"Transcending nature"?
- Thread starter wynn
- Start date
Well, if you want to disregard the evidence, that's your business. Don't hassle me about it.
As to your "examples," all you've done is demonstrate that you don't understand the concept of transcendence. Holding back is not transcending. Making a rational decision is well within your nature, so how could the exercise of that rationality possibly be transcendent?
@JDawg --
What evidence are you talking about? I saw nothing more in your posts than opinions. Granted I agree with a lot of what you say, but it seems to me that your claim here is entirely subjective.
And again you've grabbed the entirely wrong end of entirely the wrong stick. The point was that I wasn't thinking rationally, in fact I wasn't even really thinking at that point. You also entirely ignored my other example, what is "transcending nature" if not temporarily shutting down part of your own brain?
What evidence are you talking about? I saw nothing more in your posts than opinions. Granted I agree with a lot of what you say, but it seems to me that your claim here is entirely subjective.
And again you've grabbed the entirely wrong end of entirely the wrong stick. The point was that I wasn't thinking rationally, in fact I wasn't even really thinking at that point. You also entirely ignored my other example, what is "transcending nature" if not temporarily shutting down part of your own brain?
So you essentially want me to restate my entire argument again? Just read the posts. I linked you to them, they're pretty self-explanatory. I'm not going to repeat them when they're already there for you to read.
I mean, at least tell me what it is you disagree with.
So then what do you think it was that caused you not to hit back? I had assumed your argument was that your rational thinking was what transcended you above a primal "Me hit, me hit back" urge, but if not that, then I don't know where you're going with it. Either way, not everyone has the instinct to hit back. And impulse control is not transcendence. If we aren't limited by these things, then how can we transcend them?
You mean like we shut down parts of our brain when we go to sleep? All I have ever read about brain activity in monks is how, when praying, their brain activity is in line with what would be called "the religious experience."
That's just how the brain works. When you learn, you strengthen synaptic connections in the brain (excuse whatever terminology I misuse here; I'm not a scientist, if you couldn't already tell). That is a physical change to the brain, and yet you're amazed by trances?
Anyway, neither a trance nor learning is transcendent.
Both of us have already shouldered our burden of proof [by giving examples of human progress unparalleled in other species] - you hadn't.
"rise above or go beyond the limits of" - of nature itself, we have not. But of our innate nature and the ways of life in the natural world - we have.
But that is clearly not transcendence.
That is simply a particular species displaying a specific aptitude.
For instance the ability of a whale to hold its breath doesn't make it above and beyond (aka transcendental) mammals - it merely displays a certain aptitude that makes it unique for mammals. All the other characteristics of mammals are in full operation - in fact the ability to designate a species to a category undercuts any attempt to declare it "transcendental" at the onset since the category clearly delineates precisely what it is not transcending.
:shrug:
The means, tropes and language of sleeping, eating, mating and defending may have changed but the essential acts remain the same
:shrug:
light already answered this, but I do want to say that I've thoroughly debunked your examples of "transcendence," and that no further burden lies upon me. We are clearly not limited by the things you seem to think we are.
What you two clearly lack is an understanding of the word. I don't know how to cure that problem for you. Maybe read the dictionary entry?
Ok. Maybe I should agree at this point. We are above nature and have achieved great things that no other species has, but because our brains have made us capable of this and these are a natural result, we are not transcendent. We have merely overcome our instincts and limitations and have thereby conquered the planet.
But do tell me, what would humans have to do for them to be considered transcendent?
We're not above nature, though. Our brains are a result of a natural process, and are thereby a part of nature. Just because we're the most advanced of the species on the planet doesn't mean we're above nature itself. We still get sick, we still are born with deformities and chemical imbalances and, and we still die.
What you're doing is confusing the amazing for the impossible. You think that because no other animal can, say, make medicine, then the act of making medicine must be transcendent. But that isn't the case. What others are doing here is confusing impulse control with transcendence, because they are under the false impression that as animals we should not have the ability to do something that goes against our instinct--but of course as rational, thinking humans, we are perfectly capable of doing that.
