Why Darwinism?

[seebs]

I just had something hit me like a sack of bricks.

I have always wondered why anyone would care whether or not Darwin recanted. It's not just that the allegation is false; it's that I can't conceive of its relevance.

It occurs to me:

Everyone I have ever seen offer the claim that Darwin recanted has used authority as the primary basis of belief.

In short, they figure that a claim that Darwin recanted ought to affect "evolutionists" the way a claim that Benedict XVI recanted ought to affect Catholicsm. They assume that, as they believe things primarily based on their having been asserted by an authoritative source, so too does everyone else. And that, in turn, implies that if they can identify the authoritative source, and discredit that source, the beliefs derived from it will evaporate.

This is a much more fundamental disconnect than I previously realized.

[David B]

Yes!

It has never struck me like that before, but my intuition tells me that you are right.

Trouble is, they somehow manage to close their ears to the discrediting of their authority - an authority with no real credit.

David B (excludes a few honourable exceptions from the broad rule of thumb that religious people are fundamentally disconnected)

[TransverseWave]

I think he's right too. I've been hearing that argument for a while now, and just saying, "Huh?" And hearing the curious way fundamentalists insist on talking about "Darwinism," as if it were all about the man. (Usually when you hear a persistent different in language like that it's either a historical artifact or an in-group out-group marker, but I wasn't quite convinced that was the whole story, in this case.)

Back when I was OEC it never once occurred to me to offer anything personal about any evolutionary scientist as a reason for disbelieving in evolutionist. I evidently made a lousy fundamentalist. (Explains what happened later, I guess.)

[seebs]

I think a big part of the problem, of course, is that the alleged "discrediting" of the authorities does not come from a recognized authority. So it's not even the beginnings of an argument.

Trying to prove that the authority is not authoritative, without appealing to a more compelling or effective authority (by their existing standards), is ridiculous and incoherent.

BTW, this is in no way limited to creo/evo. I knew a dogmatic atheist who had an absolute authority belief system, which he built around Noam Chomsky and Roger Penrose. He read some of their stuff, concluded they were brilliant, and adopted a firm policy of believing everything they said. He explicitly affirmed that this was his model; this is not just guesswork.

And yes, he was a fucking lunatic.

[David B]

I think a big part of the problem, of course, is that the alleged "discrediting" of the authorities does not come from a recognized authority. So it's not even the beginnings of an argument.

Trying to prove that the authority is not authoritative, without appealing to a more compelling or effective authority (by their existing standards), is ridiculous and incoherent.

BTW, this is in no way limited to creo/evo. I knew a dogmatic atheist who had an absolute authority belief system, which he built around Noam Chomsky and Roger Penrose. He read some of their stuff, concluded they were brilliant, and adopted a firm policy of believing everything they said. He explicitly affirmed that this was his model; this is not just guesswork.

And yes, he was a fucking lunatic.

Yup.

I used, on another board, long ago, to argue woth a dogmatic atheist who was a Randite, and continued to argue that paying tax is slavery.

Which it ain't.

In my own religious days, I read a translation of a book by the Hindu sage Sankara.

In retrospect, the bulk of what he said was based upon faulty metaphysics - not surprising more than 2000 years ago.

But the title of the book lives me yet.

'The Crest Jewel of Discrimination'.

http://www.realization.org/page/namedoc0/vc/vc_0.htm

Discrimination, I think, is the key to working out as best we can the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Now - to digress.



Crest Jewel of Wisdom
(Viveka-Chudamani)

Verses 1-50



I prostrate myself before Govinda, the true Guru and ultimate Bliss, who is the unattainable resort of all scriptures and Vedanta. 1

Human nature is the hardest of creaturely states to obtain, even more so that of manhood. Brahminhood is rarer still, and beyond that dedication to the path of Vedic religion. Beyond even that there is discrimination between self and non-self, but liberation by persistence in the state of the unity of God and self is not to be achieved except by the meritorious deeds of hundreds of thousands of lives

Basically, he seems to me to be saying that Hindu's (like him) are very lucky, and I see parallels with Christians saying that c hristians like them are also very lucky.

David B (was going to say more, but will end by saying that he has no reason to see the metaphysics of Sankara, with his reincarnation, is any more or less sensible than the Christian doctrine of Salvation, which is to say, not at all sensible)

[TransverseWave]

I think a big part of the problem, of course, is that the alleged "discrediting" of the authorities does not come from a recognized authority. So it's not even the beginnings of an argument.

Trying to prove that the authority is not authoritative, without appealing to a more compelling or effective authority (by their existing standards), is ridiculous and incoherent.
And frequently the only thing that gets through this is a grid-smashing event.

Reason being: changing your mind is easy when doing so relieves tension between your view and what's before your eyes, when it resolves the discord. However, when changing your mind will break the entire interpretive framework, it leads to an immensely greater state of tension: much more is unexplained and troubling than before. It is not usual and not easy to voluntarily move into a position where you have much less ability to explain the world.

[seebs]

Exactly.

I got lucky early on and ended up with more than one interpretive framework, and I continue to put real effort into keeping multiple frameworks available. Why? Because none of them are perfect. So I switch frameworks from one topic to another, from one day to another, basically as they get better or worse at solving my problems.

I tend to be an instrumentalist with respect to epistemology. While thoroughly aware that there is nothing really analogous to preference in most software, I still use the model of "what computers like" most of the time when interacting with them, because even my fairly stunted social instincts are way faster and "cheaper" to me in resource allocation than actual full modeling of computer behavior. So I offload a task to a less correct but functionally good-enough model and there's more general-purpose computing available for me to use on my actual work. (Interestingly, this works better the less predictable software is; it's exceptionally good at allowing me to use Microsoft Word, but virtually useless for C compilers.)

[TransverseWave]

I got lucky early on and ended up with more than one interpretive framework, and I continue to put real effort into keeping multiple frameworks available. Why? Because none of them are perfect. So I switch frameworks from one topic to another, from one day to another, basically as they get better or worse at solving my problems.
How'd you end up with more than one?

[seebs]

Very interesting question.

My guess is that I spend a lot more time than most people do thinking about what other people think or feel. Once I realized that they did have internal states, and that these were not obvious, I became fascinated by the question; thus, for instance, my degree is in psych, where I specialized in cognitive psychology.

You know how there's a significant difference between the presence of people and the presence of non-people? There's a basic human instinct which makes people-ness a matter of primary experience -- you can't not know that other people have thoughts and emotions. Unless, say, hypothetically, you were autistic. Then you might have to think about it, and form conclusions about it.

I think as long as it's going off instinct, you end up with the instinct obviously ascribing basically comparable cognitive experiences to other people, because that makes sense; you're generalizing from yourself to other people, and/or from other people to yourself. I don't have that. I am widely and generally deficient in any kind of cognitive thing that depends on the intuitively obvious claim that other people are essentially the same kind of thing I am. But, as a side effect, I don't expect them to think like me. I expect them to think in wildly different ways, and the more I watch them, the more amazingly different these ways are.

The only way I know of to make sense of peoples' behavior is to model it, and if you have a working cognitive model of how someone thinks, you can think like that.

I'm still mind-blind, and I still don't tend to remember to try to model peoples' thoughts or experiences all the time, and I don't always notice how they will play out, but... I learned early on that there is no one correct model of "how people think", and that people generally expect other people to think like themselves. So if I have to interact with someone, I try to observe how they expect other people to act, because that tells me how they themselves are likely to act. Then I know how they think.

There are at least five or six essentially different approaches to epistemology out there, probably more. People who get into huge shouting matches over how stupid other people are nearly always turn out to be disagreeing about foundational epistemology.

Unfortunately, most people don't understand this, because it assails a foundational (and perhaps necessary) assumption -- the essential universality of their way of filtering experiences into models of the world. But you can do okay without that, as long as you have the time and bandwidth to carry several models.

[TransverseWave]

I think as long as it's going off instinct, you end up with the instinct obviously ascribing basically comparable cognitive experiences to other people, because that makes sense; you're generalizing from yourself to other people, and/or from other people to yourself. I don't have that. I am widely and generally deficient in any kind of cognitive thing that depends on the intuitively obvious claim that other people are essentially the same kind of thing I am. But, as a side effect, I don't expect them to think like me. I expect them to think in wildly different ways, and the more I watch them, the more amazingly different these ways are.
OK.

The only way I know of to make sense of peoples' behavior is to model it, and if you have a working cognitive model of how someone thinks, you can think like that.

I'm still mind-blind, and I still don't tend to remember to try to model peoples' thoughts or experiences all the time, and I don't always notice how they will play out, but... I learned early on that there is no one correct model of "how people think", and that people generally expect other people to think like themselves. So if I have to interact with someone, I try to observe how they expect other people to act, because that tells me how they themselves are likely to act. Then I know how they think.
How well do you do predicting what I'll do?


There are at least five or six essentially different approaches to epistemology out there, probably more. People who get into huge shouting matches over how stupid other people are nearly always turn out to be disagreeing about foundational epistemology.
Ah! This is what I want. What are the approaches you know of?

Not shy of bandwidth, but I've spent so much time handling my own sets (one of them being interesting but catastrophic) that my observation has sometimes suffered.

[seebs]

How well do you do predicting what I'll do?

Not very. I don't know you very well. In general, I tend to model you as a self-aware science type; your basic methodology is usually pretty close to scientific, but you are conscious of this and probably choose different methodologies under different circumstances, at least a little.

Ah! This is what I want. What are the approaches you know of?

Not shy of bandwidth, but I've spent so much time handling my own sets (one of them being interesting but catastrophic) that my observation has sometimes suffered.

Hmm.

Interesting question.

Okay, basic models:

* authority->truth
* experience->truth
* science->truth
* analysis->truth

Those are the basic foundations I've usually seen. Science is a sort of hybrid of experience and analysis, with special restrictions on what constitutes an experience which should be considered at all. Conventional dogmatic religion tends to promote a pure authority system. The popular scientism among many atheists tends to promote a pure science system. Hippies and mystics tend to go with pure experience; anytime someone starts talking about "what's true for you", they're probably assuming that experience dictates truth. Some philosophers tend towards analysis as truth.

