asdf32 posted:

I'm not totally getting this.

Evolution is a powerful influence over behavior (still a poorly understood and often downplayed one) but the example given (run from lion) is an emotional reflex not a belief.

There are many many ways that evolution influences our behavior at all time. Evolution primes our emotional responses, our reflexes, provides us with basic mental faculties like spacial reasoning to navigate, memory, image/sound/sensory interpretation, an ability to count, and ability to recognize other human faces and a host of other specially adapted mental modules, reflexes and responses that we often take for granted.

I don't think these are beliefs and I don't think we can easily evaluate whether they're true or false.

blowfish posted:

Effectronica does not know much about evolution and is attempting to ask questions about the relationship between knowledge/belief and behaviour at a high school student level. As you pointed out, it is not strictly necessary to know or understand a situation for an adaptive behavioural response. Effectronica also is also ignorant about as to why belief and knowledge are more accurate than expected by chance in the cases where they exist, which is because evolutionary processes favour building adequate models of the world. From this point, Effectronica furthermore does not understand why knowledge is then not perfect, which is because 1. nothing can be perfect and 2. because evolution only favours good thinking to the point of it being sufficient rather than to perfection. Effectronica also doesn't understand the distinction between simple reflex-like behaviour and more complex behaviour.

Smudgie Buggler posted:

Beliefs are behaviours. Despite the way we talk about them, beliefs aren't possessions. They're not properties. To say we have a particular belief is to say we think a certain pattern, and thinking is a doing. Behaviour.

rudatron posted:

• Beliefs are not independent events, they can influence each other (induction). This will screw up your math.
  
• Beliefs are not subject to selection pressure, because they are not encoded genetically. Patterns of thought/kinds of intelligence are - each of which will imply a 'family' of beliefs. This will also screw up your math.
  
• The claim that most of our beliefs are true (and thus a ~special mechanism~ is needed) contradicts the previous claim that there is no natural mechanism to determine truthfulness (why there wasn't an option 5). How would you know, either way?
  
• A false belief can still result from the right kind of intelligence/thinking with bad information - you cannot necessarily use the possibility of false conclusions as a reason for rejecting the argument-form that produced them. It has to be evaluated on its own terms - which means dealing with metahpysical naturalism/parsimony

You can't dodge metaphysics, the person you're copying from is dumb, and so are you.

Series DD Funding posted:

What sorts of false-but-adaptive beliefs do you think we would have in the modern day if the supernatural didn't exist? We don't know how true Paul's beliefs actually were, after all, just that they were adaptive.

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

For the purposes of this conversation, false beliefs can be evolutionarily advantageous.

Thinking that a Scarlet King Snake is an Eastern Coral Snake is a false belief, but recognizing the banded colors as poisonous snakes is probably beneficial if you ever were to come across an Eastern Coral Snake.

Brannock posted:

You're foolish if you don't believe human thought informs culture, and you're also foolish if you don't believe human thought has been informed by evolution.

blowfish posted:

Effectronica does not know much about evolution and is attempting to ask questions about the relationship between knowledge/belief and behaviour at a high school student level. As you pointed out, it is not strictly necessary to know or understand a situation for an adaptive behavioural response. Effectronica also is also ignorant about as to why belief and knowledge are more accurate than expected by chance in the cases where they exist, which is because evolutionary processes favour building adequate models of the world. From this point, Effectronica furthermore does not understand why knowledge is then not perfect, which is because 1. nothing can be perfect and 2. because evolution only favours good thinking to the point of it being sufficient rather than to perfection. Effectronica also doesn't understand the distinction between simple reflex-like behaviour and more complex behaviour.

Technogeek posted:

So, are you in fact Alvin Plantinga, or are you just plagiarizing him?

Effectronica posted:

Okay! How does natural selection act on the phenotype produced by thinking in a certain way, while still forbidding telepathy? That is, how can natural selection distinguish between thinking "Brightly-colored animals are dangerous" and "Brightly-colored animals are cuddly" without any corresponding actions to act on, while still preventing us from reading minds without taking a peek at them?

quote:

Most of our beliefs are true, in my estimation, because they conform to what our senses tell us when they are tested, and because I reject the notion that we do not perceive the world accurately through our senses. You also reject this notion, in practice if not in theory, because you typed a response, rather than rejecting it as an inaccurate perception. This does strongly suggest some differentiation between beliefs and actions, because your beliefs may well be that our senses are inaccurate, but you nevertheless acted as though they were.

