Sartre, existentialism, and science

Faith & Science Conversation
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This (and your related post or posts) will take me quite some time to work through. The thoughts probably took you time to develop as well. At this point, I don’t understand.

Which really was my intent.
If the quesiton is what makes human beings human beings, or what makes human persons persons, there’s a rock bottom suggestion.
It’s objective, doesn’t rely on arguable subjectivities or dogmatic statements.

I suggested, too, that it might be a naive way of dealing with the “essence” of humans (or people or whatever we are), as it includes no philosophical component, unless one were to say that that is reflected in its “scientistic” point of view that relies on a biological definition to determine essence. Likewise my understanding of the biology I suggest could be sufficient to establish “essence”, may be insufficient to reasonably propose what I am proposing.

Nevertheless, my suggestion - a definition of the species - contains no actual personal or individual componant. But as soon as those are brought in, so are dogmas of all kinds.

All of this to say, I think it makes much more sense to talk about what people make of their lives, what they do, that is that existence precedes essence.

But what we do is always subject to the interpretation of cultural norms.

Nothing is simple.

Or very little.

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No, I’m not confused. I’m disagreeing with you, that’s all. The “mind” is the product of the physical brain. It’s simply metacognition, not something with a life of its own (let alone eternal life).

The mind isn’t a product of language. Neanderthal likely spoke a proto-language, yet they produced musical instruments and a few symbolic artifacts. They had a mind much like ours and even mated with us in the not-so-distant past.

Chimps, as I noted before, have first-order Theory of Mind just like human toddlers. In other words, both human toddlers and chimps can project their thoughts into the mind of another and imagine what they’re thinking. Male chimps spend most of their free time deceiving and playing tricks on their peers. Chimps even laugh, though it took us humans a long time to realize it because researchers confused their laughter for panting. They don’t have the right vocal tract to laugh or produce speech. In short, previous hominins, chimps and other animals have “mind” without fully modern language, so your premise is flawed.

With apologies to Francis Collins, DNA and language are only roughly comparable.

The human mind isn’t a product of language alone. The brain and language co-evolved throughout the Homo lineage. DNA doesn’t have representational capabilities. I have no idea what you mean by that. DNA has some characteristics roughly comparable to language, but language is a product of cultural evolution, while DNA is biological evolution. Two totally different mechanisms.

Your “demonstration” is a non sequitur. The fact we can speak and reason about DNA has nothing to do with whether the “mind” is a product of language.

No, animals don’t have language. They have systems of communication, but that doesn’t preclude them from having rudimentary forms of what you call “mind.”

Language was simply one step up the ladder toward love and empathy with both God and our fellow human beings.

It’s easy to falsify. Point to a quality you consider uniquely human, and I’ll be glad to point out its roots in the animal kingdom.

Your counter-claim contains the weasel words “ideas and concepts” and “directly from animals.” That allows you to wiggle out of anything because you make everything hinge on abstractions and demand a direct line of abstract ideas from animals, who aren’t capable of such, to humans. That’s a no-lose proposition, which is truly meaningless.

Nope. Among chimps, for example, some behaviors are inborn, but most are learned. That’s cultural learning, not biologically inborn and encoded in DNA. Jane Goodall characterized their society as “order without law.” They don’t have a “moral code” because they are amoral. So when they witness things like infanticide and cannibalism, they go about their business because they have no category for such behavior.

No, I’m doing the opposite. My frank challenge was for you to put forward something uniquely human, such as language or morality, and I would be glad to demonstrate its roots in the animal kingdom.

I think you’re reading your own biases into my words.

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Chimps even have a crude type of language that combines physical postures and vocalizations. Although somewhat controversial, people have claimed to have taught sign language to Koko the gorilla, and she seemed capable of inventing new word associations to describe new things.

I can’t find the quote at the moment, but I think it was Darwin who said something along the lines of “While the gap in intelligence between man and ape is profound, it is a much smaller gap than between humans and lower animals”. If we were to put humans, chimps, and ants on a graph of intelligence, us and chimps would nearly be on top of one another on that scale.