In a debate between, say, a traditional YEC and Joe Average Atheist, you're seeing a debate between authority->truth and science->truth. This means that one of the participants sees reproducible data as the essential starting point, and the other sees credible authorities as the essential starting point. I suspect most YEC quote-mining isn't intentionally deceptive; after all, most of them take single-verse prooftexts from the Bible as authoritative. They're not looking for grand sweeping patterns; they're looking at each authority as making a set of claims which are necessarily all of equivalent value.

Some people mix these. Even when mixing these, people may not realize that they have more than one system, and may not use them all intentionally or consciously; they may also not realize that there are choices about which ones to use when. A lot of people whose truth model is pure science at a conscious level have extremely elaborate moral systems which they experience as being "scientific", because they are not aware of the process by which they adopted their foundational value axioms. (We can say with some confidence that it wasn't scientific, because science simply has no framework for addressing a value question. The common assumption that some form of utilitarianism is a "scientific" value system is a category error, mistaking the development of ways to achieve goals for the initial decision about what goals to achieve.)

I tend towards experience for basic values, with some willingness to take authorities and analysis as guidance on how to clarify or explore those values. For material claims, I tend to rely on science, and for mathematical or theoretical claims, I tend to rely on analysis. However, I tend to use experience as a sort of default baseline; underneath it all, I'm probably a mystic. Oddly, I arrived at that position through analysis... I think I tend to use analysis as my meta-tool for choosing which tools to use.

[Late_Cretaceous]

I have never understood the idea of attacking Charles Darwin or claiming that he "recanted".

If he recanted or not is of no consequence - the theory is still valid with or without his endorsement. If Charles Darwin liked to suck the blood out of babies necks it would not affect the validity of the theory. I think some people think discrediting Darwin would discredit the theory as though it was a philosophy or religion of some sort.

[TransverseWave]

How well do you do predicting what I'll do?

Not very. I don't know you very well. In general, I tend to model you as a self-aware science type; your basic methodology is usually pretty close to scientific, but you are conscious of this and probably choose different methodologies under different circumstances, at least a little.
Pretty generally accurate, that, so far as it goes.

A significant number of the more conspicuous features of my behavior not determined by that, are dictated by the need to avoid engaging the interesting-but-catastrophic frame. I am not autistic; I do do a large amount of intellectual modelling of behavior (as you can plainly see). The interesting-but-catastrophic frame does it by nature; the other half does it partly of necessity. -- Say I had to build an emulator to ride on top of interesting-but-catastrophic.


Okay, basic models:

* authority->truth
* experience->truth
* science->truth
* analysis->truth
...
In a debate between, say, a traditional YEC and Joe Average Atheist, you're seeing a debate between authority->truth and science->truth. This means that one of the participants sees reproducible data as the essential starting point, and the other sees credible authorities as the essential starting point. I suspect most YEC quote-mining isn't intentionally deceptive; after all, most of them take single-verse prooftexts from the Bible as authoritative. They're not looking for grand sweeping patterns; they're looking at each authority as making a set of claims which are necessarily all of equivalent value.
Authority I can model. That makes sense.

I tend towards experience for basic values, with some willingness to take authorities and analysis as guidance on how to clarify or explore those values. For material claims, I tend to rely on science, and for mathematical or theoretical claims, I tend to rely on analysis. However, I tend to use experience as a sort of default baseline; underneath it all, I'm probably a mystic. Oddly, I arrived at that position through analysis... I think I tend to use analysis as my meta-tool for choosing which tools to use.
OK, now ... this I don't know how to do. The hippie-mystic bit. When I'm talking to you I can see that there's a framework there, but I don't know how to build enough of it to try it on.

I mean, authority is procedural, which I find fairly simple to get a grip on.

[seebs]

Mysticism is indeed largely non-procedural.

I'm going to mention something, but before you read up on it too much, you should give some serious thought to whether it's safe -- it sounds like it might trigger some of your brain's localized bad cases.

Epistemological anarchism.

Epistemological anarchism is an epistemological theory advanced by Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend which holds that there are no useful and exception-free methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge. It holds that the idea that science can or should operate according to universal and fixed rules is unrealistic, pernicious and detrimental to science itself.

(Wikipedia)

Basically, underneath it all, I am pretty sure that every process has limits. There are things you can analyze, and there are things you can't. There are things where the process of "analyzing" them replaces them with something subtly different. The map is not the territory; my description of life is not the reality of life.

I am autistic, and I married a poet. I have been forced to accept that the model I used for nearly everything simply could not describe or contain things which were demonstrably real and significant. And yet, I am already very much aware that the models other people use are also flawed.

My conclusion is that any one schema is insufficient. The world is not any one of these things. My brain is small; the universe is large. If I can contain a model, the model cannot be a reasonably complete model of the universe. Therefore, every model I can use is flawed.

So I don't commit to any one as the "true" model. I accept that I have to use different tools for different circumstances. The ruthless efficiency with which I subdivide problems and discard probably-irrelevant data when debugging can impress seriously smart and very experienced programmers; trying to handle romance that way was probably one of the stupidest things I ever did. Most people, I think, figure out reasonably early on that replication of results and control groups are not typically part of a healthy or functional romantic life, for that matter.

So instead of saying "this method is true, the others are false", I say "these methods are good at different kinds of things."

BTW, I forgot an absolutely crucial model: narrative->truth. This is extremely important, because it's particularly common in pre-enlightenment periods, and is one of the few stable pre-scientific models other than authority.

In fact, narrative is an extremely useful way to share and communicate blocks of experience in relatively recognizeable ways, which can save people a great deal of time and pain. But is it always true? Not necessarily by other standards. On the other hand, building a narrative of events is often the only way we are able to comprehend them at all...

The central dogma, I think, is that I do not believe that my comprehension is the same as the thing-comprehended; that strikes me as requiring a great deal more intelligence and capacity than I have available. I have only mental models of the world; they are not the world, and never will be. My thoughts about things are never the things themselves, and while they may be roughly accurate, they are never the reality.

I generally have very little luck talking to authority->truth believers about religion, but a great deal in common with other mystics trying to talk about it. Trying to talk about science->truth or analysis->truth thinkers about religion is usually pointless to me, because I'm talking about a thing that is by definition not part of their worldview. It's actually frustrating to me for just about the same reason that it is frustrating for a scientific sort to try to get "evidence" from a typical authority-belief Creationist. The underlying concept isn't there.

The really horrible miscommunications where people just talk past each other mostly seem to come from translating things from one model into another, which necessarily loses most of the content, then attacking the resulting straw men. It's not nearly as much of a problem when both participants are aware of different epistemological approaches.

[TransverseWave]

BTW, I forgot an absolutely crucial model: narrative->truth. This is extremely important, because it's particularly common in pre-enlightenment periods, and is one of the few stable pre-scientific models other than authority.

In fact, narrative is an extremely useful way to share and communicate blocks of experience in relatively recognizeable ways, which can save people a great deal of time and pain. But is it always true? Not necessarily by other standards. On the other hand, building a narrative of events is often the only way we are able to comprehend them at all...
OK, it's late, back to some of the rest of this tomorrow, but this part let me comment on now.

I don't know if I have any clue about narrative->truth.

I write fiction and verse. The reason for writing fiction and verse is that I want to communicate things that are connected and not readily reducible. If it fits into an essay, I'd write an essay; this is for creating aesthetic impressions and otherwise saying things aren't best reduced to propositions. I understand it as communication just fine.

But how the heck does it work as an epistemological method? Or, at least, how does your model of it work, if you can convey it?

Is it that there's an overarching story, and one accepts what seems to fit into the story? Say, if we take a Norse warrior with an outlook on the virtues to be cultivated, and the worthy goal, shaped by idea of fighting and dying alongside the gods at Ragnarok? If not something like that, what?

[seebs]

There is a story of a preacher talking about the Bible, saying "This is true, and some of it happened."

If you write fiction, you probably appreciate the distinction he's trying to communicate, yes?

And you note that I do not assert that a preacher said this; I assert only that there is a story of a preacher saying this. I don't know anything specific on the issue; I've heard it enough that it seems quite likely that some preacher somewhere has said it. But it doesn't matter to me whether it happened or not. What do I care? The story is expressive; the historical fact claim is uninteresting.

Narratives can be a way of communicating, not specifically what happened, but about what kinds of things happen. That is often much, much, more useful information to us. No one I've ever met could possibly keep track of the amount of data available about what happens, which is why people use so many anecdotes when talking about moral choices and the like; we have to look at individual stories in which we can form opinions about things.

Some peoples' "histories" were not written as an account of events which occurred, but as an account of what it is like to live. We tend to call these "fiction", but as many people observe, some quite frequently, you can often learn a lot more about life from fiction than you can from the newspaper. Narrative as truth is a bit of an instrumentalist view; it is built around seeing "truth" as "what beliefs and expectations allow us to make good decisions."

I had a cognitive psych professor whose particular interest was the role of narrative in communication. He told a lot of stories. He told us a story, a fairly long one, when it came time to introduce material about ethics, informed consent, and so on. Let me see how I can do, roughly eighteen years later (yeesh, half my life now!) at reporting it:

(switch to first person because that's how the story is)

When I was starting my graduate work, I was on my way to start on my first research project. As I was walking across campus, I was looking at the people walking the other way. They seemed to be sort of clumped in groups; some groups seemed pretty happy, and some groups seemed pretty sad.

When I got to the office, I found out what the experiment was that we would be working on. People would take an aptitude test. We recorded the results of the test. Then, no matter what the results had been, we split people into two categories randomly. The first group was told that they'd done exceptionally well on the test, and we wanted to do another test to see a bit more about how they were doing. The other group was told that the test suggested that it was probably some sort of error that they got into college, but we'd like to give them another chance just to see whether there might have been a problem with the test. Then we'd test them again, and see how the information affected their performance.

So my first question was when we'd debrief them about the experiment, and the guy running it said "Debrief them? Why?" I tried to explain how this could affect people, and he didn't seem to care. I ended up filing a complaint with the ethics board, and because the professor was running the department that year while the normal department head was on sabbatical, I spent the rest of the year doing meaningless work that had nothing to do with the program; he didn't have the authority to kick me out, but he could assign me to meaningless work.

