Vorkosigan

Taffy wrote:
It merely says that one cannot believe our sensory and cognitive faculties represent the world as it is and believe they originated through a blind process.

Evolution by natural selection is not a blind process...like I said, Plantinga completely misunderstands natural selection. Under natural selection, an organisms' traits are selected for by environmental pressures. An organism is not "blindly" shaped by its environment, because selection processes are non-random. They operate in understandable and sometimes predictable ways. Further, organisms do not start out at "zero," but with the traits they already inherited from their ancestral organisms.

Plantinga is correct in arguing that random processes could not produce complex organisms, but evolution is not a random process. Plantinga's objection is of the same variety as the famous tornado-in-a-junkyard objection of Sir Fred Hoyles, and equally incorrect.

It's important to think about "environment" in a very broad way, from efficiently dealing with the heat of the sun on skin, to digesting, to sussing out the motives of fellow organisms of the same species, to finding a mate.

In the human case, the more spectacular and obvious aspects of our cognitive faculties evolved primarily to deal with that complex, mendacious, status-mongering, oversexed ape known as H. sapiens. If you're interested in a little introductory reading, you might try this <a href="http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html" target="_blank">Primer on Evolutionary Psychology</a>. It contains a short introduction to a way to think about evolution and cognition. You may find it congenial, or you may prefer reading something like The Symbolic Species by T. Deacon, who argues against certain aspects of the ideas of Tooby and Cosimides.

As for ephemeral and epiphenomenal, I meant the former. Beliefs simply do not last long enough to shape behavior, evolutionarily speaking. That is why beliefs cannot evolve, only cognitive faculties and apparatus can.

As Tooby and Cosimides put it above:

It is important to realize that our circuits weren't designed to solve just any old kind of problem. They were designed to solve adaptive problems. Adaptive problems have two defining characteristics. First, they are ones that cropped up again and again during the evolutionary history of a species. Second, they are problems whose solution affected the reproduction of individual organisms -- however indirect the causal chain may be, and however small the effect on number of offspring produced.

Note that adaptive problems recur; beliefs do not recur.

Vorkosigan

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

Clutch

Vorkosigan already did this, but overkill is still probably too little... Anyhow, first, you might notice that the environment is full of highly stable regularities. Tigers don't just eat you -- they eat you, and they are bigger than pineapples but smaller than elephants, orange and black, all stripey-like... chock full of regularities that an organism can *detect*. Selection in favour of such detection abilities is, therefore, about as far from "blind" as you can get. If you don't understand this, you are doomed to give pointless non-arguments against evolutionary theory.

Second, how on earth could you think Plantinga's argument showed an incompatibility between evolutionary theory and the idea that our belief-forming mechanisms are reliable? Even were the argument to work, it only purports to show that there's no *guarantee* that evolution's purposes are truth-preserving. It doesn't even pretend to have the resources to show the impossibility of natural selection's favouring truth-constructing cognitive mechanisms.

No matter, because it doesn't do what it claims in any case. It is very plausible, on evolutionary theory, that organisms would represent the world as it is, and not in some false but behaviourally equivalent way. Why? Because evolution is the true art of the possible. There's just no mechanism for generating arbitrary, perversely false systems of belief and desire that will nevertheless produce survival behaviour reliably. Whereas there is an eminently simple way of getting such behaviour reliably: accurately track properties of the world as it is. The regularities are right there in my environment; I don't need to construct elaborate falsehoods that coincidentally get me to act in a survival-friendly way. Merely reliable representation of my environment gets me survival power by the truckload.

What Plantinga gets is what was built all along into certain assumptions about mental content, namely, that it is possible in principle that one is systematically deeply deceived. Hooray for Descartes, I guess -- but there are excellent reasons for thinking that evolution would not select for such a system. So reliability is not merely consistent with ET; the latter explains the former in empirically fruitful ways.

Taffy Lewis

If there are sensory/cognitive faculties which do not represent the world as it is yet do give rise to survival conducive behavior and reproductive efficiency then it seems that natural selection cannot distinguish between these faculties and those which do represent the world as it is. It seems easy enough to imagine how false beliefs can be correlated with survival conducive behavior and reproductive efficiency. Plantinga-style examples can be multiplied indefinately.

Pomp

Taffy Lewis,

If there are sensory/cognitive faculties which do not represent the world as it is yet do give rise to survival conducive behavior and reproductive efficiency then it seems that natural selection cannot distinguish between these faculties and those which do represent the world as it is.

