http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
What does real mean?
What would be the case even if there were no minds to perceive it.
Well, considering there are some 200 – 300 different ways of sensing the world, I can’t imagine what ONE accurate representation would even mean.
Let’s just consider one example: bees can see ultraviolet, but humans can’t, so clearly you don’t see the same world as bees do. So which of the two – you are bees – are seeing the ONE accurate representation of the world?
Again, no. A description of accurate in this context is a perceptive assessment that allows the successful action. That was what KN noted. I don’t understand what’s difficult about this concept.
Let’s try this a different way: flies fairly regularly successfully land on ceilings. Clearly they have a different perception of the world than you do (compound eyes and all). So which one – you or a fly – has the ONE accurate perception of the world? Or is it possible that you both have different accurate perceptions of the world, each one suited to different capabilities and goals?
Is there a difference between a seashell, a vase, a lacrosse stick and a painting of a tulip, if there is no one to perceive it?
“What would be the case” would seem to imply some sort of specification. What specification language is to be used in expressing this?
A “painting of a tulip” is an abstraction, so there’s a difference there.
Motivation does not matter if you are not bound by your nature you have no internal constraints on your behavior by definition.
I don’t think you get it.
If anything can happen you have no way know you are not a BB or in a simulation. Because those are “things” so they can happen
apparently you haven’t given this much thought.
Perhaps you want to have another go at it.
peace
I won’t repeat again that I think this is wrong and betrays a misunderstanding of how knowledge works. I will just note that it’s another example of a rude and arrogant post by someone who–whether he’s “given this issue much thought” or not–is, IMHO, sorely mistaken about it.
God can choose to reveal stuff using any means he wishes.
even little ole me
It’s not that I don’t have faith in his ability to reveal. It’s my great privilege to be a small part in that process.
peace
My guess is that it’s counterproductive.
phoodoo:
KN:
phoodoo:
Neil:
An irrelevant difference. A painting of a tulip is an abstract representation of a tulip, sure, but it’s also an object in and of itself, just like the seashell, vase, and lacrosse stick.
Phoodoo is simply asking whether real objects retain their differences in the absence of observers, and I, as a realist, would say yes.
fifth:
Apparently he didn’t choose to use you. Your presuppositionalist theology is an incoherent mess, not something an omniscient God would endorse.
Or if he did “reveal” it to you, he was probably drunk at the time.
It would be helpful if you explained what you mean by this. Just saying I’m mistaken is of little value if you don’t describe the error
Do you think this comment to me was rude or arrogant?
quote:
If the above constitutes “exploring” for you, it’s no wonder you’re stuck in anachronistic, inconsistent, philosophical dead-end. I prefer a little bit more thought and intelligence in my exploring, thank you.
end quote:
please keep in mind that my comment above was in response to that quote
peace
Walto does this seem to be a little rude or arrogant to you?
peace
quote:
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.
(1Co 1:27-29)
end quote:
peace
For what it’s worth, when fifth says something like this…
…I think the best response is simply to show that he’s wrong, which is typically the case.
keiths:
fifth, quoting 1 Corinthians:
If God were using you to “shame the wise”, he’d have revealed to you a theology that actually made sense.
You’re not shaming anybody but yourself with the stuff you’re peddling.
sounds reasonable, let’s see if you follow your own advise
apparently not
😉
peace
Well, I could, but then we’d both be wrong.
You’ve confirmed my original observation. You insist that anyone who doesn’t assert the existence of your god is asserting its nonexistence. It is you who is unable to hold an agnostic (literally, lack of knowledge) position, even ad arguendo.
You have provided no evidence or rational argument to support your claim that a god exists. That means there is literally no reason to take such an entity into consideration. Nonetheless, you continue to interject your baseless assertions into nearly every thread here.
Physician heal thyself. You appear constitutionally incapbable of parking your priors at the door. You are unable to distinguish between failure to explicitly assume your god and explicitly assuming that it doesn’t exist. Worse, you insist on polluting every thread in which you participate with your proselytizing.
The evidence supporting the existence of both is equivalent.
