Phyzzle posted:

I don't know why "Beliefs cause behavior and are evolutionarily adaptive, and are inherently true or false" is not a 5th option. In that case, our beliefs are true about as often as they should be.

Phyzzle posted:

Which part, of the three, is fairly unlikely? If our beliefs are not all true, they can still cause behavior, they can still be evolutionarily adaptive, and they can still be inherently true or false.

The same goes for the lack of a natural mechanism to determine truthfulness. There may be no 'natural' mechanism to determine truthfulness, yet our beliefs can still cause behavior, they can still be evolutionarily adaptive, and they can still be inherently true or false.

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.

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?

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

waitwhatno posted:

CommieGIR posted:

Not as stupid as a guy who thinks plugging in his eSATA hard disk overheated his laptop. Because it demonstrates that you don't know how a basic computer functions, or how the individual systems function. Much like your thread discussing how evolution implies the supernatural.


No, Supernatural ideals are not like tectonic plates. Tectonic plates still have some evidence supporting their existence prior to their discovery, supernatural phenomenon mostly depends upon coincidences and pseudoscience.

I sincerely doubt that in 50 years, we'll be praising someone for the discovery of the supernatural world that was hidden all this time. Plate tectonics had evidence even before their discovery, as of right now, the supernatural has even less evidence than the evidence of the idea of the atom during the classical Greek era.

blowfish posted:

haha lol

So anyway, your whole idea is based on the idea that beliefs are more likely to be true than expected by random chance. I will give you that intuitively this seems true at least for beliefs that can potentially matter in everyday life.

You then go on to produce terrible awkward guesstimates involving abuses of probability a first year undergrad should be ashamed of (I would even say you are intentionally misleading if I didn't think you are not competent enough for that):

botany posted:

I absolutely do not get this. The mechanism is learning, both through trial and error as well as through information taught by others. All of that is perfectly obvious and acceptable to a naturalist thinker. What am I missing?

Technogeek posted:

I really don't see how that implies supernatural agency, though. Going back to the tiger example, one could apply the pattern of "large animals with sharp pointy teeth are dangerous" to tigers and still get a true belief despite no experience with tigers specifically.

botany posted:

Rarity doesn't matter though? You're ignoring how information spreads. There might only be a single instance of a tiger attack or there might be a hundred - what matters is how many people talk about it and for how long people talk about it. (There was only a single Chernobyl disaster, and look what an impact that had.)


[quote]None of this is true. If you're a child in a western country without access to zoos you might well learn that tigers are dangerous by watching Disney's adaptation of the Jungle Book. There is no continuous chain to a tiger attack survivor that I'm aware of, but watching the movie instill the idea that tigers are dangerous nonetheless. Presumably a high percentage of our beliefs are acquired that way. There is no mystery in this.

Bro Dad posted:

2/10.

CommieGIR posted:

Wow, the majority of posters have both argued against your points and your reaponse is to almost wholly dismiss all their arguments out of hand.

Well done.

ShadowCatboy posted:

*snip*

Technogeek posted:

Well, for one thing, it means that I can now consider your poor defense of the argument to be part of the troll rather than a genuine belief that what you're saying is a good presentation of said argument. (Which actually isn't a poor choice of tactics, so long as you can avoid making it too obvious that that's what you're doing.)

CommieGIR posted:

No, I think its safe to say you think everyone presenting counterpoints is below you and hence even if they understand your arguments correctly, you can dismiss them off hand as being wrong and ignoring their counterpoints.

Which is what you do in every thread.

You presenting Creationism as 'reasonable' basically makes any points you are trying to present as reasonable bunk.

ShadowCatboy posted:

Actually, motion-detection/reaction and cognitive understanding are two entirely separate faculties. We evolved the former earlier on and the faculty uses non-conscious portions of the brain. The ability to conceptualize it accurately is much harder and required the development of systematic science. I'm quite sure that Plantinga's argument allows for erroneous reasoning, but my point is that our reasoning on more complicated elements would be naturally erroneous if it were not for the systematic development of scientific standards that took place outside of evolution. This would overall debunk the idea of a sort of guided cognitive evolution that you seem to be proposing.

Heuristics are essentially comparable to vestigial organs in this kind of creationist argument: they run counter to the hypothetical organized design of a Creator.

