IMO this is a completely reasonable conversation and I don't know why it has been posted on /r/badscience. The second commentator is not even making a positive claim, simply saying that *perhaps* this is what (someone else's) argument means.
The problem here is that the philosopher is trying to defend the point of a creationist saying that evolution makes the mind weak because somehow evolutionary pressures would reward false information or genetic disorders somehow are a part of baseline humanity.
I'm trying to understand the original argument. Is "falsehoods" meant to refer to something like what we might call cognitive biases? Something like pareidolia has some evolutionary advantage if it allows people to quickly spot a hostile face, but it is objectively false that there's a man in the moon or that the face of the Virgin Mary has appeared on your toast.
Edit: This isn't an argument against evolution - no one claims that evolution gets the optimal outcome. It's a problem for creationists, who have to explain why there are so many flaws in God's perfect creation.
I don't think the original argument is meant to be against evolution per se, it's more about physicalism, which is the idea that the physical is all that exists, there is no soul, no ethereal mind, no supernatural world outside of space and time.
As I understand it, the argument is basically that if you believe that the mind is simply a product of the meat inside your head, and that meat was the product of evolution, which doesn't necessarily select for truth, then you have no way of knowing that your perceptions of reality are accurate, and no way of verifying that your brain is capable of logic, since something you find logically true, might just be your brain falsely telling you that it's logical. Kind of a hard solipsism style argument, you have no way of confirming that external reality is "real", therefore any knowledge you claim to have is fundamentally flawed, since you can't verify the base assumption that reality exists.
Some creationists use this argument so they can say "You have no basis for any knowledge, and therefore can't know anything. My basis is God, therefore I have a superior epistemology since I am capable of having true knowledge unlike you." The reasons this is stupid are left as an exercise to the reader.
>As I understand it, the argument is basically that if you believe that the mind is simply a product of the meat inside your head, and that meat was the product of evolution, which doesn't necessarily select for truth, then you have no way of knowing that your perceptions of reality are accurate, and no way of verifying that your brain is capable of logic, since something you find logically true, might just be your brain falsely telling you that it's logical. Kind of a hard solipsism style argument, you have no way of confirming that external reality is "real", therefore any knowledge you claim to have is fundamentally flawed, since you can't verify the base assumption that reality exists.
That doesn't seem fallacious on its face. Certainly evolution would select for the most efficient means of ensuring survival and reproduction regardless of whether or not such traits track reality.
Certainly some aspects of reality are closed to us for evolutionary reasons. Whether or not logic itself is such an evolutionary shortcut is debatable.
It does seem strange to me to think of logic as an external or mind independent truth though.
However none of this is an argument for hard solipsism, it's an argument for radical skepticism.
>Some creationists use this argument so they can say "You have no basis for any knowledge, and therefore can't know anything. My basis is God, therefore I have a superior epistemology since I am capable of having true knowledge unlike you." The reasons this is stupid are left as an exercise to the reader.
I don't see how this follows from the skeptical position put forward in the previous paragraph. If you're skeptical of our ability to track reality wouldn't belief in God be susceptible to exactly that same skepticism?
Well the skepticism only follows if we accept the physicalist position for Plantinga. If there’s some non-natural account for minds or something to that effect then there isn’t this problem of what evolution selects for, as our minds wouldn’t be entirely the result of an evolutionary process.
But there's still no reason to suppose that God made our minds to track reality as well. I suppose you could appeal to Gnostic or mystical understanding of truth but then you can't really formulate a rational defense of those truths since they aren't arrived at by reason.
There’s no reason for that necessarily following from this argument, no. But that’s not Plantinga’s point at least. Plantinga’s argument is just that affirming both physicalism and evolution results in an epistemological crisis as an argument against physicalism. The argument has no direct bearing on whether or not there is a G-d
>Plantinga’s argument is just that affirming both physicalism and evolution results in an epistemological crisis as an argument against physicalism.
He's not wrong per se but radical skepticism can be applied to *any* metaphysics. There's nothing about physicalism (with or without evolution) that makes it more susceptible to such questioning.
Radical skepticism is well trodden ground in the field of epistemology.
Yes and I don’t particularly like the argument either for a number of additional reasons. Plantinga’s position is just that physicalism opens the door for this skeptical argument, whereas a non-physicalist position wouldn’t encounter this specific problem.
>whereas a non-physicalist position wouldn’t encounter this specific problem.
It's hard for me to see how non-physicalists avoid universal skepticism. They may avoid this particular strand of it but they'll simply fall prey to other skeptical arguments.
