Incidentally, I work in one such obscure field of mathematics called symplectic geometry, which at one point had a very closely tied connection to physics - and it still does - but it has also become a field in its own right where people (like me) solve problems in symplectic geometry sometimes simply because symplectic geometry is now a sort of canonical field and a big jump in understanding of symplectic geometry is considered laudable even if it makes no jump in the understanding of physics. If one wishes, one can simply forget the connections to physics, and just accept it as a bunch of definitions where one proves things from those definitions and perhaps someone finds it useful in physics and perhaps not (obviously I would rather the former).

While I don't much care whether one considers this a science or a philosophy (and don't think it much matters to the arguments in the OP) one worthwhile perspective is the following. Suppose I applied the "forget the physics" transformation to my work. Pretty much everything I do day to day would remain the same, with the possible exception that my work might seem just a bit less motivated. Given the similarities before and after the "forget the physics" transformation, it would be a bit odd I think to call one science and the other philosophy. However, that is exactly what one might do since the former is sort of contained with a broader attempt to understand physics, and the latter is contained entirely within this abstract formal manipulations disconnected from the physical world. Anyways, don't really have a horse in this, but perhaps the above is interesting.

Sure. In which case, if one wants to make the "doesn't answer/can't answer" distinction, my point retracts to asking why the appearance of conscious beings is deeper and more special among the class of questions science can't answer. Presumably this is quite a large class and we have to see why this particularly question in this class gets the special attention.

That said, perhaps this is being misread by me or mistated by nagel, but the formulation made it seem much more in the "doesn't" opposed to "couldn't" category: This is NOT asking the epistemological queston "how do we know what we think is true is true" which I would agree is not something science can probably answer. I would have thought giving such an account would be describing precisely the processes by which we are led to such thing which, given the context of evolution being discussed, seems to imply a quite appropriately scientific answer talking about exactly how it was that our minds with our abilities did develop. In other words, a scientific problem. Am I reading this exactly backwards?





As a side note, this seems like a bad definition since it is self referential, as the definition of reliabilism depends on the definition of reliability. Perhaps that latter word is well known, but I ought to check that it means what it would mean colloquially "it is usually truth-conducive but not absolutely always truth-conducive". As in, am I correct to think that reliabilism is a different concept from something like "absolute infaliability"?


How is the last paragraph not exactly a case of goddidit? Yes there is the general epistemological problem of skepticism about our beliefs. The resolution for the theist of this problem is to just accept the existence of God as a properly basic belief, where god in this sense is defined precisely such that it solves this epistemological problem. And perhaps more things. It might also be the god that solves a moral problem by being that which imbues morality or the god that solves the cosmological problem by being that which imbues our universe with existence. But at the very least, we are assuming a god which fixes this epistemological problem. This seems like "goddidit" at its core? I suppose you could argue that "that which solves the epistemological problem" is not the direct definition, it will usually be given as something else and then solving the epistemological problem is argued to follow shortly thereafter. So then it would be a step or two removed, but still we are accepted a god defined such that it solves this problem. That is, goddidit.

The difficulty I have with your position is that evolution is not framed in a context of truth at all.

You're giving "truth" a special place in some sort of spectrum of evolutionary adaptations (meta-adaptation?). When we look at virtually every other form of adaptation, we frame them ALL in terms of different types of environmental pressures. We've got the beaks of birds changing shape, developing different types of breathing mechanisms, defense mechanisms... all of those are framed in the context of what is happening around the organism.

It would appear to be a form of special pleading to argue that humans evolved differently under the exact same rules. We don't frame any other adaptation in terms of cognitive processes vis-a-vis "truth." There is no parallel to this.

Again, I don't think this argument really goes anywhere. The belief that dragons require moist environments, and that they flee (or die) in dry seasons (as do the fungi) is just as effective.

Also, the idea that having access to the cave works as an advantage may or may actually be true. Two species evolving on an isolated island may evolve different characteristics, and both can be just as fit to live on the island. You can't give "cave-dwelling" a higher quality of adaptation than "field-dwelling."

