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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.
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Aug 16, 2015 22:58
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Effectronica posted:Instead of shouting "It's wrong! It's wrong!" like you're shaken with self-doubt or something, why not provide a counterargument? 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.
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Aug 16, 2015 23:31
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Effectronica posted:No it isn't. I can believe a false thing that is nevertheless capable of producing effective behavior. After all, what does it matter for the purpose of reproduction if I believe sperm are homunculi or not? 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.
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Aug 16, 2015 23:46
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Effectronica posted:I didn't say "totally independent", smarmy. 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. quote:But, for example, if I avoid large predators because I think they're venomous, what is the inferior effectiveness? Or are you going to appeal to "on average" and thus render yourself unassailable? 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.
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Aug 17, 2015 00:01
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Effectronica posted:Wow. All the people who got mad because I used binary true/false as a simplification, and here they are ignoring you using it as the centerpiece of an argument that amounts to assertions. 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?
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Aug 17, 2015 00:30
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Effectronica posted:Your argument relies on everything being solely true or false. But to answer your question: not necessarily. Ha! 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.
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Aug 17, 2015 00:44
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Effectronica posted:How else should I answer? Should I lie and say either yes or no? Should I go along with your dishonesty? 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.
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Aug 17, 2015 00:56
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Effectronica posted:The question is relevant but did not seem to be asked in honesty given your posts thus far. Drop the persecution complex already. I'm asking a pointed question and you've done nothing but respond with snark and bad attempts at dodging around it. I've laid out how this is essential to your argument, and you agree it's relevant, so answer already.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:05
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rudatron posted:Wow, not even responding to me. Okay then. He's ignoring me now too. It's easier to be sanctimonious than answer the difficult questions that point to weaknesses in your argument I guess.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:50
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Effectronica posted:Okay, well, you could go back to my initial post, and, assuming you can read things, you could engage with the proposition that beliefs are not acted upon by natural selection, and we could move from here, if you were inclined to conversation rather than asininity and whatever "you should consider harder" is meant to mean. The rest of this is basically down to assuming inherent definitions, which is, um, well, not really philosophically materialistic in nature. I tried to do exactly this and now you're ignoring me.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:30
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Effectronica posted:Because you started demanding answers to a yes/no question, and I decided that I was going to treat something that walked like a duck as a duck. Maybe you could quickly rephrase it? Here: HappyHippo posted:"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. You were dancing around the question of whether or not accurate beliefs generally produce more effective behaviour so I asked you to answer it straight up.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:36
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 14:04 |
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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. My goal is demonstrate why I think you're wrong. I think your whole argument is based on an incorrect premise, and that it is precisely the incorrectness of this premise which makes you wrong. If you don't want people pointing out weaknesses in your arguments don't make a thread in the debate and discussion forum about them. quote: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. There's four situations here: 1) Accurate beliefs and effective behaviour, 2) Inaccurate and effective, 3) Accurate and ineffective, 4) Inaccurate and ineffective 1) and 4) are the most common and describe the majority of situations. 2) and 3) happen, but are much more rare. Your argument is to point to examples of 2) and 3) and saying that because they can happen then there's little or no evolutionary pressure to produce accurate beliefs. Evolution doesn't require absolutes though. So long as 1) and 4) are more common than 2) and 3), it's evolutionarily adaptive to be accurate. Also, intentionally or not your language suggests that evolution is operating on the beliefs directly rather than on the apparatus which constructs them, which is the brain. There's a subtle but important distinction between the two. While I do believe that more accurate beliefs produce more effective behaviour, evolution is one step removed from beliefs, and the result is that the brain can be biased in certain ways. For example, I think it's generally less maladaptive to see a pattern where there isn't one than to miss one that's there. This results in a lot of human superstition like good luck charms, trying not to "jinx" it, "knocking on wood" and the like, in the mistaken belief that these actions will have a positive outcome. While these actions aren't accomplishing anything, overall they're fairly harmless. Evolution makes that trade off because missing a pattern (such as the signs of an impending tiger attack, or not realizing certain berries are making you vomit) can be far more maladaptive. So evolution has erred on the side of more aggressive pattern matching than would produce the more accurate beliefs. I don't think it's a coincidence that your example of the king and coral snake falls into this category. But that's an aside, the most important point here is that, to the extent that the brain produces accurate beliefs, that accuracy can be entirely explained by selection pressure, with no need to bring in the supernatural.
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Aug 17, 2015 14:04
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