Humans are conceptual

[Athena]

Animals live by instinct and feeling. True they can learn some technlogies, such as sticking a twing in a hole to get termits, or birds learn to sing from their parents. Humans go beyond this. They can learn of a God they never directly experience. They can learn of concepts such as Stoicism, Catholism, Islam, Democracy, Socialism, Capitolism, Individualism, or the sin of individualism and the wrong of ego.

Not only can humans learn these concepts, but that often have strong feelings about them. Especially religious ideas, or political ideologies, learned when we are young, are tied to feelings of right and wrong. I am saying really tied to our feelings of right and wrong, so we are very emotional when it comes to religion and ideologies. What we believe feels so right, it is hard to believe why everyone doesn't accept the truth of what know (feel) is right.

Each generation is a cohort. That means those who come of age at the same time will be impressed for life, by the historical events and music of thier generation. So we have the depression generation, the war generation, the baby boomers, and the lost generation resulting from a change in public education, and the me generation- which was the solution to being lost for lack of learned shared values.

As we learn it, and think/feel it, so we manifest it. Unlike all other animals, we can run our lives with reason. Learning more about being human and what it means to be human, increases our ability to live by reason. Unfortunately, education for technology is not good education for being human.

[*****]

The scientific method was a result of the Enlightenment that began in Europe in the late 17th Century. It is important to note the ultimate aim of the Enlightenment was freedom, in particular the liberation of people from the influence of religion. It was widely known that the Church had hindered progress in all fields of life socially, economically and scientifically via the intolerance to inquiry it had imposed upon the continent.

The intellectual elite of Europe saw this as backward superstition, obsolete tradition and narrow-minded bigotry and hoped their own project would smash the domination of the Church and lead to ‘modernity’. The European scientists and philosophers felt reason was the most central human faculty so they argued to be allowed to exercise it by questioning everything through scientific endeavour. They sought to challenge ideas that were held in a dogmatic manner i.e. where questioning was not allowed. This led them to clash directly with Church leaders and the political establishment who both
maintained that some things were totally certain, sacred and should not be questioned.

On the surface, the determination to question to arrive at conclusions and also to use reason instead of emotion cannot be faulted. However the ‘modernist’ trend went further. Anything that claimed to be certain (i.e. claimed to be Divine) had to be confronted and opposed via reason, questioning and scientific enquiry. The commitment to use reason in all cases was hostile to any idea on life that did not originate from the human mind. This included religious guidance. Enlightenment philosophers refused to give anything an amnesty from debate and called for people to be brave enough to do without ‘belief’. Immanuel Kant eloquently summed up the Enlightenment mission as the:

“…emergence of man from his self-imposed infancy. Infancy is the inability to use one’s reason without the guidance of another. It is self-imposed, when it depends on a deficiency, not of reason but of the resolve and courage to use it without external guidance. Thus the watchword of the enlightenment is Sapere aude! Have the courage to use’s own reason!”
(Kant, ‘Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Only’ quoted in Honderich,
1995, p236)

Sapere aude means ‘dare to know’ but Enlightenment philosophers felt being certain was never a possibility. They equated certainty with dogma and felt compelled to fight it. After they won their intellectual clash in Europe they set about introducing secularism at a state level. Secularism is not the absolute denial of religion. It is generally not that antagonistic to religion as long as religious guidance is prevented from taking part in decisions and denied a role in public life.

When this step was taken, the secular liberal democratic nation-state, a new model for organising society, was born.

17th Century empiricists such as Locke, as well as his 18th Century successors Berkeley and Hume, felt knowledge was not innate but was instead based on the senses alone. The 19th Century positivist movement of Comte developed from these ideas and felt thought would evolve from religious thinking (the lowest, most immature level) up to the highest
‘positive’ level (science). Once it had evolved it would be used in every issue.
Science was seen as the height of knowledge since it never left itself open to dogma. Science challenged everything and never lapsed into certainty and absolute truths. We also find logical positivism and analytic philosophy lead by the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein of the 20th Century. British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell summed up the position when he wrote:

“To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by
hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it”
(Russell. B. ‘A History of Western Philosophy’)

From this brief timeline we witness the development of an agenda deep within the modernist project that has filtered through somewhat to today’s scientific and philosophical establishments; there is a hatred for absolute certainty.

It is correct to dismiss unquestioning dogma since it is irrational, unstable and no different to emotional faith. Questioning is clearly imperative if one is to answer the greatest questions satisfactorily but the secular fear of certainty does not seem particularly rational either. Scientific thought therefore does not prize certainty but instead asks an unending, ever-increasing set of questions.

[rez]

Quote by: Athena Animals live by instinct and feeling. True they can learn some technlogies, such as sticking a twing in a hole to get termits, or birds learn to sing from their parents. Humans go beyond this. They can learn of a God they never directly experience. They can learn of concepts such as Stoicism, Catholism, Islam, Democracy, Socialism, Capitolism, Individualism, or the sin of individualism and the wrong of ego. Not only can humans learn these concepts, but that often have strong feelings about them. Especially religious ideas, or political ideologies, learned when we are young, are tied to feelings of right and wrong. I am saying really tied to our feelings of right and wrong, so we are very emotional when it comes to religion and ideologies. What we believe feels so right, it is hard to believe why everyone doesn't accept the truth of what know (feel) is right. Each generation is a cohort. That means those who come of age at the same time will be impressed for life, by the historical events and music of thier generation. So we have the depression generation, the war generation, the baby boomers, and the lost generation resulting from a change in public education, and the me generation- which was the solution to being lost for lack of learned shared values. As we learn it, and think/feel it, so we manifest it. Unlike all other animals, we can run our lives with reason. Learning more about being human and what it means to be human, increases our ability to live by reason. Unfortunately, education for technology is not good education for being human.

The Limbic Brain

Quote by: Athena Unlike all other animals, we can run our lives with reason.

Balderrot and spiddle! Humans are only emotional. Reason, what little there is, merely panders to emotion. Even scientists study those subjects that move them emotional. We are not a reasoning animal that feels. We're a feeling animal that thinks. We're not even a particularly intelligent animal. If we were advertising wouldn't work.

Regards
S

[Scribbler1]

Quote by: sdbest We're not even a particularly intelligent animal. If we were advertising wouldn't work.

Damn, that's good!

I agree completely with that sentiment.

[Athena]

Quote by: sdbest Balderrot and spiddle! Humans are only emotional. Reason, what little there is, merely panders to emotion. Even scientists study those subjects that move them emotional. We are not a reasoning animal that feels. We're a feeling animal that thinks. We're not even a particularly intelligent animal. If we were advertising wouldn't work. Regards S

Well, I think we have come a long ways from homosapiens who once roamed the land as hunters and gathers, and ate what they could without even cooking it, as other pedators eat what they can.

[Athena]

*****

I think your post was much more appropriate for this thread than others. However, I would give far more credit to the earliest civilizations. By 1776 everyone who was educated had a classical education, based on Greek and Roman classics. The Greeks didn't exactly have religion, and they sure didn't think a God spoke to them giving them laws. They were secular and Athens was the first democracy. Their patron Goddess Athena, taught men to make their own laws, rather any of the Gods giving them laws. Espicially the Greeks had inquiring minds, but we owe much to India and later Arabs as well.

Cultures rule us even more than our emotions, and each culture is different, with its own concept of reality, customs, values, taboos. We are in deed conceptual creatures.

Quote by: Athena Well, I think we have come a long ways from homosapiens who once roamed the land as hunters and gathers, and ate what they could without even cooking it, as other pedators eat what they can.

Not at all. We're good at pushing the technological buttons that have been acquired over millennia, but few us--probably none of us--have a clue about how to go about reproducing the stuff you think has taken us "a long ways from the homosapiens (sic) who roamed the land."

Here's a thought. All the elements, compounds, metals, and chemical you would need to build an iPod can be found any any farmer's field. Yet, there's not one person on this planet who could walk into a farmer's field and build an iPod from scratch. Just like early Homo sapiens used stone tools, we use cell phones. The difference? Early humans not only understood their technologies, each of them could recreate it. We live in a technological mystery and are no smarter than our earliest ancestors. In fact, we're probably, as individuals, a whole lot dumber.

Regards
S.

[CoffeeSaint]

Quote by: sdbest Not at all. We're good at pushing the technological buttons that have been acquired over millennia, but few us--probably none of us--have a clue about how to go about reproducing the stuff you think has taken us "a long ways from the homosapiens (sic) who roamed the land." Here's a thought. All the elements, compounds, metals, and chemical you would need to build an iPod can be found any any farmer's field. Yet, there's not one person on this planet who could walk into a farmer's field and build an iPod from scratch. Just like early Homo sapiens used stone tools, we use cell phones. The difference? Early humans not only understood their technologies, each of them could recreate it. We live in a technological mystery and are no smarter than our earliest ancestors. In fact, we're probably, as individuals, a whole lot dumber. Regards S.

Not that I disagree -- I certainly won't be building an iPod from scratch -- but if we are so dumb, where did the iPod come from? If it comes from collective intelligence, that intelligence must be based at least in part on individual intelligence, which would argue that we are more intelligent than our ancestors. I don't see that an individual's inability to recreate millennia of accomplishment by the group implies that the individual could not represent a link in the chain, and each of those links could arguably be smarter than the stone agers.

There's no such thing as "collective intelligence." How to build an iPod. Steve Jobs gather together a few thousand extreme specialists who are woefully limited by their education about what they know. Specialist A knows about PVC plastics but couldn't program a VCR or build a sandbox, B knows where's she can outsource small hard drives, but couldn't build or even sharpen a knife, and so on. The parts are then assembled, partially debugged and then marketed to a gullible public. There's not one person at Apple, including Steve Jobs, who could build an iPod on his or her own even if they had the parts.

Consider this, if all the libraries and data bases of human knowledge were erased tomorrow, mankind couldn't put its Humpty Dumpty back together again. Within a few years, we in the developed world would be begging the rural peasants of the world to take us in an give us food and shelter.

As I say, 21st century, developed world Homo sapiens look smart, but beneath that veneer of Gap and Land's End we're just dumb consumers who couldn't make a stone tool or a fire--let alone a steam engine--even if our lives depended on it.

Regards
S.

[Athena]

Quote by: sdbest Balderrot and spiddle! Humans are only emotional. Reason, what little there is, merely panders to emotion. Even scientists study those subjects that move them emotional. We are not a reasoning animal that feels. We're a feeling animal that thinks. We're not even a particularly intelligent animal. If we were advertising wouldn't work. Regards S

I gave your reply some thought and I am ready to respond to it.

You are sitting in a room all by yourself. How do you feel?

Someone knocks on your door. How do you feel?

A girl you know is walking down the street holding onto some guy's arm. How do you feel?

Your mother is coming over. How do you feel?

You had a TB skin test and the sight of the injection is red. How do you feel?

You just lost a tooth. How do you feel?



I think all these questions demonstrate first there is thought, and secondly a feeling.

[Athena]

Quote by: sdbest There's no such thing as "collective intelligence." How to build an iPod. Steve Jobs gather together a few thousand extreme specialists who are woefully limited by their education about what they know. Specialist A knows about PVC plastics but couldn't program a VCR or build a sandbox, B knows where's she can outsource small hard drives, but couldn't build or even sharpen a knife, and so on. The parts are then assembled, partially debugged and then marketed to a gullible public. There's not one person at Apple, including Steve Jobs, who could build an iPod on his or her own even if they had the parts. Consider this, if all the libraries and data bases of human knowledge were erased tomorrow, mankind couldn't put its Humpty Dumpty back together again. Within a few years, we in the developed world would be begging the rural peasants of the world to take us in an give us food and shelter. As I say, 21st century, developed world Homo sapiens look smart, but beneath that veneer of Gap and Land's End we're just dumb consumers who couldn't make a stone tool or a fire--let alone a steam engine--even if our lives depended on it. Regards S.

