Define “improve”. Evolution is a scientific process that involves the disappearance of genetic data of individual organisms unable to reproduce. People tend to equate the “ideals” that evolution seems to promote with the ideals that are best for humans and should be desired. But this is relatively nonsensical. The “ideal” that evolution promotes or “wants” is relatively arbitrary. If the human agenda and the evolutionary agenda were the same thing, then charity would not be something that appeals to our innate or societally induced (your choice) sense of morallity. Speeding up evolution means nothing more than killing off the weak.
This may seem unrelated, but you claim that we should “kill the bad species”… how can we know what is essential and what is without worth if we can’t even figure out what our adenda is relative to nature’s?
Man is part of nature, I don’t believe we have free will, and I don’t think it’s ‘evil’ or some tragedy when we drive some species extinct, that’s the way nature works. If some large predator was introduced to New Zealand, for instance (and it’s conceivable that it could have happened without our help), then moas would have been driven to extinction anyway, and it would have been no different than us hunting them to extinction. Sometimes when populations mix, certain species don’t do so well. We aren’t killing off all other species, just the ones that can’t adapt.
Elephants have changed the habitat of parts of Africa drastically through their grazing and tearing down of trees. They have doubtlessly driven some species to extinction through destroying their habitat. I don’t see anyone saying they aren’t part of nature.
I still don’t see an answer to my question: is it wrong to exterminate a species? I realize that dolphins and dodo birds are cute-but how would their extinction differe in any material way, from the extinctions we human have wreaked upon the poor smallpox virus, and (hopefully) on the tuberculosis bacterium?
Anybody that thinks that mother Nature knows best ought to experience his or her’s child’s suffering from an infectious disease!
I suspect most people would have little sympathy for the smallpox virus, had it caused the death of one of their offspring!
So if it’s OK to wipe out viruses and bacteria, what’s wrong with taking out rats and mice?
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with exterminating a species. If we have caused instinction of a species, then we merely have in common what other predators have done.
Dolphins and dodo birds do not harm us, so there is no reason to kill them. If dolphins were somehow decimating our population, then we would probably need some kind of plan to kill them off. After all, it is survival of the fittest.
Rats and other pests are undesirable. Perhaps the world would be better without them, perhaps not. We’ve got exterminators to get rid of them, but they simply won’t go away. But, if they were a greater threat to our livelihood than they are now, we would probably more systematically try to destroy them like we did with the smallpox virus, repurcussions or no repurcussions.
Right and wrong are relative. Survival is more absolute.
If you lay out in front of a dog a variety of meals (beef, chicken, pork, ice cream, etc), the dog will choose a meal, and therefore exercise its free will. If it chooses not to decide, it still has made a choice (what song was that?)
Lemur wrote:
I think you have that slightly twisted. We are in agreement that a soul is something supernatural, yes? If humans were discovered to have a supernatural element, then part of us would be outside of nature. The same goes for animals. If an animal is discovered to have a soul, then a component of it is outside of nature.
The presence of a soul in humans would differentiate us from nature, just as the presence of a soul in any other form of matter would differentiate it from nature.
On the slight chance that you didn’t already know the answer to this question, it was, fittingly enough, Free Will by Rush with “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
The evidence that humans have souls is that we have free will? Um, I don’t think so. First, you’d have to SHOW that we actually do have free will (I think we do, at least a “good enough” kind of free will, see Daniel Dennet’s books, but nevermind that). This is begging the question…you assume we have free will, which supports the existance of a soul, which is what gives us free will. We seem to make choices, but perhaps these “choices” are actually just created through quantum chaos in our nervous systems. You can’t just say: Humans have free will. The only way to get free will is through a soul. Therefore, humans have souls. Do we have free will? And is the only way to get free will through some entity that trancends physical laws? I argue that we can get a form of free will that doesn’t turn us into robots that doesn’t require any non-material addition to the human brain.
Anyway, let’s stipulate that humans have souls. Where did said soul come from? Are you really arguing that we can tell what entities have an extra-material component by how much “free will” they seem to demonstrate? I mean, if we believe in hinduism or buddhism, human souls are no different than animal souls, we just have different material bodies. So, plant souls come from inanimate souls, animal souls come from plant souls, and human souls come from animal souls.
Now, in order for us to argue that humans are supernatural, we would have to argue that the concept of a soul is supernatural. Well, if we could show that every entity in the universe had a soul, then the label “supernatural” wouldn’t seem to apply. Souls would be a natural part of the universal order, albeit one that hasn’t quite been understood yet. If everything has a soul, then souls are natural.
