I’m not sure I know what it means to say that humans “know” things. We often speak as if humans “want” things, but everyone knows that it’s only a metaphor.
Yeah, yeah, very cute. I agree that folk psychology has a few problems with it, but I’m not yet ready to toss commonsense notions like knowing and wanting entirely out the window.
Okay, think of it this way: we can see why natural selection would result in organisms with a folk psychology of selves that have beliefs and desires, even if these abstractions are a little leakier than we think they are. But human societies haven’t faced the same kind of selection pressure that could produce such adaptations, so whatever sense human societies can be said to know things, it’s probably very different from the sense in which individual humans can be said to know things.
Evolution is no longer the only optimization process in this world—human societies don’t need to undergo evolution, they are intelligently designed. If you think human societies don’t develop a sense of self, just wait for the next July 4, or whatever your local day of nationalistic celebration is.
To say that a society has a sense of itself seems absurd; societies are not sensing things. How would you distinguish between a society that has a sense of itself versus one that doesn’t? By the behaviour and identity of its members? That makes as much sense as determining if I have a sense of self by surveying my neurons to see if they identify as being a part of me. A group of sensing beings ascribing to an ideology does not a new entity with a sense of self or a capacity for knowledge make.
I’m not sure I know what it means to say that humans “know” things. We often speak as if humans “want” things, but everyone knows that it’s only a metaphor.
Yeah, yeah, very cute. I agree that folk psychology has a few problems with it, but I’m not yet ready to toss commonsense notions like knowing and wanting entirely out the window.
Okay, think of it this way: we can see why natural selection would result in organisms with a folk psychology of selves that have beliefs and desires, even if these abstractions are a little leakier than we think they are. But human societies haven’t faced the same kind of selection pressure that could produce such adaptations, so whatever sense human societies can be said to know things, it’s probably very different from the sense in which individual humans can be said to know things.
Evolution is no longer the only optimization process in this world—human societies don’t need to undergo evolution, they are intelligently designed. If you think human societies don’t develop a sense of self, just wait for the next July 4, or whatever your local day of nationalistic celebration is.
To say that a society has a sense of itself seems absurd; societies are not sensing things. How would you distinguish between a society that has a sense of itself versus one that doesn’t? By the behaviour and identity of its members? That makes as much sense as determining if I have a sense of self by surveying my neurons to see if they identify as being a part of me. A group of sensing beings ascribing to an ideology does not a new entity with a sense of self or a capacity for knowledge make.