When the department head came back, I got a message almost immediately telling me to go see him. I had heard he was a pretty harsh guy, and I was very nervous; I'd worked really hard to get into this program, and so far as I knew, I'd pretty much just thrown it away, but I went to see him anyway. If he was going to throw me out, I was going to tell him what I thought of the program.

So I got to his office, and introduced myself. And he said "Howard, you really went out on a limb here." And my stomach sank even further, and then he said "and I am really glad you blew the whistle here. We can't have this kind of thing in our program."

I still don't know what I'd have done if I'd been kicked out of the program, but I couldn't put up with that kind of experiment.

Now, consider. I heard this story 18 years ago. I have ADD. The chances are that I've got at least half the details wrong by now, and it's not implausible that the guy who told us the story had some wrong too.

Does that matter?

The truth is that an experiment which can seriously harm peoples' future potential or wellbeing is not okay. The truth is that you must tell people about experiments, and make sure they understand afterwards if you said anything false during the experiment. The truth is that you must do these things, and ensure that other psychologists do these things, even if it risks your own career.

In this, narrative is truth. Other models of truth are not nearly as effective at communicating this kind of thing. We can learn from other peoples' experiences and mistakes, but we do it better by far when these experiences are presented as a narrative we can internalize as a view of How Things Happen, than when they are presented as data.

If my psychology professor had given us statistics, with percentages and such, about how many people are made unhappy by badly run psychology experiments, would I still remember any of them? Would I have the thought of how horrific it would be to be told you were an idiot by an apparent specialist in the field, to be told that you would likely flunk out of college, and then never be told it was just a test to see how you reacted?

I think narrative models of truth are at their best when working on establishing values, norms, and expectations. For these, they are very good.

Interestingly, you'll see a huge amount of this on both sides of the abortion debate. You see very little in the way of statistics -- because the statistics don't really matter to most people. Stalin nailed that one; one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. What we care about is individual stories of people who were nearly aborted, or people whose lives were in danger from pregnancy.

[sparklecat]

My conclusion is that any one schema is insufficient. The world is not any one of these things. My brain is small; the universe is large. If I can contain a model, the model cannot be a reasonably complete model of the universe. Therefore, every model I can use is flawed.

You talk of subdividing problems; isn't that essentially what we as a species are doing when it comes to modelling the Universe? One person's model may be flawed and insufficient, but many people working together and building on previous results can lead to greater accuracy. I'm not saying we're anywhere even approaching close to such a thing, but I think ruling it out as a theoretical possibility is unnecessary.



(I'm going to guess that you see me as a science type :D)

[seebs]

We can absolutely improve our models -- but no model any human understands can be even close to complete.

Imagine that the smartest person alive were to try to fully comprehend the thoughts of someone who is barely smart enough to think. Do you think it would be possible? I don't. And there are over six billion people.

World big. People small. Our models will always be incomplete. That's fine; we can refine them, specialize, focus on the things we care about. The problem comes when we conclude that the things we are not modeling are in some way unreal simply because we don't model them.

[sparklecat]

We can absolutely improve our models -- but no model any human understands can be even close to complete.
I will grant that, simply because we're not capable of holding enough information. But that doesn't mean we can't amass it outside our brains, understand the bigger picture, and draw accurate conclusions from it.

World big. People small. Our models will always be incomplete. That's fine; we can refine them, specialize, focus on the things we care about. The problem comes when we conclude that the things we are not modeling are in some way unreal simply because we don't model them.

If we have no way of modelling or even detecting the presence of them in a verifiable way, of what practical purpose would it be to conclude they exist?

[seebs]

I will grant that, simply because we're not capable of holding enough information. But that doesn't mean we can't amass it outside our brains, understand the bigger picture, and draw accurate conclusions from it.

Except that the bigger picture is simply false at a smaller level.

Newtonian mechanics are great at the level I exist at. They are wrong at relativistic velocities. They are also wrong at the quantum level.

The conclusions are only accurate at the level we formed them at. Furthermore, the information is necessarily subject to a lot of filters; things which don't fit into a given schema can't be handled by it, but that doesn't mean they're not real!

If we have no way of modelling or even detecting the presence of them in a verifiable way, of what practical purpose would it be to conclude they exist?

We often have ways of modeling them -- this is why there are many ways of thinking about things.

I cannot offer a detectable or verifiable way to establish that my spouse loves me. I have pretty good suspicions, but nearly all of the significant information is simply not "verifiable" in any useful way.

I think, though, that it may be useful to think about such questions, or to be able to take positions on them.

Models are great as long as we understand that each model is only one of many models, and is not the whole of reality. Every model has places where it works; there are times when it is best to use an authority model of truth (say, when trying to find out what someone else thinks or feels...).

Not everything is verifiable or reproducible. If we ignore all the things we can't manage in a lab, we ignore an awful lot of life.

[Katjo]

I've just read through the whole of this thread - some massive insights here, thanks Seebs.

Some of this I suppose I've known, but it makes real sense to see this laid out in such a clear way. Now I have much better insight into why some people just don't get things that seem really clear to me - they have different schema. When trying to explain something to someone, or understand them I need to model their schema(s).

There is some interesting stuff on storytelling in "Made to Stick", by Chip and Dan Heath. Not only is a story easier to remember, it also allows us to mentally rehearse outcomes as we are hearing it.

With regards to the original point, about "Darwinism", we don't talk about "Newtonism", "Einsteinism", (although we might use Newtonian, Cartesian, etc in a scientific context). So why do we use Darwin's name? Wikipedia says that the term was first used by Huxley in 1860, but it also says of the suffix -ism "denotes a distinctive system of beliefs, myth, doctrine or theory that guides a social movement, institution, class or group".

I am now convinced that using the term "Darwinism" plays into the hands of creationists, and I will challenge its use whenever I am able to in future.
Regards

[seebs]

I think the reason is that Newton's and Einstein's results don't directly contradict a widely-held belief. They don't look like authority belief systems because they don't look like competing belief systems. The people who talk about "Darwinism" don't perceive Newton and Einstein as authorities who founded belief systems, because their claims do not look like ridiculous things no one would accept except by someone's authority.

[Ray Martinez]

I just had something hit me like a sack of bricks.

I have always wondered why anyone would care whether or not Darwin recanted. It's not just that the allegation is false; it's that I can't conceive of its relevance. [SNIP....]

Religious Fundamentalists are responsible for starting the rumor that Darwin recanted during the last days of his life, not Lady Hope.

Lady Hope and her account of visiting a dying Charles Darwin said nothing about a recantation. It was Fundamentalists who deliberately misinterpreted her report.

Ray

[seebs]

But that has nothing to do with anything. No one cares who started the rumor; what's interesting is the question of why anyone would care about the rumor.

[espritch]

When people have no actual knowledge of a subject, they are forced to rely on the authority of those who do (or claim to). That is why, for instance, the Catholic church forbade the translation of the Bible from Latin for many centuries; it gave them greater control over the masses to have exclusive access to the official holy text.

Creationism is dependent on the fact that most people don't really know how much evidence there really is for evolution, so they see it as a matter of authority. Since Darwin is the authority most closely associated with Evolution in mind of the public, Creationists know that if they can undermine that authority, they can undermine acceptance of the idea among the ignorant.

[David B]

When people have no actual knowledge of a subject, they are forced to rely on the authority of those who do (or claim to). That is why, for instance, the Catholic church forbade the translation of the Bible from Latin for many centuries; it gave them greater control over the masses to have exclusive access to the official holy text.

Creationism is dependent on the fact that most people don't really know how much evidence there really is for evolution, so they see it as a matter of authority. Since Darwin is the authority most closely associated with Evolution in mind of the public, Creationists know that if they can undermine that authority, they can undermine acceptance of the idea among the ignorant.

That's what Seebs said in the OP, as I read it.

David B

[seebs]

To be fair, much of what we believe is accepted on authority at some level; I've never been to the Moon. However, I think there's a big gap between the way most people with some exposure to science view this (seeing it as the cumulative cultural authority of many, many, thousands of scientists), and the way that creationists tend to assume a single authority.

[TransverseWave]

There is a story of a preacher talking about the Bible, saying "This is true, and some of it happened."

If you write fiction, you probably appreciate the distinction he's trying to communicate, yes?

And you note that I do not assert that a preacher said this; I assert only that there is a story of a preacher saying this. I don't know anything specific on the issue; I've heard it enough that it seems quite likely that some preacher somewhere has said it. But it doesn't matter to me whether it happened or not. What do I care? The story is expressive; the historical fact claim is uninteresting.
I often find that it does matter.

Tolkien's stories say things about goodness and temptation and the ever-hollow nature of evil that many people (including me) recognize as true. I'm not disputing for a moment that the stories may be the best way to express some such truths. However, it isn't the case, at least in my brain, that they have the same imaginative effect as they would if I believed they actually occurred. I don't have the feeling I would have if I said to myself, "Maiar once walked the Earth." I have never stood in a northern land and regretted the passing of the Girdle of Melian.

"Young Goodman Brown", by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a story in which a man drains his life of all joy by believing what he sees in a dream (or, very likely, a vision from the Devil): he sees everyone he knows and has thought to be good, including his wife, come out to the woods for a Devil-worshipping rite. The moral is the same in any case: the effect of believing unjustified ill reports can be devastating. But suppose one believed this story to be fact. Then it would convey not only that, but probably also: "You have a deadly enemy who seeks to destroy you with lies."

There have been some scandals in publishing of late, concerning authors who wrote novels, couldn't sell them as novels, and passed them off as memoirs instead. There is a difference between "This is what we imagine the world to be like in some respects" and "This is what someone has in fact found the world to be like."

Narrative as truth is a bit of an instrumentalist view; it is built around seeing "truth" as "what beliefs and expectations allow us to make good decisions."
Holding onto this.

Now, consider. I heard this story 18 years ago. I have ADD. The chances are that I've got at least half the details wrong by now, and it's not implausible that the guy who told us the story had some wrong too.

Does that matter?
I don't think there's a blanket judgment to be made on whether it matters. It depends on which details are apt to be wrong, and the purpose for which you're telling the story.