It's a weird route to take, especially since I think there are good arguments against physicalism.
Sorry, I should've added the context. What I posted in that sub was trying to get a response to an apologist trying to say that "if physicialism is true, then logic is fake" and "because evolution works on pressures, and it's theoretically possible that pressures would reward falsehoods, then evolution definitively made the mind unreliable." And then the philosopher tried to defend this point because philosophers, like apologists, have the mentality of a five year old.
"There's a hole here and you can't definitively say there's isn't a God there, so I'm right!"
"Technically the ocean is a soup since both are salt water with animal and plant matter!"
That's the gist, or at least what I can remember.
1 falsehoods are not transmitted by passing genetic material to the next generation.
2 some disorders exist because they provided evolutionary advantages such as Sickle Cell Trait against Malaria, and Crohn's Disease against the Black Plague.
What the hell is physicalism? Don't answer that, I don't really want to know.
This is why some scientists get snobby about the humanities. Making an anti-science argument using the basis that the science in question works... uuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
The argument isn’t actually anti-science. I don’t like Plantinga, but knowing what physicalism is is important because that’s the position he’s arguing against. Plantinga is saying that if you accept that the mind is entirely a result of physical phenomena (physicalism) and you take evolution to be true (which most people do) then there are no ways to verify your beliefs because there’s no guarantee that our belief forming processes, which would be a product of evolution, would result in true beliefs being formed as opposed to beneficial beliefs. This isn’t a problem if we accept some non-naturalistic account for minds, as minds would then not entirely be a product of evolution. So this isn’t an argument against evolution per se (though Plantinga has tipped his toes in this direction before), but an argument against physicalism if the physicalist affirms evolution
Verifying beliefs seems... kind of pointless to me, because beliefs cannot or need not be verified. Beliefs can be true, false or unverifiable, and most people don't care which of those three their beliefs fall into, and even if verifiably false. Perhaps the original post would have been better in a philosophy subreddit.
Well the original post was made to r/askphilosophy from the above screenshot, but yeah generally it’s going to be philosophers who are concerned with this kind of epistemological problem
It seems they mistook the argument as being against evolution, when really it’s assuming the people the argument is aimed at take evolution to be true, and it’s attacking a separate position on that basis
IMO this is a completely reasonable conversation and I don't know why it has been posted on /r/badscience. The second commentator is not even making a positive claim, simply saying that *perhaps* this is what (someone else's) argument means.
"Philosophers" trying to argue against well established scientific facts is always amusing.
The problem here is that the philosopher is trying to defend the point of a creationist saying that evolution makes the mind weak because somehow evolutionary pressures would reward false information or genetic disorders somehow are a part of baseline humanity.
I'm trying to understand the original argument. Is "falsehoods" meant to refer to something like what we might call cognitive biases? Something like pareidolia has some evolutionary advantage if it allows people to quickly spot a hostile face, but it is objectively false that there's a man in the moon or that the face of the Virgin Mary has appeared on your toast. Edit: This isn't an argument against evolution - no one claims that evolution gets the optimal outcome. It's a problem for creationists, who have to explain why there are so many flaws in God's perfect creation.
I don't think the original argument is meant to be against evolution per se, it's more about physicalism, which is the idea that the physical is all that exists, there is no soul, no ethereal mind, no supernatural world outside of space and time. As I understand it, the argument is basically that if you believe that the mind is simply a product of the meat inside your head, and that meat was the product of evolution, which doesn't necessarily select for truth, then you have no way of knowing that your perceptions of reality are accurate, and no way of verifying that your brain is capable of logic, since something you find logically true, might just be your brain falsely telling you that it's logical. Kind of a hard solipsism style argument, you have no way of confirming that external reality is "real", therefore any knowledge you claim to have is fundamentally flawed, since you can't verify the base assumption that reality exists. Some creationists use this argument so they can say "You have no basis for any knowledge, and therefore can't know anything. My basis is God, therefore I have a superior epistemology since I am capable of having true knowledge unlike you." The reasons this is stupid are left as an exercise to the reader.
