Fair enough.

Given your classification of this as a brute fact, I find that there really isn't much to say in response. We disagree on the aesthetic qualities of your position. I don't tend to think of flies buzzing away when I swat at them as being somehow similar to logical discourse, but I have nothing to counter that as a possibility.

Surely I wasn't that opaque. Is that the strongest formulation of my view you can come up with? I don't think swatting flies is equivalent to logical discourse either. Additionally, the brute fact was the rationality of the universe, not the causal connection - that's just a testable hypothesis (eventually). I'm sure there are other naturalistic possibilities.

I do think:

"if I go where the tigers are then I'll get eaten. I don't want to be eaten. Therefore I'll go somewhere else"

is equivalent to

"if its true that the set of primes has a largest member then multiplying all of them and adding one will not lead to a contradiction. It does lead to a contradiction, therefore there is no largest prime".

Do you think that

?

Sure. (Loosely, not logically).

If a then b.
not b
therefore not a.

Do you think a fly buzzing away to avoid being swatted as being the same as the logical conclusion of a fly to buzz away to avoid being swatted?

The distinction between a behavioral mechanism which can be explained in logical terms and a logical mechanism itself is where the paths seem to diverge. In other words, just because a fly can "know" to buzz away to avoid being swatted surely does not imply that the fly holds any particular beliefs about being swatted and the consequences of remaining stationary. Correct?

Obviously.

Just so long as we're clear that the concept of truth for truth_1 and truth_2 statements is the same.

I think the idea is that we get the idea of "true" from evolutionarily significant beliefs, and then apply it to more abstract beliefs. But it is the same idea. Like bunny said, we get the idea of truth and related concepts (e.g. number, entailment, etc.) from much simpler situations and only developed advanced math or logic as a kind of playing around with these ideas.

Okay. Obviously I don't view this as absurd, but rather as another example of how evolution can bring great changes to an organism over time.

I'm not sure I understand your example. I view these responses by cats and dogs as being based on very rudimentary cognitive processes (we obviously see this more with advanced animals like the large primates), not just the behavioristic S-R model. Over time, and with the right environmental pressures and mutations, I expect that dogs and cats could also evolve from these simple cognitive processes to the more sophisticated ones characteristic of humans. If your point is that humans are unusual in being much more advanced cognitively than other animals--I agree. But so what?

Remember, I'm taking it as a given that the purely behaviorist account of truth and the mind is false (if they are not, then none of this is a problem). As such, I'm just assuming that we really do have thoughts with mental content, etc.

This is well said (but not better than usual, so I can only give you a B+, OrP). If we look at cognitive facilities as a component of the development of the brain, we need not even consider comparisons to other animals to see the point, though that equally illustrates it. Why are some people able to better perform abstract computations? Or have better concrete memories? Or any objective measure of intelligence? While this field is still in relative infancy, it seems that certain parts of the brain developed to facilitate certain kinds of thinking. If that part of the brain is under-developed in another person (or cats and dogs, if you like), then we understand that it's not so much that the creature is incapable of cognitive function, but that they are incapable of cognitive function in the way we measure and distinguish human cognitive potential.

Is this perhaps the irreducible complexity question in another form? Our cognitive processes didn't necessarily develop as a means to an end, such as to give us the functionality we experience today. Our biology is an interlocked system, so too the components of our brains, and new features that served a single purpose sometimes take on indirect but powerful functionality not only on their own but when integrated into a system where the sum of its parts leads to unexpected innovations.

So just to be clear, all the recent posts have been trying to get you to accept the criticism made by nagel i identified in post 61, which for a long time it seemed like you were rejecting. So now that you seem to agree, we can move on to new subjects, of which I don't think you would yet know what "my position" is.

As I said quite a bit earlier in the thread before this tangent, i certainly think we are forced to contend with some formulation of skepticism. We can't guarantee the validity of our assumptions or the accuracy of our mental processes. Perhaps the logical precepts we accept are not valid, perhaps there is no external world, etc. Unless we assume away the problem (such as assuming the existence of a deity defined in such a way as to eliminate the problem, perhaps calling it a properly basic belief), this skepticism remains.