It would matter in general if you described a kind of experiment that no one would be allowed to do at all, as that would leave a lasting false impression of what sort of things can happen, what that environment is like. Possibly this is not what you mean by 'details', however.

For our purposes here, it matters not at all if the fellow's name was really Howard. However, it can matter a lot if the story told requires someone to make a judgment about a participant in it. For example, if the point was to learn something about Howard: then it matters if you're talking about the right guy. One of the difficulty in some of the Holocaust war crimes trials is that witnesses very often remember the incidents themselves vividly, but not the precise dates when they happened; but without the date, it may be impossible to show that the defendant was posted to the right place and might have committed the crime.
In this, narrative is truth. Other models of truth are not nearly as effective at communicating this kind of thing. We can learn from other peoples' experiences and mistakes, but we do it better by far when these experiences are presented as a narrative we can internalize as a view of How Things Happen, than when they are presented as data.
OK, yes, it's good, perhaps the best thing, for internalization.

I think narrative models of truth are at their best when working on establishing values, norms, and expectations. For these, they are very good.
Now what I'm after, what I want to make sure I understand, is how the truth-test element works.

Authority: "It is true because an authority said it. False because the authority denied it. Or undetermined, because the authority said nothing."
Science, (wildly oversimplified): "It is true because I can test it. False because it fails the test. Undetermined because it's untested."

Now what is the case with narrative? I have some strong suspicions, because I think I've watched people making the tests, but I am curious as to your observations.

I think I've seen people who organize their thinking about the world and themselves and stories. Sort of a "How the world/my culture came to be what it is" and "how I came to be who I am and found my place in it." If it fits with the stories, they're likely to accept it. If it doesn't, they're likely to reject it.

[TransverseWave]

To be fair, much of what we believe is accepted on authority at some level; I've never been to the Moon. However, I think there's a big gap between the way most people with some exposure to science view this (seeing it as the cumulative cultural authority of many, many, thousands of scientists), and the way that creationists tend to assume a single authority.
There's a big difference, which I'm not sure I'm going to get all the pieces of, and which I may not be able to articulate correctly (partly because I have a screaming headache).

I believe a lot of things second- or third-hand, on the basis of someone else's say-so. I believe that there have been probes sent recently to Mars, for instance; and the people who reported believe it because they talked to other people who say they sent the probes and have seen the results returned. I do not, however, see myself as having an obligation to believe the Mars probe reports because an authority told me. I believe the probes were sent and have returned results because it seems the most likely explanation for the existence of the reports I read.

There are cases where I take the opinions of experts as likely to be well-informed, and so I believe them. However, there are cases when I have contrary data, where I know something that doesn't accord with the expert doctrine, and then I'm likely to disbelieve the experts. I don't have an obligation to believe them because they're authorities. I believe them when, given the information that I have, it's more likely than not that they're right.

If I have good information on a subject myself, then my belief that the experts are likely to be right has weight, inasmuch as I have a good reason for the evaluation. If I don't, my belief has little weight.

It's all probability estimates and inference chains. It's fundamentally the same kind of evaluation I do in any other circumstance where my data are very incomplete.

In a real authority-first system, one doesn't weigh the words of the experts and decide whether or not to believe them. One is obliged to believe as they say, even if what they say appears unlikely or impalatable. One submits one's own judgment to the authority's, regardless. This I do not do.

Or, to put it another way: people with education in the sciences must fully expect that the experts are presently wrong on some points, and will be shown to be wrong. That's how we expect to advance.

[seebs]

You have a very good point there; most educated people don't have much for authority-based beliefs... At least, not intentionally. A lot have a fair number in fields where for one reason or another they aren't very critical, or where the "experts" sound plausible.

[TransverseWave]

<prod> Narrative->truth. Does my description of the truth-test sound anything like what you think is there? I'm trying to get a grip on this before I go on to epistemological anarchy.

[seebs]

I often find that it does matter.

Tolkien's stories say things about goodness and temptation and the ever-hollow nature of evil that many people (including me) recognize as true. I'm not disputing for a moment that the stories may be the best way to express some such truths. However, it isn't the case, at least in my brain, that they have the same imaginative effect as they would if I believed they actually occurred. I don't have the feeling I would have if I said to myself, "Maiar once walked the Earth." I have never stood in a northern land and regretted the passing of the Girdle of Melian.

I think there's a bit of a difference, but I often don't care much either way. If I am trying to discuss those truths, the question of whether the events used to explore them occurred doesn't seem interesting or relevant.

There have been some scandals in publishing of late, concerning authors who wrote novels, couldn't sell them as novels, and passed them off as memoirs instead. There is a difference between "This is what we imagine the world to be like in some respects" and "This is what someone has in fact found the world to be like."

I think the strength of that difference varies from person to person.

I don't think there's a blanket judgment to be made on whether it matters. It depends on which details are apt to be wrong, and the purpose for which you're telling the story.

It would matter in general if you described a kind of experiment that no one would be allowed to do at all, as that would leave a lasting false impression of what sort of things can happen, what that environment is like. Possibly this is not what you mean by 'details', however.

Yeah.

Take, say, The Lottery.

Hmm. Well, thinking about it: I don't think it matters whether or not it happened, because I think it would.

For our purposes here, it matters not at all if the fellow's name was really Howard. However, it can matter a lot if the story told requires someone to make a judgment about a participant in it. For example, if the point was to learn something about Howard: then it matters if you're talking about the right guy. One of the difficulty in some of the Holocaust war crimes trials is that witnesses very often remember the incidents themselves vividly, but not the precise dates when they happened; but without the date, it may be impossible to show that the defendant was posted to the right place and might have committed the crime.

Yes. They're useful as statements about the nature of human evil, but not useful in identifying which humans did what.

Now what I'm after, what I want to make sure I understand, is how the truth-test element works.

I'm not sure it has one.

Now what is the case with narrative? I have some strong suspicions, because I think I've watched people making the tests, but I am curious as to your observations.

I think I've seen people who organize their thinking about the world and themselves and stories. Sort of a "How the world/my culture came to be what it is" and "how I came to be who I am and found my place in it." If it fits with the stories, they're likely to accept it. If it doesn't, they're likely to reject it.

There's a kind of plausibility test, I think. It is whether the story feels like a story that could have been true. Except it's not exactly plausibility, because it clearly distinguishes between realistic characters in science fiction, and unrealistic stories of ordinary daily life.

I'm quite fond of the webcomic PvP, partially because the writer's particularly good at writing his characters plausibly. The thing is, one of the characters is a troll. The interactions between the troll and the other characters have narrative-truth "plausibility" even though I don't actually imagine it "plausible" that a troll who lost his job in Everquest would end up at a gaming magazine.

I think it's sort of a process of refinement as we develop a set of expectations about human nature, and then use narrative to further improve or develop these expectations.

It's not quite a matter of agreement. A powerful narrative can change someone's mind, so it's not just that it aligns with previous expectations. There's just something that people tend to respond to. To borrow language from another model entirely, the Quaker use of the phrase "speak to my condition" is probably about what serves as the narrative truth-test. It may not agree with what you think, but if it doesn't, it fills a gap you may not have known existed until you heard about it.

I have no empathy to speak of. Up until my college years, I was probably functionally a sociopath. I did not accept or see any value in peoples' attempts to ascribe value to other peoples' feelings. It was narrative truth that convinced me; I spent a lot of time listening to the Grateful Dead. In particular, Barlow's Just a Little Light and Hunter's Brokedown Palace. I don't really know exactly why or how, but these expressed to me that there was a thing I did not experience or know of, which was more important than all the things I had any awareness of.

I still have no primary-experience empathy, but narrative truth has given me a way of understanding and caring about other humans anyway.

[anthrosciguy]

I just had something hit me like a sack of bricks.

I have always wondered why anyone would care whether or not Darwin recanted. It's not just that the allegation is false; it's that I can't conceive of its relevance. [SNIP....]

Religious Fundamentalists are responsible for starting the rumor that Darwin recanted during the last days of his life, not Lady Hope.

Lady Hope and her account of visiting a dying Charles Darwin said nothing about a recantation. It was Fundamentalists who deliberately misinterpreted her report.

Ray

Although Lady Hope was not the first person to claim Darwin recanted, she did make the claim, and claimed that he had done so to her at his home. James Moore, the guy who did a well-known Darwin biography, wrote a book on the subject, The Darwin Legend (http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Legend-James-R-Moore/dp/0801063183) (very good if you're interested in this admittedly somewhat trivial part of history). Her claim was nonsense, as Moore and others have pointed out, but she did make it for many years.

[TransverseWave]

Now what is the case with narrative? I have some strong suspicions, because I think I've watched people making the tests, but I am curious as to your observations.

I think I've seen people who organize their thinking about the world and themselves and stories. Sort of a "How the world/my culture came to be what it is" and "how I came to be who I am and found my place in it." If it fits with the stories, they're likely to accept it. If it doesn't, they're likely to reject it.

There's a kind of plausibility test, I think. It is whether the story feels like a story that could have been true. Except it's not exactly plausibility, because it clearly distinguishes between realistic characters in science fiction, and unrealistic stories of ordinary daily life.

I'm quite fond of the webcomic PvP, partially because the writer's particularly good at writing his characters plausibly. The thing is, one of the characters is a troll. The interactions between the troll and the other characters have narrative-truth "plausibility" even though I don't actually imagine it "plausible" that a troll who lost his job in Everquest would end up at a gaming magazine.

I copy. When we talked about that in rec.games.frp.advocacy, eventually we settled on 'realism' for things that conformed to expectations for our own world and 'verisimilitude' for things that felt as if they could be real in some possible world.

For this discussion let us indeed say that narrative-plausibility includes clearly fanciful things that give the impression that they could have been real. I find the corrupting effect of the One Ring n-plausible.

I think it's sort of a process of refinement as we develop a set of expectations about human nature, and then use narrative to further improve or develop these expectations.

It's not quite a matter of agreement. A powerful narrative can change someone's mind, so it's not just that it aligns with previous expectations. There's just something that people tend to respond to. To borrow language from another model entirely, the Quaker use of the phrase "speak to my condition" is probably about what serves as the narrative truth-test. It may not agree with what you think, but if it doesn't, it fills a gap you may not have known existed until you heard about it.
Yes, OK, that's better than my phrasing. I don't mean to leave the potential reshape-and-extend aspect out.

