The Anomaly that is Man

[Mudhammam]

The only relevant tidbit I have to add, as I agree with your general summary, is this oft-quoted gem from Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." Somewhere in there I suppose man holds a privileged position.

Perhaps that shows we don't have a privileged position. If we did, it would be comprehensible that the universe should be comprehensible.

But really, not everything gnomish utterances of Einstein reflect wisdom rather than ignorance or mental fart.

That's quite gnomish of you. I rather agree with Einstein. Our ability to comprehend certain limits to our present comprehensibility, and therefore push the boundaries into what initially seems absurd, is, if anything, what makes our position privileged and more importantly, continually interesting.

[Anomalocaris]

Perhaps that shows we don't have a privileged position. If we did, it would be comprehensible that the universe should be comprehensible.

But really, not everything gnomish utterances of Einstein reflect wisdom rather than ignorance or mental fart.

That's quite gnomish of you. I rather agree with Einstein. Our ability to comprehend certain limits to our present comprehensibility, and therefore push the boundaries into what initially seems absurd, is, if anything, what makes our position privileged and more importantly, continually interesting.

It is somewhat strange to regard our position as being privilieged when evolution seem to have produced a continuous spectrum of facilities for comprehension in long line of ancesters to Homo Sapien sapien. With our current state of understanding of mental processes and how they relate to physical structure of the brain, it is not clear to us at what point the most basic form of what we might consider comprehension could first have occurred. It may have occurred with homo erectus, it may have occured with the last common ancester between humans and chimps, it may have occurred 70 million years ago with the first tree shrew. Who is to say, given the current low state of empirical knowledge of how comprehension occurs in the brain, no form of comprehension whatsoever occurs in the first plecental mammals, or mammal like reptiles? Or dinosaurs? Or birds? Some birds like crow certainly seem to exhibit what looks exquisitly comprehension like behavior, such as the comprehension that dropping pebbels into a jar would raise the level of water in it to the point where the bird could sip off the top.

How much comprehension, and of what nature, actually existed in other parts of the sanimal kingdom, or how much each of them pushed the boundaries of comprehension, is an loosely bounded unknow at present.

So where does that leave the assertion of our previliged position?

Now leave aside the speculation of how much comprehension occurred outside the realm of homo sapiens. Let us assume for the sake of argument that comprehension is a clearly distinct neurologicawl activity from cognition of any other sort. Let us also assume that such activity as comprehension has never occurred until the first homo sapien sapien arrive on the scene. So what? How does that privilege us?

Every single function, no matter or trivial and common place, has to have evolved for the very first time on earth, or even in the universe, at some time in the past. So at some time in the past, any biological function would have been possessed by only a single species, or even only a single individual, ever.

So does that make that species or individual privileged?

Are you a privileged individual because no one else has ever experienced 13.6123245356653 billion years post big bang before you?

[Mudhammam]

Are you a privileged individual because no one else has ever experienced 13.6123245356653 billion years post big bang before you?

I fail to see much relevancy in the larger portion of your post, but yes, considering the relatively recent trends in evolution, I do think that we are more privileged than our ancestors or other animals for the simple fact that we're granted far more access to knowledge of ourselves and our environment and can use it for immense good or immense harm (a distinction that itself can only be made by us). In my view, we're not privileged because God conceived us this way; we're privileged because natural selection made us able to conceive God. If humans are still around in 1,000 years, and thriving, they will probably be justified in feeling privileged beyond anything we're currently able to apprehend.

[Anomalocaris]

There is nothing privileged in being the first to attain a certain arbitrary milestone in natural development. Everything has a first instance in a universe evolving out of the Big Bang.

The assumption of privilege becomes even more unsupportable when you see that it is by no means clear we are the first, nor is it clear that the first is truly significantly or qualitatively different from the immediate predecessor to the first.

[ShaMan]

I do think that we are more privileged than our ancestors or other animals...

I do not. I think it is our ego telling us we're privileged over others (including plants and animals), and that is why we've taken the Earth and made it our bitch. Mother will have the last say.

And, if we're going for sheer evolutionary privilege, then I'd say that bacteria has us beat trillions of times over (literally).

[downbeatplumb]

---

Was having an exchange with someone recently about my de-conversion and among the things he asked was...

What do you make of the strange coincidence that man stands apart from creation, encompassing it and acting as a sub-creator? The idea that man can seemingly explain everything but will never fully explain himself and the bizarre correspondence between reality and his mind? ...what Walker Percy describes as being Lost in the Cosmos?

