Unanswered Questions
I'm briefly setting down a couple of things that have crossed my mind:
Global Warming: though it seems to be an undisputed phenomenon caused at least in part by human activity, it is possible to come across people, some of them apparently reputable scientists, who deny either that it is happening, or that it is not caused by CO2 . This is something that I would have thought was objectively verifiable, a physical occurrence, measurable, observable. That the world's climate is controlled by physical forces, structures in my terminology, must be true, but the apparent doubt seems to indicate that the exact nature of those structures is not as fully known as we would like to think.
Free will has been debated for centuries, as to whether or not it exists. The consensus now is moving toward the position that it does not, thanks to genetic and neurochemical research (I don't have any references to hand), and philosophers have always been divided on the subject. Assuming behaviour to be determined, then, it must be determined by forces - structures - of which we are largely or completely unconscious.
Advances in neuroscience have shown that a great proportion of brain activity is unconscious and that, by implication, much behaviour is controlled by this activity; which ties in with the lack of free will. Certainly there is much in our relationship with our surroundings that is unconsciously processed: coordination of movement, aspects of vision, and there is research that shows how we are predisposed to take certain attitudes, eg. to strangers etc.
All of this, and things I've spoken of earlier, suggests to me that the underlying structure, the mechanism that controls our destiny, is something of which we are largely ignorant. I don't believe this entity to be sentient or necessarily purposeful. It may a blind, massive, random force. Yet within it there is organisation, as is evident by the organisation of the physical universe, the existence of patterns within it.
Global Warming: though it seems to be an undisputed phenomenon caused at least in part by human activity, it is possible to come across people, some of them apparently reputable scientists, who deny either that it is happening, or that it is not caused by CO2 . This is something that I would have thought was objectively verifiable, a physical occurrence, measurable, observable. That the world's climate is controlled by physical forces, structures in my terminology, must be true, but the apparent doubt seems to indicate that the exact nature of those structures is not as fully known as we would like to think.
Free will has been debated for centuries, as to whether or not it exists. The consensus now is moving toward the position that it does not, thanks to genetic and neurochemical research (I don't have any references to hand), and philosophers have always been divided on the subject. Assuming behaviour to be determined, then, it must be determined by forces - structures - of which we are largely or completely unconscious.
Advances in neuroscience have shown that a great proportion of brain activity is unconscious and that, by implication, much behaviour is controlled by this activity; which ties in with the lack of free will. Certainly there is much in our relationship with our surroundings that is unconsciously processed: coordination of movement, aspects of vision, and there is research that shows how we are predisposed to take certain attitudes, eg. to strangers etc.
All of this, and things I've spoken of earlier, suggests to me that the underlying structure, the mechanism that controls our destiny, is something of which we are largely ignorant. I don't believe this entity to be sentient or necessarily purposeful. It may a blind, massive, random force. Yet within it there is organisation, as is evident by the organisation of the physical universe, the existence of patterns within it.
posted by Peter Shelton at 6:08 PM
1 Comments:
Very cool.
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