Pragmatism
Are "abstract" ideas like truth or justice any more significant than apparently mundane objects like a fork or a spoon? Truths and spoons serve their own respective purposes that only really matter when something is done with them or someone or something uses them. There seems to be an arbitrary and false hierarchy that assigns greater significance to certain ideas because of their purported significance to the human condition. Yet any particular idea can not be any more powerful than how useful it is to what happens in the moment. An idea or thought that does not somehow influence some one's or some thing's actual day to day experience of life has no power.
This makes intuitive sense from a Darwinian perspective. Neutral variations (or variations that have no effect on the fitness of an organism) have no power in determining what happens to an organism in two distinctive ways. First, they have no power to determine an organism's purpose (way of making a living/experience) in whatever context it exists within. Second, neutral variations have no power to change the entire purpose/structure (ways in which to make a living) of the context itself. In any particular context there are many ways of making a living. One could view a multicellular organism as a society of many different cell types, where each cell ends up making a living in a certain way by being one cell type or another based upon its neighbors as well as its overall position in the organism, and its developmental history (or a history of salient variations that had power in determining the way in which the cells develop). Yet variations can also affect the entire context...which in turn could conceivably flip good and bad for any particular organism in an environment. For example, if a meteor hits the earth, large organisms will suddenly find it very hard to make a living.
One consequence of only being concerned about variations that have an effect on the way in which life exists is that there are no absolutes. This may be a disquieting thought at first, but this appears the most internally consistent view of any "belief" structure. Ideas only exist so long as they are useful in perpetuating any particular mode of existence. Obviously such a philosophy can not answer questions such as how does one define the purpose of a particular mode of existence independently from experience (which is what a lot of philosophy tries to do). But it does not restrict the modes of existence and ways in which to make a living into an artificially superimposed hierarchy based upon rules or beliefs that may or may not be actually true. In essence, the philosophy of pragmatism allows for a infinite multitude of possible variations which have an effect on the way in which humans and other organisms make a living. The definition of pragmatism is somewhat circular (since it assigns meaning to ideas that affect the way in which one makes a living, and the way in which one makes a living affects the ideas one assigns meaning to), but this circular nature can be found in many physical systems, such as natural selection's "survival of the fittest" (who else would survive?) Within the context of any particular system there is no way to define a true golden standard (generalization) about what is good or best without imposing an artificial human value system. Since we'll never know what is actually true or best, or if either of those two ideas have any meaning whatsoever, it seems senseless to impose artificial rigid belief systems, and more internally consistent to allow for a more pragmatic and plastic belief systems.
This is of great importance to every living organism right now, because the world (the environment and ourselves) change whether we like it or not, and unless we recognize that fact and embrace it we will be forever fighting demons we do not even understand.
This makes intuitive sense from a Darwinian perspective. Neutral variations (or variations that have no effect on the fitness of an organism) have no power in determining what happens to an organism in two distinctive ways. First, they have no power to determine an organism's purpose (way of making a living/experience) in whatever context it exists within. Second, neutral variations have no power to change the entire purpose/structure (ways in which to make a living) of the context itself. In any particular context there are many ways of making a living. One could view a multicellular organism as a society of many different cell types, where each cell ends up making a living in a certain way by being one cell type or another based upon its neighbors as well as its overall position in the organism, and its developmental history (or a history of salient variations that had power in determining the way in which the cells develop). Yet variations can also affect the entire context...which in turn could conceivably flip good and bad for any particular organism in an environment. For example, if a meteor hits the earth, large organisms will suddenly find it very hard to make a living.
One consequence of only being concerned about variations that have an effect on the way in which life exists is that there are no absolutes. This may be a disquieting thought at first, but this appears the most internally consistent view of any "belief" structure. Ideas only exist so long as they are useful in perpetuating any particular mode of existence. Obviously such a philosophy can not answer questions such as how does one define the purpose of a particular mode of existence independently from experience (which is what a lot of philosophy tries to do). But it does not restrict the modes of existence and ways in which to make a living into an artificially superimposed hierarchy based upon rules or beliefs that may or may not be actually true. In essence, the philosophy of pragmatism allows for a infinite multitude of possible variations which have an effect on the way in which humans and other organisms make a living. The definition of pragmatism is somewhat circular (since it assigns meaning to ideas that affect the way in which one makes a living, and the way in which one makes a living affects the ideas one assigns meaning to), but this circular nature can be found in many physical systems, such as natural selection's "survival of the fittest" (who else would survive?) Within the context of any particular system there is no way to define a true golden standard (generalization) about what is good or best without imposing an artificial human value system. Since we'll never know what is actually true or best, or if either of those two ideas have any meaning whatsoever, it seems senseless to impose artificial rigid belief systems, and more internally consistent to allow for a more pragmatic and plastic belief systems.
This is of great importance to every living organism right now, because the world (the environment and ourselves) change whether we like it or not, and unless we recognize that fact and embrace it we will be forever fighting demons we do not even understand.
posted by meta_darwinist at 1:12 AM
1 Comments:
Very well-put. And it's very late so I'm not going to try articulating a lot right now because my contacts are bothering me and it wouldn't make sense. BUT as I was reading I was reminded of Sedaris's essay where he talks about how when you learn a foreign language, you don't learn the abstract words like those describing religion until much, much later. You have to get the survival stuff and the alphabet and whatnot. But the problem comes when you try to figure out how to articulate these abstract thoughts when you literally don't have the words for them. He gives a nice demonstration of explaining Easter to a Moroccan woman. People forget what it's like to not know words and how to use them property because we, as English-speaking educated adults, are so accustomed to using multisyllabic abstract words properly and, if we see a word, and don't understand it, we go look it up in the dictionary and can immediately put it in context.
And I'm rambling. My point: we take for granted the second-nature things like "vocabulary" until we suddenly don't have them. And then we end up describing Easter as "the son of your father who someone make die on two morsels of lumber and then we eat of the chocolate."
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