Canute said:
I remember when my son came home from school with some physics homework concerning mass. Of course, he had been given no indication that we have no idea what mass actually is. I suggested he asked his teacher about this. Needless to say he was told to shut up. Mass is what the textbook says it is. I feel it is as important to teach kids what we don't know as well as what we do, and probably far more so.
Come on, Canute. This has nothing to do with the failing of your kid's physics class. The question of what mass is exactly is a philosophical question. Physics deals with physical ontology, not with substance ontology. For the purposes of calculation, mass is what it does, and that is all that matters to physics. If a physics class bothered to ask these questions, they'd be distracted from asking all of the questions that they can actually answer, answers that result in us having these wonderful computers to chat with each other on and ask philosophical questions. Do you have any idea how much a physicist in training already has to learn? If they needed to learn philosophy in addition, it would take ten years to get a degree.
Recently, as a favour for a friend, I looked half a dozen articles on evolutionary psychology. I was astonished to find that consciousness was not mentioned once, and did not seem to exist at all for the authors. Then I started thinking. We cannot claim that consciousness has any role in evolution without claiming that consciousness is causal. To claim that consciousness is causal is not unscientific, scientists have no idea whether is causal or not, but it is scientifically unorthodox in the sense that it is inconsistent with science's usual metaphysical conjectures, such as the causal completeness of the physical and physicalism. Perhaps then peer pressure is such that one cannot talk about consciousness if one is a professional evolutionary psychologist. Or perhaps I just happened to read an unrepresentative sample of articles.
There is a much simpler explanation for why there is no mention of consciousness as a causal factor in evolution. It's that psychologists don't refer very often to "consciousness" at all. If you want to look for desire and motivation as factors in evolution, you look for those words, not for the word "consciousness." It's a word that isn't used often by psychologists, not because of peer pressure, but because they don't know what to make of it. They have no way of researching the subjectivity of first-person experience that is scientific. Nobody does. You might see consciousness referred to in neuroscience journals, but even then, you'll see them mostly discussing global brain processes, not subjectivity. Because a scientist has no means of researching this matter, any mention of it will be speculative theorizing, which is found in philosophical journals. All you're seeing here is the division of academic disciplines. There is nothing sinister or conspiratorial about it.
But it does seem to me, as an outsider, that neo-Darwinism is a theory of machines. Why does it have to be this?
Because we cannot get inside of the heads of animals to determine how their subjective experience motivates them. Science treats animals as machines because it doesn't have the means to treat them as anything else. This is not so much a failing of evolutionary theory as it is a failing of science when applied to conscious creatures period. Yes, it has its shortcomings. It isn't a panacea with the answers for everything.
In fact, what you should be able to find is a huge rift in schools of human evolutionary thought. One team led by Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, claims that humans and all other animals can be reduced to machines. The other team, led by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, makes the counterclaim, the same claim you are making, that we must not treat conscious creatures as automotons. According to this school, no purely biological account will ever be enough to explain why evolution occurred exactly the way it did. Neither school is considered to be one of orthodoxy; you might be surprised to find how much disagreement there really is amongst evolutionary biologists.
The agreement really boils down to this and this alone: species of today evolved from a smaller number of species that lived in the past due to variation and selection. Darwin's natural selection, wherein a pool of varied organisms of a single species is dwindled by competition for reproductive and food resources, is one mechanism of selection. Sexual selection in sexual species is another one (and yes, there is debate as to whether or not the consciousness of the sexual creatures must be taken into account). Variation arises by mutation, recombination, and other mechanisms that are not necessarily agreed upon. Saltationism is not a significant source of speciation. Aside from these basic things, pretty much everything else is up for debate.
If having wants can affect behaviour then consciousness is causal.
Okay, someone as philosophically well-versed as you are should know that this matter it not so cut-and-dry. There are plenty of theories out there that purport to explain desire without reference to subjectivity. You may not be satisfied with them; heck, even I may not be satisfied with them (in fact, I am not), but you should not claim this hypothetical conditional statement as being a straightforward deduction. It may or may not be true.