However, if humans were the ONLY entities that had souls, that WOULD differentiate us from other natural entities, meaning that it would be acceptable to say that humans were not “part of nature”.
Now, I agree that no serious scientist believes that mushrooms and rocks have souls, but there are hardly any scientists who believe humans have souls. So, if we stipulate human souls it seems likely that we’d have find that other living things had a sort of soul too.
But of course, we’re only stipulating souls, and I don’t really think souls exist. Do I have to go into a long explanation of why souls seem very unlikely to me? The short answer is that we have evolved from creatures that most people would not assign souls to. Where did the souls come from? If you look at our cells, every atom in them is identical to non-living atoms. There is no vital essence in living things, life is ordinary matter arranged in extra-ordinary ways. Plants take up inorganic carbon dioxide, convert it to living tissue, and humans eat the plants. Unliving carbon atoms that were once inorganic CO2 are incorporated into your living cells. But there is no magic vital essence that creates life.
So…what function would the soul serve? How would it hook into a soul-less animal to create an ensouled human? How could this evolve? And if a soul is completely non-material entity, how can it interact with a material brain to cause it to make decisions? And how can the material brain send signals to a non-material soul? Makes no sense.
But, if we were to detect such signals, then in my opinion it would mean that the soul was material, albeit a strange and mysterious sort of material that we don’t understand. But it would be amenable to scientific investigation, we’d be able to investigate the way information is transfered, etc. Which puts souls firmly in the material world, which by my defintions would make them “natural”. YMMV.
I think you’re demanding an unreasonable standard of veracity. There are plenty of things which we can’t prove, but which we nonetheless accept as fact (for example, macroscopic causality, axiomatic statements and the tenet that we’re not just disembodied brains living in virtual reality). In fact, philosophy abounds with all manner of statements for which we lack absolute proof. Should we discard millenia of philosophy for this reason?
In fact, we can’t prove that man is simply a part of nature, either! The original question is a philosophical one, and is inherently unprovable. Thus, in exploring this question, we should not selectively demand proof of arguments presented for or against it.
Besides, even though we don’t have proof that free will exists, we do have evidence to that effect. The fact that man is apparently capable of acting in independent and creative ways, ranging from absolute selfishness to evident altruism. The fact that man is able to overcome the animal urges which govern lower organisms (for example, when fasting or practicing abstinence). And so forth.
It’s not circular reasoning at all. We appear to have free will. If we do, the best way to explain this is to postulate the existence of a soul. End of story. In other words, the soul is the postulated ANSWER to the question of why we appear to have free will.
Agreed. However, as I keep pointing out, I’m not seeking absolute proof. I’m seeking the most reasonable answer to a question for which there can be no proven answer.
Are all of our “choices” merely the result of quantum interactions, chemical reactions and the like? Perhaps. However, that strikes me as a far more complicated and fanciful explanation, one which creates a myriad of unanswerable questions – and I’m speaking as a physical scientist here! Until more concrete evidence to that effect materializes, we have to form our beliefs based on the best evidence currently available.
Those are interesting questions, but they’re unnecessary to the topic at hand. We don’t have to demonstrate where souls come from in order to provide a reasonable case for its existence. After all, we have reasonable evidence that the universe exists, yet scientists don’t demand proof of where its mass came from. The two questions are related but separate.
If an entity has free will, then it does have a supernatural component. Without this supernatural components, all of its actions must be deterimined exclusively by the physical reactions within its system. In fact, without a supernatural component, that entity is nothing more than its corporeal body. If so, then the whole notion of “self” and “will” can not be distinguished from its physical form, and so its choices are driven entirely by physical laws of nature.
That’s not true. I’ve worked in the physical sciences for over a decade now. A huge number of scientists that I know are theists, and thus believe in a soul. (There are also many who espouse other beliefs, such as atheism, but the point remains. To say that “hardly any” scientists believe in a soul is ridiculous and false.)
Besides, if we’re going to talk about burdens of proof, then the most outlandish beliefs are the ones which require greater evidence. If someone wants to propose the possiblity that rocks have souls, then they had better present a DARNED GOOD EXPLANATION for their apparent inability to act in any self-governing fashion.
No, that merely becomes a possibility. Besides, as we pointed out, there existence of non-human “souls” is irrelevant to the topic at hand. It would not demonstrate that man has NO non-physical component. Rather, it would simply mean that some other organisms have a non-physical component as well.
Perhaps, but I don’t think that’s a convincing example. One could argue that the dog is simply being governed by its fundamental drives (e.g. hunger or satiety, food preferences, etc).
