Free-Will & Morality

Do you believe in free-will? The current prevalent philosophical view is that we don't have free-will...  that we are a deterministic aggregate of our life experiences and of our genetics.  That what we do or say or even our thoughts are predetermined.  This, of course has a tremendous impact on the question of "morality".  If we don't have free-will, then we also can't be held responsible for our actions.  On what do you base a moral framework in the absence of free-will?

Although I'm still not convinced that we don't have some kind of free will I think that Naturalists and Pantheists can build a moral framework using evolution. That IMO is the only way that science can purport to to have a moralistic framework.

Even though a person may be a product of random genetics and random environments or experiences and that person reasons a choice based on this then he/she must still be held accountable for their actions based on the fact that human society should have an evolution based morality where the good of society trumps the freedom of an individual who chooses an action that is detrimental to society, and therefore to the maximum propagation of the species and the fact that the perpetrator of such action does not deserve to propagate and should therefore be incarcerated for as long as it takes to rehabilitate him/her, if at all possible. Based on evolution, retribution is also a valid natural human emotion and should come into play as well. There is also, of course, the deterrent value of social justice.

Someone might say, well evolution is about survival of the fittest to which I respond it isn't, it is the survival of the species that is the most important factor. In that sense it is the perpetrator of an anti-social behavior that is the weakest link.

Emergence of the Mind

Do you believe that emergence of the mind is explained by evolution?  I don't.  I think that there is something very special about the universe/ nature that led to the emergence of the mind.  Or is it vice versa? The following is startling in its conclusion.  From various sources:

"In his book "Mind and Cosmos", Thomas Nagel (a very highly regarded philosopher of science) argues that the materialist version of evolutionary biology is unable to account for the existence of mind and consciousness, and is therefore at best incomplete. He writes that mind is a basic aspect of nature, and that any philosophy of nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally misguided. He argues that the standard physico-chemical reductionist account of the emergence of life – that it emerged out of a series of accidents, acted upon by the mechanism of natural selection, flies in the face of common sense."

"Nagel's position is that principles of an entirely different kind may account for the emergence of life, and in particular conscious life, and that those principles may be teleological, rather than materialist or mechanistic."

Internet & Human Knowledge

The idea that we have, through the Internet, all of the human knowledge, at the tip of our fingers is patently false.  We have the greatest almanac, encyclopedia, academic papers, etc. We can find information about just any topic you can think of.  What is not there is deep knowledge of particular topics.  Take engineering for instance.  Will the internet help you solve complex engineering problems requiring knowledge of power series of differential equations or vector differential calculus or complex integrals, or Taylor and Laurent series, or Laplace transformations, or the knowledge of which will help you solve your problem.  This is true of so many fields of endeavour.

So no, the Internet does not provide all of the human knowledge.  Instead, HEAVY USE encourages us to become a non-thinking web surfer where we acquire superficial knowledge about many topics.  There is evidence from many studies that the Internet is actually changing our brain’s neuronal structure, in a bad way.  We start looking for instant gratification from our search engines and have difficulty reading a document to the end, often because we get lost in the hyperlinks and ancillary knowledge.  It is gradually depriving our brain of the capacity to concentrate deeply on a single subject, the ability to read books and retain them in long term memory.  We lose the ability for critical thinking and creativity.

If you are an expert in a field, then the Internet can be of great value to you… unless you start spending two hours a day or more, randomly surfing the web or follow too many FB groups, emails, and text messages on your smartphone.  There are strategies that you can use to evade this pervasive, invasive, time wasting, technology.  You can have your email refresh only every hour, you can get apps that block certain web sites (e.g., facebook.com, google.com, etc.) for certain time periods in your days…

Nature Epiphany

I remember that one morning about 37 years ago, like it was yesterday. I was at University and six of us had gone canoe camping in Algonquin Provincial Park in eastern Ontario. We had portaged to that pristine lake and canoed on to a small island on the lake. I got up alone at dawn. It was cool and crisp. The air had this special smell of damp nature. I walked across to the other side of the island and sat on a rock by the lake. There was this mist rising above the mirror like lake. Then, I saw a sort of triangular wave coming across the lake. It was a beaver swimming along in the mist. It ducked its head down and slapped the water hard with its tail. I hadn't really realized it then, but I just had had an epiphany sitting there by the lake alone with nature. I believe that I became a Pantheist right then and there although I only heard that term and recognized that fact 32 years forth. I have had many beautiful and special nature moments since but nothing like that one morning marked in my soul forever.

