And what were the chances of some specific guy being born in 17th century England and writing out a play called Hamlet? — Bradskii

The problem with your view is how much it ascribes to chance. Ultimately, you say, stuff just happens, but that is actually not an argument or an explanation.

And time only exists because we exist? — Bradskii

The existence of time requires the establishment of duration between points in time. That is what is supplied by the mind. You're neglecting or overlooking the way in which your mind is actually involved in constructing what you call 'the objective universe', by imagining it as if you can see it from no point of view whatever.

as a tool to help decide how to build a bridge or when to plant my crops, it is a romantic story. — T Clark

Nevertheless as this is a philosophy forum it is appropriate from time to time to at least consider philosophy.

The bottom line of Robert Lanza's Biocentrism can be interpreted to say that the universe comes into being through the conscious experience of agents. That is why we are designated 'beings'. Time and space themselves are functions of the mind of observing agents, they have no intrinsic existence outside that. Yet we consistently and mistakenly project reality onto the so-called external world because we lack insight into the way in which the mind constructs reality.

Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things, veritas aeterna, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility—that is knowledge—which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result—knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. — Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation

That is a red light, perhaps you would say a prejudice, of mine. — T Clark

I would. :-)

The point about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics is that evolution apparently defies the second law by greatly increasing the degree of order - but, we are told, only because somewhere else in the Universe, entropy is increasing in inverse proportion. This decrease in entropy became the term 'negentropy', a contraction of 'negative entropy' coined by Erwin Schrodinger in his book What is Life? (reputedly one of the inspirations behind the later discovery of DNA.)

I'm dubious about the so-called supremacy of the second law of thermodynamics. As an overall trend in Western thought, 'natural laws' of this kind have been assigned the role previously accorded to 'divine law' or (as Alfred North Whitehead says) 'the inexorable decrees of fate'. But now I note in many of the popular science media in my newsfeed, the whole concept of 'scientific law' is itself being called into question.

As we're into video show-and-tell, here's a presentation by Robert Lanza on 'biocentrism'. I'm not sure how he is regarded in the mainstream - I suspect not highly - but I find his attitude philosophically superior to your common or garden varieties of materialism.

Does anyone see a resemblance between Aristotle's 'unproven first principles' and Godel's incompleteness theorem?

'The theorem states that in any reasonable mathematical system there will always be true statements that cannot be proved.'

I still say it’s an open question. There are alternatives to either of the two horns.

No direction. Unless you want to claim a divine purpose. — Bradskii

They seem to be the two horns of a dilemma, don't they? I'm familiar with the dogma, but I still say it's a reasonable question, from the perspective of speculative philosophy.

That's dangerously close to the old 'why are there still monkeys?' question. — Bradskii

Fair point. I guess the question I’m angling towards is that of whether evolution is directional in nature - whether it tends towards (for instance) creatures with higher degrees of intelligence. I understand that the mainstream view is ‘definitely not’. But then you can ask whether it is a question that is in scope for biology or science at all. What evidence could there be for either the affirmative or negative? It would seem to me to be more a matter of the starting assumptions.

Do you think nature values an organism over another? — Bradskii

I do sometimes ponder why evolution didn't simply come to an end with blue-green algae. Heaven knows they proven their ability to survive for near a billion years.

seems to me the manifest purpose of this site. Says a famously "God-intoxicated" thinker:
Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
~Spinoza — 180 Proof

I'm tackling this title. But I've already encountered many Spinozist aphorisms that seem decidely more religious than anything that you present e.g.

I do not think it necessary for salvation to know Christ according to the flesh: but with regard to the Eternal Son of God, that is the Eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all things and especially in the human mind, and above all in Christ Jesus, the case is far otherwise. For without this no one can come to a state of blessedness, inasmuch as it alone teaches, what is true or false, good or evil. — Letter 21 (73) to Henry Oldenburg, November (1675)

I think there's a kind of lineage from earlier Jewish mysticism to Spinoza, but I'm still investigating.

