Utilitarian Review 10/15/11 | The Hooded Utilitarian

Pretty good review about the “Thing” prequel!

Both movies to a degree certainly confirm traditional gender stereotyping: men are emotionally insensitive and isolated, individualistic; women are empathetic…

Re that chap arguing with the neuroscientists, from the article:

———————-
…Raymond Tallis…nurses his animosity toward thinkers who reduce human beings to animals “acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces.”
———————-

As I’d mentioned on another thread, consider the true story of separated-at-birth identical twins, raised by different families, sometimes with no knowledge of the existence of the other. When reunited as adults…

——————–
…James Arthur Springer and James Edward Lewis, had just been reunited at age 39 after being given up by their mother and separately adopted as 1-month-olds. Springer and Lewis, both Ohioans, found they had each married and divorced a woman named Linda and remarried a Betty. They shared interests in mechanical drawing and carpentry; their favorite school subject had been math, their least favorite, spelling. They smoked and drank the same amount and got headaches at the same time of day.

Another source says:

The twin boys were separated at birth, being adopted by different families. Unknown to each other, both families named the boys Jim. And here the coincidences just begun. Both James grew up not even knowing of the other, yet both sought law-enforcement training, both had abilities in mechanical drawing and carpentry, and each had married women named Linda. They both had sons whom one named James Alan and the other named James Allan. The twin brothers also divorced their wives and married other women – both named Betty. And they both owned dogs which they named Toy…

Equally astounding was another set of twins, Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe. At first, they appeared to be a textbook case of the primacy of culture in forming individuals — just the opposite of the Lewis-Springer pair. Separated from his twin six months after their birth in Trinidad, Oskar was brought up Catholic in Germany and joined the Hitler Youth. Jack stayed behind in the Caribbean, was raised a Jew and lived for a time in Israel. Yet despite the stark contrast of their lives, when the twins were reunited in their fifth decade they had similar speech and thought patterns, similar gaits, a taste for spicy foods and common peculiarities such as flushing the toilet before they used it.

Daphne Goodship and Barbara Herbert first met when they were 40. Debbie was raised Jewish and Sharon was raised Catholic.

They, too, have discovered remarkably similar life experiences. “We discovered we had a miscarriage the same year, followed by two boys and a girl in that order,” says Barbara.

They admit that they’ve also cooked the same meal from the same recipe book on the same day, without knowing it…
——————–
More at http://lornareiko.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/identical-twins-who-were-separated-at-birth-what-are-they-like/ ,

But, these were surely all simply amazingly coincidental conscious choices; there’s no “acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains” here!

Back to that original article ( http://chronicle.com/article/Raymond-Tallis-Takes-Out-the/129279/ ), where Tallis plays about as fair as Fox News does. :

———————
The backlash against neuroscience isn’t new—one controversial paper in 2009 accused social neuroscientists of making “voodoo correlations” between brain regions and emotions—but the crowd delights in Tallis’s hyperbolic version of it…

…what every philosopher should know is that any philosopher—Plato, Hume, Kant, take your pick—”can be made to look like a flaming idiot if you oversimplify and caricature them,” Dennett tells me.

“Tallis indulges in refutation by caricature,” says Dennett, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. “He’s not taking his opponents seriously. He’s sneering instead of arguing. He’s ignoring the complexities of the arguments. So he’s not really doing philosophy. He’s doing propaganda.”
———————
(Emphasis added)

Gee, I’d never heard of anyone doing that before! Exaggerate, simplify and distort the point of view of the other side to ridiculousness (i.e., “Eco-Nazis want to abolish civilization and send us back to the Stone Age!”), then attack them for being extremists…

———————–
Tallis’s crack-of-dawn philosophizing began to yield a major work, a 1,000-page trilogy that accounts for what makes humans different from other animals while avoiding both religion and reductive biology. In these books of “philosophical anthropology”— The Hand, I Am, and The Knowing Animal —Tallis argued that humans escaped biology through a chain of events that began several million years ago with the evolution of the human hand.
————————-

Um, “escaped biology”? (That’s Tallis’ actual wording in the book.) Yes, we’re all pure intellects now, our actions guided by Vulcan-like perfect rationality…

————————–
The dexterity of our uniquely free thumbs “utterly transforms the hominid’s relationship not only to the external objects it is manipulating, but also to its own body,” Tallis wrote, “and this in turn feeds back on to the relationship with those material objects”—carrying humans beyond unreflective animal instinct…
—————————

Uh, does Tallis know there are many animals who regularly and intelligently use tools, are capable of going “beyond unreflective animal instinct”?

