Phil Roberts said:John Wilkins said:Phil Roberts, Jr. <[email hidden]> wrote:
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:
Assume for the sake of argument that most ampliative
inference is more a matter of COGNIZING a rule
(i.e., order) than a matter of FOLLOWING a rule (e.g.,
logic) and, along with it, the OPTION of following
a rule or NOT once it has been cognized. If such
were the case, then we might readily expect to find
AN INVERSE CORRELATION between 'being rational' and
'being determined'. Who knows? We might even
eventually find a species that was beginning to
question the most central natural mandate of all,
'maximize your own self-interest', taking the form
of an increased volatility in self-value, and an
insatiable appetite for self-significating
experience. In other words, we might find a species
becoming less and less concerned with staying alive
(e.g., the 9/11 terrorists) and more and more concerned
with sustaining REASONS for staying alive (e.g.,
needs for love, attention, religion, moral
integrity, wealth, power, autonomy, justice,
meaning purpose, etc.) precisely as can currently
be observed in nature's most rational species.
Would that be such a bad thing?
Whew... let's take 'em one at a time.
We have heuristics - rules of thumb, which we employ.
They are always gained on the basis of past experience
(for that matter, I am one of those deluded souls who
thinks logic is itself the result of past learned
experience).
I agree with you about logic. One of the brightest among
us (Aristotle for instance) managed to cognize the order
in the manner in which we cognize order. But unlike my
read of you so far, I believe who ever this individual
was, he had intellectual acuities that went far beyond
rote learning and trial and error, the so-called
"darwinian" approach as you have deemed it, I believe.
Well, all I can say is that there is no way I can conceive
of for this to occur, apart from noetic rays or clairvoyance
or divine revelation.
Quoted message said:
Quoted message said:
Rational, in philosophical usage, means able to maximise
coherence, warrant of belief, and conceptual and
empirical adequacy, or some such.
Rationality is widely construed as comprised of two
domains, an epistemic/cognitive domain and a practical
domain. The first domain might be construed as more or
less corresponding with epistemology, although epistemics
would probably be a better term for it. The latter domain
is dominated by the means/end theory, in which rationality
is construed as a matter of efficiency or expected
utility, in its game theoretic formulations at least. But
it is also important to note that the originators of game
theory adopted this stance purely for the purposes of
simplification. They were not attempting to make any sort
of pronouncements about the rationality of ends. They just
wanted to bypass this murkey issue, which was probably not
such a bad idea:
I am not in this sense a Kantian (which is whence we get the
pure and practical reason distinction, and the means and end
contrast).
Quoted message said:
Let's fill out the quote you give for context: One might
argue: if it is pointed out to both [player] 1 and [player]
2 that alpha3 and beta2 [two strategies in a game] are in
equilibrium, then 1 _should_ choose alpha3. Possibly, but
nothing in game theory says so.. If we were player 1 in this
case, we certainly would choose alpha3, but we would not
call another "irrational" if he did otherwise. Even if we
were tempted at first to call an alpha3-non-conformist
"irrational," we would have to admit that player 2 might be
"irrational" in which case it would be "rational" for player
1 to be "irrational" - to be an alpha3-non- conformist. We
belabor this point because we
Quoted message said:feel that it is crucial that the social scientist
recognize that game theory is not descriptive, but
rather (conditionally) normative. It states neither
how people do behave nor how they should behave in an
absolute sense, but how they should behave if they
wish to achieve certain ends (Luce and Raiffa, 1957).
It prescribes for given assumptions courses of action
for the attainment of outcomes have certain formal
"optimum" properties. These properties may or may not
be deemed pertinent in any given real world conflict
of interest. If they are, the theory prescribes the
choices which _must_ be made to get to that optimum."
page 63, by the way.
The rationality here is one of a course of action to be
taken in a situation of agreed value and conflict of
interest. But this is a very limited form of rationality.
This is why game theory is applicable to evolution - the
"rational egoism" is specified in a very specific sense
- of maximising the number of copies of a gene. But this
does not transfer to social behaviors directly. Social
action is not selfish because we can model genes as if
they were selfish (something Dawkins notes quite
explicitly in the Afterword to the 1989 edition of The
Selfish Gene).
Genes can be considered *as if* they were selfish players in
a game, and the end result of this selection can be
apparently altruistic behavior on the part of the organisms,
due to kin selection, and the fact that iterated Prisoner's
Dilemmas (uncommunicative dilemmas where either one player
loses out or both do less well than the optimum) will, if
the initial population is suitably composed, evolve into
equilibrium of "[censored] for tat" strategies.
In short, cooperation can evolve through the maximisation of
genetic fitness. It won't always, but there is absolutely no
justification for the direct transference of selfishness
from the level of the gene to that of the individual or
social group, contrary to Ghiselin's sarcastic and cynical
comment, "scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed).
It's all about keeping your levels straight when determining
the interest bearers.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:This is only feasible ahead of time if we have some
noetic projective power, which we don't.
Not quite sure what you mean by this. We have a certain
amount of predictive power, but that is apparently not
what you have in mind.
No. We have that because we learn from experience what sort
of projection works, whether that experience is individual
through learning or evolutionarily in our innate cognitive
machinery.
Quoted message said:If, on the other hand, you arguing that 'being rational'
is a matter of 'being objective', and in spite of the
fact that we might never know for sure when that might be
the case, then I would quite agree. Indeed, I would argue
that we can clear up lots of rationality paradoxes by
adopting just such an assumption, that 'being rational'
is simply a matter of 'being objective'. We can also
clear up an evolutionary anomaly, but that's a litte far
down the road.
Nope, "being rational" in a game merely means that you are
completely consistent in carrying out the "calculation" of
what will maximise the outcome. That is different to being
rational in the philosophical sense (which, incidentally,
means to maximise conceptual coherence, as I said).
Quoted message said:
Quoted message said:So we can only tell if we are rational over long periods
and in populations, just as we can only tell if a novel
trait is fit the sameway.
Yes. We are rational when we are objective, but its damn
difficult to tell just exactly when that is and we can
never be sure.
Which is why, in the end, the only test is success at
maximising fitness, either conceptual or biological.
There are three, and so far as I can tell *only* three,
sources for our abilities to model the environment
successfully:
1. Individual learning (through trial, error elimination,
and selective retention of what works);
2. Cultural learning (through trial, error elimination and
selective retention of what works); and
3. Evolutionary adaptation (through trial, error
elimination, and selective retention of what works).
That each of these applies to differing substrates in no way
undercuts the claim that the same general process is
occurring. After all, biological evolution applies to a
range of differing substrates too...
Quoted message said:
Quoted message said:It's not a matter of maximising self-interest; since
Marx's "false consciousness" we have understood that self-
interest can be served often by self-delusion, and that
"interest" can be interpreted as a political term,
leaving scientific knowledge to be a political
weathercock.
Ahmen!
Special concern for one's own future would be selected
by evolution: Animals without such concern would be
more likely to die before passing on their genes. Such
concern would remain, as a natural fact, even if we
decided that it was not justified. By thinking hard
about the arguments, we might be able briefly to stun
this natural concern. But it would soon revive... The
fact that we have this attitude cannot therefore be a
reason for thinking it justified. Whether it is
justified [i.e. rational] is an open question, waiting
to be answered (Derek Parfit, 'Reasons and Persons'😉.
But what Parfit does not deal with in this passage (which,
by the way, you sling around like biblical texts; watch
that) is the fact which we now understand that selection on
"selfish genes" coupled with sufficient random variation
(drift and mutation) to allow differing population
structures to arise (for density dependent selection changes
fitness values locally) can give rise to robust altruistic
strategies at the organismic level. It's too easy to say
"anything that is not useful to the individual will be
eliminated". This is not true - it is what is useful to
maximise the inclusive fitness of many copies of genes.
Quoted message said:
Quoted message said:
I prefer to think of scientific knowledge as post hoc
tendencies to do the right thing empirically. As Quine
once said, in _From a Logical Point of View_ (one of the
first attempts to reconcile evolution and epistemology
after the logical whatevertheyweres), "creatures
inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic,
but praiseworthy, tendency to die before reproducing
their kind".
Objectivity in cognitive affairs is adaptive. Agreed. But
objectivity in valuative affairs is not, since selfishness
is usually going to be more efficient in perpetuating
one's self and one's genetic blueprints.
Human and baboon have evolved by natural selection. If
you look at the way natural selection works, it seems
to follow that anything that has evolved by natural
selction should be selfish. Therefore we must expect
when we go and look at the behavior of baboons,
humans, and all other living creatures, we will find
it to be selfish. If we find that our expectation is
wrong, if we observe that human behavior is truly
altruistic, then we will be faced with something
puzzling, SOMETHING THAT NEEDS EXPLAINING. [my
emphasis].
Who are you quoting now? What do they go on to say? Please
don't argue like this.
