Can it be said that 2+2=4 was true prior to the universe and after its predicted collapse? That's difficult, but, the truth of this claim appears to be independent of the universe. — Manuel

i.e. 'true in all possible worlds'.

Here is the passage that @Caldwell referred to:

If I am right, there is more to the idea of real definition than is commonly conceded. For the activities of specifying the meaning of a word and of stating what an object is are essentially the same; and hence each of them has an equal right to be regarded as a form of definition*

My response is: so what? What is the point?

In human terms you might say reinforcement learning is about learning how you should make decisions so as to maximise the amount of pleasure you experience in the long-term. (Could you choose to make decisions on some other basis?) — GrahamJ

Do you mean, that hedonism is the only basis you see for an ethical philosophy? That there are no ends beyond pleasure?

In stating the hard problem this way, have I unwittingly signed up for transcendental or metaphysical realism? — GrahamJ

Based on what you've said, I think 'metaphysical realism' with a strong side-order of Skinnerian behaviourism.

the activities of specifying the meaning of a word and of stating what an object is are essentially the same; and hence each of them has an equal right to be regarded as a form of definition*

Doesn't this just say that definitions are meaningful because they state what the object in question is? And that knowing what things are is the basis for creating definitions?

Is immortality a solution or something detrimental? — Benj96

My belief is that what has been passed down as 'immortality' or 'eternal life' does not actually mean perpetual embodied existence or living forever in physical form but rather in realising a state of being which transcends physical existence. (There are exceptions, for example in Taoist and various esoteric schools there are teachings of actual embodied immortality but I think they're the exception. I'm also highly dubious of the Christian dogma of the resurrection of the physical body.)

Of course, such a state is impossible to imagine or conceptualise, but this is part of the point! The ordinary being is so attached to his/her physical form that they cannot conceive of anything beyond it, so can only conceive of the immortal in terms of a continuation of their normal state of existence for an endless duration - which would indeed be hellish. Instead there is another dimension to existence, the timeless and deathless, entry into which is what 'the deathless' actually means (see for example this Buddhist text.)

Time is the dimension across which change occurs; it cannot exist "in a moment" but is emergent from change. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm interested in the sense in which time itself must be grounded in the perception of duration. See this example which I have mentioned previously:

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers. Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time loses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. So the observer plays an absolutely crucial role in this respect. Linde expresses it graphically: 'thus we see that without introducing an observer, we have a dead universe, which does not evolve in time', and, 'we are together, the Universe and us. The moment you say the Universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness...in the absence of observers, our universe is dead'. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

This implies that time enters the picture, so to speak, with the observer - which also lines up with Kant's view on time.

The Greatest Nuclear Threat we face is a Russian Victory, The Atlantic.

Argues that Putin's success would entail uncontrollable nuclear proliferation, whilst his defeat will deflate the attraction of nuclear weapons.

Someone should say something about the distinction between 'being', 'existence' and 'reality'. They're casually regarded as synonymous, but they're actually not.

I'm not schooled in Heidegger, but I thought I'd drop this excerpt in as it is at least relevant:

Heidegger’s task is precisely to show that there is a meaningful concept of being. “We understand the ‘is’ we use in speaking,” he claims, “although we do not comprehend it conceptually.” Therefore, Heidegger asks: Can being then be thought? We can think of beings: a table, my desk, the pencil with which I am writing, the school building, a heavy storm in the mountains . . . but being? If the being whose meaning Heidegger seeks seems so elusive, almost like no-thing, it is because it is not an entity. It is not something; it is not *a* being. “Being is essentially different from a being, from beings.” The “ontological difference,” the distinction between being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), is fundamental for Heidegger. The forgetfulness of being that, according to him, occurs in the course of Western philosophy amounts to the oblivion of this distinction.