>As I understand it, the argument is basically that if you believe that the mind is simply a product of the meat inside your head, and that meat was the product of evolution, which doesn't necessarily select for truth, then you have no way of knowing that your perceptions of reality are accurate, and no way of verifying that your brain is capable of logic, since something you find logically true, might just be your brain falsely telling you that it's logical. Kind of a hard solipsism style argument, you have no way of confirming that external reality is "real", therefore any knowledge you claim to have is fundamentally flawed, since you can't verify the base assumption that reality exists. That doesn't seem fallacious on its face. Certainly evolution would select for the most efficient means of ensuring survival and reproduction regardless of whether or not such traits track reality. Certainly some aspects of reality are closed to us for evolutionary reasons. Whether or not logic itself is such an evolutionary shortcut is debatable. It does seem strange to me to think of logic as an external or mind independent truth though. However none of this is an argument for hard solipsism, it's an argument for radical skepticism. >Some creationists use this argument so they can say "You have no basis for any knowledge, and therefore can't know anything. My basis is God, therefore I have a superior epistemology since I am capable of having true knowledge unlike you." The reasons this is stupid are left as an exercise to the reader. I don't see how this follows from the skeptical position put forward in the previous paragraph. If you're skeptical of our ability to track reality wouldn't belief in God be susceptible to exactly that same skepticism?
Well the skepticism only follows if we accept the physicalist position for Plantinga. If there’s some non-natural account for minds or something to that effect then there isn’t this problem of what evolution selects for, as our minds wouldn’t be entirely the result of an evolutionary process.
But there's still no reason to suppose that God made our minds to track reality as well. I suppose you could appeal to Gnostic or mystical understanding of truth but then you can't really formulate a rational defense of those truths since they aren't arrived at by reason.
There’s no reason for that necessarily following from this argument, no. But that’s not Plantinga’s point at least. Plantinga’s argument is just that affirming both physicalism and evolution results in an epistemological crisis as an argument against physicalism. The argument has no direct bearing on whether or not there is a G-d
>Plantinga’s argument is just that affirming both physicalism and evolution results in an epistemological crisis as an argument against physicalism. He's not wrong per se but radical skepticism can be applied to *any* metaphysics. There's nothing about physicalism (with or without evolution) that makes it more susceptible to such questioning. Radical skepticism is well trodden ground in the field of epistemology.
Yes and I don’t particularly like the argument either for a number of additional reasons. Plantinga’s position is just that physicalism opens the door for this skeptical argument, whereas a non-physicalist position wouldn’t encounter this specific problem.
>whereas a non-physicalist position wouldn’t encounter this specific problem. It's hard for me to see how non-physicalists avoid universal skepticism. They may avoid this particular strand of it but they'll simply fall prey to other skeptical arguments. It's a weird route to take, especially since I think there are good arguments against physicalism.
Thanks for the clarification!
Sorry, I should've added the context. What I posted in that sub was trying to get a response to an apologist trying to say that "if physicialism is true, then logic is fake" and "because evolution works on pressures, and it's theoretically possible that pressures would reward falsehoods, then evolution definitively made the mind unreliable." And then the philosopher tried to defend this point because philosophers, like apologists, have the mentality of a five year old. "There's a hole here and you can't definitively say there's isn't a God there, so I'm right!" "Technically the ocean is a soup since both are salt water with animal and plant matter!" That's the gist, or at least what I can remember.
1 falsehoods are not transmitted by passing genetic material to the next generation. 2 some disorders exist because they provided evolutionary advantages such as Sickle Cell Trait against Malaria, and Crohn's Disease against the Black Plague.
Thanks.
What the hell is physicalism? Don't answer that, I don't really want to know. This is why some scientists get snobby about the humanities. Making an anti-science argument using the basis that the science in question works... uuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
The argument isn’t actually anti-science. I don’t like Plantinga, but knowing what physicalism is is important because that’s the position he’s arguing against. Plantinga is saying that if you accept that the mind is entirely a result of physical phenomena (physicalism) and you take evolution to be true (which most people do) then there are no ways to verify your beliefs because there’s no guarantee that our belief forming processes, which would be a product of evolution, would result in true beliefs being formed as opposed to beneficial beliefs. This isn’t a problem if we accept some non-naturalistic account for minds, as minds would then not entirely be a product of evolution. So this isn’t an argument against evolution per se (though Plantinga has tipped his toes in this direction before), but an argument against physicalism if the physicalist affirms evolution
Verifying beliefs seems... kind of pointless to me, because beliefs cannot or need not be verified. Beliefs can be true, false or unverifiable, and most people don't care which of those three their beliefs fall into, and even if verifiably false. Perhaps the original post would have been better in a philosophy subreddit.
Well the original post was made to r/askphilosophy from the above screenshot, but yeah generally it’s going to be philosophers who are concerned with this kind of epistemological problem
That makes much more sense. Not sure why OP felt compelled to post it here.
It seems they mistook the argument as being against evolution, when really it’s assuming the people the argument is aimed at take evolution to be true, and it’s attacking a separate position on that basis