I might, also, except that it too easily comes across as a kind of secular fundamentalism. Most of the so-called new atheists - they're no longer new - fall into that trap.

I've resisted reading De Chardin, one of my lecturers described his prose as 'turgid'. But I was interested to learn about the book by Dobzhansky, he is one of the principals of 'the modern synthesis'. I'm just perusing the intro to his book, and he seems much more willing to consider spiritual perspectives than do many of the pop intellectuals who use evolutionary theory to bludgeon religious belief.

Darwin and Wallace both used the term "survival of the fittest" to describe natural selection. — T Clark

Ahem. Survival of the fittest was introduced by Herbert Spencer in an essay on the principle of natural selection - Darwin later approved and adopted it (I think it was even in later editions of his book).

Interestingly, Wallace broke from Darwin over the publication of the Descent of Man. While agreeing with Darwin's account of the common ancestry of h. sapiens with respect to the anatomical features, he fundamentally disagrees with the idea that the biological account determines the abilities of human kind, concluding his chapter in a very similar vein to the OP (refer to the attached for what he adduces as evidence):

Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now adduced - strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which are clearly what ought not to be on the materialistic theory - will be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as dependent on those fundamental laws and causes which furnish the very materials for evolution to work with. They will also be relieved from the crushing mental burden imposed upon those who--maintaining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but products of the blind eternal forces of the universe, and believing also that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and all life on the earth necessarily cease--have to contemplate a not very distant future in which all this glorious earth--which for untold millions of years has been slowly developing forms of life and beauty to culminate at last in man--shall be as if it had never existed....

As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and perfectibility. To us, the whole purpose, the only raison d'être of the world--with all its complexities of physical structure, with its grand geological progress, the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and the ultimate appearance of man--was the development of the human spirit in association with the human body. — Darwinism Applied to Man, Alfred Russel Wallace

If I add heat to the water, it is heated and the water molecule increase in kinetic energy. Since it is confined by air pressure, it's pressure increases (PV=NRT) and it's entropy decreases. — T Clark

I googled it, what I find is the opposite:

Entropy increases as temperature increases. An increase in temperature means that the particles of the substance have greater kinetic energy. The faster-moving particles have more disorder than particles that are moving slowly at a lower temperature.

----------------

'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution'. Theodosius Dobzhansky. — Bradskii

Dobzhansky (an Orthodox Christian) wrote a book endorsing Du Chardin's ideas, called The Biology of Ultimate Concern, which addresses 'ethical, ideological and philosophical implications of evolution.' The introduction can be found here.

Some writers restrict the word "evolution" to biological evolution only. This seems to me gratuitous. The universe has had a historical development; so had life, and so had mankind. This historical development did advance to life from absence of life, and did ascend to man from non-human ancestors. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

When you add energy to a system, you decrease it's entropy — T Clark

Is that a fact? If I boil a pot of water, is its entropy decreased?

So at the risk of being on topic, is there a coherent, sound argument that can be made that is sympathetic to the intuition so poorly expressed in the OP? A way to rescue teleology? — Banno

Might await another OP on the topic. But my sympathy here is not because of the quality of the argument, but the sense of existential dread. It may not be well expressed but I think it is well founded.

It's like tossing bloodied meat into the Piranha River. :cool:

There's also a fair amount of latent hostility to anything that sounds vaguely religious on this forum. (As per Thomas Nagel's comments in 'Evolutionary Biology and the Fear of Religion', which I've posted previously.)

The best way to prevent proliferation of poor threads to ignore them. I tried to steer it towards a discussion of the philosophical issues, but the response clearly indicated that I was wasting my time.

//ps another of my stock articles on the theme.//

(I restored the question, which I had deleted.)

I believe the Thin Alchemist had an identical view.

What more do we need? — Tom Storm

Philosophy aspires to something more than utility.

