Boonton, mi amigo, the original point of the essay still remains. There may well be environmental “pressure” that favors accuracy of sensation; but not one that favors accuracy of belief. That’s if you believe that “blind forces” are all that’s involved.

At its core we aren’t talking about accuracy of sensation. Accuracy of sensation means that the lion biting into you hurts a lot. Knowing the red snakes will kill but the green snakes won’t is not about accurate sensations. Yes there’s a clear evolutionary pressue to be able to see the difference between the red and green snakes but that’s not the same thing as a belief about them being true or not true. whether or not these forces are ‘blind’ (whatever that really means) has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter if the red snakes are deadly because they were introduced by a gameskeeper interested in creating an evolutionary pressure against color blindness or if they just happened to ‘fall off a truck’ carrying red snakes through the territory.

I don’t think you can get away from the fact that as long as beliefs have real world consquences there’s an evolutionary pressure that favors the development of true beliefs. This pressure may be tempored by the cost of developing a true belief. For example, it may be less costly to adopt a ‘less true’ belief of ‘all snakes can kill’ rather than figuring out exactly which snakes are and are not deadly.

IOW, Dennett’s original point stands: evolution alone shapes us toward =useful= beliefs, not necessarily toward true ones.

As I noted in my very first comment on this thread, “But accuracy is extraordinarily useful.”

Are you arguing that accuracy and utility are completely uncorrelated?

Adam Apple sees the grass rustle and runs because he believes it is a lion, but it is only the wind. Does he survive to find food and mates?

Takes a lot of energy to break into a full sprint and charge for the nearest tree, climb it and stay up there till its safe. If you expend that energy to get away from a lion its necessary but if you are so jumpy that you’re doing it all the time you’re putting yourself at risks. Risks from wasting energy, risk of injury during your sprint, and risk of looking foolish in front of potential mates ;)

Xenophanes sees marine fossils in the mountains of Greece and believes it is due to a primeval world-flood because he knows of no other natural process for depositing marine life in mountains. Does he obtain food and mates?

A better example because its a belief that’s of the real world but much less connected to direct survival. What’s important, though, is not the particular belief but the mechanism we have of generating a belief and then revising or refining it going foward.

Since Xenophanes’s survivial doesn’t directly depend on the truthfulness of that belief, he has much less incentive to correct it. In fact it might work to *not* correct it. If some younger philosopher is pushing a more true belief about fossils, Xenophanes might find his luck with the ladies is better if he has the young philosopher dismissed as a lunatic rather than admitting its a better belief.

But its still a belief about the real world. That means, since its a false belief, the more you push it the greater the odds are it will start to break down under scrutiny. Xenophanes, though, may resist pushing it a bit more because of its looser connection to actual survivial. Adam Apple, in contrast, has a real problem if he mistakes rustling for a lion too often.

The conundrum can be solved if we assume that “belief” is not an inherited, genetic trait, but rather a learned behavior.

I don’t disagree. A handful of ‘beliefs’ seem to be genetic. It seems, for example, that nearly all humans have an inbred fear of snakes. It’s not very strong and can easily be ‘unlearned’ but it spans most cultures that have been studied, appears even in infancy and almost certainly carries over from primate days. Snakes are a huge problem for primates and a lot of communication they do entails warning each other about snakes in the area. In the developed world its really easy to loose track of just how much of a problem snakes can be if you’re nearly naked, living near and in trees.

But unlike many other animals, most of our beliefs are no inherited but our process of making beliefs is. As I pointed out we have roughly two systems for making beliefs….one is “I’ll figure it out myself” and the other is “I’ll believe what everyone else does”. The latter has plenty of cons clearly but it has several interesting pros. For one thing its fast and more importantly it allows humans to accumulate beliefs from the “I’ll figure it out myself” process. This duel system requires our very large brains which inturn require a very long period of learning and require lots of energy. From an evolutionary point of view we are something of a ‘Hail Mary pass’.

Anyway, the question raised in this thread was given that we may adopt false beliefs should we have any confidence in our beliefs about evolution? I think the reason this question appeals to Joe and others is that it sounds like a clever way to overturn evolution, in reality its just nihilism. If you overturn evolution because you just can’t trust our belief system, well any other belief also gets overturned too.

My position here is that we have a ‘natural belief selection’ process that constantly churns our beliefs reaffirming some, rejecting others. In that process, you can view beliefs themselves as a type of species. The false belief is at the distinct disadvantage in ‘churning’ as it will probably become less and less viable when viewed from different angles. The true belief is at an advantage because when you approach it from an odd angle, it maintains its consistency.

The “all snakes are deadly” and “some snakes are deadly” is an example of why this ‘churning of beliefs’ process is a trait with a lot of fitness potential. We have very good reason to think ‘churning’ beliefs will get us closer to true beliefs and reject false ones.

But the only problem with this is that in order for a false belief to get rejected in the churning process, it must relate to the actual world. Xenophanes’s belief about a world flood is not directly related to survival but it is related to the real world. When other ‘angles’ are examined, the belief starts to look less consistent, less plausible. It’s probably an evolutionary trait that we like beliefs less and less as they appear less and less consistent with the real world.