I don't think it is special pleading at all to note that evolutionary advantageous mental processes are going to have a large amount of correspondence with mental processes that give true answers. Not absolute, of course, and surely some counterexamples must exist (regardless of whether your fungi/dragon one is or is not such a counterexample). It is still a question of looking at pressures on an organism and they make changes based on the propensity for gene survival. It is just that a true thought like "jumping off cliffs is bad" or "such and such a hunting strategy is good" is evolutionary advantageous because it is true that jumping off cliffs is bad and such and such a hunting strategy is good. Since organisms operate in the real world, changes that respect the veracity of that real world would, on balance, be good. Truthfully understand the real world to our advantage seems to be entirely consistent with developing a special beak for this real world, and not at all a case of special pleading.

I didn't mean to say anything about this part of the discussion.
I am basing this off of Nagel's own view about consciousness, where he says that a complete scientific description of the mind or consciousness will not be a complete description of either--thus showing that there is more to what it means to be conscious than can be covered by our scientific theories. In other words, he thinks that even a perfect understanding of the laws of physics and chemistry would give us enough information to know how consciousness (because consciousness is not fully describable in scientific terms).

This is a bit inside baseball, but reliablism arose as a way to resolve the Gettier problems with the traditional "justified true belief" account of knowledge. The basic idea is that in order for a person to be warranted (or justified) in believing that p we have to look beyond just whether those reasons justify the belief that p. Reliablism says that we also have to look at the process by which she came to believe that p--whether that process is appropriately truth-tracking or reliable. Anyway, this gets complicated and not that interesting to most people in a hurry (fake red barns anyone?), but the relevant idea here is that we would have to look at the actual architecture of the brain (or mind for you dualists) to know whether a belief was warranted. Here's SEP for more.

The reason this isn't a goddidit is because this argument doesn't show or even really attempt to solve the problem of skepticism. All it is meant to show is that if god does exist, then at least one challenge to knowledge (the evolutionary challenge) is defeated. However, it doesn't pretend to show us that god does in fact exist. Now, Plantinga goes on to make other arguments meant to show that it is rational to believe in God, but those other arguments are conceptually distinct from this point.

This is supposed to be unlike naturalism which, if this argument is successful, is self-defeating because if it is true then global skepticism would immediately follow.

Of course humans evolved differently--all species evolved differently (this is trivial). The main point is whether the evolution of humans happened under the same rules as for everything else. My answer to this is yes. I'm not claiming that humans evolved to have truth-apt cognitive processes because true beliefs or truth-apt cognitive processes are privileged in a special way by evolution.

Rather, I'm claiming that we should in fact expect that the evolutionary benefit of having cognitive processes leads to selecting for more truth-apt cognitive processes rather than truth-neutral cognitive processes, because the truth-apt processes contribute more to survival. If that claim is true, then Plantinga's claim that under naturalism we shouldn't think that our cognitive processes are reliably truth-tracking is false.

This is not to say that we should necessarily expect that organisms with cognitive processes will evolve. Rather it is to say that organisms that do evolve such processes will tend towards them having some accuracy in representing the world, as that seems to be primary to how these processes provide benefit.

In order for this work, you're going to have to argue that for all our beliefs, there is some other false belief that causes the exact same behavior as the true belief and that these false beliefs are just as likely to be selected for. That seems incredible to me.

It was your example. Obviously we are assuming that there is some evolutionary advantage that comes from how the cave is used or we would just move to another example where there is.

But in fact, we have plenty of evidence that this should NOT be expected, as evidenced by the number of cognitive processes that have evolved that do not bear well with respect to "truth." For example, the human mind is TERRIBLE at intuitively grasping ideas like conditional probabilities and we know that, in fact, we are quite prone to making "obvious" logical errors.

So we have in reality seen that false-apt cognitive processes have developed along with truth-apt cognitive processes, and it's not at all clear from an evidence standpoint that the truth-apt cognitive processes have "contributed" more to survival. (Again, I note that you can reject the existence of God, but then find yourself facing this almost ubiquitous false belief which clearly contribute to survival by controlling certain types of behavior.)