You have provided no evidence or reason to think that your god is necessary. While you may feel mocked to have that pointed out, any mockery that does occur is directed at you, not at the apparently fictitious object of your beliefs.
Both. You’re advocating badly.
The real problem that I see is that you derail nearly every thread here with this nonsense. Those of us, myself most definitely included, who reply to you are part of the problem, certainly. This is why I suggested that you create a thread for your beliefs where we can keep these apparently endless and useless discussions away from the other content of the site.
What is your objection to showing other participants some courtesy?
Strange then that you never demonstrate that behavior here.
phoodoo:
You’ve mentioned that you’re a professional athlete. Are you a lacrosse player, by any chance? Just curious.
What you have revealed thus far is how damaging childhood indoctrination can be to a developing mind and how rude people are willing to be in the name of their gods.
fifthmonarchyman,
I won’t repeat my views on knowledge a 50th tiime.
Yes, I think the post you were responding to was also rude and arrogant. Turn the other cheek.
fifthmonarchyman,
Sure. I’m often rude and arrogant too. Never denied it. We’re talking about YOU though.
I have two roughly-hewn responses here.
First, I think that transcendental reflection establishes a very weak, minimal ‘metaphysical realism’. We can know, by reflecting on our own cognitive capacities and incapacities, that we would not be able to identify our very own cognitive capacities at all if we were not also some minimally empirically detectable degree of regularities and irregularities in the world.
This establishes that there are real structures and that we are in some sense, even a very impoverished one, in cognitive contact with those real structures.
Second, in terms of how we should characterize those real structures, I favor a ‘subtractive argument’: start off with the thick world of embodied and enlanguaged experience, then imaginatively subtract from it everything that we know is contributed by our discursive practices and sensorimotor abilities. What is left over is The Real. What we have are what Dennett calls “real patterns” and what Kincaid helpfully glosses as “the ability of sources of Shannon information to resist entropy”. (There might some additional argument here to show that that ability shows up in experience as grounding counterfactuals.)
However, I do not think that there is a single correct way of fleshing out these structures in more detail than that independent of some way of pragmatically coping with them, and there are indefinitely many ways of pragmatically coping with them, varying across social practices within a culture, varying across cultures distributed in geography and history, and also varying across species, all of which have characteristic suites of sensorimotor abilities functionally integrated into the goals and niches of that kind of organism. So although I endorse a version of realism, it’s a very radical and pluralistic pragmatic realism!
Proverbs 4 NIV
Oh well, looks like holy writ (Christian, anyway), disagrees with itself again, sort of leaving us to figure things out for ourselves.
Not that it wasn’t a completely useless text anyway, since there is a myriad of foolish ideas and hardly all of them could be what God used (one would think not, anyway). I’m not sure what FMM’s claim to have the correct foolishness is supposed to rest upon, perhaps that it is especially circular and foolish?
Glen Davidson
fifth:
walto:
Amen, walto.
fifth,
Do you think your robotic behavior brings glory to God?
At least to a first approximation, “regularity” means something like rule based.
So where do those rules come from? And what do you make of Wittgenstein’s argument on the impossibility of following a rule?
For myself, I think Wittgenstein is right. So even if there are regularities, we probably could not find them.
My alternative is that we (as biological organisms) make up our own rules of behavior, and retain those rules that work well. I don’t see a problem in following the rules that we have created for ourselves. Here, “work well” means that the resulting behavior supports our life support systems.
The idea is that we able to make up rules that categorize the world based on internal states. And our experience of reality emerges from this categorization.
I see the mathematics as support this emergence (based on the ideas behind Gillman & Jerison).
However, that does leave the reality that we experience as somewhat dependent on our biology.
But then, with that subtraction, you subtract everything. I don’t think there are any “real patterns”. And, as far as I know, the only sources of Shannon information are biological organisms and their artifacts.
I have to agree with FMM here. The supposed god he believes in has not revealed a theology that makes sense.
It is also remarkably ineffective at inspiring the receivers of these supposed revelations to produce logically coherent arguments and evidence.
Neil Rickert,
Interesting post, Neil. Thanks.
Granting that pluralism, do also deny that we can assess the merits of different epistemic practices for a given domain of knowledge?
