Phil Roberts, Jr. <
[email protected]> wrote:
> John Wilkins wrote:
> > Tim Tyler <
[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >>The effect allows evolution to take advantage of
> >>intelligent design, lamarckian inheritance, and directed
> >>mutations.
> >>
> >>The first ramifications of it are unfolding all around
> >>us as I write.
> >
> >
> > In my role as idiosyncratic deviant, I must reject this
> > claim. Intelligent design, so-called "lamarckian"
> > inheritance, and directed mutations are all the end
> > result of lower-level darwinian processes.
>
> I don't think Tim is disagreeing. Nor am I. What I am
> saying however, is that there is no reason to assume that
> everything produced by natural selection is adaptive and,
> in particular, flying airplanes into skyscrapers looks
> like one of those most precious of all scientific
> commodities, a full-fledged evolutionary anomaly. I'm also
> assuming that suicide being the second leading cause of
> death among teenagers, who have not yet reached their
> reproductive prime, is a biological feature screaming for
> an explanation. The one I am suggesting here is that, once
> you introduce rationality into the natural selection mix,
> you begin to pick up stuff that the world has never seen
> before, and that a lot of the biological craziness we see
> in man can be accounted for in terms of a simple
> postulated mechanism in which:
>
> 'an increase in cognitive objectivity (knowledge,
> intelligence, wisdom, cognitive competence, etc.)
> "facilitates" an increase in valuative objectivity
> (impartiality)' IRRESPECTIVE OF ITS ADAPTIVENESS.
>
> with the valuative objectivity manifested in:
>
> a. an increase in intrinsic valuing of non-related
> others (e.g. save the whales, concern for a bird
> with a broken wind, etc.)
>
> juxtaposed with:
>
> b. an increased volatility in self-value (guilt,
> etc.)
>
> relative to the valuative profile predicted by our formal
> models ("ruthless selfishness").
>
>
> > Intelligence relies on the inheritance of prior trial
> > and error.
>
> Which of one's creative ideas is going to survive might
> depend on this. But the ampliative inference component is
> profoundly intuitive IMHO, and heaviltiy dependent on the
> capacity to 'cognize similarity and difference', i.e.,
> intuitiveness, perceptiveness, sensitivity, an eye for
> epistemic beauty (and ugliness), etc., in short, all the
> things that are currently absent in the soft sciences,
> including evolutionary psychology IMHO. The part you are
> talking about, i.e., checking to see if one's ampliative
> inference actually corresponds with reality, comes
> afterwards. But most of the heavy lifting is is
> accomplished in a highly ANAlogical manner, as Hume
> maintained some 250 years ago:
>
> 'All reasoning is nothing but comparing'
>
> This also gives us a nice way to understand how
> reasoning, in Hume's sense (ampliative inference) might
> have evolved from simple conditioning in which we
> construe conditioning as:
>
> 'the capacity to cognize obvious similarity and
> difference (e.g., this A + B sequence is like the one
> observed previously)'
>
> and reasoning construed as:
>
> 'the capacity to cognize abstruse similarity and
> difference (e.g., electricity is like water flowing
> in a pipe)
>
> Its also compatible with the Greek derivation for the term
> rationality ('ratio' = to compare), and in which we might
> simply construe rationality as the psychical product of
> ampliative inference.
A problem with adaptation arguments is that we must be
absolutely clear on what it is the aptation is adapted *to*.
By definition, if it is the outcome of a selection pressure
in its favour, it is adapted to that pressure. That does not
imply it is adapted to everything, nor that it is adapted in
any absolute sense.
Reason, or cognitive prowess, etc., has a tradition of being
seen as the path to Truth. But we now, in large part due to
Maynard Smith style game theory, see rational choice as
something that relates only to the current payoff matrix. So
while we can say that a projected action is rational, we
must say that relative to some prior selection pressure in
favour of that action type.
If engineers build bridges out of known materials, they are
ampliatively (lovely word) applying what they already know
by experience about those materials, and making some
assumptions about uniformity (something else Hume discussed)
in order to project. But in failing to take into account
harmonics caused by wind, they get catastrophic failures.
This too gets included in the prior history bank.
Each inductive extension to that bank is tested, and, if it
works, reused. If not, then we investigate until we know why
it failed and how it will behave in the future.
So in each case, the exercise of reason is an application of
prior knowledge.
Tim appears to think that this process of inductive
prediction is foolproof, or capable of extending beyond what
is known with a guarantee of some success. Hume might make
some ascerbic observations on that point. Selection is the
exercise, by biology or by reason or by complex adaptive
systems like culture, of inherited knowledge only. There is
no "lamarckian" process going on; it's a matter of
identifying the correct level of the process.
All that, and we also must take into account that ideas
as well as genes can drift along and be retained for
sheer chance sampling. As my quandam supervisor once
wrote - just because an idea in science is retained, does
not make it right.
>
> > There is nothing magical about it, and it cannot
> > anticipate outcomes except on the basis of learned
> > regularities.
>
> But once cognized, one can choose to employ the regularity
> or NOT, an option not available prior to the cognizing of
> the regularity. As such, the cognizer would become 'less
> determined' by the regularity than a creature that did not
> have this capacity, would it not?
Perhaps, but that is not at issue. I can choose to
ignore known regularities, but I cannot ensure that I
succeed post hoc.
>
> > Even then, the best engineer or artist has to solve
> > problems in the traditional, "darwinian" way.
> >
>
> 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).
Rational, in philosophical usage, means able to maximise
coherence, warrant of belief, and conceptual and empirical
adequacy, or some such. This is only feasible ahead of time
if we have some noetic projective power, which we don't. 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. 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.
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".
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.
>
> > [Coy]I have a paper on this[/Coy]. I argue that all
> > supposed non-darwinian processes must be darwinian at
> > that or a subordinate level.
>
> Why?
>
> > I call this Dawkins' Conjecture. But I do not think all
> > cultural inheritance must be the result of selection; so
> > perhaps it is not Dawkins' idea at all...
>
> 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. 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).
--
Dr John S. Wilkins, www.wilkins.id.au "I never meet anyone
who is not perplexed what to do with their children" --
Charles Darwin to Syms Covington, February 22, 1857
But the point is