Effectronica posted:

That's the point of the argument- there's no known natural mechanism to determine truthfulness of beliefs, and, besides, it's also fairly unlikely because our beliefs are not all true.

quote:

Second of all, while natural selection's influence on culture is almost certainly extremely limited

Effectronica posted:

Okay! How does natural selection act on the phenotype produced by thinking in a certain way, while still forbidding telepathy? That is, how can natural selection distinguish between thinking "Brightly-colored animals are dangerous" and "Brightly-colored animals are cuddly" without any corresponding actions to act on, while still preventing us from reading minds without taking a peek at them?

asdf32 posted:

I'm not getting how this is supposed to intersect the supernatural. I do think a lot of people stumble on this subject though because it's actually quite hard to entirely escape a belief in the supernatural.

Effectronica posted:

You should be able to demonstrate that truthfulness is inherently adaptive, without forming inaccurate beliefs to sustain your psychology.

Effectronica posted:

You should be able to demonstrate that truthfulness is inherently adaptive, without forming inaccurate beliefs to sustain your psychology.

quote:

Portia’s accurate visual recognition of potential prey is an important part of its hunting tactics. For example, in one part of the Philippines local Portia spiders attack from the rear against the very dangerous spitting spiders, which themselves hunt jumping spiders. This appears to be an instinctive behavior, as laboratory-reared Portias of this species do this the first time they encounter a spitting spider. On the other hand, they will use a head-on approach against spitting spiders that are carrying eggs. However, experiments that pitted Portias against "convincing" artificial spiders with arbitrary but consistent behavior patterns showed that Portia’s instinctive tactics are only starting points for a trial-and-error approach from which these spiders learn very quickly

Effectronica posted:

Okay! How does natural selection act on the phenotype produced by thinking in a certain way, while still forbidding telepathy? That is, how can natural selection distinguish between thinking "Brightly-colored animals are dangerous" and "Brightly-colored animals are cuddly" without any corresponding actions to act on, while still preventing us from reading minds without taking a peek at them?.

Smudgie Buggler posted:

I... I have no idea how to begin responding to this. It is, as they say, "not even wrong." I can only try, I guess.

For a start, I don't think you know what a phenotype is. It is the composite of an organism's observable traits, not an observable trait.

Secondly, I don't know what you mean by 'forbidding' or 'preventing' telepathy. You write as if natural selection has a will of its own.

Third, what the hell does "without any corresponding actions to act on" mean?

Fourth, and I think this goes to the heart of this abortion of a thread, why the hell would natural selection operate on beliefs at all except insofar as they influence an organism's capacity to reproduce?

rudatron posted:

The point about induction is that your argument about how unlikely it is to have a lot of true beliefs doesn't work out - the same reasoning that leads to one true belief will lead to others (that is, the conditional probability of having a true belief goes up the more true beliefs you have). You treated them as independent events as a part of an argument that this result was unlikely, and therefore there must be a supernatural intervention. Remember also that beliefs themselves are not coded genetically (well, human beliefs generally aren't) - intelligence, or kinds of thinking is. That is what is subject to selection pressure. Your model wasn't just simplistic, it is totally undermined by how intelligent life actually evolved. Moreover, this:

Contradicts this:

All natural selection has to do is pressure organisms to tend to judge accuracy based on what they directly perceive, and your argument for the necessity of the supernatural falls apart (because you are basing it on how unlikely it is).

edit: The other big problem is the leap from the unlikeliness to the existence of the supernatural - go outside and read any number plate, the odds of that exact number plate having showed up is incredibly unlikely. But it still happened, because you had to have a number plate show up. Yet no one claims supernatural intervention here.

Did you make this thread because you honestly believe this, or are you just trolling? I seriously hoping it's the latter, for your sake.

botany posted:

I have to admit that I still don't understand the basic argument, Effectronica. If I understand you correctly, your basic point is that natural selection by itself is not enough to ensure that the majority of our beliefs come out as true. (I assume you're mostly concerned with basic beliefs that correlate closely with actions, such as "snakes are dangerous", rather than more complex ones such as "the Goldbach conjecture will likely be proved true one day".) From the fact that natural selection alone doesn't explain our mostly true beliefs, you conclude that the supernatural (whatever that is) does guarantee this. Is that the basic argument? What do you mean by "the supernatural"? And how does the supernatural do this job? Why is there no other mechanism outside of (a) natural selection and (b) the supernatural that would explain the general veracity of our beliefs?

CommieGIR posted:

Evolution does not imply the supernatural, its a stretch to believe that ia true since we know most of evolutions basic mechanisms and influences, and implying the supernatural is just an attempt to imply creationism or intelligent design.

blowfish posted:

If "bright coloration = danger" and "bright coloration = cuddly" only existed in a hypothetical organism's mind and had absolutely no behavioural effect whatsoever, there would be no selective pressure towards either.

