Redefining Athiesm: You cannot fully accept until you fully understand.

[tar]

TAR - Are you suggesting that it was the Piraha people's evolved capacity to rehearse interactions with potential enemies or mates or friends... to imagine in their minds how events would take place with "unseen others" and to mentally choreograph various scenarios (and that those who did tended to be better prepared for new events and stimuli than those that could or did not mentally rehearse interactions with unseen others)... is the same mechanism that could likely have caused them to feel as if they could "see spirits?"

Inow,

 

You read my mind.

 

And previously (before the spirit thing) I was suggesting the opposite. I was incorrectly figuring that the number thing, might have been an indication that their capacity for considering unseen others might be likewise "missing" from their conceptual architecture. However, after the spirit thing is factored in, the unseen other mechanisms seem to be intact, and their reluctance to accept Jesus as their lord and savior, and the biblical "father" that goes with him, seems to be better explained by their cultural tendency to not accept hearsay evidence. They might have accepted it, if someone they trusted, said they saw Jesus, or God. Which requires me to come up with a different hypothesis, in terms of why the number thing and the God thing might be related. I am guessing that they are, but I do not have a good possible explanation of why they might be. What is it, that we do, when we add, that the Piraha do not readily do?

 

Regards, TAR2

 

Perhaps us counters have a place holder mechanism that has atrophied in that population, or has not developed because of some cultural influences. Or we, the counters, hijacked some neurological mechanism that the Piraha also have, but we use it for counting, which is other than its evolutionary purpose.

 

Moontanman,

 

Nature/nurture. Another wrinkle. This gets harder and harder to figure out.

 

Humans have a number of skills and abilities that other mammals do not have. How many of them were natural, and how many of them were learned? And what exactly is so unnatural about learning?

 

Regards, TAR2

Edited December 17, 2012 by tar

[PeterJ]

 

What you have done is take the description of trees and imagined a tree. This tree is by definition a concept of a tree and remains a concept of a tree. At no point in time does our concept of a tree have the value of an existing tree. When we speak of a possibly existing tree, we are not describing a tree that was discovered in 2020 (the point at which we gained knowledge of the tree), we have not travelled back in time and applied the knowledge that we gained in 2020 now. The limitations of the concept remain in place when we ultimately discover the tree in 2020 and a new description is given, but even if it is the same as that of the concept, they have different meaning. That is why I said that the existing thing is not a tree, because as we converse at this present time and with our present knowledge we are not conversing about a tree in reality but merely the concept of a tree. The concept only exists as a concept.

Perhaps it would be enough to say that all perceptions are theory-laden. Thus meditative practice is often strongly focused on seeing the world as it is, and thus seeing existence as what it is. Science takes 'existence' for granted, and thus never really engages with the question of what is real and what is not. But you make a good point,. When we say a tree exists, we mean that what our neurophysiological system interprets as a tree is subject to what we imagine existence to be. The room for confusion about the nature of trees (or any psychophysical phenomena) and the nature of existence is considerabl;e