Correct. Languages are abstract while DNA is concrete. DNA is its chemistry. It is no more profound than we can use language to describe water than it is to do the same with DNA.

I’m in that same boat. I will admit that I am a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to these types of philosophical discussions, but for me the relationship between brain and mind is the same as the relationship between gut and digestion or lungs and respiration. The mind is simply the result of what the brain does.

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That assumes we already know enough about consciousness to conclude the brain produces it. Some will say “of course, what else could it be?” But we really just don’t know that the brain makes it and we don’t possess a comprehensive understanding of all the other alternatives. From an incomplete understanding we are in no position to rule anything out.

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Yes we disagree. And frankly the failure of communication can no longer be considered innocent. It is now a product of your refusal engage what I actually said by substituting your own nonsense. You don’t have to engage what I said, you don’t have to believe what I believe, but the same goes for me. But this pretense with strawman responses is dishonest.

I say the mind has a life of its own – with entirely separate needs and inheritance. All living things depend on a particular environment and for the mind it is the human body and brain. But it is a physical living organism and there is nothing eternal about it. This is not traditional dualism. You asked the question of whether I am a dualist and I answered. If you are not interested, then don’t ask. To be sure we are likely defining many words differently such as “life” and “mind.” Which is why I suggest we were getting lost in semantics.

Likewise, I am saying language is the substance of the mind just as chemistry is for the body. I don’t see any of your facts about chimps and imagination about Neanderthals proving anything about this. Yes language and brain co-evolved. I have said the same thing many times. No you are NOT teaching me anything. Sorry.

Sure it does. It is direct and physical. But each of those nucleic acids represent the amino acids which they connect to in protein synthesis. And thus sequences of nucleic acids represent the proteins they assemble and the functions those protein have in the body.

Of course they are. And the word evolution is used for both because both are using the same basic learning process of trial and error.

No it is a demonstration that language has all the representational capabilities of DNA.

Correction “what Jay313 calls the mind.” It certainly does preclude them from having what I call the mind, since you agree they don’t have language. And yes of course they have brain function which is all you use the word “mind” for.

That is not falsification any more than the rhetoric of creationists falsify claims of evolution. Your ability to generate rhetoric on this matter is not falsification either.

Ideas and concepts are “weasel words”??? So you don’t believe there is any such things as ideas and concepts? Curious. Is that Wittgenstein? If so I would put that in the same category of other weasel philosophies which declares there is no such thing as meaning. I am certainly not interested in meaningless “weasel” philosophy.

I don’t see why you think this proves that a moral code cannot be extended beyond the human use of concept and language to biological behaviors. You are using bizarre strawman argument. I said nothing about how chimps get their moral code. Again my point was just the opposite, that morality is not something unique to humans – that it doesn’t require language. Thus the only thing different about human morality is just the use of language.

Looks like you will go anywhere just for the sake of argument alone. A waste of my time only pretending to engage in a discussion. Better simply to agree that we disagree and leave it there.

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I agree with most of what you’ve said in this thread but I can’t see why you say language is the substance of the mind. But of course our use of language has factored into our evolution as any advantageous adaption would. But -and here I am trying to inject some levity- any dissection of a brain will turn up no language, only grey and white matter plus other needed bits.

Do you agree that the mind, not the brain, is ‘where’ first person experience happens?

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Is that what he said?

If so, it would probably be because he defines consciousness as a brain function like the mind. If so then that is another thing we disagree on – another word we use very differently.

For me “consciousness” is completely different subject. I see little reason to understand this differently from the gathering of information about things, which I see happening in all forms of life down to the microscopic. There are just different means of handling information, all biological life using chemical information transfer, animals using neurological signals, and we using language.

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I can’t speak for Jay but that was my impression.