This resembles the musings of Tillich on the non-existence of God - that God is 'beyond existence', therefore not *a* being:

Existence refers to what is finite and fallen and cut of from its true being. (Ex- means 'apart from', 'ist' to be, to stand). Within the finite realm issues of conflict between, for example, autonomy (Greek: 'autos' - self, 'nomos' - law) and heteronomy (Greek: 'heteros' - other, 'nomos' - law) abound (there are also conflicts between the formal/emotional and static/dynamic). Resolution of these conflicts lies in the essential realm (the Ground of Meaning/the Ground of Being) which humans are cut off from yet also dependent upon ('In existence man is that finite being who is aware both of his belonging to and separation from the infinite' Therefore existence is estrangement.

...What Tillich is seeking to lead us to is an understanding of the 'God above God'. ... the Ground of Being (God) must be separate from the finite realm (which is a mixture of being and non-being) and [so] God cannot be *a* being. God must be beyond the finite realm. Anything brought from essence into existence is always going to be corrupted by ambiguity and our own finitude. Thus statements about God must always be symbolic (except the statement 'God is the Ground of Being'). Although we may claim to know God (the Infinite) we cannot. The moment God is brought from essence into existence God is corrupted by finitude and our limited understanding. In this realm we can never fully grasp (or speak about) who God really is. The infinite cannot remain infinite in the finite realm. That this rings true can be seen when we realize there are a multitude of different understandings of God within the Christian faith alone. They cannot all be completely true so there must exist a 'pure' understanding of God (essence) that each of these are speaking about (or glimpsing aspects of)...."

Just found this fabulous remake of the Santana classic Oye Como Vas. Full screen and volume up! (And that site that is behind these 'global remakes', Playing for Change, has many astounding things on it.)

I think Murphy's Law originated in the US military and was a rule of thumb for minimising the amount of complexity required in a military operation or strategy. Like, if you planned a battle, don't rely on everything going right, you have to allow for the fact that someone will make a really basic mistake or some piece of equipment will break. (It's related to KISS, 'keep it simple, stupid!') In that context, I think it's a sensible attitude, but it definitely is not a philosophy of life. For you to even be in a position to write that OP, a highly improbable number of things had to go right, which they apparently must have done - like, you have the technology to do it, and it works. It is not reproducing your ideas unintelligibly and you can post them OK (and don't worry about your English it is perfectly OK). As for the harsh reality of life, you are speaking about it in the abstract, and no doubt you can find many examples to point to, and even have had many of them happen. But regarding them as 'typical' or 'what always happens' is, I'm sure, a recipe for unhappiness. It doesn't mean being unrealistically cheerful, but at least try a 'glass half full' approach rather than expecting the worst of everything.

I've been reading the IEP entry on Kit Fine. In it, there's a summary of the discussion in the paper. Note this paragraph, which I've already mentioned. I'm trying to understand the logic.

One of Fine’s distinctive contributions to rehabilitating essence was to argue against the modal conception of it (1994b). To do so, Fine introduced what is now a famous example. Consider the singleton set {Socrates} (the set whose sole member is Socrates). It is necessary that, if this set exists, then it has Socrates as a member. And so, by the modal conception, the set essentially has Socrates as a member. But, Fine argues, on plausible assumptions, it is also necessary that Socrates is a member of {Socrates}. And so, by the modal conception, it follows that Socrates is essentially a member of {Socrates}. This, however, is highly implausible: it is no part of what Socrates is that he should be a member of any set whatsoever. — IEP

I am puzzled about the meaning of 'modal logic', so I asked ChatGPT, which came up with:

Modal logic is a type of formal logic that studies reasoning about necessity and possibility. It is used to formalize reasoning about the modalities "it is necessary that" and "it is possible that." Modal logic is often used in philosophy to study issues related to knowledge, time, and causation. Some important concepts in modal logic include the notion of a possible world and the concept of a modal operator, which is used to indicate necessity or possibility.

So, applying that definition to the IEP excerpt. The experession 'by modal conception' is used to denote logical necessity (is this right?) So, if this set exists, then by necessity it has Socrates as a member. But it's not essential to Socrates that he is member of any set.