So one point I made earlier, was that this skepticism, or this epistemological uncertainty, is neither helped nor hurt by the entire discussion of evolution. Certainly given what we think is true, we can look back and note how there seems to be a preponderence of overlap between evolutionarily advantageous mental processes and ones that we think are true. However, there remains some uncertainty, perhaps every single mental process we have is actually wrong and just coincidentally advantageous and we can't see this because what we think is true or false is based on our inaccurate mental processes. So we are in the same category as if we knew nothing at all about how we developed. We think some things are true, but we cannot shed ourselves of our skepticism.

btw, I don't think you are right to say there are two "truth concepts". The meaning of the word "truth", even if no sophisticated epistemology has been espoused, is the same in both. Yes, there are two different domains of questions, but the basic idea of a correspondence between a mental state and the real world remains the same for both of them, it is the same conception of "truth" being used.

Further, every mental faculty we have today came through evolution and most of the advances over the last several thousand years of human civilization have been advances in culture, not advances in genetics. So if we are going to think that those mental faculties are truth-apt because the ability to think true things is an evolutionary advantage, what we do today when we do the kind of, say, advanced mathematics that our civilization makes possible, it is simply applying the same truth-apt mental processes that we developed to these new problems. Sure, I don't think we have any guarantee of their accuracy and we must remain skeptical and there is epistemological uncertainty here. But if we are to give a best guess, i suspect this is how the world actually was. We developed advanced mental processes because it was evolutionary advantageous, and these mental processes correspond overwhelmingly with the ability to determine the truth of things since that was an advantage, and we can now apply these same processes to other questions and get true answers. So while I agree the underlying epistemological "problem" doesn't go away, I am not particularly concerned that my mathematics research is completely wrong because, say, basic logical precepts are entirely backwards or something like this.

The other side of this is being deeply unimpressed with the "solution" to this problem claimed by just assuming god.

There are two aspects to this.

1) Consider the bolded. What environmental pressures and mutations would account for this type of more sophisticated characteristics? This still feels hand-wavy at this point.

2) This brings back the language of "evolving towards" something. That is, if you believe that there is some sort of universal favoritism towards logic over illogic, then one must wonder why evolution would have such a bias. This puts logic in a very special category because we have seen in evolution that it really doesn't play "favorites" with specific characteristics. Big creatures are not favored over small ones, and flying are not favored over swimming. We see success with all sorts of characteristics.

Here, we need to be very careful about the set-up of the hypothetical. We need to think of two creatures being "basically equivalent" except for this one feature. If you have two creatures that are basically equivalent, except that one flies and the other swims, there's no particular reason to think that either one will have a better chance of survival. It depends on all sorts of other variables (size of the creature, environment changes, characteristics of predator/prey (if any), etc.).

But if you have two essentially basically creatures, except one thinks better than the other, you would probably imagine that the one that thinks better has a better chance of survival regardless of these other variables. It's hard (for me) to imagine a situation where the dumber creature survives and the smarter one does not. (Obviously, both can die because they get eaten by a bigger animal, and both can survive, but those are not evolutionarily interesting situations.)

I am confused by this post: Here you seem to be contesting the quote in post 61. You seem to asking why we would expect this favoritism towards better thinking.
But here you have answered your own question and seem to be agreeing with us that we WOULD expect precisely this kind of favoritism.

In fact, I can't think of a single example of an animal which - according to what we think of as true processes - gets an advantage because it thinks in an entirely false fashion along the lines of "i see a tiger therefore there is not a tiger" or something like that. It seems quite reasonable, given that we live in a real world, that the smarter creatures - all else being equal - gets an advantage. But of course, things are very often not equal which is why other traits like size or strength get selected for over questions of intelligence.

The immediate example I thought of was bacteria.

Yes, I'm being fairly hand-wavy. I'm not really trying to present a full story of the evolutionary origin of language or mental content--I just don't know enough about the topic to do so. What I'm trying to do in this thread is show how Plantinga's argument that is meant to show that naturalism implies skepticism in a strong sense fails. My hand-wavy response is enough to show that.

However, for more, Ruth Garrett Millikan on language would be a good place to start.