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Mind as a nothing more than a function of the brain looks like a waste of a word. I tend to look for median positions and understanding the why of traditional thought. Frankly the outright dismissal I see in so many responses to classical thought look just as deserving of my own dismissal. So while I agree that Descartes dualism is wrong, I also see merit in the idea of a mind as something different than the brain. And so connected with my own understanding of life (from Erich Jatsch’s book “The Self organizing Universe”) as a self-organizing process, I see the mind as self-organizing process as well, but in the medium of language just as biological life is a self-organizing process in the medium of chemistry.

Now a lot of difficulty is that language pretty much requires drawing arbitrary lines in what is essentially a continuum. And I quite acknowledge that reality tends to be a lot more complicated. For example… since we have information transfer in these three different mediums of chemistry, neurological impulses, and language, then perhaps there is merit in the idea of seeing something mind-like in animals using neurological information rather than chemistry or language. We just don’t have a ready word for that yet.

By first person experience I think you are referring to consciousness. And thus I see that as happening in micro-organisms in some sense. The only way of getting to what you are saying is if language is somehow implicated and I quite agree that it makes a difference (a big one). I am certainly not saying that the first-person experience of a micro-organism is the same as ours. I see life and consciousness both as highly quantitative things, and I think our consciousness is very much greater than that of a micro-organism (obviously). I don’t love the word “roots” as Jay313 seems to but I do see connections to very similar things going on in all living things.

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I had a professor who held that “essence precedes existence” applies to things while the reverse is true of thinking beings. The question was where the line is drawn. He also used it as a pointed question: are you living as a thing, or as a thinking being?

I would say that the error is trying to apply those categories to God in the first place. I don’t think that “nature” and “choice” are separate categories especially when it comes to God.

Really? Does it tell you which women in Corinth were the ones who tended to wear jewelry and makeup in public, so you can understand Paul’s admonitions on the matter? Does it tell you what the term “image of God” means? Does it tell you what the relevance of the admonition to go a second mile was?

In answer to the question, “What is Sickness Unto Death?”, a fellow student said, “Trying to read the book of that name”.
:grimacing:

That’s a good observation! Such projection is a symptom of those who have never understood what a worldview is and thus have not managed to ask what worldview they hold; they absorbed a worldview growing up and can’t see any other way of thinking.

This error comes from a shallow use of the concept, actually – it confuses essence and ‘accidents’. Essence does not rest on how one wishes the world to be but on what truly is. True essence can be determined only by examination, not be decree (however philosophical).
It’s the issue in the whole current business of gender: one side wants to tie gender to a philosophical abstraction without asking about reality. The same problem pops up in theology, for example in taking the deduction that all power belongs to God and packing it into the term “omnipotent”, then applying a philosophical meaning of omnipotent back onto the scriptures.

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Interesting. An alternative is to say non-thinking things don’t have an essence until one is assigned to them by thinking beings in their use of language. Then no line is drawn since we are assigning an essence to ourselves as well in our choices.

So you simply avoid the question of whether God chooses to love something. I don’t see the point. It is a simple yes or no question. Does God have no choice in the matter of loving us? I don’t think a “no” answer fits the Bible or Christianity very well.

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Drat, I can’t seem to control the quoting function so well anymore. But I agree that brain = mind does seem like one word too many. I also agree with the advisability of trying to understand traditional thought … though probably not as you. I don’t default to it but I there is much there to admire and some to keep.

Regarding Descartes’ dualism I do think that is a case where opposites coincide where it is disadvantageous to declare a winner and ignore the other side. And I also do think much of how our minds work are well thought of as self organizing processes. Beneath what we decide on in the spotlight of consciousness is an ocean of realizations contributing as best they can peripherally.

I agree with you about language especially the discursive variety does often distort by enthroning one aspect as the whole when it isn’t. But I 100% agree that every living thing has a degree or form of consciousness. In fact so does each cell in our metazoan bodies. You really can’t understand our mode of life if you don’t take into account that these communities of cooperating unicellular beings unlike our process in a bottom up fashion. DNA is top down and important but doesn’t account for all the decisions being made cooperatively below.