I was so naive and one-dimensional back then, at 21. All I was interested about was hockey, football, girls and my science/ engineering studies. I was raised a Catholic, went to Catholic school and all I knew is that I rejected all that had been crammed into my head. I didn't even know what an atheist or agnostic were, never mind a Pantheist. It makes me smile how innocent I was back then. I had no sense of searching for spirituality or other interests. As a child I had been raised in the middle of nature at the edge of a small village and my cousins and I used to go into the woods to play all the time. I had forgotten that closeness with nature moving to the big city for my studies. After the canoe trip above, something fundamental changed in me. I wanted to know more about the world and my place in it.

Intuition & Intellect

I think that in modern society, intellect and activity are given more credit than is due. There is an equal, though unacknowledged, value in emotions, intuition (requiring inactivity), and love. This devaluation of feeling is one of the ways that men have devalued women and the immediacy of nature. I feel that when we return to equal evaluation of feelings, it will be a giant step towards harmony with Nature - which is so sorely needed for the evolution of humankind.

It’s not a secret that humanity needs to reconnect with nature and its sacredness.  I do not believe that viewing nature with the intellect precludes this. I believe that the main problem is that most humans have a blasé attitude towards nature. In fact Emerson, in his essay “Nature”, posits just this. He is very much in awe of the Universe and Nature. I think that in modern society, that none of the two are present in many people ... I believe that many today know this if you judge by the proliferation of very popular books on "reconnecting with the sacred nature”.  The intellect is equally important to love, intuition and emotions. You find this great awe of Nature by very popular scientists, physicists, biologist, and literature etc.  Authors like R. Dawkins, N.D. Tyson, W. Whitman, etc. inspire awe in nature through the intellect but also through our emotional response to nature/cosmos.  I believe that not enough people, including pantheists, regard nature from an intellectual perspective.  Even hunter/gatherers "knew", nature through their intellect: where/which to find edible plants/roots, plants with medicinal properties; animal behavior, how to hunt; track and draw animals into traps, etc... But they were also very "connected" to the sacredness of nature.

Mindless

Driving a winding road
I was tempted to rise
And rake the trees with my fingers,
To plunge my hands in the river,
And drink all of it;
To breath all the air above,
To lay down from one horizon to the other
And feel the soft nature underneath.
Then to stand up and eat the sun,
To wave my arms and thread the stars,
To swim in the galaxies
And drown in them.

About Scientists

Is there really a core of scientists or institutions that control all of science; and have so much power? No. It is the politicians who hold the funding and are happy with coal and oil burning for electricity generation and running cars too. There are many disciplines in science but I do not believe that they're trying to sell their brand of reality like religious sects. This is a misrepresentation. Each discipline want to add to the knowledge that humanity holds. Are scientists nobler than the rest of humanity... of course not. Scientists have the same good and bad traits that the rest of humans have. Are the ideals of the scientific pursuit noble? Yes. It is much nobler than the ideals of dogmatic Abrahamic religions are. Have "science and our technological wonders outstripped our human ethics"? Perhaps, but to what extent are we willing to backtrack?

It is applied sciences, technology, like housing and cars and jumbo jets and bridges and 100-story buildings, with all the supporting factories, steel mills, etc. that use all this dirty electrical energy or coal burning... Is it not those scientists and engineers that merit our scorn? Well yes and no! If we are going to criticize science, we need to be more specific about exactly what we're talking about. Science covers a lot of disciplines... and not all are of equal value or deserving of funding or criticism. It is a matter of priority. Then, there are technologies that provide us with our toys, like large screen LED TVs and surround sound, iPods, computers, tablets and smartphones, etc. How much coal or oil do you think is burnt every year to support all the industries mentioned? Are we ready to give up those technologies or move from our 1,500 sq.ft. home to a 1,000 sq.ft. home or stop flying. Are we ready to give up A/C in cars and homes?