I mean sure, you could always say "Well this is how the Creator-entity designed it through evolution. Messily, with the ability to develop more complex forms/abilities over a long span of time and a lot of work." But this no longer serves as a proof, it's little more than post-hoc rationalization akin to Theistic Evolutionism.


I do not accept that this gap exists whatsoever, because I do not accept the ontology that reason must accurately reflect reality qua reality (or noumenal reality, or however you want to call it). In fact, I would argue the opposite. This is ultimately why Plantinga doesn't impress me: his argument is just a more convoluted attempt bring the question of reason and God back to a pre-Kantian era. The whole paradigm is somewhat archaic.

ShadowCatboy posted:

Actually I would really like to know exactly what you think is backwards about my summary. Because I think my post pretty faithfully reflects the bolded part of your post here.

ShadowCatboy posted:

What exactly do you mean by "reality"? Because you're using this term very very vaguely.

ShadowCatboy posted:

No. It is only "backwards" in the order that I listed it in, not in terms of the development of the argument. I could just as easily reorder the steps from 4 to 1 and detail the argument as "We perceive reality accurately. But evolution alone does not account for this. Hence, God." Or whatever you like. At best this is just quibbling over minor details, at worst it's meaningless pedantry.


Why exactly, ontologically speaking, would a definition of reason require phenomenological reality to correspond with noumenal reality at all? Why can't a functional definition of reason operate within phenomenological reality on its own?

And how, mechanistically speaking, does God (or whatever) bridge the gap between phenomenological reality and noumenal reality?

CommieGIR posted:

So, not only do you like making 'God of the gaps' arguments, you like pretending that said god is being purposefully deceptive by disguising his actions are natural occuring instances.

.......riiiiiighhhhhtttt....

Jack of Hearts posted:

I'm reminded of an old German with some unspellable name who claimed that hatred was something reserved for those we esteemed. If he's blinded by anything, I doubt it's by hatred.

Will you address the probability question I asked above? Do you even know what conditional probability is?

Buried alive posted:

You're kind of on the hook to explain stuff like this then:

.

Also this..

And you have to do it without subscribing to the idea that science/scientific realism or whatever you want to call it is a worthy pursuit. Because if you do, then we don't need anything beyond the realm of a phenominal process in order to figure things out. Unless you're sticking with 'natural process we don't know about' still counts as supernatural, in which case we need to discuss what the hell the supernatural is even supposed to be if ignorance of a natural concept/rule/whatever is all that it takes to make something supernatural.

ShadowCatboy posted:

Okay then? I'm not sure what the point of this thread is then, because all that's being said here is that "for something rationally impossible to be true there'd need to be something external to reason to allow that to happen." Which I might be able to accept, but I don't see the point since human reason operates quite will without having to appeal to supernatural or suprarational entities.

It's basically like saying "If we could eat numbers some mysterious nonrational X must be incorporated to make this to happen." It doesn't really make sense, even if it would be kinda neat. But we operate quite well without having to do the rationally impossible act of eating numbers.

Also, I want to know what exactly you mean here:


What EXACTLY do you mean by "supernatural"? Or "exists"? Or that the division between noumenal and phenomenological reality still accepts that "the supernatural exists"?

Jack of Hearts posted:

A) I disguised nothing, if you're talking about my first line. It wasn't thinly-veiled; hell, if there's a single theme with you, you are not nearly as clever as you think you are.

B) I implied nothing. I asked what you thought the probability was that this question can be reduced to a trichotomy given the fact that you are actively hostile to everyone who criticizes said argument. It's a reasonable question! You expressed some slight uncertainty in the OP, possibly insincere. But you explicitly stated that your argument relies on a trichotomy, where you regard two of the options as ludicrous, reducing it to a monochotomy. Is your belief shaken by the fact that you have no adherents? Do you consider that, at best, you are terrible at presenting your arguments? Or, most likely, do you regard yourself as a genius prophet before heathens?

HappyHippo posted:

You still haven't demonstrated why accurate beliefs cannot be accounted for by evolution. This is the crux of your argument and it's completely wrong.

phasmid posted:

You're confusing philosophy and science. Evolution is real, people who disagree are wrong, please inform yourself by reading about biology and not some argument from special interest groups (i.e. Christianity).

phasmid posted:

Which particular posts did I ignore? Was it the same ones you ignored by trying to categorize "reality"? Nobody has ever been able to say what reality *is*. Your arguments are faith-based, not science based, and you haven't given a substantive answer yet. You just hide behind claptrap.

