Sean Carroll
Discussion at the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop, October 2012. Participants include Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Simon DeDeo, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flangan, Rebecca Goldstein, Janna Levin, David Poeppel, Massimo Pigliucci, Nicholas Pritzker, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross, and Steven Weinberg.
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Glad to be reminded of this wonderful,conference. Thanks for highlighting these snippets…. I watched many hours of it in original form, but it was a lot to take in.
It would have been great if they'd had a chimp scientist with them. Researchers are discovering more and more chimp gestures that convey intention and have meaning. It's not such huge divide between humans and the rest of animals as this group assumes.
I worry this is slightly dangerous terrain; we're ascribing the power of reason exclusively to humans though there's no real justification to say why the dog or the chimp isn't doing the exact same thing. Granted, Daniel then justified it to a certain extent by defining his view of reason as necessitating language – but I don't necessarily agree that without language there can be no reason. Furthermore, I remain unconvinced that humans are the only ones who employ language to convey or investigate reasons (i.e. reasoning). Language can well be defined as whatever representations are employed in the wilful attempt at affecting another entity, and in that sense, language is a tool many animals employ, and may well not be limited to traditionally biological entities. Perhaps it might be useful to think of reasons as existing in a Darwinian sense of the word only, as strategies employed in the short term to be capable of reducing entropy in a system, but necessary to increase entropy in the long term.
Alex is insufferable.. Why so smug, it's a discussion, man.