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What is your dangerous idea?

 
  

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Jack Fear
19:47 / 05.01.06
Lurid, I have always loved you.

Heironymus: running down that Edge.org link...

Jesse Bering: “As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God.” (Interestingly enough, Bering seems to agree with my assessment that the fcaopacity for belief is one of the things that makes us distinctly human “God is not an idea, nor a cultural invention, not an 'opiate of the masses' or any such thing; God is a way of thinking that was rendered permanent by natural selection.” He later goes on to call God a “biological appendage”. The conclusions that he and I draw from this knowledge are, of course, very different.)

Jordan Pollack, in discussing “Science as just another religion,” betrays a pretty limited understanding of what religion is all about. Philip Anderson, asserting that “The posterior probability of any particular God is pretty small,” similarly mises the point pretty spectacularly, as does Carolyn Porco: “The confrontation between science and formal religion will come to an end when the role played by science in the lives of all people is the same played by religion today.” All science is missing, she says, is ritual. (As if Dawkins is less popular than Mother Teresa because he hasn’t got a funny hat.)

Sam Harris comes out of the gate with this spectacularly wrong-headed charge: “The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.” Note the “always,” there. Always always always. He then calls on the scientific community to start “blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal,” before calling religious belief a “hideous obscenity.”

Todd Feinberg, who works with brain-damaged people who’ve become delusional when their nervous systems got fried, says “There is an intimate relationship between my patients' narratives and socially endorsed fairy tales and mythologies.”

Keith Devlin says we are entirely alone: “There is no God; no Intelligent Designer; no higher purpose to our lives.” Then he gets his digs in: “Personally, I have never found this possibility particularly troubling, but my experience has been that most people go to considerable lengths to convince themselves that it is otherwise.” The sheep!
Robert Provine rips the “empirically improbable afterlife and man-in-the-sky cosmological perspectives,” before conceding that faith is a good racket: “What better theological franchise is there than the promise of everlasting life, with deluxe trimmings? Religious followers must invest now with their blood and sweat, with their big payoff not due until the after-life. Postmortal rewards cost theologians nothing--I'll match your heavenly choir and raise you 72 virgins.”

I could go on: Must I go on?

(On the other hand, Scott Atran gets it about right, I think: “[R]eligious fervor is increasing across the world, including in the United States, the world's most economically powerful and scientifically advanced society. An underlying reason is that science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central. Science is not particularly well-suited to deal with people's existential anxieties, including death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness or longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Religion thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings and society's foundational moral needs, perhaps even more so in complex and mobile societies that are increasingly divorced from nurturing family settings and long familiar environments.” His dangerous idea is that science encourages religion in the long run, and vice versa—and I subscribe to that—it's basically Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" supposition again.
 
 
Lurid Archive
20:07 / 05.01.06
And I love you too Jack.

The interesting thing for me is that I agree with a lot of what you are saying in your last post. Religion is very plausibly a "biological appendage", yes, although I'm not sure that says anything about what one's attitude towards it should be.

And although I don't think that science encourages religion, my point of disagreement would largely rest on the fact that "science" tends to stand in for amoral global capitalism, as well as amoral accumulation of empirical knowledge. But I certainly wouldn't say that science provides an alternative to religion (though this is a touch complicated, as religion has retreated enormously in the face of scientific progress). So, lots of agreement....wanna take it outside before the thread gets too rotty?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
20:16 / 05.01.06
Also, there seems to be confusion over whether the quality the absence of which makes you subnormal is the ability to believe generally in non-experiential data, or the ability to believe specifically in God. That needs some attention, I think, as these positions have two different tendencies.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
21:16 / 05.01.06
Hang on a moment: science is philosophically determined by evidence, generally experiental. There are theories and theorems, not the same thing at all. So to criticise scientists because they see no evidence of God and thus God does not exist for them is absurd. God isn't even a theory, there is no evidence to suggest that any God has ever existed. How on earth is someone committed to seeking out theorem meant to believe in something that is not even a theory?

As to science as just another religion- depends on the definition of religion, if yours is a cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion then the general scientific philosophy is a religion to the average research scientist.
 
 
Jack Fear
22:51 / 05.01.06
Nina: Pollack is talking less about zeal than about marketing. He sees a necessary and inescapable conflict between science and religion, and thinks that the greatest hope to win the war is to essentially found a new religion based on scientific principles, which would eventually co-opt existing religions. Which is, again, a pretty tin-eared reading of the relative roles of science and faith in people's lives and a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion is and what it's for.

