Exactly what are you trying to say?
That Hitch and Dawkins did not support free will?

Then, productivity, orderliness and responsibility predates civilisation and are the cornerstones of successful evolution for many species. You completely missed what we learnt from nature the past 100 years. In humans these existed long before “civilisations” and existed in our non-human ancestors.

Relationships with our allies (which were first our direct and then wider family, then friends and then other tribes and then far off nations) is the reason we were able to build civilisations in the first place. Agriculture was just the means, relationships was the reason.

Then to fail to understand that altruism (which is one of the great observations in the natural world) is the basis of our morality and that apes have all developed a set of ‘morals’ that makes them successful, well not much I can say then.

Just because he used”monkey” terms does not make it amoral. Instincts are not necessarily immoral. To the contrary, for example lying feels instinctively wrong, and is immoral.

The best one you used for last. Feelings are not a fundamental or art?
You can maintain civilisation all you want, without feelings you will have no art, and good luck desiring freedom etc without feelings.

@Hanno

Absolutely, Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins are incompatiblists. All naturalists are with the exception of a few fence straddlers.

Productivity does not exist in nature with the exception of a few eusocial insects and other animals that instinctually alter their environment to make it produce the resources they need.

Prior to agriculture and to a lesser extent pastoralism humans like most other animals consumed but didn't produce resources outside of a few harvesting tools, clothing and shelter. You can argue that I'm creating an arbitrary red line between harvesting and producing but that is always the case. Understanding the world involves a lot of abstract categorization. Deciding when to put similar things in different categories is always somewhat arbitrary. More importantly evolution is conservative meaning that instincts have been preserved going back to ancestors that it would be hard to argue were producers.

Orderliness and responsibility are under genetic selection but are not rationally instinctual characteristics. They may be the consequence of predispositions but they are abstract concepts not found in nature anymore than animals use advanced mathematics to solve problems. The main point I want to convey is that freewill is as abstract as money but like money has physical consequences.

On the question of cause and effect concerning agriculture you again have to draw arbitrary red lines. Pre agricultural people did sow and harvest but those hunter and gathers were not agriculturalists. You can't categorize a population as agriculturallists until they are dependent on agriculture. it's this dependence that is key to understanding cultural evolution. If we take Sumer as an example of an early civilization you can grasp the relationship. Sumerians or their ancestors were like the Aztecs pushed by stronger tribes to areas unsuitable for hunting and gathering. In order to survive in the harsh environment that had to organize in ways nomadic hunters and gathers with some sporadic sowing and harvesting do not. They needed to construct and unfailingly protect irrigation. That calls for a more complex social order and a hierarchy built around organizational competence not strictly military skill. It also requires a greater ability to manipulate abstraction such as mathematics to plan production, distribution, storage and property rights.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about reciprocal altruism. By definition instincts are not rational. Evolution doesn't have a plan or not one we have been able to discern. I suppose if you are religious you could argue that evolution is gods plan but that is a tautology of sorts. Altruism is a culturally derived abstraction that ethologists have latched on to as an analogy. Evolution is driven only by fitness and only eusocial insects are strictly altruistic even in the aligorical sense. That doesn't mean that group or multilevel selection doesn't take place it's just that it shouldn't be confused with the common definition of altruism.

Immoral and amoral are different concepts. Nature driven by fitness can no more be immoral than moral. Morality is a culturally evolved abstraction. To be amoral means neither moral nor immoral.

Feelings are instincts rising to consciousness through physiological changes thus the reference to the senses. That they have been elaborated by cultural and social evolution doesn't change their nature. You can't change instincts you can only alter their expression.

In the past religion bridged the gap between physical and abstract reality. It often employed art and emotion to achieve this. If we lived in the easy but unstable environment our instincts evolved in there would be no need for religion because there would be no gap to bridge. We only start to see art when abstract reasoning becomes important for survival. As civilization became more advanced so did abstract reality. Mathematics is a good example of abstract reality but I prefer money because it's somewhat easier to understand. Civilian requires a harsh but stable environment that is unnatural. But humans are animals and animals go "insane" when their instincts are unfulfilled. I have never said that art and feelings are not essential to civilization. What I said was that agriculture necessitate the suppression of the instinctual life. A different kind of social organization was required that has a hierarchy based on productive competence first and networking or natural organization second.

