Female orgasm. Evolution. Explanations. Knowledge...

[skakos]

A new explanation of how did female orgasm evolve into existence [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... t-VzDOTuM8] made me think: We claim that evolution is random and RESULTS in the ability to adapt and survive. So we try to just find out HOW what we ALREADY know that happens, happens.

What does the abovementioned process tell us about Knowledge itself?

We believe that we learn new things. But in fact, what we know dictates what we learn...
What we think is knowledge, is a manifestation of what we believe.
We interpret what we see based on the eyes we have. Right?

Who believes there is "objective" knowledge?

[hammock]

We believe that we learn new things. But in fact, what we know dictates what we learn...What we think is knowledge, is a manifestation of what we believe. We interpret what we see based on the eyes we have. Right? Who believes there is "objective" knowledge?

The extrospective world does conform to its own habits rather than your or my or his/her personal wishes; and is intersubjectively accessible in the experiences of each of us and is available to be studied by the understanding of each human individual. That's the extent of how it is "objective", without romping into this or that version of meta-phenomenal beliefs.

Knowledge-wise we do have to interrogate the cosmos of outer sense with schemes of our own devising [oldie from Kant below], which are further crouched in presuppositions and formulated frameworks which we work from or are the grounds from which carry out these inquisitions upon nature (and the output of the process does feedback into its inputs). So that's bound to have some evolving biases and favorites which contribute to the interpretations of observations and results of experiments (our production of knowledge). Which is still happily ignored as long as the organized information is useful.

However, such knowledge is not necessarily the preferences / inventions of any lone human; but evaluated and held by a group or community or culture. So while there may be no perfect, mind-independent description of the universe... Our organized information is hardly subjective either. That is, confined to and born from the privacy of a single you or me or him/her.

It seems rather outlandish, to begin with, that a vast "is" like the cosmos would possess as well as need representation / knowledge like biotic agents do, even a flawlessly objective version. Richard Rorty ~ "Truth cannot be out there--cannot exist independently of the human mind--because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own--unaided by the describing activities of humans--cannot.”

When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made the air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite column of water; or in more recent times, when Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime back into metal, by withdrawing something and then restoring it, a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. Accidental observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover.

Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which alone concordant appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws, and in the other hand the experiment which it has devised in conformity with these principles, must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated. Even physics, therefore, owes the beneficent revolution in its point of view entirely to the happy thought, that while reason must seek in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it, whatever as not being knowable through reason's own resources has to be learnt, if learnt at all, only from nature, it must adopt as its guide, in so seeking, that which it has itself put into nature. It is thus that the study of nature has entered on the secure path of a science, after having for so many centuries been nothing but a process of merely random groping.

[Blaggard]

There is no objective or absolute or pure knowledge it is all tainted by perspectives and bias, all we can do is minimise how much our own biases impinge on say experiments by using double blind trials, where neither the Scientists or patients know whether they are takin a placebo or the medication. Or in the case of sociology by doing multiple studies on large sources and looking for correlations, even this though is subject to the current paradigms and bias.

I am not surprised though that male and female orgasms evolved by separate means, humans and higher apes and dolphins are the only species that experience orgasms though as we would define them so it's a pretty interesting question and I think it is likely to promote co-operation in large groups of animals such as the famous love apes or Bonobo chimps a species of the more aggressive pygmy chimpanzees, who use sex like a hand shake and will screw pretty much anything that isn't nailed down or even the same sex, they're not to fussy about age either, for them it's little more than saying hello only with sex. Clearly there is some bonding significance in it I think.