Haus: You are absolutely correct: this is a point that seems to need clarification. Be it hereby noted—as should have been clear from my initial post—that I am not necessarily talking about God.

Again: I'm talking about the ability to believe something—anything—not necessarily in a religious context—without experiential proof.

Faith in a God is just the most convenient example of this sort of belief-without-proof, and also the one that drives Men of Science utterly batshit. The specific argument is the doorway to the larger, or vice-versa. The general principle of belief-without-proof usually comes in for a kicking while arguing against the existence of a God ("...and neither do the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny," goes the classic form).

Jesse Bering, though, identifies it correctly, in a sideways fashion. "God" is a way of thinking, as Bering asserts, programmed into us by natural selection—and the way of thinking he's reacting against is belief-without-proof. He calls it a biological appendage, but he seems to regard it more as a biological appendix—something useless and vestigial, which can and should be cut away.

In so doing, we would be either transcending or damaging our biological programming—depends who you listen to. Either way, though, the end-result—a new homo sapiens with a crucial feature of its consciousness expunged—would no longer be quite human. Not subhuman: just... not quite human. Superhuman, if you like. Would that be better? Or post-human. Post-humanism is still big among Western academics, isn't it?

Obviously, I disagree with Bering's conclusion: I think that the elimination of this capacity would be an enormous loss for human consciousness and understanding. Science is a way of knowing—the primary, maybe even the best way of knowing. But it is a mistake, I believe, to say it is the only way of knowing, or that it is appropriate in all circumstances and situations.
 
 
Ganesh
23:01 / 05.01.06
Again: I'm talking about the ability to believe something—anything—not necessarily in a religious context—without experiential proof.

What constitutes "experiential proof" here? If you believe they put a man on the Moon (man on the Moon) based on experiencing the televised Moon landings, for example, does this count? Is television second-hand "experiential proof"? Is radio? Are newspapers? Is the Internet? Is the Bible?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
23:11 / 05.01.06
That's about my next step as well - I think that you'd find it very hard to identify a person who does not believe in anything not directly experienced at all - it's possible, but I'd say quite rare. You might get people who wish to perceive of themselves or present themselves as such, but I'd doubt any such statement. Bertrand Russell believed in love. I believe that somewhere in Green Bay there is an American football team called the Green Bay Packers owned by a man called Malcolm, and so on. So, what's our standard here? At what point are you able to say that a leap of faith hasa occurred?
 
 
Jack Fear
23:33 / 05.01.06
I leave that as an exercise for the reader. Everybody's standard will be different, after all, and that's as it should be: There's a difference between having a capacity for belief and being a gullible, credulous pushover.

(The particular Russell quote I was thinking of was "It is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true." Is this a generally-useful axiom? Yeah, I guess. Is it applicable across all circumstances, as Russell suggested? I would argue not. Bully for him on the love thing, though.)
 
 
Ganesh
23:41 / 05.01.06
I'd agree with Haus, then, that you'd be hard pushed to find anyone who doesn't believe in things they haven't directly experienced. At the time of writing, I am watching Jodie Marsh and Pete Burns in conversation on E4, in the Big Brother House. I believe both individuals exist, despite never having perceived them directly, in person. I'm responding to 'Jack Fear', an individual I've never seen on television but in whose existence I believe. I'm thinking about Bertrand Russell, an entity I've never corresponded with over the Internet but in whose existence I believe.

If you're unwilling to draw a line here, Jack, then yes, I agree with you that anyone who truly didn't believe in anything or anybody they hadn't directly perceived with their own sensorium probably would have some sort of neurological disorder. We're in Oliver Sacks territory.

So... not that dangerous an idea, really.
 
 
---
00:03 / 06.01.06
WTF !!! GOD = NULL: YR HOLY BOOK IS A LIE AND U SHEEPLE U LIVE IN TEH PLASTIC CONSENSUS REL:AITY!!1!

Well if you replace the SHEEPLE with ignorance, or delusional, and take the word PLASTIC out, what's left are a few beliefs, or ideas, that are shared by millions and millions of people all over the world. Just because it's easy to rip into, it doesn't mean that it couldn't potentially be a dangerous idea if more and more people shared it.

Reality being consensual could be a total truth. Buddhists don't believe in a single God, and many people believe that the Bible contains a lot of errors, or could infact be full of lies. You can still have Jesus at somepoint in history and have a Bible that's full of untruths.

It's crazy to think that many things that could infact be truths can be typed in caps with one or two other words added in and made to look like comedy, or something that should be dismissed if you want to stay out of the nuthouse.