Civilization is a kind of artificial eusociality and has abstract realities that affect fitness. That those realities to some extent conflict with the naturalist philosophy is unavoidable. The most important conflict arises over the abstraction of freewill.

@Hanno

Here is something for you to consider.

[evolution-institute.org]

Why do you think people like Harris and Dawkins would reject group selection when Darwin thought it was likely?

Wokeness didn't just spring up over night it was pushed to it's present state by elements of humanism. The correction to the enlightenment never took place for naturalists. Unless you realize that culture which is abstract drove human evolution you can't get to the necessary correction.

@wolfhnd
By creating terms and grouping everyone into those groups arbitrarily does not make it true.
The existence of tools in nature was one of the great finds in natural science.Sorry you missed it.
There are no difference between human and other animals other than that we took everything further than them. However if you compare a chimpanzee with a deer, and then again man with a chimpanzee, we are less advance vs a chimpanzee than a deer is to a chimpanzee. You can continue this exercise down the evolutionary road.

Then, the importance of productivity before civilisation is well established. It was exactly the making and taking care of tools, and clothes and making and storing food for harsh times allowing the colonisation of areas that gave us the eventual resources to create civilisation. And even then it was the tools we developed before that allowed us to develop the tools we would need later.

The exact same applies to morals. All our basic morals evolved long before civilisation. And they are based on our basic instincts. We are still primarily controlled by our instincts. We just claim otherwise because our “morals” and man made rules are according to our instincts in the first place and then our experience in the second.

We evolved “morals” and created religion. We did not evolve or create religion and then developed morals.

Whether religion was actually necessary for higher civilisation to develop is hotly debated. I am if the school that at the very least religion supported the creation of higher civilisation. It probably was instrumental. However, religion did not cause our morals. It just codified it.

Without responsibility many species would go extinct immediately. Ditto orderliness. You somehow think that humans are different. This very nonsense religion made up in the first place.
It simply because you never watched a troop of baboons prepare themselves for a night sleep on a rocky outcrop. Once you observed them long enough and understood that they behave exactly like human families you will understand the folly of ignorant religion. The order of the troop and different responsibility of each troop member is something you need to see and study to fully appreciate.
Maybe I was just very lucky to grow up in Africa and see these things long before I was old enough to know anything about philosophy that I can see it and you apparently cannot.

To think you are any different to animals because you are slightly better at some things explains to a great extent why we think we are better than other humans and why atrocities occurred and still do.

Then at what point in earth’s history was life “easy but unstable. I would really like to know when this was. Please provide me with a timescale. Especially when this “easy” life let to our current or past instincts?
No, life from abiogenesis till today is very hard and harsh. Only our application of technology meant that some (and not all) humans have relatively “easy” lives.

The rest you said is vey hard to understand. All I can I observe (and that is my observation only) is that it appears you never observed nature, studied and tried to understand it, especially how it shapes us into what we are today.

The time period 2 million years till 10 000 years ago are much more important to what we are as humans than the last 10 000
Years.
Of course the recent history is very important, however we as humans changes relatively little over that time.

@wolfhnd
Wokeness is just another modern religion. And as all religions it hates free will.

Everyone has their opinions and thoughts about evolution. Some are good and some not so much. Dawkins and Harris are no different.

I don’t get your point. From a pure genetic point of view only individual mutations occur… however due to large number of mutations that occur in a group, similar mutations in different individuals in a group greatly enhances the individual mutations thereby strengthening the whole group’s evolution.
That is how new species evolve.

@Hanno

The important thing that is missed in human evolution is that it was driven by tools. We don't have tools because we have big brains we have big brains because we have tools. The brain requires a lot of high quality energy that is readily available if you have the tools to get at protein rich sources. Once you become dependent on tools there is an evolutionary trajectory towards larger brains and language to transmit the abstractions required to create them.

