If you look at the evolution of evolution, doesn't it seem like it was all for the rise of man...?

[Landon Caeli]

And yet we humans organize for war, as if we cannot imagine the horrors of war...
Or as if we don't even care...

That's why some say there exists good and evil. Creation and destruction. Think about it.

 

[Shemjaza]

So, you think we are rare, that "millions and millions haven't", huh, (and I would ask you how you arrived at that conclusion) And, even if were, that, "one in millions", even one in millions could be very, very many, considering the entire universe that is...

As far as the conditions go, you don't think anyone had a hand in that...? And might do so in other places too...?

You don't believe in higher intelligence than us...? What makes "us" the "most intelligent" lifeform in the entire universe...?

What if ones began where we are now, where are they now?, or where would they be by now? How would they exist? In what form?,

Depending on where they are at, we could all be still in our infancy to them, as they once were (maybe).... I think they some of them went beyond of this realm, or one of them/us did, maybe after millions of years in a humanoid like form, evolved into something else... "Q" like maybe...

It's possible...?

Well, if life and intelligent life like us is not as rare as you think, you'd almost have to conclude that some lifeforms did develop into a higher state of being, if intelligent life or humanoid like life, is not as rare as you think, and it really hinges upon that...

God Bless!

I think you are misunderstanding me. I don't have any information about the life in the rest of the universe.

What I'm comparing us to is the millions and millions of species currently alive on Earth.

I'm completely willing to accept that out there somewhere there could be species both a lot older and a lot smarter then us, but this in no way justifies wild speculations about the ability to suspend the laws of physics to become godlike beings like the Q.

We don't know what is ultimately possible, but we should make conjecture based on evidence and reason.

 

[Nithavela]

Why would any form of life ever develop the ability to reason and think in abstracts well enough to "discover" anything again? Mutations are so random. So random, it could never happen again.

...That's why we're the diamonds of the universe. We are literally stardust made animated, yes, but our minds, with our conscience, are even more precious of a gem. So precious, and so rare, it probably could never happen twice -unless it's the very language of the universe. But that's not possible. Is it?

Diamonds are actually really, really common. That diamonds are so expensive is just a scam perpetrated by the jewel industry which withholds the largest part of the worlds reserves.

So maybe your diamond allegory is actually true-ish?

Being able to reason helps with survival.

 

[The Brown Brink]

That's why some say there exists good and evil. Creation and destruction. Think about it.

Yeah, it's easy to blame Satan and Evil.

"The Devil made me do it."
Right?
Yeah, right.

Some people don't want to be responsible for their own behavior.

 

[The Brown Brink]

Yeah, it's easy to blame Satan and Evil.

"The Devil made me do it."
Right?
Yeah, right.

Some people don't want to be responsible for their own behavior.

And yet they still want to be called "grown ups."

 

[DogmaHunter]

If you look at the evolution of evolution, doesn't it seem like it was all (in preparation for) the rise of mankind (humankind)...?

Or not...?

Comments...?

God Bless!

Or for the rise of the fire ant.
Or any other species alive today.

It's not like this is an end-point or anything...

 

[DogmaHunter]

Unless consciousness is the goal, and the ability to think in abstracts, rather than 'diversity'.

If you were a cheetah, you might be saying that about speed.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Why would any form of life ever develop the ability to reason and think in abstracts well enough to "discover" anything again? Mutations are so random. So random, it could never happen again.

...That's why we're the diamonds of the universe. We are literally stardust made animated, yes, but our minds, with our conscience, are even more precious of a gem. So precious, and so rare, it probably could never happen twice -unless it's the very language of the universe. But that's not possible. Is it?

Humans aren't the only species on Earth capable of abstract thought and having a degree of consciousness and intelligence - but ours is generally richer and more sophisticated than others we've seen.

It's not just mammals that show evidence of intelligence and conscious awareness - octopuses do too - and these are creatures that don't share the common evolutionary heritage of a vertebrate nervous system.

If recognisable features of conscious self-awareness have evolved more than once on Earth, it seems likely that there is a reasonable chance of them evolving in suitable environments elsewhere. The key requirement seems to be occupying an environmental niche where flexible and creative behaviours are a significant advantage.

 

[Landon Caeli]

Yeah, it's easy to blame Satan and Evil.

"The Devil made me do it."
Right?
Yeah, right.

Some people don't want to be responsible for their own behavior.

I think it's more about understanding what evil is and trying to avoid it than blaming our faults on the devil.

 

[The Brown Brink]

I think it's more about understanding what evil is and trying to avoid it than blaming our faults on the devil.

I wonder what exactly people think Evil is...
Do you know?
What do people think it is?

 

[essentialsaltes]

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

He was describing what he thinks is necessary and sufficient for consciousness in general, not just human consciousness. The elements you mention are enabled by consciousness, but not required for it and are features of the interaction between a rich consciousness and preconscious cognitive elements.

