The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Peebothuhlu]

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? 

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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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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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.