What happens with beliefs that have little or no connection to the ‘real world’? Well I’m sure they churn a lot but they don’t become inconsistent. Like it or not many religious beliefs are like that. What did the Greeeks believe about gods? That they existed but you couldn’t see them, detect them. They interacted with the real world but in random ways that you couldn’t predict. In other words, you had a belief that could be churned a lot but almost never disproven. As a result, this ‘process’ is not very trustworthy when it comes to beliefs like that. The Greeks didn’t have very good reasons for believing in gods and at the end didn’t have very good reasons for rejecting the gods. It’s much harder to say they were right about those beliefs than it is to map out a progression of bleiefs about fossils as getting closer to the truth over time.

Adam Apple sees the grass rustle and runs because he believes it is a lion, but it is only the wind. Does he survive to find food and mates?

Xenophanes sees marine fossils in the mountains of Greece and believes it is due to a primeval world-flood because he knows of no other natural process for depositing marine life in mountains. Does he obtain food and mates?

Albrecht of Saxony sees marine fossils in the mountains of Germany and believes it is due to an uplift of sea floor because otherwise erosion would have smoothed the earth to an egg. Aside from being celibate, could he have obtained food and mates?

Edward Blyth sees that the less fit organism fails to survive and believes that this demonstrates the fixity of type; that is, that species are unchanging because sports are weeded out. Does he obtain food and mates despite his whiskers?

Charles Darwin sees that the better fit organism survives and believes that this demonstrates the origin of species; that is, that species change because certain races are favored. Does he obtain food and mates despite his whiskers?

Fact is, the human race is actually here and is notorious for entertaining false beliefs on a variety of subjects. (Accuracy of observation is a separate matter.)

The conundrum can be solved if we assume that “belief” is not an inherited, genetic trait, but rather a learned behavior.

The topic of randomness has puzzled man since the pre-historic times and it still puzzles most people, including philosophers, scientists and evolutionary biologists.

Yes but I think its less applicable here than you think. Throwing dice is just an expression, its not really a random activity. Where the dice ends up depends on very non-random factors like the weight of the dice, gravity, the force of the throw and so on. But since none of that can be calculated the gambler uses randomness in his model.

Randomness is also used for factors that enter from ‘outside the model’. The example I used is a comet hitting the earth. It’s random only in the sense that Darwianian theory doesn’t tell us when and how comets will hit the earth. The event is treated as random but it really isn’t. The comet behaves according to the laws of motion.

The place I’m aware of randomness really being an essential part of science’s theory of nature is in quantum physics. Everywhere else its just a shorthand way to handle calculations that are either too tedious or too difficult ot actually do.

Ye Olde Statistician
IOW, Dennett’s original point stands: evolution alone shapes us toward =useful= beliefs, not necessarily toward true ones. (And not, be it added, necessarily toward false one, either.)

All things being equal, it would seem true beliefs about the real world tend to be more useful than false ones.

YOS
In what way is it “advantageous”? We’re not talking about the ability to obtain more accurate data: e.g., that this snake is deadly but that one is not. And the only “advantages” that matter are those that enable one to secure food and mates. Running from the rustling grass because you =believe= there may be a lion in there is just as effective as running from the rustling grass because you =know= there is a lion in there.

IOW, Dennett’s original point stands: evolution alone shapes us toward =useful= beliefs, not necessarily toward true ones. (And not, be it added, necessarily toward false one, either.)
+ + +

BTW, “towards” is a telos-word.

I’m still trying to figure out your problem with natural laws moving “always or for the most part” toward an end. And I suspect it may be because you think Paley’s “watch” thought experiment is a teleological argument.

The Early Modern rejection of finality in nature is part of what led to the “traditional” problems regarding causation/correlation, induction, etc. that got Hume so hot and bothered.

Whitehead argued that the “problem of induction” is due to the mechanistic concept of matter. “If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so that the first invention of it must be entirely arbitrary, it follows at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary connections which are not warranted by anything intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects”
– Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p.4

For more detail, see here:
http://www.epsociety.org/userfiles/art-Feser%20%28Teleology%29%281%29.pdf

“In other words, a coin flip isn’t really ‘random’. It’s a lot of applications of the laws of motion and gravity that simply can’t be calculated. The ‘randomness’ of natural selection is the same thing essentially.”

The topic of randomness has puzzled man since the pre-historic times and it still puzzles most people, including philosophers, scientists and evolutionary biologists. Einstein’s dice quote (from his letter 1926 letter to Max Born) denies randomness even to quantum mechanics, and to Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, thus resulting in a long lasting controversy between the two schools.

Likewise, the Darwinian confusion about the randomness of natural selection or some of its sub-processes is at the heart of the controversy, and most evolutionary biologists don’t even want to acknowledge that there is a deep problem with their own understanding of the underlying mechanisms of their theory or theories, effectively rendering these theories of evolution not a “fact” but a rather dubious non-explanatory or nonsensical proposition.

