Text 4119, 312 rader
Skriven 2006-07-18 00:08:00 av Robert E Starr JR (4592.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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"Josh Hill" <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:tutlb254fojs61c8unms3lhhptfkcu9bop@4ax.com...

>>Since when was the prime focus of a cookbook the optimized metbolization 
>>of
>>the dish in question?  The focus of any cookbook is *taste*.  Some recent
>>cookbooks do try to be dietetc, true but, the object is to make foods that
>>do this for us tasty, not optimise their bodily usage.  Very few people 
>>are
>>preoccpied with their Kerbs Cycle.
>
> Whence, then, arises the faculty of taste, or its relationship to
> motivation, or our preoccupation with it?
>
> You seem to be assuming that we have to be aware of the reason for our
> preoccupation, but I stipulated that that wasn't the case, that we're
> not usually consciously aware of /why/ we're fascinated with it. But
> notice the way we seek out sodium, up to a point, or sweets, until
> we've had too much and they become cloying. Notice our enjoyment of
> mildly acidic foods (think Vitamin C) and how the acidity too becomes
> cloying (experiment: try drinking orange juice soon after you've taken
> a vitamin pill -- note that it tastes too sour). Notice our avoidance
> of foods that are excessively bitter (associated with alkaloid
> poisons?) and our enjoyment of savory foods, rich in glutamate. And so
> forth.

As Mickie-D's has adequately shown, taste and nutritional value have been 
successfully decoupled for a while now.

Cooking is about manipulating a food to taste better and that has nothing to 
do with optimizing its nutritional value to the body.


>>Otherwise, I could point out that sensability and arguability have no
>>correlation in contemporary society.
>>
>>
>>>>> Or it may be
>>>>> something devised by a deity, albeit such explanations tend to be weak
>>>>> on what purpose the deity serves herself -- more a putting off than a
>>>>> solving.
>>>>
>>>>You treat the deity as a purely human construction, picking logical 
>>>>nits.
>>>>To someone who believes, stuff concering the diety(ies) isn't a
>>>>construction
>>>>or at least isn't enitrely.  Strikes me the choice to keep that filter 
>>>>in
>>>>place is to never see what a believer sees.  I'd wonder if it would be
>>>>possible to even conceptualize what a believer sees.  When I try on that
>>>>filter and look back at a beliver, all I see is self-deception on the 
>>>>part
>>>>of  the believer, which doesn't grant much respect.
>>>
>>> I share that prejudice to some extent, but at the same time, I see
>>> religion as having a practical role in human survival. In that sense,
>>> in the sense that it encodes culturally important behavioral memes,
>>> religion seems "real" to me, and worthwhile.
>>>
>>> I tend to think that religion, art, dreams, daydreams, and hypnosis
>>> are intertwined. Religion might be looked upon as art that claims to
>>> be completely true when in fact it's only partially true (as opposed,
>>> say, to our historical fiction, which generally claims only to be
>>> partially true, though people tend to accept it as truer than it is).
>>> So from a personal, subjective perspective, I can compare it to the
>>> "willing suspension of disbelief" that most people experience to some
>>> degree when watching a movie or even listening to music. And to some
>>> extent, I think, even those of us who don't ascribe a literal
>>> existence to the deity find our intellectual beliefs and emotional
>>> responses changing as a result of our exposure to art or to religion,
>>> just as we would had we been given suggestions under hypnosis. So for
>>> all our vaunted rationalization, we are to some extent affected by the
>>> same socially useful meme-sharing phenomenon.
>>
>>....Then we're agreed?
>
> Depends. What were talking about? :-)
>
> Seriously, yes, to a large extent.

The difference is interpretation.   I see "bug".  You see "feature"


>>>>>>> And can't it?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>You can certainly use science to provide evidence of consequences... 
>>>>>>but
>>>>>>morality judges whether those consequences are good or bad ones.
>>>>>
>>>>> Why can't science examine what makes those consequences good or bad?
>>>>> It seems to me that both psychology and neuroscience have done that,
>>>>> as more recently has evolutionary biology and even mathematics.
>>>>
>>>>Depends on what you're looking for.
>>>>
>>>>Science as psychology can plumb the depths of why people think what they
>>>>do.
>>>>As statistics, it can tell you what percentage of a population believe a
>>>>certain way.  As history, it can tell you how belief has evolved over
>>>>time.
>>>>
>>>>Science cannot tell you what "good" is because that's subjective, albeit
>>>>subjective centered in a common region.  As explained above, science can
>>>>map
>>>>the region but it cannot make that ah-ha leap to what IS good.
>>>>Scienctists
>>>>can make that leap but science, methodological tool that it is, is 
>>>>denied
>>>>the ability by the very nature of its Method.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure that that's so. I gave in another post the example of the
>>> incest taboo, which has been refined by science as our understanding
>>> of procreation and genetics has improved. And science understands why
>>> every society considers their version of the incest taboo to be good:
>>> a society that ignored it on a wide scale would become less
>>> competitive due to inbreeding.
>>
>>Plenty of analysis, zero experience.  Makes my point nicely.  See my next
>>comment, which is preserved for reference.
>>
>>>>Put another way, science can tell you about the story but it can't make
>>>>you
>>>>experience it.  "Experience" requires imagination and imagination is not
>>>>empirical.
>
> I don't think so. You said 'Science cannot tell you what "good" is
> because that's subjective, albeit subjective centered in a common
> region.  As explained above, science can map the region but it cannot
> make that ah-ha leap to what IS good.' And I don't believe that. In
> fact, I think we're giving more and more of that over to science,
> though many aren't aware of it, because I don't think that most people
> are aware of the mechanisms by which society makes its moral choices:
> they persist in believing that it comes from a holy book or deity, or
> in the case of those who are less religious from one or another
> ideology, Marxism or democracy or capitalism or conservatism or
> liberalism or libertarianism or fascism, despite the evidence that
> that isn't the case.

