Setting human limitations...

[Humanist_Activist]

This is a difficult subject, and also one that leads to huge disagreements and misunderstanding.

First is defining what we mean by limitations, some limitations are well known, for example in unaided human perception, the wavelengths of light we can see with a naked eye, its sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation, the wavelengths of sound and the intensity we can hear. This also can vary by individuals, some can hear or see better than others, but generally the average limits are well known.

Another is physical limitations of the body, we know the average tensile strength of our bones and knowing the laws of physics as we do, we know what are the possible limits of what we can do with our bodies. How much we can lift, etc. Sometimes we exceed these limits, usually due to stress, causing injury, but overall the limits are again well known.

Since these are relatively well known, we have developed tools to overcome them, a single human would have difficulty lifting a ton of stone, but using a rope and pulley, or a lever, and they can easily overcome this limitation of the body. The same goes for our perceptions, again tools, such as night vision goggles, infrared cameras, hearing aids and other tools can overcome the limits on our senses.

But what about limitations on human comprehension, knowledge, and learning? This is more difficult to quantify. The more we know about the brain, the more questions pop up. Obviously there is a limit to how much knowledge and memory a single individual can hold inside that head of theirs. However, we have yet to figure out what exactly this limitation is, we don't really have a measurement of it.

Its can be extremely individual, savants of various sorts show what happens with specialization of memory, such as remembering dates, or calculating numbers, etc. However, most humans are generalists, and suck at certain things, such as math. However, again, we developed tools to help overcome these limitations, from the abacus to slide rules, to calculators and computers today.

In addition, we have other tools to aid in things such as retention of knowledge, increased comprehension, etc. Language is the first and obvious one, no longer shackled by learning by imitation alone, we could explain the hows and whys of what we did, and pass them on to others. The written word then came along and gave such knowledge a sense of permanency and an ability to spread such knowledge far and wide. Development of technology, especially in recent decades, has only accelerated this spread and growth of knowledge.

So, just like how technology has overcome our limitations on our physical bodies and perceptions, so has it augmented and overcome our mental limitations as well. We developed tools to help us think better, and combined with faster and more efficient communication between us, has lead to an explosion of knowledge and understanding.

This seems to frighten many, and they use religion not as a bludgeon, but as a road block, claiming we can know only so much, and can go no further, and try to reserve what's behind the roadblock as something incomprehensible, such as a deity. The evidence for this road block actually existing isn't evident, indeed it seems, with the exponential growth of discoveries we are making, setting any limit on human knowledge and understanding at this point is foolhardy at best.

Am I saying that there are no limits? Of course not, we, as a species, may have a limit, but it certainly seems evident that we haven't reached it yet, so why set an arbitrary line? We don't know what happened before the Big Bang, we don't know exactly what chemical processes lead to life arising in the first place, but these are blanks, not barriers. Inserting a deity or religion in these blanks, these gaps, doesn't increase our understanding of them or anything else, really. Only careful examination of the evidence seems to lead anywhere.

[tama]

1. Thanks

Hope this goes better than rug's opening, but thanks also for rug making this happen.

Both science and religion are exploring and widening the limits of human experience. Both in the widest sense, religion including 'religious experience/altered states of mind' and "other ways of knowing" besides standard scientific methodology. The either-or attitude and setting dogmatic understanding against each other is in itself limiting. If we tentatively generalize religion to introspection and science to extrospection, we can see that they are not in conflict, but different directions of searching the limits. Intro- and extro- are obviously spatial relations, and both religion and science can contribute to going beyond the distinction and separation between inner and outer, subjective and objective. E.g. holography and holonomy are scientific inventions, principles and metaphors, and they contribute to comprehending inner-outer distinction in new light also for religious approaches.

[Humanist_Activist]

2. I view religion as a mental phenomenon...

what sustains it is belief after all, faith. Something that is, by definition, unproven and unprovable. The problem is when that faith tries to impose itself on the world, whether in making incorrect claims about the nature of the universe and the things in it, or trying to impose restrictions on the same.

