I should have asked “What does he consist of? Solely of what you can see under a microscope or with a scanner…?” :manvspc: :frighten:>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Do you say to him “I love you, my dear old thing”?! Is he just a material object as far as you are concerned? Husbands **are **often regarded as pieces of furniture.What does he consist of? Solely of what you can see, taste, smell, hear and touch? I wonder what your love for him consists of…
So you think it’s fruitful to consider ourselves fundamentally separate from other animals, to abstract our various abilities from their probable physical causes?
Our bodies are physical entities. There is no part of them that has been demonstrated to be independent of physical existence.
Uh, matter isn’t the sole reality. Energy, forces and fields exist too, as does space, understood as that which lies between observable physical entities.
So treating people badly is preferable to negotiating compromise? Fair cop, though, if others treat me badly straight off the bat.
Right. So why are you bemused by the differential survival rates of intelligent animals?
According to current research, from single-celled organisms that developed ways to exchange genetic material with other single celled organisms.
Originally, probably through a series of mutations. However, once the mechanisms were present, natural selection would have taken over to select for those organisms that had the best survival and reproductive outcomes in any given population.
Intelligence is observed primarily in modern animals. We don’t have much to go on, except for the size of the braincase, in order to estimate the intelligence of extinct species. What is apparent, however, is that adaptable opportunists seem to do well. Neanderthal man probably had a larger brain than modern humans, yet they died out. This may have been because they were better adapted in bodily terms to survive ice-age conditions, and when the ice retreated, they didn’t adapt fast enough. Or it may be because modern humans out-competed them for resources. Intelligence by itself is not enough to ensure long-term survival. Environmental change doesn’t always favour the smart and well-adapted; environments don’t always change, but may move to new locations, and such organisms as are adapted to thrive in certain environments - such as rats and cockroaches in modern cities - will move to places where they can do well.
I would be inclined to question your sources, to begin with. Why is it irrational to disbelieve in supernatural entities? I mean, atheism in the modern world may correlate with higher suicide rates, but how do these compare to the homicide rates of religious believers?
Not at all - I am denying the omnipotence and omniscience of the scientific method.
Hardly. I am claiming the mind is probably a physical phenomenon, on the basis of the fact that so many things previously attributed to supernatural forces have been found to have perfectly adequate physical explanations. Not so much that it can’t be supernatural, but that I find no reason to assume it is so.
How else would I relate to him other than through my own senses? I have never had telepathic conversation with him, only that which is facilitated by the physical functions of speech and sound and hearing. That is my means of insight into his mind. My love for him is based upon observation of his actions and my conversations with him, as well as the more primal functions of touch, taste and smell, all of which reveal that he is a compassionate, empathetic, intelligent man and one whom I happen to find aesthetically attractive. How else do you expect to be able to interact with another but through your senses? Do you have a sixth sense? Are you telepathic?Do you say to him “I love you, my dear old thing”?! Is he just a material object as far as you are concerned? Husbands **are **often regarded as pieces of furniture.
Can you suggest a greater one?
The Blessed Trinity’s Love is obviously the greatest creative power and the closest parallel in our experience is the creative love of a man and a woman manifested in their child.
My first reading was that you were suggesting that the love - and result of that love - a child - was the greatest creative power.
If that reading is correct, I don’t agree.
My second reading is that you were referring to the creative power of the Trinity.
If that reading is correct, I agree.
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The reason is that polyamory is a logical consequence of the belief that human beings are nor more than biological machines!
Uh…how do you figure? I see no logical connection, nor do Christian (yes, there are some) or pagan polyamorists, for example. What is it about monogamy that cancels out a belief that humans are biological machines, and that marriage is purely functional as an arrangement for conceiving and raising offspring - much as pair bonding functions in other sexually-reproducing species - and passing on property? What ‘higher’ human qualities are fostered by monogamy that are not fostered by polyamory?
I’ve never denied that we have abilities not present in many other animals. But elephants have powers that amoebas lack - different animals have different capacities, as I keep pointing out but you keep denying by claiming that we should treat all animals the same way and have the same expectations of them all. Why does the fact that particles of matter lack understanding mean that in complex arrangements, they cannot manifest understanding? What do you think understanding is that it transcends material causes?
That is a failure of language - I cannot refer to any part of ‘my’ body, when using the English language, that does not imply that ‘I’ am some entity apart from my body. This is evidence that our language evolved amongst people who were/are primarily dualists, rather than evidence that there is any fundamental separation between the self and the physical body.
I suspect the whole concept of ‘materialism’ as you seem to understand it is erroneous. You are attempting to impose limits that we don’t know exist.
Did I say it was? You were the one implying that cooperation is anathema to the pursuit of self-interest.
Again, it depends on the circumstances. Large brains are huge energy consumers. If the animals possessing such brains cannot acquire sufficient fuel for them, of course they will die. There are some circumstances in which intelligence can facilitate the finding of food - and one of the advantages of humans, from an evolutionary perspective, is our ability to be generalists when it comes to diet - but if there’s not enough food, then there’s just not enough food, no matter how smart you might be. And that’s just one set of circumstances in which intelligent animals may lose out. The more intelligent the animal, the longer the period of relative immaturity and vulnerability and need for parental care. This, too, can be a disadvantage - but in the case of humans (and several other social species) it has led to a strengthening of the ability to form social bonds, with a commensurate improvement in overall survival rates of populations.
Probably a combination of genetic mutation and chemical reactions, but I’m not a cell biologist, so I don’t actually know.
Intelligence is a measure of the ability to process information about one’s environment. Yes, I do think random genetic mutations set the evolution of intelligence in motion, but they were not the only factor involved - sexual recombination and natural selection played their parts.
In comparison to the extinction rates of animals we would not consider intelligent, they are not all that staggering.
It obviously is if you hold a very narrow view of the features that enable survival (and presumably if you just want to consider humans as more special, somehow, than every other animal species and not just a result of evolutionary good fortune). But ultimately, survival and reproductive success are the keys to evolutionary development. It isn’t always readily apparent what the evolutionary advantages of certain features might have been. For example, walking upright on two legs probably didn’t make our ancestors faster runners, nor did it necessarily make them better at spotting food sources or potential dangers; what it did (or so biologists think) was provide a small saving in the energy expended on locomotion, energy that could be redirected to other necessities, such as reproduction. Doesn’t seem that significant, perhaps, but over the long term, across populations, it could make all the difference to survival and reproduction rates.
Again, you’re assuming limits that we don’t know exist. ‘Natural causes’ might encompass capacities you automatically - but unnecessarily - assign to supernatural causes. We just don’t know, and may never know. My assumption is that we’re natural beings, and that therefore such realities as we may perceive are natural realities.
Does this include those committed by crusaders, inquisitors and suicide bombers?
Do you recognise the limits of human reason?
Au contraire - compassion, empathy, intelligence and attraction are all things we can only perceive using our senses. A person can use language to tell us what they believe they are like (or to give us the impression they’d like us to receive), but it’s only through a holistic sensory experience of seeing that person interacting with their environment that we can really build a sense of what they are like. Aesthetic attraction is very obviously connected to the senses; but compassion, empathy and intelligence are discerned by means of the relationship and interaction between a person and his surroundings. As to insight and mind - insight is the application of past experience to present and possible future circumstances; mind is the accumulation of information and properties manifested by the brain and body.
Your faith in science is touching but science presupposes intelligence.
Is intelligence purely computational? Doesn’t it entail insight?
Were they all lack insight? What do you think insight is? A configuration of molecular activity?
The simplest monocellular organisms have outlasted all the rest - and stand the best chance of doing so in the future! Size and complexity are gross disadvantages for survival.
These speculations do not alter the immense improbability of a process of progressive development which has culminated in the most astonishing achievement in the entire universe - without which such speculations wouldn’t even occur! If you had been a hypothetical observer of the Big Bang you have dismissed it out of hand because hindsight is always “wiser” than foresight. It amounts to believing that intelligence exists, therefore it had to exist. Why? In order to survive? Why does anything have to survive? Because something must survive! It is impossible for life not to exist!
