Vitae

Kachana;


Excellent question.

I think the original poster put it in a more complex setting but you have cut and thrust to the core concept and simply, unlike most 'philosophers'...I like it.

My opinion, for now;

Reason does not exist on its own, it is entwined with emotion, they are one in Thought, in All Individuals.
This is what, in my experience, enables Me to have our own 'individual perspectives.'

It is My contention that this is the method we use/ are using/will be using, to tap into 'fragmentational reality' and 'ultimate reality'

We, have/are/will 'reason com-passione,' whether we are honest enough to admit it or not is another matter.

Of course, we are not as yet all capable of using it efficaciously because of evolutionary/political/economic/cultural differences and illusory dichotomies.

Perhaps as a second choice, (for those interested in utility, as the ultimate concern) one needs to define what one wants one's reality to consist of, and discard the excess baggage, at this point in time?

This of course, would mean one would need to create one's own reality, to the extent that it's possible for one to do so.

One must define what one means by 'reality' Kachana.

I.E. Are you referring to the 'reality of 'the current state of logic' and of the 'scientific method?'

Or, are you referring to the 'reality of life?'

Regards

madmax2976

Fine, then I will conject. First, it is evident to me that I can trust my reason as humans, including myself, have been very successful in doing so. Second, the past four hundred years have demonstrated the strength of the naturalist position while at the same time, pushing the supernatural farther and farther back from the realm of probability. Thus, I have more than ample reason to conclude that the likelihood is that a naturalistic answer will be forth coming for this particular mystery. (I'll just assume it really is a mystery at this point, although I'm sure those more learned in the sciences of the brain and mind could provide much more actual information. It just doesn't matter in order for me to address this question. )

Evolution is a fact. The idea that all lifeforms evolved from a common ancestor is a theory. As for how evolution produced a brain capable of obtaining knowledge about the world, I am not knowledgable enough about evolutionary studies to attempt to lay out a scenario. But in light of the tremendous evidence for naturalism and against supernaturalism I can reasonably assume a naturalistic explanation is the more likely possibility in the face of any mystery.

If I could "answer" a mystery, then it would be solved and it would no longer be a mystery. You implied conjecture was just fine and I have given you that.

You?ve given me what you believe are examples of irrational causes. I want to know what the term "irrational causes" means to you. Please define the phrase.

Did I miss something? Where did you demonstrate such a claim? Perhaps I'll have to read back through all these posts, but you certainly didn't lay out any argument for such a thing in your opening post.

So, in effect, you will: 1. disregard the phenomenal success naturalism has had in answering many of the mysteries of the world 2. disregard the failure of supernaturalism to demonstrate it has ever reliably explained anything about the world 3. disregard the fact that you can?t examine every naturalistic possibility, known or unknown 4. assume it is reasonable to believe that naturalism cannot solve this puzzle if neither we nor you can think of a naturalistic answer to the mystery. [which would mean it would no longer be a mystery but would actually be solved ]

And you would consider this the more "reasonable" position to hold? Hmm.

- "Theists seek God in the dark. What we currently do not yet understand becomes their best, indeed their only, evidence for the divine."

[ March 19, 2002: Message edited by: madmax2976 ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Jon Curry:

Sure it is. You argued that a naturalist cannot know that his cognitive faculties are in fact reliable (even though the theory of evolution gives him good grounds for believing that they are). I pointed out that everyone, not just naturalists, has essentially the same problem. Both the theist and the naturalist can give perfectly good accounts, in terms of their own metaphysical systems, of how they came to have RCF. But neither can know that his account is correct, or that he does in fact have RCF. So this is not an argument against naturalism. ( I can quote chapter and verse if you like to show that this was in fact the point of the “self-test” comment.)

Yes, in a way. The doctrine of original sin was invented to explain why we (and the rest of God’s creation, for that matter) are radically imperfect in all kinds of ways in spite of being the product of a perfect, and perfectly benevolent, Creator. No doubt the specific imperfection of having defective cognitive faculties wasn’t on their minds when they came up with this ridiculous doctrine, but it was intended to be an all-purpose explanation for such imperfections.

The Rule again. Are you planning someday to deal with my refutation of the claim that the Rule applies to evolution? If not, please stop appealing to it as if it is an unquestionable truth.

As I said, I think all beliefs are the result of “irrational” causes. The difference between your two lists is that the beliefs in the first group were not produced by RCF, whereas the ones in the second (apparently) were. (Or at least that was your intention. But of course I think that a belief that God exists based on the Cosmological Argument is an example of a belief that resulted from faulty cognitive function.)