[tama]

3. Mental and social phenomena

are hard to separate. When a "religious" experience gets interpreted in a certain way and becomes a doctrine and dogma, enter the power games. AFAIK members of this group are in general agreement about that - and that also scientific theories and hypotheses can become paradigmatic doctrines and dogmas in human minds, they don't happen in social vacuum.

"Faith" does not imply, by necessity, belief in any doctrine, it can be as simple as self-confidence without setting any limits of potentiality to "self". The leap from considering something scientifically unproven (and unprovable) to believing that what is unproven is impossible, can be a self-fulfilling prediction, and thus setting individual limits of experience. Human potential and human limits have a lot to do with open mind.

[Humanist_Activist]

15. The difference is that science is self correcting, to account for human fallibility...

religion is not. Yes, individuals of both groups are susceptible to dogmatism, however, unlike in religion, science doesn't develop "followers" without hard evidence to back up theories and ideas. Those in the profession who are dogmatic end up being discredited sometime in the future if their ideas don't match with the evidence.

Generally, over time, the scientific method leads to wide reaching consensus with the repeatability of experiments and the conclusions drawn from observation, religion goes in the opposite direction, leading to further fragmentation and discord. Think of the many denominations of Christianity alone, all drawing inspiration from a single book, yet there are tens of thousands of these groups that, in many cases, simply don't agree on some of the most basic of doctrines.

I also don't really agree with your definition of faith, the problem is the inexact nature of that use, I have confidence in things such as the gravitational constant, speed of light in a vacuum, etc. but I certainly don't have faith that those constants are constant, I have evidence and observation to back it up.

The point of skeptical inquiry is to keep an open mind, but also to withhold judgement until evidence comes in to support an idea, theory, or proposition. The question of a deity is a classic one, withholding judgement means not believing the claims made by others without evidence, that doesn't mean a deity is impossible, just unlikely, and certain definitions of deity are internally inconsistent and can't exist.

[tama]

20. Self correcting

is magnificent capability. Whether in terms of empirically valid world views, liberation from causes of suffering, questioning often unconscious assumptions behind opinions, etc.

As for evidence and observation, there's now new evidence that is anomalous to speed of light in terms of Einstein's theory, also evidence that fine structure constant has changed. Science is full of open questions and that is what makes it interesting. I like to question and doubt also the "omnipotence" of the common notion of causality that standard scientific methodology is currently based on.

[Humanist_Activist]

25. And that's why I don't use faith to describe my confidence in those things...

I'm confident in many things that may change in the future, that's the nature of relying on evidence, I have no faith, in anything, instead I have beliefs and trust in things based on the best available evidence. Those may change, a friend may break a trust, and stranger may gain it, etc.

However, there are certain things, that are based on evidence, that I trust with pretty good confidence, I don't think that if I step outside I will be thrown off the planet due to its spin. Granted that would be cool to experience, but it wouldn't last long enough and I would die at the end. But its not fear that keeps me from believing that its not going to happen, but rather observation, things fall towards the center of the earth, not away from it, gotta love the laws of gravity.

[tama]

27. Based on previous experience

of Einstein's curved spacetime replacing Newton's theory of gravity in absolute Euclidean space, theory that would combine gravity with three other fundamental forces, would be even wierder...

[Eliminator]

4. Science can't answer everything...

....until it actually does, that is.

Lightning: God. Then static electricity.
The sun: God. Then a ball of hydrogen gas.
The flu: God. Then a virus.

EVERY single time religion has purported to answer a question, science has stepped in to show how it really is.


IF the truth is that there is a limit, I can guaran-fucking-tee you it won't be religion to determine that truth. It'll be science that finally determines whether or not there is a limit. I suppose then religious folk can ascribe the final unknown to "god", but by then he'll be a god that doesn't control anything, doesn't really do anything, doesn't really have any power whatsoever, and quite frankly, doesn't have any reason to exist.

