RD's point is the same as Dr Manhattan's ephiphany in Watchmen, that any given individual is extremely unlikely. But then, every week someone does win the lottery.
////////////////there are no unlucky people who didn't get conceived. (Can a sperm be unlucky?)
But such concerns seem pedantic against the inspiring writing. :)
/////////////////......as a eulogy. However, this thought process is quite strange, and implies we might be around to witness the reaction or that it might have some intrinsic value for those who remain. Perhaps it is just a psychological mechanism that somehow keeps us from facing the nothingness we rationally know must be so? Perhaps it is our last gasp effort to pass along a meme of our essence or prior existence?
//////////////////THE LAST LECTURE-RANDY PAUNCH
We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Be good at something, it makes you valuable.
Be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.
PMO
///////////////////DAWKINS-PURPOSE OF PURPOSE
.....I think at a certain point Archeapurpose and neopurpose collapse into one, but it is none the less useful in keeping Darwinian and conscious goals separate. I remember one creationist asking questions about the first cell. Why would it want to reproduce? That would only create competition for resources. The question was so profoundly wrong I had difficulty wording my opposition. I was a Christian at the time, but not the science-hating 6000 year old earth type. I knew that bacteria didn't choose to do anything. They reproduce because under suitable conditions it is impossible for them not to reproduce. At the same time it is impossible for our brains not to process information, hence why I would say that archea/neo-purpose are at their base the same thing.
.........hat the problem of goal tenacity v. innovative thinking may impose a limit to raw intelligence as we see it now. As a system becomes more and more powerful, and thus able to simulate more and more possible futures, the fascination with imaginary worlds may overcome any previous goal.
/////////////////would like to see how stupid we look in say, 500 years time. ok most of us now reliese that animals are not here so that humans have something to eat. but how many of us still eat animal products? selfishness seems more idiotic to me.
..............Why do we like flowers? Do we really like them because insects have been selecting them for millions of years? There are some flowers that have been selected by flies, but that does not mean we enjoy the resulting stink produced by those blooms. I think this is a really interesting question.
Do wild animals work continuously for their reproduction? I would consider dolphins playing in warm waters, and occasionally having sex just for fun, delightfully hedonistic.
What is the purpose humans can have? Is it neopurpose? I am not sure. Isn't there yet another level of purpose - a purpose that we come up with by thinking about what we want to achieve? The purpose present in a human brain is not the purpose present in a guided missile, because the missile has no awareness.
When a bat is described as having both neo- and archeo- purpose, I admit to finding myself confused as to the difference.
When we look at a sheepdog in a hunting posture, I think we should ask Who is doing the subverting of behaviour? Perhaps humans have been subverted by the hunting behaviour of wolves to tame them for the purpose of herding sheep?
There is only one point I would directly disagree with Richard about: is contraception a subversion of Darwinism? No, I think not. The chances of survival of children may well be improved by the parents not having any more. Contraception can directly assist the passing on of genes.
............UPLOC=There appears to be purpose for most things. Our lives are filled with activities that have a clear purpose, we go to work to earn money, we eat to alleviate hunger etc. So it not unreasonable to assume that there is a purpose for our very existence as well. The distinction surely is between the purpose that drives our personal behaviour and a purpose that exists independently of it? I cross a road because I want to visit a shop or talk to a friend but no one would claim that there is a universal concept of crossingness that is applied to all roads.
Like most children who are shown a globe for the first time and told that their country is near the top, I couldn’t understand how the people who lived on the bottom didn’t fall off! It was not until I understood that there was no top or bottom but it was gravity that fooled me into that assumption that I came to terms with it.
So it is with purpose, when you understand that purpose is something that you construct for yourself (or others impose on you) and that life the universe and everything exists happily without purpose, it is easy to accept.
............
Purpose is a hard thing to think about. Much of what we think is purposeful about our actions is a retrospective labelling of what our unconscious has already decided.
Do we really need the language of 'purpose'. I don't know. Sometimes I think that 'purpose', like 'meaning' is nothing more than a feeling we experience when we look at a situation. It is easy to mistake such feelings for things that are real.
................RETROSPECTIVE LABELLING OF PURPOSE
...............Gay' penguins 'adopt' chick: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8096453.stm
Male penguins raise adopted chick: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8081829.stm
...............Language is a funny thing isn't it? When I listened to Richard talk of purpose I heard 'fitness for a use' not 'intent'. Your mention of the word 'meaning' make me wonder.
