Monday, January 21, 2013

Schliesser on the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism


I commented recently on the remarks about Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos made by Eric Schliesser over at the New APPS blog.  Schliesser has now posted an interesting set of objections to Alvin Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism” (EAAN), which features in Nagel’s book.  Schliesser’s latest comments illustrate, I think, how very far one must move away from what Wilfred Sellars called the “manifest image” in order to try to respond to the most powerful objections to naturalism -- and how the result threatens naturalism with incoherence (as it does with Alex Rosenberg’s more extreme position).

The EAAN

First let me summarize Plantinga’s EAAN, which I think does pose a powerful challenge to naturalism, though I don’t think it shows quite what Plantinga thinks it does.  (Plantinga’s most recent statement and defense of the argument can be found in Where the Conflict Really Lies, which I recently reviewed for First Things.)

The EAAN begins by noting that what natural selection favors is behavior that is conducive to reproductive success.  Such behavior might be associated with true beliefs, but it might not be; it is certainly possible that adaptive behavior could be associated instead with beliefs that happen to be false.  In that case, though, there is nothing about natural selection per se that could guarantee that our cognitive faculties reliably produce true beliefs.  A given individual belief would have about a 50-50 chance of being true.  And the probability that the preponderance of true beliefs over false ones would be great enough to make our cognitive faculties reliable is very small indeed.

Now if evolution is only part of the story of the origin of our cognitive faculties, this is not necessarily a problem.  For example, if there is a God who ensures that the neurological processes generated by natural selection are generally correlated with true beliefs, then our cognitive faculties will be reliable.  But suppose that, as naturalism claims, there isn’t more to the story.  Then for all we know, our cognitive faculties are not reliable.  They may be reliable, but we will have no reason to believe that they are, and good reason to believe that they are not.  Now that means that we also have good reason to doubt the beliefs that are generated by those faculties.  For the naturalist, that will include belief in naturalism itself.  Naturalism, then, when conjoined with evolution, is self-defeating.  Evolution, concludes Plantinga, is thus better interpreted within a non-naturalistic framework.  

I think the basic thrust of this argument is correct, though I prefer the related argument that generally goes under the name of “the argument from reason” and has been defended in different versions by Karl Popper, Victor Reppert and William Hasker, and which I endorsed in Philosophy of Mind and The Last Superstition.  For one thing, I don’t think the basic point of the argument has anything to do with weighing probabilities, so that Plantinga’s tendency to state the argument in probabilistic terms needlessly muddies the waters somewhat.  The key point is rather that the logical relations that hold between thoughts cannot in principle be reduced to, supervenient upon, or in any way explained in terms of relations of efficient causality between material elements.  See the post on Popper just linked to for a summary of the argument as I would state it.

I also think that it is a mistake to suppose that the EAAN gives direct support to theism, specifically -- as opposed, say, to a non-theistic teleological view of the world (such as Nagel puts forward in Mind and Cosmos).  In Where the Conflict Really Lies, Plantinga acknowledges (rightly, in my view) that design inferences of the sort associated with William Paley and “Intelligent Design” theory do not constitute strong arguments for theism.  But he suggests reinterpreting the tendency to see design in complex biological phenomena as a kind of “perception” rather than an inference or argument.  Just as you can perceive that someone is angry from the expression on his face, so too, Plantinga suggests, can you perceive that an organ was designed from the order it exhibits.  And just as the former perceptual belief is rational despite its typically not involving an inference or argument, so too is the latter rational even if it does not involve an inference or argument.

There’s a lot that could be said about this, but the most important thing to say is that it is simply too quick.  As any Aristotelian can tell you, it is one thing to attribute a function to something, but quite another to attribute design to it.  That roots have the function of anchoring a plant to the ground and taking in nutrients may well be something we just perceive on close examination.  But that is precisely because having such functions is of the nature of roots -- something built into them, as it were.  In that respect they are very different from an artifact like a watch, whose metallic parts do not have a time-telling function built into them by nature.  That function has to be imposed on them from outside, which is why a watch requires a designer.  But precisely because natural objects are not artifacts, to perceive functionality or order in them is not ipso facto to perceive design.  And that means that while Plantinga’s EAAN and defense of the rationality of “perceiving” functionality in nature strike a blow against the naturalist’s dogmatic rejection of teleology, they do not by themselves constitute reasons to embrace theism, specifically.  (For more on the distinction between function and design, see this post, this post, this article, and other earlier posts dealing with the difference between an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of nature and “Intelligent Design” theory.)

That is not to say that a divine intellect is not ultimately responsible for the order of things.  But for the Aristotelian (and for Thomists, who build on an Aristotelian foundation) that is a claim which certainly does require an argument, and an argument which does not conflate function and design, as too many Christian apologists have done at least since the time of William Paley, but which Aquinas’s Fifth Way -- though often mistakenly assimilated to Paley’s argument -- does not.  (I’ve defended the Fifth Way in several places, including in Aquinas.)

