It is here proposed that the evolution of life was destined to produce self consciousness out of physical matter just as surely as self-consciousness is destined to be produced by the build up of matter from the human zygote.
Our external vantage point allows us to see the process whereby an individual human matures from the point of conception We are in a position to witness all the stages in the life of individual humans. Activities such as birth, death, growth and decay go on all around us. Conversely on the grand scale of things, taking life as a whole, we are in the middle of evolving life and so we don’t have an overall, clear picture of the process.
In this video Sean B. Carroll states that:
…living things are occupying a planet whose surface is always changing. Hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tectonic movement, ice ages, climate changes whether local or global, all of these keep changing the environments that species are in, they are running to keep up and most of the time they fail. So we have to think about earth’s history to understand life’s history. We have to understand what’s going on at any particular place to appreciate what’s going on with any particular species.
The same could be said for the cells in your body. Their environment is always changing and most of them do not survive as you change from embryo to adult. From an individual cell’s point of view there may not seem to be any direction.Some live some die, some change slowly, others change dramatically. But from the higher perspective of the whole body there certainly is direction.
It must be acknowledged that vertebrates evolve at the different rates. Coelacanths have been around for hundreds of millions of years. When animals within a group are compared, the ones that are deemed to be the most primitive are those that retain characteristics from the node of the group’s branch. So among vertebrates coelacanths are considered more primitive than humans even taking into account that they have had the same amount of time for their evolution.
Rational Wiki explains that:
Biologists have evidence that all life developed from a common ancestor that lived just under 4 billion years ago, and the concept is accepted by virtually all scientists working in the field.
If that is true then every single tetrapod alive today has an unbroken ancestry dating back to this common ancestor. Every amniote can trace their ancestry from a water existence to organisms that first set foot on the land, to fully air breathing, but still exothermic, organisms, and finally on to endothermic mammals and birds. At each stage these animals have become more detached from the external environment. I hope the following points will make this clear.
If we follow tetrapod evolution there is a progression from external to internal fertilisation, from eggs deposited in the environment to eggs protected from the environment by an outer shell and then on to gestation within the mother. Even after birth mammals do not take their sustenance directly from the environment but from the mammary glands of the mother.
And humans generally are not content to eat food taken directly from nature. It is altered by extracting, mixing, cooking and preparing so that much of the time the consumer does not even know where it originated.
We aim to nullify the effects of weather and seasons by the use of suitable clothing, We are able to eat food that is out of season by having it transported round the world or by preserving it, or dehydrating it or freezing it. We do not depend on the seasons for procreation and we are able assist conception when it doesn’t occur naturally. All of this serves to detach us more and more from our surrounding environment. Some people are not happy about this detachment and so they call for us to “get back to nature”.
But this separation is necessary for self consciousness to develop. An organism that does not feel itself to be outside of nature cannot have self consciousness.
There must be a feeling of “me in here against nature out there”. We humans are unique in considering our activities as contrasting with the natural world. We contrast natural with artificial. No other animal has separated itself from nature to the extent that humans have.
Humans can trace their ancestry back through reptile-like, amphibian-like and fish-like conditions, the latter three have obviously remained at an earlier condition than humans. This does not mean that they haven’t evolved since the split with the ancestors of humans. After all there are a multitude of ways of being a reptile, an amphibian or a fish. It just means that they haven’t grown out of the environment they find themselves in to the extent that humans have.
This separation from the environment can even be observed in each individual human looking from toe to top. We can be said to have our feet planted firmly on the earth. Gravity holds us to the earth and our legs support our weight and allow us to move about. Our arms are freed from this task and using the marvelous structures at the ends of them we can create out of the substances of the earth. Gravity plays a lesser part in their activities. Moving on up our brains, being suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, are even more free from earths gravity. Using our brains we create, not from the substances of the earth but out of our inner selves. Being encased in the skull separates our brains even more from the external environment.
Using our hands we mould earthly substance, using our brains we mould thoughts.
Evolution is a creative process and it has turned creatures into creators.
