolved as memes in our society. In both cases we can be confident that their existence implies they are not inclined to be eradicated, which is at least a minimal indication of quality.

A pedant would observe that there are huge assumptions here beyond instanteous thoughts. Myself I am inclined to assume the principle that there is far more likely to be some sense than no sense in what we perceive, and to start from there looking for patterns in it. Indeed this is how we all develop the ability to see, hear, communicate, walk and so on (as infants) by using our natural neural networks to look for sense in the sensory inputs, without substantial assumptions as to what it is.

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