Jack of Hearts posted:

Originally I felt like Effectronica was just another tedious moralist. Now I welcome him as another jrodefeld.


"These reasonings do not cohere," per the cheap translation I have of Epictetus.

Suppose I approach a question sure that I'm a philosophical genius saying something profound,

i.e.,


and that, broadly speaking, everyone laughs at you, and that, strictly speaking, nobody accepts this as correct.

Does your internal estimate of the probability that you are a philosophical genius (clearly approximately 1) change at all?

My reasoning compels me to nothing, it compels you to nothing; it merely asks: is your faith in your own genius at all affected?

Who What Now posted:

All philosophy is is semantical games, so watching you flip your poo poo because someone asked you to define your terms is funny enough to justify this thread.

Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:

You could try helping them understand, refine your rhetoric, and make sure your terms are clear, instead of shrugging your shoulders and giving up any hope and getting mad when you're misunderstood.

I don't think any philosophical theory was utterly pristine in its first draft.

ShadowCatboy posted:

Why exactly is that quoted section off-topic? It's pretty much the crux of Plantinga's argument. Hell, I pointed out in my posts that once you strip away all the crap about evolution he's just proposing a standard epistemic argument for God in the vein of pre-Kantian philosophers. "God is the bridge between noumenal and phenomenal reality" isn't window dressing. It's the whole point that you and Plantinga are trying to get to. It's the unspoken central thesis of "Why Evolution Implies the Supernatural."


90% of philosophy is establishing definitions, clarifying definitions, and making sure your definitions are consistent. The rest is just trying to link them together in meaningful ways. How you define terms have profound implications for how those concepts interrelate. If you aren't prepared to define your terms in ways that are as specific and detailed as possible, you probably shouldn't be doing philosophy.

And confusion surrounding the term "exists" was why the Ontological Argument was so confusingly abstract and difficult to directly address for like 1000 years.

HappyHippo posted:

Your style of argumentation leaves much to be desired.

"Beliefs" are essentially the world model constructed by the brain. An accurate world model is essential to effective behaviour, so there is selection pressure to produce brains which construct accurate models of the world. Brains get beliefs and act on them through instinct, inference from sensory experiences, and information shared by others. Since the brain is the product of evolution and there is selection pressure to produce brains which construct accurate world models, evolution directly shapes these processes in order to make them more accurate than chance.

rudatron posted:

• Please quote any of your relevant arguments that accurately responded to to the main thrust of my argument:
  
  "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"
  
  Reminder, this isn't just saying the model is 'simplistic'. If if were simple, it could just be made more complex. No, the model is wrong, even at this simple scale, because the 'improbability' conclusion you're deriving of one of your cases is totally undermined by this very simple change - your model isn't simply imprecise, it's inaccurate.
  
• The probability of plates being arranged by last digit (I assume you mean in ascending or descending order) is exactly the same probability of being ordered by any digit list (that is - random). Moreover, your response to my attack on the categorical usefulness of using an improbable event to conclude supernatural intervention is to then argue that I've numerically underestimated the improbability. Okay, but rescale the probability as much as you want, the same argument applies - the jump to a supernatural explanation is not justified, parsimoniously a natural explanation will always work better.

HappyHippo posted:

The possibility of doing so doesn't mean that behaviour isn't on average more effective when it's based on accurate beliefs. If your argument is based on the idea that accuracy of belief is totally independent from the effectiveness of behaviour then this will be pretty funny.

rudatron posted:

Well at least that explains the reason you've basically refused to engage with anyone fairly, but I do wonder how you can call what you're doing 'trolling'. Where is the entertainment? This is kyrie-level incompetence here. If you're goal was to show up D&D, then I don't think you've actually succeeded, because you've been taken apart pretty thoroughly so far.

HappyHippo posted:

If it's not "totally independent" then there's a connection between belief and effective behaviour, and therefore there is evolutionary pressure to produce accurate beliefs.


Throwing up a couple of examples where the wrong belief produces the correct behaviour isn't going to get you anywhere. In the vast majority of situations the correct belief produces more effective behaviour than an incorrect one. You wouldn't be able to reliably poo poo in the toilet if your brain wasn't producing a generally accurate world model.

rudatron posted:

Do you consider me one? You're the one trolling after all. What about ShadowCatBoy? Who is of that type here, and have you successfully 'trolled' them? Though this will probably lead to an argument about what trolling is (which will be trolled, obviously) but that may not be successful.