Yes, experience tells us that any belief such that we can trace back through the causal chain that produced it to identify a nonrational cause of it should be doubted. But experience tells us nothing about whether we should trust a belief produced by cognitive function that was produced by evolution, because we have no experience of processes that take place over billions of years. Evolution involves an incredibly long, complicated causal chain which produces entities that become more and more diverse in many respects (including complexity) over time. Our brains are simply not well adapted for thinking about such processes; our intuitions about the results that can be expected from nonrational processes cannot be trusted when they are applied to such a process.

Because your experience includes zero examples of causes that resemble evolution in any significant or relevant way.

My argument is that evolution is different in known ways from any other naturalistic process that we know about, and that these differences, on careful analysis, make it entirely plausible that Lewis’s Rule doesn’t apply to it.

Well, I guess I don’t understand what your point is then. The original exchange was:

This doesn’t seem on its face to have anything to do with “consciousness”. It seems rather to have to do with whether a computer can arrive at conclusions which (if it did have consciousness, at any rate) it would be justified in believing. Or to put it another way, if a human being were to start with the same information and process it in the same way to arrive at the same conclusions, would he have a ”justified belief”? I just interpreted “knowledge” and “belief” in such a way as to facilitate discussion of this question.

But the point is that they can reliably output true information as a result of good programming, provided that they are given inputs that reflect reality to start with.

Yet another restatement of the Rule. This is getting tiresome.

I dealt with this very point in my March 8 post. Are we going to keep going around in circles?

There’s no reason in principle why a computer’s “inputs” must be in the form of propositions expressed in the form of words. They could consist of inputs from “sense organs” that are an integral part of the machine. In that case there would seem to be no difference between the computer’s epistemological status and ours. The computer’s sensory “inputs” could, for all it “knows”, all be “faked”. So could ours.

But RCF has nothing to do with whether the inputs to the “processor” reflect reality. It has to do with whether the processor tends reliably to preserve truth. That is, if, given inputs that correspond to reality, its outputs also correspond to reality with reasonable reliability, it has RCF.

Your conception of what a computer is capable in principle of doing shows a certain lack of imagination. (Maybe you should read more science fiction.) Let’s imagine a computer that does not simply manipulate syntax, but actually does things. (This is simply a matter of providing it with appropriate output devices, and has already been done on a primitive level.) Now suppose that the computer, as a result of moving around the city and processing information obtained from its input devices, concludes that there is a 7-11 on the corner of Fifth and Broad. Now I ask it to bring me a Slurpee from the 7-11. It goes to Fifth and Broad, buys a Slurpee, and brings it home. I don’t know whether you’d agree that it “knows” anything, but surely you would agree that it has displayed an “understanding”, in some meaningful sense, of what my words meant. Its belief that there is a 7-11 at Fifth and Broad does not consist merely in its typing out “Yes” in response to the question of whether there is a 7-11 at Fifth and Broad. This is definitely not analogous to the case of the guy in the Chinese Room.

[ March 20, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Vorkosigan

If naturalism is true then our RCF are the result of a long chain of irrational causes. But we have no reason to think that our RCF actually lead to true conclusions about reality.

This is actually an irrelevant point. Whether our cognitive faculties produce "true conclusions about reality" is unimportant. The issue is whether they create behavior that leads to evolutionarily positive outcomes; behaviors that permit their owners to get their genes into the next generation.

For that reason it might even be necessary to fool their owners by building in beliefs that are false with respect to some aspect of "reality" because they are useful with respect to some other aspect of reality.

Jon, your argument puts too much emphasis on consciousness and not enough on behavior. Most cognitive activity takes place away from the consciousness and you are completely unaware of it. Indeed, there are schools of cognitive science that argue consciousness is superfluous to cognition and exists only to provide post facto rationalizations for behavior undertaken for reasons the human is unaware of. That is why BD introduced his computer that gets a slurpee from 7-11.

To me it seems you think you are talking about cognition, but the way I read you, you seem to be thinking solely about consciousness. I suspect BD sees the same problem. This unclarity in your thinking is creating the problem BD nicely illustrated with his 7-11 and Slurpee computer gopher. You are actually, at least the way I read it, arguing that no behavior could ever evolve, except for simple automatic reflexes.

Consider the problem of bee communication, which is exactly like the computer gopher, except it actually exists in reality. Bees talk to each other, and no one has put forward any evidence that says bees are conscious. Is that behavior evidence for theistic intervention, or could it have evolved?