What I was trying to say in my earlier post was, don't look to evolutionary theory to try and find the meaning of existence. Evolutionary biology is not concerned with any kind of meaning beyond explanations of how species procreate, develop, and survive (or not). But on the other hand, it's a mistake, and one made by many, to look to evolutionary theory to disprove anything in particular about the meaning of existence. Science has a deliberately limited scope - it deals with specific issues, even if it asks very broad questions within those constraints. As Steven Weinberg said, the more the universe is comprehensible, the more it seems meaningless. But then he was a cosmologist, and his discipline deliberately excludes any discussion of meaning, so duh! But all kinds of meanings are read into it on both sides of the debate.

There is professional evolutionary biology: mathematical, experimental, not laden with value statements. But, you are not going to find the answer to the world's mysteries or to societal problems if you open the pages of Evolution or Animal Behaviour. Then...you have evolution as secular religion, generally working from an explicitly materialist background and solving all of the world's major problems, from racism to education to conservation. — Michael Ruse, Is Evolution a Secular Religion?

Besides, a lot of people have an interest in denying that evolution could have any purpose or goal besides procreation and survival. After all if life is a meaningless accident, then any anxiety about the possibility of not knowing what it is, is alleviated. I'm sure that's a factor too.

@Banno - Are you aware of Mary Midgley's criticisms of Richard Dawkins?

Notice that the theory of biological evolution is not directional - it doesn't 'evolve towards' any particular outcome, it's simply an account of how species develop through time. Evolution in the sense of development towards an overall goal, whether historical, philosophical, religious or biological, is generally deprecated by science as orthogenetic. Orthogenesis is a theory that proposes that evolution proceeds in a predetermined direction, driven by some internal force or mechanism. It was popular in the early 20th century but has largely been discredited by modern evolutionary theory, which emphasizes the role of natural selection and random genetic variation in shaping the diversity of life. I think Henri Bergson's 'Creative Evolution' is regarded as an orthogenetic theory, but it's not really much taught any more.

So the sense in which you're talking about evolution has little or nothing to do with 'the theory of evolution' as science pursues it (which is not to say that it's mistaken or fallacious).

However, for philosophical purposes, you have a valid point. Information, as used by those physical scientists, is not a "metaphysical primitive"*3 or even a physical object. Instead, it's the creative process of enforming : giving form to the formless; meaning to the meaningless. — Gnomon

The philosophical question is What creates?

I’m inclined to place reason amongst the ‘meta-cognitive faculties’. Apart from its obvious instrumental utility - counting, and so on - the advent of language, reason, and self-consciousness signifies a new plateau of awareness that was is not available to other creatures (nor to our early simian ancestors). One of the straightforward manifestations of reason is asking why: why did that animal drop dead for no visible cause? A human will puzzle over that, and perhaps examine the corpse for insight, while a hyena will simply help itself to the remains. Surely that kind of awareness would have manifested very early in human ancestry, reaching another plateau with Greek philosophy. 'Wisdom begins in wonder', as Socrates said.

To be fair to Thomas Nagel, I only quoted one paragraph.

Thanks! Had forgotten that exchange!

Did the Greek understanding of reason generally identify this faculty as human or divine in origin? — Tom Storm

That is the million-dollar question. Reason was appropriated by theologians as the 'divine spark' and equated with being an aspect of 'imago dei' - now, of course, deprecated as an archaic relic of pre-modern thought and discarded as 'religious'. But it still nags at me. I got a book out of the library, The Dream of Reason, by Antony Gottlieb, but I found it pretty dull to be honest. Looking for a better account. It's a work in progress.

Hoffman is one of the directors on Kastrup's Essentia Foundation, I think they're pretty close. I've read quite a bit of Kastrup the last few months. Overall, I'm an admirer, although I think he puts an awful lot of weight on a couple of sketchy metaphors. But I'm encouraged by the fact that he's on all these panel sessions and his work is appearing all over the place. I think he's becoming a formidable advocate for scientific idealism. (I joined the Kastrup forum while I was away from here, but alas it's been more or less overtaken by Rudolf Steiner fans so I left.)