I have no empathy to speak of. Up until my college years, I was probably functionally a sociopath. I did not accept or see any value in peoples' attempts to ascribe value to other peoples' feelings. It was narrative truth that convinced me; I spent a lot of time listening to the Grateful Dead. In particular, Barlow's Just a Little Light and Hunter's Brokedown Palace. I don't really know exactly why or how, but these expressed to me that there was a thing I did not experience or know of, which was more important than all the things I had any awareness of.

I still have no primary-experience empathy, but narrative truth has given me a way of understanding and caring about other humans anyway.
Huh. Of course art shows things in a new light, but I wouldn't have anticipated communication across a gap like that. That it can is interesting. I don't know what it means.

Of course it would be reasonable then to believe in the unusual transforming power of a particular story, whether it was historically true or not. I think I begin to see a few things. (Blurrily, yet.)

... One thing art does do, is bring up things that were not otherwise accessible to the conscious mind. I was going to say 'things buried in the subconscious', but that's tendentious, and I wish to avoid assuming any particular theory.

Part of my experience was moderating a support list for people with dissociative identity disorder. These people very often had narratives of how they came to be fractured, and what it meant. They'd all been viciously abused, as you might imagine. But not all of the stories they told about what had been done to them were real-world credible. Whether the stories were real-world credible or not, they believed them, shaped their lives by them, and reacted to the idea of examination as if to a threat of scalding: it seemed to threaten their sense of self and identity. (Sometimes some of their alters would doubt their own stories, and that didn't appear to bother them, but if anyone else showed doubt -- eeeaaahh!)

The urge to explain is very strong; a giant inexplicable darkness that comes from somewhere identifiable seems less persistently troublesome than one that come from one-knows-not-where. This I know. Nevertheless, I consider it essential to doubt my constructions: especially, it is of the essence to doubt the constructions of the interesting-but-catastrophic frame.

Without wanting to go too far into whether the sort of therapy these people were getting was the right sort ... well, sometimes I had my doubts. They had stories that trapped them. The prevailing theory seemed to be to go back again and again and again to explore the horrific emotions. It didn't seem to be making anyone happier overall, in any timeframe I could observe. :dunno:

[seebs]

I copy. When we talked about that in rec.games.frp.advocacy, eventually we settled on 'realism' for things that conformed to expectations for our own world and 'verisimilitude' for things that felt as if they could be real in some possible world.

You're a usenetter? I never knew! (rec.games.frp.dnd, alt.folklore.computers, alt.religion.kibology, soc.religion.quaker, and of course, I moderate comp.lang.c.moderated.)

For this discussion let us indeed say that narrative-plausibility includes clearly fanciful things that give the impression that they could have been real. I find the corrupting effect of the One Ring n-plausible.

Yes. I have seen corruption like that in the real world, and I recognize its account of what corruption is like as matching closely with corruption I have seen or experienced.

Yes, OK, that's better than my phrasing. I don't mean to leave the potential reshape-and-extend aspect out.

I didn't catch it at first until I thought it through.

Huh. Of course art shows things in a new light, but I wouldn't have anticipated communication across a gap like that. That it can is interesting. I don't know what it means.

Me neither. When I went to look up who wrote the lyrics to Broke-down Palace (it has a hyphen, as lyrics, even though it's not usually hyphenated on album covers), I saw a note about someone who had talked about how it had shown him that there was another aspect to art he had not previously understood.

It is not just that art can cross such gaps; it is that, so far as I know, only art can cross such gaps.

Of course it would be reasonable then to believe in the unusual transforming power of a particular story, whether it was historically true or not. I think I begin to see a few things. (Blurrily, yet.)

Yes. I come into a lot of conflict with other Christians, because I accept the Bible as a useful discussion because I had already found these things to be true, rather than accepting its claims based on authority. I thought the Bible was full of crazy nonsense for quite a long time. When I had reinvented or rediscovered enough of the underlying schema, though, I found it fascinating to discover that the Bible actually addressed things which were interesting and true. (Oddly, they are rarely the things that get the sound bites on TV.)

... One thing art does do, is bring up things that were not otherwise accessible to the conscious mind. I was going to say 'things buried in the subconscious', but that's tendentious, and I wish to avoid assuming any particular theory.

Certainly. But in some cases, I think it can go further.

When we have experiences, our minds can create new concepts and models to reflect these experiences. Art is a way of transmitting experience; well-written poetry can be substantially similar to the described science-fiction effects of projective telepathy.

Part of my experience was moderating a support list for people with dissociative identity disorder. These people very often had narratives of how they came to be fractured, and what it meant. They'd all been viciously abused, as you might imagine. But not all of the stories they told about what had been done to them were real-world credible. Whether the stories were real-world credible or not, they believed them, shaped their lives by them, and reacted to the idea of examination as if to a threat of scalding: it seemed to threaten their sense of self and identity. (Sometimes some of their alters would doubt their own stories, and that didn't appear to bother them, but if anyone else showed doubt -- eeeaaahh!)

Interesting, and I think not totally surprising.

In nearly any kind of support or therapy thing, there is no progress to be made that does not start by at least understanding and accepting the reality of the existing cognitive model. It may turn out that the best thing is to switch models, but you can't do this without starting within the existing model. Quite simply, you can't convince someone of something without doing so within their existing epistemology.

The urge to explain is very strong; a giant inexplicable darkness that comes from somewhere identifiable seems less persistently troublesome than one that come from one-knows-not-where. This I know. Nevertheless, I consider it essential to doubt my constructions: especially, it is of the essence to doubt the constructions of the interesting-but-catastrophic frame.

I am a big fan of doubting everything. I think that's why I'm so fond of the term "epistemological anarchy" (which I first heard from Hugo Holbling some years back, by the way).

Every epistemological system is flawed. There are things it cannot comprehend, process, accept, or model. Many things, usually. If you commit too strongly to any one system, you become blind to things that system is weak at. If your only model of life is science, you will cripple your ability to experience or respond effectively to powerful narratives or raw experience. If your only model of life is narrative, you have no framework at all for comprehending statistical data.

So I switch frameworks rapidly, I try to view issues from different perspectives, and I otherwise undermine the very powerful tendency of the brain to try to simplify on a single model that "always works". And of course, once you're mired enough in any one model, it always works -- because you no longer have any way to perceive its failures.

Socrates is right, that the foundation of knowledge is understanding that you are ignorant. I would say that the foundation of successful thought is understanding that your thoughts themselves are sometimes unreliable or inaccurate.

So how to get anything done?

Punt. Sometimes you just have to make your best guess and move on. I just don't see any point in calling things "knowledge" prematurely. I doubt there's anything I believe that is supported by all of my epistemologies; I just sometimes pick an answer and continue with it provisionally, because I have no interest in the alternative choice (which is sitting around doing nothing).

[Ray Martinez]

I just had something hit me like a sack of bricks.

I have always wondered why anyone would care whether or not Darwin recanted. It's not just that the allegation is false; it's that I can't conceive of its relevance. [SNIP....]

Religious Fundamentalists are responsible for starting the rumor that Darwin recanted during the last days of his life, not Lady Hope.

Lady Hope and her account of visiting a dying Charles Darwin said nothing about a recantation. It was Fundamentalists who deliberately misinterpreted her report.

Ray

Although Lady Hope was not the first person to claim Darwin recanted, she did make the claim, and claimed that he had done so to her at his home. James Moore, the guy who did a well-known Darwin biography, wrote a book on the subject, The Darwin Legend (http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Legend-James-R-Moore/dp/0801063183) (very good if you're interested in this admittedly somewhat trivial part of history). Her claim was nonsense, as Moore and others have pointed out, but she did make it for many years.

IIRC, it was Moore who established the fact that Lady Hope did not publish a claim of recantation----that reviewers of her report deliberately misinterpreted.

Ray

[anthrosciguy]

Religious Fundamentalists are responsible for starting the rumor that Darwin recanted during the last days of his life, not Lady Hope.

Lady Hope and her account of visiting a dying Charles Darwin said nothing about a recantation. It was Fundamentalists who deliberately misinterpreted her report.

Ray

Although Lady Hope was not the first person to claim Darwin recanted, she did make the claim, and claimed that he had done so to her at his home. James Moore, the guy who did a well-known Darwin biography, wrote a book on the subject, The Darwin Legend (http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Legend-James-R-Moore/dp/0801063183) (very good if you're interested in this admittedly somewhat trivial part of history). Her claim was nonsense, as Moore and others have pointed out, but she did make it for many years.

IIRC, it was Moore who established the fact that Lady Hope did not publish a claim of recantation----that reviewers of her report deliberately misinterpreted.

Ray

Well yes, that's true, on a technicality. She didn't claim to have seen him on his deathbed, nor that he recanted as such, just that he was a devout Christian. Her account, even in its first less embellished form, was implausible in the extreme, and contradicted by everybody who knew much of anything of Darwin's views, such as in Emma Darwin's letters which are of course public now (available online, I think) as well as J.W.C. Fegan, a preacher who preached for years in Downe and whose work on temperance was heartily applauded and supported by Darwin (the Darwin family strongly supported Fegan's temperance work). Fegan knew Darwin well enough, and would be expected to know what Darwin's religious views were.

I am quite sure that anyone who knew Mr. Charles Darwin would agree with me that he is one of the last men we have ever known, if he thought a lot of people had been misled by any theories or suggestions of his, to pass away without in the fullest and most public manner, acknowledging any mistakes on his part in his suggestions, or in the way he had phrased them. There is no question that Mr. Darwin died as he had lived -- an agonostic -- but he was a most honourable, chivalrous and benevolent gentleman.

J.W.C. Fegan, 1 May 1925
letter to Mr. J.A. Kensit of the Protestant Truth Society

Here, from pages 92-93 of Moore's book, is Lady Hope's account, written up for a Christian magazine after she moved to the USA:

The Darwin Legend, James Moore, pp.92-93, 1994

The editor of the nation's leading Baptist magazine, the Watchman-Examiner, was covering the conference. He insisted that Lady Hope write the story out so he could give it "the widest publicity." "It will give the world a new view of Charles Darwin," he declared.'