I don't see why your claim should be accepted if one rejects God. If one accepts God, this is easy to accept.

My example only extended to the idea that true/false beliefs can lead to the same behavior. It had nothing to do with whether living in the cave was better or worse.

I am aware it is not a proof of the existence of god, but as you said it it reads exactly like a goddidit (lol I rather like this expression, thanks). Namely, these are things when any question or problem is posed, and then simply assuming gods existence solves that problem. Usually by the implied definition of god, or a few short steps away from the implied definition of god. So in this case the problem is why should we think our mental processes are reliable? And the answer is that God did it, or at least, that if we assume god exists then he is the one that makes our mental processes reliable.

Btw, sometimes such things can be turned into "proofs" of god. For example, WLC will first argue that if god exists, then we have a universal morality (because goddidit). And then he will argue that if god does not exist we don't. So then the proof of god is that if one accepts the existence of universal morality - something many people "feel" - then the existence of god follows. So someone could turn this into a proof of god by accepting as a premise that we DO have reliably truth-apt cognitive processes, then the previous arguments that god creates this but evolution does not would - if we accept these as the only two possibilities - prove gods existence. But nobody has, thankfully, done that.

I think we should move on from the specific example. I grant Aaron with correctly identifying a situation where a false belief has an evolutionary advantage. Actually I grant Aaron with the ability to regularly come up with loads of such examples, and this seems quite reasonable given how fallible humans are.

However, I don't think this takes away from the idea that, on balance, things which give evolutionary advantages are true because we have to act in the real world and accurately understanding it and being able to do things like predict and analyze it is going to be an advantage, even if sometimes our analysis is wrong, or is wrong but turns out to be helpful.

Btw, nagel said much the same thing being argued by OrP and myself here:
That is, there seems to be good reason so suspect at least some level of good overlap between evolutionary advantage and truth. He goes on to note that this doesn't necessarily extrapolate to the veracity of the Higgs boson, however, which is fair. In my view, there is some underlying skeptism, that is not at all resolved regardless of how amazing evolution is or is not in its correspondence to the truth.

If you had read the very next sentence, you would find that you're probably not quite understanding the position being put forth.

You're playing games with "truth" here.

Edit: To expand a bit --

You're trying to claim "truth" as an abstract quantity while using "truth" as being formulated specifically on a behavioral mechanism. It's not the same thing at all.

The "truth" of seeing a tiger in front of you as a purely stimulus-response concept does not extend to "truth" as accepting a logical proof of a particular abstract claim.

I want to push this further. We know that cats can see a dog approaching and run. This is a stimulus-response type of truth. Do you think that cats have access to "truth" in any real way as a result of having this type of reaction? Is there anything here to suggest that because cats have this type of reaction that it should therefore be expected that cats are evolving towards (have already evolved) some level of abstract reasoning, even if only at a very rudimentary level?

If you had read the very next sentence of my post, you will see that I explicitly referenced the sentence you incorrectly accused of not reading and not understanding:

Sorry, can you expand still further, because I don't quite see what you are meaning here. As I see it, we have mental processes by which we come to believe there is a tiger in front of us. But it is in principle either true or false that the tiger actually is in front of us. The contention being put forward is that mental processes that accurately access and predict the universe as it is are, at least on balance, going to be beneficial. As in, it is an advantage for us to be able to correctly identify if there is or is not a tiger in front of us.

I don't think we should speak of "evolving towards" things, but setting that aside I would say that the cat is engaging in a mental process that is advantageous to it (knowing to run from danger is an advantage) that, thankfully for the cat, overlaps with the true fact that dogs are dangerous and thus cats should run. Now the cat surely does not have any meaningful "abstract reasoning", but we can imagine the situation of a hunter coming up with a strategy to hunt that does use abstract reasoning and it is only an advantage if it is true that this strategy is effective.

The contention from the other side is that the mental process of accurately determining the existence of a tiger in front of us is so far removed from the mental process of considering abstract truth statements that there is no good reason to think that evolution accounts for this development.