The bottom line is that what the EAAN/”argument from reason” shows, in my view, is that we cannot coherently trust our cognitive faculties unless we suppose that they are directed toward the attainment of truth as their telos or end.  But this does not by itself entail any extrinsic, artifact-like teleology of the Paleyan sort.  One could opt instead for an immanent teleology of the Aristotelian sort (and then try to resist a Fifth Way-style argument to the effect that this sort of teleology too ultimately requires a divine cause).  This is, in effect, Nagel’s strategy.

Schliesser’s response to the EAAN

Let’s turn now to Schliesser’s remarks.  Do read his entire post (which, never fear, isn’t as verbose as mine often are) in case I have missed any important elements of the context in interpreting the passages I’ll be quoting from it.  Schliesser begins as follows:

[L]et's grant -- for the sake of argument -- the claim [made by Nagel, following Plantinga] that "Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole."  What follows from this?

My quick and dirty answer is: nothing. For the crucial parts of science really do not rely on such mechanisms of belief formation.  Much of scientific reason is or can be performed by machines; as I have argued before, ordinary cognition, perception, and locution does not really matter epistemically in the sciences. 

End quote.  If I understand him correctly, what Schliesser is saying here is that even if the EAAN casts doubt on the reliability of our cognitive faculties (given naturalism), that is irrelevant to the question of whether science is reliable, for what is crucial to science can be done by machines, and the EAAN does not cast doubt on their reliability.  He also writes:

[Nagel] thinks that somehow there are "norms of thought which, if we follow them, will tend to lead us toward the correct answers" to "factual and practical" questions… Now… if this claim is true, it is utterly unsubstantive--none of the non-trivial results in physics or mathematics are the consequence of following the norms of thought. (I realize that there is a conception of logic that treats it as providing us with the norms of thought, but even if one were to grant this conception, it does not follow one obtains thereby mathematical or scientific results worth having.)

Schliesser’s point here, I think, is that the substantive results of science are not arrived at mechanically via the simplistic application of a set of more or less commonsense rules of the sort one finds in a logic textbook.  That is to say, scientists don’t proceed by saying: “OK, now let’s take the traditional Laws of Thought, the valid syllogism forms, inference rules like modus ponens, etc. and start cranking out some implications from what we’ve observed.”   Scientific practice is far more complex than that, especially insofar as it involves the use of computers following algorithms very unlike the patterns of reasoning we rely on in ordinary life.  Hence (again, if I am reading Schliesser correctly) if the EAAN shows that ordinary patterns of reasoning are unreliable on the assumption of naturalism, that is irrelevant to the reliability of science insofar as it does not rely on these patterns anyway.  Continuing in this vein, Schliesser writes:

Okay, let's assume -- for the sake of argument -- that it matters that humans are engaged in scientific practices that generate the building blocks of theoretical accounts.  In most of these the ordinary or average products of Darwinian evolution as such are not allowed near the lab.  In fact, the ordinary or average products of primary, secondary, and university education are also not allowed inside the lab.  Insanely high "achievement" over, say, twenty years of human capital formation is required before one becomes a little cog in the collaborative, scientific enterprise. (It's likely, in fact, that such achievement may just be a consequence of being a relatively rare freak of nature--a "monster" in eighteenth century vocabulary.) Parts of this achievement undoubtedly takes advantage of our selected for cognitive capacities and, perhaps, enhances these in subtle ways.  A large art of this achievement is the actual unlearning -- or generating the capacity for temporary disabling -- lots of our avarage Darwinian programming.  Moreover, much of the unlearning takes place after one's formal education is complete and inside the lab, where one's cognitive capacities are transformed into engagement with particular model organisms and particular specialized techniques. One does not need to accept all of Foucault, to see that the disciplining of scientific agents is as much an enhancement of human nature as a battle with pre-existing nature. So, "in science" our "cognitive capacities" are not used "directly." (Moreover, in so far as any human perception takes place in the epistemic processes of science much effort and skill is directed at making it entirely trivial.)

End quote.  Here I take it that Schliesser’s point is that the cognitive tendencies hardwired into us by natural selection are unlearned in the process of scientific training and practice -- the whole point of science being, as it were, to replace the “manifest image” that our natural cognitive tendencies generate with the “scientific image” (again to allude to Sellars) -- so that it doesn’t matter if those cognitive tendencies are unreliable.  

So, as I read him, the reliability of the cognitive tendencies put into us by natural selection is in Schliesser’s view irrelevant to the practice of science -- and thus to the defensibility of naturalism, which regards the scientific description of the world as either exhaustive or at least the only description worth bothering with -- for two reasons.  First, the relatively few human beings actually involved in scientific practice in a serious way do not rely on the cognitive tendencies in question in the first place, but seek precisely to resist and replace them.  And second, the modes of cognition they are engaged in can be carried out by machines anyway, which don’t have any hardwired human cognitive tendencies to resist.  So the EAAN fails, because it falsely supposes that it is the reliability of those hardwired human cognitive tendencies that naturalism presupposes.