It doesn't have to be original to be dangerous.
 
 
eddie thirteen
01:37 / 06.01.06
It's dangerous in the sense that walking into a Baptist church and shouting about the non-existence of God at the top of your lungs could help you to get your ass kicked, right there in a house of the lord. That is to say, it could be very dangerous indeed for the person who espoused it. I'm not so sure it's dangerous to society as a whole. "This is all bullshit!!!" is maybe not a bad place to start, but it's not very constructive. More to the point, it's not even very destructive -- for good or ill, denouncing the world at large doesn't change the world one whit. In fact, the world is equipped to pleasantly accommodate the perpetually (and stereotypically) dissatisfied, above-it-all, self-proclaimed non-sheeple. There are plenty of places of privilege in our society for "dangerous" provacateurs whose pronouncements are trite and ineffectual; academia is just one. They bitch because to bitch is their rationale, frequently their bread and butter, definitely their raison d'etre, and the more I talk about them, the more pretentious I shall become.

So, to keep it real, let's pretend we're at a club. I say, "This fucking sucks, yo." You say, "Hmm, yeah. We should go somewhere else. Got any ideas?" I say, "It sucks *everywhere.*" This strikes me as quite deep. This strikes you as annoying and counterproductive, because while my agenda is to bemoan the state of world affairs and generally piss upon all options, spoken and unspoken, some yet to be devised at all, and further to *extend* my agenda to all affairs past and present, real and unrealized, *your* agenda is go somewhere else, with any luck to have the good time we're not having here. In other words, my idea is that I have no ideas -- and, unfortunately, my idea will not get us out of this club. Hence, my idea sucks. Unless my idea is actually to affect a cool, above-it-all pose, which will allow me (by portraying a theoretically attractive figure of cool) to reap the very real benefits of the club I have so recently denounced.
 
 
Ganesh
01:59 / 06.01.06
My dangerous idea (which is not at all original to me): the evolutionary 'function' of homosexual males is to produce and perpetuate culture, and our cultural incidence is biologically determined. This is essentially born of studies of birth order in which it's commonly found that homosexual men are more likely (than their heterosexual counterparts) to have older brothers - with the likelihood of homosexuality increasing with each older brother. This suggests to me that there is some sort of biological mechanism in the maternal pre-birth environment that 'keeps track' of the number of sons, and influences sexuality accordingly.

Why? Possibly as a natural way of curbing population growth (homosexual men being less likely to breed as widely) but also perhaps to contribute to those arts that bind a culture rather than biological offspring. This partly derives from the idea that cultures progress through phases of growth/development and, having reached a level of population mass and stability, begin to flower in terms of producing art.

There are all sorts of holes in this theory (one being, of course, that it doesn't account for lesbians - as per usual) but I'm fond of it. It's dangerous because, in emphasising differences rather than commonalities, it goes against the grain of much of the gay movement's struggle for equality.
 
 
Char Aina
02:36 / 06.01.06
Why? Possibly as a natural way of curbing population growth (homosexual men being less likely to breed as widely)

how would such a population control evolve?
what need could population control have had in our past that would have been long term and wide scale?
forgive my ignorance, but hasnt population only become a species wide problem pretty recently?


but also perhaps to contribute to those arts that bind a culture rather than biological offspring.

perhaps i am missing something, but why would more gayers make for more art?
forgive again my ignorance, but arent you just going along with the old gay=artsy crap?

i know gay and straight artists and, although i know more straights than gayers who hate art, i would also say i know more straights than gayers who love it and have it by the balls.
 
 
matthew.
03:05 / 06.01.06
what about gay people who produce really shit art?
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
03:21 / 06.01.06
hasnt population only become a species wide problem pretty recently?

Overpopulation is a problem relative to a specific habitat, ie too many of a particular species in one space and that space can no longer support them. In the case of humans that space is the entire world. However, overpopulation is a problem in smaller spaces too- look at deer populations in various parts of the United States, for instance, as humans have eliminated most of their natural predators. Deer hunting in my home state is legal at least in part (I suspect primarily) to keep the population in check. So, evolving a particular species-wide trait to help prevent local overpopulation doesn't seem impossible.

There are, by the way, gay animals. Mammals and birds that I know of, but there may be others too, which suggests to me some sort of biological significance to it, though my knowledge of biology/evolution is rudimentary at best. (Oddly, one of my friends came up with the gays-as-population-control idea when we were both like 15, in the middle of an overnight activist newsletter mailing, during one of those Deeeep Conversations teenagers have.) (That by the way isn't meant to reflect at all on your idea, Ganesh, because I think it's a pretty interesting one.)
 
