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An understanding of evolution
by natural selection, does it matter?
Or to put it another way, “Who cares?”
Or, “So what?”
And, “What difference does it make?”
I may not understand general relativity; that doesn’t stop me from using the GPS on my cell phone. So what’s the big deal if I or my children or my elected officials don’t “get” evolution?
The subject line question, “Why is this important?” may seem a bit broad, but your answer to that question will help us focus on the most important part of any production: our audience.
We look forward to hearing from you and will keep you posted as to our progress.
And, please, feel free to forward this to others you think might like to contribute.
Sincerely,
Roger
Wanna help Roger with his production? I am,
and will forward any AWAD thoughts to Roger.
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That's a good question. And it deserves a good answer.
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One reason for having at least a general understanding of evolution is so that you don't waste the time of students who really do care and want to learn about evolution so they don't have the so-called controversy filling up their school time. If I were a early school science teacher and were required to spend some time discussing creationism or intelligent design I would get it out of the way early in a session on the nature of science and why those two ways of thinking are not science.
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Thank you, Faldage, your pragmatic answer will be welcomed.
Roger and his team will be in Oregon Friday to present his interviewing work to the funding committee so any other thoughts offered here can be forwarded to Roger by noon tomorrow.
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Why is understanding evolution important? Because...
We ARE Evolution. And so is everything else. We know this vicariously through every thought and observation we've made since birth. We are wired to experience an ever-progressive cause-and-effect reality with any other reality being beyond our ken.
BANG! Cosmic stuff becomes atoms and atoms become molecular and elements become rocks and rocks become life. And life, mindless as the rocks that preceeded them, evolved and is evolving.
[part I of 2]
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Part II
"To thine own self be true, and it must follow,
as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
___________________________________ William Shakespeare
And therein lies the problem. Both evolutionists and creationists fail to understand the functions of Free Will and Determinism. And they don't because of the invention and evolution of language.
Mindless mechanical evolution continues the clade rather than the individual. Culture (especially language) serves that end.
Words and thoughts compete against other word and thought systems at the expence of the individual for the continuance of the clade. Morals, customs, belief systems, etc. are created with more vigor when concocted by a free-thinking many rather than by an autocratic few.
So here lies the paradox: Words and thoughts are physical objects (think about it) that lie and claim "Free Will".
Ergo: The Universe Is Deterministic and we have Free Will.
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Free will and determinism are artifacts of language.
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What's the evolution of the troll?
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Free will and determinism are artifacts of language. Of course. And Evolution determines the functions of language.
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What I'm saying is that free will and determinism are just words and phrases that have no referents in Reality.
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What I'm saying is that free will and determinism are just words and phrases that have no referents in Reality. Exactly. But the concepts of free will and self-determination built the computer you are staring into today. A baseball bat has a referent in a physical baseball bat. The abstraction "free will" has a much greater referent in Reality. Ask Germany: ask Japan.
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Words and thoughts are physical objects
Even when you show me the word "stone" carved in stone it will not convince me that a word is a physical object. Nothing proves the true nature of the stone. They can describe it down to atoms and smaller particles still but nothing explains what it really is.
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But the concepts of free will and self-determination built the computer you are staring into today. They may have had some influence on the minds of the people who were responsible for the computer I am staring into today, but that doesn't make them any more Real things independent of our conceiving of them.
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Words and thoughts are physical objects
Even when you show me the word "stone" carved in stone it will not convince me that a word is a physical object. Nothing proves the true nature of the stone. They can describe it down to atoms and smaller particles still but nothing explains what it really is.
Then is a stone a physical object? What are the parameters of being a stone? Is a grain of sand a stone? Is the Earth a stone? A stone is a word that means whatever we say it means. What say we agree that every "word" is as physical as a stone.
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But the concepts of free will and self-determination built the computer you are staring into today. They may have had some influence on the minds of the people who were responsible for the computer I am staring into today, but that doesn't make them any more Real things independent of our conceiving of them. Does not lightning flash and thunder clash? Are they not Real things? Does not the spoken word vibrate the atmosphere when we talk? Do not physical patterns recur in our brain with any certain word we re-think? Are these not Real things?
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Thunder is Donner is tonnerre is гром is any other number of things in any other language. Yes, a word is a vibration in the atmosphere, but that vibration has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we apply to it. Gift pronounced by an English speaker is close to the same vibrational pattern as Gift spoken by a German speaker but the thing refered to is not at all the same in the two languages. I could say barksnoogle but that doesn't mean that there is anything out there in Reality that it refers to unless we, as a reasonably large group use it to refer to something out in Reality. Similarly, we can use a word that we all agree on the meaning of and it still doesn't have to have an actual referent in Reality. We can speak of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all agree what it means, but that doesn't mean that there actually is a Flying Spaghetti Monster out there in Reality.
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"... Yes, a word is a vibration in the atmosphere, but that vibration has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we apply to it..." Well...name a word that has.
