Thomas_More
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LEVEL of consciousness. Plus, you have already said you think we are HIGHER than other animals, not just in some ways different. You must also believe, since most of my messages are quotes, that Gould talks nonsense, since there is nothing i have said about animals that he would have disagreed with.
You indicate too that you have a dilemma regarding your determinism since you cannot reconcile it with moral agency. I have no such dilemma.
So i, likewise, say sayōnara* to you.
*Sayōnara is what the Japanese say when they no longer wish to have further dealings with someone.
Stephen Jay Gould:
“We have generally tried to unite our intellectual duty to accept the established fact of evolutionary continuity with our continuing psychological need to see ourselves as separate and superior, by invoking one of our worst and oldest mental habits: dichotomization, or division into two opposite categories, usually with attributions of value expressed as good and bad or higher and lower.
” we considered distinctive mental attributes — the existence of a moral sense, or the ability to form abstractions. All have failed as absolutes of human uniqueness.
“The development of ”culture” — defined as distinct and complex behavior originating in local populations and clearly passed by learning, rather than genetic predisposition — has persisted as a favored candidate for a ”golden barrier” to separate humans from animals, but must now be rejected as well.
” the basic formulation of them vs. us, and the resulting search for a ”golden barrier,” represents a deep fallacy of human thought. “
All animals are conscious. Their consciousness suits their needs. A lioness, co-operating with her sisters on the hunt, knows enough of the laws of nature to channel the flight of a gazelle into their trap.
Elephants and other animals grieve and also play. They are all conscious and all intelligent. They all have language. But you will only apply the term to the word formation-based language of humans. Your knowledge and awareness suits your function as an ape, their knowledge and awareness suits their needs.No doubt you deny them free will. I agree with you. You don’t have it either.
I live with two cats. I am aware that i am of a different species to them. I’m not SUPERIOR or HIGHER, just different. I do what I do, they do what they do.
So you see evolution, nature, as a ladder, an hierarchy. That is your arrogance.
So your imperfect sense of the laws of nature (since you want your will to be free of those laws) means you know about Saturn and Jupiter and Das Kapital, but your power of smell will never approach that of a dog, nor your agility that of a monkey. An elephant and a lion do not NEED to know the workings of a computer or car engine.
Your insistence on SUPERIOR and INFERIOR, on HIGH and LOW, says more about you and the society you are from than about the diversity and splendour of nature. Your need to be centre-stage says a lot about your fear and insecurity faced with the cosmos and with your minuscule place in it.If they think they can transport proles to Mars to produce surplus value there, after wrecking their own planet, why not? The beginnings of an expansion of capitalism beyond Earth.
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-11-28-vw-322-story.html
” Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all.”
Albert Einstein.So now we’re saying the US does want war with China?
How long would both sides then tolerate the heavy losses involved without going nuclear?
See what i mean?And THE WESTERN SOCIALIST in 1972 understood the definition of free will in the same, classical, way as I do.
Again:
” the most vital argument that the Socialist advances against free will is that its acceptance precludes the possibility of a science of sociology. The Socialist expounds the principle of laws acting behind social causation. If man, individually and en masse, is a creature of caprice, if he thinks and acts independently of his heredity and social milieu, then the search for laws supposed to govern human history, economics and social relations is forever doomed to futility. The acceptance of free will is a flat denial of social science.”
THE WESTERN SOCIALIST.
To say that free will has been proven since the debates of the 18th century, you would have to prove that it is now known that we are responsible for our wishes, our thoughts and our feelings, and that we will to will, want to want, and wish to wish, and that our feelings are freely chosen, and spring from nothing but themselves.
Rather like telling a child whose parents have just been killed and the family home destroyed, “Why are you crying? Be happy!”
If i hold to the classical meaning of the term free will, the meaning that the classic materialists (and even some deists) attacked, it is because i believe language is important and the past something to learn from.
As Orwell said, “Loose thinking leads to the loose use of words, but the loose use of words also leads to loose thinking.”
Whatever we may think of the personalities and milieux of the classical 18th century materialists, whatever they might be behind in today, they were the foundation stones of modern materialism.
If we attach any meaning we like to historical terms like “free will”, where is our connection to our materialist heritage? Why insist on definitions at all, for anything?
And people who want to learn from the past, they will be flummoxed when reading Voltaire et al. and coming across “free will”, or “necessity”, and other terms. Treat language capriciously and you get a lexical free-for-all of loose words and loose 🤔 thinking.
No, it would be a life of free will, and it would be awful, with no morality and no motives for any thought or action.
And since one would only have the thoughts and feelings one wants to have, there would be no political activity. Firstly, it would be pointless, since no one’s will would be subject to any persuasion, and secondly, one wouldn’t be fazed by any evil or injustice whatsoever. Feeling only as you want to feel, you wouldn’t experience any love, hatred, sorrow, grief, anger, or indignation.
There would be no relationship with anything at all.