 
Char Aina
03:49 / 06.01.06
However, overpopulation is a problem in smaller spaces too- look at deer populations in various parts of the United States, for instance, as humans have eliminated most of their natural predators.

have you noticed or heard of any evolutionary changes among the deer population of the united states?

humans may have changed the american habitat drastically, but they didnt do that until whitey popped by, and that wasnt even half a concern until he got settled, a good few years later. the deer have had a few hundred years to adapt to these conditions and they havent yet.
it just isnt long enough.

is it?


has the problem of overpopulation ever been a problem for anything like the time scale needed?

i dont think so.
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
04:08 / 06.01.06
have you noticed or heard of any evolutionary changes among the deer population of the united states?

I was just using that as an example of overpopulation on a local level- the actual circumstances don't really matter, I was just pointing out one way in which it could happen. By 'species-wide' overpopulation I assume you meant 'human population has grown to the point where the planet can't support it.' My point was that the cumulative effect of lots of different instances of local overpopulation could potentially lead to species-wide evolution, because groups of animals better-capable of regulating their population in changing circumstances would be more likely to survive.

Again, though, I'm not a scientist. People who know more about evolution than I do? Any thoughts?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
04:10 / 06.01.06
I think the point is that within any environment there is always the potential for over-population in the species. Thus the anti-overpopulation adaption could feasibly exist at any level of environment/species dominance. For example, the savannah. Look at the Lions: overpopulation could easily be a problem with them, being at the top of the food chain. Anti-overpopulation tools thus helpful for lions.

Now look at the gazelles. Suppose a disease comes along and wipes out the Lions but leaves the gazelles- how are the gazelles going to cope without predators? Thus, anti-overpop helpful there too.
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
04:15 / 06.01.06
Yup. Legba says it better.
 
 
Char Aina
04:58 / 06.01.06
so rather than evolve a lower birthrate we went for the massively more inneficient evolution of offspring who dont like breeding as much?

seems a stretch.

you would only need these non-breeding offspring if they performed a useful function for their family to ensure replication.
i cant imagine the presence of one non-breeding and artistic family memeber would have enough of an effect on the overall survival of the group, even accepting that a non-breeding son would have these traits more commonly than a breeding son.

can you?
any idea how it would go?
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
05:12 / 06.01.06
so rather than evolve a lower birthrate we went for the massively more inneficient evolution of offspring who dont like breeding as much?

Evolving a lower birthrate period would be counterproductive, wouldn't it? It's in a species' (specie's? species's?) best interest to breed as much as possible up to the point where its environment can no longer sustain it. A simple lower birthrate would reduce that species' chances of surviving in the first place, yeah?
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
05:32 / 06.01.06
And I guess one question to ask- has there been any comprehensive study of homosexuality among animals beyond observing that it exists? Does the older-male-offspring thing hold true there?

I assume no such study has occured in the US, given the political climate- I think the last person to find a concrete link between homosexuality and biology (brain structure actually- can't remember his name, Simon Vey maybe?) basically had his career ruined because of it. No US politician/grant provider is going to touch that sort of thing, what with the hordes of homophobes and religious fundamentalists running around hating on/fearing teh gays.
 
 
Char Aina
05:39 / 06.01.06
the original concept is going to reduce the birthrate too, isnt it?

what important difference is there between this complex reduction and a simple reduction of procreative rates?

ganesh seemed to be suggesting that the hypothetical gay caveman will be less likely to reproduce, being more likely to get involved in homosexual(and therefore childless) coupling. what positive difference does that make to our species' evolution that is worth the risks and costs?

is the difference culture? is the point that un-babies make less art than gay-babies-grown?
i am still not convinced the hypothetical 'early gay man' is worth the energy cost to his mother or tribe as a population limiter.
whatever art he created would have to be pretty special to confer an advantage that would outweigh the risk of his birth and the extra work needed to keep him, and that's still assuming that a married straight cave bloke with three kids and a mammoth to hunt isnt the cultural type(and therefore a better buy).
 
 
Gendudehashadenough
05:45 / 06.01.06
Enjoy the punchk.

:2cents:
 
 
Char Aina
05:51 / 06.01.06
there is no way you paid two cents for that.
not unless you were ripped off worse than an open barn door in a hurricane.
 
 
P. Horus Rhacoid
06:09 / 06.01.06
the original concept is going to reduce the birthrate too, isnt it?

what important difference is there between this complex reduction and a simple reduction of procreative rates?


