Teleology important for science

[Bradski]

Love can refer to an emotion, but it need not.

Love is an act of will aimed at promoting the well-being or good of those loved. It may or may not be accompanied by an emotion. Ergo, love is NOT “…simply an emotion."

That’s like saying that hate does not necessarily refer to an emotion because hate is an act of will related to smacking someone in the head. Of course, smacking them in the head may or may not be accompanied by an emotion.

It may or may not? Methinks it may indeed.

 

[inocente]

A person, even a child, might feel or sense an injustice or unfairness has occurred, but that would only be the result of and after having an idea of what constitutes justice or fairness. The “sense” would arise from the understanding, not the understanding from the sense.

But Paul says “the requirements of the law are written on their hearts”. There’s evidence that all social species may have a sense of fairness, as a necessary requirement for cooperating in groups.

Seems that a sense of justice is innate, since those without it, psychopaths, are treated as having a disorder. They can’t be taught to understand justice, as they just don’t have the ability to sense it.

 

[inocente]

The anti-teleology people might want to try to explain why it is that Mozart is so universally beloved.

First, you’d have to prove he is. Granted that most people like and even need music of some kind, but which kind is subjective. Maasai tribesmen may not agree with you about Mozart. And for instance this Mingus has three times as many views as that piece.

 

[tonyrey]

Tony was asking if those concepts could be explained scientifically as they, presumably, relate to the mind. It is the mind we are talking about. And naturally they can. I didn’t say, because it would be a bizarre proposal, that they are ONLY emotions or senses (with the exception of love, which I guess you realised IS simply an emotion so thought better to leave it out).

Justice and freedom are the easy ones. It isn’t just the 5 senses we have. There are very many indeed and justice, for example, is sensed emotionally. It doesn’t have to be explained and is not taught nor is it a learned response. Very young children experience it automatically. It’s one of the things that is hard wired into all of us. Because…well, it was useful in the grand scheme of things. We feel it emotionally. Chemicals and electrical impulses when we experience it. Likewise a sense of freedom.

But truth and goodness? Well, these are slippery little terms when used on a religious forum. They are usually preceded by the indefinite article and capitalised: The Truth and The Good. What they specifically mean when used in that way is entirely dependent on who is using it.

But I’ll use them in the everyday sense and will agree that truth can come out of the list. Something is true or not totally independent of our emotional response to it. So I’ll give you that one. But good? Again, we recognise something as being good on an emotional level. We sense it. That stays.

I admire your courage and honesty in conceding that truth is independent of our fears, wishes, feelings and emotions. In other words it is an objective aspect of reality which doesn’t fit into the materialist’s scheme of things because it cannot be perceived by the senses. You are in good company with the logical positivists who abandoned their theory when they realised the principle of verification cannot be verified empirically. This is where the power of the mind transcends neural impulses and explains how we have insight and understanding which are unique on this planet. As Pascal pointed out:

346 Thought constitutes the greatness of man.

347 Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity consists then in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endeavour then to think well; this is the principle of morality.

Pensées

It also follows that goodness is objective because reasoning is valuable, whether we like it or not, and it doesn’t pay to be unreasonable…

 

[goout]

That’s like saying that hate does not necessarily refer to an emotion because hate is an act of will related to smacking someone in the head. Of course, smacking them in the head may or may not be accompanied by an emotion.

It may or may not? Methinks it may indeed.

No analogy there.
A good case can be made that indifference is the opposite of love, not hate.
Indifference is the complacent stagnation of the will.
It “steps over” the other without consideration.
Indifference does not move out to another in any way.

 

[Peter_Plato]

That’s like saying that hate does not necessarily refer to an emotion because hate is an act of will related to smacking someone in the head. Of course, smacking them in the head may or may not be accompanied by an emotion.

It may or may not? Methinks it may indeed.

Even so, the question of how the hate came about hinges upon having reasons for hating someone. Individuals hate other individuals largely because of what others have done to them – acts of will which created the emotion of hate after consideration of those hateful acts. The emotion doesn’t just arise for no reason.

So whether or not the love or the hate are accompanied by an emotion doesn’t refute that the emotion arises from the reasons and not vice versa, at least in rational or thinking human beings. Sure, normal human beings may have feelings of love or hate but those feelings come about for reasons which have the assent of the person doing the loving or hateful act – unless we are talking about psychopaths, which we weren’t.