The book that has most impressed me is the one I kept mentioning last year, Charles Pinter's Mind and the Cosmic Order. Very level-headed and grounded in solid science. Now I have to work out how that ties in with the faculty of reason, which neither Pinter nor Hoffman nor Kastrup really address (but I think Nagel does.)

We generally build our ideas and reasoning upon their perceived results and this in itself is an interpretative act. This same impulse might include human sacrifice to keep the crops healthy, or COVID vaccinations to keep us well. — Tom Storm

Circling back to this point - that is obviously true, but I think 'reason' in day-to-day usage, in our cultural context, usually implies scientifically-sanctioned reason, and also a pragmatic sense of reason. A rational person weighs the odds, acts prudently, plans, and so on - all well and good and I'm not knocking it, but I think it reflects what has been called the 'instrumentalisation' of reason.

I don't know if our culture thinks that reason 'goes all the way down', so to speak. If you reflect on the meaning of reason for the Greek philosophers, I think their estimation of it was far more comprehensive, and more far-reaching. They were seeking, in their own way, a 'theory of everything' - seeking after the first cause or, if you like, the ultimate reason. But now that's all 'ancient history', as the saying goes.

On a more contemporary note, the question I would pose Donald Hoffman is the extent to which his claim that 'reality is an illusion' - the title of his book - can escape the very conditioning factors which support his claim. After all, he believes his book and argument pertain to something real, but how can they, if reality itself is an illusion? I think the proper title of his book ought to be about the fallacy of cognitive realism, although it wouldn't make nearly as catchy a title.

How to catch out a P-Zombie - ask them how they are.

Would you consider this a useful refinement of Plato's idea of instantiation? Does Aristotle still propose a realm of forms? — Tom Storm

Now there's a great thread topic, but we'd need input from some of the more experienced readers in that subject. (AFAIK, Aristotle rejects the 'realm of forms', but I think it's far from clear what was meant by that in the first place, or what precisely is being rejected.)

Notice that they're all artefacts.
— Wayfarer
DNA is not an "artefact" — 180 Proof

That rather begs the question, does it not? :naughty: The point about the informational structure of DNA is that it is unique to living forms and the question of the origin of life is still open.

I thought at Gnomon was using information as a kid of secular analogue for essence. — Tom Storm

Well, kind of, but I question the accordance of this usage with the classical meaning. My understanding is that 'essence' boils down essentially to 'is-ness' - what makes a particular what it is. That was derived originally from Plato's 'eidos' (idea or form), usually understood as mediated by Aristotle's 'immanent realism' (i.e. that forms are real only when they are instantiated in particulars).

There has been a re-evaluation of Aristotle in modern biological thinking, because his 'form-matter' dualism is actually highly adaptible (unlike Aristotelian physics, for instance). I've read some discussion of whether Aristotle's ideas of telos (and entelechy) actually anticipated the idea of DNA. But that can be discussed through the perspectives of (for instance) biology and biosemiotics. I'm finding the introduction of 'information theory' a bit tendentious.

A stone sculpture is informational. It's not merely a stone. DNA self-replicates because it is informational. It's not just organic compounds. An origami unicorn is informational. It's not simply paper. Etc. — 180 Proof

Notice that they're all artefacts. Inorganic matter is not 'informational' in that sense.

DNA is the medium (paper), the message (information is in the sequence of nucleotides) — Agent Smith

The general thrust of molecular biology is that DNA encodes and transmits information. Biosemiosis says that it is, therefore, different in kind from inorganic matter, as that passage indicates.

I generally like your attitude and admire your enthusiasm, but I think there's a gap in your account. I think there has to be some sense in which 'Mind' is fundamental or foundational - not simply as the product of interactions of matter-energy and form.