Human beings, on the other hand, are capable of acting in ways which are contrary to their fundamental drives. This happens when they behave altruistically, for example. It also happens when they engage in fasting, sexual abstinence, dieting and asceticism. Other animals are known to go through periods where they don’t eat or mate, but that’s far different from these human examples of self-denial.
However, I do agree with you in your response to lemur, as reproduced here:
Or perhaps not an answer that you want to see? The answer I gave is that yes, it is wrong to drive a species to extinction because we don’t the know effect it will have on the ecosystem we rely on for our own survival.
That, plus I’ll add that other species have a right to survive just as we do (IMHO, I consider it immoral to kill for no valid reason). Sure, mice can be pests, but they are not such a big problem that they deserve to be wiped out completely. Not to mention that mice are a food source for other species (hawks, etc.) and their absence will affect other species you may want to have around. The ‘food chain’ model is obsolete. Scientists now call it a ‘food web’ to indicate that there is an important interconnection among species and we don’t know how the ripples will spread when we snip out one strand of the web. If chaos theory has anything to say, a small change to one small part can result in a huge change to the overall system.
Yes, of course, if a human is suffering from a germ-induced disease, it is the right of that human to fight back. I think it would also be acceptable to kill an individual of an endangered species that is immediately threatening a human’s life (for example, it would be justifiable self defense for someone being attacked by a tiger). But is it not acceptable to kill off the entire species due to some perceived threat.
The only exception I can think of is some human pathogens, like you say. I can agree on that point - - but I can also see the benefit in keeping a sample in a lab for future scientific research - - as is the case for some bacteria I cannot recall at the moment. But it would be a huge mistake to kill off ALL bacteria and virus in the world (never mind impossible). I don’t think you were saying that, but just in case there is a mis-read, I’ll note that many species of bacteria are directly beneficial to our survival. Only a very small percentage are actual human-pathogens.
Sure, it’s more complicated. Have you ever studied biochemistry? Um, that’s complicated. That doesn’t make it wrong. We know that human cells are amazingly complicated, we know that human cells are made of ordinary matter. YOU’RE the one postulating vital essences. How does that work? Are you saying that free will violates the laws of physics? Because that’s what your theory would require. Occam’s razor is a way to chose between two theories that explain the facts equally well, a way to pare down theories to the absolute minumum needed to explain the facts. It does not mean that all theories need to be simple, far from it.
You invoke the soul as an explanation for how free will could exist. Fine, except that you have postulated an entity with completely unknown properties and completely unknown nature. It’s like invoking fairies to explain why the sun shines. If you can’t show me evidence of the fairies other than sunshine, it’s circular reasoning. I believe in a variety of free will that doesn’t violate known physical laws. Now, you may disagree that’s fine, or you may feel it’s not “real” free will, that’s fine. Or you may feel that we don’t know all physical laws yet, that’s fine too. But you can’t object to my theory because it’s complicated without another to take it’s place…and the new theory has to explain BETTER than the old one, right? How does you theory explain free will? That’s what I was getting at with that stuff about how the non-material soul interacts with the material body. If you have no explanation for how this can happen, I have no reason to believe in the existance of the soul, or fairies.
I could postulate that free will is caused by non-material gremlins, it explains as much as your “soul” theory. The only problem with my “gremlins” theory is that we have no reason to believe that gremlins exist…except, wait, we have free will! That proves it!
Look, this is getting a bit off the subject. You are defining free will a supernatural event. Fine, I don’t agree though. Let’s just say you may be talking about Free Will, while I’m talking about free will.
Yes, I am arguing that humans are nothing more than their corporeal bodies. Don’t give me that Free Will stuff as evidence against it, since I can always retreat to the postition that humans don’t have free will after all. “I can make a choice. I couldn’t make a choice if I didn’t have a soul.” Hmmmm…nope.
You are saying a dog cannot make a choice, therefore does not need a soul. Well, I hold that dogs can make choices. I don’t see a huge gap between a dog’s behavior and human behavior. We are pretty similar. What is the difference between a human and a dog? The difference is one of quantity, not quality. If humans need souls, dogs need souls.
You define a soul IN ADVANCE as supernatural, and hence any creature with a soul must be supernatural. Well, why? Why should a soul be supernatural? Why can’t a soul be natural, following physical laws that we still haven’t understood? If every creature has a soul, if rocks and trees have souls, and rocks and trees are natural (yes?), then souls are natural too, yes? Ah, but those other things can’t have souls? How do you know? A billion hindus believe otherwise. If a soul is a natural part of every living thing, it is part of nature. I admit, at this point we’re arguing semantics, but it seems unreasonable to label a fundamental attribute of everything un/non/super-natural.