All that does is just redefine the problem, not solve it. For now we just added another layer that needs to be resolved, while in fact not addressing the original one sufficiently. We just define consciousness as something different, extend it as almost an Aristotlean Sensitive Soul into most of Animalia, while thus failing to address our Reason and so forth, that which traditionally is termed Consciousness or Sentience.

We have a strong tendency to ascribe teleological agency, but evolution isn't teleological, although it produces the kind of results we often associate with teleological processes. There's no purpose; evolution is what happens when natural selection filters populations that reproduce with heritable variation. The cause of evolution is the filtering effect of natural selection on populations that reproduce with heritable variation.

There is confusion here. Let us take the four cause approach: The material cause are the animals themselves, the Efficient cause is their 'survival of the fittest' competition, the Formal cause is the genetic material being passed on. How can we leave out the Final cause; the propagation of those genes, the organism's survival and its most succesful competitive advantages? Clearly Evolution is driven by survival, for otherwise none of it could occur. This is its final cause - it need not be a conscious decision to do so, but to affirm three and deny the fourth renders the concept incongruent, to my mind.

There's a subtle but crucial difference between saying, 'a trait evolved because it aids survival' and 'a trait evolved in order to aid survival'. Viewing the results of evolution, it's tempting - but wrong - to express them in terms of the latter rather than the former. It's like seeing a tall guy playing basketball and saying "he's tall because it makes him good at basketball", rather than, "he's good at basketball because he's tall".

Agreed, but you need to differentiate 'because' as well. It can be read as 'on account of' or 'by reason of'. These suggest very much different things, as the second also suggest agenticity. If you look at a broader view of an organism, a trait evolved because it aids survival, but is maintained in order to do so, of which both are slippery evolutionary constructs with multiple philosophic interpretations of our terms.

I didn't see it that way because I don't see how natural selection is teleological - can you explain?

This goes back to Final Causes that I talked about earlier. When a phenomenon appears to have a goal, it is necessary to explain this or at least the appearance thereof. In Biology, there is a need to ask a couple of related questions:

When we ask why do goal directed entities exist, we can comfortably answer that evolution by Natural Selection produced them. This easily encompasses all of population genetic theory. We then ask what their goals are, we point to adaptive devices for feeding, defence, reproduction and in short, survival. We then ask how goal-directed entities work and we enter the realm of complex systems, of General Systems Theory or Control Theory or even things like Cybernetics.
The latter two are part of modern biology and the Sciences. They are also very much Final Causes, in essence Teleological explanation of the activity produced by Natural Selection then. Natural Selection is merely a part of the complex, not that itself is teleological, but our broader modern physiological systems very much are. This is why his procrustean theory of consciousness seems set against itself.

 

[Neogaia777]

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

All that does is just redefine the problem, not solve it. For now we just added another layer that needs to be resolved, while in fact not addressing the original one sufficiently. We just define consciousness as something different, extend it as almost an Aristotlean Sensitive Soul into most of Animalia, while thus failing to address our Reason and so forth, that which traditionally is termed Consciousness or Sentience.

I think you misread his intent - he's not explaining consciousness in depth, he's describing it as an instance of a certain class of self-organising processes.

There is confusion here. Let us take the four cause approach: The material cause are the animals themselves, the Efficient cause is their 'survival of the fittest' competition, the Formal cause is the genetic material being passed on. How can we leave out the Final cause; the propagation of those genes, the organism's survival and its most successful competitive advantages?

I'm no expert on Aristotelian metaphysics, but I think the answer to that question depends on the interpretation of Aristotle's teleology and so what 'Final Cause' means. As I understand it, there are two views, that of intended purpose, and that of the natural result of physical law (laws of nature) operating on/in some context; and to complicate things, they may not necessarily be exclusive.

If we take the latter view, that the Final Cause is simply the end result of a natural process, then I have no problem with adaptive fitness being the Final Cause of evolution, in much the same way as a rounded pebble is the Final Cause of a rough stone lying on the beach - except that for evolution, the 'end result' is taken to be the situation at some arbitrary elapsed time after some arbitrary starting point.

It's also worth noting that Aristotle excluded some events from having/requiring ends (Final Causes), such as chance events, and (his specific example) the eclipse of the moon, for which the efficient cause was the major explanatory cause. It's not clear to me what the distinguishing criteria are between events that have Final Causes and those that don't, but I see evolution as a process whose efficient cause is the action of natural selection on heritable variation, and as far as I'm concerned, that alone suffices as its Aristolean major cause.

Alternatively, it can be seen fundamentally as the result of energy dissipation driven by entropy increase - a process built on chance events at both a thermodynamic level (i.e. statistical mechanics) and at the process level of individual variation (e.g. via random mutation), and the stochastic elimination of individuals in a population, influenced by those variations. Perhaps this excuses it from a Final Cause?

Clearly Evolution is driven by survival, for otherwise none of it could occur.