Evolution does play favorites with specific characteristics. That is, it favors those characteristics that enhance reproductive success. Your point seems to be that it doesn't favor any characteristics for something inherent to that characteristic. I agree, and am not claiming anything differently for cognitive processes. I'm not saying that evolution favors truth-apt cognitive processes because it thinks that truth is really cool. I am saying that truth-apt cognitive processes are favored because they tend to be more successful in enhancing reproductive success than truth-neutral cognitive processes in the environments in which human and animal cognition arose.

You want to say that in some situations truth-neutral cognitive processes would be favored. Fine. I'm willing to grant that. If you want to narrow my claim to just environments like those in which human and animal cognitive processes evolved, I'm okay with that. I'm not really trying to make an absolute claim about either evolution or cognitive processes. For all I know, in a completely different environment it wouldn't help.

The swimming/flying comparison is not very good as the swimming animals probably live in different environments from the flying animals and so are not competing with one another.

What we would want is something like this: two gorilla populations competing for the same resources in the same area, which are identical except that one has slightly more truth-apt cognitive processes than the other. My claim is that the population with slightly more truth-apt cognitive processes will tend to be more successful over time and so come to dominate the entire area.

Right, so we agree.

Not quite. If you were irreducible complexity as the framework, it seems to me that OrP is framing the conversation as being that cognitive processes ARE reducible to simpler processes, whereas I'm saying they're NOT reducible (there's a jump that needs to be made because of the "type" of cognitive processes involved).

So the two sides of the argument are lining up slightly differently.

To be clear, you're characterizing Plantiga's argument as "If naturalism is true, then mental content cannot be trusted at all"? That seems a bit stronger than what I had taken it to be. But if that is what the argument is, then I'd similarly reject it.

My argument has been regarding the limits of one should expect from cognitive processes that develop in such a manner should be. We seem to start from something like flies buzzing around and make this leap to the mental content of "If I move, I won't be hit" and then another leap to "there exist infinitely many primes." We seem to have no reason in particular to think that this type of development should happen in a materialist/naturalist world. The first jump is particularly mysterious (basically, something like the development of consciousness). The second jump can follow after the first jump is made (although the accounting for this is not particularly strong). In the absence of the first jump (a behaviorist definition of truth, which is really only about selecting actions that enhance survival -- so the absence of some sort of "true" mental content at all), the second jump cannot be trusted.

Yet another thing to look into one of these days when I have more time.

The difficulty I have is that the favortism being lavished on intelligence appears to be a one-way street. All things being equal, intelligence is ALWAYS favored. The same cannot be said of any other characteristic that I can think of. Most other adaptations are highly dependent upon environmental conditions.

Is a larger or smaller animal favored? It depends. Smaller animals are favored in environments with fewer resources because it takes more resources to keep a larger animal alive.

Are more energy efficient animals favored? In an area of plentiful resources, there's no pressure to select for this, so it's neutral.

But, no matter the circumstances, intelligence gets favored. We can't imagine how stupidity (with all other features being equal) can ever win. It's not even clear if there's a situation in which intelligence is neutral.

I agree. See above.

We agree that intelligence is favored. We don't agree that favoring intelligence follows from a materialist evolutionary perspective without requiring special pleading.

I don't understand your last two sentences. Why is it that you think evolution is favoring intelligence, if not from a materialist perspective? Are you suggesting some form of deity directed evolution or something like that? Regardless, I don't see what the problem is or why it is special pleading. It seems quite obvious that higher intelligence would be an advantage, all else held equal, in a materialist evolutionary perspective, I don't get why that point is contentious.

As for your examples, intelligence can be a neutral trait. Numerous species over long periods of time evolve in other ways significantly but don't change their intelligence, that has remained neutral throughout. When is intelligence favouredvs must being neutral? Well it depends on the environmental condition, just as you wanted. Note that there are consequences of intelligence like big resource expensive brains and long pregnancies and child rearing that mean it is usually a non physical hypothetical to imagine "all else being equal" when it comes to this question.