But the bottom line is that many or most evolutionary biologists have adopted a clear atheistic meaning of randomness akin to pure chaotic chance which then to some more or less significant degree somehow mysteriously creates all this wonderful life that Darwin so poetic about. However, unless these scientists can give their “random” mechanism some real precisely defined “scientific” meaning, such explanation of evolution by random chance is akin to mere magic.

The whole modern endeavour to impose on science and especially on biology “methodological naturalism,” or an aura of naturalism, (essentially by redefining, twisting, or hiding the common sense meaning of words), is nothing but hypocritical humbug which is aimed at hiding God from nature and from the minds of people. The result is clear — such science then becomes a real humbug drowning in all sorts of dualisms and mind-boggling doublespeak.

Belief 1: All snakes are deadly.

Belief 2: Certain snakes are deadly, others are not.

Clearly we know that belief 2 is a true belief, belief 1 is a false belief.

But belief 1 may still be useful. A person following belief 1 will incur some costs. He may lose the opportunity to enjoy a snake as a pet. He may miss out on the fact that you can eat some snakes for dinner. Perhaps non-deadly snakes can be used to keep rodent populations in check around grain stores. On the other hand, by avoiding all snakes he will decrease his chances of death from snake bite. Most of the time, the pro of this false belief will far outweigh the cons. Snakes are not that great pets compared to dogs, there’s usually plenty of other things to eat, you can use cats to keep rodents in check if you don’t have mousetraps.

Belief 2 is true and it does seem like it has an advantage over the false belief. But belief 2 is harder to get at. One has to accumulate a lot of knowledge about different snakes. You may have to collect numerous snake stories from your fellow humans or conduct lab tests on the venom of various types of snakes or maybe even risk your life by letting yourself get bit by snakes you think are safe.

So now time for philosophy. Some humans have belief 1, others have belief 2. We know that human belief systems are fallable. We know that a fallable belief production system is perfectly consistent with human nature. Knowing that, do we have a right to say that belief 2 is probably more correct than belief 1?

I would say yes, since belief 2 represents a belief that is consistent with a larger range of data than belief 1. Belief 1 may ‘work’ from an evolutionary stance in the limited context that you happen to live in an environment with dangeorous snakes. But since we know belief 1 is false, we also know that it will not hold up very long to scrutiny. If someone who holds belief 1 starts talking to everyone in the world about snakes, he is going to start encountering people who got bite by snakes and didn’t die. He may even witness this directly, he may even accidently get bite by a snake and not die himself. The false belief is less likely to work over the long run. So there is reason to believe our ability to arrive at true beliefs is real, if not guranteed. But that assumes the belief is about the real world that we live in. Beliefs about an ‘unreal world’ would not be subject to this because there’s no feedback to cause false beliefs to break down.

Consider beliefs about the planet Mars 100-300 years ago. There were many beliefs, most or all of them false. But Mars did not exist as part of our ‘real world’. One person could imagine there were people there, another monsters with three eyes, another monsters who were 100 feet tall and so on. As long as no one actually went to Mars, no actual cameras were sent there, these false beliefs could flourish with no corrections at all. Only by making Mars part of ‘our real world’ by actually looking at it with good telescopes, sending probes to it to report back, did false beliefs start to break apart. It’s not that true beliefs were discovered as much as they were filtered. Out of thousands or more beliefs, the ones killed first and foremost by interaction with the real world are false ones.

So now turn to ‘big beliefs’ such as ‘does God exist’. Evolutionary theory should say that we should be skeptical of our ability to answer that with a true belief provided we maintain a definition of God as some type of entity that stands outside our normal ‘real world’. A strict reading of Genesis can be rejected for evolutionary history because science has brought the study of fossils and dating into our ‘real world’. But the more metaphysical question of was this all intentional or not cannot be answered reliably. Beliefs about these answers are likely to multiply just as beliefs about Mars did and without any ‘check’ from the real world there’s nothing to kill off the false beliefs in order to get at the true ones (or more true ones).

One may get on well, gaining food or mates, adapting to one’s niche in life, believing all the while that the sun goes around the earth.

But as Boonton has pointed out repeatedly, an ability to correct erroneous beliefs when they fail to work is an advantage. And it doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to work more often than not.

As I pointed out three days ago, this actually seems to match what we observe. Pretty much everything we’ve learned about the universe since we left the savannah has been counterintuitive. Round Earth, heliocentrism, continental drift, atomic theory, germ theory of disease, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics… all deeply counterintuitive and unexpected. Frankly, in areas we can’t test and have no experience in – my money’s always on the answer being something we didn’t expect.

And yet, when the beliefs we had didn’t work… we came up with more accurate – or at least, less false – beliefs. (See Isaac Asimov’s excellent essay, The Relativity of Wrong.)

Your confusion over τελος may stem from a mechanistic view of nature, shared by such unlikely folks as Behe and Dawkins.

That’s ‘fleshing it out’?