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.
One of my favorite FrankenJoe gems, about the information content a cake.
” And by eating the cake you are consuming the information- some stays with you and the rest is waste”
😀
Well, I suppose it helps kill the time until Charlie says something intelligible.
John Harshman,
Well it isn’t as if the archetype conversation isn’t centuries old and you seem to be just finding out about it on an obscure blog.
John,
Could be a while. Meanwhile, keep spinning that Frankie wheel!
Yes, I think that one would need to say that affordances, niches, and sensorimotor abilities can’t be explained independently.
The possibilities of movement (affordances) for an organism are explained in terms of its sensorimotor abilities. At the same time, however, why it has the sensorimotor abilities it has is explained in terms of the ecological niche that is occupied by organisms of that kind. And then there needs to be a place for the evolutionary history whereby organisms of that sort came to occupy precisely those ecological niches characteristically occupied by that sort of organism.
Thank you for the article on macaque vocalizations. Of course it is never my intention to deny the continuity between humans and other primates — there’s got to be a lot of continuity or our evolution would seem like an act of magic.
My point, however, was that there are some really importing discontinuities as well, especially at the cognitive level — not because individual human brains are so much more powerful or complicated than individual chimp brains, but because our cognitive processes are tailor-made, highly specialized adaptations for cultural living (here using culture in the broadest possible sense to include language, technology, art, religion, politics, economics, and science).
To ask, “where is the archetype stored?”, is like asking, “where is dark energy stored?”. The spherical zygote perhaps expresses the archetype in its purest physical form and in the fully formed animal we see the archetype individualised by the behaviour of the animal.
No physical being has reflected the archetype perfectly. Nothing is ever static, Heraclitus was a wise man.
I do not hold the view that archetypes are original physical forms from which the various types of animal originated. If the archetype was fully realised in the physical world then all living beings would be the same, there would be no difference between them. Difference comes from the way that each type of creature expresses the archetype.
As Steiner put it in Goethean Science:
The peripheral formative forces are most clearly demonstrated in the metamorphosis of the butterfly. The outer shell, the chrysalis, takes on the form of the virtually formless, yet to develop butterfly within.
No, but Parisians do belong to a more advanced culture than the Sentinelese.
The Logos
CharlieM,
Charlie, you imagine that you have explained something. You are wrong. I conjecture that you have no clear conception yourself, and this accounts for some of your difficulties. Your analogies are so far all useless, including “dark energy”, “centrifugal and centripetal”, and “chrysalis and butterfly”. The quote from Steiner is likewise opaque.
But it seems that there is only one archetype for all animals, which is best expressed by a sphere, as you claim. Is this true? Or, as Steiner claims, is it best expressed in the “higher” animals? Is there a separate archetype for choanoflagellates? For plants? How many archetypes are there, and what are they? How does this single, animal archetype relate to the ladder of life?
If you can’t even explain what you’re talking about, what’s the point?
John Harshman,
If you don’t already know what “archetype” refers to, even though it was part of biology for centuries, then what is the point of trying to educate you?
Sorry to disappoint you but that isn’t what I am saying.
I would argue that as life evolves consciousness is at the same time becoming more concentrated in the individual. It is not produced by the material structures it is expressed in these structures.
John Harshman,
I don’t find CharlieM’s views difficult to understand.
As far as I can tell, he maintains a Neoplatonic (or perhaps more neo-Aristotelian) picture of biology. On this picture, there’s the unchanging, non-spatio-temporal form or archetype, and then there’s the particular exemplifications of that form in each individual living organism. It’s a view with deep roots in Coleridge, Teilhard de Chardin, and many others. (I might disagree with him over how close it is to Goethe per se, but that’s a side issue and not one I really know anything about. But there’s this, The Will To Create: Goethe’s Philosophy of Nature, for the curious and idle.)
The Neoplatonic picture of biology, with its deep commitment to evolution as a teleological process, is at odds with modern science, but as we’ve already seen, CharlieM is not interested in holding his picture to the evidentiary standards of modern science.
I don’t find his views at all difficult to understand. I simply see no reason at all to think that they are true. As I see it, any speculation that is not sufficiently constrained by empirical evidence is indistinguishable from bullshit.
