What what, in the butt?

consciousness in my butt.

More self-important bullshit. What we know as "consciousness" is merely an evolutionary reaction to our innate abilities to communicate. Communication predating even hypothesis in the first place, it is merely a method of forethought that has, admittedly, due to its particular development in human beings, lead to our being "dominant" over many other competitive organisms we share an environment with. No doubt, our comparative ability to correlate some of the contents of our world, before and after their relevance to occurring, is important, but only as important as it is useful to our continued proliferation.

However, new competence material always makes me uneasy. I don't believe there is any forcing of evolution. People who try to make you believe that the world would be a better place if you merely just ______ are usually quite deluded or trying to sell you something.

We are a species generally unchallenged outside of our own kind - what reason could our natural course have to develop? There's simply no motive for us to become increasingly peaceful, cognitive beings, unless it in some way serves a biological interest; in which case sporadic mutation is quite stymied by the very industries of our consciousness: fashion, sex, appearance - if the "deformed" and the "ugly" are suppressed in reproduction by industries of fey prefects, how shall such traits - positive or negative - be developed? Perhaps that's not even true though - perhaps the squalor of mankind gets as much transmissive opportunity as anyone else, so long as it stays within its own tax bracket. But I'd say that with as many faculties of tranquility of self-possession you can reach for, there are just as many destructive principles present in the mind, hurdling our egomaniacal sense of spiritual justice the same direction as all "lesser beings": entropy.

And who are these transcendental "saints and mystics" anyways? Sure is getting newagebullshit around here...

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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

If beings and animals are all evolving then, why isn't there any animal we have discovered trying to evolve now?

quote:

Originally posted by Saka If beings and animals are all evolving then, why isn't there any animal we have discovered trying to evolve now?

Some folks (many, actually) would say we have: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23812858/

Then again, how one objectively defines what constitutes and evolutionary leap is suspect to begin with.

Also, I'll try to track down an article I recently read positing that Cichlids in Africa are going through something of an evolution right now into an entirely new species.

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last minute disco dot net

quote:

Originally posted by Saka If beings and animals are all evolving then, why isn't there any animal we have discovered trying to evolve now?

Well most creatures tend to not mutate on the fly - its more about mutation in relevance to the previous generation, so changes are present upon birth.

The problem is, to know exactly what has changed, you would have to do an extremely meticulous study and charting of the complete traits which compose a particular animal. Then observe its offspring and realize whatever differences might be. Then study the proceeding offspring and so on. You may not even notice any differences whatsoever because there may not be any - that's one thing against you. Furthermore, it often takes a great amount of time for creatures to evolve and gain or lose certain traits - and they do so in reaction to both their environment as well as the other organisms they cohabit with. You can see how this would lead to quite an innumerable amount of variables to both consider and observe.

It's more like every living thing is in a constant state of evolution and seeing as how we've only had a short [cosmically] amount of time to ponder it, and we seem to rather use this time to muse about God or about how we must look inward to change, we mostly fail in recognizing the great interdependency that living things share, especially when we limit our judgments to mere "consciousness" being the crux of dominance.

___________________
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

When humans show compassion isn't that going against evolution?

So, a soldier is injured, and another soldier, without thinking runs out to drag the man to saftey, without a thought to his own survival...

Doesn't that go against survival of the fittest, and protecting ones own gene's while eradicating anothers....

Just thoughts.

Man would most certainly not be the organism he is were it not for the society he has made to support himself.

I would say that compassion is a social mechanism first, and an humanistic ideal secondly. To actively risk your own life in order to save another of your species [or even outside of your own species...] may seem disingenuous to personal survival, but there are many consequences for such a thing - one humans know could be the moral imperative, risking both sanity and status for not acting within one's abilities, thus severely negating possible reproductive opportunities. After all, who wants to fuck a known coward?

Also a thing to consider is that survival of the fittest is no guarantee that the fittest always survive, nor that the weakest shall always perish. There are plenty of traits all manner of creatures exhibit which are not conducive to evolutionary mandate but are still prevalent regardless. There's just no such thing as a perfect animal.

___________________
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

quote:

Originally posted by Saka When humans show compassion isn't that going against evolution? So, a soldier is injured, and another soldier, without thinking runs out to drag the man to saftey, without a thought to his own survival... Doesn't that go against survival of the fittest, and protecting ones own gene's while eradicating anothers.... Just thoughts.

Not at all, In fact it's a re-affirmation that humans make greater use of their 'consciousness' than a dog or a fox. If the soldier is willing to risk his life to save
a partner, it shows how evolved a species has become. A species that can think outside
the realm of self-interest & instead act upon those feelings of 'love' and 'courage', which have distingushed the human race amongst other less consciousness mammals

quote:

Originally posted by diggerz Not at all, In fact it's a re-affirmation that humans make greater use of their 'consciousness' than a dog or a fox. If the soldier is willing to risk his life to save a partner, it shows how evolved a species has become. A species that can think outside the realm of self-interest & instead act upon those feelings of 'love' and 'courage', which have distingushed the human race amongst other less consciousness mammals

You've not established how magnanimity is a "greater use of 'consciousness'". Not one bit.

___________________
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

quote:

Originally posted by RJT If anyone wants to read it, here's a link: http://www.sendspace.com/file/w8i71m

It says I need a password to open it.

What's the password?

[Edit: Never mind, I see I can open it in read-only mode without the password.]

quote:

Originally posted by RJT http://www.sendspace.com/file/w8i71m

A couple questions:

You don't explicitly say what you mean by "relative" or "objective" truths or suggest a way of distinguishing between them. What kind of definition of "relative" and "objective" are you using?

Also, would Sellars endorse the distinction between relative and objective truths? The way I see it, one of the points to adopting his theory of knowledge as beliefs justified according to standards held by a community of language users (which is more or less what you said, I think) is to remove entirely the old worry about whether our beliefs are adequate according to some standard independent of the needs or rules of human communities -- such a worry no longer arises because the notion of "epistemic standards independent of any society" is simply incoherent.

Finally, given that many people would probably accuse you of being a "relativist" with regard to knowledge after reading your paper, how would you answer the worry that without a transcultural standard of knowledge one has no means of adjudicating factual or theoretical disputes between the worldviews of different societies and no way for one society to convince another that its epistemic standards or practices are inadequate? On a relativist view of knowledge, is mere cheerleading for your own epistemic standards the only thing you have left in such a situation?