Granted. So, you've established that it is possible for natural selection to give rise to cognitive abilities that do not produce only true beliefs. It is equally possible for an intelligent designer to produce beings with cognitive abilities that do not produce only true beliefs. You simply cannot do better than a stalemate here. What's the point?

Vorkosigan

Originally posted by Taffy Lewis:
If there are sensory/cognitive faculties which do not represent the world as it is yet do give rise to survival conducive behavior and reproductive efficiency then it seems that natural selection cannot distinguish between these faculties and those which do represent the world as it is.

IF there are.....but so far all we've seen is this tiresome "if." Time to put up or shut up.

It seems easy enough to imagine how false beliefs can be correlated with survival conducive behavior and reproductive efficiency.

Once again, beliefs do not evolve, so I have no idea what you are talking about.....

Plantinga-style examples can be multiplied indefinately.

....since Platinga-style examples can be multiplied indefinitely, please give us 5 examples of built-in false beliefs that have survival value. Or go away.

Also, is your claim that cognitive faculties could not have evolved true only of H. sapiens? Or does it apply to all living organisms that have cognitive capabilities, from the lowliest roach on up?

Vorkosigan

Bill Snedden

Sure, but since "Plantinga-style examples" have little to do with how evolution really works (as others have pointed out), what does that have to do with the topic at hand?

Regards,

Bill Snedden

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

Clutch

Taffy, yep. If there a selectable way for us form utterly false beliefs while still reliably, stably, surviving, then it is empirically possible that evolution built such a belief-formation mechanism into us.

But are you forgetting your claim that commitment to evolutionary theory *forces* one to conclude that such falsehood-forming mechanisms were actually built into us? That was an interesting claim, though miserably false. This new claim -- it's merely possible that we're systematically deceived -- is interesting in its own way, too, and might be true, depending on the notion of possibility involved. We might be systematically deceived by an evil demon, for that matter. Er... how, exactly, was this an argument against evolutionary theory?

Taffy Lewis

The question is can an organism behave in ways that are survival conducive and reproductively efficient and have sensory and cognitive faculties which radically misrepresent how things are in the world. It seems obvious that it can. Plantinga's examples of silly belief/desire sets show this.

Consider Smith again. He has radically false beliefs about the world yet his behavior would allow him to survive just as well as someone with true beliefs. This would hold whether you are simply talking about merely surviving or whether or not you are talking about reproducing.

Downplaying the roles of beliefs in evolution doesn't help the opponent of the argument. It simply allows Plantinga to argue more forcefully that true beliefs need not be correlated with survival conducive behavior and reproductive efficiency.

"Oh...so beliefs play no role in evolution? Great..so they don't have to be true in order for us to survive and reproduce. And naturalism has no means of insuring that our beliefs are largely true."

And once again the argument depends on a realist conception of truth. You can accept various forms of antirealism with regard to truth and avoid the argument.

One last point: It is true that the existence of various deities would not insure that our sensory and cognitive faculties represent the world as it really is. The deity might be evil and desire to deceive us. Maybe as a big joke. But the God of western theism is supposed to be perfectly good or omnibenevolent. Deception for no good reason seems immoral so this particular god would likely give us accurate senses/cognition.

Taffy Lewis

Clutch:

The idea is that there are many more ways of being wrong than right. If someone asks you what is one plus one you have to say two in order to be correct. But in order to be wrong you can give an infinite number of answers. If evolution cannot favor "correct answers" then there is no more reason to believe our senses/cognition are "right" than "wrong". And since there are many more ways of having false beliefs than true ones it is more likely our senses/cognition will yield false beliefs. But again this depends on denying that there are good reasons for thinking our beliefs will be largely true given naturalism.

lpetrich

The problem with Alvin Plantinga's examples is that they involve inference rules that easily fail outside of those examples; except for the simplest one, that tigers are dangerous and must be avoided, they lead to incorrect actions. Thus, if one thought that the best way to get near something is to run away from it, as in some of the examples, one would have endless trouble outside of that example.

However, there are still ways for false beliefs to emerge, such as too-limited inference capability and shortcuts that work a large fraction of the time but not 100% of the time.

The common human tendency to practice anthropomorphism may be an example of such a limitation.

Also, Mark Twain supposedly used to say that it was possible to learn too much from experience.  A cat, he said, that had squatted once on a hot stove lid would never sit down on a hot stove lid again.  The trouble was that it would never sit down on a cold one either.