This reminds me of the book "The case against reality". It's exactly the evolutionary argument against true knowledge of the external world. But I find the proposition philosophically dangerous since it defeats science and the idea that evolutionary processes themselve exist.
It doesn't defeat science. Science is based on inferences, not proofs. For this reason testable predictions can still increase confidence even if perception is unreliable to a degree.
@@uninspired3583 I agree. But the book is problematic in my opinion. It slips into solipsism and has some other issues. No wonder Depak Chopra recomends it
@@mikip3242 lmao. His biology is solid, particularly his renowned work on the visual system. Where he really runs into trouble imo is stepping into quantum physics. The points he relies on just aren't supported well, he takes a niche, widely disregarded view on it. Yeah this is exactly the kind of thing swindlers like Chopra love: a significant kernel of truth wrapped in a warm cloak of speculation.
@@uninspired3583I’m fairly certain that Hoffman’s position isn’t that our perceptual faculties are unreliable *to a degree* unless the degree is *completely* - the FBT theorem says that there’s zero probability that our perceptions match objective reality. The goal of fitness necessitates total obliteration of truth if you take the conclusion as Hoffman states it..but I agree this doesn’t do any harm to the scientific method.
@@realSAPERE_AUDE i don't think so. Total obliteration of the truth wouldn't leave anything for selection pressure to work on, but evolution is a critical component of his description.
The evolutionary debunking argument is useful for explaining why specific kinds of belief formation are unreliable, but it doesn't follow that ALL perceptions are truth independent
It doesn't require that conclusion. All that's required is that, for any cognitive process, we can't be justified in thinking that it tracks the truth.
I think it should be noted that while the notion that false beliefs are sometimes useful in the sense that it is better to run from a 'lion' and sometimes end up running from a 'false lion' - if you run away from too many 'false lions', that will impact your likelihood of fully satiating your thirst at the waterhole, and waste too much energy and time that could be better spent finding food - and that's a detriment to survival. Plantinga gives these bizarre cases where weirdly inappropriate behaviours somehow lead to a survival enhancing action. This, to me seems waaay more of a stretch than the probability of our senses more or less accurately perceiving reality. There is at least pretty obvious logical coherence in the idea that senses merely see reality as it is - but Plantinga wants us to accept a world in which trillions of interactions between our senses and the world all happen by chance to allow us to survive in it. The probability of that is surely preposterous.
This was a lot of fun to watch. Thanks! I have an idea that might be worth exploring. We can possibly explore science as a belief-formation process that is emergent from (but more reliable) than evolution in truth-tracking. If we accept that, then the defense you presented earlier about extra propostions might work
I think examples of people who risk their lives knowingly (And not just to protect other people's lives.) because of their belief-forming processes cast a bit of doubt on premise #2 without being circular (I think?). This wouldn't be selected for but also stems from generic features of our reasoning since the average person is often able to understand and even praise the behavior. The archetypical example here would be someone like Socrates. It still seems that natural selection influenced our belief-forming processes, but it doesn't obviously follow that all aspects of it were directly selected for, some or many could just stem from weird interactions between more underlying stuff. This way maybe it's not that unlikely that we really did just get lucky and our belief-forming processes are generally truth tracking despite it not being advantageous to us (Or maybe they're "good enough" without being the best option for maximizing survival.).
Maybe reliability is not a black and white property, but rather it could be anywhere between 0% to 100%? To cast doubt on our belief-forming process, doesn't mean it's completely unreliable. There is, afterall, a correlation between forming accurate beliefs and survival even if our belief-forming system is biased for false positive
My own position is an Evolutionary Debunking Argument (EDA) against realist epistemic access. It seems like if evolutionary processes merely entail our survival, and not truth or access to reality, then it would be special pleading to claim humans uniquely have this access, and would make the probability of humans over all other existing species AND all other possibly existing species as having this unique faculty is virtually non-existent. It's definitely a type of global skepticism, but I'm okay with that lol
I think I have sorted out my objection to the evolutionary debunking argument. If I claim it is possible for to reach correct beliefs in spite of the argument that allow us to satisfy our needs I do not thereby assert that all my beliefs are true. The mere fact that it is possible for an evolved being to have false beliefs does not contradict the possibility of this being reaching true beliefs.. Normally we correct false beliefs in the course of interacting with the environment or interacting linguistically with either ourselves or others. For the evolutionary debunking argument to work it is not enough for its proponent to show that an evolved being can have deviant belief/desire sets. It is also necessary to show that, assuming the being to be perfectly rational, the false beliefs in the set cannot, even in principle, be replaced in the course of the normal activities of this being by true beliefs that the this being knows to be true and that also allow the being to satisfy the corresponding desires. Absent such a demonstration the argument fails. (In the following I will assume the being to perfectly rational and I will call the process to be demonstrated “correcting the beliefs” although that does not quite catch what is going on.) However any such purported demonstration must show that the beliefs cannot be corrected, even in principle, using language. This implies that the holder of the beliefs, even if perfectly rational, cannot be induced, even in principle, to believe something that has the linguistic form that we would take to express a correction of the beliefs in normal language. I find it very difficult to see how this could occur if she were not speaking a deviant language. This coupled with the fact that in all cases of deviant belief/desire sets I have seen it is fairly easy to specify such a deviant language that the believer could be speaking that would make the beliefs true leads me to think that all cases of supposed belief/desire sets are capable of being analysed into either situations where the believer could substitute the incorrect beliefs by true beliefs in the course of normal life or situations where the believer is speaking different language. I don’t think I have done enough to prove this conclusion but I do think I have done enough to challenge the evolutionary debunking argument in a way that appears to be very difficult to answer. Other global debunking arguments may well be susceptible to similar challenges although I have not thought it through.
It seems to me that the evolutionary story does make it highly likely that our perceptual and cognitive faculties are unreliable, including in some cases in systematic ways. But we already knew that (optical illusions, cognitive biases etc.). In order for it to be a *global* debunker (one that should cause us to cease believing *all* our beliefs), we would need it to be likely, according to the evolutionary story, for organisms as complex as us (which I take to be evident based on the complexity of our mental representations alone--even if we are deluded about everything, the delusion is certainly a complex one) to have perceptual and cognitive structures that fail to track real features of their environments with any degree of regularity. That seems to me highly unlikely. Take Plantinga's "Delia and the lions" thought experiment. It's still necessary in that case for most of Delia's beliefs to be true in order to get the adaptive "running away from lions" behavior: lions exist, she exists, the ground, trees, and so on are roughly where she thinks they are, running is a way of getting from one place to another, etc. It's hard to even imagine a scenario in which desires and beliefs could be fitted together so that such an enormous number of interconnected beliefs as we have 1) are adaptive when combined and 2) utterly fail to track reality in any way. But even if that were possible, evolution favors simplicity. Organisms don't evolve endlessly complicated Rube Goldbergesque solutions to problems when a much simpler, more energy-efficient solution is available. And it seems to me that a mental system that's trying to kill itself and avoid reproducing but reliably manages to survive and reproduce because its representation of the world is completely wrong in all the "right" ways, were it even possible, would be far more complicated affair than a mental system that's (generally) trying to survive and reproduce and has a mental representation of the world that's "true enough" to let it succeed most of the time. I think the evolutionary story should make us more skeptical, just not in a global way. We should be more skeptical of beliefs that would seem to favor survival and reproduction, for instance the belief that life is preferable to death, that death is something we ought to fear. If suicide were preferable to going on for beings like us, natural selection would definitely want to hide that from us. But it couldn't do that in a way that undermines all our belief-forming processes' reliability because then we would just die out from stupidity.