Two minor points to your excellent post: There is no sense in talking about "before" the big bang, because the big bang is when time itself begins. And 2: We DO know the general chemical processes that lead to life arising and the subsequent evolution of the species that eventually lead to us. We're just fuzzy on the details, which, given enough time, will eventually be discovered.

[rrneck]

6. Clearly religion can never replace science.

And whatever province it may have over matters better dealt with using the scientific method is rapidly being kicked out of the way.

What are the chances that science will assume province over the role religion is designed to play in human culture?

[cleanhippie]

9. I don't think science will replace religion...

but it will make (and already is) religion obsolete, at least the religions we see today. There will probably be new beliefs that take over the roles that our current religions now hold, but I feel science (and reason) will overcome traditional religions and they will fade into the history books.

[rrneck]

13. Absolutely.

Although traditionally new religions spawn from existing religions there may be some serious change in our future. The biggest threat to religion isn't atheism, it's professional sports. There are so many avenues for the expression of emotionally driven faith that religion is simply unable to compete. Given the current state of our civilization in terms of resource use, technological prowess and capability for horrific destruction, who knows what expressions of faith may crop up in the next few hundred years. We may be in for another axial age.

[cleanhippie]

8. +1

[deacon_sephiroth]

10. which is why it's the God of the gaps

and as I stated in Rug's other post about the sliver of perception, the attempt is to point out how big the gap is... so god must be hiding in there somewhere... right?

[tama]

14. God of the gaps

"God of the gaps is a type of theological fallacy in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. The term was invented by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to discourage reliance on teleological arguments for God's existence.[1]

The term goes back to Henry Drummond, a 19th century evangelist lecturer, from his Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man. He chastises those Christians who point to the things that science can not yet explain—"gaps which they will fill up with God"—and urges them to embrace all nature as God's, as the work of "... an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology."[2][3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

[Leontius]

21. Glad to see the name Henry Drummond mentioned in this forum a quite amazing man.

[Jim__]

5. In your attempt to discuss human limitations you raise 2 spurious issues: fear and religion.

Your post does not justify either issue as pertinent to the consideration of human limitations.

I'm going to consider only the potential limitations on human knowledge. My first consideration in this would be the historical development of the human brain. It developed through evolution via the natural selection of accidental mutations. Specifically, the human brain was selected for because it solved problems in the environment better than brains based on other accidental changes. We have to assume that our brains are a minimal cost model that can work well with our bodies and solve environmental problems a little bit better than the next-best model. Since evolution did not require that our brain have an unlimited capacity to solve problems; but only a slightly better capacity to solve the problems that were encountered in its environment, I believe that there is an a fortiori case that the human brain has limitations.

Is there any evidence for such limitations? Yes. For example, the human brain has a tendency to categorize knowledge. We divide up problems into subject matter categories, entities into life and non-life categories, life into plant and animal, and then subdivide these categories. To a certain extent, we see the world in terms of these categories; they have a certain determinative effect on our knowledge. Is there a physical constraint on the categories that we choose? An excerpt for Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Basic Books pp 18 - 19):

The first and most important thing to realize about categorization is that it is an inescapable consequence of our biological makeup. We are neural beings. Our brains each have 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. It is common in the brain for information to be passed from one dense ensemble of neurons to another via a relatively sparse set of connections. Whenever this happens, tha pattern of activation distributed over the first set of neurons is too great to be represented in a one-to-one manner in the sparse set of connections. Therefore, the sparse set of connections necessarily groups together certain input patterns in mapping them across to the output ensemble. Whenever a neural ensemble provides the same output with different inputs, there is a neural categorization.

To take a concrete example, each human eye has 100 million light-sensing cones, but only about 1 million fibers leading to the brain. Each incoming image therefore must be reduced in complexity by a factor of 100. That is, information in each fiber constitutes a "categorization' of the information from about 100 cells. Neural categorization of this sort exists throughout the brain, up through the highest levels of categories that we can be aware of. When we see trees, we them as trees, not just as individual objects distinct from one another. The same with rocks, houses, windows, doors, and so on.

