Louis
Posts: 6436
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote (Reciprocating Bill @ Sep. 01 2007,13:58) | | Quote (Louis @ Sep. 01 2007,03:57) | To be fair Bill, I have mentioned (only in passing) the huge amount of data from a variety of studies neurological, sociological, psychological etc. But you're right, we haven't delved into this huge and very interesting aspect of the discussion properly yet. I was hoping we'd get there eventually. I've tried to get people to focus on the core aspects of the epistemological conflict because that is where the only real aspect of conflict genuinely lies. The reason I've tried to do this is because from there everything flows easily.
Louis |
This was implicit in your opening posts. I nudged the conversation this direction in part because the focus of religion/science questions often remains stuck on questions of deities and origins, including the origins of moral codes (as though those are the sole questions that animate religious ardor), when I think that another important engine is the problem of death. The notion of an immortal soul is essentially encapsulated denial vis death. Plus, although deities and origins are quite "remote," the notion of "soul" intrudes right here (RB raps skull with knuckles) or here (lays hand on chest), and is DOING things (RB commits a sin for demonstration purposes only), and conflicts with our understanding of biological reality quite locally.
| Quote | | Incidentally these studies give lie to the claim that reason cannot investigate moral, ethical and aesthetic areas. It seems your "fans" have ignored this bit ;) |
Lenny briefly advanced a notion that goes to this - which I think is a subset of the more general problem (and it is a real problem) of how to reconcile agency with a complete causal picture of the world - when he stated "As I said before, even if we discover right down to the molecular level why person X holds this opinion and person Y holds that one, that STILL doesn't tell us which opinion is correct." This points to the fact that "physical explanations" and "reason explanations," which both seem obvious in an of themselves, are hard to reconcile*. A topic for another post.
(*see Schueler, G. F. (2001). Action Explanations: Causes and Purposes. In B. F. Malle, L. J. Moses, & D. A. Baldwin (Eds.), Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.) |
Oh absolutely!
Re: reasoned explorations of morals etc:
As you know, I've gone into a reasonable level of basic detail trying to explain how this (in principle) is done. And unlike Lenny's caricature, I don't pretend at all to claim to have a method of distinguishing which opinion is correct in the absence of context (both interest and environment). I don't expect to be able to get a complete causal picture of the world (far from it!), but I don't see why in principle a coherent first approximation is impossible, and that includes cognitive phenomena.
Thanks for the reference, I've just found a copy on the web of that chapter, so I'll give it a look and get back to you. (ADDED IN EDIT: PIGS KNACKERS! It's only the first two pages. Mumble...library.....groan...rhubarb...moan)
Louis
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Bye.
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