However
1) we don't expect flexible behaviour to be hard-coded beforehand to such a degree of specificity
2) since your terrible example has an organism's oversized brain being engaged in nonstop intellectual masturbation with no real world effect, said oversized brain is wasteful and would most likely be cut down to a dumb reflex machine by natural selection

In reality, and in an organism which hard coded decisions "bright coloration = danger" leads to your organism not touching things with gaudy colours while "bright coloration = cuddly" has either no effect because most organisms don't cuddle random things, or in those which do it leads to cuddling. In a world where a large proportion of brightly coloured animals are actually dangerous, natural selection selects for "bright coloration = danger" because not getting injured is adaptive. In organisms which have flexible behaviour, both would exist as a subset of "notice bright coloration" and "learn from experience to avoid injury" and "learn from others' experience", all of which would be selected for.

Effectronica posted:

I am not Alvin Plantinga, nor would my rephrasing of his argument constitute plagiarism, since he was not the first one to make the argument that evolution and naturalist views of the mind are incompatible with one another.

Effectronica posted:

I'm going to respond as a single post, because many people have offered what are essentially identical arguments and rather than copy-and-paste many times I'll just respond all at once.

First of all, Complaining about Models: The whole point of a model is to be a simplified version of reality. Saying that it's simplified is not really a criticism at all.

...

Effectronica posted:

You said, "Smudgie Buggler", that beliefs are behaviors, that they contribute to the phenotype of an organism. Therefore, it must be possible to distinguish, externally, between the phenotypes produced by different beliefs, in order for natural selection to act on them. However, since telepathy is not real, it must similarly be impossible to peek inside someone's brain without directly observing it. In addition, natural selection must be able to act in the absence of actions corresponding to the belief, in order for this to be true. In other words, even if I never act on my belief that brightly-colored frogs are cuddly by actually touching them, natural selection should still be able to quash this maladaptive belief, no?

quote:

The vast, vast majority of this has been addressed elsewhere in the post that you eagerly scanned for opportunities to deliver an intellectual smackdown. What's left is, essentially, a misunderstanding of the argument. We are not dealing here with a singular event, such as seeing a particular license plate. We are dealing with a large number of events. If you saw that every license plate in a parking lot was arranged by order of their last digit, you would assume that this was highly unlikely to happen by chance, and that they were deliberately arranged. Since you can see that the vast majority of beliefs people hold about the world are true, and that these true beliefs include ones where empirical testing is unlikely to ever occur, and that largely instinctual beliefs are similarly likely to be true, then it seems entirely likely that there is some unknown force or process which acts to promote the formation of true beliefs about the universe. Now, this has pointed out another possibility, but I'll leave that to other people to root out.

quote:

By "supernatural", I mean something that exists outside of what is known to exist within philosophical naturalism. This would include natural mechanisms that are yet unknown.

Effectronica posted:

That is, how can natural selection distinguish between thinking "Brightly-colored animals are dangerous" and "Brightly-colored animals are cuddly" without any corresponding actions to act on, while still preventing us from reading minds without taking a peek at them?

Technogeek posted:

Perhaps, but I do believe he came up with the specific "Paul likes getting eaten by tigers" example that you used.

That said, one problem I have with the argument is that I certainly don't see any valid reasoning behind the claim that any given belief has a 50/50 chance of being true or false. Why should, for example, the belief "fire is bad to touch" have exactly as much of a chance to form as "fire is not bad to touch", particularly given that we are fully capable of observing the effects of combustion upon objects which are not our own flesh? If the probability of developing a true (or at worst, a benignly false) belief is higher than 50% when it comes to matters that would affect the ability of a given individual to reproduce, that would seem to throw off your math a bit.

Buried alive posted:

I just wanted to touch on this, since nobody else has yet. Nobody is criticizing your model based on its simplicity alone. Consider two models of the earth-sun system. One is geocentric, one is heliocentric. They are both equally simple (or complex, if you prefer that term) but the geocentric model will give bad results because it simply cannot explain certain observations that the heliocentric model can. In this case it's the change in the angle of the path of sun throughout the year. It's not too simple, it's simply wrong. Your model is also wrong. Beliefs do not operate in a vacuum and the odds of any particular belief being true or false are not 50%.

Technogeek posted:

Perhaps, but I do believe he came up with the specific "Paul likes getting eaten by tigers" example that you used.

