Omniscience and quantum mechanics

[Wiccan_Child]

Now where were we...

Unless many organisms acquire this altruistic instinct at once, the instinct cannot survive because the individual organism acting upon this instinct will not survive to pass it on, right? So how can a trait evolve in an entire species at once?

If nothing else, the famous Lemski experiments empirically demonstrated the idea of 'genetic history' - ineffectual mutations can build up until they spontaneously become viable proteins. Most of these are terrible, so get shot down, but some are either neutral, or even mildly beneficial. So you can have traits emerge surreptitiously as an accumulation of inert mutations - which would thus appear in all the species. Thus, it only takes a single mutation for offspring to get this trait, which is much more likely than a host of novel genes just appearing.

More generally, altruism doesn't necessarily lead to the death of the host. Initially, it would just be a hormone or an increase in hormone production, that makes the host slightly more protective of their young, or slightly more prone to hostility, etc.
The trait, as it exists today, wouldn't spontaneously arise from a completely selfless species. Like everything else in evolution, it's incremental.

But then neither is any feeling a behavior. Either mental feelings themselves are behaviors, or else we separately mentally feel things about behaviors. I believe the latter. If you look up "behavior" at Wiki, you'll see it defined as response to stimuli. But feelings about behavior clearly cannot be purely responses to stimuli, because they are actually moral value judgments about the appropriateness of responses to stimuli. Behavior can be response to stimuli, but feelings about behavior are, obviously, about behavior itself. So they must be something other than mere behavior.

I disagree that the moral "instinct" can be called a "desire". Morality is famous for conflicting with desires. Desires are the players, morality is the referee. If you say the moral instinct is just one of many desires, then that precludes the idea that morality could have come to be a dominant desire through evolution.

Morality is a feeling about feelings. Like reason, it is "about" something else. It's removed from nature. Nothing natural is "about" anything.

I disagree. Why couldn't we have evolved to attribute purpose and meaning onto things which are, in reality, purposeless and meaningless? We see faces in clouds, don't we?

Your point seems to be that morality is useful, therefore it would be naturally selected for. My point was that morality is not useful; it doesn't work. At least not until we can philosophize about it, but philosophy comes much later than morality, at least according to those who think morality has its roots in altruistic bacteria.

But you previously accepted the benefit of moral behaviour. Why do you not think that morality is useful without philosophy? We don't need to have a dusty old tome tell us why we feel murder is wrong - we just do. Philosophy comes after morality.

I'd sometimes like to commit suicide, if nothing else out of curiousity, but skipping the wait is against the rules. Besides it's bad style, like an actor storming off the stage before his parts done due to a tantrum or something. It's immature. (Double entendre intended by the word "immature": childish, and not fully developed to the extent of possible or intended development. )

On the contrary, if the plot calls for the character to kill himself, then the character will kill himself. A good actor would follow through with the script. So, if you believe in predestination and fate, then to kill one's self must be in line with the script.

So, go and kill yourself. If you succeed, you must be doing God's will, right?

You say the spiritual view is baseless, and the natural view "works", but you can't even tell me what the natural view says, can you? It doesn't say anything. Science can't even tell me whether a chair exists. We've had this cutting-edge thing called quantum mechanics for about 100 years and the best and brightest still don't have a clue how to interpret it. It's a great irony that no materialist knows what material is, and no naturalist knows what nature is or what it means. I see no meat in the natural view.

What I find ironic is that you're arguing against the very real advances made by science using those same advances: you're debating me on the Internet You scoff at quantum mechanics, but we have computers and medicinal drugs. You scoff at general relativity, but we have SAT-NAVs and space stations. You scoff at evolution, but we have artificial selection and have brought endangered species back from the brink. You scoff at germ theory, but we have vaccines and retro-viral drugs.

Obviously you didn't scoff at those things, but you get my point. Science works, baby.

That seems an unscientific thing to say. Like a man saying "I relaxed my grip on a ball in my hand, and the ball moved to the ground. Why did it move to the ground? Because I relaxed my grip. Nothing more to it, case closed."

Ah, but unlike AV (), we don't say 'case closed': we move on. We've established that relaxing one's hand in that scenario will drop the ball. Fantastic! Now, next question: why?

We know how the electron operates. Fantastic! The next question is why does it do what it does? A fascinating topic in itself. But the fact that we don't know the complete workings of how the electron behaves doesn't mean we don't know that it behaves. What an electron actually is, is irrelevant to the fact that an electron is - whether it's a superstring or a point particle, it's still gonna power your home, is it not?

But you think the brain is a purely physical machine, don't you? How could you run one kind of physical input into two versions of the same physical machine and get two different outputs?

You and I both have computers, but the sheer fact that they're both computers doesn't mean they run in exactly the same way, does it? My resolution is different to yours, my RAM, my ROM, my hardware, my software, etc. So even though they're broadly similar, the actual input-to-output function is quite different.

The same is true for our brains. Though they're broadly similar, they're obviously different at the atomic and even cellular level. Our brains aren't absolute set-in-stone copies of each other down to the very carbon and hydrogen from whence they're wrought P), they're organically grown. They've been moulded by different stimuli - that is, after all, why we're two different people. Your brain has been trained to speak in a US drawl, while mine has a poncey British accent. Our brains are brains, but they're not the same.

So the Devil's in the details. How can two machines give different outputs for the same input? Easy: they're machines, but they're not the same machines.

I didn't say a chair is an atom because it's made of atoms. What if string theory turned out to be true? Will you then say the strings are real but the atoms aren't, since atoms are arrangements of strings? If I build a universe with [real base units, whatever they are] then the universe is real. An arrangement of real things is not in any sense unreal simply because it's an arrangement.

Sure. But the chair isn't anything more than an amalgam, just as a proton isn't anything more than an amalgam. There are, ultimately, the real deal, the fundaments of reality, whatever that may be.