But traits that are either asymmetric in that they are either an advantage or make no difference but don't cause disadvantages are common. For instance, a trait that makes one less sexually desirable is not going to be selected for. A trait that makes a hunter slower is not going to be selected for (unless it is some other advantage like resource conservation or size which is what is actually being selected for, not the slowness in and of itself). Flagrant waste of limited resources is not going to be selected for, all else equal. Etc. But even if you were right, and intelligence was an entirely unique trait among all the other traits in terms of it being the only asymmetric one, so what? That might just be the reality of the evolutionary world.

This is a misunderstanding of the argument put forth, and fairly bad misunderstanding of evolution in general. There certainly are species that have not increased in intelligence. But that could be because whatever necessary mutation has never happened. The claim is NOT that that intelligence MUST come about, but rather that if you compare two species that are identically except for this one feature, one cannot even IMAGINE a scenario where less intelligence is better (compared with the other charactersitics, which depend on environmental pressures).

I find this hard to parse because "sexual desirability" is an extremely complex trait. It doesn't reduce to a single trait (or type of trait). Rather, it is a conglomeration of a large number of traits.

Right. So the selection of traits depend on the circumstances. In the abstract, it's not obvious that speed should always dominate.

If resources are abundant, it won't matter. (See US comsumption.)

It might be, but it's still special pleading if this ONE trait has special preference.

Right. And it seems like everyone is agreeing that we can't imagine a good scenario that isn't totally hypothetical where, all else being equal, less intelligence is better. We can think of many scenarios where it doesn't matter, and where intelligence is not going to be selected for because the environment prioritizes for some other traits. I assumed this was what you meant by "neutral" but perhaps not.

Exactly. Likewise, for intelligence, its selection depends on circumstances and doesn't always dominant. I can't imagine a circumstance where lower intelligence by itself or slower speeds by itself are advantageous, but certainly can where other factors like reduced pregnancy times or lower resource consumption is advantageous so smarter brains and faster speeds might not arrise.

But if you want to think of intelligence as super special, great, so what? If that is the case, and I will just grant you it is for the sake of argument, why does that cause problems for the materialist conception of evolution?

A quick aside, why are we restrained to "all things being equal" when referring to the selection for intelligence? Aren't there always going to be additional energy requirements when selecting for intelligence (and its respectively larger cranial capacity)? Or are we saying that the selection for intelligence will always be greater than the selection for less energy requirements?

for the record, I noted already that it would be nonphysical to assume that one could come up with such an all things equal type situation, and we can add longer pregnancy and child rearing time and the like. Now if we want to imagine that hypothetical where there are no additional consequences then fine, but then I get to also imagine the hypothetical where there are no additional consequences to being faster in which case I submit being faster would be advantageous everything else being equal (although that still doesn't get you to it being the dominant thing being selected for). Whether you allow these hypotheticals or not, in either case intelligence doesn't seem to be particularly special. And even if it was particularly special, so what?

Yes, that is the argument that I've been focusing on, so it looks like we are in agreement on this point. Briefly, here is the difference. The problem that I've been focusing on assumes that consciousness and intentionality somehow evolved in humans. The problem is why we would think that a consciousness and intentionality that developed through natural selection is truth-directed.

There is another problem, which isn't so much worried about whether consciousness or intentionality is truth-directed as about how such seeming non-material things developed in the first place. How is it that we gained through exclusively evolutionary means the ability to do calculus or enjoy ice cream, etc. I take it that this latter problem isn't so much worried about whether these experiences are true or accurate (as even false beliefs and non-veridical experiences are still mental content) as about the putatively physical nature of these experiences.

Maybe it is aspects of the latter problem that you are focusing on?

I don't know how to be any clearer about this--I am not using a behaviorist definition of truth anywhere in my argument or views. I am using a correspondence definition of truth and claiming that beliefs, especially simple ones like, "There is a tiger," that correspond to reality tend to be more useful than beliefs that don't correspond to reality.

Thus, I don't think the "jump" from these kinds of beliefs to beliefs about, say, stars and planets is as big as you seem to think it is. We are applying abilities we've already gained in one domain, representing the immediate world around us through perception and basic reasoning, to another domain--representing the stars and planets, and then space and time and so on to modern science.