Computer Interface: 14:38 -let’s say I play a computer game with virtual objects that are being depicted. -Since the objects appear again and again even if they vanish from the interface, I would then expect that a corresponding electronic pattern is stored somewhere in the computer. -And if those virtual objects interact, I would expect that the electronic patterns influence each other. -So it seems like as if the interface accurately represents the interactions between the electronic patterns. Self-defeat and XX-pill: -When it comes to the XX-pill, even if my memories are somewhat reliable, I often misremember something. Edit: -So there seems be three solutions, either my memory is mistaken or it is correct, if it is correct then the pill got the 5% chance of not working and my memory is still intact or I took the pill, got the 95% chance scenario and I just where lucky that my memory just happen to be correct. -It seems that any scenario is equally unlikely, the last one is unlikely because it would be a miracle to get correct fully unreliable memories. Otherwise I fully agree with everything what you said in the video. I know what I am doing is a little bit nit-picking. Therefore I would like to say, that I genuinely enjoy your video(s).
Your response to the UI analogy seems super reasonable, but I'm not sure I understand the XX pill. You lay out three possibilities: 1. (5%) The pill didn't work, so my memory is almost certainly correct. 2. (95%) The pill did work, and either a) My memories are incorrect; given 2, this is highly likely since the memories have no causal relationship to the truth. b) My memories are correct; given 2, this would be a miracle. The odds of 2a seem like nearly 95%, but you say that each scenario is equally unlikely - why?
@@shadowofobama505 Yes I agree my second reasoning is a little bit odd but there might still be a possible defense for my reasoning. -I assumed that you remember that you have taken the pill, this memory could then only be incorrect if you in fact did not take the pill. -The scenario of 2a is therefore impossible by virtue of you having the memory, so scenario 2b is all that remains…
Re the computer interface, the worry here is that we end up with a concept of "truth" that concedes almost everything to the skeptic. We get something like: our beliefs about the world are true just in case there is some sort of regularity or pattern that has some properties that correspond to the structure of the beliefs. I'm reminded of Newman's objection to structural realism, that any structure at all can be instantiated in any set of objects and relations, provided there are enough of them. One thing to bear in mind with the inference example is that we can see both sides of it. We know in detail the properties of the interface, in detail the properties of the hardware and operating system, and then we can identify relations between them. If we're treating this as analogous to our cognitive processes, then the "world" side is hidden, and the relations between cognitive system and world are hidden: the most we can say is that there is some sort of correspondence... To what? In what way? We don't know.
@@KaneB Yes, I also thought that identifying a individual structure might be a challenge for a structural similarity representation. -But it still might work, let’s say the universe is infinite and there are two planets, earth A and earth B. Both have the exact same internal structure. -If I mimic the structure of the earth with a mental representation, then I use myself as a reference point. Then you can not use a map without knowing where you are on the map. -It seems then clear that I am representing earth A because this is the structure in which I happen to be embedded in. Similar, ordinary objects do not only have internal relations but also external relations (how they relate to other entities). And some of the external relations connect me with the entity. And when I use myself as a reference point in the mental representation, then I might be able to track down the individual entity. -Another challenge might be that The same structure of my mental representation appear multiple times in the same entity. -But the scale at which the entity causally interact with my perception might be a way to distinguish them. -Yes, all the individual particles interact with my senses, but the fact that all the particles in the entity are causally close to me determines the scale.
@@KaneB When it comes to the XX-pill, this example can maybe be extrapolated to the theory of evolution. So there a three scenarios: 1. Evolution is false. 2. Evolution is true and I am unreliable. a) And I have Evolutionary believes. b) And I don’t have Evolutionary believes. 3. Evolution is true and I am reliable. Edit: -If one believes in evolution, then 2b is not possible. So a huge chunk of the likelihood for the scenario disappears into thin air. -If we really are the product of evolution, then the presence of our evolutionary believes would be a miracle if our mental and sensory faculties where really unreliable. -Edit: The believe in evolution and not the truth is the miracle. The truth would just follow because evolution happen to be the case. -But like the other response, this might run into a problem, then although the thought experiment doesn’t require the reliability of my sensory faculties. It still relies on the reliability of my reasoning faculties. -So the Rationalist might give two possible responses. 1. He is a hard rationalist and argues that we have direct access to the reliability of our reasoning when we try to check its validity. Reason is as self-evident as sensory experience. 2. He is a soft rationalist who rejects the necessity of sufficient justification and holds it to be perfectly rational, to believe in the reliability of reason without justification. -The hard rationalist would be dubious, since it seems possible that I can make mistakes if I try to check its validity. -The soft rationalist would at least in this case also be dubious, since we are questioning the reliability of our reasoning faculties.
The first time I heard the EAAN, I considered it to be absurd - and I still do. The moment one takes a moment to think about all the errors of reasoning that one has made and consider the various errors of reasoning that humanity makes, one can ideally recognize that truth determinations for humanity can be difficult. We have all sorts of biases and other factors that make for erred reasoning. We observe a continuum of cognitive ability which strikes me as being reasonable given evolution. The idea of a supposed omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent entity which supposedly created cognitively deficient creatures strikes me as absurd and grotesque (given the background knowledge of the argument author's position). I consider my position to be the defeater to the defeater, since it is the case that we have a continuum of reasoning errors and thus suffer at various truth determinations. This immediately results in the argument being a difference without a distinction, since it must be the case that under either scenario we suffer reasoning issues and thus by appeal to the simplest explanation, we are a product of evolution as opposed to some mix of something else and evolution. No matter how poor our reasoning, it is the only reasoning that we have. I suspect the power of the argument is in an appeal to vanity (something that can cause reasoning errors). Most people like to think of themselves as being reasonable; and I like to think of myself as being reasonable. However, I immediately thought about all the errors that I have made as well as all the errors that I observe of others as well as the continuing errors of reasoning while an individual proclaims themselves to be reasonable.
28:19 but isn’t the global defeater argument itself self defeating? If I assume naturalism and the evolutionary story (like in the argument) then we conclude that we can not rely on observations, but the premises also rely on obervations. So we can‘t trust the premises, which makes the conclusion also untrustworthy. So the argument itself is circular? And if the argument succeeds anyway, we don’t have an alternative.
Plantinga's argument is just idiotic. He makes a necessary connection between how our cognitive faculties evolved and its unreliability a priori. That's just reductive and dumb. You have to look at all the facts in cognitive and neuroscience. etc ...
