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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.
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Aug 16, 2015 14:17
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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. 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. First, you can't believe in free will without something supernatural providing the spark. Because otherwise you can only understand yourself and the world around you to be a deterministic process playing out inevitably like a complex string of dominoes. Only something outside the scientific universe we understand and occupy could disrupt it. Second, "I think therefore I am". While science does a great job explaining you and your learned and inherited behavior and traits it does nothing to explain my subjective experience looking through my two eyes right now while typing these words. And then of course there are basic paradoxes like "how did the universe start" etc etc. But I'm not grasping how the op's notion of belief intersects this. Adaptive behavior in generally going to be "right" by some measure. Animal swimming reflexes need to actually succeed at keeping them above water and hunger reflexes need to lead an animal towards nutrition to be adaptive. There are obvious limits to the complexity with which adaptions can be encoded and implemented and side effects to them. But that doesn't pose a particularly deep problem.
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Aug 16, 2015 14:57
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quote:Second of all, while natural selection's influence on culture is almost certainly extremely limited Incredibly wrong. All human behavior, morality and emotions which drive us through day to day life are rooted in evolution. The very things we associate with "culture" including art, music, dance are essentially irrational, and can only be understood in terms of their intersection with our evolutionary adaptations and goals. 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? It can't but ways of thinking inevitably show up in behavior and actions which are more or less adaptive.
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Aug 16, 2015 15:33
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Effectronica posted:You should be able to demonstrate that truthfulness is inherently adaptive, without forming inaccurate beliefs to sustain your psychology. Why do you think intelligence evolved in the first place? 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 In this case we have a spider with instinctual behavior that is presumably adaptive because it's generally right. But intelligence allows the spider to further refine that understanding in a way that can be seen to better approximate the "truth". Accurate models of the world are almost always better. They just come with huge genetic or cognitive costs. Humans as a species have been successful precisely because or our ability to understand (the "truth") and manipulate the world around us. The benefits to this are obvious.
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Aug 16, 2015 15:45
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Effectronica posted:Okay. There is no way for me to give you a satisfactory answer because your goal is transparently to trap me into either saying nonsense or weaseling a concession out of me, and threading the needle requires a lot of space and time that I have no confidence you will admit. But I feel confidence by saying that aloud, so I will say that, if we accept beliefs produce behavior, accurate beliefs generally produce more effective behavior than inaccurate beliefs, but not overwhelmingly so. Because while accurate beliefs will, in theory, produce effective behavior all of the time, inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior for all common situations would still persist, and while inaccurate beliefs that produce effective behavior all of the time are much less likely to emerge than accurate beliefs, when they do emerge they should be as persistent as accurate ones. This is ignoring cases where accurate beliefs produce ineffective behavior, such as waiting to verify if that's a king snake or a coral snake. So in other words, there is still the problem of purging inaccurate beliefs and ensuring that they survive in marginal numbers. This doesn't really resolve the question. This same problem generalized to all aspects of evolution. Yes suboptimal solutions sometimes end up sticking around for a long time. I'm still not clear on what the argument is for the idea that we actually have accurate beliefs more than expected.
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Aug 17, 2015 03:34
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:AFAIK She's arguing that beliefs w/r/t how the affect evolutionary fitness are/were far more accurate then what we should have for our weird ape brains and imperfect senses to be the only vectors for beliefs, especially considering how brief human communication has been around compared to the evolutionary time scale. Therefore something else must be influencing beliefs, and since ape brains and imperfect sense are the only currently natural means of sharing beliefs we have confirmed, something seemingly supernatural must be actually something that is actually natural i.e. something akin to telepathy is real life and it's how beliefs got so accurate before the development of communication tools like language and writing. I get that in general. But the whole argument is based on the idea that correct beliefs are more common than expected. That requires quantifying both what we expect to see and what we do see. That's what's lacking as far as I can tell. Also, since from evolution's perspective beliefs are identical to any other selectable attribute, I want to see those same two metrics compared against say anatomy. Because when I evaluate the shape of a fish in terms of its hydrodynamic efficiency I see a remarkable number of things that are "correct" and inevitably some things that arn't. In general, it seems roughly identical to my understanding of intelligence (remarkable in some ways, flawed in many others).
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Aug 17, 2015 14:23
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