...........t's in our (genes') interest to prefer environments with flourishing vegetation, as likely sources of plant and animal food. Also, flowers may play upon our pre-existing predilections for the colours and smells of fruit?
,,,,,,,,,,,,When a bat is described as having both neo- and archeo- purpose, I admit to finding myself confused as to the difference.
How about, neo-purpose is a goal sought by an individual organism that it has set for itself? Thus, the wing is 'for' flying, the sonar is 'for' finding insects, but these 'purposes' are Dennettian free-floating rationales, outside the creature's control. Whereas choosing when to fly and choosing which insect to pursue is setting new purposes 'dynamically' - in a brain.
We might then argue that our brains go a step further by permitting us to choose what kind of goals to pursue, whereas the bat is stuck with choosing between this or that insect. But it's getting into philosophical territory...
///////////////Scientists need to speak up for the freedom principle more than they do if they want to defend their enterprise.
...............Prof. Dawkins' newly minted terms "archaeo-purpose" and "neo-purpose," which he introduces in the above video to distinguish between purposeless adaptive complexity in nature and the purposeful kind of complexity found in human invention.
A simpler way of distinguishing between these two kinds of complexity would be to use the term "value" to explain the former, and the term "purpose" to explain the latter. To use the example Prof. Dawkins gives in the video: "The value (rather than archaeo-purpose, as he would have it) of the bird's tail feathers is to stablize the bird in flight." And "the purpose (rather than neo-purpose) of an airliner's tail wings is to stabilize the plane in flight." This is a simpler, not to mention a more precise, way of distinguishing between the complexity found in nature that results from random mutation and natural selection, and the artful complexity found in human invention. After all, the goal here is really to communicate that there is no purpose in nature, therefore it's best to keep this term completely out of the vocabulary for teaching evolution rather than to modify it with prefixes like "archaeo" (or even "pseudo," which makes more sense than "archaeo") and continue to use it.
.................a bit of tribalism in his constant attacks on the VS and most political thought to the Right of socialism? It seems to be proof that none of us can escape our tribal instincts. He is part of an "in group" and dearly loves to show contempt for the "out group".
............... The purpose of Reason
The book itself is not the writer but it is writtem
The computer itself is not the designer but it is designed
The table itself is not the maker but it is made
The baby with all different body parts each of which require different chemistry and structure, eyes, feet, brain, kidney, and and have diffrent duties cannot bbe maker but it is made. Just think about numberless of kidney's duties!
The world itself is not the maker but it is made
The universe is not maker but it is made.
The purpose of Dawkins is to prove that evolution has one purpose only to entartin the Reason.
...............
///////////////////ANIMAL RIGHTS AND OPPOSITION TO SPECIEISM
//////////////////t's nothing to do with the act of actually EATING the organism, it's how they are treated in our care and should be judged on the capacity for pain.
Dawkins points out repeatedly that there is a continuum in the biological world of neurological complexity.
And you clearly haven't studied biology because fungi and plants don't even posess nervous systems; this can only be a discussion about the morality of farming ANIMALS.
..............IT MATTERS TO THAT STARFISH
..............AVOID AT RISK SITUATN
...............So buying a chunk of meat in the butcher's is colluding with the mass slaughter of other sentient beings and therefore morally much worse than assenting to the destruction of a human fetus
/////////////////////POWER CORRUPTS-30 YR HX REPEATS ITSELF -JRAN
//////////////////FARm animals are never given anesthetics when they are mutulated (castration, dehorning, branding, mulesing, debeaking, etc...). The most likely reason is that there is no financial insensitive to the CAFO. On the contrary, these humane efforts would put a CAFO at a competitive disadvantage to it's competition if it (for some reason) decided to buy anesthetics for it's animals.
..............
Artificial meat should solve most of the problems, so let's hope it comes soon.
.................he criterion for KILLING (if done sans horrible prior pain, e.g. by a bullet to the head) should be capaicty to 'plan for the future'.
Should be? Says who?
A bird making a nest can plan for the future better than an infant. I wonder if the bird considers its future as important as an elephant does its own, despite it seeming that the elephant's future-planning ability is more sophisticated. Should that matter?
Anyway I find it a rather arbitrary metric to determine "level of suffering," which is objectively hard to pin down.