Ahh here is where you mentioned the micro organisms and I still very much agree about that. Consciousness occurs in many forms and most does not include language. I think language is really what the fall is about IMO. That is the fruit which when eaten has both up and downsides. Other creature no doubt have their challenges but different than ours. If you don’t like the idea of roots because it paints all creation as imperfect, earlier and imperfect attempts I agree with you. We have no conception of how to bring about life. I think each is remarkable in some way or other but it is still nice to discover what is common about our subjectivity and why some come at it differently. I agree -if I understand you correctly- we won’t find a purely physical basis for why we are as we are and why we vary among ourselves.

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O. M. G.

We read that in philosophy class! It wasn’t used in an intro, but as a response to the inevitable student confusion as to just what existentialism is supposed to be.
Wow – memories . . . .

I recall discussing this for an entire afternoon on the Pacific Crest Trail. As someone who suffers from bipolar disorder, it wasn’t a mere theoretical question to me to ask, “Is bipolar something that my brain forces on my spirit, or is it part of who I am (my essence)?”

I disagree. It’s a concept that can force people to think clearly and deeply. I will never forget the long discussion one evening over “What is the essence of ‘ship’?” where we sought to pin down just what the word meant in a way that it covered all uses of the word. In linguistics we used it to argue whether a given vocable was actually one word or multiple words.
It’s only when someone thinks that they can declare what the essence of something is, without deep examination, that the concept is a problem; that and when it is tied to some concept of a hierarchy of being.

Thinking of “essence” always brings to mind the question posed by one philosophy professor, “What is essence of ‘duck’?” and one wit, referring to a prank where someone had actually caught one of the campus ducks and somehow smuggled it in and placed it in the professor’s valise, noted, “Must include ‘shits on desk’.” – a comment the professor put to use to illustrate that any definition of something’s essence has to be exhaustive (not merely as in the effort required to clean said desk).
Addendum: we were forced into some apophatic efforts in attempting to define the essence of “duckness”, as we could not manage to distinguish it from “gooseness” without negative statements.

A question posed at a church leadership retreat: Is the self more like a sculpture or a stew?
(It sounds like silly theory, but it was a way of getting people to focus on working to see who others really are instead of jumping to conclusions.)

That’s how one philosophy prof defined “essence”. “The thing as it is” indicated what remained after stripping away non-essentials, what Aristotle called “accidents”.
But another professor didn’t like the term, because “the thing as it is” in his view included those accidents, as they were what distinguished one member of a set from another member, e.g. what distinguished a classroom chair from one in the lounge (his example).

Heh – I feel the same way. I still don’t think I grasp what “existential” means, and Kierkegaard always gave me headaches.
But to weight in on the question, if we equate “form” with “essence”, then the second birth is a re-form-ation.

hystericalhystericalhysterical

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I’ve argued that the cost was in trying to even set up the experiment – and that the result was to show that communism has never been tried because it has been shown to be impossible to even achieve the starting conditions, and beyond just dangerous to even make the attempt.

Ironically, Adam Smith, the supposed champion of capitalism, warned about this, that capitalism is antithetical to free markets and fair dealing.

Yes! – it was a conservative movement that adopted a liberal framework to secure.

That strikes me as perhaps the ultimate existential question.
And I have no clue. I do hope that it is something that leaves behind the deficits of my current brain chemistry.

I think Lewis makes the case that what counts as “self” is character.

I second that quite fervently! Except in a few rare cases, in my experience the term “obedience” has always meant “conform” and has been tightly linked to the assertion “you just don’t have enough faith”.

It’s a great metaphor. I’ve heard it used in a sermon, without attribution, taking up the idea of the church as a ship.

I also.

I’ve struggled with loneliness. Not sure if I manage it much better.