If our cognition is developed through a method that leads to falsehood then all the other things you mention would just be both likely interpreted falsely and be based on falsehoods
@@GottfriedLeibnizYT there are plenty of reasons to think so. And counter arguments against it. But if our cognitive faculties evolve in a way that doesn't select for truth, but only survival and people who lack truth might survive better then it is reasonable that the rest follows. And any other "facts" like neuroscience and so on would not be helpful since you would view them with a mind, and they were created by minds, that evolved in the previously mentioned way. It isn't so that he ignored the existence of science and so on. But if his argument is sound and valid, then it wouldn't matter.
20:30 I don't know if anyone pointed this out. But what you said here doesn't make sense. It seems question begging. All the information we have (models, faculties and their function, etc.) is based on natural selection. Saying that they track genuine features of the world is like saying natural selection-based tools are showing us the real world but this precisely the is what need to be proved.
It seems to me that anyone who actually believes such an argument would not make the argument - they lack all reason to do so. I suppose they might just enjoy saying their beliefs aloud even though they don't believe anyone is listening.
What do you mean by "reason"? A person who accepts this argument could still have feelings and drives. They wouldn't take themselves to have a justification for any of their beliefs, but they might recognise particular casual factors that tend to prompt beliefs. So reflection on this argument has a particular casual effect on them, and perhaps they enjoy expressing this.
I think things like the evolutionary debunking argument can be interpreted as saying something about language. The lion example is rather complicated but let’s take a simpler example: Anne is familiar with all the experiences about her environment that we would take to justify her believing there is water to the right of her but not to the left of her. Moreover she is thirsty. Suppose after discussing the situation with her we come to the conclusion that: 1) “Anne believes there is water to the left of her.” and: 2) “Anne believes that to turn left she has to act in a way the we would call turning right.” We then observe that Anne turns right and successfully quenches her thirst. What the debunker wants to say is that Anne has two false beliefs that somehow cancel each other out leading to successful behaviour. But couldn’t we equally well say that she speaks an idiolect of English in which the words “left” and “right” have been substituted one for the other? Isn’t this what an anthropologist who came across a group of people who consistently behaved in this sort of way actually would say? Moreover there actually are idiolects of English that display phenomena like this. One of my sons used to say things like “This computer game is gruesome!” and then play the game for hours on end. It seems so absurd that it would take a philosopher to say he had two false beliefs, namely: a) “I want to have a horrific unbearable experience.” and: b) “The way to have a horrific unbearable experience is to play this computer game.” and then because these false beliefs somehow cancel each other out he ended out thoroughly enjoying himself.
IIRC, the argument is not that two false beliefs could cancel each other out, but that a false belief and a desire could cancel each other out. For example, Anne 1) believes that drinking water will kill her and 2) wants to die. She doesn't merely mean unusual things by "drinking water" and "death". Intuitively, this is kind of implausible - why would evolution develop this complex web of false beliefs and counterproductive (evolutionarily) desires, when it could instead give us accurate beliefs + desires which align with evolutionary success? Also, it seems that these double negative combinations of belief/desire would only work if they evolved in perfect conjunction with one another - in fact, for a desire like 2, we would need exactly backward beliefs for a great deal of situations. This story doesn't fit at all with my (limited) understanding of evolution, but maybe there are more plausible examples.
I'm a little puzzled by your objection. Yes, I can imagine people who speak "deviant" languages, so a person who speaks what looks like English but where the meanings of some terms are switched. However, I can also imagine - or at least I think I can imagine - people who have "deviant" belief-desire sets, such that they produce similar patterns of behaviour as me but where their representations of the world are completely different. These are two different scenarios, and I can imagine both, at least when described fairly abstractly. Are you suggesting that in fact, there is no coherent scenario of "deviant" belief-desire sets; that all such cases will turn out to be merely cases of "deviant" languages? That would be an interesting conclusion, but why should we believe that?
I think there is a problem with the very notion of belief. If my dog Rover turns right and then gets a drink of water, we might say “Rover believes there is water to the right of him.” Similarly Anne spoke a language we could not understand and we saw her get a drink of water we might say “Anne believes water is there is water to the right of her.” In both cases our criteria for assigning belief is assigned by non-verbal behaviour. This leads to an interesting question. “Can I be mistaken about my beliefs?.” Suppose I believe it is safe for me to cross the ice on a lake. I know what the temperature has been for the past week. I know how quickly the ice sheet on the lake thickens at this temperature. I know what thickness of ice will support my weight. Moreover I know that someone has measured the thickness of the ice and as a result of all of this I know that the ice is thick enough to hold my weight. I know it but do I believe it? I would probably believe I believe, I would probably say I believe it, it but do I? Well, suppose there is hungry lion in a cage gnawing through a rope holding the cage closed and my only way to escape being eaten is to cross the ice but when I come to the edge of the lake I suddenly have a strong disinclination to cross the lake. I worry that the ice might break and stop in my tracks. Observing this behaviour someone may say “He does not really believe the ice will hold his weight even though he thinks he does.” or “at one level he believes it but at another level he doesn’t”. We can even imagine the following conversation: Friend across the lake: “Hurry up and cross the lake or you will be eaten, you know the ice is thick enough to hold your weight.” Me: “Yes, I know that but I can’t bring myself to believe it.” This suggests in addition that not only is it possible for me to be mistaken about my beliefs that I that is possible for me to have knowledge without belief. Put another way, I think the only coherent sense you can make of the notion of a “deviant” belief-desire set is to have one that can be analysed into a situation of deviant language. It then becomes a mere matter of convention whether you want to say you have a deviant belief-desire set or whether you wish to say you are dealing with an example of deviant language. Speaking of deviant language however comports with our usual use of the terms in question. Speaking of a deviant belief-desire set as if it were not just a verbose way of speaking about deviant language strikes me as truly perverse.
@@KaneB I find it very difficult to imagine a case of deviant belief that cannot be analysed as deviant language. I grant that abstractly it can seem possible but I am fairly sure that if the situation is examined in enough detail it will turn out to be a case of deviant language. Consider the following conversation: Tutor: “How would you solve this problem?” Student: “That’s easy, you can solve it by a simple application of Lami’s Theorem. Tutor: “That’s interesting, I would never have thought of that. Show me how it is done.” ... Student goes to the white board and does some calculations and solves the problem. Tutor: “That’s not Lami’s theorem you are using it’s Schupp’s theorem.” Now you might describe the situation as the student having two deviant beliefs that end up in his being able to solve the problem, but it is unlikely that either the tutor or the student would describe the situation like that. In other words it is unlikely, unless she wore being sarcastic for the tutor to say: “It looks like you have two false beliefs that are related in such a way that they enable you to solve the problem.” She is far more likely to say: “I think you ought to learn the names of the theorems properly before the end of term test.” In the absence of an example of a concrete example of a supposed “deviant” belief-desire set that cannot be analysed as, perhaps inadvertent, deviant language I can’t see how it can happen. I will go further than that; I don’t think the idea makes any coherent sense.