A fortnight later, the Watchman-Examiner carried Lady Hope's story under the title, "Darwin and Christianity."

It was on one of those glorious autumn afternoons, that we sometimes enjoy in England, when I was asked to go in and sit with the well known Professor, Charles Darwin. He was almost bedridden for some months before he died. I used to feel when I saw him that his fine presence would make a grand picture for our Royal Academy; but never did I think so more strongly than on this particular occasion.

He was sitting up in bed, wearing a soft embroidered dressing gown, of rather a rich purple shade.

Propped up by pillows, he was gazing out on a far-stretching scene of woods and cornfields, which glowed in the light of one of those marvelous sunsets which are the beauty of Kent and Surrey. His noble forehead and fine features seemed to be lit up with pleasure as I entered the room.

He waved his hand toward the window as he pointed out the scene beyond, while in the other hand he held an open Bible, which he was always studying.

"What are you reading now?" I asked, as I seated myself by his bedside.

"Hebrews!" he answered-" still Hebrews. 'The Royal Book,' I call it. Isn't it grand?"

Then, placing his finger on certain passages, he commented on them.

I made some allusion to the strong opinions expressed by many persons on the history of the Creation, its grandeur, and then their treatment of the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis. He seemed greatly distressed, his fingers twitched nervously, and a look of agony came over his face as he said:

"I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them."

Then he paused, and after a few more sentences on "the holiness of God" and "the grandeur of this Book," looking at the Bible which he was holding tenderly all the time, he suddenly said:

"I have a summer house in the garden, which holds about thirty people. It is over there," pointing through the open window. "I want you very much to speak there. I know you read the Bible in the villages.

To-morrow afternoon I should like the servants on the place, some tenants and a few of the neighbors to gather there. Will you speak to them?"

"What shall I speak about?" I asked.

"CHRIST JESUS!" he replied in a clear, emphatic voice, adding in a lower tone, "and his salvation. Is not that the best theme? And then I want you to sing some hymns with them. You lead on your small instrument, do you not?"

The wonderful look of brightness and animation on his face as he said this I shall never forget, for he added:

"If you take the meeting at three o'clock this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in with the singing."

How I wished that I could have made a picture of the fine old man and his beautiful surroundings on that memorable day!

She repeated this basic story up until her death.

Fegan, BTW, also said in the letter I quoted above, "I am weary of discussing the veracity of this preposterous story". He also said in a postscript "Have you ever considered why Lady Hopebetween 1882-1916 never told this striking story in England? -- why she never cleared her name from Sir Francis Darwin's charge of falsehood?" Fegan, from the letters in the book, liked the fact that Lady Hope's evangelism, but discreetly pointed out that he didn't like many of her ideas and actions.

[TransverseWave]

OK, back to here.


Basically, underneath it all, I am pretty sure that every process has limits. There are things you can analyze, and there are things you can't. There are things where the process of "analyzing" them replaces them with something subtly different. The map is not the territory; my description of life is not the reality of life.
Check.

I cannot accurately describe to you some things about the way my mind works. Partly, this is because English breaks. It has no words that mean the things I mean, and the nearest equivalents are all in some way misleading. In some cases it's imaginable that I could make new words that would be precise, although whether I could ever get their meaning across to anyone else is debatable. In other cases, I doubt words will do very well.

The primary more-or-less comprehensible description (comprehensible to some people, that is) is metaphor. For instance, it is substantially true to say that the interesting-but-catastrophic process has available a non-maskable interrupt. It can always pre-empt if it really thinks it needs to. I need to stay out of situations where there's any serious chance it's going to think it needs to.

Also: of course all our descriptions are oversimplifying, sometimes drastically. I once tried to flowchart my RPG resolution considerations -- that is, what I considered when I was making a ruling as a roleplaying gamemaster. I knew it was going to be involved, but I swiftly discovered it was so darned complicated it was effectively unchartable, at least in anything like the time I wanted to spend on it; and even if I could have produced a linear chart with the equivalent outputs and inputs, it wouldn't have mapped worth a darn to my actual process.

My conclusion is that any one schema is insufficient. The world is not any one of these things. My brain is small; the universe is large. If I can contain a model, the model cannot be a reasonably complete model of the universe. Therefore, every model I can use is flawed.
...

So instead of saying "this method is true, the others are false", I say "these methods are good at different kinds of things."
OK.

I generally have very little luck talking to authority->truth believers about religion, but a great deal in common with other mystics trying to talk about it. Trying to talk about science->truth or analysis->truth thinkers about religion is usually pointless to me, because I'm talking about a thing that is by definition not part of their worldview. It's actually frustrating to me for just about the same reason that it is frustrating for a scientific sort to try to get "evidence" from a typical authority-belief Creationist. The underlying concept isn't there.
You said that some philosophers were likely to use analysis->truth. I'm curious as to why religion by definition would not be part of their worldview. Doesn't philosophy admit many concepts that can't be shown to map to the physical world? (That's not the best phrasing. I hope you can understand it.) Or have you got other analysts in mind?

[seebs]

I cannot accurately describe to you some things about the way my mind works. Partly, this is because English breaks. It has no words that mean the things I mean, and the nearest equivalents are all in some way misleading. In some cases it's imaginable that I could make new words that would be precise, although whether I could ever get their meaning across to anyone else is debatable. In other cases, I doubt words will do very well.

I don't think they do very well for the whole of anyone's thought process.

The primary more-or-less comprehensible description (comprehensible to some people, that is) is metaphor. For instance, it is substantially true to say that the interesting-but-catastrophic process has available a non-maskable interrupt. It can always pre-empt if it really thinks it needs to. I need to stay out of situations where there's any serious chance it's going to think it needs to.

Sounds like a good strategy. I have learned that there are things which cause me to behave in ways that I usually think are irrational and/or undesireable, so I mostly avoid them.

Also: of course all our descriptions are oversimplifying, sometimes drastically. I once tried to flowchart my RPG resolution considerations -- that is, what I considered when I was making a ruling as a roleplaying gamemaster. I knew it was going to be involved, but I swiftly discovered it was so darned complicated it was effectively unchartable, at least in anything like the time I wanted to spend on it; and even if I could have produced a linear chart with the equivalent outputs and inputs, it wouldn't have mapped worth a darn to my actual process.

Yup.

This is probably true of most decision making. If someone can describe a process correctly, it is generally not the actual process used by a human to make a decision.

You said that some philosophers were likely to use analysis->truth. I'm curious as to why religion by definition would not be part of their worldview.

It might be -- but some of my way of thinking about religion wouldn't be.

I can't make much headway discussing my religious experiences with analysts or authority believers. I can talk quite well about my experiences with non-Christian mystics, though...

The thing is, I have a perfectly good analysis model; it's probably the first I really used much, as I was raised by mathematicians. But there are things I can't talk about within that framework, and which just don't translate into it.

Doesn't philosophy admit many concepts that can't be shown to map to the physical world? (That's not the best phrasing. I hope you can understand it.) Or have you got other analysts in mind?

I can talk about many aspects of my religious beliefs with people whose primary view is analytic, but I can't come close to getting to the core values or the underlying patterns of events and experience which cause me to believe any religious claims in the first place. I can give a rough translation into analytic or empirical language, but the thing that results is not the same as the untranslated thing. It's like trying to translate an authority belief into empirical language or vice versa; the result is just plain not the same thing, even though it's as close as you can come in the new framework.

If you play RPGs, it may be useful to think of this in terms of transferring characters from one system to another. There is no GURPS character with the characteristics of an 18th level AD&D 1E Wizard. There is no D&D character with the characteristics of a 150-point GURPS mage, either. You can make something similar enough that someone who knows both systems can see what you're doing, but it will never actually be the same.

The same thing happens with language used to describe thoughts or experiences. I am firmly convinced that there does not exist any set of words in English which can express the distinction between infatuation and romantic love in a way that would allow a person first experiencing one of them to know which it was. The sense experienced mathematicians have of what's wrong with an argument is often very different from anything you could do by explaining the error. Explaining the error is usually after the fact; in my experience, you start with the simple observation that there is something wrong.

For that matter, until a couple of years ago, I would have told you I had depth perception, but I think I would have been wrong. I had the ability to distinguish distances; I did not actually perceive depth as a primary kind of experience. Now I often do (thanks to a combination of glasses, better brain adaptation to stereoscopic vision, and Schedule II controlled substances).

[TransverseWave]

I can talk about many aspects of my religious beliefs with people whose primary view is analytic, but I can't come close to getting to the core values or the underlying patterns of events and experience which cause me to believe any religious claims in the first place. I can give a rough translation into analytic or empirical language, but the thing that results is not the same as the untranslated thing. It's like trying to translate an authority belief into empirical language or vice versa; the result is just plain not the same thing, even though it's as close as you can come in the new framework.
OK. Have you had any locatable discussions on the subject with someone whose framework you think is analytic? Anybody we know? I am curious to see how well, or how badly, it translates to mine.

[seebs]

I can talk about many aspects of my religious beliefs with people whose primary view is analytic, but I can't come close to getting to the core values or the underlying patterns of events and experience which cause me to believe any religious claims in the first place. I can give a rough translation into analytic or empirical language, but the thing that results is not the same as the untranslated thing. It's like trying to translate an authority belief into empirical language or vice versa; the result is just plain not the same thing, even though it's as close as you can come in the new framework.
OK. Have you had any locatable discussions on the subject with someone whose framework you think is analytic? Anybody we know? I am curious to see how well, or how badly, it translates to mine.

Hmm. I don't think I have anything current or recent. I have a few efforts at IIDB, but that's almost always been with empiricists, not analytics. I think there were some at CF a long time ago.

Hmm. I think Noodles tends to be more analytic than empiricist; I could try to hit him up for an example. :)

[TransverseWave]

You're a usenetter? I never knew! (rec.games.frp.dnd, alt.folklore.computers, alt.religion.kibology, soc.religion.quaker, and of course, I moderate comp.lang.c.moderated.)
In the late 90s. I've barely posted this millennium. I hung around rec.arts.sf.composition, too, but not very steadily.