If you put a solid object in an enclosed container full of liquid, one of three* things will happen. If the object is lighter than the liquid it displaces, it will rise to the top and exert an upward force on the top of the container. If the object is heavier than the liquid it displaces, it will sink to the bottom and exert a downward force on the bottom of the container. If the weights match, the object will float.
*ETA: If the object is made of sodium and the liquid is water, a fourth thing will happen.
I should add that theoretically the ship needn’t float in any great amount of water, either, but that generally it has to because it’s usually in a water space having a great deal more mass and volume than itself. A little water won’t float it out of dry dock because the weight of the ship forces it to be grounded until the water is high enough for it to float, and by that time it’s in a huge amount of water.
Displacement is theoretic, not an absolute quantity of existing liquid (an absolute volume/mass in a liquid of a certain density). So the brain or ship has to “displace” given amounts of liquid, but that just means that the ship or brain is taking up space within a liquid that would have to be filled with liquid otherwise to maintain the same overall volume of the liquid plus the object. The “displaced liquid” never had to exist, so the brain just has to be taking up space in the liquid in order to have near-neutral buoyancy within the skull.
Glen Davidson
Could you folks start a new thread about brains falling over cliffs and floating? It must be terribly relevant, but I fail to see how.
Pity. I had thought that it might be accessible to science, but I see not.
CharlieM,
No it isn’t. I perceive people, when they talk of an archetype, as talking of some ‘ideal form’ which, in some vague waffly way, constrains the development of individuals. This notion, with its implicit discontinuity in descent, does not sit well with the observed facts of continuous change.
That’s very helpful, thanks.
Universal common descent is not accessible to science. The claim that chimps and humans share a common ancestor is not accessible to science. The claim that ATP synthase arose via natural selection, drift and/ or neutral construction is not accessible to science.
Heck the bulk of the claims made by evolutionism are not accessible to science. So obviously being accessible to science has very little weight 🙄
It’s my hope, and I admit it’s a forlorn one, that Charlie will eventually tell us what he means.
For my part, I am not averse to Charlie’s fascination with the trajectory that runs through simple animal sentience to complex human sapience. I share that fascination, and it’s central to my own research.
And he is certainly right to suggest that this trajectory runs from the perception of motivationally salient affordances (through the econeurobiological mechanisms underpinning animal cognition) to the empirical modeling of hidden causal structures (through the discursive-material social practices of modern science).
In short, there is a serious need for a naturalistic account of science itself.
My objection to Charlie’s position turns on the following claims he seems to be making here:
1. The sentience-to-sapience trajectory has some metaphysical priority over all other evolutionary trajectories;
2. This trajectory is best understood as a teleological process;
3. This teleology cannot be understood in terms of empirical, naturalistic science with its emphasis on models of causal structures, verified by measurements with empirical magnitudes, that have passed through the iterative error-reduction procedure of peer review;
4. Rather, correctly understanding this teleology requires returning to the Neoplatonic biology of Cuvier or Owen;
5. Reliable knowledge of “archetypes” is established by some kind of intuitive knowledge in which the intellect transcends the empirical constraints of space and time.
I think that all of these are false, beginning with (1) and (2), and the argument as sketched here runs directly into the Myth of the Given by the time we get to (5).
Simon Conway Morris wrote a book about this – Life’s Solution – if anyone is unaware. I actually quite enjoyed it, the more so since I hadn’t paid for it! But ultimately (I think) wrong.
I think I agree with you, but you should think of simpler (and perhaps clearer) ways to say whatever that was; “motivationally salient affordances”, whoa.
Yeah, I’d just call it the good shit.
Glen Davidson
That is totally fair! 🙂
Here’s the idea: according to ecological psychology (originally developed by J. J. Gibson), every sentient, living animal is directly aware of “affordances”: the possibilities of movement in its environment. The affordances that can be detected by an animal are relative to its sensory and motor abilities. To a human and a dog, stairs afford climbing (but in different ways, both sensory and motor). To a spider, stairs do not afford climbing but they do afford web-making.