That said, one problem I have with the argument is that I certainly don't see any valid reasoning behind the claim that any given belief has a 50/50 chance of being true or false. Why should, for example, the belief "fire is bad to touch" have exactly as much of a chance to form as "fire is not bad to touch", particularly given that we are fully capable of observing the effects of combustion upon objects which are not our own flesh? If the probability of developing a true (or at worst, a benignly false) belief is higher than 50% when it comes to matters that would affect the ability of a given individual to reproduce, that would seem to throw off your math a bit.

Effectronica posted:

...


Actually, geocentric models are useful in astronomy, because locating stars under the assumption that the Earth is the center of the universe is more practical than using the Sun, or the center of the Milky Way. Similarly, this model is useful, especially since no one has actually shown that the probability of discerning truthful beliefs is inherently high (never mind that you still only have a 0.5% chance of forming 50 correct independent beliefs with a 90% chance of forming truthful ones) or that despite appearances, induction is essentially foolproof as far as discovering the truth goes.

blowfish posted:

It would not squash that belief specifically because that belief does not matter. In order to hold many beliefs that do not matter, you would need a large amount of unproductive brain capacity (i suspect i am describing the real situation of real life effectronica here). Brains are expensive, and therefore natural selection would act to reduce useless brain capacity, shrinking your eventual successors' brains to their actual level of usefulness. In a world where brains cost nothing, there would be no selection for or against unused beliefs whatsoever.

You have yet to demonstrate that
1. the large majority of beliefs people hold are true (you must have a high opinion of yourself)
2. that beliefs that have not been and will not be empirically tested are likely to be true (it is by definition impossible to do this)
3. that beliefs within one person and across a population of persons are independent of each other (this is not the case because brains do not consist of perfectly compartmentalised units and because people communicate)
4. that beliefs are instinctual, rather than that there exists a set of hard-coded instincts selected to be adaptive at some point in the past in addition to a set of beliefs covered by 1-3

Your definition is as poor as your knowledge. Before the first empirical paper on plate tectonics was published, plate tectonics was supernatural, amirite

blowfish posted:

Effectronica does not understand probability very well. When actually looking for true or false beliefs, the probability of any given belief being true is p=(number of possible true beliefs)/(number of possible true beliefs+number of possible false beliefs).

The only case where there's a 50/50 chance of being true or false applies would be a retarded situation where we list someone's beliefs and then flip a coin to guess which are true or not, at which point 50/50 of our guesses being right becomes expected regardless of the proportion of true beliefs of the test subject.

Effectronica posted:

That being said, someone could develop the belief that fire is bad to touch because it's painfully cold, rather than because it's painfully hot, and while this is very, very likely to be destroyed by sense-experience, there are plenty of other experiences that are unlikely to be corrected by further evidence and to allow false beliefs to take hold. But we still tend to have a fairly low percentage of false beliefs, even given rare events.

blowfish posted:

Effectronica does not understand probability very well. When actually looking for true or false beliefs, the probability of any given belief being true is p=(number of possible true beliefs)/(number of possible true beliefs+number of possible false beliefs).

blowfish posted:

You have failed to provide evidence that a meaningful proportion of beliefs normally originate without sense experience. In fact, this is unlikely in your example of fire being hot because a baby will upon its first encounter with a lit candle stick its fingers in and then find out why that was a bad idea.

You have failed to account for the fact that humans communicate. Humans hold correct beliefs about things they have not personally experienced because other humans have personally experienced those things and can speak about them with authority. I assume that the office chair I just ordered from amazon will support my weight because I am not morbidly obese and therefore of a weight that chairs are supposed to support. I do not need to personally try out the chair I ordered first to know this belief is true with a high probability.

quote:

Actually, geocentric models are useful in astronomy, because locating stars under the assumption that the Earth is the center of the universe is more practical than using the Sun, or the center of the Milky Way. Similarly, this model is useful, especially since no one has actually shown that the probability of discerning truthful beliefs is inherently high (never mind that you still only have a 0.5% chance of forming 50 correct independent beliefs with a 90% chance of forming truthful ones) or that despite appearances, induction is essentially foolproof as far as discovering the truth goes.

very bad mistakes bolded

waitwhatno posted:

And the amount of all possible and feasible believes is practically infinite. The idea that random beliefs just materialise in our heads and then there is a 50/50 chance that they are true or false is absolutely hilarious.

