-and on the basis of how you think that maybe sometimes people get excited and overzealous about mundane data - you hem and haw about biology? No, stop it.

That's just not the case, and you know it. People may do that, sure, but that's not why you're here saying the things you have to say....about..biology.

(March 26, 2021 at 12:50 am)Peebo-Thuhlu Wrote: You refer back to a Psychology book, (Okay, that's your ballywick and I get that) but produce particular quote that's, like 150 years old? Huh?

I think the Darwin quote is believable, don't you? Despite its age.

If people used to think that the soul was a divine spark placed into each individual by God, then discovering that people evolved would be likely to affect that belief. This doesn't mean that we should be uncritical of the findings of evolutionary psych, but as an atheist I would think you'd want psychology to be cognizant of evolution and rethink its precepts, wouldn't you? 

Quote:Heck, lets go off and pull up Nagel's "What it is to be a bat." and plug that into the discussion?

That wouldn't be strange. "What is it like to be a bat?" is a serious question and has been instrumental in how we think about our phenomenological experience. Do you think it's outmoded or something? 

Bats and people evolved differently, so it makes sense to think that they experience the world differently. 

Recently I've read criticism that says brain science may be approaching things in a way that's even more outmoded than that. The fact that current neuroscience explanations are very materialistic, cause and effect type of formulations, may in fact be stuck in a Newtonian world that physicists have long discarded. If modern physics accepts entangled telepathic particles, non locality, and retro causation, then it isn't crazy to look for these effects in the brain. We know that birds use quantum effects in navigation, for example, so we have no a priori reason to rule them out in humans. What the brain does may turn out to be a lot stranger than we are currently imagining.

Why, why should the one fact affect the other belief? And why should what it's like to be a bat be so profound? You don't know what it's like to be me, either, and I'm human.

(March 26, 2021 at 12:50 am)Peebo-Thuhlu Wrote: You refer back to a Psychology book, (Okay, that's your ballywick and I get that) but produce particular quote that's, like 150 years old?

Your question was in response to my psychology comment; I assumed you wanted consistency here.

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(March 26, 2021 at 1:12 am)Belacqua Wrote: I think the Darwin quote is believable, don't you? Despite its age.

The age of the quote adds to its value. If Darwin himself foreshadowed the rise of evolutionary psychology. Then clearly evolutionary thinkers have been interested in particular systems within an organism for a long time. Sexual selection, for example, is entirely behavioral (also proposed by Darwin). But perhaps I misunderstood Peebo's question.

(March 26, 2021 at 1:12 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(March 26, 2021 at 12:50 am)Peebo-Thuhlu Wrote: You refer back to a Psychology book, (Okay, that's your ballywick and I get that) but produce particular quote that's, like 150 years old? Huh?

I think the Darwin quote is believable, don't you? Despite its age.

If people used to think that the soul was a divine spark placed into each individual by God, then discovering that people evolved would be likely to affect that belief. This doesn't mean that we should be uncritical of the findings of evolutionary psych, but as an atheist I would think you'd want psychology to be cognizant of evolution and rethink its precepts, wouldn't you? 

Quote:Heck, lets go off and pull up Nagel's "What it is to be a bat." and plug that into the discussion?

That wouldn't be strange. "What is it like to be a bat?" is a serious question and has been instrumental in how we think about our phenomenological experience. Do you think it's outmoded or something? 

Bats and people evolved differently, so it makes sense to think that they experience the world differently. 

Recently I've read criticism that says brain science may be approaching things in a way that's even more outmoded than that. The fact that current neuroscience explanations are very materialistic, cause and effect type of formulations, may in fact be stuck in a Newtonian world that physicists have long discarded. If modern physics accepts entangled telepathic particles, non locality, and retro causation, then it isn't crazy to look for these effects in the brain. We know that birds use quantum effects in navigation, for example, so we have no a priori reason to rule them out in humans. What the brain does may turn out to be a lot stranger than we are currently imagining.

No quite like that.

I find the pulling out of the Dawrin quote to be weirldy out of context.

Hence why I offered up Nagel's "Bat." Since, from my dim memory of reading not the actual nagel's item in full but its coverage in  "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid." by Douglas Hofstadter a few decades ago it more seemed to fit the flow of the conversation of biology, brains and changes with the flow of time etc.

Uhm... 'Telepathic particles'? Okay, new one to me. As for 'Quantum compass birds' again it's been ages since I've seen something like a 'New ScIEntist' article on bird thinking. New Scientist being about my level of reading comprehension, I'm afraid.

I do agree that what our brain (Or any critters) doings quite might be stranger than what we 'Think' (   ). However I don't think people are actually poking for an actual 'Ghost' in the machinery, do you?

Cheers.

Not at work.

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(March 26, 2021 at 1:37 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(March 26, 2021 at 12:50 am)Peebo-Thuhlu Wrote: You refer back to a Psychology book, (Okay, that's your ballywick and I get that) but produce particular quote that's, like 150 years old?

