Lies or Incompetence?

[ElCodeMonkey]

I am often fascinated by the fact that people cannot come to an agreement about something. I can lay out what I think is solid and rational argument only to find the recipients entirely incapable of comprehending. Similarly, the arguments brought forth to me sound ridiculous and easily defeated, but they can never see how they've been defeated so soundly and logically. It's easy to see them as incompetent or dishonest yet I strongly believe they feel the same about me. They are absolutely just as convinced as I am in the opposite direction. We often think the other side is just being dishonest, evil, or stupid. And yet the other side thinks the same. So how in the world can we ever truly know? Is there a method of knowing if we're lying to ourselves and we're the dumb ones? Has science shown anything in the brain perhaps that can reveal that we truly DO understand something but choose to reject it and so deceive ourselves? What is really going on? Or is one side of an argument actually just evil incarnate like we're led to believe?

[mgb]

This is exactly why I keep referencing Davie's book ...

Yes, I'll check it out, thanks...


Some excerpts from the reviews-

that many of the explanations here center on how proteins, cells and organs communicate enough information to create a human body without a grand plan.

The picture of the developing human here is one of emergent behavior and complex and intricate information flows. The vocabulary here includes "signalling" and "gradients" and "feedback loops." Because of the constraints of evolution (far easier to add on to an existing process than change it), and development (stuff has to work all the while it's being created and changing form), the form that these take can sometimes be bafflingly and - at least at first blush - needlessly intricate. However, because of this, the ability of this system to develop, function and repair in the face of varying environmental conditions, mutations, and errors far exceeds what humans have been able to thus far create.

The body builds itself via the “simple� responses of individual cells to their environment with no comprehension of the “grand scheme of things� beyond their decisions.


These reviews suggest something way beyond the idea of a rigid, randomly assembled code telling all the stuff what to do, which is what I have been arguing against. But I'd have to read the book, of course.