re: #134 Obdicut

Obdicut

I think your #117 is more or less true. You are right that evolution doesn’t judge what is good or bad in any other way than applying survival-weight towards the outcomes of these strategies.

However, you say we are the only ones that choose rather than “randomly stumble” upon these cooperative strategies. I think this is a false premise. The cooperation amongst apes or wolves or meerkats is no more random than that which we employ. We are all biological entities, employing strategies that are driven by as well as judged by the environmental context in which they are exhibited.

Our social structure is a phenotype of biological evolution. Now, does that mean that unfair usury practices or adopting orphans are selected for by evolution? No, but the mechanisms that drive these underlying desires are. Just as the desire to pursue fair exchanges and punish cheaters is also evolutionarily-driven. Just as is the preference to care for children that are from our in-group or are kin.

I guess what I’m saying is that there is no Darwinian world to break from. The very act of defying what we perceive to be cruel is also Darwinian. Secondly, we as humans, aren’t the only ones who do this (this thing that isn’t done anyway).

Do you believe consciousness is just a passenger, with no actual ability to alter determinism?

Free will just an illusion?

We’d have to make sure our terms are well-defined before we can get into this but yes, I believe this to be true. Although I am not clear about what it means to “alter determinism”. Consciousness does seem to be an emergent property of a complex brain, not separate and distinct from it. You could call it a passenger. I’d call it a very large committee of loud, boisterous engineers trying to steer a train, adjusting occasional track changes and train speed based on who was loudest or what alliances dominated at the time.

There is a lot of scientific debate (wresting it from the philosophers) on the concepts of the self and of free will. To be sure, contra-causal free will certainly does not exist. Political or social freedom are not incompatible with determinism, nor are they synonymous with free will.