I'm struggling to understand why this is significant. After all, Socrates is ostensibly a real being, it could be any person whatever. But 'a set' is a concept. When he asks 'does this set exist', the question I would pose is, 'does any set exist?' - at least, does it exist in the same sense that a real person (e.g. Socrates) exists. This is why it seems a rather artificial example, but I could be missing something basic about it.

Hey, it was The Sixties. :party: Hard to explain to the youngsters, nowadays.

What is your explanation for existence? — Benj96

My involvement with philosophy was originally motivated by the belief in, and search for, the enlightenment I was certain was real. As a youth, these ideas were circulating, as I grew up in the 1960's and found a sense of identity through popular music, The Beatles in particular, and later through the counter-cultural movements that grew out of all of that. Part of that was a consequence of early experiences with hallucinogens, also very much part of the culture of the time, but I also had a couple of naturally occuring epiphanies.

The principle realisation was very hard to express in words, and probably looses meaning when I attempt it - but it was about the eternal nature of the subject, the I (while standing in a park one twilight.) This was that the I, as the subject of experience (not as the individual person or self) was somehow fundamental or foundational to existence - that wherever anything is, I am. Some years later, I found similar ideas in the teachings of Ramana Maharishi. He often referred to the verse from Exodus, 'I am that I am', as the point of convergence between the Bible and his teaching. I also had an intuitive sense of a forgotten truth, something I had known an unthinkably long time ago, that was the most important thing to understand, and which I had forgotten, but which was tantalisingly close. (Later I began to wonder if this was related to the Platonic 'anamnesis'.) Both those experiences were fleeting but vivid.

I went to University later than most and basically followed a curriculum that I thought might address these issues - philosophy, comparative religion, psychology and history, with comparative religion being the most useful and relevant to my questions.

So, after that preamble, I still believe that there is enlightenment, even though there's a lot of nonsense written about it. It has given rise in me to an orientation towards philosophical idealism, which I regard as the mainstream of philosophy proper, today's scientism and physicalism being parasitic upon it. The key understanding that has come out of this is that human existence is not something accidental, the product of a biochemical fluke, but is intrinsic to the Cosmos. Of course, we have to accomodate the discoveries that science has made since the 17th Century which are genuinely novel in the history of mankind. But that doesn't mean simply relegating the whole of previous culture to the archives, they have to be re-intepreted - that is the meaning of philosophical hermenuetic. And there's a lot of activity in this space. I was one of the first overseas registrants to the first Science and Nonduality Conference held in San Rafael in 2009, there are plenty of people working on these ideas (some bogus and some 100% for real.) The principle challenge is that we're not 'going interstellar', we are inextricably terrestrial and we have to learn to live on and maintain Spaceship Earth if we are to survive (which we will.) We have to find or retrieve or develop a wisdom tradition of our own, which aspires to enlightenment, mokṣa, liberation as its highest goal, rather than endless consumption, entertainment and becoming.

That's about it.

From which:

Fine argues, on plausible assumptions, it is also necessary that Socrates is a member of {Socrates}. And so, by the modal conception, it follows that Socrates is essentially a member of {Socrates}. This, however, is highly implausible: it is no part of what Socrates is that he should be a member of any set whatsoever.

So, why shouldn't the response to this be simply 'so much the worse for "set theory"?'

I think from the perspective of non-duality the activity (thinking) and the entity (the thinker) are one in the same. — NOS4A2

However we're not a cup when we see a cup, nor a mountain when we see a mountain.

A footnote on Aristotlean-Thomist epistemology.

Now, the process of knowledge is immediately concerned with the separation of form from matter, since a thing is known precisely because its Form is received in the Knower. But, whatever is received is in the recipient according to the mode of being that the recipient possesses.

If, then, the senses are material powers, they receive the forms of objects in a material manner; and if the intellect is an immaterial power, it receives the Forms of objects in an immaterial manner. This means that in the case of sense knowledge, the form is still encompassed with the concrete characters which make it particular; and that, in the case of intellectual knowledge, the form is disengaged from all such characters. To understand is to free form completely from matter.

