Inserted again DMB, if you're up for it ... On 5/18/07, david buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Kriminel said to dmb: > So Dave, you think ideas and societies do not evolve? Or do they evolve on > the basis of some supernatural principle? > > dmb says: > Neither. I'm following James and Pirsig in saying that mechanistic > explanations of evolution are empty and the idea that it is all driven by > the desire for mere survival is a ridiculous concept.
[IG] The mechanisms of genes and memes may be driven by that simple metaphorical concept - though even "survive" is a rather Victorian spin on Darwinism - I tend to use "fitness" - not as in the physical fitness domination over competition, but as in "best fit" to the environmental opprtunities and limitations (functional fit, as you call it later, though I would want any unexpected limits implied by your word "functional"). Anyway we are actually very close here if you can see my point ... below. But denying the fact > of evolution or attributing it to supernatural forces is even more > ridiculous, of course, and I'm certainly not suggesting any such thing. > > Kernal said: > Volitional evolution? Is that like eugenics or Think and Grow Rich? You know > there was this guy Lamarck and he claimed... > > dmb replies: > Huh? Isn't eugenics based on classic social darwinism, a.k.a. amoral > survival of the fittest? I think so. And think and grow rich? Isn't that > Susie Orman of PBS fame, which I'd never watch by the way? (I follow the > theory that wealth is for the mediocre; one has to be smart enough to know > how to get the money but stupid enough to believe that money is equal to the > good life.) In any case, neither of those things have anything to do with my > point about volition vs mechanism. As I understand it, evolution is driven > by the desire for betterness and survival is just one particular species of > better. Better is a relational concept of course. There is something we > desire beyond the preservation and perpetution of existence. In a million > billion tiny ways everything moves toward bettterness, single celled > organisms and philosophers are going to be dealing with entirely different > kinds of better, but this is what drives evolution in any context. I think > of it as an impulse to transcend any given situation that doesn't seem quite > good enough, whether that means moving away from physical danger or > inventing a new metaphysics. Betterness is a vague word, but there is a > clear and basic idea in it. It implies a will at work in all these tiny > particular cases, not a blind mechanism. > > A positivist might see volition as some kind of miracle, but I don't. It > seems quite natural and completely ubiquitous. [IG] Absolutely. There is no difference between my "drive" for fitness and your "volition". It may seem absurd to translate the mechanism involving a single gene or meme as the explanation for volition at the more holistic levels - because that is indeed utterly absurd. It is that interpretation of "Darwinisn' that is absurd. These mechanisms only apply at the atomistic level, and even the choice of "atoms" has some degree of arbitrariness - even in genetics. Darwin only saw the pheotypes and species, those were his "atoms", other Darwinists saw "traits and features" as their atoms, newer Darwinists see genes or named sections of DNA molecules, etc ... the "analysis" gradually finds smaller atoms to talk about (it cuts things up) - BUT it is absurd to use a reductionist argument to explain how the whole is simply constructed from those parts. It makes a heck of a lot more > sense because evolutionary theory has to account for improvement, not just > change and variety. There is an apparent direction that can't be explained > in terms of mechanisms, functional fit or random mutations. [IG] Agreed, in cannot be explained only in terms of those, even though those mechanisms are real; and really are involved in what is going on; it needs to be explained in terms of all the emergent patterns that arise in those, and patterns in those patterns .... the MoQ levels. You wouldn't describe a waterfall in terms of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms - even if a physical model said it was made up entirely of those. (It's a standard philsophical though experiment isn't it about the stuff we call water ?) > > dmb > > _________________________________________________________________ > More photos, more messages, more storage—get 2GB with Windows Live Hotmail. > http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_mini_2G_0507 > > > moq_discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ > moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
