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If I understand Sam Harris I think he hopes that people will eventually wake up to the value of seeing things in a clear, logical way where we can work together to solve problems. If this is the case I am not as hopeful as Mr. Harris. We are still hunter-gatherers in our psychological approach to living. Our direct ancestors have been evolving for the past half billion years or more. That history is built of volumes in hardware and firmware that make up our survival instincts. We share many of these instincts with our relatives still living in the wild. I do not think that the last 50,000 years is anywhere long enough to grow out of them. What has occurred for humans in that time is the acquisition of the ability to abstract and imagine. Survival instincts compel us to perform actions that made our ancestors more likely to stay alive. It is easy for us to think that we have outgrown instincts and say “Of course I am going to duck when I see something flying at me. It is the logical thing to do.” And it certainly is the logical thing to do, but that thought covers up the fact that we still acted on instinct, that logical thought add a few microseconds to our reactions which could interfere with the result. The surface expression of human instinct is emotion and feeling, and when we feel uncomfortable in certain situations we want to move to a less stressful one. This is what has helped keep us alive.

Among the situations that allow us to feel comfortable are:
Being among others that we trust
Having a high status in that group
Having access to necessary sustaining resources
Being in a secure defensible location
A feeling that things are under control

With our ability to imagine we make up stories that ease the stress of being constantly on guard. When our instincts get processed through our imaginations, religion and politics emerge. We can imagine a story that gives us a feeling of certainty which can mask our fears and give us the confidence to pursue what we want. We are in the right, it is obvious that our group is better than others, we have an identifiable challenge or enemy that can make us feel safer because we know it is there. This masking is too easy and effective to expect it to go away any time soon. In our particular nurture group we want to feel confident that we are a little smarter, stronger and more capable than other groups. It is a part of our survival instincts and has now come to the point where it is starting to work against us.

Pand0ro 7 May 14
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It doesn't help all that much to be rational if there is faulty data. What Harris ignores is that religious precepts probably evolved for sound evolutionary reasons. Harris rejects group selection which means he is working with bad data. Here is a link to the arguments against group selection.

[edge.org]

Pinker and Harris are humanists and our caught up in the idea that humans are different by kind not degree. It is a kind of speciescentrism that is just as wrong headed as ethnocentrism. It doesn't help that for most of their lives they have been the smartest person in the room. While rejecting the blank slate theory they still cling to the notion of emergent properties. In which complexity itself is not sufficient to explain differences between us and our ape relatives. If you ask them what self awareness or consciousness is they will not be able to give a satisfactory answer.

The key to understanding why they hold the views they do is that the idea of homosapiens is itself wrong headed. We are an advanced version of homohabius even if there proves to be no direct linage. We don't have tools because we have large brains we have large brains because we had tools. I don't think Harris and Pinker can imagine themselves as naked apes. Without culture they would be as helpless as any other species and their complex brains practically useless. They are the "artificial" product of tools, primarily language tools.

We are the cultural ape. Culture is not exclusive to humans, culture is everything about a social animal that is not genetic. When E. O. Wilson said socialism: good idea, wrong species he too was ignoring that because civilization is reliant on hierarchies of competence we have a self imposed ant like nature. It is visible in neotony which is a by product of self domestication. This idea that culture transforms genetics is perhaps hard to grasp but to a large degree is just rejected because we want to feel self made or special and not the product of swarm intelligence over thousands of years.

Another thing they get wrong is the nature of abstractions. There is nothing "real" about physics it is entirely abstract. All language including mathematics are abstract. There is no such thing as one for example, everything is divisible and cannot exist without being relative to something else. This is where Dennett comes to the rescue with his take on freewill which Harris rejects. As Dennett says freewill is as real as money it just isn't what you think it is. You can argue that money is not real but try having a complex society without it. In other words something doesn't have to be "real" to be real in the sense that it has concrete consequences.

All I'm saying is keep an open mind about group selection because the rejection of this concept is key to understanding the folly of collectivism. It is simply hubris to think you are going to engage in social engineering without endless unintended consequence. Complex chaotic systems are not amendable to the current state of our reductionist science. See Stephen Wolfram for an explanation of why that is.

wolfhnd Level 8 May 15, 2020

Humans are genetically compelled to live in groups. The advantage of that is a sort of division of specializations. Some are more selfish, some more open. Some are home bodies, some are adventurers. Some are warriors, some accommodate. Some are leaders, most are followers. What emerges is a system that allows us to adapt to life almost anywhere in the world. The reason we can do that and not other similar group species (like wolves) is our tool use. I agree that we have big brains because we have tools.