Part of my experience was moderating a support list for people with dissociative identity disorder. These people very often had narratives of how they came to be fractured, and what it meant. They'd all been viciously abused, as you might imagine. But not all of the stories they told about what had been done to them were real-world credible. Whether the stories were real-world credible or not, they believed them, shaped their lives by them, and reacted to the idea of examination as if to a threat of scalding: it seemed to threaten their sense of self and identity. (Sometimes some of their alters would doubt their own stories, and that didn't appear to bother them, but if anyone else showed doubt -- eeeaaahh!)

Interesting, and I think not totally surprising.

In nearly any kind of support or therapy thing, there is no progress to be made that does not start by at least understanding and accepting the reality of the existing cognitive model. It may turn out that the best thing is to switch models, but you can't do this without starting within the existing model. Quite simply, you can't convince someone of something without doing so within their existing epistemology.
In this case, it's certainly the epistemology.

The group would have it that it's the stories also; but I'm not sure that that would have held with all the individuals if it wasn't a group more and identity-flag. And I'm not entirely sure that it was good for them, overall. But there was no nondestructive way to change it, even if it had been clear that it needed changing.

[seebs]

I think a lot of people place a great deal of weight on their identification with their epistemology. Questioning it is an attack on their confidence that they know what's happening.

I know an awful lot of people who hold foundational beliefs because if they didn't, they couldn't know anything.

Me, I don't know. And I'm not real happy about it, but I'd rather admit it and see what I can do.

[Anti]

No offense, but are you really just now figuring out that believers place great stock in arguments from authority?

[nephesh]

In short, they figure that a claim that Darwin recanted ought to affect "evolutionists" the way a claim that Benedict XVI recanted ought to affect Catholicsm. They assume that, as they believe things primarily based on their having been asserted by an authoritative source, so too does everyone else. And that, in turn, implies that if they can identify the authoritative source, and discredit that source, the beliefs derived from it will evaporate.

This is a much more fundamental disconnect than I previously realized.

*loves the smell of raw exposed underlying axioms in the morning*

[nephesh]

I think he's right too. I've been hearing that argument for a while now, and just saying, "Huh?" And hearing the curious way fundamentalists insist on talking about "Darwinism," as if it were all about the man. (Usually when you hear a persistent different in language like that it's either a historical artifact or an in-group out-group marker, but I wasn't quite convinced that was the whole story, in this case.)

It actually constitutes a "diminisher". In those enamored of herd mentality and human consensus, who ascribe authoritativeness to such things and imagine "truth" to be a product of "majority rule", naming evolution "Darwinism" has (for them) the effect of reducing it to theoretically "just one man's opinion" instead of the vast and permeating paradigm underpinning the entirety of modern scientific thought and endeavor. Again, evidence of a fundamental "disconnect".

Back when I was OEC it never once occurred to me to offer anything personal about any evolutionary scientist as a reason for disbelieving in evolutionist. I evidently made a lousy fundamentalist. (Explains what happened later, I guess.)
Rational thinkers do not make good fundies of any stripe or type -- materialist fundies included. :dunno:

[nephesh]

Human nature is the hardest of creaturely states to obtain, even more so that of manhood. Brahminhood is rarer still, and beyond that dedication to the path of Vedic religion. Beyond even that there is discrimination between self and non-self, but liberation by persistence in the state of the unity of God and self is not to be achieved except by the meritorious deeds of hundreds of thousands of lives

why the fuck do these people seek anatta anyway, and why do they imagine it so unattainable. :dunno: been living in it for years and cannot comprehend what they find so desirable about it. can only imagine it to be a "grass is greener" type thing where it appears desirable to them because they imagine it will afford them some type of blissful escape from the drudgery of banal existence. which it does to some degree, but without removing banality itself from existence, sometimes it just bloody well makes things harder. :dunno:

[nephesh]

changing your mind is easy when doing so relieves tension between your view and what's before your eyes, when it resolves the discord. However, when changing your mind will break the entire interpretive framework, it leads to an immensely greater state of tension: much more is unexplained and troubling than before. It is not usual and not easy to voluntarily move into a position where you have much less ability to explain the world.

Perhaps this reveals the secret route of egress into narcissism and/or "functional solipsism". To wit: When faced with such a dilemma, some retreat to the world they alone have the ability to explain and the supreme authority to do so (at least, as far as comparatively speaking in regard to other human beings goes).

[nephesh]

You know how there's a significant difference between the presence of people and the presence of non-people? There's a basic human instinct which makes people-ness a matter of primary experience -- you can't not know that other people have thoughts and emotions. Unless, say, hypothetically, you were autistic. Then you might have to think about it, and form conclusions about it.
Not necessarily. Someone "programmed" (i.e., through years of being dealt with or handled a certain way by primary caretakers) to believe that either (a) others perceive him as having no thoughts or feelings; (b) others regard his thoughts and feelings exclusively as having no merit, weight or worth; (c) others perceive the interactive evidence of his thoughts/feelings as being some deliberately chosen affectation purposefully engaged as an attempt to manipulate them or produce a specific response or outcome; and/or (d) as a result, in the entire "world of others" (which basically means everyone outside of himself) he can expect to never be regarded as having authentic thoughts or feelings or having themselves taken seriously therein -- might, as a natural consequence of this "programming", develop a complete disconnect with the concept of others having real thoughts or feelings themselves, or with the concept of others being "real" at all. They might become aware of this later in life and seek to compensate intellectually with a "theoretical" awareness but this can never replace the actual fundamental HARDWIRING of genuine internal recognition of the FACT and PRESENCE and REALITY of others as having authentic thoughts and feelings.

In other words looking at the developmental phase of childhood in which empathy develops ... if the child happens to be surrounded by interactive models (particularly in primary caregivers but also present in secondary ones as well as siblings and/or peers) that either overtly lack empathy toward himself or at least manifest the functional equivalent to such a lack, then this model, and not a healthier one, will be internalised and cemented ("hardwired") as his "default setting." Particularly where the input and feedback of the social structure around himself consistently splits and invalidates his own innate healthier mechanisms. Even the child that strives to hold tight to his own inner awareness at this time, finding it continually "under siege" by those around him, cannot help but ultimately fail in the effort, for this unfortunate outcome has been predetermined and hardwired as well through centuries of human evolution and human social acclimations.

It does not require autism to produce this. An otherwise "neurotypical" child can be shaped and forged in this fashion by the powers doing so in his life which lay far beyond his own awareness and therefore beyond his grasp, comprehension, or ability to compensate for. He doesn't even necessarily know he's being shaped at that age, for starters, let alone possess the tools OR the awareness of alternatives and options and their corresponding potential outcomes, to do anything about it.

I think as long as it's going off instinct, you end up with the instinct obviously ascribing basically comparable cognitive experiences to other people, because that makes sense; you're generalizing from yourself to other people, and/or from other people to yourself. I don't have that. I am widely and generally deficient in any kind of cognitive thing that depends on the [...] claim that other people are essentially the same kind of thing I am. But, as a side effect, I don't expect them to think like me. I expect them to think in wildly different ways, and the more I watch them, the more amazingly different these ways are.
So your "instinct" in the above would = "hardwiring" yeah? Seems so.
The part in bold -- very much the same here. Finding, however, that the whole "expecting people to think like oneself" happens UNconsciously for the most part and without continual mindfulness and conscious self-correction it sticks its foot out to trip you constantly. Hardwiring forms its own trap. When you have grown up with everyone -- literally fucking everyone -- around you determined at any and all cost to treat every fucking thing you do or say as "affectational" and potentially manipulative rather than authentic and self-expressive, it literally imprisons you for life in a bloody Iron Maiden (complete with Iron Mask) where the more you seek to escape the deeper the spikes drive into your flesh, figuratively speaking. With the added "fun" of the prison being mobile and invisible and any and all attempt to define it, describe it, communicate it, being regarded as ludicrous high drama good for five minutes of LOLz and not much else. The pain never ends, the crying out in pain (which cannot be helped, even if you seek to suffocate it entirely it will still leak out now and again in the most unmistakable fashion) constantly gets reinterpreted by others as self-pity and drama (which then form a recurring negative feedback loop reinforcing the original hardwiring), and the prison gets thicker and thicker with every repetition. The only solution seems to be to isolate yourself entirely from human beings and the structure of this world and the dependency for survival upon its economy makes that nearly impossible for all but the independently wealthy.
There are at least five or six essentially different approaches to epistemology out there, probably more. People who get into huge shouting matches over how stupid other people are nearly always turn out to be disagreeing about foundational epistemology.

Unfortunately, most people don't understand this, because it assails a foundational (and perhaps necessary) assumption -- the essential universality of their way of filtering experiences into models of the world. But you can do okay without that, as long as you have the time and bandwidth to carry several models.
Got all this going on intellectually. Can't make it work socially or emotionally though. Never could and never have.

[seebs]

No offense, but are you really just now figuring out that believers place great stock in arguments from authority?

I know that many do. (Not all do, mind; I was totally shocked in to discover that such systems exist, at one time.) What's interesting to me is that it's not just that people are persuaded by these, but that they also assume other people will be -- and that other people are typically just as blind about how other people reason.

[seebs]

Good point, nephesh; it's quite possible to create similar problems through presentation of bogus data sets. (e.g., the kittens raised without horizontal lines, who never learn to see them.)

My understanding is that most people can eventually retrain from things like that, but it's hard and requires help from someone outside the "box" who can understand it. This can be very hard.

[TransverseWave]

No offense, but are you really just now figuring out that believers place great stock in arguments from authority?
No.

[Ray Martinez]

Although Lady Hope was not the first person to claim Darwin recanted, she did make the claim, and claimed that he had done so to her at his home. James Moore, the guy who did a well-known Darwin biography, wrote a book on the subject, The Darwin Legend (http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Legend-James-R-Moore/dp/0801063183) (very good if you're interested in this admittedly somewhat trivial part of history). Her claim was nonsense, as Moore and others have pointed out, but she did make it for many years.

IIRC, it was Moore who established the fact that Lady Hope did not publish a claim of recantation----that reviewers of her report deliberately misinterpreted.