Now for the puzzle: on the one hand, our distinctive abilities for language and technology are modifications of animal cognition. And we too perceive affordances in our everyday dealings with the world. We are animals and our cognitive machinery conforms (so far we can tell) to the principles of animal cognition generally.
But on the other hand, all other animals are completely locked into their affordance-specific awareness of their environment. Through language, culture, and technology we have developed scientific practices and institutions that allow us to peak behind our affordances and discern something of the hidden causal structure of reality (including the causal basis of our awareness of affordances!)
What we need, then, is a naturalistically respectable account of the trajectory from animal sentience to human sapience. I have my disagreements with Charlie’s way of framing the problem but I don’t object to his fascination with it.
Kantian Naturalist,
OK. That at least is clear. I’m not sure I think Gibson’s ideas (at least as you express them) are at all useful or that “affordance” (urk) is a useful word. Organisms sense their environments. Some of them move in response. Vertebrates, at least, construct mental models of the world around them. Humans construct more complex models than anyone else, ’cause we’re special.
I don’t think this has much to do with Charlie’s ideas, but of course we can’t be sure until he makes his ideas clear. Gibson seems to be talking about the change from our nearest relatives to us, while Charlie is looking at the grand progression of his ladder of life, with no special attention to its pinnacle (him) other than to note that it’s the pinnacle.
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m having trouble seeing the difference from using “affordance” to “opportunity” in your comment above. What would you say the distinction is?
Apologies for my part in the derail, Joe. Though in my own defence, I’d point out the first mention is in the OP:
These are good questions and I don’t have all the answers.
I’ll try to explain it as I see it. Modern science is in the main materialistic and reductionist. This is a legitimate way of attempting to explain reality but it is totally one-sided as it will only provide half of the answers we are looking for. If we add to this Platonic idealism this will go some way to providing a more complete answer to the questions we ask.
Think about Plato’s ideal solids. Imagine a sphere of any size you like, and think of a tetrahedron inside it with its apices touching the surface and another one outside it with the centre of its surfaces touching the surface at the same points. Now if we shrink the inner tetrahedron and expand the outer one at the same rate they will both reach infinity together. The inner one will become a point at infinity and the outer one a plane at infinity.
Modern science for the most part only reckons with the point at infinity, it tends to diregard the plane at infinity. Picture the singularity of the big bang or a black hole, the beginning of life or of an individual expanding out from conception. These all expand out of a central point.
We see matter expanding outwards, what our senses do not give us is the formative forces working in from the periphery. Physical matter has to do with pointwise expansive forces but form is produced by the planar contractive forces acting on the matter.Physical matter has its source in the point, The formative force of the archetype has its source at the periphery.
Centrifugal and centripetal forces working together to create the variety of life.
CharlieM,
But no evidence for any of that.
Glen Davidson
John Harshman,
Thee points:
(1) Actually, it’s people like myself and a few others in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science who are interested in using Gibson’s ideas to think about the continuity and discontinuity between humans and other animals. Gibson himself was a psychologist of perception.
(2) In psychology of perception, there’s a clear contrast between Gibson’s approach and that of (for example) David Marr. In Marr’s theory of vision, there’s a very low-information image on the retina, which is transformed into higher and higher information as the image is processed in various parts of the visual system. In Gibson’s theory, the information that the animal needs is not in the brain but in the environment. The sensory systems sample this information and use this sampling to guide movement. So there’s much less “mental modeling” going on.
(3) At present there’s a lively debate going on as to whether cognition requires “metal gymnastics”. I’m using Chemero’s Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Wheeler’s Reconstructing the Cognitive World, and Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind for one of my current papers. And I will note that Chemero, Wheeler, and Clark are all interdisciplinary cognitive scientists and philosophers (unlike myself).