You might try to understand what a complex concept is.

You can not possibly think as an early Celt thought. You can not think as early explores of the US thought. You are accustom to running water and electricity, and other convinences that have evolve over time. You are living on the collective intelligence of thousands of years, but take it all for granted.

And for your arguement about how an Ipod is built, that is clearly an arguement for collective intelligence, since as you say, no one person knows it all, but collectively they can accomplish what none could accomplish alone.
Collectively bees tend to the queen, feed the next generation, repair the hive and defend it, and a swarm of them can kill humans. Collectively, the many are much more capable than one.

[Athena]

Quote by: CoffeeSaint Not that I disagree -- I certainly won't be building an iPod from scratch -- but if we are so dumb, where did the iPod come from? If it comes from collective intelligence, that intelligence must be based at least in part on individual intelligence, which would argue that we are more intelligent than our ancestors. I don't see that an individual's inability to recreate millennia of accomplishment by the group implies that the individual could not represent a link in the chain, and each of those links could arguably be smarter than the stone agers.

There would be no music for the Ipod, if long, long ago people had not started making something like music, and then over many years added to the knowledge of music and instructments. There would be no Ipod without the discovery and evolution of electronically transmitting sound. Before there could be a plastic Ipod, someone had to realize oil was useful and could be turned into something called plastic. In the past it would take a good hundred years for an invention to become popularly used. Today, something new can be made popular over night through news releases and advertizing, which have evolved over many years, before being what the media is today.

There is a huge mountain of information that comes before today's Ipod.

Quote by: Athena ... You just lost a tooth. How do you feel? I think all these questions demonstrate first there is thought, and secondly a feeling.

Actually what you're describing is stimulus and response, and in each case an emotional response with little thought at all. The process, in most cases, goes like this stimulus->emotional response->intellectual rationalization.

Regards
S.

[CoffeeSaint]

Quote by: sdbest There's no such thing as "collective intelligence." How to build an iPod. Steve Jobs gather together a few thousand extreme specialists who are woefully limited by their education about what they know. Specialist A knows about PVC plastics but couldn't program a VCR or build a sandbox, B knows where's she can outsource small hard drives, but couldn't build or even sharpen a knife, and so on. The parts are then assembled, partially debugged and then marketed to a gullible public. There's not one person at Apple, including Steve Jobs, who could build an iPod on his or her own even if they had the parts. Consider this, if all the libraries and data bases of human knowledge were erased tomorrow, mankind couldn't put its Humpty Dumpty back together again. Within a few years, we in the developed world would be begging the rural peasants of the world to take us in an give us food and shelter. As I say, 21st century, developed world Homo sapiens look smart, but beneath that veneer of Gap and Land's End we're just dumb consumers who couldn't make a stone tool or a fire--let alone a steam engine--even if our lives depended on it. Regards S.

Each of those people at Apple -- the PVC specialist, the outsourcer, Steverino -- are individually more capable than a stone age hunter/gatherer. Whether or not we are more intelligent, I'm not sure, but our individual capabilities are greater, in my opinion. I think you are ignoring all of the study and training -- and thought -- that goes into the ability to serve as one small cog in a machine that makes our modern technologies, and I doubt that a Neanderthal could handle even a basic high school education. Since they didn't have anything even remotely resembling a basic high school education -- without getting into the flaws in said education today -- I would say we have improved.

