Identity (Identity)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 07:55 (5568 days ago) @ xeno6696

First of all, Matt, welcome back to AgnosticWeb. It's good to hear that you and your wife are recharged and rejuvenated. With your positive attitude, you will overcome all the remaining problems. - While you were away, David has been providing us with fascinating glimpses of the extraordinary ingenuity of "Nature's I.Q.". I'd like to link these with the subjects of identity as well as evolution (certain aspects of which David is challenging). - First, though, another word about animals. There was a sad photograph in this week's Sunday Times, and the caption reads: "Two-year-old orphan Jumaane nudges the face of his dead mother in an attempt to bring her back to life. Yoki, who at 19 was not elderly for an elephant, died on Thursday at the Nyiregyhaza animal park in Hungary, apparently from a tumour in her spleen. Keepers say that since his mother's death, Jumaane has been inconsolable, wandering around aimlessly and weeping." - There is nothing unusual in this. Elephants not only grieve, but they even stand and contemplate places of death when they return years later. Conversely, they can also celebrate wildly, trumpeting, dancing, and peeing with excitement. If we have common descendants, we should not be surprised that we have common characteristics (which may include the peeing!), and these are not confined to the body. Thus far, the theory of evolution fits together well. - David, however, has been asking how evolution could have produced various extraordinary symbiotic relationships and methods of entrapment. I would like to extend his question to emotions, consciousness, memory, etc. The "free will" that you are so concerned with, Matt, is another of these faculties ... the result of enhanced consciousness. Like you, I think that we have it, but that we are also greatly influenced by factors (some internal) beyond our conscious control. This leads to two related questions: 
1) Do we believe that all of these astonishingly complex faculties are produced solely by physical cells within the cerebral cortex? 2) If so, do we believe that the relevant sections of the brain ... not to mention the nervous system to which it is connected ... arose initially out of random mutations, i.e. blind chance (though surviving and improving through natural selection)? - If the answer to 1) is yes, then doesn't it mean that we are indeed, as you put it, "slaves to atoms"? If the answer is no, what else is there in us (and, in less developed form, presumably also in other animals) that can produce phenomena such as consciousness, emotion, memory, reason? - If the answer to 2) is yes, so be it. But the greater the complexity, even allowing for millions of years of evolution, the more faith we have to have in chance, which brought about those initial random mutations.