If it is true that "logical" processes are selected over "illogical" ones (because they exhibit an evolutionary advantage), then the language of "evolving towards" is reasonable.

Bolded: Being able to imagine this says nothing of the reality of it happening. For example, many animals hunt strategically with (presumably) the complete absence of abstract reasoning.

Italics: Whether a strategy is effective says nothing about whether the cognitive processes that developed that strategy were based on true statements. A bad poker player could push in the same place that a good poker player pushes, but the bad poker player could have done it for all the wrong reasons. Both players (in that situation) are equally apt at survival.

You are playing games with "truth." You want to use it in the form of "true that the strategy is effective" while simultaneously trying to make it apply to something like "truth" as a intellectual construct. You can't have it both ways.

There are obvious advantages to being able to form beliefs such as, "If I travel in a group with others, I am less likely to be killed by a jaguar."

Perhaps a 'true intuition for conditional probability' can only be directly selected for at this primitive level. But that would be enough for the concept of 'conditional probability' to take hold, and further refinement to begin.

This presumes that the cognitive processes already have a self-reflecting ability to perform probabilistic projections. That is, the ability to logically process statements like "the likelihood of event X" and "I *could* do X" must exist BEFORE this type of reasoning can take hold. Notice that this is different from some sort of stimulus-response type of mechanism, such as those used to model the emergent properties of group behaviors. (For example, the simple rule of "stay close to others of my species" leads to the complex behavior of things like pack movement.)

My memory may not be correct on this, but I believe that primates demonstrate a stronger grasp of conditional probabilities than humans.

But isn't this debate about a species that has evolved at least some symbolic intelligence; and whether this species would benefit from preferentially acquiring true beliefs? (It doesn't seem possible to have a debate about whether symbolic intelligence improves fitness. Unless, I suppose, we stipulate an evolutionary environment that does not resemble Earth.)

Dunno, that seems weird.

I think viewing truth as symbolic pretty much removes all these "philosophical" (consider this an extremely hash and sarcastic usage of quotation marks) obstacles fairly easily. It makes "finding truth" irrelevant, because you could no more find "truth about alligators" than you could find the letter A as some cosmic constant in alligator-kind... regardless of spelling.

The only way to resolve it would be via a machine that knows itself perfectly, which requires an endless loop (try to construct a program which knows the sum of all information within the program, and this becomes obvious),

Thus we can't know if "absolute truth" exists and we know that even if it did, we could never find it.

It is prudent then, to focus on method instead. As a thought experiment (irony intended) it becomes obvious that any method that would tell you that alligators are fluffy vegans should probably be discounted...and that includes the sillyness of "everything is equally valid because you just can't know dude".

Nah, most concepts of "arrows on evolution" if you were where it progresses "towards" something is a misunderstanding of how it works. At any given moment it depends on the selective pressures out there, which change over time. Those selective pressures for a particular animal may change so that, say, speed or strength is prioritized and that a marginal increase in intelligence doesn't help because of whatever selective pressures exist. For humans, we had a long period of time where the selective pressures selected for increasing intelligence and so we progresses in a single direction of increasing intelligence for a long time, but in principle in some time in the future that might reverse itself if the selective pressures change. Dolphins, for example, are very intelligent but because their environment lacked the kind of selective pressures that would result in an organ like "hands" which are so critical for us and for the development of intelligence that they don't get much further advantage of being more intelligent (although I am just speculating).

However, this doesn't undermine the naturalist point here. Given an environment such as the one that humans evolved in, it is quite reasonable to think that increased intelligence able to accurately conceive and think about the world was a selective advantage, ergo it is quite reasonable to think of human thoughts as reasonable at least within this domain.