Moreover, if the proper knowledge of the senses is of accidents, through forms that are individualized, the proper knowledge of intellect is of essences, through forms that are universalized. Intellectual knowledge is analogous to sense knowledge inasmuch as it demands the reception of the form of the thing which is known. But it differs from sense knowledge so far forth as it consists in the apprehension of things, not in their individuality, but in their universality. — Aquinas on Sensible and Intelligible Forms

My interpretation - the senses receive the material form - color, dimensions, texture, and so on - while the intellect "receives" the intelligible species which is the type, which allows us to know what it is. "Knowing what [x] is" is the point.

(this is a footnote, not intended to divert the thread.)

It is said that 'intelligence is the ability to make distinctions'. So it can be assumed that it is a distinction that Republicans will not make.

Zizek believes the modern world is sick, due to the hegemonic dominance of Capitalism. In this thinking he is joined by most of the members of the Frankfurt school. The sickness they see in the world is inseparable from their reliance on the notion of alienated subjectivity. — Joshs

I have encountered the Frankfurt School only later in life. It is pessimistic - I do wonder how many potentially productive lives were derailed by One Dimensional Man - but I still think that elements of their critique are spot on. I'm particularly thinking of the way that 'the establishment' (online and other entertainment media, advertising, social commentary, mass economics) overtly or covertly encourages ways of being that benefit capitalism by the stimulation of desire (New! Sensational! Don't miss out!)

Saying that I also recognise that liberal culture provide far more opportunity for dissent and non-conformity than did any of the forms of Marxist culture that we have seen so far, so I take any form of Leftist critique with the appropriate grain of salt. But I still think they represent a perspective that needs to be heard. (I wonder whatever became of the critics of 'corporatism'?)

Thanks, I'm enjoying the forum again, and trying not to get involved in too many arguments.

I read some months ago that Russia was having to re-purpose chips from domestic appliances such as dishwashers to use in their missiles due to their inability to purchase chips on the open market because of sanctions. In any case, the way they have been bombarding Ukraine is completely unconscionable and must be prevented, thwarted or stopped by any means necessary.

Great! You win access to bonus article.

*

For my money enactivist approaches in cognitive psychology do a better job of this than the alternatives, via a monism that avoids the kind of idealism championed by Wayfarer, Kastrup, Hoffman, Kant and others. — Joshs

Thankyou for my inclusion in such exalted company :up:

:cool:

I was interested in this so I looked on the web. — T Clark

I read about it in Simon Conway-Morris' book, Life's Solution.

I've made the case many times that objective reality and materialism are metaphysics, not physics. They also are very useful. — T Clark

Scientific materialism arises precisely in the attempt to apply scientific method to the problems of philosophy. Science is predominantly a method of acquiring knowledge but is not a worldview per se. In fact part of the implication of scientific scepticism is that it should not be taken as a worldview.

I completely accept that what we see is not necessarily an accurate representation of objective reality. But that's internal to us. — Bradskii

But you can't step outside that. There's not 'the world how it is' and 'how it appears to us' because what we know is a function of how it appears to us.

What changes could there have been to that objective reality that we could propose? — Bradskii

The objective reality you propose is a creation of the mind. Of course the moon and the universe existed in some way before your existence, but the way in which it existed is entirely unintelligible, completely meaningless.

Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer. — Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order

I totally get how outlandish these ideas sound when you first encounter them. The reason it provokes such a strong reaction is because it challenges your innate sense of what is real. But that is what philosophy calls into question (or should, although that is rarely found in what is taught as philosophy in today's academy.)

Notice the similarity between these two Q&A's. The first is from Donald Hoffman, whom we've been discussing, the second comes from Chris Fuchs, who is a quantum theorist and an advocate for a philosophy of physics called Quantum Baynesianism (QBism).

If it’s conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description of the world.

Donald Hoffman: The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.

Compare that to

Treating quantum mechanics as a single-user theory resolves a lot of the paradoxes, like spooky action at a distance.