@@KaneB Come to think of it there may be cases where a case for unanalysable deviant belief-desire sets can be made when dealing with purely linguistic data. For instance I mistakenly believe that pin1yin1 (a standard phonetic way of transcribing Mandarin Chinese) “kou4” is pronounced the way “ge3” should be and I also mistakenly believe the pin1yin1 transcription of “个” is “kou4” and as a result satisfy my desire to pronounce “个” correctly then prima facie that looks like a case of a deviant belief-desire. But to get this to work for all Chinese characters I would have to systematically map transcriptions wrongly onto sounds and characters wrongly on to transcriptions. If I did this it could definitely be analysed as deviant language. In other words this one example has been made from a fragment of a deviant language. I think the problem partly arises from the notion of “belief” not being sufficiently clear. This has always struck me as being the case even before I heard of Plantinga’s argument. I have never been able to understand why belief is taken as somehow simple an unanalysable so that, for instance “justified true belief” can seem like a reasonable definition of knowledge. It has always struck me that knowledge is better candidate for a simple unanalysable concept. Or if it is analysed it can be analysed as a relationship between marks on a piece of paper or an arrangement of molecules in the brain or the internal configuration of a computer and a state of affairs. In an earlier post I suggested it might make sense to say someone knows something but does not believe it.
It seems to me that I can overcome the circularity problem by the fact that if I do not assume that my faculties are reliable in the beginning of the argument I couldn't not even assess the argument and it would end up being question begging. I first need to grant the argument that my faculties aren't reliable, only then I run into the circularity problem. While I am still assessing the arguments premises, for example that our faculties therefore are not truth-tracking, I am justified in assessing it assuming that they are, which would cut out the circularity point, which seems to be the first step, since otherwise one is not even allowed to argue against the argument it seems to me.
global evolutionary debunking depends on the idea that, since evolution only cares about survival and reproduction, it doesn't predict truth tracking beliefs. which seems very, very dumb evolution doesn't care about walking and obviously it's still evolutionary good to be able to move. Nobody would say that legs are unexpected under evolution. And nobody should think that truth tracking beliefs are unexpected either.
And this is what is needed for the debunking argument to work. Not just that some beliefs are wrong sometimes. But that beliefs are wrong by default and only right on accident. Which is why the "predator vs just the wind" thought experiment doesn't support the argument. It shows a bias. That is, one way in which beliefs deviate from truth tracking. Which only makes sense as a sentence because beliefs usually are truth tracking, which the debunking argument cannot have.
As for the computer desktop thought experiment, the beliefs are still truth tracking on the abstract level of the "file" and "folder" and "cursor". Otherwise you wouldn't be able to use the computer. The fact that we have no idea what happens on a more fundamental level isn't "global debunking", it's just a argmument that we shouldn't trust our intuitions about the fundamental nature of reality. Which materialists generally already believe.
I would use two counter examples against GEDA. The central pitfall of GEDA is that it equates intuition with all of reasoning. But, we have formal reasoning structures that were not created by evolution. First, there are counter intuitive results. Science has often revealed things that surprised the scientists, for example the acceleration of the size of the universe. Second, people have used these reasoning systems to create beliefs that are counter to survival and reproduction. A solid example of this is antinatalism.
@Boulanger948 with the expansion of the universe, the stars were measured with a telescope hooked up to a computer. The only thing the scientists observed was the printout. The asymmetry argument for antinatalism does not rely on any empiricism. It is an apriori argument. But, whether or not an argument relies on senses is immaterial. In order to counter GEDA, a belief must meet one of two requirements. First, the belief is created by a reasoning system not created by evolution, or second, the belief is counter productive in terms of survival or reproduction.
I don't think the argument conflates intuition with all of reasoning. It assumes that whatever belief-forming processes we have, if the evolutionary story is true, are products of natural selection. That includes the senses, intuition, reasoning, the whole bit.
So, what do you trust, mortal? Evolutionary theory or your own lying eyes? Seriously, if belief in evolutionary theory defeats belief in the reliability of direct perception, the logical conclusion should be that evolutionary theory is unreliable, at least as an account for forming beliefs. For the argument to work, you need not only to trust evolutionary theory (despite your skepticism), but to trust it *more than anything else,* at least _prima facie._ A way to save evolutionary theory could be to ask ourselves what does "true" even mean. We have no access to the world of things-in-themselves (if such a world even exists). The very idea of perceiving the world in a way that is somehow identical to how it *really* is, is incoherent. Given this constraint, one could *define* truth, at least for perceptions, as what promotes survival and reproduction. What other non-circular definition of a true perception can you propose? (Note a nuance here: you can define a *false* or *illusory* perception as one that is inconsistent with other perceptions, but that assumes other perceptions are generally reliable. It is that general reliability that can either be just postulated by fiat or defined in evolutionary terms). (Also, by the way, the claim that evolution should favour false positives when it comes to threats ignores the harm too many false positives can cause to an organism's chances to sustain itself and reproduce).
Honestly, if the argument leads to total disbelief in evolution, then it's successfully gotten us to throw out a lot of our epistemology. I agree that "perceiving things in themselves" is a difficult standard for perceptual truth, although I'm not sure about the alternative you propose. Right now, I'm looking at a tree; does my perception of this particular tree at this particular moment promote my survival and reproduction? I can't see how it does, but it would be really weird to say that makes the percept untrue. Now, one could say that my biological/psychological *system* which sees the tree is evolutionarily beneficial, but it's not obvious how that would be a truth-maker for individual percepts. I think the most compelling challenge to the EDA is along the lines of what you mention at the end: would evolution actually make our perception totally unreliable? I don't find the argument Kane describes all that convincing.
29:38 Wouldn't this just debunk our belief about the "straws in themselves"? What if our belief was about our appearance of the straws being equal in length? Even if this appearance doesn't track the "real" length of the straws, our belief would be correct.
Sure, beliefs about appearances are not targeted by that example. In the straws case, we obviously don't have a global debunker. We only have a debunker for beliefs about the actual length of the straws.
@@KaneB What do you think could be a debunker for an appearance? In the straws example for the belief that "It appears that all straws are of equal length" I can think of some: maybe I am misremembering the length of the other straws or while looking at all of them simultaneously, my attention is split between them and I can't really tell all of their lengths at once. But what about a belief like "There is something orange" when I think there is an orange in my visual field? If we want to be global debunkers, how would we debunk this?
It truly is a joy to be American and die laughing every time Kane says, "Source," because I always hear, "Sauce."
This reminds me of the book "The case against reality". It's exactly the evolutionary argument against true knowledge of the external world. But I find the proposition philosophically dangerous since it defeats science and the idea that evolutionary processes themselve exist.
It doesn't defeat science. Science is based on inferences, not proofs. For this reason testable predictions can still increase confidence even if perception is unreliable to a degree.
@@uninspired3583 I agree. But the book is problematic in my opinion. It slips into solipsism and has some other issues. No wonder Depak Chopra recomends it
@@mikip3242 lmao. His biology is solid, particularly his renowned work on the visual system. Where he really runs into trouble imo is stepping into quantum physics. The points he relies on just aren't supported well, he takes a niche, widely disregarded view on it.