 

[Peter_Plato]

But I’ll use them in the everyday sense and will agree that truth can come out of the list. Something is true or not totally independent of our emotional response to it. So I’ll give you that one. But good? Again, we recognise something as being good on an emotional level. We sense it. That stays.

If “something is true or not” is “totally independent of our emotional response to it,” I would argue that something being good or not is just as “totally independent of our emotional response to it.”

Think about it. Do we always get right what is truly good for us over the long term? We might want things and think they are good for us, but quite often we are mistaken. The acknowledgement that “I like it” or “I want it” followed by “…but is it truly good for me?” makes sense because we understand at our core that our emotions quite often deceive us and lead us in directions we ought not go. We may “sense” something being good on an emotional level, but we just as often are led by our emotions into betraying the good and choosing otherwise because those same emotions can trample over or ignore what is truly good.

 

[tonyrey]

I admire your courage and honesty in conceding that truth is independent of our fears, wishes, feelings and emotions. In other words it is an objective aspect of reality which doesn’t fit into the materialist’s scheme of things because it cannot be perceived by the senses. You are in good company with the logical positivists who abandoned their theory when they realised the principle of verification cannot be verified empirically. This is where the power of the mind transcends neural impulses and explains how we have insight and understanding which are unique on this planet. It also follows that goodness is objective because reasoning is valuable, whether we like it or not, and it doesn’t pay to be unreasonable…

I should add that reason and emotion aren’t mutually exclusive where truth and goodness are concerned. Pascal rightly believed ““The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by reason, but by the heart”. The same principle applies to justice and freedom because we feel so strongly about our rights we are prepared to fight and even die for them in extreme cases. They obviously have a rational foundation if we exist in a rational universe; otherwise they present an insurmountable problem…

 

[Bradski]

If “something is true or not” is “totally independent of our emotional response to it,” I would argue that something being good or not is just as “totally independent of our emotional response to it.”

Think about it. Do we always get right what is truly good for us over the long term? We might want things and think they are good for us, but quite often we are mistaken. The acknowledgement that “I like it” or “I want it” followed by “…but is it truly good for me?” makes sense because we understand at our core that our emotions quite often deceive us and lead us in directions we ought not go. We may “sense” something being good on an emotional level, but we just as often are led by our emotions into betraying the good and choosing otherwise because those same emotions can trample over or ignore what is truly good.

I’m talking again at the emotional level. Which is generally the level at which we make decisions about what is good or bad. Good being defined as something which would serve a benefit. Or to be more accurate, which would have been (or still is) beneficial in the long run when the emotional architecture was being constructed.

And I agree, the decisions we make at an emotional level are not always beneficial to the individual in particular cicumstances. I wouldn’t recommend ‘if it feels good, do it’ as a rule for long term success, although I often get accused, as an atheist, of promoting it.

But it does explain why we feel, for example, that altruistic behaviour is good. Despite using valuable time, energy and resources helping others with no immediate possibilty of a return on investment, we unconsciously know that it encourages reciprocal altruism. Why do we think that having sex with a sibling is bad? Becuase we unconsciously know that it’s a bad way to pass on your genes.

You don’t have to dig too deep to discover the reasons why we perceive things as being good or bad. You just need to know where to dig.

 

[Bradski]

Pascal rightly believed "“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…

He simply didn’t know where to look for the reason.

 

[o_mlly]

… at a minimum, children’s cognitive mechanisms were selected over evolutionary time to ‘assume’ that certain things tend to be true of the world and of human life’ (Cosmides and Tooby 1994: 106-7)

In other words, we have an in-built sense of, for example, justice.

And to think of all the time and effort philosophers have spent to understand the idea of justice when they could have simply asked their kid.

Yes, children may cross-claim quite often against each other, “That’s not fair!” but just as often, their perception of justice is wrong. One of the cross-claiming children must be wrong but both “feel” right.

Justice, properly understood, is an intelligible concept; not an emotional percept.

 

[Peter_Plato]

But Paul says “the requirements of the law are written on their hearts”. There’s evidence that all social species may have a sense of fairness, as a necessary requirement for cooperating in groups.

Seems that a sense of justice is innate, since those without it, psychopaths, are treated as having a disorder. They can’t be taught to understand justice, as they just don’t have the ability to sense it.

I think the way that Paul used the word “heart” is the same way that Jesus used it when he said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” The “heart” is the core of the person, that which is the core of being at the heart of the individual.