I've read a bit about this idea of the foundational role of information - for example Paul Davies' book on it, and I have James Gleick's The Information - but I think there's some sort of fallacy of equivocation associated with such theses. Put simply, what is behind genetic information, what is its cause? Is biological information somehow spontaneously generated by inorganic matter? You know there is a theistic Argument from Biological Information. I'm not sure I accept it, but I think I'd sooner accept it than the idea that some kind of amorphous 'information' is 'behind everything'.

None of which is actually relevant to the question in the thread, other than to say that it is possible to conceive of 'the self' as the identity of a process rather than as an immutable or unchangeable entity - just as the Buddha does. The Buddha declined to answer the question 'does the self exist' with either yes or no, because the aim is to understand how the process of dependent origination gives rise to the sense of self, which is the central teaching of Buddhism.

Shame, I found him congenial enough, never really had reason to argue with him (but then I now try and keep away from threads that are tending towards flame wars.) But I understand the mod decision.

…that seems to the general thrust

Are you attempting to relate the traditional meanings to form/substance in Kant? Connect them somehow? See how an investigation of the one would get you to the other? — Mww

This book I have, Kant's Theory of Normativity, Exploring the Space of Reason, Konstantin Pollok, seems to be arguing that Kant adapted Aristotle's hylomorphism into his own 'transcendental hylomorphism'.

There's a very big-picture theme behind this line of argument.

I'm very interested by the evaluation of reason in Greek and medieval philosophy. There is a well-known expression of the 'rational soul of man' - the faculty of reason being that which enables the human to intuitively grasp the 'logos' of the Universe. Of course, that sounds medieval, in fact the only places you seem to really encounter it is amongst Christian intellectuals (mainly Catholic and Orthodox). But I'm inclined to think that this is due to their absorption of the Greek philosophical tradition, rather than on explicitly doxological grounds. But note this:

.'...we may be sorrrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual "I".'

~ The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic PhilosophyAlfredo Ferrarin

Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.

….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism

This is actually preserved in Aquinas' epistemology, but it soon dies out in the Western tradition.

Consequently, in its physical forms (e.g. energy/matter) Information must obey physical laws, but in its metaphysical forms (e.g. mind/ideas) information must obey logical laws. — Gnomon

This occupies the field of biosemiotics, which we've all been introduced to here through the contributions of @apokrisis, hence my quote from Marcello Barbieri, one of the leading theorists in that field.

But I don't believe it is meaningful to speak of 'information' as if it is the fundamental substrate or foundation of all that exists. It is not a metaphysical primitive - the word itself is polysemic, i.e. has many different meanings depending on its context and the subject under discussion. One of the biosemiotic theorists I was reading earlier this week associates the emergence of intelligence exclusively with the presence of life and mind.

And I regret to say that I invariably find your 'enformationism' mere hand-waving.

The evolutionary argument against naturalism is derived from the 'argument from reason'. It posits the existence of God as the explanation for the existence of reason. The argument states that the capacity for reason cannot be explained by natural causes alone, and must instead be the result of a rational, intelligent creator. The argument is often attributed to C.S. Lewis - I'm not an admirer, by the way - who presented it in his book "Miracles: A Preliminary Study". I think this is the general family of arguments that was adapted by Plantinga.

One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the naturalistic worldview].... The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... Unless Reason is an absolute – all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. — Wikipedia, The Argument from Reason

However while I believe the argument has merit, I don't appeal to it in support of belief in God or that it means the Bible is the 'word of God'. My view is simply that you can't provide a convincing naturalistic account of the faculty of reason, because such accounts invariably rely on the argument that reason is a product of evolutionary adaptation. But I prefer Thomas Nagel's approach:

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion

In other words, to appeal to evolutionary theory to justify reason, you're 'stepping outside' of reason, trying to find some other grounds on which to justify it - which undermines the 'sovereignity of reason'.

There's a lot more to be said, but that provides an indication.