Yeah this is exactly the kind of thing swindlers like Chopra love: a significant kernel of truth wrapped in a warm cloak of speculation.
@@uninspired3583I’m fairly certain that Hoffman’s position isn’t that our perceptual faculties are unreliable *to a degree* unless the degree is *completely* - the FBT theorem says that there’s zero probability that our perceptions match objective reality. The goal of fitness necessitates total obliteration of truth if you take the conclusion as Hoffman states it..but I agree this doesn’t do any harm to the scientific method.
@@realSAPERE_AUDE i don't think so. Total obliteration of the truth wouldn't leave anything for selection pressure to work on, but evolution is a critical component of his description.
The evolutionary debunking argument is useful for explaining why specific kinds of belief formation are unreliable, but it doesn't follow that ALL perceptions are truth independent
It doesn't require that conclusion. All that's required is that, for any cognitive process, we can't be justified in thinking that it tracks the truth.
@@KaneB thanks for clarifying, I wasn't really paying attention because I just keep your videos playing to give you the adsense ❤️
@@elijahdick9568 Thanks, I appreciate it!
I think it should be noted that while the notion that false beliefs are sometimes useful in the sense that it is better to run from a 'lion' and sometimes end up running from a 'false lion' - if you run away from too many 'false lions', that will impact your likelihood of fully satiating your thirst at the waterhole, and waste too much energy and time that could be better spent finding food - and that's a detriment to survival.
Plantinga gives these bizarre cases where weirdly inappropriate behaviours somehow lead to a survival enhancing action. This, to me seems waaay more of a stretch than the probability of our senses more or less accurately perceiving reality. There is at least pretty obvious logical coherence in the idea that senses merely see reality as it is - but Plantinga wants us to accept a world in which trillions of interactions between our senses and the world all happen by chance to allow us to survive in it. The probability of that is surely preposterous.
At about 25:20 you got causes and effects backwards. That is, unless most people find it natural to believe causes come after effects
good stuff, Kane!
Thanks
This was a lot of fun to watch. Thanks!
I have an idea that might be worth exploring. We can possibly explore science as a belief-formation process that is emergent from (but more reliable) than evolution in truth-tracking. If we accept that, then the defense you presented earlier about extra propostions might work
I think examples of people who risk their lives knowingly (And not just to protect other people's lives.) because of their belief-forming processes cast a bit of doubt on premise #2 without being circular (I think?).
This wouldn't be selected for but also stems from generic features of our reasoning since the average person is often able to understand and even praise the behavior. The archetypical example here would be someone like Socrates.
It still seems that natural selection influenced our belief-forming processes, but it doesn't obviously follow that all aspects of it were directly selected for, some or many could just stem from weird interactions between more underlying stuff.
This way maybe it's not that unlikely that we really did just get lucky and our belief-forming processes are generally truth tracking despite it not being advantageous to us (Or maybe they're "good enough" without being the best option for maximizing survival.).
Maybe reliability is not a black and white property, but rather it could be anywhere between 0% to 100%? To cast doubt on our belief-forming process, doesn't mean it's completely unreliable. There is, afterall, a correlation between forming accurate beliefs and survival even if our belief-forming system is biased for false positive
My own position is an Evolutionary Debunking Argument (EDA) against realist epistemic access. It seems like if evolutionary processes merely entail our survival, and not truth or access to reality, then it would be special pleading to claim humans uniquely have this access, and would make the probability of humans over all other existing species AND all other possibly existing species as having this unique faculty is virtually non-existent.
It's definitely a type of global skepticism, but I'm okay with that lol
I think I have sorted out my objection to the evolutionary debunking argument. If I claim it is possible for to reach correct beliefs in spite of the argument that allow us to satisfy our needs I do not thereby assert that all my beliefs are true. The mere fact that it is possible for an evolved being to have false beliefs does not contradict the possibility of this being reaching true beliefs.. Normally we correct false beliefs in the course of interacting with the environment or interacting linguistically with either ourselves or others. For the evolutionary debunking argument to work it is not enough for its proponent to show that an evolved being can have deviant belief/desire sets. It is also necessary to show that, assuming the being to be perfectly rational, the false beliefs in the set cannot, even in principle, be replaced in the course of the normal activities of this being by true beliefs that the this being knows to be true and that also allow the being to satisfy the corresponding desires. Absent such a demonstration the argument fails.
(In the following I will assume the being to perfectly rational and I will call the process to be demonstrated “correcting the beliefs” although that does not quite catch what is going on.)
However any such purported demonstration must show that the beliefs cannot be corrected, even in principle, using language. This implies that the holder of the beliefs, even if perfectly rational, cannot be induced, even in principle, to believe something that has the linguistic form that we would take to express a correction of the beliefs in normal language. I find it very difficult to see how this could occur if she were not speaking a deviant language. This coupled with the fact that in all cases of deviant belief/desire sets I have seen it is fairly easy to specify such a deviant language that the believer could be speaking that would make the beliefs true leads me to think that all cases of supposed belief/desire sets are capable of being analysed into either situations where the believer could substitute the incorrect beliefs by true beliefs in the course of normal life or situations where the believer is speaking different language.
I don’t think I have done enough to prove this conclusion but I do think I have done enough to challenge the evolutionary debunking argument in a way that appears to be very difficult to answer. Other global debunking arguments may well be susceptible to similar challenges although I have not thought it through.
It seems to me that the evolutionary story does make it highly likely that our perceptual and cognitive faculties are unreliable, including in some cases in systematic ways. But we already knew that (optical illusions, cognitive biases etc.). In order for it to be a *global* debunker (one that should cause us to cease believing *all* our beliefs), we would need it to be likely, according to the evolutionary story, for organisms as complex as us (which I take to be evident based on the complexity of our mental representations alone--even if we are deluded about everything, the delusion is certainly a complex one) to have perceptual and cognitive structures that fail to track real features of their environments with any degree of regularity. That seems to me highly unlikely. Take Plantinga's "Delia and the lions" thought experiment. It's still necessary in that case for most of Delia's beliefs to be true in order to get the adaptive "running away from lions" behavior: lions exist, she exists, the ground, trees, and so on are roughly where she thinks they are, running is a way of getting from one place to another, etc. It's hard to even imagine a scenario in which desires and beliefs could be fitted together so that such an enormous number of interconnected beliefs as we have 1) are adaptive when combined and 2) utterly fail to track reality in any way. But even if that were possible, evolution favors simplicity. Organisms don't evolve endlessly complicated Rube Goldbergesque solutions to problems when a much simpler, more energy-efficient solution is available. And it seems to me that a mental system that's trying to kill itself and avoid reproducing but reliably manages to survive and reproduce because its representation of the world is completely wrong in all the "right" ways, were it even possible, would be far more complicated affair than a mental system that's (generally) trying to survive and reproduce and has a mental representation of the world that's "true enough" to let it succeed most of the time.