Aside from there being a bit of an argument from ignorance mixed up in there. Personally, I don't see man as standing apart from "creation" but rather continuous with and fully encompassed by nature. The bizarre correspondence between reality and his mind, I see as being sensibly explained by evolution both as a product of our adaptation to the environment in one sense (our brains accurately interpreting what we perceive) and also as a by product of our more developed brains (our capacity for beliefs, advanced abstraction and concept formation). The same goes for our acting as "sub-creator". Is it an strange coincidence that we are very much the only ones that ended up like this? Sure, but it hardly amounts to anything more than that.

Would be interested in other perspectives on this question.

---

We're just another ape.

[Mudhammam]

There is nothing privileged in being the first to attain a certain arbitrary milestone in natural development. Everything has a first instance in a universe evolving out of the Big Bang.

The assumption of privilege becomes even more unsupportable when you see that it is by no means clear we are the first, nor is it clear that the first is truly significantly or qualitatively different from the immediate predecessor to the first.

It's not the fact that our evolution reached an arbitrary milestone or that everything has a first instance (which is not true at all, unless you were attempting to make a different point and clumsily worded it) that makes our existence privileged. These are non-sequiturs to what I take most people to mean when speaking of our species as unique or privileged with respect to everything else known to exist. It's the fact that, perhaps for the very first time or as far as know, quite scarcely, a being came into existence that had within its possession the ability to both create and articulate meaning, using complex, syntactical language, constructing concepts that cohere with the environment to the extent that it even enables them to predict events decades and centuries (and billions of years) before their occurrence, to mention a few advantages bestowed upon us by nature that have also given us dominion over the planet. Even biological functions that we do not possess (I imagine that might be what you're thinking) become possible through extended phenotypical designs, to almost seem to eliminate all conceivable restrictions (in due time, of course). The very articulation of your statements, or any that you might think to convey, which are intended to parallel a fact about the world, have no veritable significance outside of our species. That's what I mean by privilege. No other creature on earth, or to our knowledge, beyond, even comes close to possessing this attribute, and even if others do exist, it's still indisputably quite rare.

[Dolorian]

No other creature on earth, or to our knowledge, beyond, even comes close to possessing this attribute, and even if others do exist, it's still indisputably quite rare.

So, what do you make of that? Do you think that a theist is justified in concluding from this that a God must have created us? Do you see this as a problem for a naturalistic worldview?

[Exian]

A theist is no longer justified in concluding that, in light of scientific findings, understanding logic, and that we now understand the importance of evidence when forming our beliefs.

[Anomalocaris]

There is nothing privileged in being the first to attain a certain arbitrary milestone in natural development. Everything has a first instance in a universe evolving out of the Big Bang.

The assumption of privilege becomes even more unsupportable when you see that it is by no means clear we are the first, nor is it clear that the first is truly significantly or qualitatively different from the immediate predecessor to the first.

It's not the fact that our evolution reached an arbitrary milestone or that everything has a first instance (which is not true at all, unless you were attempting to make a different point and clumsily worded it) that makes our existence privileged. These are non-sequiturs to what I take most people to mean when speaking of our species as unique or privileged with respect to everything else known to exist. It's the fact that, perhaps for the very first time or as far as know, quite scarcely, a being came into existence that had within its possession the ability to both create and articulate meaning, using complex, syntactical language, constructing concepts that cohere with the environment to the extent that it even enables them to predict events decades and centuries (and billions of years) before their occurrence, to mention a few advantages bestowed upon us by nature that have also given us dominion over the planet. Even biological functions that we do not possess (I imagine that might be what you're thinking) become possible through extended phenotypical designs, to almost seem to eliminate all conceivable restrictions (in due time, of course). The very articulation of your statements, or any that you might think to convey, which are intended to parallel a fact about the world, have no veritable significance outside of our species. That's what I mean by privilege. No other creature on earth, or to our knowledge, beyond, even comes close to possessing this attribute, and even if others do exist, it's still indisputably quite rare.

All you've said is special is defined by how we differ from everyone else we know, and in particular how we differ from everyone we know in ways we like to be proud of, therefore we are by definition special.

I happen to think none of the traits you mention has any specialness about them. They are all likely to be mere undistinguished points somewhere along continums of different aspects of biological capabilities that, to the best of our ability to infer, the universe can and most likely have produce an almost infinite number of separate occasions. We are extremely unlikely to represent any extreme value on any of those continums. and we are also extremely unlike to be the first to every attain our point along any of the continum on which we can be measured.

In other words, nothing that we distinguish ourselves with is likely to be something other than common place in the universe, as far we our most reasonable inference of how the universe works can tell us.

We only marvel at ourselves because we are so provincial that we've never seen anything but our own cradles.