Quoted message said:Selfishness is the exact opposite of valuative
objectivity (impartiality). So we have reason to assume
that nature is selecting for objectivity/ rationality in
cognitive affairs, and selecting AGAINST
objectivity/rationality in valuative affairs (e.g.,
Dawkins has pointed out that there is a surprising amount
of mitochondrial DNA from a single individual floating
around Europe, its origins tracable to the time of Attila
the Hum 🙂 Or think of what Joseph Stalin was able to
accomplish without the inefficiency of moral qualms
constantly getting in the way)
And this does not necessarily translate to long term
fitness. A couple of generations don't matter - if [censored]
genes spread, the likelihood is that a [censored] population
will eventually encounter conditions in which the [censored]
strategy does less well than NiceGuy genes overall.
Quoted message said:
Quoted message said:Organisms adapted to conditions, and then they can leave
those conditions or the conditions change around them.
We have cognitive capabilities that once were highly
adaptive, but we have changed our environment faster
than our genes can track. So it is unsurprising that we
do things that are not adaptive. But the ideas
themselves still adapt. That's why I think cultural
evolution is darwinian, even if not Darwinian.
But the problem is not just in our ideas. More
importantly, we have VALUES that look radically askew, at
least from the perspective of the authors I have grown to
respect (Price, Hamilton, Dawkins, Smith, Williams,
Campbell, etc.).
Even with qualifications regarding the possibility of
group selection, the portrait of the biologically based
social personality that emerges is one of predominantly
self-serving opportunism EVEN FOR THE MOST SOCIAL
SPECIES, for all species in which there is genetic
competition among the social co- operators, that is,
where all members have the chance of parenthood (Donald
Campbell).
And the question is why? My own view is that we have a
tradeoff between generations; I call it "social
investment". We are all trying to maximise the assistance
we get from our troop for our progeny. This strategy will
tend to evolve cooperators of a kind (not naive
cooperators, though). Don Campbell is one of the Good Guys
as far as I am concerned, BTW.
Quoted message said:
Rather than "ruthlessly selfish", as predicted by our
formal models, [censored] sapiens might more accurately be
described as benevolently selfish and, even more bizarre,
plagued with moral qualms that sometime lead to self-
termination.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:
But that IS Dawkins' idea, isn't it?
The new [primeval] soup is the soup of human
culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a
noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural
transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes
from a suitable Greek root, but I want a
monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope
my classicist friends will forgive me if I
abbreviate mimeme to meme .
But Dawkins only allowed that memes might be adaptive,
as do a great many evolutionary epistemologists.
I don't think so, John. Dawkins was the one who made the
radical and I believe, totally honest remarks about just
how selfish we "ought" (an epistemic ought, not a moral
one) to be given our formal models of natural selection.
That's why he went out of his way to provide an entire
last chapter that was a DISCLAIMER for any assumption that
you can apply these conclusions directly to human nature.
Dawkins was contending that we currently have an
explanatory void between the theory of natural selection
(at least as it shows up in the formal models) and humam
nature as it is currently observed. "Memetics" is just a
placemarkder for whatever theory its going to take to fill
this expalantory void.
I think Dawkins is close to being a panadaptationist, and I
agree about the placeholding of memes (I would rather strip
cultural evolution of gene-metaphors and replicators and
talk about the dynamics - so I'd rather speak of "cultural
Darwinism"😉. But one thing his meme theory does do is point
up that the evolutionary dynamics of culture are distinct
from, but constrained by, the evolutionary dynamics of
biology. My own metaphor is the layers of currents in a
river - the deeper ones are not necessarily guiding the
superficial ones; each has its own dynamics.
Quoted message said:
Quoted message said:It makes a lot of sense if you allow that they can be
the result of nearly neutral drift, or adaptation to
something other than "reality" (for example, adaptation
to local cultural conditions).
I think the 9/11 terrorst (and others) are like red flags
being waved in front of natural scientists saying, "Quess
what boys, its time to go back to the drawing boards". I
also think the difference between a scientist and an
academic or a technologist is precisely in his ability to
notice when something is askew, possibly requiring a
paradigm shift (e.g., the periphilons of Mercury come to
mind). The fact that just about every contributor to this
thread so far seems to be complacent about the 9/11
terrorists, for example, is pretty sad. But then I just
attended a conference in which I was the only one in the
room who thought morality might not be adaptive, so I'm
gettin' kinda used to it (with the exception of Matt
Ridley, that is, but only in private conversation after
the meeting).
4/11 poses nothing we didn't already know from a couple of
millenia of documented fanaticism. It just hit America
hard, that's all (from a theoretical perspective; it hit
me hard as I had friends near there, and I had just been
there a couple of months prior). There is no anomaly to
deal with, but a well-known fact of cultural dynamics.
--
John S Wilkins PhD - www.wilkins.id.au a little emptier, a
little spent as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient. -- Seamus Heaney