I know lot’s of western scientists are theists, but so what? I’m saying that none of them hold that AS SCIENTISTS they have anything to say about souls, or that souls have any sort of scientific value. And if they were Hindus, they’d be polytheists, and if they were pagan they’d be pantheists, etc.
The point is that not all religions believe that only humans have souls, many believe that other creatures have souls as well. Right? There’s as much evidence for human souls as there is for dog souls, or mouse souls, or tree souls, or mushroom souls, or rock souls. How do you KNOW that rocks don’t have free will? Perhaps they simply chose to sit quietly and meditate for millenia. Plants turn toward the light, grow, spread their seeds, some attack other plants, some spread fire. Dogs obey their masters even in dangerous situations.
Anyway, the point is not that I really think these entities have souls. I’m just pointing out that the religious tradition that we historically inherited is no more likely to be true than any other possible religious tradition. It’s fine to believe anything you want, just don’t assume that other people will agree with your “common sense” assertions that just happen to exactly agree with western religious traditions.
IMO the idea of Free Will pretty much throws science out the window, but if any of you met me in the Free Will vs Determinism thread you’d know that
Man is obviously a part of nature in some ways, but as JTC noted, he doesn’t have to be in all ways. But to invent a component of man that has not been conclusively shown to exist in the same way we can show a rock exists or mitochondria exist then I think we’re stretching things.
Long Live Determinism!
[sub]Sorry guys, had to say that[/sub]
I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong. Please remember that I’m merely arguing for the possibility and plausbility of a non-physical essence. You’re the one who keeps getting hung up on the demand for proof.
Besides, there is absolutely no explanation of how these deterministic physical processes can result in non-deterministic free will. All we have is the unsupported assertion that they do. In addition, there is the mindboggling question of how mere matter can somehow attain self-awareness. Even if we postulate that free will is the mere result of biochemical processes, we can’t even begin to explain how this is so.
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Free will doesn’t violate the laws of physics because these laws have no application outside the physical world. A soul is, out of necessity, non-physical. The laws of physics do not have to apply to them.
No, but these theories should not be EXCESSIVELY simple. In other words, they SHOULD explain the facts. That’s the problem with the mechanistic hypothesis. It does nothing but assert that free will is the result of physical processes. It doesn’t even offer the beginnings of an explanation of how this can be so.
Heh heh, quite so! But it is even more problematic to explain how non-material entities can produce free will in material beings! If it’s mind-boggling that mere matter can attain self-awareness, just imagine the double-reverse boggle of unknown non-matter attaining self awareness.
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Here’s where I might caveat. It is possible for a soul to be “material” in a philosophical sense, even though it is material of a completely undiscovered type. So, it is logically possible for a soul to be composed of reverse polarity LaForgeons attached via anti-rubberbandons, which will be discovered in the year 3456 AD.
Kind of like how physicist define “our universe” as everything that can interact with everything else. If we could travel to another “universe”/dimension, it would really be part of our universe.
Right, except that physics shows that quantum events are not deterministic. So, there is no way to predict when that atom of radioactive iodine is going to split and send a high energy photon through that particular neuron, which makes that particular muscular movement move THERE instead of HERE. If we add all this up, and factor in the mathematically chaotic nature of human behavior, and then the chaotic nature of human interactions and we have behavior that is inherently unpredictable even if one knows the initial conditions exactly.
You’re welcome to take that position. If you do though, then you have no basis for complaining when others disagree with your views. After all, if there’s no free will, then they truly have no choice in the matter. (Keep that in mind, the next time someone steals your stereo.)
It is also problematic, but not moreso. That’s why I think it’s absurd to demand proof of the soul’s existence, treating the mechanistic view as though it were the default argument. Neither one provides a complete explanation.
As I’ve said several times before, I don’t care about proving things that are inherently unprovable.
That’s not necessarily more mind-boggling. We already have ample experience with matter, and it displays no properties of self-awareness. Thus, it is hardly unreasonable to postulate that self-consciousness is a non-material property.
If you seek to explain everything, then the non-material prospect is certainly more daunting because it’s not directly measurable. However, if we are to explain how free will can exist, then it’s hardly the more mind-boggling prospect. It has the advantage of not running counter to our direct experiences.
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Here’s where I might caveat. It is possible for a soul to be “material” in a philosophical sense, even though it is material of a completely undiscovered type. So, it is logically possible for a soul to be composed of reverse polarity LaForgeons attached via anti-rubberbandons, which will be discovered in the year 3456 AD. **
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If you’re talking about fundamental particles, then these aren’t just “philosophical,” they are physical. Being undiscovered doesn’t make them any less physical.