A comparison: picture a kingdom that is large enough that some people, having never met the king, deny he even exists – from their perspective, they are just living according to what they can recognize, but to the king they would still be disloyal.

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Three “boos” for the news cycle!

But the filter is the definition of truth as “rules and facts”, without ever asking of scripture what it says it is, relying rather on human tradition and a modern worldview.

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No I never said any such thing. In fact, I have explicitly disagreed when someone made this claim in another thread. The role I see for religion is NOT one of explaining things which cannot be explained naturally. The role I see for religion is one of providing a basic necessity of life for subjective participation.

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I never thought religion came about to explain things as a crude sort of science. Though one does hear that frequently from professing atheists.

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Despair.

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I have been reading the Wikipedia article on “Sickness unto Death.” Much of it is meaningless to me. It frankly seems like the thinking of someone rather too self-involved and tortured – certainly way beyond my own experience. I have simply never been that tortured. If I have a great challenge in life it is learning to feel more and be more sensitive to other people. The closest I have come is simply to believe in a faith that life is worth living. Remember that existentialism provided a meaning of “God” for me in the equivalence of faith in God to a faith that life is worth living. But beyond that, what I read about Kierkegaard’s writing in this Wikipedia article is just too alien for me to understand.

When I took a class on Existentialism at the university, I did my term paper on a book of Stephen Donaldson, “The Wounded Land” (fourth in fiction series called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant). Daring eh? I have frequently called these books my existentialist Bible. It is about a writer who contracts leprosy so his family leaves him, but he stubbornly refuses despair. Then he is called to another world in order to fight an enemy who is the personification of despair. In the fourth book he brings along another person, a woman doctor, who has had her own struggle with despair due to a horrific experience as a child. So while I cannot really understand what Kierkegaard writes so much, I certainly see despair as a kind of central evil. I wouldn’t call it sin, however. It is more that I see a refusal to despair as heroic.

There are three kinds of despair presented in the book: one of them relates to being unconscious of having a self; another to not wanting to be oneself; and the third, to feeling that one is not oneself. He describes the first kind as “inauthentic despair”, because it is born of ignorance. In this state, one is unaware that one has a self that is separate from its finite reality. One does not realize that there is a power that created and continues to create oneself, and accepts the idea of finitude because one is unaware of the possibility of being more inherent in selfhood. The second kind of despair is refusing to accept the self outside of immediacy; only defining the self in immediate, finite terms. This is the state in which one realizes that one has a self, but wishes to lose this painful awareness by arranging one’s finite life so as to make the realization unnecessary. This stage is loosely comparable to Sartre’s bad faith. The third kind is awareness of the self without a willingness to acknowledge the dependence of that self on love, i.e., the power that created one. In this state, one accepts the eternal, and may or may not acknowledge love, but refuses to accept the aspect of the self that is love. Kierkegaard describes this kind of despair as the most heightened kind, and labels it “demonic”. (Wikipedia)

Of the three kinds of despair described, only the second kind even seems familiar to me (sounds like envy), and only because I have seen it in other people. But even this is too irrational for me. I guess I related more to the kind of despair described in Christine Feehan’s Dark books which is a despair from the emptiness of not feeling anything. Not that I have felt such a despair myself really. For me the lack of feeling is simply the background on which feeling has seemed like a miracle to me on occasion. And it is not like I don’t feel things when I read books and watch movies. So maybe it has more to do with engaging with life and people. And perhaps I have changed over time as well.

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I don’t understand why that is even an issue of loyalty. To make it such sounds like the king is experiencing a bit of insecurity. LOL I would think it is only disloyalty if you make that a reason to act against the king. But one can see no reason to believe the king exists, but still support the law given by king as a good thing.

So I have expressed considerable doubt that believing in His existence much of a priority for God. Seems to me, He has more important things to concern Himself with. More than that, I see good reason to think more effort to make people believe He exists would do more harm than good. Instead, it is more a priority those using religion to control and manipulate others.