In terms of the destruction of all of our data sources, the influence it could have on us depends on the extent of that destruction. If the information was simply wiped out, a great part of it could be regenerated, at least in terms of math and science (literature and art and music, if we are counting those as information, could not be recovered as easily, of course). If the information was destroyed and our knowledge of it wiped out as well, we still would not fall all the way back to the stone age as long as we had some memory of what we used to have: the knowledge that it is possible to have steam engines and some concept of what a steam engine is makes it fairly easy to construct -- even if you include such processes as mining and smelting ore, and forging metal. If we know that they once existed, I think we could regain them.

This seems fairly obvious to me: we have the stuff, it didn't fall from the sky like manna from Heaven, therefore we have more ability to make stuff than did people who never made the stuff. What's wrong with that (horribly composed) syllogism? I may not know anything about iPods, but I know how to read and write -- and that is the foundation of gathering and increasing knowledge, as after a catastrophe. And I could make paper and ink, too, so even if I were thrown into the Stone Age I'd be smarter than the average cave man.

Now: are we controlled by our reason instead of our emotions? I'd say we can be, thus we are sometimes. As a society and as a race, certainly not, but there are times when each of us resists emotional appeals in favor of logical ones. We don't only follow our instincts.

[Athena]

Quote by: sdbest Actually what you're describing is stimulus and response, and in each case an emotional response with little thought at all. The process, in most cases, goes like this stimulus->emotional response->intellectual rationalization. Regards S.

Try answering the questions.

Quote by: CoffeeSaint Each of those people at Apple -- the PVC specialist, the outsourcer, Steverino -- are individually more capable than a stone age hunter/gatherer. Whether or not we are more intelligent, I'm not sure, but our individual capabilities are greater, in my opinion.

"Individually more capable" at what?

Parachute a stone age Homo sapien into to 21st New York they'd likely survive. Drop a New York stock broker onto the African veld 20,000 years ago, and he or she would die trying get the cell phone to work so they could call 911.

We vastly over-rate our competency because of the complexity of our society. Take away the complexity and most of us in the developed world would perish. Shut the power off in a major city for a few days and chaos would reign.

Onto part II. You say, "We don't only follow our instincts." By instincts I assume you mean emotion. There is almost nothing in the developed world, particularly the consumer society, that has anything to do with reason. Reasonable people wouldn't base an economy on consumerism, or be moved by fashion, or worship movie stars. I could go on and on and on.

Regards
S.

[Athena]

Quote by: CoffeeSaint Each of those people at Apple -- the PVC specialist, the outsourcer, Steverino -- are individually more capable than a stone age hunter/gatherer. Whether or not we are more intelligent, I'm not sure, but our individual capabilities are greater, in my opinion. I think you are ignoring all of the study and training -- and thought -- that goes into the ability to serve as one small cog in a machine that makes our modern technologies, and I doubt that a Neanderthal could handle even a basic high school education. Since they didn't have anything even remotely resembling a basic high school education -- without getting into the flaws in said education today -- I would say we have improved. In terms of the destruction of all of our data sources, the influence it could have on us depends on the extent of that destruction. If the information was simply wiped out, a great part of it could be regenerated, at least in terms of math and science (literature and art and music, if we are counting those as information, could not be recovered as easily, of course). If the information was destroyed and our knowledge of it wiped out as well, we still would not fall all the way back to the stone age as long as we had some memory of what we used to have: the knowledge that it is possible to have steam engines and some concept of what a steam engine is makes it fairly easy to construct -- even if you include such processes as mining and smelting ore, and forging metal. If we know that they once existed, I think we could regain them. This seems fairly obvious to me: we have the stuff, it didn't fall from the sky like manna from Heaven, therefore we have more ability to make stuff than did people who never made the stuff. What's wrong with that (horribly composed) syllogism? I may not know anything about iPods, but I know how to read and write -- and that is the foundation of gathering and increasing knowledge, as after a catastrophe. And I could make paper and ink, too, so even if I were thrown into the Stone Age I'd be smarter than the average cave man. Now: are we controlled by our reason instead of our emotions? I'd say we can be, thus we are sometimes. As a society and as a race, certainly not, but there are times when each of us resists emotional appeals in favor of logical ones. We don't only follow our instincts.

