🚀 go-pugleaf

Starbuck wrote in response to John McCarthy:

> >>>1. All religion formerly made scientific claims, because it was an
> attempt to understand and control the world, and some forms of
> religion still do.  Some present religious writers claim to make no
> scientific claims, but perhaps they do when they write about the mind.<<<
>
> "Science" is not an attempt to control the world.  That would be technology.
> Science is a process whereby the physical world can be understood.  This
> done through direct observation and measurement.  Religion attempts to
> answer questions of value, purpose and meaning.  Questions which good
> science assiduouly avoids for very good reason.  Science cannot answer such
> questions.

I think there is little doubt the adaptive value of cognition to an organism
stems
from increased control over the environment as a result of having better models

of it. Science is primarily aimed at the modeling end, and technology at the
control
end.  But in its roots, this is overall an adaptive learning process.

As to religious questions about value, purpose, meaning etc. I find it
remarkable
anyone could believe that psychology , evolutionary biology and neural science
can have nothing to say about these subjects. Economists already have plenty to

say about value, and  what they have to say is listened to far more  often in
social
decision making than what religions have to say . The idea that value theory is
the 0
exclusive province of religion doesn't stand up to observation.

> >>>2. It has turned out that the universe has no purpose that anyone has
> been able to make a convincing case for.  It is not a person that
> cares what we do or think.<<<
>
> Many persons are convinced that their life (and the world around them) is
> meaningful.

So what? E.g. maybe that's more or less inevitable given the way our brains
work.
That wouldn't make it true.

> Whether you or anyone else fails to be convinced is another
> question entirely.
>

The burden of proof is on those making the claim that such and such is "the
meaning
of  the universe".  Which purported meaning are you defending, and what is your

evidence?

>
> >>>3. Human purposefulness and morality has and must have human sources.<<<
>
> Human sources can provide purpose and morality.  I question whether one can
> logically assert that it MUST have human sources until one has examined and
> exhausted all other potential sources.  I sincerely doubt that anyone has
> even attempted such a heroic endeavor, let alone accomplished it
> successfully.
>

Perhaps purpose and morality are forms of adaptive information, which like all
adapations code certain features of an environment . Humans don't generate
all this information ex nihilo, with no natural selection working,  because
then it
would have no adaptive value. Some of undoubtedly has no adaptive value and
is a sort of ethical noise. But surely not all of it --  after all, we did get
here.

--
Alan McGowen