Richard Dawkins: Essentialism

[mauricio]

This idea of essentialism and it's inability to apprehend our reality filled with continuums, overlaps and multiplicity in meaning, explains the reasoning behind some of my positions on the semantics of ideological labels and the reality of race.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVTgtvK3vDo

[Baruch]

Exactly.  However useful in a narrow way Pythagoras with music and Plato with geometry were (and later Greek mathematicians were far better) ... it is "all I have is a hammer, so that must be a nail".  The idea for most philosophers, that all philosophy since Plato is a footnote to Plato ... is part of our intellectual problem.  Without intellectual flexibility, and escape from Academicism and Scholasticism (ancient and medieval) ... new ideas will not occur.

Yes, what the speaker said ... the better model for reality is biology, and a biology without artificial distinctions ... than space-time-matter-energy ... however useful technologically that may be ... it reduces humans to technology (hence the desire of people to have their personalties uploaded into robots ... which would be a kind of hell) ... it is anti-humanistic.  Indeed ... Plato was opposed to that greatest early humanist ... Homer.

[Sal1981]

Seems to me like the old idealism vs materialism, in my mind.

There is no essence, any more than there are abstractions.

"Essence", if you will, is merely like an abstraction of the materia; a convenient tool for our minds to model our world. But it's just that, just a model, not a representation of anything in the world.

The problem, as duly noted in OPs vid, is when you basically use essence models to infer the more pragmatic materia models, such as saying something or someone is "tall" instead of just saying the actual dimension of something or someone.

[jonb]

Bad craftsmen blame their tools.

Categorisation is a very useful tool the problem is that, the way forward in one area might be by categorising one way, which in-itself limits the progress in another direction, where a different set of categorisations might be the best method.
People get so limited by a reliance on their set of categories that it seems they may well become unable to communicate with another set of people that divide information differently.
This might be as simple as the meaning of metals in Astrophysics and chemistry, or the tea party and the left in Europe who both have the same basic enemy, but express that in wildly different ways that attack each other rather than the original target that upset them in the first place.
My dyslexia limited my understanding of the written word till a relatively late age, by which time I had built up a very good visual understanding. Thoughts about linear grouping that seem hard wired into the literate mind just seem childish to me and simply do not work as a template outside very precise and restricted zones, but literate people seem unable to identify the limits of their categories.

[Baruch]

My getting past the chattering monkey mind/mouth/pen ... you are ready to leave the Temple.  I suspect synesthesia patients have amazing insight as well.  Ordinary people are ... social cannon fodder.

[jonb]

I think that there is a very good reason why people think in different ways-
I think we are evolved to come at things from different points because it is useful. Even if that means a single individual might have a disability the effect on the whole pack is that it enhances them, if they can cooperate rather than just dismiss the aberrant voice.

[josephpalazzo]

This idea of essentialism and it's inability to apprehend our reality filled with continuums, overlaps and multiplicity in meaning, explains the reasoning behind some of my positions on the semantics of ideological labels and the reality of race.

Greek philosophy dominated the Western world for nearly 2000 years (300BCE-1500CE) until the advent of science circa 16th century. Unfortunately it is still prevalent among Christian scholars, why in the US, they still are working in every which way to denigrate science - the target being evolution, climate change, both of which are contrary to their core Christian beliefs.

[Baruch]

Greek philosophy dominated the Western world for nearly 2000 years (300BCE-1500CE) until the advent of science circa 16th century. Unfortunately it is still prevalent among Christian scholars, why in the US, they still are working in every which way to denigrate science - the target being evolution, climate change, both of which are contrary to their core Christian beliefs.

Christian teaching gained respectability, by absorbing Plato and Aristotle ... thus creating Christian theology.  But that is exactly what got in the way of a free thinker like Luther or an empiricist like Galileo.

[peacewithoutgod]

This idea of essentialism and it's inability to apprehend our reality filled with continuums, overlaps and multiplicity in meaning, explains the reasoning behind some of my positions on the semantics of ideological labels and the reality of race.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVTgtvK3vDo

If this is what Dawkins actually said, I'm surprised that anyone had to read this on a video, considering how much he's been known to be live and vocal on his own behalf. I also wonder on the purpose for this reading by one with a YouTube name "Concordance" (usually of a biblical constext). However, those who actually read Dawkin's books know that it's consistent with what he teaches in them - that essentialism has no place in defining species barriers.

See The Greatest Show On Earth for an excellent explanation of how Natural Selection actually works. Not quite as exiting as The Selfish Gene or The God Delusion, but it does good at putting the worst of the sci-fi essentialists in their place.