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Effectronica, if you're going to rip off Alvin Plantinga wholesale, can you at least put more than two loving seconds of effort into concealing it? Unless you're actually him, I suppose.
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Aug 16, 2015 08:43
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:32 |
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So, are you in fact Alvin Plantinga, or are you just plagiarizing him?
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Aug 16, 2015 15:16
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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. 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.
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Aug 16, 2015 15:57
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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. 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.
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Aug 16, 2015 16:36
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Effectronica posted:Consider the subset of beliefs where learning is rare because the events about the beliefs are rare, so direct testing and transmitted knowledge of testing is, in turn, rare. These are still very likely to be truthful, much more likely than by chance. 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.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:04
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:32 |
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Effectronica posted:What relevance does this have? 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.)
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Aug 16, 2015 21:18
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