wave said:
I am not aware of anyone in mainstream science who claims that natural selection and mutations are responsible for abiogenesis. Can you clarify who "they" are? Any scientists? If so, in what papers?
Let’s drop abiogenesis for now since it seems to be getting mixed up with our talk about evolution. When I said “evolve an organism” I meant evolve from say a sea scorpion to a spider. Obviously natural selection and mutations cannot have produced abiogenesis when genes didn’t exist.
wave said:
My point is that scientists would consider non-physical mechanisms seriously, as long as you provide scientific evidence to support your claims.
It seems to be a very difficult task to explain what I find wrong with your above logic (since I have tried and failed many times with others in the past). To try to make my point, I’m going to jump back and forth between a couple of issues.
To understand my objection, you have to see the significance of the fact that the most important part of empiricism’s epistemology is based on sense experience. As you know, we can hypothesize brilliantly, but nothing is said to be “known” empirically until it is confirmed by observation (which occurs via sense experience). Something that seems without controversy is that the senses only transmit physical information, and therefore sense experience strictly gives us awareness of the physical world.
I accept it as an ironclad principle that (tautologies aside) to know reality we must experience it. But rather than empiricism, I have referred to my own personal epistemology as “experientialism” because of my conviction that sense experience isn’t the only kind of experience available to consciousness. If so, might another kind of experience produce knowledge of something other than physicalness? Hold that thought for a second and let’s talk about science a bit more.
If we decide to study the physical world, the senses serve us well. Because the physical world is bound in order, rhythm, cycles, predictability, symmetries . . . our intellect can develop and use calculating methodologies to work with physicalness. We are deeply entrenched in the physical world, from the universe as a whole to our own bodies, especially the CSN, so there is lots and lots to study and understand through scientific investigation. It seems there is little, and to some, nothing, that isn’t either physical or entangled in physicalness somehow.
Now, here we are talking about if the development of the universe might have been guided by some sort of universal consciousness. As a “neutral” thinker (i.e., not a Biblical IDer) I have suggested it’s worthwhile to give that hypothesis serious consideration. You respond by saying, “scientists would consider non-physical mechanisms seriously, as long as you provide scientific evidence to support your claims.” Hmmmmm. See the problem? How is science going to evaluate non-physical evidence?
But I don’t get off that easy because if I am an experientialist, what experience can offer evidence of the universal consciousness hypothesis? In this case, the experience required to reveal the evidence seems to be through a method that is exactly opposite of the scientific method. For science, one peers through the senses “outward” at the external world. But the most consistent reports of experience of universal consciousness have come from people who learned
withdraw from the senses to feel “inward.”
To a devoted externalizer, the idea that looking inward might tell us something about evolution seems ludicrous. But to accomplished meditators, it is clear what the relevance is. The inner dimension reveals that the external world is a condensed form of something far more basic. I’ll borrow and bastardize Bohm’s concept of “enfolded” to describe what I mean. It’s like the physical world is densely folded, and when someone can work their way back through the folds, one finds it all stretched out and one. Once you reach that unfolded realm, there you are conscious and unified with something vast which also seems conscious.
The history and nature of this experience is rarely studied carefully, even by meditators. I seldom find anyone who has focused their study (or practice) of inwardness specifically on what’s called “union.” Yet that experience, at least what I found in my research, is the experience responsible for the most consistent reports about an underlying consciousness behind manifest physical creation.
wave said:
Suppose you can add any non-physical process you want to Evolution and/or Abiogenesis, as long as you can back it up scientifically.
A non-physical process obviously can’t be backed up scientifically. I will offer you one below anyway, but first let me point out how this is interpreted by scientism devotees (i.e., those only willing to accept as true scientifically confirmable facts).
Scientism devotees typically demand scientific evidence. They also typically refuse to accept anything which isn’t scientific. Do you see the epistemological assumption they are operating under? They assume if it can’t be investigated scientifically, then it isn’t real. Because science relies only on the senses, which only transmits physical information, scientism devotees are only prepared to look at physicalness. If someone suggests there maybe something non-physical, the science devotee demands scientific proof.
Further, it has been my experience that the majority of scientism devotees are so conditioned by their obsession with externals, they not only resist looking inward, they view it as basically a waste of time. After all, if you value studying externals above all else, then what can inwardness possibly offer?
So we have scientists studying the evolution of life. What do they find? They find only physical factors. What do they conclude? That only physical factors are responsible. Yet there are problems with the theory, like the fact that evolution operated at one time in such a way that it developed new organs, then it stopped. The only thing that scientists can find now that produces changes to an organism is natural selection and genetic variation, but the only thing we can observe it doing is making bigger bird beaks, or altering the color of moths, etc.
We don’t now see new development of organs that will lead to new classes of organisms. Why no midstage stuff? Why no new organs-in-progress? Surely all organisms can be improved upon. But do you hear many scientism devotees admitting that, based on what we can observe, genetic variation is far too unvaried and natural selection is ridiculously too ordinary to create such a thing as an organ? No, they cling to it as the most likely creator of the different life forms, and only allow that if some other mechanism is involved, it must be physical factors we’ve yet to discover.
The problem is, all who are insisting evolution is only physical, and that it be taught in school that way, aren’t representing the full range of human experience. They are a specialized group, possibly obsessed with externals, who want us all to buy their ontology and epistemology. Others of us think inwardness and learning to feel deeply have epistemological value, and don’t want theories derived from looking at reality only in one way shoved down our throats.
Those gaps filled with half-baked physicalist theories, notably abiogenesis and organ development through natural selection/mutation, are areas still fillable by a theory of universal consciousness. So a lot of people (the vast majority in fact) aren’t yet ready to hear scientism devotees claiming, and insisting on teaching our children, that life and consciousness are “most likely” only physical.
wave said:
Suppose you can add any non-physical process you want to . . . Here is your chance to include that "significant missing" piece. What would you like to include?
What sort of non-physical influence would I propose? If you understood about getting back to the unfolded place where a foundation of consciousness resides, I might suggest that that consciousness is
evolutive in nature, and was responsible for the bursts of organizational quality which led to new organs. If that “evolutive” consciousness is key to the organization of the folding, then it would be part of genetic organization, and so I’d see genetic manipulation as where this evolutive consciousness intervened during the evolution of biology.
I might explain the punctuated thing like this. Since the evolutive impetus is consciousness, it strives to develop a form that will allow consciousness to emerge. So as the planet became more supportive, eventually the evolutive force gave priority to paths with the most emanative promise, and these became the
lead evolutive structures; but left behind were evolutive effects still alive in all surviving species.
The non-selected forms continued to physically evolve in the sense that they could adapt to environmental conditions, but since they were no longer the vanguard of the evolutive thrust, such peripheral evolution was not where one might find continuing consciousness evolution in biology. The evolutive force continued to push, leaping up through species after species, ever seeking the highest possible expression of itself (“seeking” in the opposite sense of how water “seeks” the lowest point) until after millions of years of evolutive momentum, the modern human came about.
In this model, after survivability is established, the drive toward emergence is the most powerful force of evolutiveness, and the human form was eventually singled out as the lead evolutive structure to surpass all other life in the sophistication of evolutive emergence. In other words, consciousness is emerged evolutiveness.
Such arrogance isn’t going to impress those thinking people who aren’t already committed to physicalism, but who instead are looking for opinions formed from the fair and objective evaluation of ALL relevant evidence.)