In traditional orthodox Christianity and classical moral theology with foundations in both Judaism and the best of Ancient Greek philosophy, the individual or person is comprised of three aspects:

1. the mind or rationality of the person whose proper object is the truth,
2. the will of the person whose proper object is what is truly good, and
3. the senses or emotional aspect of the person which have as their proper object true beauty.

The “heart” of the person is where these three aspects come together to form the person.

When Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart…” What he is saying is blessed are those who are purely and completely, “with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your being” wholly and completely (purely) seeking the true, the good and the beautiful (aka God.)

So what it is that is “written on the heart” is not merely transcribed onto the emotions, but the mind seeking for the truth, the will for the good and the desires or emotions for the beautiful. So it isn’t purely the emotional aspect of a person which counts as the “heart,” it is all three aspects properly aligned – the mind to the truth, the will to the true good and the senses to the truly beautiful – which comprises the heart upon which all three ends have been “written” by God.

Any attempt to reduce the heart purely to the emotions should be resisted, precisely because the mind is required to identify and seek the truth, and the will to choose what the mind (reason) has helped identify as the proper good, and the senses to desire what the mind and will have made clear is the truly good and proper object of each human desire (the beautiful.)

It is this alignment within the person of mind, will and desires which makes someone “pure of heart,” i.e., where false beliefs are outed, the will is focused on the proper goods, and all desires are refined and purified accordingly.

 

[levinas12]

Please recall that integral to Catholic belief is the resurrection of the body. This has been so from the very early Church Fathers and implicit in Jesus’ rising from the dead. Certainly our bodies will be glorified, but the Church has never embraced the idea of disembodied souls who are “freed” from material existence. That is a Gnostic notion.

Still, the fact is that human persons can exist without their bodies. I stress “person” here because “soul” might be confusing. “Soul” is the “form” of a living body, “form” being understood as what accounts for all the operations of that living body. As such, “soul” at least in the Aristotlean sense cannot exist apart from the body. But “person” in some way can exist apart from the body. This is why we can distinguish between “soul” and “person”.

An unanswered but interesting question - what principle of operation belongs to the human person after death but before bodily resurrection?

For example, I am assuming that the saints can intercede for us - and, to do so, they must able to “see” us, to be “aware” of what’s happening in our world. But how do they “perceive” us when they don’t have their bodies?

I think that God has to supernaturally intervene here. This cannot happen naturally.

So Descartes’ cogito, at least to this extent, is vindicated.

This is not gnosticism.

 

[Peter_Plato]

And read anything by Cosmides and Tooby, in particular their brick of a book: ‘The Adapted Mind’. They suggest, with a gargantuan number of references to studies that agree with them, that these type of concepts are innate. Hard wired. What they call ‘domain specific procedures’. The old idea of the mind as a tabula rasa is still around, but there aren’t many that still support it, certainly since Kohlburg died in ’87.

‘The new research on domain-specific reasoning in cognitive development indicates that the human mind is permeated with content and organisation that does not originate in the social world. At a minimum, children’s cognitive mechanisms were selected over evolutionary time to ‘assume’ that certain things tend to be true of the world and of human life’ (Cosmides and Tooby 1994: 106-7)

In other words, we have an in-built sense of, for example, justice.

Merely because the “content and organization” does not originate in the social world does not, by default, mean it had to have been “evolved” by natural selection processes. That would be a presumption on your part.

Even if children are “hard-wired” for survival within a normalized human community does not imply that such hard-wiring towards looking out for themselves to ensure survival (egoism) is necessarily anti-moral or immoral.

I haven’t read Kohlberg in a while, but he never struck me as someone who fully endorsed the idea of tabula rasa, quite the opposite, in fact.

I would argue that we do have a “built-in” sense of justice, but that “built-in” sense is far more encompassing than merely having an emotional proclivity towards justice. It would be a “built-in” (and teleological) alignment towards the true, the good and the beautiful. See my previous post.

The idea of justice – to each his due – positively smacks of teleology precisely because what is “owed,” in both all immediate and final senses, to each moral agent is defined by the end towards which each exist in the first place.

Treat like things alike provides the “form” of justice, but the content of HOW like things ought to be treated can ONLY come from a teleological understanding of justice.

Ergo, any sense of justice must be moored on teleology and an understanding of how things like human moral agency works in order for a proper and complete “sense” of justice to be developed within any individual – to bring this tangent back to the thread topic.