I think the evolutionary story should make us more skeptical, just not in a global way. We should be more skeptical of beliefs that would seem to favor survival and reproduction, for instance the belief that life is preferable to death, that death is something we ought to fear. If suicide were preferable to going on for beings like us, natural selection would definitely want to hide that from us. But it couldn't do that in a way that undermines all our belief-forming processes' reliability because then we would just die out from stupidity.
Computer Interface: 14:38
-let’s say I play a computer game with virtual objects that are being depicted.
-Since the objects appear again and again even if they vanish from the interface, I would then expect that a corresponding electronic pattern is stored somewhere in the computer.
-And if those virtual objects interact, I would expect that the electronic patterns influence each other.
-So it seems like as if the interface accurately represents the interactions between the electronic patterns.
Self-defeat and XX-pill:
-When it comes to the XX-pill, even if my memories are somewhat reliable, I often misremember something.
Edit:
-So there seems be three solutions, either my memory is mistaken or it is correct, if it is correct then the pill got the 5% chance of not working and my memory is still intact or I took the pill, got the 95% chance scenario and I just where lucky that my memory just happen to be correct.
-It seems that any scenario is equally unlikely, the last one is unlikely because it would be a miracle to get correct fully unreliable memories.
Otherwise I fully agree with everything what you said in the video. I know what I am doing is a little bit nit-picking. Therefore I would like to say, that I genuinely enjoy your video(s).
Your response to the UI analogy seems super reasonable, but I'm not sure I understand the XX pill. You lay out three possibilities:
1. (5%) The pill didn't work, so my memory is almost certainly correct.
2. (95%) The pill did work, and either
a) My memories are incorrect; given 2, this is highly likely since the memories have no causal relationship to the truth.
b) My memories are correct; given 2, this would be a miracle.
The odds of 2a seem like nearly 95%, but you say that each scenario is equally unlikely - why?
@@shadowofobama505
Yes I agree my second reasoning is a little bit odd but there might still be a possible defense for my reasoning.
-I assumed that you remember that you have taken the pill, this memory could then only be incorrect if you in fact did not take the pill.
-The scenario of 2a is therefore impossible by virtue of you having the memory, so scenario 2b is all that remains…
Re the computer interface, the worry here is that we end up with a concept of "truth" that concedes almost everything to the skeptic. We get something like: our beliefs about the world are true just in case there is some sort of regularity or pattern that has some properties that correspond to the structure of the beliefs. I'm reminded of Newman's objection to structural realism, that any structure at all can be instantiated in any set of objects and relations, provided there are enough of them.
One thing to bear in mind with the inference example is that we can see both sides of it. We know in detail the properties of the interface, in detail the properties of the hardware and operating system, and then we can identify relations between them. If we're treating this as analogous to our cognitive processes, then the "world" side is hidden, and the relations between cognitive system and world are hidden: the most we can say is that there is some sort of correspondence... To what? In what way? We don't know.
@@KaneB
Yes, I also thought that identifying a individual structure might be a challenge for a structural similarity representation.
-But it still might work, let’s say the universe is infinite and there are two planets, earth A and earth B. Both have the exact same internal structure.
-If I mimic the structure of the earth with a mental representation, then I use myself as a reference point. Then you can not use a map without knowing where you are on the map.
-It seems then clear that I am representing earth A because this is the structure in which I happen to be embedded in.
Similar, ordinary objects do not only have internal relations but also external relations (how they relate to other entities). And some of the external relations connect me with the entity. And when I use myself as a reference point in the mental representation, then I might be able to track down the individual entity.
-Another challenge might be that The same structure of my mental representation appear multiple times in the same entity.
-But the scale at which the entity causally interact with my perception might be a way to distinguish them.
-Yes, all the individual particles interact with my senses, but the fact that all the particles in the entity are causally close to me determines the scale.
@@KaneB
When it comes to the XX-pill, this example can maybe be extrapolated to the theory of evolution.
So there a three scenarios:
1. Evolution is false.
2. Evolution is true and I am unreliable.
a) And I have Evolutionary believes.
b) And I don’t have Evolutionary believes.
3. Evolution is true and I am reliable.
Edit:
-If one believes in evolution, then 2b is not possible. So a huge chunk of the likelihood for the scenario disappears into thin air.
-If we really are the product of evolution, then the presence of our evolutionary believes would be a miracle if our mental and sensory faculties where really unreliable.
-Edit: The believe in evolution and not the truth is the miracle. The truth would just follow because evolution happen to be the case.
-But like the other response, this might run into a problem, then although the thought experiment doesn’t require the reliability of my sensory faculties. It still relies on the reliability of my reasoning faculties.
-So the Rationalist might give two possible responses.
1. He is a hard rationalist and argues that we have direct access to the reliability of our reasoning when we try to check its validity. Reason is as self-evident as sensory experience.
2. He is a soft rationalist who rejects the necessity of sufficient justification and holds it to be perfectly rational, to believe in the reliability of reason without justification.
-The hard rationalist would be dubious, since it seems possible that I can make mistakes if I try to check its validity.
-The soft rationalist would at least in this case also be dubious, since we are questioning the reliability of our reasoning faculties.
The first time I heard the EAAN, I considered it to be absurd - and I still do.
The moment one takes a moment to think about all the errors of reasoning that one has made and consider the various errors of reasoning that humanity makes, one can ideally recognize that truth determinations for humanity can be difficult. We have all sorts of biases and other factors that make for erred reasoning. We observe a continuum of cognitive ability which strikes me as being reasonable given evolution. The idea of a supposed omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent entity which supposedly created cognitively deficient creatures strikes me as absurd and grotesque (given the background knowledge of the argument author's position).
I consider my position to be the defeater to the defeater, since it is the case that we have a continuum of reasoning errors and thus suffer at various truth determinations. This immediately results in the argument being a difference without a distinction, since it must be the case that under either scenario we suffer reasoning issues and thus by appeal to the simplest explanation, we are a product of evolution as opposed to some mix of something else and evolution.
No matter how poor our reasoning, it is the only reasoning that we have.
I suspect the power of the argument is in an appeal to vanity (something that can cause reasoning errors). Most people like to think of themselves as being reasonable; and I like to think of myself as being reasonable. However, I immediately thought about all the errors that I have made as well as all the errors that I observe of others as well as the continuing errors of reasoning while an individual proclaims themselves to be reasonable.
28:19 but isn’t the global defeater argument itself self defeating? If I assume naturalism and the evolutionary story (like in the argument) then we conclude that we can not rely on observations, but the premises also rely on obervations. So we can‘t trust the premises, which makes the conclusion also untrustworthy. So the argument itself is circular?
And if the argument succeeds anyway, we don’t have an alternative.
Imagine the look of disappointment on the face of a man with a purple headress who's favorite book about his own tribe turned out to be a fabrication.
Plantinga's argument is just idiotic. He makes a necessary connection between how our cognitive faculties evolved and its unreliability a priori. That's just reductive and dumb. You have to look at all the facts in cognitive and neuroscience. etc ...