It seems to me that it is bashing science in general that is open for debate. I do not believe that science claims to have dominion over nature like some religions do. In fact the scientific method is trying to explain nature using reasoning, empiricism, theory and experimentation... and honest scientists will readily admit that we are far from knowing everything about nature. And I do believe that some scientific endeavours such as with hot fusion research can dig us out of the nightmare of burning fossil fuels which is the true problem presently underlying science and technology.

Electronic Books

I refuse to move to electronic books.  How many of you, book readers, have switched to kindle? Amazon’s  Kindle reader has all the features one could hope for, hundreds of books at your hand, highlighting passages, inserting comments, searching online dictionaries, listening to mp3s, download books, etc… but it also is turning books into hypertext documents and here is the main problem, distractions.   Books are being turned into web sites.

I’m reading Pulitzer finalist book “What the Internet is doing to our brains – The Shallows” by N. Carr, and it has opened my eyes very wide to how the Internet and smartphones are causing our brains to be structurally changed; in such a way that we are being trained for instant gratification of finding information quickly and are degenerating, gradually, to a much shorter attention span; and therefore the ability to take a book and read and understand a hundred pages in one sitting; to have the attention span for deep learning, for deep knowledge.  Instead we are skimming very quickly documents on the web and learn only superficially.  There is a lot more to this than I’m letting on now… If you are at all concerned of how Internet technologies are affecting us and especially our children, you must take the time to read that book I mentioned.

Are we Alone in the Universe

Do you believe that there are many other advanced civilizations on planets around other stars in the galaxy?  Carl Sagan said something like this “if we are alone in the universe it would be an amazing waste of space”. I believe otherwise, that it is quite possible that we are the only planet in the galaxy with a technologically advanced civilization. The emergence of life, from unicellular to intelligent, on planets, particularly here on earth. Here are some corroborative facts I’ve been reading from various sources. 

If we suppose that life is easy to start (which I'm not entirely convinced, The RNA world hypothesis has many problems and is difficult to validate), a technological civilization like ours is certainly not easy to come by. There was an amazing consilience of events that occurred in the solar system and on earth that made possible the advent of advanced sentient life on earth. 

Just to name one, when the solar system formed planets there were five rocky planets and four gaseous planets initially. The fifth rocky planet, Theia, was about the size of mars and had an iron core similar to the earth. Fortunately Theia had an orbit very close to that of the earth. At some point, soon after the creation of the solar system, it collided with earth. The effect was that the outer crust of the earth and Theia were blasted into space and formed the moon.

This event was very conducive to creating life on earth including simple unicellular and higher life forms. The main reasons are:

- the formation of a thin crust, and therefore plate tectonics which enabled the formation of land instead of a water world and helped regulate climate

- the formation of a large iron core which created a strong magnetic field thus deflecting the life harmful charged particles (from the sun, etc.)

- because the moon is so large it acts as a stabilizer of the earth's 23 degree inclination. Before the formation of the moon the earth's inclination varied from 0 to 90 degrees which created havoc with climate made the earth not very conducive to create life

- the production of tides highly responsible for life migrating from water to land

There are dozens of effects that the formation of the moon enabled not only life, but intelligent life on earth. In addition to the formation of the moon there were a large number of factors that enabled the formation of our mother planet with just the right combination of elements, orbit, etc. for a technological civilization to emerge.

Is the Internet bad for our Minds

Have you noticed that you have less concentration when reading books, over the past several years? What do you make of the following?

In the book “What the Internet is doing to our Brains – The Shallows” by N. Carr (Pulitzer prize finalist), the following passage struck me: “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, re-programming the memory… I’m not thinking the way I used to.  I feel it more strongly when I’m reading… Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two.  I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do… I think I know what’s going on.  For over a decade, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing… the web’s been a godsend to me as a writer… The boons are real. But they come at a price… media aren’t just channels of information.  They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”. 

He claims that our brain neural pathways are physiologically changed by our use of the Internet. In the rest of the book he attempts to demonstrate this thesis scientifically.  This is mind boggling if it turns out to be true. I can’t wait to read the rest of this book.