A small percentage of our categories have been formed by conscious acts of categorization, but most are formed automatically and unconsciously as a result of functioning in the world. Though we learn new categories regularly, we cannot make massive changes in our category systems through conscious acts of recategorization (though, through experience in the world, our categories are subject to unconscious reshaping and partial change). We do not, and cannot, have full conscious control over how we categorize. Even when we think we are forming new categories, our unconscious categories enter into our choice of possible conscious categories.

Most important, it is not just that our bodies and brains determine that we will categorize; they also determine what kinds of categories we will have and what their structures will be. Think of the properties of the human body that contribute to the peculiarities of our conceptual system. We have eyes and ears, arms and legs that work in certain very definite ways and not in others. We have a visual system, with topographic maps and orientation sensitive cells, that provide structures for our ability to conceptualize spatial relations. Our abilities to move in the ways we do and to track the motion of other things give motion a major role in our conceptual system. The fact that we have muscles and use them to apply force in certain ways leads to the structure of our system of causal concepts. What is important is not just that we have bodies and that thought is somehow embodied. What is important is that the peculiar nature of our bodies shapes our very possibilities fro conceptualization and categorization.

[tama]

16. Plato's Sophist

is another classic piece on categorization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist_%28dialogue%29

"The definition of the sophist aims at verbal explanation and requires knowledge of the nature of the kinds, as well as of their ability of blending."

Plato goes into "Titanomachia", attempt to define basic categories like being, non-being, movement, rest, sameness, difference, and finds out that all those categories are interdependent (cf. de Saussure's general linguistics). Plato's conclusion is to characterize being as 'dynamis'.

[cleanhippie]

7. Well, apparently, we can understand the world we live in through "other ways of knowing"

but the folks that assert these "other ways of knowing" have yet to give even a single example of knowledge gained via some "other way of knowing." They are unable to show just one advancement of understanding our world that has come about through some "other way of knowing."

Why do I bring this up? Because it is exactly the type roadblock you describe that hinders our collective advancement of understanding our world.


I think that is why there seems to be all of this religious blather and ballyhoo going on right now; religion is being threatened with extinction, and it has many of the folks who believe the religious claims of the supernatural very, very scared. But we, as humans, will eventually move beyond it. I only hope I get to see the next great step past religion happen in my lifetime.

[deacon_sephiroth]

11. and I think that's the point of the day (week? month? century?)

Yet another thread is up top today asking for ONE SINGLE example of posative religious contribution to our advancement as a people, a species, society, planetary stewards, etc.

Yet another thread is silent...

I share whole-heartedly in my desire to see a world devoid of dogmatic wish-thinking as an excuse for ignorance and intellectual complacency, though I have little optimism for it.

[tama]

18. Many examples have been given

on both accounts, but obviously there was no honest interest of inquiry but some other motivation.

[cbayer]

19. I am really confused here.

After all the outrage that was expressed when "blather and ballyhoo" was used to describe organized atheist groups, it's now ok to use it to describe organized religious groups.

[rrneck]

12. Since we seem able to design machinery to significantly expand the ability of the brain

I am not so sure there are any meaningful limitations on its capabilities. We can build machines that far outstrip our physical abilities with relative ease, I see no reason why we cannot do the same with our brains.

The limitations may well be not in our brains but in the object of our investigations. The planet itself may not support the kind of physical and mental activity required to make all those technological leaps. For every Mars lander there are about a hundred million Nike tennis shoes. For every cyclotron experiment there are about a hundred million mindless tweets. For every Einstein there is a Hiroshima.

While our intellectual capacity does not seem to me to have any meaningful limits, I think our emotional capacity is equally limitless as well. We seem not only to be able to conceptualize what others may think or feel, we can create fictional characters as experiments to conceptualize what could be possibly be thought or felt just to see what will happen and share in those emotional highs and lows. It's what religion, otherwise known as fiction, is designed to do. For every god there is a Satan. For every heaven there is a hell. For every St. Stephen there is a Torquemada.