Ray

Well yes, that's true, on a technicality. She didn't claim to have seen him on his deathbed, nor that he recanted as such, just that he was a devout Christian. Her account, even in its first less embellished form, was implausible in the extreme, and contradicted by everybody who knew much of anything of Darwin's views, such as in Emma Darwin's letters which are of course public now (available online, I think) as well as J.W.C. Fegan, a preacher who preached for years in Downe and whose work on temperance was heartily applauded and supported by Darwin (the Darwin family strongly supported Fegan's temperance work). Fegan knew Darwin well enough, and would be expected to know what Darwin's religious views were.

I am quite sure that anyone who knew Mr. Charles Darwin would agree with me that he is one of the last men we have ever known, if he thought a lot of people had been misled by any theories or suggestions of his, to pass away without in the fullest and most public manner, acknowledging any mistakes on his part in his suggestions, or in the way he had phrased them. There is no question that Mr. Darwin died as he had lived -- an agonostic -- but he was a most honourable, chivalrous and benevolent gentleman.

J.W.C. Fegan, 1 May 1925
letter to Mr. J.A. Kensit of the Protestant Truth Society

Here, from pages 92-93 of Moore's book, is Lady Hope's account, written up for a Christian magazine after she moved to the USA:

The Darwin Legend, James Moore, pp.92-93, 1994

The editor of the nation's leading Baptist magazine, the Watchman-Examiner, was covering the conference. He insisted that Lady Hope write the story out so he could give it "the widest publicity." "It will give the world a new view of Charles Darwin," he declared.'

A fortnight later, the Watchman-Examiner carried Lady Hope's story under the title, "Darwin and Christianity."

It was on one of those glorious autumn afternoons, that we sometimes enjoy in England, when I was asked to go in and sit with the well known Professor, Charles Darwin. He was almost bedridden for some months before he died. I used to feel when I saw him that his fine presence would make a grand picture for our Royal Academy; but never did I think so more strongly than on this particular occasion.

He was sitting up in bed, wearing a soft embroidered dressing gown, of rather a rich purple shade.

Propped up by pillows, he was gazing out on a far-stretching scene of woods and cornfields, which glowed in the light of one of those marvelous sunsets which are the beauty of Kent and Surrey. His noble forehead and fine features seemed to be lit up with pleasure as I entered the room.

He waved his hand toward the window as he pointed out the scene beyond, while in the other hand he held an open Bible, which he was always studying.

"What are you reading now?" I asked, as I seated myself by his bedside.

"Hebrews!" he answered-" still Hebrews. 'The Royal Book,' I call it. Isn't it grand?"

Then, placing his finger on certain passages, he commented on them.

I made some allusion to the strong opinions expressed by many persons on the history of the Creation, its grandeur, and then their treatment of the earlier chapters of the Book of Genesis. He seemed greatly distressed, his fingers twitched nervously, and a look of agony came over his face as he said:

"I was a young man with unformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them."

Then he paused, and after a few more sentences on "the holiness of God" and "the grandeur of this Book," looking at the Bible which he was holding tenderly all the time, he suddenly said:

"I have a summer house in the garden, which holds about thirty people. It is over there," pointing through the open window. "I want you very much to speak there. I know you read the Bible in the villages.

To-morrow afternoon I should like the servants on the place, some tenants and a few of the neighbors to gather there. Will you speak to them?"

"What shall I speak about?" I asked.

"CHRIST JESUS!" he replied in a clear, emphatic voice, adding in a lower tone, "and his salvation. Is not that the best theme? And then I want you to sing some hymns with them. You lead on your small instrument, do you not?"

The wonderful look of brightness and animation on his face as he said this I shall never forget, for he added:

"If you take the meeting at three o'clock this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in with the singing."

How I wished that I could have made a picture of the fine old man and his beautiful surroundings on that memorable day!

She repeated this basic story up until her death.

Fegan, BTW, also said in the letter I quoted above, "I am weary of discussing the veracity of this preposterous story". He also said in a postscript "Have you ever considered why Lady Hopebetween 1882-1916 never told this striking story in England? -- why she never cleared her name from Sir Francis Darwin's charge of falsehood?" Fegan, from the letters in the book, liked the fact that Lady Hope's evangelism, but discreetly pointed out that he didn't like many of her ideas and actions.

Thanks for the very informative post. I seem to have misunderstood. I thought "recantation" meant repudiation of his evolution theory. We know Darwin died an Atheist. The "Agnostic" label was crafted to avoid the bad stigma of Atheism in Christian England. I would have soundly agreed with you from the outset if I thought the issue was Christianity instead of evolution.

Ray

[anthrosciguy]

Thanks for the very informative post. I seem to have misunderstood. I thought "recantation" meant repudiation of his evolution theory. We know Darwin died an Atheist. The "Agnostic" label was crafted to avoid the bad stigma of Atheism in Christian England. I would have soundly agreed with you from the outset if I thought the issue was Christianity instead of evolution.

Ray

Well, Lady Hope did put that somewhat subtle (for an evangelical pampheteer) suggestion that Darwin recanted his views on evolution with that passage about how he supposedly had these kinda wild unthought-out speculations that to his great surprise people took seriously, and she gets bonus points for slipping in the idea, which she put in Darwin's mouth, that people made "a religion" of them.

Actually, I think agnostic was at that time a term which meant atheist, and there wasn't, AFAIK, the difference between "agonostic" and "atheist" that many people make today.

[Ray Martinez]

Well, Lady Hope did put that somewhat subtle (for an evangelical pampheteer) suggestion that Darwin recanted his views on evolution with that passage about how he supposedly had these kinda wild unthought-out speculations that to his great surprise people took seriously, and she gets bonus points for slipping in the idea, which she put in Darwin's mouth, that people made "a religion" of them. SNIP....

Her report is contradicted by a mass of good evidence and arguments. I am going to obtain Moore's book and read it.

Ray

Edit: I thought Moore had said that LH was deliberately misinterpreted. This explains my original claim. I need to verify if Moore said this in some context. But I see from the quotes that her report implicates a recantation----of everything.

RM

[TransverseWave]

It actually constitutes a "diminisher". In those enamored of herd mentality and human consensus, who ascribe authoritativeness to such things and imagine "truth" to be a product of "majority rule", naming evolution "Darwinism" has (for them) the effect of reducing it to theoretically "just one man's opinion" instead of the vast and permeating paradigm underpinning the entirety of modern scientific thought and endeavor. Again, evidence of a fundamental "disconnect".
Well, underpinning biology, anyway. Yeah.

[anthrosciguy]

Well, Lady Hope did put that somewhat subtle (for an evangelical pampheteer) suggestion that Darwin recanted his views on evolution with that passage about how he supposedly had these kinda wild unthought-out speculations that to his great surprise people took seriously, and she gets bonus points for slipping in the idea, which she put in Darwin's mouth, that people made "a religion" of them. SNIP....

Her report is contradicted by a mass of good evidence and arguments. I am going to obtain Moore's book and read it.

Ray

Edit: I thought Moore had said that LH was deliberately misinterpreted. This explains my original claim. I need to verify if Moore said this in some context. But I see from the quotes that her report implicates a recantation----of everything.

RM

It's a good book, with the caveat that it is a bit of trivia for most; glad that he did all the work to actually make a book of it. He's got several appendices with interesting letters like several from JWC Fegan, and of course from his work on the Darwin bio he has a lot of background knowledge. His main thing about the later mistakes about Hope's claimed visit is that he thinks she did visit Darwin at some time (she gets some obscure details right), and he attempts, based on the family not being there and the weather, etc., to nail down when. Many people had thought that she didn't visit at any time, or even that she was a fiction, made up by those who promoted her claim. But he clearly doesn't buy her overall claim, because of course it contradicts virtually everybody who would know what Darwin thought, as well as things he wrote. Fegan's letters are espcially interesting in that, IMO.

But Lady Hope wasn't the only one who hoped Darwin would recant re religion, and there were tales of him doing so, including one household servant. But the family expected people to do that in his final days and guarded him carefully, I expect especially to keep him from being disturbed by boorish religion-pushers (although no doubt Emma wished he had changed his beliefs on religion, but no through coercion of the dying man she loved).

[Febble]

Exactly.

I got lucky early on and ended up with more than one interpretive framework, and I continue to put real effort into keeping multiple frameworks available. Why? Because none of them are perfect. So I switch frameworks from one topic to another, from one day to another, basically as they get better or worse at solving my problems.

I tend to be an instrumentalist with respect to epistemology. While thoroughly aware that there is nothing really analogous to preference in most software, I still use the model of "what computers like" most of the time when interacting with them, because even my fairly stunted social instincts are way faster and "cheaper" to me in resource allocation than actual full modeling of computer behavior. So I offload a task to a less correct but functionally good-enough model and there's more general-purpose computing available for me to use on my actual work. (Interestingly, this works better the less predictable software is; it's exceptionally good at allowing me to use Microsoft Word, but virtually useless for C compilers.)

Interesting. My husband, who learned his computing in the sixties, is useless at getting MS applications to work, but I'm rather good. I've always said it's because I treat the problems as psychological problems rather than as logic problems. I can solve them because I ask myself what the computer wants (or what the person who wrote the interface thought that people interacting with it would think the computer wanted). And if a trick does work, I "rephrase".

But then that's how the brain works anyway. We work with inexact models the whole time. People would be shocked (I was) if they knew how little of a visual scene we actually see clearly at any one time (about 2 degrees of visual angle). We essentially construct a visual model of the world, labelling parts of it "objects", and attributing to those "objects", "properties".

And we assume that that model is reality. But it isn't. It's just an extraordinarily authoritative model.

[Febble]

Good point, nephesh; it's quite possible to create similar problems through presentation of bogus data sets. (e.g., the kittens raised without horizontal lines, who never learn to see them.)

My understanding is that most people can eventually retrain from things like that, but it's hard and requires help from someone outside the "box" who can understand it. This can be very hard.

Whoopsies, just noticed you are way ahead of me there.

[VoxRat]

[Mod Note:

I just moved this over from "Evolution & Origins" because, despite the word "Darwinism" in the title, it's really Philosophy.

VoxRat,
E&O Mod]

[seebs]

Thanks, Rat!

BTW, you have a seriously terrifying avatar. Please make it go away.