So a “sense of justice,” to be meaningful and proper, must grasp what human beings are and towards which ends they exist, otherwise the “sense” becomes completely empty and void of any value whatsoever. In other words, justice must transcend mere feelings within the individual and attend to reasons why other moral agents exist in the first place in order to determine the nature of what would be good and just (the proper due) for them.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Still, the fact is that human persons can exist without their bodies. I stress “person” here because “soul” might be confusing. “Soul” is the “form” of a living body, “form” being understood as what accounts for all the operations of that living body. As such, “soul” at least in the Aristotlean sense cannot exist apart from the body. But “person” in some way can exist apart from the body. This is why we can distinguish between “soul” and “person”.

An unanswered but interesting question - what principle of operation belongs to the human person after death but before bodily resurrection?

For example, I am assuming that the saints can intercede for us - and, to do so, they must able to “see” us, to be “aware” of what’s happening in our world. But how do they “perceive” us when they don’t have their bodies?

I think that God has to supernaturally intervene here. This cannot happen naturally.

So Descartes’ cogito, at least to this extent, is vindicated.

This is not gnosticism.

This post by Edward Feser might resolve your issue:

edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2012/03/what-is-soul.html#more

 

[Peter_Plato]

That’s like saying that hate does not necessarily refer to an emotion because hate is an act of will related to smacking someone in the head. Of course, smacking them in the head may or may not be accompanied by an emotion.

It may or may not? Methinks it may indeed.

Since you brought it up, I think there is a distinction to be made even on the emotional side of what human beings consider love to be.

If love, as an emotion, is strictly defined as “a strong attraction towards someone or something,” the problem is that there is no moral inference to be made with regard to how that someone or something will be or ought to be treated by the one exhibiting the love.

Why, for example, does this man have this attraction (love) towards this woman? It could be strictly carnal or ego flattering or from a host of other causes or reasons. Where are the moral implications to be made with regard to using “attraction” purely as the “sense” from which – you seem to be insisting – morality is to derive? There doesn’t appear to be any particular moral inference to be made strictly from the fact that the man has the attraction (love) to the woman.

On the other hand, if love, properly understood, is willing the good for the other, then love becomes a virtue in the Aristotelian sense of a power of the soul. Again, this may or may not be accompanied by some emotion or other, but that would depend upon the state of the soul (the level of corruption or incorruption) of that person.

Ideally, individuals ought to feel strong emotions with regard to caring for the well-being of others, but, being fallen human beings, sometimes our emotions don’t align because we are tired, exhausted, confused, conflicted or something else. I would submit that someone who doesn’t “feel” like showing concern for the well-being of another but nonetheless acts to their benefit is being quite heroic precisely because they are more concerned with the well-being of the other than they are with maintaining a self-flattering sense of themselves. They likely, in fact, have sufficient control over their wayward emotions to know that those emotions are disordered or unwarranted.

If your view of things is correct, human beings could never act against their emotions or would never have thoughts that were in conflict with those emotions. Both of which just seem patently false.

 

[o_mlly]

I think the way that Paul used the word “heart” is the same way that Jesus used it when he said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” The “heart” is the core of the person, that which is the core of being at the heart of the individual.

…

The term “heart” (kardia) is never used in the New Testament to refer to the physical organ of man as the term is used when reference is made to heart in the Old Testament. But the Hebrews also used the term in reference to the non-material nature of man. The use grew from the concept that the heart is essential to physical life. It was a natural transition to bring the term over to the spiritual world as was done by the time of the ministry of Jesus. The New Testament sees the heart figuratively as the center of the real person, the center of spiritual life.

biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/grace-journal/12-1_36.pdf

 

[inocente]

I think the way that Paul used the word “heart” is the same way that Jesus used it when he said, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” The “heart” is the core of the person, that which is the core of being at the heart of the individual.

In traditional orthodox Christianity and classical moral theology with foundations in both Judaism and the best of Ancient Greek philosophy, the individual or person is comprised of three aspects:

1. the mind or rationality of the person whose proper object is the truth,
2. the will of the person whose proper object is what is truly good, and
3. the senses or emotional aspect of the person which have as their proper object true beauty.

The “heart” of the person is where these three aspects come together to form the person.

When Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart…” What he is saying is blessed are those who are purely and completely, “with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your being” wholly and completely (purely) seeking the true, the good and the beautiful (aka God.)