No, survival is an enabler, not the driver. Survivors are the raw material on which evolution acts. It is driven by natural selection, with survival and heritable variation as enablers (although there is an argument to be made that genetic drift is an evolutionary driver independent of natural selection, so heritable variation could be considered a subsidiary driver). Some recent ideas also suggest that phenotypic plasticity (phenotypic changes by the selective activation or deactivation of genes, e.g. epigenetics) and boichemical self-organisation (e.g. protein folding) can also be evolutionary drivers.

Agreed, but you need to differentiate 'because' as well. It can be read as 'on account of' or 'by reason of'. These suggest very much different things, as the second also suggest agenticity.

Either way, the basketball player analogy applies.

If you look at a broader view of an organism, a trait evolved because it aids survival, but is maintained in order to do so, of which both are slippery evolutionary constructs with multiple philosophic interpretations of our terms.

I agree that a trait evolves because it aids survival, but I don't agree a trait is maintained in order to aid survival - a trait is maintained because it aids (continues to aid) survival; as I suggested earlier, it's an ongoing process.

As is often the case, subtle semantic differences make for a tricky discussion.

This goes back to Final Causes that I talked about earlier. When a phenomenon appears to have a goal, it is necessary to explain this or at least the appearance thereof. In Biology, there is a need to ask a couple of related questions:

When we ask why do goal directed entities exist, we can comfortably answer that evolution by Natural Selection produced them. This easily encompasses all of population genetic theory. We then ask what their goals are, we point to adaptive devices for feeding, defence, reproduction and in short, survival. We then ask how goal-directed entities work and we enter the realm of complex systems, of General Systems Theory or Control Theory or even things like Cybernetics.
The latter two are part of modern biology and the Sciences. They are also very much Final Causes, in essence Teleological explanation of the activity produced by Natural Selection then. Natural Selection is merely a part of the complex, not that itself is teleological, but our broader modern physiological systems very much are. This is why his procrustean theory of consciousness seems set against itself.

It seems to me that we favour teleological (purposeful, agent-centred) descriptions because we have a temporally extended consciousness that enables us to plan ahead (model futures) and so define explicitly goal-seeking behaviour. We call this having purpose or intent. We can also visualise the past to trace the consequences of our past (and possible past) actions, which inclines us to interpret causal sequences teleologically.

However, it is an emergent expression of combinations of low-level behaviours that are not themselves considered purposeful or intentional, and is ultimately an elaboration of simple stimulus-response (reflexive) behaviour, enabled by memory (storage of the results of experience) and virtualisation (modelling of possible pasts & futures).

It is a useful interpretation in as much as it distinguishes or identifies certain emergent classes of behaviours (e.g. goal-seeking), but it's misleading when applied to lower level behavioural sequences, however much they seem to be teleological.

I tend to the view that we apply teleological language to undirected, non-purposeful processes and their results because it's a familiar and useful conceptual shorthand, in the same way as we are inclined to assign imaginary purposeful agency, and even gender, to inanimate objects (especially machines), and even conceptual abstractions; e.g. the car refuses to start, she's a beautiful boat, Lady Luck is against me, etc.

 

[Hammster]

ADMIN HAT ON


Moved from Physical & Life Sciences as this is the more appropriate forum.


ADMIN HAT OFF

 

[Wakalix]

(Hammster, I get that reference. Like a bag of wet cement!)

If you look at the evolution of evolution, doesn't it seem like it was all (in preparation for) the rise of mankind (humankind)...?

Or not...?

Comments...?

God Bless!

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Being able to reason helps with survival.

Side note: Interestingly, social competition might have been one of the main selection forces for intelligence. Most external challenges in the world don't require incredible intelligence, but if the difficulty of your opponent scales with the overall intelligence of the species - if the challenge is internal rather than external - then there wouldn't be the usual phenomenon of "past this point, extra intelligence is basically a worthless expense of resources".

 

[joshua 1 9]

If you look at the evolution of evolution, doesn't it seem like it was all (in preparation for) the rise of mankind (humankind)...?

We are star stuff, so you would have to say the entire universe was created for our sake and the drama that is playing out here right now.

One thing we know is that God became a part of His creation and that is what the incarnation is all about. Adam, Melchizedek & Jesus are refereed to as the son of God. Jesus was the only Begotten Son of God.

 

[Ophiolite]

If you look at the evolution of evolution, doesn't it seem like it was all (in preparation for) the rise of mankind (humankind)...?

I understand giraffes, scorpions and rats feel much the same way.

 

[Kylie]

If you look at the evolution of evolution, doesn't it seem like it was all (in preparation for) the rise of mankind (humankind)...?

Or not...?

Comments...?

God Bless!

Looks like it was even better for the rise of bacteria...

 

[quatona]

If you look at the evolution of evolution, doesn't it seem like it was all (in preparation for) the rise of mankind (humankind)...?

No. It seems like it (including mankind) was all (in preparation) for the rise of cancer.