Soren wrote on Sep 11^th, 2013 at 10:55pm:



Claiming every thing is instinct only falls into this absurd conclusion if you make no demarcation between animal instincts and human ones. Art comes about because human beings have a higher ability to self-reflect and reflect on phenomena, and the ability then to act on it. It could be argued that "reflectivity" is just another instinct.

On the other hand, if we have a dualism of instinct and non-instinct, the question has to be asked: What is this "non-instinct" and where does it come from? Is it transcendent of the phenomenal realm? Booker also makes the case that we at one point were completely embodied by instinct and then only later grew out of it. I would be interested to hear his hypothesis on how this phenomena occurred and at what point in time it did occur. Booker's position here rules out transcendentalism.

Postmodern Trendoid wrote on Sep 12^th, 2013 at 11:39am:


Sounds like an argument from the Acadame there, Postmodern Trendoid.

Do you, by any chance, work in a uni?

The old boy went to the prestigious University of Balony.

I’m with the old boy 100%. We, you see, are phenomenologists.

We’re purveyors of fine quality smallgoods, aren’t we, old chap?

muso wrote on Sep 12^th, 2013 at 6:37pm:


This is silly.  A case of science talking out of the back of its own head.


Turn it around for a minute. Is there any aspect of existence that science will not, one day fully and without any leftovers, explain?


If yes - that's what we are talking about.
If no - you claim too much.

Me
Quote:



muso wrote on Sep 13^th, 2013 at 9:23am:



We are saying the same thing from different ends. There are aspects of sentience and existence that science can explain. But not the whole.

There is a good article in the current New Republic about scientism, the conflating of  scientific knowledge with knowledge as such.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinker...


Science is interesting but not as a guide to what's most important in life - our interpersonal relationships. In that regard, it is largely irrelevant.

An example (and taster) from the artricle:

In 1997, Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel, another scientistic theory of everything. In one of its less charming passages, Diamond proposes “the Anna Karenina principle” for the understanding of the domestication of animals: “domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.” He is mimicking the renowned opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel: “all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The adage is rather overrated, since all happy families are not alike; but here is how Diamond explicates it: “By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.” This is a fine instance of the incomprehension, and the buzzkill, that often attends the extension of the scientistic temperament to literature and art. Of course Tolstoy had no such sociology or self-help in mind. His proposition was a caution against generalizations about the human heart, and a strike against facile illusions of intelligibility, and an affirmation of the incommensurability, the radical particularity, of individual experience. In-laws!

muso wrote on Sep 13^th, 2013 at 2:49pm:


Neither uncomfortable nor threatening. Whatever scientific light is shed on the brain - physiology, biochemistry - is welcome. But the mind has no physiology or biochemistry.

Physiologically and biochemically indistinguishable healthy brains produce wildly different minds. The relevance of the brains behind them become largely irrelevant very quickly.

Scientific descriptions of the physical characteristics of the various pigmentations on a painting or a printed page say very little that is interesting about the painting as a painting or the ideas in the text. They may be very very good scientific descriptions but would be largely irrelevant.

Yes, everyone liked him for his dendroids, Old Herr Einstein.




Leave if out, Muso. What kind of person you are is not in your dendroids or brain chemistry.

muso wrote on Sep 16^th, 2013 at 10:14am:



The brain is not identical to the mind or personality or soul or character. The most important aspects of our 'inner lives', are only trivially brain activities.

The great variety of human experience exceeds our the biological, biochemical variations. These variations among apes, for example, would be nearly identical to the variations among humans but the scale and range of experience we have is colossal compared to even the most travelled and cosmopolitan apes.

What is interesting about us is the leftover when all the biology and chemistry has been said and done. This is not to say that there is no biology or chemistry relevant to explaining humanity. But the explanations thus provided are relatively trivial and limited. Freedom, potentiality, is not a brain activity.

muso wrote on Sep 17^th, 2013 at 10:23am:



Yes, yes, yes. And Cathy Freeman's victory at the Olympics was really all about the underlying muscle structure, heart-lung function and so forth.

We were all cheering her underlying medium, not her.