On 8/30/2012 6:23 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, August 30, 2012 9:00:12 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
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 suggesting that if I add a randomizer that the words being spit out will
eventually learn to become an author?
That would be necessary but not sufficient. You'd need an editor (or natural selection)
to find something coherent.
Are you an Intelligent Design creationist?
Of course not.
Then why can't you accept that living systems are not designed, don't 'need' be they way
they are, are just formed by random variation and natural selection.
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.
Ok, then you /know/ nausea is possible because you have experienced it. That doesn't
change the fact that nausea has no business being possible in a universe driven only by
bottom up evolution.
IT'S RANDOM! Having business assumes a goal, foresight.
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.
T-cells are social organisms who need to care for the other cells of the body. What's
the difference?
For one the T-cells don't have young. Their 'feelings' are simple and don't need to rise
to level of being expressible or to be resolved with conflicting feelings. You are again
asking why some biological system 'needs' to be the way it is, as though there is a
designer who can explain his choice.
Brent
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