Quick cos I have to get to bed- I think it's a mistake to assume that natural selection/evolution will always give rise to the most efficient way of doing something- a lower sex drive/higher instances of stillborn offspring etc could be one way of controlling a population's size, homosexuality could be another which for whatever reason has evolved where the others haven't.

I admit I'm not sure how Ganesh's gays-as-creators-of-culture idea works in relation to this; it seems like it might be completely separate, a social thing rather than biological*. Maybe as society evolved, people in homosexual relationships had more time to devote to writing/thinking/etc because they didn't have to spend time raising a family?

*my definition of biological in this particular context may be a tad confused
 
 
Wombat
06:54 / 06.01.06
How about everyone is born with a small possibility of being homosexual. This increases if overcrouding is experienced in the early years of life.
That would work as a kick ass form of population control.
As for the Arty thing..seems a little dodgy...but spreading familly memes would have a genetic advantage.

As for my dangerous idea.
Terrorists...stop destroyimg people and start on economic infrastructure.
 
 
Char Aina
06:57 / 06.01.06
I think it's a mistake to assume that natural selection/evolution will always give rise to the most efficient way of doing something

my understanding is that evolution is mostly about negative impact, not positive. something being useful is no guarantee that it will evolve, nor is something not being useful a guarantee that it will not. (see 'hey!where's my heat vision?' and 'AIEEE! atavistic appendix agony!')

i find its easier if, rather than advantaged or disadvantaged, one thinks of it as 'less likely to die out' and 'more likely to die out'.


so yeah. efficiency is not the goal. the goal is not being dead so you can pass on your genes.

detrimental traits will be selected against every time, as they will cause your death.

my point is that there would have to be great advantage(or removal of disadvantage) to a family unit with extra for the rearing of those extra kids to be worth it. having kids is very dangerous. keeping them is very costly.

if these kids are not going to pass on their genetic material, they then have to confer an advantage over the offspring who will.
in a populous and overburdened area the family of seven will be more likely to die, i reckon.

i'm assuming ganesh has yet to fill in some of the details regarding the advantages of culture, or that he is still waiting for them himself.
 
 
Char Aina
07:04 / 06.01.06
How about everyone is born with a small possibility of being homosexual. This increases if overcrouding is experienced in the early years of life.
That would work as a kick ass form of population control.


does anyone have any figures for homosexuality in heavily populated countries?
i havent heard of a spike in occurences of queer sexuality in crowded places, but i am sure i could have missed it.

my experiences would tend to suggest that lesbigay is less common in the places with less room per person, but the sample is small and almost certainly meaningless.
 
 
lord henry strikes back
08:41 / 06.01.06
I can't track this down at the moment but I'll keep looking.

A while back I read an article that suggested that mothers who have a higher incidence of homosexual sons also tended to be very fertile, and have very fertile daughters. This would seem to suggest that male homosexuality confers no benefit in of itself but is a by-product* of some variant in females which leads to the advantage of high birth rates.

*I am aware as to how incendiary it could be to refer to a section of society as a 'by-product'. This is not my intention and I really do not wish to cause offence.
 
 
lord henry strikes back
08:47 / 06.01.06
Found it
 
 
Spaniel
09:17 / 06.01.06
Okay, before this goes much further it might pay to read a little more about Ganesh's thinking on the matter, and the science behind it.
 
 
Ganesh
09:59 / 06.01.06
Hey, I said it was full of holes - and I understand the essence of these dangerous ideas is that they can't properly be 'proved' (as is generally the case with evolutionary theory generally).

It's based on Blanchard's studies on birth order, and is a fantastic extension of his observations. Of course, it only holds true for a subset of those males identifying as homosexual (and has no bearing on lesbians - so "lesbigay" doesn't apply here), which could, I guess, be another dangerous idea: there are 'biological' (or 'maternally biological') homosexual men and those who arrive at the orientation via other routes. The population of homosexual-identifying men is aetiologically heterogeneous (ha).
 
 
Ganesh
10:03 / 06.01.06
i'm assuming ganesh has yet to fill in some of the details regarding the advantages of culture, or that he is still waiting for them himself.

Tribal bonding. In my dangeous idea, homosexual men would produce culture/art as a sort of societal glue, and a way of enabling the tribe/community to see and talk about itself - which would then confer a degree of advantage to all.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:09 / 06.01.06
Alternatively, it might be that our society, because it has a need for reflexivity and reflection, is channeling gay men towards art (to take this proposition at face value), whereas another society with different needs might orient gay men towards something else (obviously, one problem with that is that "gay" is a pretty new idea, but "primarily same-sex attracted", maybe) - for example, towards being particularly dedicated towards combat and the defence of the tribe.
 
  

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