If our cognition is developed through a method that leads to falsehood then all the other things you mention would just be both likely interpreted falsely and be based on falsehoods
@@Hvantmiki "If"
@@GottfriedLeibnizYT there are plenty of reasons to think so. And counter arguments against it. But if our cognitive faculties evolve in a way that doesn't select for truth, but only survival and people who lack truth might survive better then it is reasonable that the rest follows. And any other "facts" like neuroscience and so on would not be helpful since you would view them with a mind, and they were created by minds, that evolved in the previously mentioned way. It isn't so that he ignored the existence of science and so on. But if his argument is sound and valid, then it wouldn't matter.
Materialism is ipso facto reductive, so I don't know what your problem with a reductive argument is.
@@innocentsmith6091 Thinking that the word "reductive" has a single sense is making me cringe right now.
20:30
I don't know if anyone pointed this out. But what you said here doesn't make sense. It seems question begging. All the information we have (models, faculties and their function, etc.) is based on natural selection. Saying that they track genuine features of the world is like saying natural selection-based tools are showing us the real world but this precisely the is what need to be proved.
It seems to me that anyone who actually believes such an argument would not make the argument - they lack all reason to do so. I suppose they might just enjoy saying their beliefs aloud even though they don't believe anyone is listening.
Plantinga thinks that God fixed this problem so he can say that his beliefs by his own lites are reliable.
What do you mean by "reason"? A person who accepts this argument could still have feelings and drives. They wouldn't take themselves to have a justification for any of their beliefs, but they might recognise particular casual factors that tend to prompt beliefs. So reflection on this argument has a particular casual effect on them, and perhaps they enjoy expressing this.
the contradiction arises from the language Itself
I think things like the evolutionary debunking argument can be interpreted as saying something about language.
The lion example is rather complicated but let’s take a simpler example:
Anne is familiar with all the experiences about her environment that we would take to justify her believing there is water to the right of her but not to the left of her. Moreover she is thirsty.
Suppose after discussing the situation with her we come to the conclusion that:
1) “Anne believes there is water to the left of her.”
and:
2) “Anne believes that to turn left she has to act in a way the we would call turning right.”
We then observe that Anne turns right and successfully quenches her thirst. What the debunker wants to say is that Anne has two false beliefs that somehow cancel each other out leading to successful behaviour. But couldn’t we equally well say that she speaks an idiolect of English in which the words “left” and “right” have been substituted one for the other? Isn’t this what an anthropologist who came across a group of people who consistently behaved in this sort of way actually would say?
Moreover there actually are idiolects of English that display phenomena like this. One of my sons used to say things like “This computer game is gruesome!” and then play the game for hours on end. It seems so absurd that it would take a philosopher to say he had two false beliefs, namely:
a) “I want to have a horrific unbearable experience.”
and:
b) “The way to have a horrific unbearable experience is to play this computer game.”
and then because these false beliefs somehow cancel each other out he ended out thoroughly enjoying himself.
IIRC, the argument is not that two false beliefs could cancel each other out, but that a false belief and a desire could cancel each other out. For example, Anne 1) believes that drinking water will kill her and 2) wants to die. She doesn't merely mean unusual things by "drinking water" and "death".
Intuitively, this is kind of implausible - why would evolution develop this complex web of false beliefs and counterproductive (evolutionarily) desires, when it could instead give us accurate beliefs + desires which align with evolutionary success? Also, it seems that these double negative combinations of belief/desire would only work if they evolved in perfect conjunction with one another - in fact, for a desire like 2, we would need exactly backward beliefs for a great deal of situations.
This story doesn't fit at all with my (limited) understanding of evolution, but maybe there are more plausible examples.
I'm a little puzzled by your objection. Yes, I can imagine people who speak "deviant" languages, so a person who speaks what looks like English but where the meanings of some terms are switched. However, I can also imagine - or at least I think I can imagine - people who have "deviant" belief-desire sets, such that they produce similar patterns of behaviour as me but where their representations of the world are completely different. These are two different scenarios, and I can imagine both, at least when described fairly abstractly. Are you suggesting that in fact, there is no coherent scenario of "deviant" belief-desire sets; that all such cases will turn out to be merely cases of "deviant" languages? That would be an interesting conclusion, but why should we believe that?
I think there is a problem with the very notion of belief. If my dog Rover turns right and then gets a drink of water, we might say “Rover believes there is water to the right of him.” Similarly Anne spoke a language we could not understand and we saw her get a drink of water we might say “Anne believes water is there is water to the right of her.” In both cases our criteria for assigning belief is assigned by non-verbal behaviour.
This leads to an interesting question. “Can I be mistaken about my beliefs?.”
Suppose I believe it is safe for me to cross the ice on a lake. I know what the temperature has been for the past week. I know how quickly the ice sheet on the lake thickens at this temperature. I know what thickness of ice will support my weight. Moreover I know that someone has measured the thickness of the ice and as a result of all of this I know that the ice is thick enough to hold my weight.
I know it but do I believe it?
I would probably believe I believe, I would probably say I believe it, it but do I?
Well, suppose there is hungry lion in a cage gnawing through a rope holding the cage closed and my only way to escape being eaten is to cross the ice but when I come to the edge of the lake I suddenly have a strong disinclination to cross the lake. I worry that the ice might break and stop in my tracks. Observing this behaviour someone may say “He does not really believe the ice will hold his weight even though he thinks he does.” or “at one level he believes it but at another level he doesn’t”. We can even imagine the following conversation:
Friend across the lake: “Hurry up and cross the lake or you will be eaten, you know the ice is thick enough to hold your weight.”
Me: “Yes, I know that but I can’t bring myself to believe it.”
This suggests in addition that not only is it possible for me to be mistaken about my beliefs that I that is possible for me to have knowledge without belief.
Put another way, I think the only coherent sense you can make of the notion of a “deviant” belief-desire set is to have one that can be analysed into a situation of deviant language. It then becomes a mere matter of convention whether you want to say you have a deviant belief-desire set or whether you wish to say you are dealing with an example of deviant language. Speaking of deviant language however comports with our usual use of the terms in question. Speaking of a deviant belief-desire set as if it were not just a verbose way of speaking about deviant language strikes me as truly perverse.
@@KaneB I find it very difficult to imagine a case of deviant belief that cannot be analysed as deviant language. I grant that abstractly it can seem possible but I am fairly sure that if the situation is examined in enough detail it will turn out to be a case of deviant language. Consider the following conversation:
Tutor: “How would you solve this problem?”
Student: “That’s easy, you can solve it by a simple application of Lami’s Theorem.
Tutor: “That’s interesting, I would never have thought of that. Show me how it is done.”
... Student goes to the white board and does some calculations and solves the problem.
Tutor: “That’s not Lami’s theorem you are using it’s Schupp’s theorem.”
Now you might describe the situation as the student having two deviant beliefs that end up in his being able to solve the problem, but it is unlikely that either the tutor or the student would describe the situation like that. In other words it is unlikely, unless she wore being sarcastic for the tutor to say:
“It looks like you have two false beliefs that are related in such a way that they enable you to solve the problem.”
She is far more likely to say:
“I think you ought to learn the names of the theorems properly before the end of term test.”