You're using likelihood arguments, but when challenged, fall back on absolutes. Sure, it's not necessarily true, but that doesn't really matter, just so long as its useful. This is a result of your continued stance that beliefs are selected for, when they are not - thought-forms/intelligences which create beliefs are. Put simply, the same criteria you can use to judge beliefs as 'mostly true' (and therefore intervention was necessary) can simply be selected for - therefore, the probability of having many true beliefs is on a similar magnitude to have a few. And actually, a random ordering has a better explanation than a supernatural ordering, because the random ordering is quantifiable - you can't quantify the probability of it being created supernaturally to compare it with.

blowfish posted:

Indeed, your posting is very effective in this regard.

I need to reiterate yet again that you have no idea about behavioural sciences and evolutionary biology whatsoever. For instance, in various savannah dwelling monkeys, newborn young do not inherently fear snakes, but become fearful of snakes much more easily than of other types of animal. Such an instinctive predisposition to fear (or a straight up instinctual fear) requires absolutely no "belief" in a reason to exist - monkeys that avoid snakes tend to survive longer and thus reproduce better, and that is all the reason that is necessary. When monkeys apes became humans, and somewhere along the way acquired sufficient reasoning skills, inference from seeing/hearing about snakes doing things to people who didn't manage to avoid them was enough to build a mental model ("belief") about why snakes are bad and you are right to fear them.

Your double take at the fact that people form realistic beliefs around the dangers from animals has two problems.

Firstly, it is all but impossible to grow up without hearing or reading or seeing on TV the internet that tigers eat big things and that there are poisonous snakes and snakes that will choke you.

Secondly, you are wrong about these beliefs being correct. People are loving scared of arbitrary harmless insects and for instance will swear to god that dragonflies have a dangerous sting when there isn't and has never been a dragonfly that could do more than awkwardly pinch you with its tiny mandibles. Same for your example of snakes, by the way: choking snakes are excellent evidence for social learning and against an inherent propensity for human beliefs to be correct: until like two weeks ago, loving everyone "knew" that a Boa constrictor would torturously choke you to death by slowly crushing your airways, even though only a tiny fraction of people have ever observed one eating, because well that's what everyone and their mother knows. Now actual measurements have shown that constrictors actually kill by cutting off blood flow fairly quickly and not by choking. Everyone who talks about this issue and wants to make sure their beliefs are true needs to update them from what they were two weeks ago.

People are only approaching any sort of correct beliefs about animals that are culturally significant - i.e. most megafauna and a tiny proportions of all other animals, but as you are biologically illiterate and do not know anything beyond pop culture blurbs about animals you are unable to spot this fatal weakness in your argument. I should console you by telling you you are in the good company of moronic animal rights people in this regard.


Your definition of solipsism apparently includes any variation of "our senses are not entirely accurate". As a functional, knowledgeable human being you should realise that positing accurate senses is blatantly unreasonable, as evidenced by literal mountains of evidence ranging from our inability to perceive large ranges of sound and electromagnetic spectra (missing out on many experiences) over the fact that even a camera recording nothing humans are inherently unable to perceive will reveal how eyewitness testimony is often disastrously inaccurate.

You are unable to understand that human senses do not need to be entirely or even highly accurate, they only need to correlate with physical reality better than chance (heh) to be useful.


It is a small mind that must console itself with the illusion that open eyes are the only requirement to see the world as it truly is and in its entirety.

Buried alive posted:

That is exactly the point that I'm making. Humans can make errors in beliefs all the time. We don't experience the squares as the same shade, or the gorilla marching across the court, but there they are. Our phenomenological reality does not line up with the nooumenal reality behind it. You keep saying that beliefs are more true than we would expect them to be, but you haven't demonstrated how this is so. The faulty model discussion and things like optical illusions poke holes in that statement. In the case of the faulty model, it's the idea that your model is giving you bad results. In the case of errors, it's that human beliefs may not be as true as you think they are in the first place.

And still this whole conversation is a little silly, because you're asserted that 'things that exist naturally but are not known are supernatural'. That's not the way anyone else uses those terms, so if you're willing to accept a material explanation, regardless of whether it's God, or Buddha-nature or whatever, for the amount of apparent true beliefs we have, then the argument isn't over whether or not the supernatural exists to explain it, it's over the definition of supernatural in the first place.