Your question was in response to my psychology comment; I assumed you wanted consistency here.

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(March 26, 2021 at 1:12 am)Belacqua Wrote: I think the Darwin quote is believable, don't you? Despite its age.

The age of the quote adds to its value. If Darwin himself foreshadowed the rise of evolutionary psychology. Then clearly evolutionary thinkers have been interested in particular systems within an organism for a long time. Sexual selection, for example, is entirely behavioral (also proposed by Darwin). But perhaps I misunderstood Peebo's question.

Yup, quite probably with the misunderstanding thing.

Then again I'm happy/honest to just be reading along and hoping my "Layman's" level of understandng the world is enough for me to keep up.

Cheers.

Not at work.

(March 26, 2021 at 3:35 am)Peebo-Thuhlu Wrote: I find the pulling out of the Dawrin quote to be weirldy out of context. 

Well, you questioned whether evolution by natural selection could be relevant to "systems within an organism." And John quoted Darwin, who knew a thing or two about evolution, to say that it is relevant. 

I don't think anyone has shown Darwin to be wrong about that. 

It's true that the theory is "over-arching." Most people here want to say it's also responsible for every detail and system within an organism, since the alternative is that something other than evolution made us what we are. 

If you have a suggestion as to what, other than evolution, made human beings what they are, I think that would of interest on this thread.

By the way, I think it's great that you acknowledge a "layman's level" of understanding. Most of us are the same, if we were being honest, but few people want to admit that.

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@John 6IX Breezy

By the way, I know this isn't your particular field of study, but you might enjoy the book The Great Chain of Being if you haven't seen it already. It's about the Neoplatonic idea of a hierarchy in the universe going from dead matter at the bottom to God at the top, with people being about half way.

The reason I bring it up here is because it describes how Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandpa, got extremely close to discovering evolution on his own. He combined the Neoplatonic hierarchy, which was sometime said to be changeable, with creatures going up or down on the chain, with recent archeological discoveries, to suggest nearly all of Charles' theory. It only remained for the younger Darwin to figure out the capstone of the arch, so to speak, which was natural selection. Unfortunately Erasmus wrote his book in not very good verse, so nobody reads it now.

Easily available here, if you don't mind a little piracy:

(March 26, 2021 at 1:12 am)Belacqua Wrote: Recently I've read criticism that says brain science may be approaching things in a way that's even more outmoded than that. The fact that current neuroscience explanations are very materialistic, cause and effect type of formulations, may in fact be stuck in a Newtonian world that physicists have long discarded. If modern physics accepts entangled telepathic particles, non locality, and retro causation, then it isn't crazy to look for these effects in the brain. We know that birds use quantum effects in navigation, for example, so we have no a priori reason to rule them out in humans. What the brain does may turn out to be a lot stranger than we are currently imagining.

Yes, there is a reason to rule them out, at least for the most part.

The reason is that Planck's constant is small. Which means that the differences between Newtonian and quantum physics tend to happen at the atomic level and below. Once you get to the size of macromolecules, the differences are pretty insignificant.

There are two exceptions that I know of: photosynthesis depends on the quantum aspects of the chlorophyll molecule. There are stages where a quantum superposition is important for the energy transfer. The other case is that the receptors in our eyes (the rods) are sensitive to single photons. In a very dark room, that can amplify the quantum aspects of photons to macroscopic levels. Once you get to even a moderately dark room, however, there are enough photons that the quantum aspects get averaged away.

Navigation depends on magnetism, that seems pretty clear, but the claims that quantum entanglement are relevant for that seem very doubtful to me. Once again, it is a noisy environment at temperatures well above absolute zero, so quantum effects tend to be washed out.

I've seen claims that microtubules in the brains amplify quantum effects and are related to consciousness. Frankly, I don't buy it. Again the scale of even one monomer in a microtubule is large enough that quantum effects would be swamped.

The Newtonian approximation is incredibly good once you get above the level of atoms. It certainly hasn't been discarded as the go-to physics in biology and it shouldn't be.

(March 26, 2021 at 8:38 am)polymath257 Wrote: Yes, there is a reason to rule them out, at least for the most part. [...]

You may be right. I certainly can't say.

But if there's one thing we know about the whole mind/brain issue, it's that we don't know what's happening. So I consider the issue very much open.

The idea that we don't know what's going on with the mind brain issue is a mischaracterization of the subject, and also not an argument against any fact of biology.

(March 26, 2021 at 4:30 am)Belacqua Wrote: It's true that the theory is "over-arching."

I think this over-arching comment by Peebo is interesting. At its simplest level, evolution is change in allele frequencies over time. And the mechanisms of evolution we all know (mutation, selection, drift, etc.), are the reasons why allele frequencies change over time. But from here the theory grows broader: people become interested in adaptation, social behavior, speciation etc. With the broadest overarching umbrella perhaps being that of the historical narrative of life on earth, fossil records, origins, reconstructing the story of evolution.

I've added your book recommendation to my collection. (Libgen is like Barnes and Nobles for me lol.)