So what it is that is “written on the heart” is not merely transcribed onto the emotions, but the mind seeking for the truth, the will for the good and the desires or emotions for the beautiful. So it isn’t purely the emotional aspect of a person which counts as the “heart,” it is all three aspects properly aligned – the mind to the truth, the will to the true good and the senses to the truly beautiful – which comprises the heart upon which all three ends have been “written” by God.

Any attempt to reduce the heart purely to the emotions should be resisted, precisely because the mind is required to identify and seek the truth, and the will to choose what the mind (reason) has helped identify as the proper good, and the senses to desire what the mind and will have made clear is the truly good and proper object of each human desire (the beautiful.)

It is this alignment within the person of mind, will and desires which makes someone “pure of heart,” i.e., where false beliefs are outed, the will is focused on the proper goods, and all desires are refined and purified accordingly.

I agree but would go further - the Hebrews didn’t make any of the various divisions such as intellect/will/emotion which philosophers have made. The heart is in all respects the center of the person. See verses for instance here - biblestudytools.com/dictionary/heart/

I see now that Brad referred to emotion, but I meant simply that unless we have a disorder such as psychopathy, we’re born with the capability to be moral. We’re moral agents by nature. We can learn to make better decisions but the raw capability, the sense of fairness or justice, without labeling it emotion or reason, is there at birth.

btw regarding hate, while romantic love appears to suppress some higher brain functions, one study (and it’s only one) found that hate is more reasoned and calculating:

“A marked difference in the cortical pattern produced by these two sentiments of love and hate is that, whereas with love large parts of the cerebral cortex associated with judgment and reasoning become deactivated, with hate only a small zone, located in the frontal cortex, becomes deactivated. This may seem surprising since hate can also be an all-consuming passion, just like love. But whereas in romantic love, the lover is often less critical and judgmental regarding the loved person, it is more likely that in the context of hate the hater may want to exercise judgment in calculating moves to harm, injure or otherwise extract revenge.” - ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/08010/08102901/#sthash.gBdDBa2O.dpuf

 

[Charlemagne_III]

When Pascal (scientist, philosopher, mathematician, theologian) spoke of the reasons of the heart he was opposing those reasons to the reasons of the head. The reasons of the head are reasons that can be explained with a limited degree of certainty and completeness as a result of following logic to its conclusions. The reasons of the heart are visceral, at the center of our being, and often as not involve the functions of our emotions, our imagination, and our intuitions which are fundamental to our being whether or not we can logically describe them. The reasons of the heart, it may be said, are holistic, whereas the reasons of the head are purely analytical. This is why music will always be more visceral and popular than logic, though we need both to survive and give joy to our lives. And this is why religion will always be more popular and visceral than atheism, because God designed us to desire eternity rather than be resigned to nothingness.

 

[levinas12]

This post by Edward Feser might resolve your issue:

Thanks. Feser is helpful in explicating “soul” as a principle of operations for a living entity but, in the case of a human being, he might be conflating “soul” and “person”. “Soul” is not an entity at least in Aristotle; it is a “form” or “template” or “pattern” that is common to a plurality of living beings. Apart from our matter, your “soul” and my “soul” are the same.

After Aristotle, “soul” became more “entified” so to speak; so in Christianity, we hear about the salvation of individual souls. Here, “soul” gets much closer to “person” and is seen as a being in its own right. There was already something of this in neo-platonic circles. This view continued down to modern times in vitalism (and Hegelian Geist).

But this conflation of “soul” and “person” led to some difficulties. In Aristotle, “soul” gets individuated by “matter”; so, without “matter”, no individual “soul”. This poses a problem for Christian theologians. Thomas moved “soul” closer to “person” by arguing that each of us has his or her own agent intellect (in contradistinction to other Aristotelians who asserted the unicity and externality of the agent intellect).

But the question remains - can human intellection take place without matter. What’s curious is that Aristotle himself did posit immaterial intelligent beings (who moved the spheres) as well as a supreme immaterial Mind.

But the human agent intellect cannot operate without matter (or, more precisely, the material modification in the brain involved in the notion of the phantasm). Here Aristotle would agree with the most rabid neuroscientist.

So what happens to us after death?

Feser’s stub of a human form seems too much like a shade of Hades. I would argue instead for a more robust entity, the human person, as opposed to a human soul which is not really an entity anyway - and this postmortem human person has an enhanced ability to perceive what’s going on down here as well as what’s going on in heaven. A being not angelic, but not as debased as in Feser.