On 8/30/2012 5:39 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, August 30, 2012 8:19:32 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
If morals didn't exist, why would we choose to invent them? What possible
purpose
could be served by some additional qualitative layer of experience on top
of the
perfectly efficient and simple execution of neurochemical scripts? Don't
you see
that the proposed usefulness of such a thing is only conceivable in
hindsight -
after the fact of its existence?
We didn't invent them. They evolved. Evolution has no foresight, it's
random.
Randomness is not omnipotence. It doesn't matter how many words I write here, they will
never evolve into something that writes by itself.
Exactly. Randomness is more likely to kludge up an adaptation than create an efficient
design from scratch. Your words don't evolve because they don't move around and recombine
randomly - except in your head. Are you an Intelligent Design creationist?
It takes advantage of what is available. Feeling sick at your stomach
after eating
rotten food is a good adaptation to teach you not eat stuff like that again.
No, it isn't a possible adaptation at all. There would not be any such thing as
'feeling' or 'sick' - only memory locations and branching tree algorithms. This is what
I am saying, feeling makes no sense as a possibility unless you are looking back on it
in hindsight after the fact. Sure, to you it seems like nausea is a good adaptation, but
that's naive realism. You assume nausea is possible because you have experienced it.
That's not an assumption - that's empiricism. An assumption would be that a brain can't
instantiate feelings.
You would have to use evolution to explain the possibility of feeling in the first
place, and it cannot.
So what feeling would work to guide you not harm a child? - how about
that 'sick
at your stomach' feeling.
That implies that T-cells need a feeling to guide them not to kill friendly
cells.
No it doesn't. T-cells are not social animals who need to care for their young.
That H2O needs a feeling to guide it not to dissolve non-polar molecules. If you believe
in functionalism, then all feeling is a metaphysical epiphenomenon. I think the opposite
makes more sense - everything is feeling, function is the result of sense, not the other
way around. T-cells do feel. Molecules do feel. How could it be any other way?
But then you have no way to explain why they feel this instead of that.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