You might be tempted to say we transcend instinct, but impulse control is certainly not unique to humans, and it wouldn't be wholly accurate to say that we are always capable of it. Plenty of people get in trouble precisely because they can't control their impulses. Think crimes of passion, and sex offenders.
As to how we could transcend nature...I suppose it we were able to somehow make ourselves entirely immune to disease, and achieve something like immortality--whatever the means--I would call that transcendence. (and yet even then, I wouldn't be comfortable, because I would have to ask myself "If this is within our means, how is it then a limitation?" I'm tempted to say that transcendence is inherently impossible, but maybe now I'm confusing definitions here.) But simple impulse control? The ability to think rationally? No, these aren't transcendent concepts. We aren't even the only species of human to walk the earth, and I highly doubt we're the only reasoning minds in the universe, so I wouldn't go that far.
Do you mean that only a caring entity can be transcended?
Like when in leaving one socio-economic group for another one, a person has "transcended" that first group?
Hi! I decided to drop by, and I begin with the last entry:
Looked at as a definition, it seems not to work backwards, or does "Transcending Nature" means leaving it?
I think that some of those who like to talk about how humans have "transcended nature" have simply conjured up a false dichotomy between that which is supposedly "natural" in humans and that which is not, in order to achieve an elevated status for humans, as otherwise, they'd seem too ape-like even for their own we-are-merely-animals tastes.
Darwinists have pwide too!
Darwinists have pwide too!
Yes they should have! I wont explain why in here since theres a high probability for a thread to get locked if I begin explaining things. Cya
Good decision sV!
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Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Is it a false dichotomy, or an ambiguity in the meaning of the word 'nature'?
One meaning of 'nature' has nature contrasted with the works of man. Wilderness areas are natural, cities are not.
A different meaning of 'nature' interprets it as referring more generally to our ontological realm. In other words, to everything that belongs to the natural world and that can therefore be studied and understood by the methods appropriate to studying and understanding that world (most notably science).
So on the first interpretation of nature, every human act that results in something happening that wouldn't have happened otherwise, represents 'transcendence' of nature. Or, as popular culture would more likely spin it, the 'desacration' of nature. We often see this kind of thinking in environmentalism.
On the second interpretation, human beings are natural beings, one of the animal species on this planet, and everything that humans do is natural, just as surely as anything that might happen in the absence of human beings. So on this interpretation, it's hard to see how humans could ever 'transcend' nature.
Yeah, that's another interpretation of the word 'nature'.
There's an idea that everything has an innate essence, the expression of which is that thing's particular perfection. The teleological goal of each thing is to realize its perfection. If nature was left to its own devices, then that teleological evolution would be what drives movement and change. But there's also so-called 'violent' change, outside intrusions that knock natural change off its course and divert it to different externally-imposed ends.
I think that vision ultimately derives from Aristotle, by way of medieval Aristotelianism. The Catholic church's philosophical theology still takes it very seriously.
And oddly but interestingly, so does a loud segment of modern environmentalism. Many of our present-day environmentalists wear their secularism on their sleeves and often claim to be atheists, seemingly unaware that their vision of the world is ultimately derived from the medieval Catholic church. It's the source of the idea of humans desacrating nature, 'violently' diverting nature from its (divinely ordained) goal of realizing its own innate perfection, corrupting it to lesser ends imposed by fallen human beings, such as obtaining raw materials, growing food or making money.
I'm more inclined to think that it's just an unrecognized consequence of the history of ideas. The ways that people think about things today are strongly shaped by how our ancestors thought about things in the past. The past is what provides us with our conceptual vocabulary, so to speak, our intellectual toolkit for how we deal with the world today.
Nice post, I stand corrected.
Truth should be "transending nature's balance" unless we consider nature in itself is a balance.
But why is it unrecognized?
Given the reluctance to discuss this dichotomy or ambiguity, and the hostile self-assuredness of those who like to use the term "transcending nature," it seems that there is more at play.
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