I see human society over-awed with unfetterd intellect.

I also see some serious stereotyping of religious people.


>>>>>>>>From a scientific perspective, the problem would in large measure 
>>>>>>>>boil
>>>>>>> down to the role of cooperation in evolution.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Only on a large scale.  Just to clarify, your position is that science
>>>>>>is
>>>>>>only capable of answering moral questions on an evolutionary level?
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not sure what you mean by moral questions. As you point out below,
>>>>> science doesn't attempt to assign moral values. It can tell us where
>>>>> our moral values come from, examine the process whereby we form them.
>>>>> It can even recognize that some acts are moral and some amoral within
>>>>> a given context and aid in the refinement of moral strictures and
>>>>> judgment, by for example refining the primitive incest taboos into
>>>>> modern ones based on a knowledge of genetics. But by the same token,
>>>>> science recognizes that moral systems are at least to some extent
>>>>> contingent, personal, and arbitrary. It can suggest changes only
>>>>> within the context of externally-supplied parameters.
>>>>
>>>>....Which means science is great at mapping out known moral terrain but
>>>>incapable of exploring or reshaping that terrain.
>>>
>>> I don't think I'd go so far -- see the changes to the incest taboo
>>> above, or look at other moral alterations that have come about due to
>>> science. I'd say science fills much the same role here as less
>>> rigorous observation and thought.
>>
>>You're telling me about the action, now showing it to me.  Science cannot
>>consider anything besides the facts of a case because is is based in
>>empiricism.
>>
>>If you want to formulate morality as a statisically averaged mean, science
>>can do that.  If you want to define morality as codified and verified
>>successful survival strategies amassed over time, science can help you 
>>with
>>the organization and evaluation work.
>>
>>If you want to do more than sifting through mouuntians of information, you
>>need some heart.  Science doesn't have any, nor was it ever meant to.  It 
>>is
>>a tool.
>>
>>It's like music.  You can program a computer for social trends and 
>>calculate
>>what will sell a million records, then hire a group with those qualities.
>>That's not the same as finding a good band.  You are equating the two.
>
> I submit that science can, in principle if not in practice, find the
> good band. It's been some fifty years, for example, since Meyer
> noticed the relationship between good music and information theory.
> And if you're talking about the "heart," well, science can understand
> that too, and could in principle use it to developing the criteria
> that allow it identify a good band.

No.  it can give you a good probability *estimate*.  There's a difference 
and it's not small.

Science is at best 20-20 hindsight.  It can tell you to some degree of 
resolution what worked yesterday or when the last measurments were taken. 
Insofar as those measurements are valid today it can make a corresponsingly 
good approximation.


> BTW, I'm not so sure that the band and the computer are so different,
> except insofar as bands are more sophisticated than today's computers,
> which have the cognitive sophistication of insects (no snide remarks
> about rap, please). And I don't see any reason why the computer
> couldn't be given the same emotional drives as we have.

At the moment, that's a statement far more composed of faith than fact.


>>> I do agree that for most there's an intermediate step, one in which
>>> the scientific findings are dramatized, placed in an emotional context
>>> within the imagination to which you refer above.
>>
>>That "intemediate step" goes by another name.
>>
>>Life.
>
> But the same thing can be done in silicon.

It can?  Prove it.


> Conversely, doesn't science occur in the living?

Sure.  But science isn't alive.


> Not that I want to minimize the difference. Science represents one
> part of the psyche -- the part that forms an accurate model of the
> world around us. It isn't generally placed within the context of
> motivation or emotion, although it can analyze motivation, and it
> tends towards theory rather than concrete manifestation, e.g., it
> "lends to airy nothings a local habitation and a name," whereas
> science is concerned with reducing a multitude of local habitations
> into airy nothings.

Science does not represent any part of our psyche.  It is a tool used by a 
part of our psyche to make sense of the world.


>>>>>>>>  Science can't measure
>>>>>>>>whether I look at my life as being a good or wasted life.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Again, can't it? At the very least, it could ask (and I'm sure
>>>>>>> psychologists have).
>>>>>>
>>>>>>What measurement would science possibly use to quantify how I measure 
>>>>>>my
>>>>>>life?
>>>>>>Anyone can ask...that doesn't make it science.
>>>>>
>>>>> But asking questions can be a part of science. Psychologists, for
>>>>> example, ask them all the time, and I'm sure they've asked questions
>>>>> about the very phenomenon you describe.
>>>>
>>>>The best a psychologist can do is be able to forumlate exactly what and
>>>>how
>>>>Carl (or anyone) defines his life.  Again, we're back at being told 
>>>>about
>>>>what's going on. Psychology gives me information about the individual 
>>>>not
>>>>the experience.
>>>>
>>>>If I experience a momentary intense connection to God, psychology can 
>>>>talk
>>>>about how past experiences might have colored the way I perceived God or
>>>>measure how the experience has altered me.  Biophysics could tell me 
>>>>what
>>>>was happening in my brain at the time, etc.  Can't tell you beans about
>>>>what
>>>>it was like for me to touch God.  Just run analysis on what I say.
>>>
>>> Carl had specifically mentioned measurement, though.
>>
>>Talk to Carl about that.
>
> I believe that's what I was doing . . .

No, you were talking to me.  :)


-- 
John Trauger,
Vorlonagent


"Methane martini.
Shaken, not stirred."


"Spirituality without science has no mind.

Science without spirituality has no heart."

-Methuselah Jones
                                                                               
             
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