For example, consider human health. I think the epistemic practices inherent in science-based medicine are superior to those which rely solely on shamanism.
One could counter-argue that a shamanistic society has a different meaning for “human health”. In reply, I’d say that the term refers to a cluster concept and that there are elements of that cluster shared across all human societies due to the commonalities of humanity.
One could also argue that such a society values its own religious goals ahead of optimizing those common human health elements. I’d reply that could very well be true, but does not affect the evaluation of the epistemic practices involved in maintaining human health.
But if one was not convinced by the above replies for the shamanistic example, then consider the case of two groups of people in California (say). One says vaccines do not cause autism. Another says they do. I don’t think one can argue such closely integrated groups mean significantly different things by say “cause” or “autism”. But “vaccine” must refer to something different in the two cases since they attribute different properties to whatever “vaccine” refers to. Do both groups have equal claim to the reality of whatever “vaccines” refers to for them due to their different epistemic practices?
Try asking him what a book on the mathematics of rings has to do with the situation.
Maybe you’ll have better luck than me when he linked the same book in a similar exchange.
ETA: Of course, Putnam made points in this situation by invoking the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem in his model theoretic argument. I have nothing against bringing math to bear here. It just would be nice to have details on why and how the math of rings of continuous functions matters.
Oddly, you don’t seem humbly open to the possibility that it has no need for you.
And here I thought you really believed it’s not about you…
…or perhaps not even that.
BruceS,
I have enough trouble understanding neil’s posts when there’s NO math in them.
I take it to be a book on continuous functions, where the ring structure turns out to be significant. It is normally classified as functional analysis, not as ring theory. There are different ways of proving the main result, most typically using functional analysis methods other than rings, though the ring structure is still relevant. And, of course, the mathematical equations that we usually see in laws of physics are part of a ring structure.
Continuity in mathematics arose as an idealization of measurement. Measurement itself is a form of categorization (high resolution categorization).
But can you relate that somehow to a school of thought in epistemology or cognitive psychology or philosophy of perception or the science of perception?
Even if the relation is “here is what X says and here is what I say instead and here is where the two are connected and why what I say is a better explanation or theory or model or way of living a meaningful life.
The mathematics of measurement and saying “measurement is a form of categorization” don’t seem to connect with any of the ideas in those fields that I am aware of.
ETA: I have a rudimentary understanding of basic math measure theory, at least in terms of sets, so feel free to assume that.
I know that I have asked this before.
Kantian Naturalist,
I am still trying to understand what is an accurate perception of one’s world, and what is an inaccurate one, in your view.
phoodoo,
Just tell him what he really thinks and get on with it.
See above again. You have no clue what motivates anything that is not bound by it’s own nature. Motivation is certainly the most likely. What could even remotely indicate to you that motivation does not matter?
Of course they could. I’ve got no problem with those scenarios. All those scenarios reduce the odds of your particular god story being valid.
Oh…I dare say I’m not the one who hasn’t given this much thought. Perhaps you would care to have another go at it.
I wasn’t claiming that there’s “accurate perception of one’s world.”. I was claiming that successful action is guided by perceptions that (in turn) involve accurate representations of some aspect or feature of the environment.
For example, a diving gannet has to be able to accurately represent the relationship between the rate at which retinal image increases and its own wing position so that it achieves maximum velocity at the surface without breaking its wings.
In doing so, the gannet is sensitive to and responsive to real patterns in the world — there are objective facts about velocity, acceleration, bone structure, surface tension etc, and the gammer’s behaviour would be unsuccessful if it had no way of taking these facts into account.
The fact that the gannet lacks the concepts necessary for understanding what it is doing and why doesn’t undermine the thesis: that accurate representation of affordances at the neural level is functionally integrated into successful perceptually-guided action at the animal level (and thus avoidance of extinction at the population level).
That’s all I need to point out about animal cognition in order to refute Plantinga’s EAAN, which is how this whole sub-conversation got started.
Epistemology:
I started by studying how we learn (acquire knowledge). I don’t see that epistemology actually has much to do with that. Jean Piaget (trained in biology, but often said to be a psychologist) actually ran a research program in epistemology and learning. But academic epistemologists seem to have tried to pretend that he did not exist.
