If you mean simply find argument to establish that evolution is in some sense related to mind or idea, that should not be difficult. I can find arguments to show that butterscotch ice-cream is related in some sense to the theory of relativity. "In some sense" makes it easy, since anything you care to name is related in some sense to anything else you care to name, and I am sure I can find an argument in any particular case.

No, I mean do you hold that it is a reasonable position to take that 'mind' or 'idea' are involved in the coming to be of the evolutionary process.

How would you argue that the mind existed before the brain? Because that is what you would have to argue.

There have been many posts in this thread which put forward this exact argument, some of them addressed directly to you, to which I don't think you have responded.

Quote:
Commonly translated as 'mind' or 'intellect', the Greek word nous is a key term in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. What gives nous its special significance there is not primarily its dictionary meaning - other nouns in Greek can also signify the mind - but the value attributed to its activity and to the metaphysical status of things that are 'noetic' (intelligible and incorporeal) as distinct from being perceptible and corporeal. In Plato's later dialogues, and more systematically in Aristotle and Plotinus, nous is not only the highest activity of the human soul but also the divine and transcendent principle of cosmic order.

First, let me say that I believe that the mind is a product of the brain (but let us be clear I do not think they are the same). That is, without our brain, our mind would not exist.

Now, things which have minds are said to have evolved from single-celled organisms. Single-celled organisms, as far as we understand them, are not conscious, and nor do they have minds. At least not in the same sense a human would be conscious, or have a mind. So, if single-celled organisms were the predominant organisms at the beginnings of evolutionary life, this most likely means there were no organisms which were conscious or had minds at the beginnings of evolutionary life. If we suppose there were no conscious or mindful organisms at the beginnings of evolutionary life, then we can suppose that evolution, as the process, is not the result of mind. The mind is the result of brain activity, and the brain is the result of evolution.

There are indeed causes for why the mind came to exist. But there's no "higher purpose" for the mind existing.

We have come to this point half a dozen times in the debate. The fundamental issue is that the modern outlook (current, scientific, 21 c, whatever you want to call it) understands the human solely in terms of evolution. It is our 'creation story', that by which we explain who we are, how we got here, and what we are able to do. Now, in this context, mind is understandable as an adaptive response to the necessity of survival. There is no conception of 'mind' in an abstract sense, such as that referred to above as 'nous' in the Greek tradition. Any such abstraction can only be understood, within the framework of evolutionary theory, as an adaptive strategy which must somehow have provided an evolutionary advantage. It is implicit within this viewpoint that there are no non-material realities of the type posited by Greek philosophy, because 'science trumps metaphysics'.

Now I regard this as evolutionary or biological reductionism. I don't want to declare it incorrect - at the moment I am just trying to spell out what is at issue in this debate, and why the protagonists are so far apart.

I don't at all. It is a much more vexing argument than I think many realize. Also part of the problem is that I think (sorry this will annoy a lot of people) that we currently have a real complex about religious ideas in modern society. I remarked before that the modern attitude to religion is very like the Victorian attitude to sex. There are many taboos and things you're not allowed to say or think. But painful as it might be, we are getting it out in the open.

---------- Post added 03-05-2010 at 10:33 AM ----------

actually Dave Allen, who is a robust and articulate spokesman for the anti-religion camp on the Forum, said to me the other day something along the lines that 'religious feelings are OK, so long as you keep them private, and don't evangalize.'

That is the kind of thing I mean.

No, I mean do you hold that it is a reasonable position to take that 'mind' or 'idea' are involved in the coming to be of the evolutionary process.

I don't belive it is. Minds are not entities that can act on physical things or produce physical effects.

Do you mean a superpowerful being with a mind planned the evolutionary process?

One of which contained this quotation:



---------- Post added 03-05-2010 at 09:59 AM ----------

that is OK, I do know that this thread has veered wildly into terra incognito on a number of occasions. I have added that emphasis to show how, in orthodox Western philosophy, there is a sense in which 'mind' is understood to precede the processes of evolution.

Even if that were true, why should anyone care what philosophers say about a biological issue? How would philosophers know such a thing? (But, I suppose that the intervention, "in a sense", makes everything all right (in a sense, of course). What would we do without the phrase, "in a sense" when we want to make the dubious plausible. Everything, I suppose, is true "in a sense". Perhaps in the sense in which it is false.

OK think about this. Suppose for one minute, you were forced to live entirely by the explicit knowledge that biological science understood about life and how it works. All of the various processes in your body which are not yet fully understood would be suspended, and only the ones in the textbooks would operate.

You would perish immediately.

Now it is very handy to be able to pass the buck whenever a tough question comes up, as you often do. 'Oh that belongs to physicists. Philosophy can't tell us anything about that. That other thing is a matter for biologists. Only they would know that'.

Yet, strangely, here we all are.

Even if that were true, why should anyone care what philosophers say about a biological issue?

Because what we are considering is NOT a biological issue, insofar as its philosophical meaning is concerned. Darwinian rationalism engenders lousy philosophy.

Darwinian rationalism: what this means is that human attributes can only be considered as significant insofar as it can be rationalised in terms of whether and how it helps humans to survive. It is the basis of 'evolutionary psychology' and all the many books out there 'explaining' various aspects of human culture in terms of Dawkin's Selfish Gene theory or some variant.