For instance:

———————
Orangutans are the loners and the daydreamers of the great apes. While chimps, bonobos, and gorillas are usually found in groups called troops—socializing, foraging, or playing—orangutans tend to be more solitary. It’s not that they don’t do all the things the other great apes do, it’s just that they seem to have a more internal approach to everything. While other apes might go from tree to tree searching for fruit, an orangutan will just sit in the forest canopy for hours on end until the location of the hidden fruit seems to mysteriously reveal itself. Then it will swing over for its meal. Orangutans have even been known to watch villagers use boats to cross the local waterways, and then untie a boat and ride it across the river on their own…

Scientists like to explain the orangutan’s unique approach to problem solving with this example: If a chimp is given an oddly shaped peg and several different holes to try to put it in, the chimp will immediately try shoving the peg in various holes until it finds the hole that the peg fits in. But an orangutan will approach the challenge quite differently. It will stare off into space, or even scratch itself with the peg. Then, after a while, it will offhandedly stick the peg into the correct hole while looking at something else that has caught its interest…

…One of the San Diego Zoo’s most famous orangutans was Ken Allen, a Bornean orangutan…known for his creative escape techniques. He would unscrew bolts with his fingers, reach around to unlatch things, climb up a steep incline by the back of his enclosure to slip over a wall, and so on.

Every time keepers figured out one of his escape routes, he would discover a new one. He never seemed to mind being led back into his enclosure—he just seemed to enjoy the challenge of finding a new way out…
——————–
http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-orangutan.html

———————
———————
…At one point, Ken Allen and his mate, Vickie, teamed up for a dual escape, with the male instructing the female on the use of a branch as a crowbar, according to witnesses.

Finally, after the zoo made $45,000 in improvements to the orangutan enclosure, Ken Allen stopped going AWOL…
————————
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/dec/02/news/mn-60111

8 thoughts on “Utilitarian Review 10/15/11”

Richard Cook on October 15, 2011 at 11:54 pm said:

Where did you talk about the new Thing movie?

The link above doesn’t work.
Noah Berlatsky on October 16, 2011 at 1:47 am said:

Whoops, sorry! It’s at the Atlantic; link should work now.
Mike Hunter on October 16, 2011 at 6:11 am said:

Pretty good review about the “Thing” prequel!

Both movies to a degree certainly confirm traditional gender stereotyping: men are emotionally insensitive and isolated, individualistic; women are empathetic…

Re that chap arguing with the neuroscientists, from the article:

———————-
…Raymond Tallis…nurses his animosity toward thinkers who reduce human beings to animals “acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains by evolutionary forces.”
———————-

As I’d mentioned on another thread, consider the true story of separated-at-birth identical twins, raised by different families, sometimes with no knowledge of the existence of the other. When reunited as adults…

——————–
…James Arthur Springer and James Edward Lewis, had just been reunited at age 39 after being given up by their mother and separately adopted as 1-month-olds. Springer and Lewis, both Ohioans, found they had each married and divorced a woman named Linda and remarried a Betty. They shared interests in mechanical drawing and carpentry; their favorite school subject had been math, their least favorite, spelling. They smoked and drank the same amount and got headaches at the same time of day.

Another source says:

The twin boys were separated at birth, being adopted by different families. Unknown to each other, both families named the boys Jim. And here the coincidences just begun. Both James grew up not even knowing of the other, yet both sought law-enforcement training, both had abilities in mechanical drawing and carpentry, and each had married women named Linda. They both had sons whom one named James Alan and the other named James Allan. The twin brothers also divorced their wives and married other women – both named Betty. And they both owned dogs which they named Toy…

Equally astounding was another set of twins, Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe. At first, they appeared to be a textbook case of the primacy of culture in forming individuals — just the opposite of the Lewis-Springer pair. Separated from his twin six months after their birth in Trinidad, Oskar was brought up Catholic in Germany and joined the Hitler Youth. Jack stayed behind in the Caribbean, was raised a Jew and lived for a time in Israel. Yet despite the stark contrast of their lives, when the twins were reunited in their fifth decade they had similar speech and thought patterns, similar gaits, a taste for spicy foods and common peculiarities such as flushing the toilet before they used it.

Daphne Goodship and Barbara Herbert first met when they were 40. Debbie was raised Jewish and Sharon was raised Catholic.

They, too, have discovered remarkably similar life experiences. “We discovered we had a miscarriage the same year, followed by two boys and a girl in that order,” says Barbara.

They admit that they’ve also cooked the same meal from the same recipe book on the same day, without knowing it…
——————–
More at http://lornareiko.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/identical-twins-who-were-separated-at-birth-what-are-they-like/ ,

But, these were surely all simply amazingly coincidental conscious choices; there’s no “acting out a biological script inscribed in our brains” here!