I would say that I have more intelligence than an individual Atlantic salmon, but this species has a collective intelligence which is greater than my intelligence.
You haven’t come anywhere close to countering my claims about mammals and birds.
I don’t think you understand his views. For one thing, there seems to be only one archetype in his philosophy.
Kantian Naturalist,
No, there can be change but it is very limited
You haven’t even seemed to have noticed my claims about amphibians. And those are the counter to your claims about mammals and birds. As for you being smarter than a salmon, that may be true, but you should attempt to demonstrate it by making intelligible statements, which so far you have not. How the collective intelligence of a salmon species could be measured or even made a coherent concept is unclear to me.
I’m still trying to get a clear picture of what you are asserting. Are you suggesting that all life forms from the first bacterial cells to modern humans are different levels of expression of the same “Jesus” archetype?
I’ll grant that I don’t understand how many archetypes there are. Is there one archetype for non-mammalian vertebrates, another for mammals, and another for humans? Or is there just one archetype — “the Logos” — that is realized differently in non-mammalian vertebrates, mammals, and humans? How do we identify how many archetypes there are?
If each archetype is a body-plan, and there is one body-plan for each phylum of metazoans, then there are about thirty-five archetypes (On the Origin of Phyla) — but then there isn’t a separate archetype for human beings. since we are a minor modification on the vertebrate plan.
And although there is certainly a trajectory of encephalization in some specific lineages — say, the evolution of mammals from therapsids, the evolution of primates from insectivores, and the evolution of hominids from other primates — this is certainly not the only trajectory in the evolution of metazoans.
From an anthropocentric perspective it is certainly the most interesting, but that is not an objective fact about its significance.
Like many other concepts such as the origin of life, the big bang or the multiverse.
I don’t think anybody knows what Charlie means. Note I didn’t say “anybody else”.
The flowering of human culture is astonishing, I agree. I’m not so sure that our large brains, abilities in complex language and so on can be explained in these terms, considering that modern Homo sapiens has been around far longer than any evidence of highly developed culture, an order of 60 to 100 thousand years. Half a million or so years ago, Homo erectus had a large brain and a hyoid bone looking nearer to modern human than chimp.
Hi Charlie
I believe the thesis you are developing is: the process of developing consciousness was part of developing isolation from our environment. Do I understand this correctly? Your statement:
Is key to your thesis if I understand it correctly. Can you develop evidence to back this up?
I think KN already touched on Platonic forms. I recall Dawkins writing something on essentialism. I think this was it.
John:
Alan:
How does that address John’s point?
By contrast, I see consciousness as having to do with developing intimacy with the environment.
In terms of the evolution of the coupling of sensorimotor abilities and environmental affordances that characterizes sentient intentionality, I quite agree.
However, with the emergence of sapient intentionality we seem to be dealing with a somewhat different phenomenon: sapient animals have the capacity to distance themselves from their environments, to construct technologies that tease apart the hidden causal structure of reality, and to manipulate materials and energies to advance their own projects.
There’s a good reason why many think that we have actually left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene.
Yeah, but I don’t think that’s what Charlie is talking about.
Yes. But that requires an intimate knowledge of the environment such as allows us to maximally exploit it to our benefit.
CharlieM likes to emphasize our independence from the environment. But everything that I have eaten today has come from the environment. Some of it has been highly processed, but it originated in the environment. Our alleged independence from the environment seems greatly exaggerated.
Indeed. It certainly has been greatly exaggerated by the whole tradition of Western rationalism. I do not think it mere coincidence that this tradition was begun by people who themselves no material engagement with their environment, because all of their necessities and luxuries were produced by slaves, farmers, artisans, and also by women. Their contemplation of the Forms was a consequence of the political economy of the ancient Greek city-state.
I see. What about Corinth? Did the same sort of class come up with the same ideas due to having their needs provided by slaves, etc.? How about Persepolis?
If not, why not?
Can we be quite sure that Greek ideas of the importance of reason were faulty, due to their being the upper class, as judged by upper class people and their educators today? Are Euclid’s proofs suspect because of his belonging roughly to the class that gave us Forms? Was Archimedes’ math just a bluff for the idle classes? And are we to believe that today’s academia is pure and selfless, unlike the oppressive academia of Athens?