Human ancestors were using tools long before they had big brains and other animals use tools, famously Chimpanzees and Corvids. Some studies show that Corvids can actually solve some puzzles faster than most humans. It was the environmental niche humans occupied that led to evolution of a large brain. Chimpanzees evolved to exploit low quality energy sources by way of a large gut forming a barrier to evolving larger brains. In the chimpanzees environment where food is everywhere a bigger brain is a small advantage. Humans left the environment that chimpanzees occupy and switched to high quality energy sources. In a sparse environment a bigger brain was very useful because you could reduce your gut size and spend the gut energy on other purposes.

P.S. I'm happy to continue this conversation but only if you stop say I'm sorry you missed it.

@wolfhnd
I was forced to say you missed it to make you concede some points I was very sure you are aware of.
So I will stop doing that and apologies for using that.

We have discussed enough things in the past for me to know how much you know and how much you have thought about things.
So I am a bit surprised by the “closed minded” approach you appear to have taken here and I keep in thinking it must be because I completely don’t understand what you are trying to say.

And since we don’t really know each other than through some limited interaction here, there is always that uncertainty.

Now your previous post is of course all correct. We developed tools before big brains, and that allowed us to have bigger brains. So did language. And we are not the only species with a language. Many non-tool animals have languages. They are just primitive. Meerkats and whales and elephants have rather complex languages and chimpanzee have been taught to use hundreds of words through sign language.

When you compare chimpanzees with baboons and then simpler monkeys and then related mammals you see the increases brain size for different reasons which came about without tools.
Tools is not unique. It was just another thing among many others that influence our development..

However, I appear to have lost track how all this apply to the original question. Why the extreme distrust in naturalists?

And I still completely fail to see how Hitchens (yes he is opinionated), is against free will?

@Hanno

I just pointed out that it was tools combined with a new environment and why tool use will not force chimpanzees on an evolutionary trajectory towards larger brains.

Language and tools are abstract. Like mathematics they are first absolute, a closed system and imaginary. To make a tool you have to first have the image of it's final design and how it will be used. The important thing is that it is abstract. The imaginary tool never actually exists because of complexity. It's a reductionary process that will eventually turn into science. The next step in cultural evolution is to leave reduction behind by means of something like computational automata but that is another story. Culture is built on abstractions and that is what naturalist miss.

@Hanno

"Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it." Christopher Hitchens

"Hitchens is saying that he has freewill and then directly contradicts the premise of free will by saying that he has no choice but to have freewill...therefore no free will.

It's a joke and a really good simplification of the logical fallacy that is free will."

[reddit.com]

That is the standard position of naturalist. They see abstract reality then refuse to admit it is real.

The irony is that they have the right idea they just won't accept it. When I say there are no non trivial absolute truths I'm not denying physical reality I'm pointing out that we have not mastered complex chaotic systems. It's a question of humility as a virtue. It's a slightly altered version of the more you know the more you know you don't know.

To really understand this issue you should read Dennett and Wolfram. Both have been accused of being heretics but it's more a matter of not overreaching and losing pragmatism. Basically you can't know what you can't know.

Were it just an academic question or even philosophical I would let it go but epistemological humility is a critical issue today. We still are suffering from the dream of "scientific socialism". A disease I believe Hitchens had. When dealing with complex chaotic systems such as societies it's important to be humble. In my younger days I had the same delusions of utopia through social engineering but decades of work in physical engineering made me humble. The same kind of humility a farmer developed but intellectuals never can.

@wolfhnd
Hitchens made a statement that is correct. Exactly what about that statement is wrong?

Then someone else makes deductions what they think he meant.
So how do you derive from that deduction (which is not what Hitchens said), that he does not believe in free will?

I have not read enough of Dennet and nothing of Wolfram to comment.

This has become a discussion which is too complex to discuss on a typed forum.

I will find some time to read dennet and wolfram later and start the conversation again once I understand what you mean.