Back to that original article ( http://chronicle.com/article/Raymond-Tallis-Takes-Out-the/129279/ ), where Tallis plays about as fair as Fox News does. :

———————
The backlash against neuroscience isn’t new—one controversial paper in 2009 accused social neuroscientists of making “voodoo correlations” between brain regions and emotions—but the crowd delights in Tallis’s hyperbolic version of it…

…what every philosopher should know is that any philosopher—Plato, Hume, Kant, take your pick—”can be made to look like a flaming idiot if you oversimplify and caricature them,” Dennett tells me.

“Tallis indulges in refutation by caricature,” says Dennett, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. “He’s not taking his opponents seriously. He’s sneering instead of arguing. He’s ignoring the complexities of the arguments. So he’s not really doing philosophy. He’s doing propaganda.”
———————
(Emphasis added)

Gee, I’d never heard of anyone doing that before! Exaggerate, simplify and distort the point of view of the other side to ridiculousness (i.e., “Eco-Nazis want to abolish civilization and send us back to the Stone Age!”), then attack them for being extremists…

———————–
Tallis’s crack-of-dawn philosophizing began to yield a major work, a 1,000-page trilogy that accounts for what makes humans different from other animals while avoiding both religion and reductive biology. In these books of “philosophical anthropology”— The Hand, I Am, and The Knowing Animal —Tallis argued that humans escaped biology through a chain of events that began several million years ago with the evolution of the human hand.
————————-

Um, “escaped biology”? (That’s Tallis’ actual wording in the book.) Yes, we’re all pure intellects now, our actions guided by Vulcan-like perfect rationality…

————————–
The dexterity of our uniquely free thumbs “utterly transforms the hominid’s relationship not only to the external objects it is manipulating, but also to its own body,” Tallis wrote, “and this in turn feeds back on to the relationship with those material objects”—carrying humans beyond unreflective animal instinct…
—————————

Uh, does Tallis know there are many animals who regularly and intelligently use tools, are capable of going “beyond unreflective animal instinct”?

For instance:

———————
Orangutans are the loners and the daydreamers of the great apes. While chimps, bonobos, and gorillas are usually found in groups called troops—socializing, foraging, or playing—orangutans tend to be more solitary. It’s not that they don’t do all the things the other great apes do, it’s just that they seem to have a more internal approach to everything. While other apes might go from tree to tree searching for fruit, an orangutan will just sit in the forest canopy for hours on end until the location of the hidden fruit seems to mysteriously reveal itself. Then it will swing over for its meal. Orangutans have even been known to watch villagers use boats to cross the local waterways, and then untie a boat and ride it across the river on their own…

Scientists like to explain the orangutan’s unique approach to problem solving with this example: If a chimp is given an oddly shaped peg and several different holes to try to put it in, the chimp will immediately try shoving the peg in various holes until it finds the hole that the peg fits in. But an orangutan will approach the challenge quite differently. It will stare off into space, or even scratch itself with the peg. Then, after a while, it will offhandedly stick the peg into the correct hole while looking at something else that has caught its interest…

…One of the San Diego Zoo’s most famous orangutans was Ken Allen, a Bornean orangutan…known for his creative escape techniques. He would unscrew bolts with his fingers, reach around to unlatch things, climb up a steep incline by the back of his enclosure to slip over a wall, and so on.

Every time keepers figured out one of his escape routes, he would discover a new one. He never seemed to mind being led back into his enclosure—he just seemed to enjoy the challenge of finding a new way out…
——————–
http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-orangutan.html

———————
———————
…At one point, Ken Allen and his mate, Vickie, teamed up for a dual escape, with the male instructing the female on the use of a branch as a crowbar, according to witnesses.

Finally, after the zoo made $45,000 in improvements to the orangutan enclosure, Ken Allen stopped going AWOL…
————————
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/dec/02/news/mn-60111
vommarlowe on October 16, 2011 at 7:25 am said:

A generation, huh? That’s pretty impressive. You should get a shirt with that on it. Or at least a siggy. Noah Berlatsky, Stunning comics criticisms for a generation!

I dunno, just struck me as pretty funny.
Richard Cook on October 16, 2011 at 11:00 am said:

I think it’s great advertising for the blog. What other comics blogger can claim to have ruined criticism so thoroughly? No one, that’s who!
Noah Berlatsky on October 16, 2011 at 2:28 pm said:

I vote for Tucker Stone.
Charles Reece on October 16, 2011 at 8:40 pm said:

I think Milo was being a bit more dismissive, seeing HU as another symptom of what’s wrong with the blogging generation, not the root cause. Sorry to ruin the celebration.
Noah Berlatsky on October 16, 2011 at 9:11 pm said:

Well, he’ll never come over here to clarify, so I’m sticking with my more flattering interpretation. So there.

Comments are closed.