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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 19 Jun 2019

Taken: 03 Nov 2016

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Daniel Dennett •
2nd Excerpt •
The Really Hard Problem •
Owen Flanagan •
From Bacteria to Bach & back •
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On the Origin of Stories •
Brian Boyd •

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Skyhook

Skyhook
Among soldiers in the 1970s, there was no such thing as a sky hook. It was a fictional item used to send rookies on a wild goose chase.
6 comments - The latest ones
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
When we turn to Darwin’s bubble-up theory of creation, we can conceive of all the creative design work metaphorically as lifting in what I call ‘Design Space.” It has to start with the first crude replicators, …. And gradually ratchet up, by wave after wave of natural selection, to multicellular life in all its forms. In such a process really capable of having produced all the wonders we observe in the biosphere? Skeptics ever since Darwin have tried to demonstrate that one marvel or another is simply unapproachable by this laborious and unintelligent route. They have been searching for something alive but ‘unevolvable’. My term for such a phenomenon is a ‘skyhook’, hold up your pulley or whatever you want to lift. A skyhook floats high in Design Space, unsupported by ancestors, the direct result of a special act of intelligent creation. And time and again, these skeptics have discovered not a miraculous skyhook but a wonderful crane, a non-miraculous innovation in Design Space that enables ever more efficient exploration of the possibility of design, ever more powerful lifting in Design Space. Endosymbiosis is a crane; it lifted simple single cells into a realm of much complexity, where multicellular life could take off. Sex is a crane, it permitted gene pools to be stirred up, and thus much more effectively sampled by the blind trial-and error processes of natural selection. Language and culture are cranes, evolved novelties that opened up vast species of possibility to be explored by ever more intelligent (but not miraculously intelligent) designers. Without the addition of language and culture to the arsenal of R & D tools available to evolution, there wouldn’t be glow-in-the-dark tobacco plants with firefly genes in them. These are not miraculous. they are just as clearly fruits of the Tree of Life as spider webs and beaver dams, but the probability of their emerging without helping hand of the Homo sapiens and our cultural tools is nil. ~ Page 54
4 years ago. Edited 4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Darwin’s picture of human nature and the dawn of genuine sociality and eventually morality differs from Thrasymachus’s and Hobbes’s in two important respect. First, Darwin is a Humean, not a Hobbesian. To the extent that we are egoists with fellow-feeling. We care about the weal and woe of, at least, some others. Second, and this follows from the first point, morality is not “something altogether new on the face of the Earth.” It is not an invnetion de novo. Homo sapiens, presumably like their extinct social ancestors, as well as certain closely relates species, such as chimps and bonobos, possess instincts and emotions that are “proto-moral,” by which I simply mean that we possess the germs, at least, of the virtues of sympathy, compassion, fidelity, and courage. There is no “skyhook” being imputed here. We didn’t create the relevant instincts and emotions. Natural selection did. We are endowed with these instincts and feelings thanks to a craning operation that began with unicellular organisms. As Dennett (1995) rightly insists, if you really accept the Darwinian picture, there are no skyhooks, only cranes -- cranes all the way down. A crane -- a machine that is already grounded (and not itself very complex) -- lifts what is already there upward and onward, sometimes making something stable and new. Skyhooks, if there are any, hang up there, on their own as it were, drawing into being that which did not exist before the skyhook drew whatever it is into being. God is a skyhook; natural selection is a crane. ~ Page 45
4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
THE REALLY HARD PROBLEM
4 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Our capacity to think beyond the here and now has made out species distinctively different. It has led to attempted explanations at a level deeper than the visible. Until the emergence of science, such superhuman explanations have been all too human and flawed. Even scientific hypotheses are fictions of a kind, but science’s invented stories offer explanation without what Daniel Dennett calls “skyhooks” -- without top-down forces, without mental or spiritual agents -- and restrict themselves to what he calls “cranes,” explanations building slowly from the ground up, from the simple to the complex, rather than hanging answers from the heavens.

Science has improved immensely on the fictive agential explanations of the past -- although even scientists find they cannot help anthropomorphizing causal factors; but science could not have begun without our persistent inclination and ability to think beyond the here and now, to invent agents and scenarios not limited to the actual or the probably but exploring also the merely possible or the eerily improbably ~ Page 202 (On the Origin of Stories_ ~ Author Brian Boyd
3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
ON THE ORIGIN OF STOIRES
3 years ago.