Re:Evo Psych and the value of emotions

Hi Carey ...

My favorite lyricist, a Canadian with a very dark poetic soul, says, "Love's the only engine of survival." (Leonard Cohen, "The Future")

We have the remarkable capacity to doubt our own deepest values and rationalize them away, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

My instincts tend to agree with those who blanch at the awful pessimism modern science shows toward the human spirit. We've essentially broken intentionality down into some bizarre mixture of cultural determinism through social science and memes, and biological determinism through genes and selected instincts, so that humans no longer seem to act on their own reasons and there is no room for the soul to fly free.

To me, this is insane. It makes us mindless zombies. We've denied our own minds and trivialized our own experience. Without having to imagine anything supernatural, or even anything completely removed from the physical, it seems unavoidable to me that the tools of physical science fail at capturing human experience and the reasons for our actions, in the same sense that automotive tools fail to be of much use by a quantum mechanic. Both are real, but not directly applicable to each other. Dennett begins to address this problem in his more recent work, but it's brought out particularly well by Kenan Malik in "Man, Beast, and Zombie."

The most important thing to realize, that most people miss I think, is that the we are creatures driven by a search for meaning, and that meaning is not located simply in an individual brain but in relations and interactions between us. The mind is actually extended beyond the individual brain, in a logical rather than paranormal sense, and this is why human values can transcend individual reproductive survival, in my opinion.

I'm not offering personal advice here, but this is the way I've come to think of the popular trend to mechanize the sciences of humanity, and why I'm not entirely comfortable with the frame you're providing for these deep thoughts.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

thank you, by Carey, 06/08/04 sugar coating blather, by Todd, 06/10/04 Re:Insanity, presumptions, karate, and sugarcoating, by Fred H., 06/14/04 Odd equation, by Todd, 06/16/04 Re:Odd termites , by Fred H., 06/17/04 Re:Odd termites , by A rhetoric lesson for Fred, 06/19/04 Re:Odd termites , by Fred H., 06/19/04 Re:Odd termites , by Todd, 06/21/04 Re: Missed intention, by Fred H., 06/21/04 Materialism vs.Atheism, by Todd, 06/22/04 Re:U.S. conservatism?, by Fred H., 06/22/04 Cry for help, by Fred H. , 06/22/04

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