That being said, I do it is possible that there are limits to human cognition in ways that can limit our ability to understand some aspects of the universe. I don't think that scientific reasoning applied to the Standard Model is a very good example of those limits, as we have a lot of evidence that the Standard Model is at least partially correct. However, it is possible that evolution hasn't equipped us very well to understand other features of the universe, perhaps things like morality and aesthetics, or the nature of god, or the relation between the mind and the universe. Incidentally, I'll point out that as a general rule, naturalists actually do tend to be much more skeptical and uncertain about these subjects.

I also think it worth pointing out that in my view the proposed evolutionary origin of consiciousness is actually a big mark in favor of naturalistic accounts of consciousness. If consciousness can be reduced down to smaller modules that ultimately are solely based in physical objects, then we can tell a pretty clean story about how the mind developed in humans--i.e. a standard evolutionary tale.

However, if consciousness and the mind are not physical, but something else, then it is very mysterious how it could have evolved in humans. It would then be something outside of the causal matrix of the evolutionary history of the human species, leaving us with no explanation.

First, I would resist saying that it is intelligence that is favored. I think it shouldn't be that hard to come up with scenarios where intelligence isn't favored (e.g. perhaps it involves an energy trade-off that doesn't justify the benefit). Rather, my claim was simply comparing truth-apt to truth-neutral cognitive processes. I'm not claiming that having cognitive processes is always preferable to not having cognitive processes.

That being said, I'm not sure what the problem is here. To me, the reason why truth-apt cognition is so much more successful has to do with the function of cognition. It is meant to give us a way to respond more quickly to a changing environment, to enable us to more quickly identify dangers or prey. True beliefs will be more effective than false beliefs in responding to a changing environment because we would then be responding to actual dangers and actual prey and actual changes in the environment. It just seems intimately connected with the function of cognition.

Think of it like eyesight. All else being equal, being able to see farther and more clearly is in most cases going to be evolutionarily preferred because doing so enables the function for which eyesight was selected in the first place to be better carried out.

Now it seems you've swung in the opposite direction. I can think of lots of examples where truth-neutral cognition is evolutionarily useful--such as in overestimating the quality of our children, or in some of our moral or aesthetic beliefs.

I don't see the special pleading. You are the one claiming that truth-apt cognition is always preferred. I've also provided a reason why it would be preferred in most cases, so no special pleading there either.

Edit: Some of my last remarks rely on substituting "truth-apt cognition" for "intelligence," which might be unfair to your actual arguments. I just having really been talking about intelligence (understood as either being smarter or as cognitive ability in this thread.

Yes. This is why the truth_1 and truth_2 distinction was made. We hold many (true) beliefs about the universe which do not pertain to any evolutionary mechanisms ("these exist infinitely many primes"). The question is both about the reliability of those other beliefs and whether those beliefs are reasonably explained using a purely materialistc/naturalistic mechanism.

Okay.

Thanks for clarifying the language on this. I will adopt the truth-apt language to narrow the conversation, and I'll take "intelligence" off the table. (I'm not yet sure if I think that this switch changes the fundamentals of my position. In particular, comparing truth-neutral and truth-apt may not fully encompass the salient points. "Intelligence" not only includes recognition of truth, but also recognition of falsity. It would be something more like truth-value-discerning-apt, and not just truth-apt.)

This is an example of where I question truth-neutral cognition as a term to stand opposed to truth-apt. If beliving that children are better than they are is evolutionarily advantageous, this would indicate not a truth-neutral cognition (is "random" in its ability to detect truth), but actually a falsity-apt adaptation (ie, being prone to beliving a false claim is beneficial).

Btw, "beliefs" is really not the best framing, it is better to say "mental processes" or perhaps "mental faculties". All of those were developed based on evolution, and if they are reliably truth apt, what is going on here is applying them to new types of questions and getting new beliefs, but using the same old mental processes. So certainly the answer to whether there are infinitely many primes or not does not have an evolutionary advantage, but having the mental faculties that let us answer that question very likely did have an evolutionary advantage, which is exactly why we evolved them. There is some meaningful distinctions, to be sure, between these different domains of knowledge, but it is not quite the gapping chasm you seem to imply.