Is there such a thing as human nature?

The word you’re looking for is plasticity. Fuentes mentions it in the article:

Haha. Exactly right. There’s a feedback loop in human evolution between brain, culture, and social evolution.

Totally agree.

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But we can place evidence ahead of speculation.

Oof. Only YEC hold that physical death is a consequence of sin. Other than the ultra-literalists, the majority of Christian exegetes and theologians of every stripe have interpreted the “death” of Adam & Eve in a spiritual sense. To state the obvious, they didn’t drop dead the day they ate of the fruit of knowledge (knowledge isn’t physical), and to heap insult upon injury, the ultimate punishment was being expelled and barred from the Garden of God’s Presence. The apparent absence (hiddenness) of God is an existential problem, not a physical one.

Okay. I’ll shut up for a while and see what y’all think.

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I promised too much. One final footnote to (possibly) inspire some folks to read the article in the OP. Just for background, Ray Monk was a friend of Wittgenstein and the author of his definitive biography:

The first chapter about his upbringing will break your heart.
image

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Ha! Me as well. Funny thing happened as I read his Letter on Humanism as an undergraduate: “Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man.” I found that if you substitute the plural pronouns for singular, you get an insightful picture of what solipsism is.

Thanks for the link, I’ll be sure to look at it later.

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And another one from the Letter on Humanism:

“But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless.”

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Not original to me but I’d say we aren’t so much barred from God’s presence as we fall in love with our own opinion* and prefer to think man will ultimately stand beside or even replace God by virtue of the seemingly unstoppable progress of science. We celebrate our success with the simple cases (eg, science) and come to think there is nothing beyond our reach.

  • I’ve collected detractors here who will want to say it is I who do this by letting literature tell me what it means rather than googling it or letting the same ear for poetry tell me what is really sacred and how to serve that rather than humbly accepting conclusions from scholars in ancient traditions. To my mind that is refusing to trust the sacred and so deserving one’s expulsion from the garden. No risk, no reward.
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Great book. Wittgenstein’s life story is one of the great adventures of the 20th century. For the uninitiated and curious, Monk also wrote another fantastic book on the lay level: How to Read Wittgenstein.

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@Kendel could there be another book group in our future around this book? I we will see if I can get it on Kindle, preferably through the SF which has many more titles available in that format. (Stopped by the library branch closest to where we walk at the beach today and picked up our cards.)

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Oh wow! The Wittgenstein book? I know right now, I don’t have time to read it. HOWEVER, I would be very happy to maintain the structure of a thread, if anyone wants something like I put together for the Penner discussion.
I’m completely backed up on my scatterbrained reading. Need to finish my intro to K, and then actually read the books of his that I put out real money for, so I could write in them (Fear and Trembling and The Present Age) along with things I bought or downloaded to read related to Penner: James K.A Smith, Westphal, Crystal Downing, and others, which have taken cuts in front of J. Todd Billings’s books that I had started before Penner, and then there’s all the rest of the books cluttering my house. And MacDOnald with Merv and Randy, and and and and and…

[Stop woman. Breathe.]
[Breathing. Deeply in. And then out. Get that pulse under control.]

Um, at this moment, I don’t think I’m ready to take on Wittgenstein, but I would be very pleased to help maintain the structure of the thread, if anyone else would like that.

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Too funny. I’m probably a year out from the only nonfiction I intend to read until I get to the bottom of The Matter With Things. I expect to take breaks for good fiction though so keep those recommendations coming everyone. Very generous of you to offer though. I’m f there is a groundswell of interest I might have to reconsider.

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When people understand the use of this word in the science of biology for phenotype plasticity then it is a good word for what I was talking about. But in everyday language, the problem with “plasticity” is that it is primarily used to describe the capability of being altered by external forces. “Flexibility,” on the other hand is used in both ways, both for the capability of being altered by others and also for the capability of altering oneself. Thus “flexibility” is the better word for my intent. Oh… and Fuentes also uses the word “flexibility” in his article (both words one time each LOL). But thank you for calling my attention to concept of phenotype plasticity.

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:grin: and here I was thinking “intentionality” was the better word

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Wittgenstein has fascinated me as a philosopher even though I’m pretty sure most of what I know about him comes from Strathern’s Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes. But what a juicy intro that is! Strathern is a great story teller.

Monk writes concerning Wittgenstein, “The difference between science and philosophy, he now believed, is between two distinct forms of understanding: the theoretical and the non-theoretical.”

I couldn’t disagree with what was said about non-theoretical understanding and how we understand “a poem, a piece of music, a person or even a sentence.” Yet I also find the difference between science and philosophy is the difference between physics and metaphysics.

Metaphysics is a controversial term, and often, dare I say within the analytical tradition, found to be impossible, and yet I find it quite easy to introduce metaphysics by how the explanation of the universe is one of three possible statements: from nothing, an infinite regress, or an uncaused cause.

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There are different uses of the word.

The academic use and the dictionary definition is the philosophical study of the nature of reality. It is only controversial in the sense that there are branches of philosophy (like logical positivism) which declare that metaphysics is meaningless. It carries to extreme the practical avoidance in the hard sciences (which would leave such questions to the philosophers and focus on measurable results which are testable/falsifiable) to ironically make this into a kind of metaphysical statement about what are meaningful avenues of inquiry.

But there are also popular uses (or misuses) of the word which vary wildly to refer to things in the spectrum of religion, pseudoscience, fantasy, and downright fraudulent flimflam.

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Yes. I’d say it is a kind of madness, or drinking of the Kool-Aid, to take as axiomatic the terms of methodological naturalism. What is useful is not determinative of what is true. Leastwise it isn’t comprehensive as it rules out higher truths.

It’s a wonder how easily the verification principle was refuted.

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I would not go so far… perhaps close, I suppose… I would say.

  1. It is downright delusional if one claims they live their life according to the criterion of science.
  2. It is inconsistent if they demand that all truth claims meet the criterion of science.

In general they get into much the same trouble (i.e. irrationality) as religions do when they claim objectivity for their subjective judgements and think they have a reasonable expectation for other people to restrict their choices in life to those which they made. They simply do not have the proof or objective evidence to ground such an expectation.

But if they simply stop at this being their own subjective judgement and choice for their own life then I cannot fault them. To do so, would after all, be taking a step along the same erroneous road represented by 1&2. Yes I can back up 1&2 with simple logic and the observation that life requires subjective participation (when science is founded upon restricting itself to the opposite: objective observation), but that doesn’t invalidate a choice from experience and practicality in a life filled with pseudoscience and fraudulent flimflam to avoid the morass of irrationality they personally have seen in metaphysics and religion. I only defend the value of religion in the context of acknowledging just how dangerous it can be.

Riiiight. There are ‘higher’ truths than those self-evident ones of methodological naturalism. Like what?

Especially this.

Where there is truly danger, certainty is desirable when available. As dust on its way to returning to dust, we know we can’t preserve ourselves forever so I don’t regard death as such with alarm. I’m just in no hurry for it now but eventually when enough disability or pain accumulates I’ll be happy for the dust to reorganize.

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My love for others. The beauty in nature, music and arts. None of that is particularly empirical or useful but they matter more to me than any equation or set of data.