How might ‘Natural causes’ encompass **all **the known capacities in the universe? It requires an act of faith in ‘Natural causes’ when it is not even clear what ‘Natural causes’ are. The goalposts are extended every time there is a new discovery.
It certainly includes the countless atrocities committed by atheist regimes, notably those based on Communism, i.e. dialectical materialism.
Do you know its limits?
Our senses do not interpret what they perceive. A mindless body knows nothing!
What constructs this holistic sensory experience? What co-ordinates, unifies and gives meaning to a multitude of perceptions?
Discernment presupposes abstract reasoning.
Mechanical application with no conceptual understanding of experience?
How can an accumulation of information and properties understand what it has accumulated? Does a computer have a mind? Does it understand what it is doing? Is it responsible for its activity?
Correcto mundo. Machines do not experience “disclosure”, the revelation of the way things “are” in themselves. Only humans have that experience.
Of course animals are not machines. The Nobel Prize winner Sir Charles Sherrington who was a neuroscience pioneer believed it is impossible to know at what level life has a spiritual element but he was convinced no organism is solely mechanistic. I referred to “biological machines” because that is the logical implication of materialism - confirmed by Sair’s claim that the mind is “the accumulation of information and properties manifested by the brain and body”.
I didn’t mean to impute to you the Cartesian idea that animals were machines. My wording was sloppy. I was actually correcting myself for some things I said about animals in previous postings.
No need to apologise! I didn’t think you were imputing it to me.
I was simply explaining the context of my reference to biological machines in case anyone thought I entertained such an absurd belief. 
The Blessed Trinity’s Love is obviously the greatest creative power and the closest parallel in our experience is the creative love of a man and a woman manifested in their child.
If there is nothing parallel to the Trinity we cannot be made in the image and likeness of God - which is obviously an unChristian view…
No, there is nothing parallel to the Trinity, except it to be fatuously imagined.
Statements like that are always detracting from Truth because their only foundation is in the wilds of the author’s mind, not from Scripture.
Then you would call some animals biological machines and others not? Is this merely a matter of complexity, or do the ‘higher’ animals have a ghost in the machine?
Actually, I would say that the process of reason is indeed a process of computation, but one that takes into account a vast number of variables and possibilities. If inanimate matter cannot retain information from the past to influence future actions, how do computers store information? How does my mobile phone learn predictive text preferences from my previous (name removed by moderator)ut?
I certainly don’t think my mind has any existence that is in any way independent of my body, or independent of the physical substance of my brain. What and where is the mind if it does not arise from physical phenomena? We’ve been over this territory before, and you’ve been quite expansive about what you insist the mind isn’t and can’t be, but somewhat less forthcoming on what you believe it is.
Have they, indeed? Yet they’ve been somewhat arbitrary in applying this distinction, if the record of history is anything to go by.
This is only a limit according to your rather restrictive concept of matter and other physical phenomena.
Some quantity, however, is required for quality. Your argument was based on the concept of the survival value of intelligence. I was merely pointing out that under certain circumstances, intelligence allows for survival where lesser intellectual ability might lose out. Do you think that if all humans died out, it would be of benefit to the rest of life on earth? I agree, but I wonder where this sentiment arises in the environment of Catholic faith.
Are they? What exactly is a biological machine? How would we distinguish between a biological machine and an animal?
Which is exactly how it was perceived in past centuries.
What makes you think that the relief of boredom and a lack of self-restraint are the prime motivators of polyamory? Is that just your restrictive, sex-negative view of human relationships? I’ll endeavour to explain this again - I don’t deliberately pursue intimate relationships with others for the sake of getting away from my husband or because I lack interest in him as a lover (in every sense), but I also don’t deliberately avoid or limit intimate attachments to others, and neither does he. I don’t consider that I am committing intellectual adultery if I have a deep philosophical discussion with someone other than my husband - I reiterate, why do you place sex on such a pedestal that it is the only form of intimacy that must not be shared with anyone to whom one is not married?