In the absence of an example of a concrete example of a supposed “deviant” belief-desire set that cannot be analysed as, perhaps inadvertent, deviant language I can’t see how it can happen. I will go further than that; I don’t think the idea makes any coherent sense.
@@KaneB Come to think of it there may be cases where a case for unanalysable deviant belief-desire sets can be made when dealing with purely linguistic data. For instance I mistakenly believe that pin1yin1 (a standard phonetic way of transcribing Mandarin Chinese) “kou4” is pronounced the way “ge3” should be and I also mistakenly believe the pin1yin1 transcription of “个” is “kou4” and as a result satisfy my desire to pronounce “个” correctly then prima facie that looks like a case of a deviant belief-desire. But to get this to work for all Chinese characters I would have to systematically map transcriptions wrongly onto sounds and characters wrongly on to transcriptions. If I did this it could definitely be analysed as deviant language. In other words this one example has been made from a fragment of a deviant language. I think the problem partly arises from the notion of “belief” not being sufficiently clear. This has always struck me as being the case even before I heard of Plantinga’s argument. I have never been able to understand why belief is taken as somehow simple an unanalysable so that, for instance “justified true belief” can seem like a reasonable definition of knowledge. It has always struck me that knowledge is better candidate for a simple unanalysable concept. Or if it is analysed it can be analysed as a relationship between marks on a piece of paper or an arrangement of molecules in the brain or the internal configuration of a computer and a state of affairs.
In an earlier post I suggested it might make sense to say someone knows something but does not believe it.
It seems to me that I can overcome the circularity problem by the fact that if I do not assume that my faculties are reliable in the beginning of the argument I couldn't not even assess the argument and it would end up being question begging.
I first need to grant the argument that my faculties aren't reliable, only then I run into the circularity problem. While I am still assessing the arguments premises, for example that our faculties therefore are not truth-tracking, I am justified in assessing it assuming that they are, which would cut out the circularity point, which seems to be the first step, since otherwise one is not even allowed to argue against the argument it seems to me.
global evolutionary debunking depends on the idea that, since evolution only cares about survival and reproduction, it doesn't predict truth tracking beliefs.
which seems very, very dumb
evolution doesn't care about walking and obviously it's still evolutionary good to be able to move. Nobody would say that legs are unexpected under evolution. And nobody should think that truth tracking beliefs are unexpected either.
And this is what is needed for the debunking argument to work. Not just that some beliefs are wrong sometimes. But that beliefs are wrong by default and only right on accident. Which is why the "predator vs just the wind" thought experiment doesn't support the argument. It shows a bias. That is, one way in which beliefs deviate from truth tracking. Which only makes sense as a sentence because beliefs usually are truth tracking, which the debunking argument cannot have.
As for the computer desktop thought experiment, the beliefs are still truth tracking on the abstract level of the "file" and "folder" and "cursor". Otherwise you wouldn't be able to use the computer. The fact that we have no idea what happens on a more fundamental level isn't "global debunking", it's just a argmument that we shouldn't trust our intuitions about the fundamental nature of reality. Which materialists generally already believe.
I would use two counter examples against GEDA. The central pitfall of GEDA is that it equates intuition with all of reasoning. But, we have formal reasoning structures that were not created by evolution.
First, there are counter intuitive results. Science has often revealed things that surprised the scientists, for example the acceleration of the size of the universe.
Second, people have used these reasoning systems to create beliefs that are counter to survival and reproduction. A solid example of this is antinatalism.
You are relying on observation and memory for both of these. But the reliability of those is in question right now.
@@justus4684 no. In the first counter examples, I am relying on measurement. In the second counter examples, I am relying on logic.
@Boulanger948 with the expansion of the universe, the stars were measured with a telescope hooked up to a computer. The only thing the scientists observed was the printout.
The asymmetry argument for antinatalism does not rely on any empiricism. It is an apriori argument.
But, whether or not an argument relies on senses is immaterial. In order to counter GEDA, a belief must meet one of two requirements. First, the belief is created by a reasoning system not created by evolution, or second, the belief is counter productive in terms of survival or reproduction.
@Boulanger948 Where is mathematics stored in the genes? You are not born with some inherent understanding of calculus, you need to be taught it.
I don't think the argument conflates intuition with all of reasoning. It assumes that whatever belief-forming processes we have, if the evolutionary story is true, are products of natural selection. That includes the senses, intuition, reasoning, the whole bit.
So, what do you trust, mortal? Evolutionary theory or your own lying eyes?
Seriously, if belief in evolutionary theory defeats belief in the reliability of direct perception, the logical conclusion should be that evolutionary theory is unreliable, at least as an account for forming beliefs. For the argument to work, you need not only to trust evolutionary theory (despite your skepticism), but to trust it *more than anything else,* at least _prima facie._
A way to save evolutionary theory could be to ask ourselves what does "true" even mean. We have no access to the world of things-in-themselves (if such a world even exists). The very idea of perceiving the world in a way that is somehow identical to how it *really* is, is incoherent. Given this constraint, one could *define* truth, at least for perceptions, as what promotes survival and reproduction. What other non-circular definition of a true perception can you propose?
(Note a nuance here: you can define a *false* or *illusory* perception as one that is inconsistent with other perceptions, but that assumes other perceptions are generally reliable. It is that general reliability that can either be just postulated by fiat or defined in evolutionary terms).
(Also, by the way, the claim that evolution should favour false positives when it comes to threats ignores the harm too many false positives can cause to an organism's chances to sustain itself and reproduce).
@Boulanger948 I'm afraid you're confusing science with the pope. Science is a method of inquiery, not a religeous dogma.
Honestly, if the argument leads to total disbelief in evolution, then it's successfully gotten us to throw out a lot of our epistemology.
I agree that "perceiving things in themselves" is a difficult standard for perceptual truth, although I'm not sure about the alternative you propose. Right now, I'm looking at a tree; does my perception of this particular tree at this particular moment promote my survival and reproduction? I can't see how it does, but it would be really weird to say that makes the percept untrue. Now, one could say that my biological/psychological *system* which sees the tree is evolutionarily beneficial, but it's not obvious how that would be a truth-maker for individual percepts.
I think the most compelling challenge to the EDA is along the lines of what you mention at the end: would evolution actually make our perception totally unreliable? I don't find the argument Kane describes all that convincing.
you promised to make a video about nationalism.where is it?
29:38
Wouldn't this just debunk our belief about the "straws in themselves"?
What if our belief was about our appearance of the straws being equal in length?
Even if this appearance doesn't track the "real" length of the straws, our belief would be correct.
Sure, beliefs about appearances are not targeted by that example. In the straws case, we obviously don't have a global debunker. We only have a debunker for beliefs about the actual length of the straws.
@@KaneB What do you think could be a debunker for an appearance? In the straws example for the belief that "It appears that all straws are of equal length" I can think of some: maybe I am misremembering the length of the other straws or while looking at all of them simultaneously, my attention is split between them and I can't really tell all of their lengths at once. But what about a belief like "There is something orange" when I think there is an orange in my visual field? If we want to be global debunkers, how would we debunk this?