Piaget was looking at learning as aquiring of concepts, rather than acquiring of beliefs. And that’s also how I’ve been looking at it. To a first approximation, I see concepts as growing out of categories.
Psychology:
Eleanor Gibson saw “perceptual learning” as important. She was the wife of J.J. Gibson. She concentrated on questions of perceptual discrimination, which is related to categorization. This is related to J.J. Gibson’s theory of perception.
Stevan Harnad did some work on Cognition is Categorization.
Measurement:
I’m using “categorization” in the sense of “carving up the world”. And that’s what measurement does. We use things such as rulers to carve at the graduation points of those rulers. At one time, I described my ideas as “cognition is measurement”, but it seems better to replace “measurement” with the more general “categorization.”
Mathematics:
Our measuring systems are based on methods from geometry (literally “measuring the world”). We use a method from Euclidean geometry to divide a ruler into equally spaced graduation marks.
The Dedekind construction of the real numbers as “Dedekind cuts” amounts to carving up the rationals, with the reals being the carving points. I see that as based on an idealization of measurement as categorization. And most of our theory of continuity comes from study of functions over the real numbers.
I’m looking at measuring systems as idealized by continuous functions. The Stone Weierstrass theorem shows that we can approximate any continuous function with those built out of algebraic operations applied to a few basic functions. The Gillman & Jerison book is about how the structure of a topological space is implicit in the algebra of the continuous functions on that space.
If you read some theoretical physics, you will see that much of it is deriving the structure of reality from the algebraic relations in the laws of physics. In effect, Gillman & Jerison are just putting that into a more general picture.
Traditional empiricist epistemology claims that we derive our view of the world from observations. But those theoretical physics books make only occasional reference to observations (measurements), and mostly use the algebraic structure of the laws of physics. If you look carefully, the laws of physics are mostly idealized measurement procedures. So it isn’t the data alone, but the procedures that we follow to acquire data, that mostly matter.
I hope that gives you a better picture of what I am suggesting.
I was thinking of “regularities” as just meaning “structure” or “order”. The Wittgensteinian question is whether rules are based on regularities (he argues that they aren’t), not whether regularities are based on rules.
I think Wittgenstein is quite right to point out the regress-of-rules paradox, but I think that the Sellarsian solution (esp as elaborated by Brandom) is basically right: rules are metalinguistic expressions of social practices, where the rule says what one must do in order to conform to the norms implicit in the practice. This is why I think of norms as prior to rules. The further questions are how social practices evolved in the first place, and how anyone is initiated into a social practice.
I would urge a distinction between the norms implicit in social practices, in which case what you say here is basically right, and the biological norms implicit in an organism’s pattern of behavior. Organisms do not invent or create their own biological norms; those norms are constitutive of the organism’s characteristic way of life.
I would dispute both parts of this approach. I’m not unsympathetic to it; it’s basically the view of C. I. Lewis, whom I admire greatly. But I think it is vulnerable to a series of objections, including the worry about the Myth of the Given.
On the approach I prefer, there are biological norms that constitute our species-specific way of life, and the social norms that constitute any particular culture (leaving aside whether apes or dolphins have social norms), are embodied and embedded from the outset.
Rather than think of categories as free (and some extent arbitrary?) inventions that classify only our internal states, I think of “categories are ways of acting” (to quote Royce). An animal’s categories are its habits whereby its actions are regulated by sensory information.
One does subtract everything that is meaningful to us, yes. That’s why I find metaphysics mostly useless. But if there weren’t any real patterns at all, we’d never be able to distinguish between predictions and fantasies.
Yes, thanks for doing that.
Kantian Naturalist,
I am not seeing how that helps your case at all. All you are saying is you can think of examples where some organisms perceptions correspond to what you call a real event (who knows if it really is a real event?).
But then, all I would have to do is show other examples where their perception was wrong, to disprove your notion that evolution must produce a perception that is real. Again we are back to, all evolution must produce is a solution that works to reproduce, not one that is real. If sometimes it happens to be real, that does not change that it could just as easily produce an environment where often wrong perceptions are useful.