I’d say that an affordance is an opportunity for movement. One of Gibson’s mentors was a man named Edwin Holt. Holt was influenced by both William James and Ralph Barton Perry. I think we can see in Gibson’s ecological psychology a nice synthesis of James’s emphasis on action in perceiving and Perry’s emphasis on “direct realism” (that we directly perceive things, as opposed to the empiricist thesis that we are directly perceive sense-data and that we infer that there are things causing those sense-data).
In other words, Gibson’s thesis is that every sentient animal is directly aware of the opportunities for movement in its environment.
To bring this back to Charlie’s concerns, my thesis is that we can think of language and technology as distinctively hominid modifications of the kinds of perceptuo-practical cognition that characterizes sentient animals generally. I think that is a helpful framework for thinking in detail about the transition from Miocene apes through australopithecines to early Homo and eventually to us.
That’s where I think you begin to go wrong, at the beginning. Contemporary cience is neither materialistic nor reductionist. The science of the 21st century is not that of the 17th. Your philosophy of science is 300 years out of date.
If you read Charlie’s position carefully you will see that he is arguing for a metaphysical thesis that transcends all possible evidence, since the archetypes are defined being outside of space and time and knowable by the intellect alone.
The lack of evidence for that position is not a problem; it is not logically possible for there to be evidence for the existence of entities that are posited as being beyond all possible evidence.
And mechanistic.
Yeah, it’s bullshit.
Except that it is a problem. There’s no reason to consider such fantasies, other than a possible social one.
That’s why it’s bullshit.
Glen Davidson
While it may not be your own personal philosophy, it still seems to be the dominant philosophy at this site. What is “the mechanism of ID” comes to mind as a prime example.
Shall we throw out everything that is knowable by the intellect alone, or just archetypes?
That implies that you have at least some of the answers. Can you in fact answer any of the questions I asked? Your pointless analogy suggests not. I will salvage the only bit that seem to be attempting, unsuccessfully, to explain something.
What formative force? What, stripped of the silly analogy, is this “periphery”? You can’t imagine that you have achieved anything with that “reply”, can you?
Let’s try again, shall we?: What is this archetype? Is there more than one? If so, how many, what are they, and how do you know that? How is the archetype accessed by organisms? What causes them to express it? Are they approaching closer to it? And what does “archetype” have to do with your notions of progress in evolution?
It has never seemed so to me.
Those are assertions often made about science, but I don’t think that they have ever been correct.
So Mung, just what is the mechanism(s) of ID for the design of biological life forms? Please enlighten us.
Well why not just stay as single celled bacteria like organisms?
It is relevant and if it isn’t correct, can you explain why it isn’t?
By the way I don’t see why the discussion about the brain and CSF should be considered off topic. I for one found it interesting.
Fine, it was just one example that you haven’t explained. You added another, obvious one. But no explanation.
It’s not relevant, and your mere assertion that it is adds nothing whatsoever. It’s not relevant because how the brain is supported isn’t directly related to how it operates. What difference would it make if it were rigid and solidly anchored, just so long as it operated in basically the same way (that may not be possible, just because of material issues, but, theoretically, what’s the difference?)?
And I explained why it isn’t correct, so if you can’t get even that, there’s hardly any point in repeating it.
Glen Davidson
There are still stone age cultures around. If you don’t want to admit that there is a difference between their culture and ours then I can’t help you. That is not to say that these people are not our intellectual equals. I’m sure if one of their children was adopted by a “western” couple and raised in the USA, they wouldn’t stand out as being any different to their peers.
Have you considered that it might be you do not wish to acknowledge differences that are clearly present?
Firstly, I think that all cognitive functions are essentially embodied and embedded, not least of which because we have no scientific evidence to suggest otherwise. I think that one’s understanding of reality should be based on scientific theories, including one’s understanding of the reality of the mind. There is some circularity to this approach, but it is a benign circularity of anti-foundationalism.
Secondly, I do accept that there is distinction to be made between a priori and a posteriori judgments, but I do not associate them with distinct cognitive “faculties”. They are distinct roles within the social space of giving and asking for reasons.