Schliesser on our cognitive faculties

What should we think of all this?  Let’s consider first the claim that scientific practice involves radically moving away from our hardwired cognitive tendencies and their deliverances.  There is of course much truth in this, and I think Schliesser is right to suggest that any criticism of naturalism that does not factor it in is superficial.  However, this by no means suffices to disarm the EAAN.  

To see why, consider a couple of analogies.  Suppose you criticized a portrait or landscape artist for his poor drawing ability and he responded: “Drawing?  I don’t need no stinking drawing!  I’m a painter!  Hell, I haven’t done a complete line drawing since I was in school, and I rarely if ever even sketch out my subject before getting out the paints.  No, it’s all in the brushwork.  Obviously you don’t understand what we artists do.”  Or consider a dancer who suggested that the physiology of ordinary walking was irrelevant to understanding what she does, since she has over the course of many years had to acquire habits of movement that go well beyond anything the ordinary person is capable of, and even to unlearn certain natural tendencies.  (Think e.g. of the unusual stress a ballet dancer has to put on the foot, or the need to overcome our natural reluctance to move in ways that would for most people result in a fall.)  

The problem with such claims, of course, is that the fact painting or dancing involve going well beyond, and even to some extent unlearning, certain more basic habits does not entail that those habits are entirely irrelevant to the more advanced ones or that they can be entirely abandoned.  On the contrary, the more advanced habits necessarily presuppose that the more basic ones are preserved at least to some extent.  Even if drawing constitutes a very small part of producing a certain painting, and even if no sketch in pencil were made prior to getting out the paints, a painter without skill in drawing is going to produce a bad painting.  (The point has nothing to do with realism, by the way; a good painting done in the surrealist, impressionist, pointillist, or cubist style also presupposes the skills involved in drawing.)  Dancers have to have at least the muscles, bones, comfort with one’s body, ease of movement, etc. that are involved in ordinary walking even if they must also have much more than that.  The skills involved in ordinary drawing and walking constitute a framework for the more advanced skills, a framework that can be so covered over and modified that it may go virtually unnoticed in the course of painting or dancing, but which nevertheless cannot in principle be altogether abandoned.

Now by the same token, the ordinary patterns of reasoning as familiar to common sense as to the professional logician -- modus ponens, disjunctive reasoning, conjunctive reasoning, basic syllogistic reasoning, basic arithmetic, etc.  --  are, as Schliesser implies, a “trivial” part of science, but only in the sense that being able to walk over to the barre is a trivial part of being a ballet dancer, or the ability to draw a line or circle is a trivial part of being a painter.  While being able to walk over to the barre is obviously very far from sufficient for being a good ballet dancer, it is nonetheless absolutely necessary for being one; and while being able to draw a line or circle is obviously very far from sufficient for being a good painter, it too is still absolutely necessary for being one.  Similarly, while having the ability to reason in accordance with modus ponens, basic arithmetic, etc. is very far from sufficient for being able to do serious science, it is still an absolutely necessary condition for doing it.  The reason scientists don’t make a big deal of these “norms of thought” is the same reason ballet dancers don’t make a big deal out of their ability to walk and painters don’t go on about their skill in holding a pencil.  It is not that basic inference rules, walking, and drawing are irrelevant to science, dancing, and painting, respectively; it is rather that their relevance is so blindingly obvious that it goes without saying.

As Hilary Putnam pointed out in Representation and Reality, if you are going to call “folk psychology” into question -- which is what Schliesser is essentially doing (at least in the context of scientific practice, if not in other contexts) -- then you are going to have to call “folk logic” into question as well.  But we have nothing remotely close to an account of how this can coherently be done.  However far removed from ordinary cognition scientific modes of reasoning might be, they will presuppose fundamental logical notions like truth, consistency, validity, and the like, and our ability to recognize them when we see them.  And that means that they will presuppose the very abilities that even uneducated, untrained, pre-scientific “folk” possess.  (The fact that such “folk” sometimes make basic, systematic logical errors doesn’t change anything.  Pointing out to undergraduates that “This inference seems valid, but it is not” requires that they be able to see validity somewhere, and in particular in the argument that tells them that the inference in question is not really valid after all.)

Something similar is true of our perceptual faculties, which modern physics (with its account of the world as made up of colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless particles etc. -- think of Eddington’s two tables)  might seem to have moved beyond altogether.  That this cannot be the case is obvious from the fact that physical theory, in the name of which perception is said to be misleading, is itself empirically based and thus grounded in perception.  Science can supplement or correct what perception tells us, but it cannot coherently deny the reliability of perception wholesale.  That it is at the very least difficult to see how it could coherently do so has, as I have noted in several places (e.g. here), been noticed by a number of thinkers from Democritus to Schrödinger.

We might also note that the degree to which the actual practice of science really does involve moving beyond ordinary modes of cognition is itself a matter of controversy (as the work of thinkers like Michael Polanyi illustrates); and that equally controversial is the question of whether the methods of physics really do reveal to us the whole nature of objective material reality in the first place.  Nor need one take a purely instrumentalist view of physics to doubt that they do.  To appeal to an analogy I’ve used in earlier posts, when aircraft engineers determine how many passengers can be carried on a certain plane, they might focus exclusively on their average weight and ignore not only the passengers’ sex, ethnicity, hair color, dinner service preferences, etc., but even the actual weight of any particular passenger.  This method is very effective, and is effective precisely because it captures real features of the world, but it hardly gives us an exhaustive description of airline passengers.  Similarly, the methods of physics, which focus on those aspects of a system that are susceptible of prediction and control and thus abstract away aspects which cannot be modeled mathematically, are extremely effective, and effective precisely because they capture real features of the world.  But it simply does not follow that the description of physical reality they afford us is exhaustive, any more than the engineer’s description is exhaustive.  And thus the fact that that description is radically different from the picture afforded by perception does not entail that it falsifies the latter.  To assume otherwise is (as I have noted before) to commit what Alfred North Whitehead called the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.”  

In any event, whether we think our ordinary, pre-scientific perceptual and rational faculties are unreliable to only a minor extent or to a significant extent, we cannot coherently regard them as fundamentally unreliable.  And that they are fundamentally reliable is all the EAAN requires.  Even science at its most rarefied presupposes that at some level our senses tell us the truth in a systematic way, and that basic arithmetic, modus ponens, conjunctive reasoning, etc. are valid modes of inference.  EAAN claims that naturalism is inconsistent with this presupposition, and nothing Schliesser has said shows otherwise.

Schliesser on machines

But couldn’t Schliesser now appeal to the suggestion that the role of human beings in science is irrelevant anyway, since what they do could just as well be done by machines?  

No, one reason being that the machines in question must be designed and constructed by human beings -- they don’t grow on trees after all!  That means that, however it is they get the results they do, the machines will be reliable only if the cognitive faculties of those who designed and constructed them --namely, human beings -- are reliable.  (Nor would it help to suggest that machines that were constructed by other machines rather than by us wouldn’t face this problem; for the machine-constructing machines, or their ancestors anyway, would have been constructed by us, so that the problem is only pushed back a stage or several stages.)

But a deeper problem is that however they get here, machines in fact cannot carry out the cognitive tasks associated with scientific reason.  What they can do is merely serve as instruments to assist us as we carry out those tasks, as telescopes, microscopes, electrometers, scales, slide rules, pencil and paper, etc. do.  Schliesser is essentially taking for granted the computationalist theory of mind, on which cognitive processes in general are computational processes (in the sense of “computational” associated with modern computer science), so that they could be carried out by a machine as well as by us.  The “machine scientists” Schliesser is describing would accordingly be characterizable in terms of a kind of “android epistemology,” or perhaps in terms of what Paul Thagard calls “computational philosophy of science.”  But you don’t have to be an anti-naturalist to think that this whole idea is wrongheaded.  You just have to “get your Searle on,” as it were.

I am alluding here not to John Searle’s famous Chinese Room argument, but to the less well-known but more penetrating argument of his paper “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” (restated in The Rediscovery of the Mind), according to which computation is not intrinsic to the physics of a system, so that it makes no sense to regard anything as carrying out a computation apart from the designers and/or users of a system who assign a computational interpretation to its processes.  (I discuss Searle’s argument in more detail in the post on Popper linked to above, since it is related to Popper’s argument.)  Saul Kripke has presented a similar argument, to the effect that there is nothing in the physical properties of any machine that can determine precisely which program it instantiates.  Any set of processes could, as far as their inherent physical properties alone are concerned, be interpreted either as the carrying out of one program or as a malfunction in the carrying out of some different program.  (I’ve discussed this argument too in greater detail in another earlier post.)

Now I think that it is in fact too strong to conclude on the basis of Searle’s, Popper’s, or Kripke’s arguments that there is nothing like computation inherent in physical processes, full stop.  The correct thing to say is rather that there is nothing like computation inherent in physical processes given an essentially materialist, anti-teleological conception of the physical.  However, if we allow that there is teleology of a broadly Aristotelian sort immanent to physical systems, then (as I’ve noted in earlier posts like this one and this one) we can make sense of the idea that certain physical systems are inherently directed toward the realization of this computational process rather than that one.  And if Nagel’s brand of naturalism is correct (though of course I don’t myself think it is), then such teleology can be made sense of without reference to a divine cause.  But what we would be left with in such a case is precisely Nagel’s form of naturalism -- a form that acknowledges the force of the EAAN and affirms teleology so as to get around problems of the sort the argument raises -- and this can hardly help to salvage Schliesser’s objection to the EAAN.

And of course, even if some computational processes are inherent to nature, that wouldn’t include those exhibited by the machines we use in our scientific endeavors, which are man-made and have only a derived teleology and thus a derivative status as “computers.”  We would be the true computers, with the machines serving as mere enhancements to our computational activity, just as binoculars enhance our vision but do not themselves see anything.  The reliability of the machines’ processes would, again, presuppose the reliability of our cognitive processes; and if the reliability of the latter is grounded in immanent teleology, then the force of the EAAN has been conceded and Nagel’s position will have been embraced rather than rebutted.

The bottom line is that we cannot altogether get outside our cognitive skins, even if we can modify, supplement, or even eliminate parts of those skins.  Schliesser’s position seems to suppose otherwise insofar as it implies that we could coherently practice science and accept its results while simultaneously denying the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  In fact, however we spell out the details of their relationship, Sellars’ “scientific image” is ultimately a part of the “manifest image” itself, so that the former cannot coherently be appealed to as a way of undermining the latter.  To quote Putnam quoting William James, “the trail of the human serpent is over all” -- or if not over all, then at least all over science, which is no less essentially human a practice than dancing, painting, machine-building, or philosophizing are.

434 comments:

  1. Oh nagel is a creatiomist too, sheesh have to tell him that he is not an atheist even though he thinks he is!

    Oh and Fodor....

    Oh well any non naturalist is creationist, no need to uphold the main tenets of creationism 8D!

    ------------------------------------

    So Plantinga means, that without any guidance, which Plantinga would atrribute this guidance to God, you have no one to choose any parts of the landscape of possible beliefs that a creature would create, or that will arise in the creature's mind.

    You are missing the point, obviously.

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  2. @Danieos Thus the evolution of cognitive faculties that will reliably form true beliefs about what lies behind the phenomenal world provides no evolutionary advantage whatsoever.

    Perhaps that helps explain why our beliefs about metaphysics are so diverse and why it is impossible to achieve consensus about them.

    As I've stressed before in this conversation, science is a methodology for seeing some of "what likes behind". For things that are beyond the reach of both everyday cognition and science, we are flailing around in the dark.

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  3. " What makes you assume that any particular participant in this discussion is American, or male for that matter?"


    If you think for a moment you will probably see that I was tacitly granting non-Americans, male or female, the benefit of the doubt.



    "... Marx, whatever you think of his thought, could be a fantastic writer at times. "

    I have no idea what you suppose you mean by "fantastic", unless you find manifesto-like polemics exciting. Or, perhaps you have some of the contorted turgidities of Das Kapital in mind. Well, maybe it reads better in German. Some Germans have claimed so.

    My German is not good enough to judge.




    "I highly doubt you've read much of him."
    January 24, 2013 at 6:46 PM


    In which case you are unequivocally wrong. Which leads me to surmise in turn that you either have not read through the E.P.M. or you have an idiosyncratic notion of what qualifies as "fantastic" writing.

    By the way, they are all on line nowadays, @http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/index.htm. So it's not as if it still takes classroom immersion to gain access to the greater part of Marx's published work.

    But for any interested, here's a review of one of the several texts we used in addition to the professor's own work, back when: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1EW9QVYZ4G211/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=039309040X&nodeID=283155&store=books

    And of course there's this "classic" Marx piece which should give any of you species beings not yet weary of Marx, a taste of his prose style and moral sensibilities.

    The guy was, you know, a bag of shit ... if I am allowed to say that here?

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  4. Eduardo said:

    "you have no one to choose any parts of the landscape of possible beliefs that a creature would create, or that will arise in the creature's mind."

    This sounds very strange. Is that your view of evolution - God chooses which pathways to belief are allowed or possible? So, to you, in a naturalistic universe, there would be no constraints or pathways toward correct belief - just an infinite (or would you prefer 'unconstrained'?) number of probabilities at each and every step of evolution?

    Can you elaborate on how this 'landscape of possible beliefs' would prevent, in a hypothetical evolutionary scenario (if possible), the formation of correct beliefs, i.e., how or in what way it would be unconstrained? I would like to try to understand this.

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  5. >Can you elaborate on how this 'landscape of possible beliefs' would prevent, in a hypothetical evolutionary scenario (if possible), the formation of correct beliefs,

    Everybody here already concedes that it is possible in this scenario for the formation of correct beliefs.

    Good grief do we have to keep addressing this straw man?

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  6. "Can you elaborate on how this 'landscape of possible beliefs' would prevent, in a hypothetical evolutionary scenario (if possible), the formation of correct beliefs . . . ?"

    It doesn't prevent them. It just doesn't guarantee them.

    So yeah, BenYachov's right. Straw man.

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  7. Okay, I was just reacting to 'there will be no one to choose' etc., which sounded bizarre. I was interested in what Eduardo's understanding of evolution under naturalism was, not really in some gotcha against the EAAN.

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  8. Besides some apparent uncertainty as to whether the arguments' terms and assumptions have been understood or formulated in a coherent enough manner to be debated effectively [here], the comments of Yair and Eduardo and others illustrate once again that there is another element in play which conditions any exchanges with the more doctrinaire materialists. And that is that charges of logical inconsistency, vagueness and lack of real explanatory power, are for them, simply not the same kind of problems the usual follower of Feser's blog see them as.

    The reason is simple and we all learned it early on, but forget it: The doctrinaire materialists are not on their own assumptions engaged in the same kind of enterprise Eduardo or Yair are.

    We can all recall from our survey courses in school that the terms 'true beliefs' and 'explanation' and 'understanding' just don't carry the same freight with the evolutionary materialist of the behaviorist stripe.

    And it's probably true that the broad swath of Feser's critics here are operating off of classical behaviorist assumptions whether they are conscious of it or not.

    Existence for them starts as the more or less blind bumping around into environmental resistance until culling, habit and accumulated experience, enhance the organism's ability to navigate "successfully" ... until such time it doesn't anymore.

    There's no assumption that there is a comprehensive reality out there which is ultimately intelligible; and explanation and intelligibility reduce to descriptive behaviors and environmental manipulations which are finally inexplicable in any but self-referential terms.

    If you say that that attitude is not only incoherent when formulated in argument, but in practice also constitutes a metaphysical view of its own, you will get back what is essentially a shrug, no matter how elaborate the verbalization of it may be.

    Their "project" uses many of the same words, but those words as we all have seen here, don't really mean the same thing; any attempt to restrict the use of certain words to clearly traceable and established definitions or sense, is viewed as a form of tyranny.

    Eduardo reasonably said...

    "Tell us exactly what naturalism believes there is, then show that the evidence point to all those options ..."

    But that is not really the naturalist's project.

    and Eduardo said...

    "Now if you want to do science to rest the case, you will have to cook up WITHIN naturalism ...

    Going straight to experiments means nothing because the experiment itself doesn't pressupose naturalism, so no way to guarantee that the experiment will show what is true in naturalism."

    At which the doctrinaire materialist shrugs.

    Yair said,

    "@All: 'It appears to me we're stuck in a rut where we can't even agree on what the arguments are "really" about ...'

    I believe at this point more formalism and rigor might be productive, but [involves more] than I can afford at the moment. ..."

    But the doctrinaire naturalist doesn't really care.

    To quote our friend Marx here,

    "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

    The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. ...

    The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. "

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

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  9. I am amused at how effortlessly everyone seems to miss the point.

    Evolution does not guarantee anything. What it does is make certain things more likely. If a biological propensity towards correct beliefs lead to even a small increase in survival and reproduction, then that propensity will be selected for and become more widespread than alternatives.

    If I were appointed education czar, I would make statistics and probabalistic thinking the centerpieces of the curriculum, from kindergarten on. Even though (according to Laplace) “probability is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation”, the ability to think probablistically seems to be very rare, even or especially among the educated.

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  10. @Yair

    Some more mistakes.

    >Whether God creates creatures magically by saying magic words and waving a wand, or whether he does so by arranging a predetermined harmony - these are all forms of creationism,

    Loosely all forms of Theism that postulate a creator God are "creationist" but this is a trivial use of the term "creationist".

    Just as a loose definition of religion as "belief in Man's ultimate concern" would make all forms of Positive Atheism & or any philosophical views a "religion".

    Again trivial.

    >The only form of theism that isn't creationist is a deist god that set up laws of nature that naturally lead to the creation of life, without him needing to meddle whether directly or indirectly.

    You have a clearly Humean and Theistic Personalist view of Divine Interventionism.

    I see no difference between what you have described above pertaining to a Classic view of God in conjunction with the doctrine of Divine Providence.

    Even a Paley/Humean type interventionist Deity as you describe above could have used evolution in the above way to create life(and of course save his "interventions" for parting the Red Sea and or making the Sun dance at Fatima etc).

    So even a foul Theistic Personalist deity of whose existence I am a strong Atheist toward wouldn't be "Creationist".

    >Such a deity still has something to do with evolution, but that something does not include distorting it.

    Rather you are equivocating on your "god" concepts and you are no better then those in the Theistic camp that call Atheism a religion.

    Those are lovely "talking points" and a way to ad hominid your opponent but in the end it does not lead to any substantive critique of EAAN.

    The Churchland stuff brought up by RS is way more substantial not that I at this time endorse it or not.

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  11. Chris

    Sorry hahahaha, I was replying to you but it tooo so long people replied to you before. But that is plantinga's words, not really my view XD


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  12. Anon

    Yeah we know, the question is if evolution within naturalism can lean towards true beliefs ....

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  13. Chris

    Look for #1 on comments 1 to 200, i wrote plantinga's argument there so you will get more or less what he thinks.

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  14. the question is if evolution within naturalism can lean towards true beliefs ....

    Presumably it is not so hard to accept that mundane true beliefs can be good for survival. An antelope that believes the lion is in back of him when it is actually in front won’t live long enough to reproduce, an antelope with a more accurate belief has a better chance.

    How true belief of that sort can lead to more abstract true beliefs, about the laws of motion or the Pythagorean theorem or the existence or nonexistence of God is an interesting and not really solved question. But cognition has to start somewhere, and we have pretty good ideas about how and where it starts.

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  15. > An antelope that believes the lion is in back of him when it is actually in front won’t live long enough to reproduce, an antelope with a more accurate belief has a better chance.

    What if the antelope with the above beliefs also believes the best way to avoid the lion is too "run toward it"?

    Problem solved.

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  16. Nope, unless... beliefs can only generate one possible action and that true beliefs are the ones that will save you from dying in this univocal relation. If there is at least two beliefs that generate the same response, i can defineately say that cosmo visions within the premises of the argument are not warranted.

    Putting simple, if there are no falsities in the world I absolutely agree wtih you

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  17. There os another way: you can just say that everything in the world is wrong in terms of percentage.... No wait.... This wouldnt warrant naturalism too forget it.

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  18. Anon you are supposing that beliefs are only abstract ideas, but we are saying that beliefs are anu deliberance of our cognitive systems. Seriously I said that 300+ posts in the past ahhahhah.

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  19. Eduardo,

    I read your summary - you did a lot of work there, thanks. I lose the argument at #46, though - the examples are so silly that it's hard for me to credit them with relevance. It would've been nice if he had thought of more evolutionarily relevant/realistic examples.

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  20. I think this conversation is over, we haven't really reached any consensus but the way things are going I think it might more profittable to just analyse the arguments ourselves.

    I mean it seems to me that Anon thinks it is absurd that he can not use everyday experience as a counter argument, after all it seems he believes that beliefs are just abstract ideas, in the realm of guesses about the world. Hrafn thought the argument was bad because he smelled a rat... Yair is hell bent on proving that the argument tries to show something that some bit of scientific research can show to be wrong because you know... doing experiment is pressuposing naturalism, so any correlation a scientist find or any idea a scientist can cook up WILL AUTOMATICALLY be part of naturalism! We all here agree to disagree to that.

    Seriously perhaps RS was the only who said something of substance about the problem, as usual he always has some pretty strong things to say...

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  21. The problem I think is that he is not a guy with extensive work on neurons which is what a naturalist claim to be a belief or related to a belief. So what he does is study relations between beliefs and behavior because he thinks that is where things will end up in the discussion.

    For instance, if a belief is non existence then it will fall in option number 1, it belief is a pattern that rises during a firing of a neuron then it will maybe be a relation of the option 2.

    So really you don't really need the actual structures that exist simply because we are pressuposing naturalism and naturalism is not compatible with any possible structures.

    So that is why he never uses examples, simply because you don't really need them.

    About #46, he is simply trying to prove that a belief that creates behavior "using" it's structure and it's content and it is an adaptation, it helps the creature to live on and reproduce, may just be false. You don't have to have accurate beliefs to generate the right action.

    The argument could be beaten if someone could come up within naturalism (Depends on how you define naturalism) a new form of relation that eliminates false beliefs and make false belief way more likely to be chosen. Basically somehow the systems that created the structures in the past and the structures that are working now must choose within that landscape the correct beliefs.

    But I think the real problem is that naturalism is just poorly defined, so instead of using the definition of naturalism and starting with naturalism makes way more sense to analyse the argument, see what scenarios leads to the destruction of their own beliefs and which ones don't and see if any of those match what we think is naturalism (Yeah I quite literally saying that we for all I know may have different definitions of what naturalism is)

    The chain of thought is quite simple, and it surely won't give the same answer all the time.

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  22. DNW

    Whether I was someone so trusty of my reason... I would pretty much stop posting after what you said XD.

    If I understood you correctly

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  23. Eduardo said...

    "DNW

    Whether I was someone so trusty of my reason... I would pretty much stop posting after what you said XD."


    LOL You would stop posting if you were me? Or if you were you?


    " If I understood you correctly "


    I think what's been highlighted in this swirling debate Eduardo is not just the fact that there needed to be a certain amount of clarification of terms, and agreement on precisely what was being argued. That I think, and somewhat remarkably, given the heat that has been generated, is now conceded by most participants with a certain attitude of good will.

    What's equally interesting to me however, is that some simply appear to have no real interest in that project at all, viewing it as futile in principle: as an effort to bring something irreducibly out of focus to "standard" reason, into focus.

    Thus, what looks to me, or I suppose to you or Yair (despite your disagreements) like antinomies or self-refutingly incoherent lines of argument, are simply of very little interest to those materialists whose aims are not so much to understand reality as a whole as to gain mastery over some portion of it.

    I think that we all learned of that dichotomy in school in our first survey philosophy courses. But the lesson fades with time, and we assume that everyone values coherence in the same way, and so we get into these peculiarly disconnected arguments.

    The doctrinaires do occasionally respond to charges of intellectual incoherence of course. But it's mainly when they perceive that the charge or fall-out from it will spread widely enough to threaten their egos or authority by making them look stupid. Otherwise they just don't care.

    To some degree they are just doing what Marx did, by ruling "the question" itself out of court. Trouble for them is that they haven't the power, at least yet, to keep it out.

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  24. I mean, what I got from what you said was... oh well Eduardo what you just did was IN VAIN! If it was me, I better off just shut up XD.

    I mean I wish I could just come out when I felt there is some nice talk to be had and I will learn stuff or teach something... BUT errrr, I don't think you can let such behavior go unchecked as if it was okay ... =_=, I so I keep trying, but I agree, it is in vain no doubt.

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  25. BLS: IIRC, Plantinga says its unlikely, not impossible. But that's my issue with it, I want to know how he arrived at that conclusion. How unlikely, exactly?

    It has to be "low or inscrutable" because the alternative is that it has to be high and we know it. But that means saying that evolution has to produce creatures with reliable faculties, which makes no sense for an "undirected" process. Of course, if evolution is directed (whatever form that might take), for example if it is controlled by God, then that's perfectly consistent. But evolution can't be known likely to work that way for no reason at all, which is the predicament the evolutionary naturalist finds himself in.

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  26. Anonymous: Actually, you'd also have to say that quite a lot of evolutionary theory has been advanced and justified by creationists. Brother Mendel alone would suffice to get quite a lot of the project regarded as 'built on creationist theories' if you want to play that game.

    Indeed. If "creationist" isn't the most abused term, it's only because "evolution" gets abused more. On any natural, etymological meaning of creation+ist, almost everyone is a creationist, and it has nothing to do with evolution one way or the other. But in present fact, the most reliable meaning that can be gotten out of the word is that a lot of point-missing is about to follow.

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  27. Anonymous: I am amused at how effortlessly everyone seems to miss the point.
    Evolution does not guarantee anything. What it does is make certain things more likely.


    It amuses me less, but this argument does seem to inspire an awful lot of point-missing. Of course, "evolution" doesn't make anything more or less likely per se; it doesn't do anything. There's no "force of evolution" that moves stuff around, it's a description of how things play out. If correct beliefs increase survival, then they'll spread. And if incorrect beliefs increase survival, then they will spread instead [or as well]. The fact that we can think up scenarios that make the former possible gives us no ground to think that it must predominate. To do that, we'd need some additional facts. Plantinga simply points out that the theist has additional such premises to draw on where the naturalist doesn't.

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  28. Now that is a good point Mr green... wow 1 post, and you did more than anybody ... in 1 post XD.

    But so if we can come up with all sort of alternatives what exactly is missing to turn those into worrisome for real???

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  29. Hrfan
    "For true beliefs to undergo positive selection, all that is required is that they are positively correlated with pro-survival behaviour. Byproduct selection of correlated characteristics is widely documented within evolutionary biology (see for example research on biological spandrels). This is in fact a major unaddressed flaw in the EAAN."

    Natural selection cannot select beliefs.
    The DNA codes for proteins, not for mental states.

    But, even if it could select for mental states that still undercuts your view. Because, in principle, those mental states wouldn't be selected because they conferred truth but only because they confer a survival advantage.
    If you're going to maintain that only true beliefs confer a survival advantage you better be willing to back that up with a lengthy tome; because that is one pretty large connection you need to establish.

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  30. It doesn't matter how naturalism is defined.

    The crucial question is: How do you break out of those explanatory and/or determining factors of your own version of naturalism, to assess naturalism itself, and assign to it the status of being true?

    In other words, how does any version of naturalism whatsoever get meaningfully labeled "true", in any sense beyond the status of being merely the product of those explanatory and/or determining factors that define naturalism?

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  31. And while we're at it, let's find out why naturalists use reason as some kind of Invisible Theistic Mind-God.

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  32. Eduardo said: "I think this conversation is over, we haven't really reached any consensus"

    Yep, we're in agreement there.

    Have fun y'all. May you come out of Plantinga's confusion, sometime, somehow.

    I'm outta here.

    Cheers,
    Yair

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  33. The confusion ... he never showed to be true XD.

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  34. Have fun y'all. May you come out of Plantinga's confusion, sometime, somehow.

    Well, when you come to grips with what Plantinga is saying, that'll be progress.

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