Nothing in what I’ve said here entails that animals aren’t susceptible to hallucinations, illusions, or perceptual errors (the branch was further away or less sturdy than it looked), let alone more systematic perceptual inabilities (e.g. the inability to perceive how quickly a car is moving at it).
All of those cases are consistent with my claim that an animal’s cognitive abilities include the ability to represent accurately those features of an environment that are relevant to the satisfaction of animal’s species-specific goals within its species-specific niche.
I’m curious about the “could” in “it could just as easily”. What’s the status of this modal claim?
Obviously one can imagine a case where frequently wrong perceptions are useful. If imagining is a kind of conceiving (which seems right), then the next question is whether conceivability entails logical possibility.
Let us assume for the moment that it does, whether due to a veracious God (a la Descartes) or primary and secondary intensions across possible worlds (a la Chalmers).
On that basis, we can assert that it is logically possible that natural selection will tend to favor organisms with perceptual and conceptual abilities that systematically fail to represent any feature of their environment. They just get lucky all the time. (For example, an animal might perceive an edible fruit as poisonous, but then it might be affectively configured such that it is always trying to kill itself, and therefore eat the fruit. Its existence is a series of thwarted attempts at suicide.)
But what does this show? Not, I think, anything too interesting. It suffices to establish that there is no logically necessary connection between successful action and accurate representation. But so what? That was never the claim to begin with! (This is one of the many errors that Plantinga makes in his EAAN.) The claim was always one about what is actually the case, not what is logically necessarily the case.
But in order to know what is actually true, you can’t just sit around imagining possibilities — you have to look at the world, see what the evidence suggests, conduct some experiments, look for consilience across multiple lines of evidence. That can’t be done from an armchair, even if it’s an armchair at the University of Notre Dame.
If there’s a case in the actual world as we know it where natural selection has favored an organism with systematically erroneous cognitive abilities, I’d like to know about it.
KN,
And in that case the other kinds of suicide attempts must also be inadvertently beneficial (or at least neutral). The animal might think it can kill itself by mating, for example.
As you say, it’s logically possible. But it’s the kind of thing only a phoodoo (or a Plantinga) would propose.
Kantian Naturalist,
So wait a minute. If I give you an example of an organism with systematically erroneous cognitive abilities, have I just proven you wrong?
Or are you going to pull the rationalization that keiths is trying to use here, that this cognitive disability is part of the species wide strategy, thus your argument becomes impossible to disprove?
But since you say it requires in the field research, ok, let’s start with this one delusional creature called homo-sapiens:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131125-why-the-stupid-say-theyre-smart
I think this pretty much fits the criteria you said is required.
The problem is that this isn’t at issue at all. It’s more than slightly obvious that many organisms do not perceive “reality” at all well, even if they do well enough to get by most of the time. The question is whether evolved sensory capabilities have typically led to better perceptions of reality than existed in organisms without those sensory capabilities. It appears that indeed the more capable the organism is at perception and cognition, the better it apprehends its environment, on the whole.
The bee, for instance, has limited cognitive abilities, but on the whole it is quite good at reliably detecting important cues, such as movement, and it has pretty good spatial capabilities. It reacts to its environment in a manner that tends to get it statistically right. It’s not good at evaluating whether or not individual large animals are threats, because it just doesn’t have much of a brain, so on the whole any large animal that (apparently) threatens the hive (by getting too close) is attacked vigorously, while large animals that seem to threaten the individual are dealt with in a much less predictable manner–mainly because a bee can’t really tell if a baby is a threat or not, it really only notices movements by a large organism that may or may not be a threat. If the baby does things that seem to threaten the bee, it stings.
Bees aren’t smart, we know that. But, unlike earthworms, they can detect possible threats and resources in space by sight, and they react in a statistically useful way to possible threats and resources. Reptiles do better overall. Mammals and birds do even better, having rather greater neurologic resources for recognition and complex reaction. Generally, with more intelligence comes better recognition and more complex behaviors in response. Evolution seems to always pressure toward better understanding of the organisms’ environments, as more intelligent brains evolve.
Glen Davidson