................inger's point is necessarily an accurate one. He says that having an abortion is typically something a mother will think long and hard about and have very good reasons for but that buying meat in a store is not something that people pause for a second to think about.
His point, to my mind, is that meat eaters have a moral responsibility to consider their actions carefully. He doesn't make s statement about which is morally worse; just that both should be given due consideration.
................Anyway I find it a rather arbitrary metric to determine "level of suffering," which is objectively hard to pin down."
True; but are you saying that therefore, because it's hard to pin down how much suffering something undergoes that you just ignore it completely and eat all meat anyway?! (if not, apologies).
.............///////////FTHR-BRDRLINE DELUSN OF PERSECUTION
..RECIPROCAL COURTSEY OR INDIFFERENCE
...DRY AND WET SHIT DIFFERENCE
////////////////MINIMISE NON-VEG HABITS THEN GIVE UP
///////////////////CANT GO ON EATING SUFFERING SENTIENT BEINGS
///////////////////......go overboard to try to trivialize the suffering of animals it's usually them just playing devil's advocate out of insecurity or just advertising their lack of compassion and I try to ignore them.
..............here does the physiological reality of predator/prey relations come into this discussion? Not to be facetious, but surely, no one would call a Lion immoral for eating a Gazelle, because that is how Lions survive. I agree that humans can survive without meat (and perhaps this alone provides the moral impetus to do so), but I still think the fact that we are biologic omnivores needs to factor in here somewhere. If a carnivore is justified in his infliction of suffering, at what point is an omnivore? Or if Lion's developed the intelligence necessary to adapt their biology to a vegetarian diet, would we say they are morally bound to do so?
BUT CONSCIOUSLY OVERRIDE NON VEG URGES IS WHERE WE CAN START
.................Although there might be some environmental advantages to humans becoming vegetarians, I'm still a happy omnivore. I think for the near future, it's enough to try to limit the amount of animal suffering while there being raised for food. Slowly moving towards a diet with less animal flesh seems to me to also be a good general concept. If humans ever become all or mostly vegetarians, that's something that will take hundreds of years in not thousands. And if religion doesn't diminish enough before then, we might become extinct by then anyhow!
...............I do not ignore suffering entirely, and I don't want to. But I don't have a problem with eating meat, so I don't place animal suffering as high on my list of important values as others do.
I wonder how many shark attack survivors are vegetarian, btw. Would be curious to see if the proportion was higher or lower than that of the general beach-going population.
................Now cry me a river of bitter little tears.
Y'know, do something productive for a change.
................HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN
"One may regret living at a period when it's impossible to form an idea of the shape the world of the future will assume. But there's one thing I can predict to eaters of meat: the world of the future will be vegetarian."
- Adolf Hitler. November 11, 1941. Section 66, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
"If I offer a child the choice between a pear and a piece of meat, he'll quickly choose the pear. That's his atavistic instinct speaking."
- Adolf Hitler. December 28, 1941. Section 81, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
"The only thing of which I shall be incapable is to share the sheiks' mutton with them. I'm a vegetarian, and they must spare me from their meat."
- Adolf Hitler. January 12, 1942. Section 105, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
"At the time when I ate meat, I used to sweat a lot. I used to drink four pots of beer and six bottles of water during a meeting. … When I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water was enough."
- Adolf Hitler. January 22, 1942. Section 117, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
"When you offer a child the choice of a piece of meat, an apple, or a cake, it's never the meat that he chooses. There's an ancestral instinct there."
- Adolf Hitler. January 22, 1942. Section 117, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
"One has only to keep one's eyes open to notice what an extraordinary antipathy young children have to meat."
- Adolf Hitler. April 25, 1942. Section 198, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
"When I later gave up eating meat, I immediately began to perspire much less, and within a fortnight to perspire hardly at all. My thirst, too, decreased considerably, and an occasional sip of water was all I required. Vegetarian diet, therefore, has some obvious advantages."
- Adolf Hitler. July 8, 1942. Section 256, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
"I am no admirer of the poacher, particularly as I am a vegetarian."
- Adolf Hitler. August 20, 1942. Section 293, HITLER'S TABLE TALK
//////////////////HTLRS MUM REFUSED MTP-HTLR WAS VEGETRN
ENIGMAS OF HX
/////////////////
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