If it can't have evolved, are you saying that all complex, information-processing dependent behaviors are implanted by theistic processes?

If you concede it did evolve, where in principle does it become impossible for human cognition to have evolved?

Michael

[ March 21, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

bd-from-kg

turtonm:

While I agree with most of your comments here, I have a serious quarrel with your argument that “whether our cognitive faculties produce ‘true conclusions about reality’ is unimportant.” It may be unimportant to you, but it’s pretty important to me. Even if false beliefs enhanced survival, they would still be false beliefs. That wouldn’t matter if the only thing you value is survival, but I personally place a high value on truth as well.

Also, if the evolutionary process did not tend to produce true beliefs, given that the belief in evolution is a product of this very process (according to naturalism) this would be a very strong reason for doubting that the theory of evolution is true. That would mean that we would have no plausible explanation for how natural processes could produce RCF. And in that case our strong intuition that Lewis’s Rule is universally valid would be rational grounds for abandoning naturalism, unless we are willing to abandon instead the belief that we have RCF (which, as Plantinga puts it, leads quickly to epistemological catastrophe).

In other words, Lewis’s (and Jon’s) basic argument does have some merit. It does demand a serious answer. Just saying "irrelevant" won't do.

At any rate, the question of whether we can have reasonable confidence that natural selection will tend to produce beliefs that are not only survival-enhancing but true was discussed at some length earlier in the thread.

Malaclypse the Younger

Of course, what is left hanging in this discussion is a rigorous definition of "true".

Does truth means "correspondence with some inherently unknowable 'reality'"? I reject such a definition: If reality is inherently unknowable then I really don't care about the "truth". If reality is inherently unknowable, I would rather reject solipsism and simply embrace phenomenal delusionalism--at least delusionalism is interesting and reliance on divine revelation entirely nauseating.

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by bd-from-kg:
turtonm:
While I agree with most of your comments here, I have a serious quarrel with your argument that “whether our cognitive faculties produce ‘true conclusions about reality’ is unimportant.” It may be unimportant to you, but it’s pretty important to me.

Well, it's unimportant from the point of view of evolution, which is fundamentally the perspective we're discussing here. I too place a high value on truth, and believe that in fact evolution accounts for the reliability of our cognitive machinery.

Even if false beliefs enhanced survival, they would still be false beliefs. That wouldn’t matter if the only thing you value is survival, but I personally place a high value on truth as well.

Me too!

Also, if the evolutionary process did not tend to produce true beliefs, given that the belief in evolution is a product of this very process (according to naturalism) this would be a very strong reason for doubting that the theory of evolution is true. That would mean that we would have no plausible explanation for how natural processes could produce RCF. And in that case our strong intuition that Lewis’s Rule is universally valid would be rational grounds for abandoning naturalism, unless we are willing to abandon instead the belief that we have RCF (which, as Plantinga puts it, leads quickly to epistemological catastrophe).

I thought we discussed this earlier in the thread, and I don't think you've yet grasped my point.

I still think you're putting way too much emphasis on the reliability of conscious beliefs, whereas I am mostly focused on the reliability of cognitive processes. There's a world of difference. Evolution cannot produce true beliefs; it can only produce reliable machinery for making beliefs.

Further, in humans, our cognitive machinery is bootstrapped onto processes it wasn't originally intended for; for example, the way we use problem solving mechanisms intended for social relations to handle statistical thinking, resulting in the problem of most people holding wrong beliefs about the next roll of the dice. BTW, That is another reason why I think this discussion is all wrong; it seems to assume a general-purpose processor making beliefs about reality, but the human mind seems to have a mix of processors that it uses in parallel to solve problems. Thus the cognative machinery can be dead on in one area, and dead wrong in another. Beliefs are ephemeral; they cannot evolve.

In other words, Lewis’s (and Jon’s) basic argument does have some merit. It does demand a serious answer. Just saying "irrelevant" won't do.

I must respectfully disagree. Lewis and Jon both are too focused on consciousness, and not enough on the overall cognitive machinery of the mind. Plantinga too. Lewis can be forgiven; the cognitive science of his time was fairly primitive. Beliefs do not evolve; the machinery for making them does. That is why this whole discussion of false beliefs is irrelevant and misleading.

The real issue is the underlying machinery for making beliefs. And that has 3.5 billion years of evolution underpinning it, plus 5 million years of savage intraspecies competition with that ruthless ape Homo sapiens. I'm pretty sure that for what it is supposed to do, it is damned reliable.

Michael