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Do Materialism and Evolution Theory Undermine Science?

Phaedrus74 said:
And this makes red army ants what?

Angry Tibetan students?

:boxedin:
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Nah, man, Maoists. Buddhist Maoists. It's all so clear.

I'm still working on the carpenter ants, though. Buddhist Jesuses? Maybe anorectic Buddhist 70's pop stars?
 
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Nick227 said:
So you are saying that the real world must be known by the senses and the brain then? There is essentially no possibility of noumena-phenomena. What you see is quite simply what there is.
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No. Indeed, that bears no resemblence to what I said.

What I said was that if our senses were not accurate representations of the world, you would not be here with your silly speculations. We'd all be dead. Your argument is self-defeating.
 
PixyMisa said:
No. Indeed, that bears no resemblence to what I said.

What I said was that if our senses were not accurate representations of the world, you would not be here with your silly speculations. We'd all be dead. Your argument is self-defeating.
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Quite. That deep pit with spikes in it may not be a 100% accurate view of the underlying reality. There's every reason to believe it's pretty close.
 
Mashuna said:
Quite. That deep pit with spikes in it may not be a 100% accurate view of the underlying reality. There's every reason to believe it's pretty close.
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Care to list some of those "every reasons?"

As I see it, materialism dictates that reality is not a priori objective in the slightest. There is no actual subject anywhere. So much has to take place to construct the objective mindset. To be a functioning complex organism requires a lot of processes. I submit that it is actually far more realistic to consider that undoing some of this excess processing is more likely to reveal satisfactory results.

Nick
 
The zazen master who acts as if the deep pit full of spikes does not exist is a hole-y man indeed.
 
PixyMisa said:
No. Indeed, that bears no resemblence to what I said.

What I said was that if our senses were not accurate representations of the world, you would not be here with your silly speculations. We'd all be dead. Your argument is self-defeating.
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The senses allow an organism to survive and procreate. If they are ineffective at this then the chances are that the traits which underperform will be progressively written out of the genetic code, passed over for something better.

Objectivity is exceptionally good at protecting the organism. But objectivity requires a lot of excess processing. It is not enough to have representations of what is there. You also need to develop a clear sense of boundaries. And to rigidly enforce them through identifying self-not self. A chunk of this is done with feelings and sensations. But the more mental and thought-based aspects are undertaken by having still more processing going on. It's basically excess processing on top of what actually IS.

Nick
 
Nick227 said:
Care to list some of those "every reasons?"

As I see it, materialism dictates that reality is not a priori objective in the slightest. There is no actual subject anywhere. So much has to take place to construct the objective mindset. To be a functioning complex organism requires a lot of processes. I submit that it is actually far more realistic to consider that undoing some of this excess processing is more likely to reveal satisfactory results.

Nick
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gentlehorse said:
The zazen master who acts as if the deep pit full of spikes does not exist is a hole-y man indeed.
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Pretty much what gentlehorse said. There's an obvious evolutionary benefit for having an accurate view of reality. Those who don't have an accurate view are the ones who don't breed, due to being impaled on spikes at the bottom of a pit.
 
Nick227 said:
The senses allow an organism to survive and procreate. If they are ineffective at this then the chances are that the traits which underperform will be progressively written out of the genetic code, passed over for something better.

Objectivity is exceptionally good at protecting the organism. But objectivity requires a lot of excess processing. It is not enough to have representations of what is there. You also need to develop a clear sense of boundaries. And to rigidly enforce them through identifying self-not self. A chunk of this is done with feelings and sensations. But the more mental and thought-based aspects are undertaken by having still more processing going on. It's basically excess processing on top of what actually IS.
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No. Objectivity is a threadbare skeleton "best" view of reality using our limited perceptions. Using this objective information and processing it using reason is what takes brain processing and brain power. This goes completely against emotion and feeling.

We tend to use objective information and make it "subjective" by using short cuts such as Heuristics to decrease the speed and energy used to process this information. This is based on so called feeling and "intuition".
 
Mashuna said:
Pretty much what gentlehorse said. There's an obvious evolutionary benefit for having an accurate view of reality. Those who don't have an accurate view are the ones who don't breed, due to being impaled on spikes at the bottom of a pit.
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You are not examining the actual mechanisms by which representations are created and interpreted. There is no subject a priori. Selfhood is created through mental processing. Objectivity is constructed through reinterpreting the selfless representations created by the senses to reflect self-not self. Thus reality is constantly being processed to provide objective representations.
As discussed, this process is inevitably evolutionarily favoured but it takes place in addition to the simple creation of representations. It is a further abstraction away from this.

Nick
 
Nick227 said:
The senses allow an organism to survive and procreate. If they are ineffective at this then the chances are that the traits which underperform will be progressively written out of the genetic code, passed over for something better.
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Precisely.

Objectivity is exceptionally good at protecting the organism. But objectivity requires a lot of excess processing.
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Wrong!

Objectivity is the default. A single diode is objective. You need memory and internal logic and feedback loops before you can have any subjective processing.

It is not enough to have representations of what is there. You also need to develop a clear sense of boundaries. And to rigidly enforce them through identifying self-not self. A chunk of this is done with feelings and sensations. But the more mental and thought-based aspects are undertaken by having still more processing going on. It's basically excess processing on top of what actually IS.
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You have that precisely backwards.

The complex processing here is all involved in creating the subjective self. The objective part is the easy one. Stimulus-response. That's all that's required. Evolution will weed out the inappropriate responses and leave ones that are objectively relevant.

And the self/not-self barrier is enforced by simple physics. If you poke a planarian with a pin, it responds. If you poke a second planarian with a pin, the first planarian does not respond, because it's not being poked.
 
paximperium said:
No. Objectivity is a threadbare skeleton "best" view of reality using our limited perceptions. Using this objective information and processing it using reason is what takes brain processing and brain power. This goes completely against emotion and feeling.
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Objectivity only kicks in with certain brain functions - mirroring, body-map, and thinking among the more significant. Without the action of, for example, thinking, reality looks no different but is entirely different! There's no "one" in it. The "I" is simply not innate to being, as materialism confirms. It is just being constructed, and as it is so visual and other representions are then put into the objective perspective. Subjectivity doesn't come into the equation. It's irrelevant here. You have a baseline non-dual, selfless reality being constructed into objective reality through ancilliary processing. Simple as that if you ask me.

Nick
 
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