It seems we have become so adept at the development of systems to expand our abilities we have forgotten how to simply be who we are right here right now. It seems that there are people who don't know, or care, where their food comes from. There are others who are so enamored with ideological constructs they are willing to kill for a fiction.

I wonder if the human race is finally beginning to reach a point where the planet and our own bodies can no longer support the unlimited ability of our brains to seek out novelty both without and within ourselves. The solution to that problem, if it exists, may be the most important solution the human race has found since we walked out of Africa.

[Humanist_Activist]

17. I think the only limits on our capabilities are those imposed on us by the laws of physics...

as we know them today, and even that may change in the future.

Ever since our ancestors smashed a bone to get to the marrow with a stone millions of years ago, to the use of stone axes, sharpened sticks, fire, and other discoveries and inventions dating back millions or hundreds of thousands of years ago, we have been expanding on our capabilities, both mental and physical. At this point, this development has been accelerating, and doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Our emotional and social development seems to finally be taking shape to catch up to our intellectual and technological development. Our capacity for empathy is actually increasing, this is, despite all its problems, one of the best times to be alive in much of the world, the key is to make sure the rest of the world also benefits from these advancements. Human freedom, dignity, and life, are, slowly and surely, being given prominence in human consciousness.

I'm not saying I'm naive, but I am cautiously optimistic for our future.

[MarkCharles]

22. I'd like to join your "cautiously optimistic" view of the world, and

about the ONLY thing holding us back are out-dated religious beliefs, and mythological influences.

Now, how do we get rid of these religious beliefs that allow planes to fly into buildings?

How do we get rid of religious people restricting the rights of others to choose whom they wish to love?

How do we enforce some sort of equality of opportunity without imposition of any religious teaching before children reach the age of sexual adulthood? Why would religious folks object to being excluded from teaching their children about those creation myths?

More importantly, here, right here, on this board, how do we get people who "claim" to be liberal and put up stick figures in their manger scenes in a Southern California college town, how do we get them to see that they are buying into the same religious outrageousness of thinking patterns that the guys who flew the planes into buildings on 9/11 are into? HOW SO? Namely, they are rejecting rational thought in favor of their religious fantasies, their religious wishful thinking, their religious insistence upon their OWN views being more valid than anyone else's.

I'm sure there will be a few readers who will object to this post, which equates the 9/11 true believers to the liberals who made stick figures in a Southern California liberal college town. But the intensity of arrogance is no different for either of them, they both BELIEVE they know what's right and wrong, and will step out into society and do whatever they think is the right thing to do.

Gosh, I bet this post gets reported and condemned!!! I'm going to do a Google capture of it, just in case.

How DARE I accuse religious Christians that are so nice to the LGBT folks as equal to being like the Taliban or Al Qaida? HOW????

They both believe that they are right and righteous in what they are doing! That's the answer that shows how dangerous religious thinking can be.

[Humanist_Activist]

23. I don't think religion will go away, rather I think its influence on society will steadily...

decrease over time, to where it will become irrelevant. There will be quite persistent groups out there, but, over time, religion will die a rather peaceful death in the long term, at least for the vast majority of people.

The key is, first and foremost, education, and the spreading of critical thinking skills, teach someone to think, and you have a skeptic on your hands, and spread the skills of thinking, and faith itself becomes irrelevant.

[MarkCharles]

24. Good thoughts there! I don't object to people getting together on Sundays

for whatever they choose to do on Sundays, bowling, or painting homeless shelters, or serving dinners or whatever.

I just wish we would stop with the concept that SOME Christian people are somehow better-off because they go to church on Sundays, or that the rest of the "flock" will be welcomed home as soon as their life will inevitably meet up with some personal trajedy.

We ALL have relatives dying, we all have moments of anxiety and doubt, we all love and lose those we love from this planet.

Religion is so insidious as to invade our lives at these few critical moments. I have actually seen a woman convert from Judaism to Christianity when her dog died. Is this rational thought? Of course not.

[Leontius]

26. I agree wholeheartedly how dare someone think they are right the arrogant bastards

so I guess you'll stfu from now on to, right.