Seems to me that we could use some evidence. Oh, but I suppose no evidence is needed because of reasons, just like saying that life is thus and so because of Forms (etc.) needs no reasons, if we but read properly and categorize correctly (but ID does, I guess, also for reasons, even though both are roughly about the same observable phenomena).
Why evidence? Today we have the truth, as determined by academia, not the untruth, as determined by past academia.
Glen Davidson
If the question here is, why did philosophy develop in Athens and not in other city-states, to the extent that there is a discrepancy, I think it is this: Athens was a major trade hub, and it had massive cultural and political cap based on the military might of the Athenian navy. The awareness of cultural pluralism — that not all civilizations have the same mores and norms, a fact first attested to by Herodotus — probably put some pressure on the Athenians to either accept pluralism or look for some kind of grounding over and above “that’s just how we do it”. Thucydides argues, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, that once you’ve accepted pluralism, you’ve got no basis for criticizing injustice. (That’s how I read the Melian Dialogue, anyway.) Athens’ defeat in the war prompted, on the part of some, a bit of cultural introspection — and Socrates comes out of that response to the Athenian defeat.
I’m not sure I quite see the relevance of these examples. You’re talking about specific procedures and results in mathematics; I’m talking about the metaphysics of reason used to justify those procedures and results. One can think that the mathematics is true but that the metaphysics is not.
Obviously not. I have no idea where all of this is coming from. I feel as though I’ve elicited some sort of weird reaction I wasn’t at all anticipating. I actually feel quite blind-sided and caught off-guard here. At what point did I ever even so much as imply that there was anything pure or selfless about how the university works?
In terms of where I’m getting this from, some of it is based on Dewey’s (admittedly heavily biased) interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy in his Quest for Certainty, and some of it is based on Vernant’s The Origins of Greek Thought.
The origin of Greek philosophy is not my forte, and if I’m mistaken, then I’ll retract my claims.
Philosophy didn’t begin in Athens. It would seem, in fact, that Forms are largely a working out of Pythagorean ideas, as Aristotle implies. Another reason why trying to ground them in the socio-political affairs of Athens seems rather a poor tack to take (not to say that these had nothing to do with their philosophy, of course, but that there is likely some tie (see Aristotle’s excuses for “just” slavery) is hardly a revelation).
Yes, history is a tad more complex than your vaguely Marxist ideas suggested. You’re really got a lot of thoughts running around Athens, with Aristotle being substantially different from Plato. It’s entirely possible that a whole lot of the thought there was simply insulated from the issues of daily existence, and largely being worked out on their own logic, and even by some comparison with reality.
No you weren’t, you were just chalking up Forms to oppression, etc. Why should math be worked out without becoming a form of oppression, while Forms were intimately tied to oppression? No reason given. I happen to think that Forms are rather useless, but not necessarily such a bad idea, given what little they had to use at the time.
You were quite quick to jump on the academic fad of rubbishing ideas based on Oppression. Without any real thought of what a simplistic notion it is.
Actions.
Mistaken about what? No one’s going to say that class had nothing to do with Greek philosophy, but throwing Forms out due to their working out by certain people of whom Intersectionality disapproves is a kind of Marxist ad hominem. Forms are pretty useless, as real life and better ideas have shown, but one hardly does well to dis them merely due to the condition of those who thought about them.
Glen Davidson
The sentience-to-sapience trajectory happens during the normal development of each human individual. Life has a fractal property, We see patterns within patterns.
And as above, teleology is a feature of the natural world. Organs and structures are formed in the embryo and only later are put to their intended use.
Teleology can be understood in individual development as I demonstrated above.
No it doesn’t. Owens idea of the archetype was an ancestral form from which subsequent forms are derived and Cuvier believed in special creation of separate types. Goethe’s archetype is not the same as Owen’s archetype and he opposed Cuvier’s division of types. Goethe saw little benefit from asking of say, the tetrapod limb, “what is it for?”, because by asking questions like this the structure became static in people’s minds whereas in its essencial nature this limb was a dynamic ever changing entity. Rather he would ask himself, “How does this form change as it manifests in nature.I think that today we are in a good position to revisit the question of teleology as most thinking people already believe that the various examples of this limb are modifications of a general plan.