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No, but these theories should not be EXCESSIVELY simple. In other words, they SHOULD explain the facts. That’s the problem with the mechanistic hypothesis. It does nothing but assert that free will is the result of physical processes. It doesn’t even offer the beginnings of an explanation of how this can be so.
Technically correct, but on the macroscopic scale, all the non-deterministic qualities become essentially undetectable. Human beings exist on the macroscopic scale. It would be very unusual for an object to routinely behave in a non-deterministic fashion on a macroscopic scale. (I’ve studied QM on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, so I’m not just pulling this out of nowhere.)
Besides which, quantum events are supposed to be absolutely random. Human behavior is not. It would be a statistical nightmare to suppose that these quantum events behaved in a manner that resulted in free will decisions – decisions with a measure of consistency, yet remain non-deterministic. That’s just one reason why QM is still a far cry from explaining how the semblance of free will can exist. At best, it only provides the vaguest hint of how this can possibly happen.
FTR, I’ve long suggested that quantum mechanics may provide a way for non-material souls to interact with the physical world, while producing the results which remain consistent with the physical laws. In other words, if they can skew the quantum results sufficiently, they can produce actions that are physically consistent but statistically improbable, and still the result of a non-physical entity. That’s just speculation on my part though, and I readily emphasize that it’s not provable.
Only one more problem: You assert that we have never observed matter that exhibited free will. Well, in my view we have: Human beings. Now, I understand you don’t agree.
Ooops, I just came up with another. You complain that materialism is considered the “default” view. Well, I agree it is the “default” view, but I don’t see how else we can arrange things. If we accept that non-material explanations can be accepted, then how do we chose between them?
If we say that there is no evidence for god, and no evidence against god, we have a rule that says that means that we don’t believe in god. Otherwise, we’d have no reason to reject an infinity of unlikely but un-disprovable entities. I can’t disprove fairies, leprechauns, unicorns, etc. But, I have a rule that says that I don’t believe in anything that has no evidence for it. Which means that I effortlesslyh reject an infinite number of concepts and entities.
Now, you may feel that we have good reason to believe in a soul, while I do not. But we can’t use the unfalisfiable nature of the soul as evidence that it might exist, since under my philosophy that is a reason to reject it.
That’s circular reasoning though, since we are debating WHETHER human beings are purely matter. In other words, your “evidence” is the very topic under debate.
There are several issues to consider – the foremost critical criteria is whether an explanation contradicts existing evidence. The mechanistic explanation (i.e. that human free will is purely the result of physical processes) violates known laws of science in several ways – such as the macroscopic determinism of which I spoke, and the lack of complete randomness in human behavior. Additionally, there’s the question of whether we can truly call it “free will” if our decisions are merely the results of quantum events, chemical processes and physical interactions.
Note that I’ve deliberately omitted the question of God’s existence. Strictly speaking, that’s yet another issue to consider; however, the objections to pure materialism are not contingent on the existence of a deity.
First of all, we’re not talking about the existence of God. Second, the premise that there is no evidence for God is questionable at best, since evidence is different from proof. Third, free will IS evidence that mankind MIGHT possess something beyond the mere physical, for reasons which I’ve repeatedly cited.
Again, irrelevant. You’re assuming that there is no evidence for the non-material. I’m saying that there is, as evidenced by the fact that the material viewpoint FAILS to adequately explain free will.
That’s what it ultimately boils down to. I have listed several reasons why the materialistic approach is an inadequate explanation – thereby opening up the possibility of an extra-natural explanation. To wit:
The inconsistency between macroscopic determinism and free will
The inconsistency between 100% quantum randomness and human consistency
The question of whether one truly has “free will” if his decisions are the result of deterministic macroscopic events and random quantum events
So far, you haven’t refuted even a single one of these problems with the mechanistic viewpoint. The only option you’ve provided has been to deny the existence of free will – which makes any attempt to dissuade your opponents rather ludicruous.
No, that’s not what you said. Your exact words were,
“… there are hardly any scientists who believe humans have souls.”
The difference between those two statements is palpable… especially since many scientists do believe in a soul.
Now, of course they wouldn’t demonstrate the existence of a soul in their strict capacity as scientists. That’s because the supernatural lies beyond the scientific realm. However, this doesn’t preclude them from believing that it exists, based on their knowledge of the material world and its limitations.
The answer I gave is that yes, it is wrong to drive a species to extinction because we don’t the know effect it will have on the ecosystem we rely on for our own survival.