Yes, but in a way that a lot of people find troubling. The usual story of Bell’s theorem is that it tells us the world must be nonlocal. That there really is spooky action at a distance. So they solved one mystery by adding a pretty damn big mystery! What is this nonlocality? Give me a full theory of it. My fellow QBists and I instead think that what Bell’s theorem really indicates is that the outcomes of measurements are experiences, not revelations of something that’s already there. Of course others think that we gave up on science as a discipline, because we talk about subjective degrees of belief. But we think it solves all of the foundational conundrums.

Note the convergence of the bolded passages: there is not a single, objective reality which different observers see, there is only reality-as-experienced by those observers. (Notice both these articles are from scientists and are published in a popular science magazine, Quanta, rather than a philosophy journal.)

The argument is that a ceramic frog (or a train in the interview quoted) is objectively different — Bradskii

No - the argument is about objectivity, not about particular objective differences. You and I, being members of the same culture, period of history, and evolutionary process will share a consensus on what is objectively true. But that is not the point at issue. Hoffman's argument is that as our sensory apparatus have been shaped by evolution, then what we perceive is not objective in the sense of 'existing completely separately from our senses'. It is not independently real in the way we generally assume. The way we perceive is a function of evolutionary adaptation, not the perceptions of how things truly are apart from that or outside of that.

What is being called into question is the notion of the 'observer-independence' of the objective domain.

If you can't understand when an argument is refuted discussion is pointless.

I think that for Godel, the matter of valid forms of demonstration was paramount. Aristotle certainly was concerned with the matter but also saw first principles as being a proper fit for what was to be inquired into — Paine

Plainly - I'm able to read the encyclopedia description of Godel's proof, but I'm not equipped to understand the math. It just occured to me, however, that there is a kind of resemblance between the two principles.

There's a wooden Buddhah on my desk. Your mental representation of it will be exactly the same as as mine. And it has no impact on any action I am going to to make — Bradskii

On the contrary, it might have huge impact. If you’re Buddhist, then it affects your conduct and your view of life, and if you’re not, then you might suffer for want of those same principles.

The chances of those monkeys typing 'usbn3$*: dki8$ dh' are exactly the same as typing 'My name is Ishmail'. — Bradskii

That's only because you've stipulated the first set of characters, so it's no longer random. Besides, what Robert Lanza said is that these experiments have actually been tried. With actual monkeys, you get no text strings at all, you get broken keyboards with monkey feces on them. If you program a random character generator to output random characters, you can calculate the odds of producing the first three words of Moby Dick by random combinations, and its astronomically remote, involving trillions of years.

There's a similar principle in biology concerning the protein hyperspace. That refers to the possible ways that amino acids can be combined, only a very small number of which will actually produce a protein. The numbers there also are astronomically minute. Likewise the so-called 'fine constants' of the Universe. So when you drill down, all of the apparently random events that give rise to living beings, have precedents that seem somehow deeply embedded in the nature of the Cosmos.

There are physical laws that dictate the number of ways a system can evolve. — Bradskii

But the entire philosophical question is about whether everything is determined by physical laws, or is not. That is the question at issue, so your response begs the question - it assumes the point at issue.

There's an objective universe. It exists and operates whether we are here or not. Rocks will still roll down hills at a constant rate. Galaxies and stars and planets will form. And then there's our perception of it all. — Bradskii

I know this may be difficult to accept, but that is also the point at issue. You're speaking from a position of naive realism (no pejorative intended, it's a textbook description) which assumes the reality of the objective world (or the sensory domain, call it what you will). But precisely that has been called into question in the history of philosophy, and certainly also by more recent cognitive science and the philosophy of physics. It doesn't mean that reality is all in your or in my mind, but that the mind - yours, mine, everyone's - provides a foundational element of what we designate as real, but which we're not aware of, because it is largely unconscious, it mainly comprises automatic (or autonomic) processes. One version of this argument is The Evolutionary Argument against Reality, by Donald Hoffman - particularly apt because it is (purportedly) based on evolutionary theory. It actually ties in with some of what Robert Lanza says (although they're very different theorists.)

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.