Comparison between species of the uses to which the tetrapod limb is put is very informative. From amphibians to humans we can see a progress from a very restricted use of this limb to the human. Amphibians use their limbs for locomotion, support and scratching at most, whereas we could go on and on listing its uses in humans. We see a movement from the particular to the general.
“Space and time” are concepts arrived at through thinking no less than archetypes are.
I don’t think I am deluded about the “given”. If we are to have a consistent epistemology we need to begin at the right place. IMO we begin with the given and add to it our thinking. We never really experience the given because by the time it enters our consciousness it has already had our thinking applied to it. The given is a chaos of unconnected entities. By using our thinking we gradually connect these entities. There is only one given that, in its final form is no different to the form in which we first apprehend it, and that is thinking itself. It is not due to reality itself that the given is an unconnected chaos, it is due to the human makeup that it first appears that way to us. But through thinking we have been given the ability to reconnect the given to its real state which we had torn apart in the first place. By the use of thinking we are moving from the particulars to a unified whole. It is this whole which is the reality, not the particulars.
I think you are reading more into what KN wrote, than he intended.
I took his point to be that the forms came from those who were able to be somewhat detached from the hard realities of life. That this involved opression seemed to be a side issue, which was included for completeness. If he had been commenting on something more recent that the forms, he might have instead pointed to the industrial revolution or the digital revolution.
I think you’re reading less into what I wrote than I intended. What do you think “etc.” means?
Yes, how could it be otherwise?
First off, of course it wasn’t a side issue.
Secondly, I hardly mentioned oppression alone. That’s your little fantasy.
Thirdly, who of those who have studied deeply into science or philosophy really has not been at least somewhat detached from the hard realities of life? If that were a meaningful objection, what academic results could not be dismissed for the same purported fault?
Yeah, so what?
Ideas should be discussed on their merits, if they have any.
Glen Davidson
CharlieM,
Charlie, that was just repetition of things you have said before. Why would you expect that repeating the same thing would lead to a different result? The analogy between evolution and development is not useful, and your linear progression of vertebrate form, yet again, is yet again not useful.
Fair enough. I only call materialistic and reductionist those people who think that DNA is the source of phenotype variability.
Who posited the archetype as being beyond all possible evidence?
Oh yea, mechanistic.
Because of the limited time I have for responding I get a bit behind with my replies. So I hope that nobody will mind waiting a while for a response. your patience is appreciated.
I do try to keep my responses in some sort of order.
Cheers 🙂
GlenDavidson,
You seem to think my point about the class origins of a metaphysical doctrine is intended as an argument against that doctrine — perhaps a criticism. It is not. It was intended to explain why that doctrine emerged when it did and what role it played. Certainly the class structure of ancient Greece was not the only historical factor at work in the genesis of Platonic and Aristotelian musings on the Forms. That is to say, it was a claim belonging to historical explanation, not to philosophical analysis and criticism.
Well it didn’t.
Not even close.
Glen Davidson
What is the source of phenotypic variability?
I would like to know that also. DNA may not determine the archetype but it sure as heck controls and influences it as it develops. And I would think that those processes could add some variation to the original.
What determines the archetype?
No one knows. Denton tries to address it in his new book “Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis” but it became a boring meandering read so I put it down for now.
Just in case he is a Platonist, I thought I’d marshal my refuting evidence. 🙂
If no one knows what determines the archetype, how do you know it isn’t DNA?
The work and words of geneticists and developmental biologists- like Denton and Sermonti
That wasn’t an answer. It was an allusion to a supposed answer, including a reference that you admit you haven’t read.
Yes, it was an answer as I had already showed you their words based on their work. But hey, I can do it again:
And Sermonti- Chapter VI “Why is a Fly not a horse?” (same as the book’s title)
Frankie,
Do you know what any of that meant, and if so can you explain it? Certainly almost every developmental geneticist would disagree strongly with both those claims, assuming I know what they mean. Development is indeed a complex interaction among DNA, proteins, RNAs, a few other signaling molecules (e.g. cAMP), and environmental factors. But all except the last two arise from DNA and almost all of them arise from DNA during development, so DNA is central. And the differences between species are clear enough: they’re differences in DNA. Do you know of any evidence to refute any of my claims? No fair just saying that Denton must know, or so you assume.