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That's my point. The thing is that some words have a referent in Reality or at least reality as we perceive it, and some don't. I am merely averring that free will and determinism are in the latter category. Here's an interesting experiment that was performed that suggests that rather than having free will, we have free won't. What I am saying is that I believe that the concept of free will is just something we have invented to help us make sense of a Reality only dimly perceived.
Last edited by Faldage; 08/14/2013 10:20 AM.
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What say we agree that every "word" is as physical as a stone.
Words are intangible. Sound is as physical as a word gets. IMHO.
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And there's no correlation between the sound and the thing being referred to.
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And there's no correlation between the sound and the thing being referred to. onomatopoeia?
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Even that is subject to the phonemics of a given language. Here is a compendium of dog barks in different languages.
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So as this board now turns, we agree that "words" have no intrinsic relationship to the object or the non-objects they represent, therefore "words" have no meaning; words only have a function, namely -- the transfer of thoughts between human beings and other human beings and to dogs and monkeys and maybe, but not likely, to cats. Right?
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Even that is subject to the phonemics of a given language. Here is a compendium of dog barks in different languages. Great! Very amusing this dog-bark list. Thank you Faldage! Interesting detail: only English and Dutch have the sound of very small dogs included (yip-yip and kef-kef). Basque language is uniquely having a sound of old dogs included (jau-jau). Great list! Everything has the meaning one is willing or capable of to give to it, I think.
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I think that we can all agree that when we use a word, it means just what we choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
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And there's whole lists of words we pay extra.
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I think that we can all agree that when we use a word, it means just what we choose it to mean — neither more nor less. Yes, tsuwm, but usually when we choose a word we choose to have it understood by whomever it is we are to speak, otherwise, why speak? The salient question is: Where and how is a word physically stored in the brain where it waits unobtrusively for our request for retrieval?
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> usually when we choose a word we choose to have it understood by whomever it is we are to speak, otherwise, why speak?
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who speak only to hear themselves.
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> usually when we choose a word we choose to have it understood by whomever it is we are to speak, otherwise, why speak?
Oh, I think there are a lot of people who speak only to hear themselves. Really? Or does the Buffalo speak only for himself?  Still wondering... where do you, Shrdlu, keep the words you use when you are not using them? And in what form?
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Thanks, Buffalo.
Now tsuwm, Faldage, BranShea, and anyone else who would like to add something to this discussion, I ask:
If the words you see here can be physically stored in your computer, are not the words you use when speaking physically stored in your brain?
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We don't understand this sort of thing very well, but there would appear to be some sort of storage in the brain. To say that this means there is some concrete thing which we can, if only metaphorically, point to and say "this is the word" is stretching the meaning of things a little too much for me to buy into it.
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Yeah, what Faldage says.
I don't think of words as being physically stored in my computer or my brain. What are the dimensions of a word, what's its mass? Does my computer/brain get heavier with each new word I store? Is "it" smaller, lighter than "Rumpelstiltskin"? How tiny must the tweezers be to pluck it out? What's its chemical composition, its reactivity? Solid, liquid, or gas? What color? Nope, I can't buy it, either.
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Hallelujah! A happy turn of events.
Tromboniator and Faldage admit that our brains store information. Their only stipulation is that the information stored must be made of... nothing.
How strange, but since Trombo and Faldo are (for-the-most-part) open-minded the paragraph below should transfigure their "inert nothing" into a more logical "dynamic something".
posting interrupted will add by edit in a minute.
[This post to be continued below Faldage's elaboration below.]
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I didn't say that that the information stored must be made of... nothing. I said we don't understand how it is stored.* Besides, any storage of words is no more intrinsically linked to the Reality, insofar as there is a Reality behind the words, of what those words mean than is the vibrations in the air that we perceive when we hear those words.
*Or at least that is what I intended to say. If I didn't do a very good job of it the fault is all mine.
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Faldage.
There is no fault in thinking. And, other than high crimes, there is no fault in living except being rude which you are not.
My construction of the nature of things stems from a fifty year observation of this world without my cock in the fight.
Let me summerize:
I think that our sensory system automatically imputs (filters) selective data from the external world into the data storage system required by the brain.
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Yup. Hence my differentiation between Reality and reality.
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jenny jenny, jenny jenny, jenny jenny, neither of us stipulated anything (or both of us stipulated nothing) about information storage being of "nothing," and certainly not of "inert nothing." Electrochemical, most likely, I suppose, but not physical like putting old lamps into a storage unit down the street, and the one Aunt Lucy broke is the third on the left. I don't "admit" that the brain stores information, I wholeheartedly embrace the concept, but I have trouble with the idea that each word is some discrete brick or package, which is the image I get when you talk about physical storage. Words have meanings and spellings (right or wrong) attached to them when we retrieve them, emotional baggage, memories, associations inextricably connected to other words, experiences, images. It may be that "wherewithal," "girn," and "rapid" all have very specific coordinates in my brain, but I doubt that it's that simple.
I rather think that's a long version of what Faldage was saying a post or two back, but he is of course welcome to contradict me. Not my place (nor is there need) to put words into his mouth.
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