HappyHippo posted:

What the gently caress are you talking about? What does binary true/false have to do with this?

Quit dodging the question. Do accurate beliefs produce more effective behaviour?

blowfish posted:

lol

if you show someone who is not interested in animals a snake and don't tell them it's either a constrictor or a venomous snake and you ask them how it kills stuff the results will be pretty much random. The knowledge that constrictors kill by, well, constricting is cultural and can be entirely divorced from the nowadays-unfamiliar experience of actually facing a snake

there is some saying about missing a forest and trees that i can't quite recall here

ShadowCatboy posted:

You do realize that the term "God" doesn't always refer to the Judeo-Christian deity, right? It was a pretty standard convention used in modernist philosophy to refer to a particular "ultimate substance" or other entity of great significance in proofs. Sure I could go with "X-Factor" like you seem to prefer, but it's a little too unconventional to me and frankly it sounds a touch silly. So I guess it's my fault for not being a little more explicit, because personally my philosophical background is rooted in theology and the modernist era of philosophy and that's how I operate. But there's still no need to go all explodey-hostile.

Also for all your raging about other dudes here describing your argument (or Platinga's or whatevs) as "creationism" we weren't the ones who first drew the comparison:



Frankly, "Evolution alone cannot account for X, so you need to include a supernatural entity" is pretty much definitive of Creationism.


Your words hurt me deep down inside, where I'm soft like a woman.

HappyHippo posted:

No it doesn't. "More accurate beliefs produce more effective behaviour" is not binary, because neither "accuracy" nor "effectiveness" are binary concepts.

Your answer is pretty pathetic considering how essential this is to your argument. You'd think you'd be able to come up with something other than "nuh-uh!" if you'd put any thought into this at all.

Buried alive posted:

And those types of corrections are easily made without reference to the immaterial, so I'm not sure why you're invoking the possibility of the immaterial for other types of corrections that we are able to make. Whether something is supernatural or not (going by the rest of philosophy anyway) is an ontological question, not an epistemic one. If it's material and exists, it is natural. If it is immaterial and exists, it is supernatural. Even if this new species of cricket was magical, as long as those magical properties are grounded in materialistic ones it's still natural.

HappyHippo posted:

You should provide reasoning to support your answer, or at least demonstrate how the question isn't relevant to your argument. You'd be able to do this if you actually had thought this whole thing out. Of course had you done that you wouldn't be making such ridiculous assertions in the first place.

blowfish posted:

Now for another great example of how human senses are imperfect and how the search for ultimate truth is a fool's errand: Colour perception and language see here for a layman's example. Not all cultures differentiate colours equally - for example, until very recently, the Chinese and especially the Japanese (until post-WW2 western style education in this case) did not have a distinction between blue and green - both were called "fresh-coloured", and the ancient Greek poets' wine dark sea was not described as blue most likely because the colour blue had yet to be invented as a distinct colour from that of crappy wine (there nobody talks about things being a beautiful shade of blue in ancient Greek poetry). As you go through different cultures, there is 1) a broad trend for a matching set of colour categories given a particular number of different colour words in the language (it makes sense to start with dark/light, and go on to blood red, and for some reason blue and green are almost always separated late), but 2) many interesting exceptions to that, such as the tribe in the example I linked. You would be hard-pressed to pick out different shades of green that are considered entirely different colours by these people, who are probably weirded out by us lumping grass green and beech tree leaf green together as being basically the same. As evidenced by the Japanese postwar education reform thing, these differences in colour perception are purely cultural - we learn to adjust our idea of the world to that of everyone around us, and that is often useful, rather than towards to the world's ~true~ colours. RBG code 1,1,230 is not meaningfully different from 1,2,229 to us, but if it is the difference between a staple crop and a poisonous plant you better learn to distinguish that poo poo in the blink of an eye and experience it as different colours.

"Is your green the same green as my green? Because it is and therefore magic!", says effectronica - "Probably no, because I don't know what 'green' is supposed to be, but I really don't need to care."

quote:

Your entire argument assumes that people are automagically right about things. When shown evidence that people are not, in fact, automagically right but need to learn from others who know more than they do, you pretend it's irrelevant.

quote:

Unless the mere existence of your hypothetical volcano cricket is physically impossible, any definition of supernatural that includes it boils down to "things that are improbable but in principle possible", and loses all meaning.