Effectronica posted:

I assume that you can give a ballpark estimate of how much of our caloric intake is used up in holding memories, then? After all, it's not forming memories, accessing memories, processing sensory data, etc. that are the key reasons why our brain is gigantic, it's the size of memory storage. Just like how my last laptop overheated and died the instant I attached a 1TB hard drive by eSATA cable.

quote:

The vast majority of beliefs people hold are true because they are confirmed with our sensory experience. Maybe you believe yourself to be lost in a solipsistic fog, but I reject that. Your second point is nonsense and not related to anything I said.

well known idiot effectronica posted:

Since you can see that the vast majority of beliefs people hold about the world are true, and that these true beliefs include ones where empirical testing is unlikely to ever occur

quote:

What I said is that beliefs that are unlikely to be confirmed by a person are still accurate- even though most people who live near tigers are unlikely to ever see someone get attacked or killed by a tiger, nevertheless they have true beliefs that tigers are dangerous because they are likely to attack/hurt you if you come in close proximity to them.

quote:

The third one is attacking a simplification because you are a hateful blob of arrogance and lard. The fourth point requires justification that there are internal classes of belief.

Effectronica posted:

This is some nice self-contradiction here. The majority of beliefs must form with sensory experience, but actually, they must form from social interactions! Please, make your argument that this proposition cannot be true because people are generally delusional explicit, rather than this performance art nonsense.

quote:

So, what I want to know is this. Do you reject this proposition because you recognize that you don't read what people write, or at least don't allow it to affect your preconceived notions, and so have this deep-rooted belief that you are a normal human being and so most people are highly delusional?

Effectronica posted:

Well, thank you for saying that you refused to read the thread and are just knee-jerking. I fear that many others will be inspired by your intellectual example.

Effectronica posted:

Just like how my last laptop overheated and died the instant I attached a 1TB hard drive by eSATA cable.

Effectronica posted:

Actually, geocentric models are useful in astronomy, because locating stars under the assumption that the Earth is the center of the universe is more practical than using the Sun, or the center of the Milky Way. Similarly, this model is useful, especially since no one has actually shown that the probability of discerning truthful beliefs is inherently high (never mind that you still only have a 0.5% chance of forming 50 correct independent beliefs with a 90% chance of forming truthful ones) or that despite appearances, induction is essentially foolproof as far as discovering the truth goes.

Effectronica posted:

This is a simplification! I'm also neglecting degrees of truth, statements that are neither true nor false, and so on! This is not an Ussherian effort to determine the exact chance that any given human being has the set of beliefs they do.

That being said, someone could develop the belief that fire is bad to touch because it's painfully cold, rather than because it's painfully hot, and while this is very, very likely to be destroyed by sense-experience, there are plenty of other experiences that are unlikely to be corrected by further evidence and to allow false beliefs to take hold. But we still tend to have a fairly low percentage of false beliefs, even given rare events.

blowfish posted:

Any nonzero number is enough given a large population.

In addition, why do only animals that show some degree of flexible behaviours have very large brains relative to their body size?


Effectronica, being an ignorant blob of stupidity and sperg, has yet to grasp the concepts of language and writing.

Oversimplification, and go read some behavioural sciences, idiot.


Sensory experience of others counts. I have said this before.
The first person in a tribe to find out fire is hot can inform all other members of the tribe that fire is hot.
I can see that you wrote words here, and I can understand what each word individually means, but these words appear to be strung together in an unintelligible manner.

Technogeek posted:

Okay, so we agree that all else being equal, people will tend to form beliefs which are true; or, at worst, false in a way that has no detrimental impact on the individual's ability to reproduce. In which case, I have to ask: what the hell is the point of invoking the supernatural? "The actual bullshit that people come up with, as a rule, will not keep them from having kids" is entirely consistent with both modern evolutionary theory and recorded history.

CommieGIR posted:

A thread that is arguing a point based on zero knowledge whatsoever, surely a good faith argument should follow


No, I'm going to assume this is because something else was wrong. Because this sentence makes zero sense, the CPU is not involved in recognizing or handling the drive, nor would attatching a 1TB SATA to an eSATA port cause overheating. The drive controller is independent of the CPU.

HEY LOOK! Its a lot like this thread, you say things you THINK sound inspired and intelligent, but in reality is a bunch of pseudointellectual bullshit.

Effectronica posted:

Point to where I said/implied this or apologize for lying.

quote:

He can run because he believes tigers are dangerous, which is a true, adaptive belief. But he can also run because he wants to be eaten but feels that this tiger is an unlikely prospect to do so, which is a false but adaptive belief. Or he can run because he believes tigers are dangerous though not because they will eat him, which is an adaptive belief and still a false one for our purposes, which are about our perception of the universe, though it's partially true. So while the probability that our beliefs are true is higher than in any of the other cases, it's still low. 

waitwhatno posted: