Prof. Heying is recommending an evolution-based skeptical view of morals and purpose in human living. But is such a skeptical view really any different from the cynical view? Evolution means that survival & dominance in the struggle against others is the highest good.
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Cooperation is just as evolutionary as competition. Yes, it is true that many evolutionary drives are reprehensible (and by understanding them as such we have our best chance of avoiding them). But many other evolutionary drives are beautiful and collaborative.
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If I am wrong in thinking that all cooperation is evolved behavior carried out as a means of inter-group competition, then I would like to know. Many people speak of evolved cooperativeness as proof that evolution is benevolent, or at least not totally vicious. Who's right?
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Evolution is not benevolent—nor is it malevolent. It just is. Resources (water, food, nest sites, mates, cash…) are limited and limiting, therefore an individual’s success often comes at the cost of someone else not getting what you are using to survive. This is true.
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But collaboration—between organelles to make eukaryotes, between microorganisms and multicellular organisms to make us who we are (e.g. the microbiome), between social groups of dolphins, wolves, humans—is just as evolutionary.
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But isn't absolutely EVERYTHING about humans, & all living beings, evolutionary in nature, root, & origin? So, of course cooperation is evolutionary. The human love of music is evolutionary, but that doesn't mean that music is what has driven & drives human evolution.
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Fantastic article. Great way to frame the foundational level of how humans have and are approaching... damn well everything. Gave new words to what I have been seeing
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Thank you!
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Isn't it a problem that individuals don't have enough time and capacity to be skeptical about everything? I think we need to balance the fact that in practice, we have faith about many different things, and are selective about where we focus our skepticism.
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Yes, time is a limited resource, and we can’t question everything all the time. But we should begin each relationship that we have with an authority or information source with active skepticism, coming to trust them (or not) over time.
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I agree with you. I also feel that we are guided in our skepticism by how our experience of reality aligns with our models. Many times we don't even notice the option of being skeptical of assumptions built deep into our constructed realities until many experiences accrue. /
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In other words, we start with faith in what we've inherited from tradition and let faith guide us to where our experiences have taught us that our skepticism is best applied for maximum effectiveness. Modernism's rejection of so many useful traditions may still prove disastrous.
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I agree. Do what you have been doing, listen to whom you have been listening to, but be open to the possibility, sometimes the necessity, of change, made ever more likely in an ever more quickly changing environment.
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One fascinating aspect of modernity is that (as with any movement) many of the ppl who kicked it off probably didn't envision that many assumptions which they would not have considered up for debate eventually ended up on the chopping block.
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Sagan’s Standard and Hitchen’s Razor deal with the time issue easily enough. There is no reason to waste time on any proposition that doesn’t make the cut.
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When faith is working properly, it doesn't deal in propositions. Natural selection never required logic and propositions in order to operate.
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good stuff, however would quibble with the identification of faith as necessarily involving received wisdom (in the common meaning of scriptures, commandments, parables etc..) is it not possible to have faith without such received wisdom?
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I'm not sure what you would have faith *in* without having received some wisdom. Perhaps my understanding of it and your "common meaning" are different. In my world, received wisdom is anything coming from vetted authorities: scripture, yes, also founding political docs, myth.
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ah yes you have wider view of it than my default assumption of common meaning of term.. but can easily see how that could apply to ideology, myth, etc. i mean example alternate meaning of "faith" being faith in oneself, etc. even if uninvestigated, that is not received wisdom
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but now that i think about it, even that form of "faith" could be classified under personal myth, which some would say is inherited thru archetype even if not directly received
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