If having wants can affect behaviour then consciousness can affect evolution. It seems reasonable to suppose that human beings have two legs because they wanted to walk upright.
Just to note again, there is literature on this; scientists do not just ignore these things. I'm not going to run a blind google search, but I believe I might have some old papers dealing specifically with this matter (of how human motivation may have affected the evolution of upright walking) lying around at the bottom of a pile somewhere. If I can dig them up, I'll at least give you the titles and authors of whatever I can find. They are old, though, and there is no guarantee that I will even remember. If I provide nothing, you'll just have to look for yourself or take my word for it that desire and motivation are looked at by some scientists as factors in evolution.
It seems to me then that it is fairly easy to argue that it is consciousness that drives evolution.
You have to be careful there. I would agree with the statement that evolution is at least partially driven by consciousness, in species that are conscious. I don't see how you can justify taking the assertion any further than that, however. At this point in time, as human action may very well impact the evolution of every species in existence in at least some small way, you might be able to say that consciousness has an effect on all evolution currently taking place (the claim becomes trivial, but you can still make it). You cannot say, however, that this was always the case. There is certainly no justification in making the claim that consciousness caused abiogenesis to occur, as Sleeth has done, without making at least several very large leaps of reasoning.
If our behaviour is in any way motivated by our wants and needs than consciousness plays a central role in the evolution of our species.
A role? Perhaps. A central role? That I am not so sure of. I don't see how anyone could take umbrage with the claim, as it now stands, that the drive for food and sex is what plays the central role. While we may subjectively experience these drives as desires, there is no reason that we have to. Zombie-humans, driven by hunger and sexual need, may very well evolve in just about the same way.
The only way to avoid this conclusion that I can see is to say either that our behaviour is not affected by our wants and needs or that it is possible to have wants and needs without being conscious. The former is a counterintuitive idea to say the least, and has no evidence to support it, and the latter seems to make no sense at all.
The latter is a bastardization of the real claim that is made, however. The real claim is that, even if we did not subjectively experience our desires, we would still behave in accordance with physical needs. Take simply the claim that desire had something to do with our walking upright. This is entirely possible. Perhaps the reason humans walk upright is because one of our ancestors had the desire to stand up. When he did, he found that it purveyed some advantage to him, and he taught it to his offspring. Then the Baldwin effect kicks in and learned behavior becomes evolved behavior.
There is another possibility, though. Consider the context in which this evolved behavior took place. Our ancestors did not crawl on all fours; they climbed and swung through trees. When they left the rainforest, they could no longer do this, as the African savannas that they left to do not have the trees to enable this means of locomotion. What they likely found was that walking on all fours slowed them down. They had bodies designed to hang and be elongated; scrunching up into a crawling position results in a rather awkward gait. Injuries ensue, and attempts to evade predators fail. However, when one discovers that he can strengthen his hind limbs and walk on them alone by practice, he teaches that to his tribe and, from that point forward, the Baldwin effect kicks in and stronger, longer hind limbs are selected for.
The former cannot happen without desire; the latter can. It might also be the case that the former can happen without subjectivity; while it might make no sense to you and it might make no sense to anyone but the man proposing it, it is nonetheless a possibility.
The rest of your post seems to step outside outside of my area of (admittedly scant anyway) knowledge. Therefore, I will not address it. You've made it clear that you aren't supporting any form of intelligent design hypothesis anyway, so I hope you don't get the impression that I'm trying to shoot you down. I am really only hoping to change your view of the state of current science, which seems to be negative in places where it should not be, due to perceived slights of your personal views which are not necessarily actually there. I hope only that you can discover for yourself the great diversity and debate that really does exist amongst evolutionary biologists and others who study the matter.
I'm getting a migrane. By saying there is a "more-supported inference" all I meant was that one should infer that the evidence suggests a possibility, not what is most likely. But I'll grant you I should have been more clear. I suppose I assumed the weight of my many former posts would make it obvious where I am coming from.
The best thing I found was a study of fishes possibly between stages of developing placentas. But even these findings didn't make the researchers claim they had proof. They were excited by the possibilities, but conservative in that they recognized they would need a lot more information to prove anything.
