Meanderings

I always have what seems to me the most amazing ideas, and I write them down in my trusty notepad, and think about how awesome it will be to make a post about it... And when it comes to the time of writing there's always the wall of reluctance. A kind of mental stagnation and pain that comes from developing ones thoughts on the 'writing for an audience' level. I'm extremely hyper-graphic, finishing a journal a month. However, no one sees those journals, and if someone did I'd probably have a nervous breakdown... The reluctance comes when having to write for an audience, when you know your ideas can be judged.. But whatever, I'm just gonna write whatever...

-Right now I'm in the middle of writing a paper for a friend, on:
"The Scientific Revolution altered the world view of Science and challenged the religious beliefs and ideas of Christianity"

Easy Schmeezzy...I barely have to try to write this essay. A guaranteed 'A' for my friend... So let's try and think of some interesting angle to look at the scientific revolution...

The scientific revolution is generally thought to reflect a significant paradigm shift: a fundamental change in an individual or a society's view of how things work in the world.- This is what's most interesting about the scientific revolution. I start to think about memetics, and the evolution of ideas and knowledge. Mass changes in how we view the world... I can spend hours thinking about this stuff, writing in my journal profusely; trying to understand the complexity of human ranking systems, or why we feel the urge to urinate when hiding in a game of hide and seek, or how about contemplating the reason why I like boobs so much (because they resemble a beautiful ripe rump, ready for fertilization)... This is the kind of stuff that that amateur philosophers like me live for: the ecstasy of a brilliant ideas...

Then, comes the fine tuning; the scientific method, experimentation, validation, etc. When all the initial glamor subsides and skepticism takes over. Here it's either prove it or lose it. It's one thing to just gawk over the unconfirmed profundity of these ideas; and another to really be able to accept something as truth. The ideas need to be clarified.--Evolutionary psychology is still a very young discipline, where there is still much diversity of opinion within. Naturally there will some controversy and contentions. Some dismiss any notion of the human mind having adapted by natural selection and mutation, while others, like Steven Pinker, can't stop pointing out how much our genes determine our behavior.

The next step usually results in some kind of compromise between then two; you'll often hear phrases like: "everybody knows it's both nature and nurture"... This perspective is appropriate only as a simple statement of general clarification. One needs to go deeper than that...

Kudos to Pinker for giving nurture its due where deserved, as well as his refusal to shrug off the evidence pointing to the biological bases... I find the the stock arguments presented in evolutionary psychology (innate language, color, shape, recognition, art, etc) to be both incredibly interesting, and speculative. On the one hand, I love learning about evolution, I accept wholeheartedly the ideas neodarwinism, and embrace the science of it all with passion and respect. It's really the best we've got in understanding why and how we are the way we are... However, the gears do change a little when you start thinking about the evolution of the mind. For me, it's not a question of whether or not the mind evolved. Of course it did. The question for me is how. For this I can offer no secure resolution... Yet...

-So trying to understand my own mind in terms of evolution is, in my opinion, one of the funnest things to think about. It's almost like the snake eating it's own tail thing: trying to understand why you're trying to understand things. It's like I can just get high off my own thoughts, i.e. eating myself... It's difficult to say what exactly I find so enthralling about it. I know that I can't really be completely certain of anything. Yet, I liberally hand myself over to probability. If I can surmise that the mind being adapted by natural selection/mutation has an 85% chance of being true, I can just bask in that 85 %, and be happy...

That's all for now.