So? The claim here is not that intelligence is the ONLY evolutionary advantage. Certainly an instinctual change to hunting patterns in, say, wolves, also can provide an advantage. However, humans have developed thinking that allows for more complex understanding of how the world actually is and how to analyze it for our benefit, which is why we put wolves in zoos and not the other way around. [/QUOTE]

A perfect analogy, for as we both know, a bad poker player does not "survive" in the poker world. Yes sometimes people can use bad reasoning to come to a true conclusion. But on balance, it is precisely the ability of the good poker player to use GOOD reasoning to come up with more GOOD conclusions that make them a good poker player. Likewise for our hunter-gatherer ancestor. The ability to analyze their surroundings to be more likely to come up with good hunting and gathering strategies is an evolutionary advantage.

i still don't know what you are trying to say by this. I will say a thought is true, like "there is a tiger in front of me", if there is indeed a tiger in front of me. The contention is that true thoughts about the universe are more likely to be advantageous than not, because there is a clear advantage to knowing whether or not a tiger is in front of me. I don't see any difficulty in the above, so please elucidate.

So for the record, do you disagree with the quote in post 61, that has been adopted by me and OrP? Not whether this applies to the truth of very abstract things far removed from evolution, like the truth of the higgs boson, but whether for the domain of questions relevent to our past evolution, whether it is reaasonable to expect this general correspondence between thinking true things and those thoughts being an evolutionary advantage? The last time i brought it up you accused me of something that was obviously false if you have fully read my post and then utterly ignored the error you made.

Not as I understand it. The materialist/evolutionary perspective defines "true" in terms of behavior, not symbolic logic.

This should give you pause, then. What you are saying here is that under the correct pressures, the development of illogical thought processes could be selected for over logical ones. This undermines the entire argument that we should expect logical processes to be preferred.

Why is this reasonable? What about the environment that we have favors logic over illogic in a way that is not universal?

It depends on what you mean by "truth." My claim is that you're using it inconsistently. You need something like truth_1 and truth_2 for this to be a meaningful conversation.

truth_1 would mean the truth of things like the Higgs boson
truth_2 would mean the truth of things like relevant to evolution

Because when you mix the two, you're not really clear anymore about what you're saying. truth_1 is a sort of universal truth (given that our reasoning is correct, the Higgs boson exists in some sort of timeless sense) whereas truth_2 is a local truth (given that our reasoning is correct, there is a tiger in front of me right now, but that tiger may not be there 10 minutes from now).

Edit: I accept that the naturalist has a different perspective of "truth." I do not accept it as my own, and I think that it's somewhat flawed to say that you're using truth in a manner that is consistent with a purely materialistic evolutionary perspective. I think you need to resolve my first paragraph before you can proceed.

No, not at all. I said that under certain pressures, increased intelligence and logical thought processes might not be selected for or might not be the dominant pressures, as in instead what might be selected for is speed or strength. This is how it is in most animals, which is why we do not see a progression towards greater intelligence across the entire animal kingdom, it is other advantages that are often selected for instead. I suppose in a vacuum it is possible that some bizarre set of circumstances could occur where a long term and meaningful progression towards illogical thought processes would occur, but that seems very unlikely for exactly the same reason it seems quite likely that the ability to accurately understand the universe and think about it would be advantageous.



Why is this reasonable? What about the environment that we have favors logic over illogic in a way that is not universal?[/QUOTE]because we live in the environment as it actually is. It is an advantage to accurately know whether a tiger is or is not in front of you, because we live in real world and a real tiger is dangerous. For example if I make the logical error that "if I see a tiger, it means the tiger is not there" instead of the correct "if I see a tiger it means the tiger is there", we are liable to get eaten.



Sorry, but I am still lost on what on earth you are trying to imply here. Your two versions of truth seem to be different domains asking different types of questions, sure, but I don't see how they are fundamentally different concepts of what it means for something to be true. Is "It is true that higgs bosons exist" fundamentally different from "It is true that tigers exist"? That seems weird.

Regardless, let us not talk about whatever *I* mean by truth since I hardly have some deep sophisticated epistemology here. Instead, can you confirm or deny agreement with what nagel said in my quote from #61. You responded by challenging what *I* mean by truth, how about you address whatever it is you think HE means.

Note that you ignored me pointing out that you ignored me pointing out your gross mistake where you incorrectly accused me of not reading something when if you had simply read my post you would know that it is not the case.