Thirdly, I do accept some version of the difference between the analytic a priori judgments and synthetic a priori judgments. By the former I understand the rules of a logical system and the statement governed by those rules. By the latter I understand the constitutive norms of discourse and also the constitutive rules and definitions of a scientific theory. In the case of scientific theories, however, the synthetic a priori is relative to the conceptual framework in question. In the case of intelligible discourse as such, the synthetic a priori statements merely explicate the norms to which we are beholden in order for us to understand one another.
However, what we do not have are universal and necessary truths about the nature of reality that are knowable by all rational minds. Rationalism in that sense, in the tradition from Plato to Descartes and beyond, is a dead-end. There are no universal and necessary truths about the nature of reality, all a priori truths are relative to a conceptual system (either a logical system or a scientific theory), and all knowledge about the nature of reality involves the use of our sensorimotor abilities, because we cannot construct and test our theories without them.
My basis for this claim lies in the history of philosophy itself: it lies in agreeing with Kant’s criticism of rationalism, with Hegel’s criticism of Kant, and with the synthesis of Darwin and Hegel that begins with Dewey and continues through Sellars to contemporary pragmatism. In other words, my claim that our thought cannot transcend history is justified in terms of where we stand within the history of philosophy.
Arguably, they were correct when modern science was dominated by Epicurean metaphysics — in the 17th through 19th centuries. But even then the criticism of science as “materialistic and reductionist” was more prevalent in the Neoplatonic and Thomistic criticisms of the Epicurean interpretation of modern science, and that was always all about the cultural and political issues.
Linnaean taxonomy pertains to archetypes. All that changed after Darwin was “archetype” was replaced with “common ancestor”. So archetype is the body plan. What we are looking for is what it is that determines the type of body that will develop. Development is controlled and influenced by genes (DNA) but control and influence are different from determining what develops.
So what’s the archetype of which (say) Dendrobates tinctorius is an exemplar? Is there an archetypal Dendrobates tinctorius, or are all Dendrobates species examples of a Dendrobates archetype, likewise up through Dendrobatidae, Anura, Amphibia, Chordata, animal, deuterostome, eukaryote … is this frog archetypal of some, all or none of these taxonomic levels?
In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences
Kantian Naturalist,
‘Outside of time and space’ seems to me like a different place from inside one’s head. One might imagine one can get there from here, but that’s rather the point – it is imagining.
People are persuaded there are ‘archetypes’ simply because they see a certain permanence to species, on their time scale – and the external world, goddammit, must be rendered consistent with that perception, no matter the difficulties. That perception could not possibly be illusory …
Mung,
… wha? Someone’s written a book, you say?
The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (Cambridge Studies in the History of Science)
Philosophical Concepts in Physics: The Historical Relation between Philosophy and Scientific Theories
Say it ain’t so petrushka!
You would have to ask the people who have studied frogs or at least read their work. But Linnaean taxonomy or cladistics should give you an indication.
Nobody who does that work so much as mentions archetypes. I presume this means you don’t have an answer and have no idea how to get one.
Wow, they sure as hell know the physical characteristics of what they are studying. And that is all that is needed to answer Allan’s question.
Perhaps we understand different meanings of “archetype”. What does that word mean to you?
Body plan, just as I have already stated.
OK. The word “niche” is now looming in front of me.
I’d go deeper, considering the work that has been done with macaque monkeys. Here, for instance. (PDF)
Does that have a specific, scientific definition that I can read about?
And how many different body plans are there within frogs or within the genus Dendrobates?
John Harshman:
You would have to ask the people who have studied frogs or at least read their work. But Linnaean taxonomy or cladistics should give you an indication. 🙄
G. Simpson echoed those comments:
A dictionary always helps when you don’t know the definition of a word.
Frankie,
I’m sorry. I have only myself to blame. I responded to Frankie.
John,
Don’t apologize. If you never play Frankie roulette, you’ll never get the big payouts, like
…or…
That the payouts are sporadic just makes Frankie roulette all the more addicting.
keiths,
LoL! keiths roulette provides much better gems. Just his tripe about unguided evolution beats everything I have ever posted