I know you are a teacher. I am impressed by your self control, and what has to be patients. A lot of patients. You have conducted yourself as a teacher should. I admire you.

[Boetie]

Quote by: sdbest Actually what you're describing is stimulus and response, and in each case an emotional response with little thought at all. The process, in most cases, goes like this stimulus->emotional response->intellectual rationalization. Regards S.

You are lumping everthing in one basket. The emotions derived from basic instincts are not the same as the emotions that are socially learned.

Much of the social emotions results from learning speech. Speech is a social process. Your private thoughts is actually a social process.

Emotions can follow thought. For example you are not feeling emotional. You have a thought about a girl, a funeral etc following that thought is emotions.

Emotions and thought can be symbiotic. Meaning the two are so intertwined it's hard to distinquish the two.

Thought is the past. The fact is everything about you is the past. Your culture, your speech, your thoughts derive from all that came before you. This past becomes the present and then projected into the future.

[CoffeeSaint]

Quote by: sdbest "Individually more capable" at what?

Everything except hunting and gathering without tools. I'd give them the edge in that. We think better, we talk better, we can build better, grow/produce food better, survive injury and disease better -- yeah, pretty much everything other than running away from a sabertoothed tiger.

Quote by: sdbest Parachute a stone age Homo sapien into to 21st New York they'd likely survive. Drop a New York stock broker onto the African veld 20,000 years ago, and he or she would die trying get the cell phone to work so they could call 911.

Not true: the stone age man would get hit by a city bus or stabbed by a crackhead -- or, most likely, captured and placed in a cage for scientific study. The New Yorker, assuming you didn't pick someone with an IQ of 2, would figure out pretty quick that they were not in a good phone cell, and would go about trying to survive. They probably wouldn't do well, but they wouldn't die as fast as the stone age man, who wouldn't have any idea where to get food or what the dangers were in NYC.

Besides, why is the test of intelligence the ability to survive completely outside of one's natural environment? Why isn't it the ability to adapt toi the environment and survive longer and reproduce more -- that being the basic biological imperative anyway? In those terms, we live longer in our world than stone age people did in theirs, and there's a whole lot more of us. So why aren't we the smarter ones?

Quote by: sdbest We vastly over-rate our competency because of the complexity of our society. Take away the complexity and most of us in the developed world would perish. Shut the power off in a major city for a few days and chaos would reign.

And then order would return and the power would go back on. If it couldn't go back on for some reason, then yes, most of us would die -- but take away all of the necessities of the stone agers and they would die, too. I fail to see how that makes us less intelligent or capable.

I am not saying we're better than stone age people because our world is more complex -- which I think is the misconception you are ascribing to me. But our world is more complex, we made it so, and we survive in it; all of those things bespeak a greater ability to think and reason.

Quote by: sdbest Onto part II. You say, "We don't only follow our instincts." By instincts I assume you mean emotion. There is almost nothing in the developed world, particularly the consumer society, that has anything to do with reason. Reasonable people wouldn't base an economy on consumerism, or be moved by fashion, or worship movie stars. I could go on and on and on. Regards S.

And purely emotional people would not have a legal system based on evidence and argument; we'd still have trial by combat. Purely emotional people would not have science, or mathematics, or literature or art or technology. I could go on and on, too. The question is, do we use both reason and emotion in our everyday lives? I would argue we do. Sure, we worship movie stars, but we have the ability to construct movie theaters, capture light and sound on film or digitally, and play those movies so we can see the stars. We have the ability to write scripts for them to memorize, and to create fan sites to declare our undying love, and to perform plastic surgery on them to make them more beautiful for longer -- etc., etc., etc. I understand your cynicism, but you shouldn't use it as your only lens for viewing the world. The very fact that we can recognize what we do sometimes as being overly emotional and also very stupid shows that we can also recognize intelligence and reason, and therefore we can, and do, use those to guide us, at least at times.