We do have collectivism but it only works in our hunter-gatherer size groups of 20 to 150 people. Larger than that and people can slack off, steal from others, and live off the efforts of others. That is not to say that all people will do that, it takes a majority of responsible members to maintain a successful group. Most of us want leaders that can make us feel safe and superior to others, and want to follow them exclusively. This is our downfall. In large societies, because of our genetically acquired selfishness, leadership always corrupts. We are now at the point where our expansion leads to fewer resources for each individual. There are some who have exceptional ability and exceptional good fortune that are able to gather many more resources for themselves at the expense of the greater population. Our population exceeds the earth's ability to reprocess our demands and waste. Because of our need for self-advantage, we refuse to pay the real cost of goods we buy. The part we do not pay for goes into our atmosphere, our lakes, streams and oceans, and into our landfills.

Please know that I am not making a moral statement , it is what it is. We have gone past the tipping point and there is no saving our civilization.

@Pand0ro

I don't know why these topics do not get more traction. I hope you get more responses.

@rustyshackleford

Well I don't really believe we are in a simulation but some physicists say we live in a mathematical universe. All that really means to me is that information is "physical". The Landauer principle is a fascinating concept.

[physicsworld.com]

It's a small jump from information is real to the universe is information. Of course now you will have to define information 🙂.

Perhaps science has altered our concept of reality and real doesn't have the same exact meaning it once did. Still I see no need to get too philosophical. Oxford's definition will do > real = "actually existing or happening and not imagined or pretended". It will work for abstract as well > "existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence".

As a computational analogy you can think of abstraction as a simplified model of reality. Although I'm not a fan of Plato he got this right when he said that your idea of a horse is more perfect than a horse itself. Perfect in the sense that the abstracted horse contains all the essential elements to distinguish the horse from everything that is not a horse. Take pi as another example. It can be represented by a single symbol but it can't be perfectly reproduce. pi is real in the sense that geometric shapes have an unvaring relationship to other shapes. From our scientific perspective pi is deterministic, it doesn't vary according to where it is measured. Quantum physics throws something of a monkey wrench into our definition of real because at tiny scales it violates determinism. Exactly how deterministic the universe is however is not of interest here. We can simply say something is real if at the sensory scale it doesn't vary in time and space.

One problem that crops up is the post modernist insight that what is real is subjective because no two observers have the same experience. Jordan Peterson does away with that objection nicely by say some solutions are better than others if the problem to be solved can be agreed on.

Another obvious problem is fantasy. If abstractions are real in the sense that they are simplified models of reality then fantasy as a subset of abstractions must also be real. I would resolve that problem by saying I have never encountered a fantasy that wasn't a recombination of things that are real sensory experiences. A brain deprived of sensor experience actually developes abnormally. It doesn't matter how elaborate a fantasy is it still isn't produced in a void.

Abstraction are real because they have real consequences in the physical or as Oxford defines it "concrete" world. If you think of language as a tool then Peterson's approach still works in that some abstract tools will produce more appropriate solutions than others.

The bottom line is you are not going to get a philosophically satisfying answer. That is why I like Dennett's definition of freewill. Freewill is real because without it there can be no moral agents and without moral agency social structures become dysfunctional. Dysfunctional social structures have physical or concrete consequences. It's a definition by consequence alien to the way people normally think about reality. It is however consistent with the current concept of reality as mathematical or as I prefer information. It puts a tremendous burden on anyone trying to abstract solutions because abstraction now have concrete consequences. As I have stated many times there are no non trivial absolute truths because even if you produce a formula for everything, as physicist are want to do, it isn't clear it helps reduce complex chaotic systems.

The question I have is random real or is it an illusion caused by complexity. I don't think that question will ever be answered.

@rustyshackleford

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist. I think that there is more chaos than futurists account for. The question of the singularity is a good example. If it happens it will be as much an accident as by design. We have no idea what consciousness even is nor a good definition of intelligence.

You may want to start a thread on Ray Kurzweil's ideas, I'm interested in what Daniel Dennett has to say on the topic of Ray Kurzweil's and will look it up.

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