(Nov 13, 2016 05:58 AM)Carol Wrote: [ -> ]What is the meaning of, " it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction"?
Technically, if that interview isn't sufficient, then one needs to consult Hoffman further or rather more of his actual work. I primarily post these things to provide people with something to potentially discuss, and not because I either agree with them or grasp everything about them. However, in the interview he says:
"The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness function —mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.
[...] Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality."
Quote:Is this what it all means? [...] 10. Phenomenalism. [...] Phenomenalist philosophers believe that objects only exist as a phenomenon of consciousness. So, your laptop is only here while you are aware of it and believe in its existence, but when you turn away from it, it ceases to exist until you or someone else interacts with it. There is no existence without perception. This is the root of phenomenalism.
Phenomenalism was often found in conjunction with
positivism, due to the latter's stance against metaphysics or ontological speculation. Positivism in turn is an ancestor of
scientism -- that's "scientism" without the pejorative usage.
There were different strains of phenomenalism (and also positivism), which probably results in routine misunderstandings due to the ambiguity of trying to lump them all together under a common definition and motive.
As Reed points out below, the "materialist" scientists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th century were often phenomenalists. Reed, however, is one of many who misinterprets the usage of "phenomenal, phenomena" in this context as always referring to something mental (we'll clarify that further down).
EDWARD S. REED:
"Huxley, like all the other scientists in the group--and like almost all scientists in Europe or America at the that time--was not a materialist, despite his belief in the progress of mechanistic physiology. He argued in two directions: one from the external phenomena of science (say, the data of physiology) and the other from introspective phenomena (for example, our belief in free will). He was inclined to believe that most (or all) introspectively revealed phenomena would prove to be caused by externally revealed ones. But in any event he was a phenomenalist, arguing that what is real is phenomena. If the soul (or the unconscious) is not real, it is because it is not part of the phenomenal world.
Matter for Huxley was just what it was for Mach or Hertz: a set of phenomenal observations made by scientists. It is thus remarkable but true that the most reviled "materialists" of the 1880s--Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford--were all phenomenalists of sort or another and not materialists at all.
The positivist impulse gave new life to a variety of panphenomenalism, one whose adherents were surprisingly uncritical about the analysis of those allegedly basic mental phenomena, sensations. Thus, thinkers as different in outlook and interests as Huxley and Mach, Taine and Spencer, Wundt and Lewes all agreed that the basic "data" on which all science was to built were sensations.
This panphenomenalism was widely labeled positivism when it was propounded by scientists. In the loosely defined meandering of the term, positivism dominated the European intellectual scene from approximately 1870 to 1890." --From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology
Panphenomenalism -
David Hume (1711-1776) formulated the theory of Panphenomenalism. He denied the existence of all ultimate reality (metaphysical reality), accepting as valid data only those things experienced as sense impressions; in other words, he asserted that existence is limited to phenomena, which are objects, not of reason, but of experience. By rejecting the idea of cause and soul as substances, he eliminated the entire problem of interaction. Hume concluded that events depend upon merely repetitious or sequential activities; that nothing in the universe is ever created, or caused to act, by anything else; and that reality consists only of a series of phenomena appearing in a temporal order. --Ideas of the Great Philosophers; p. 107 - 108; by William S. Sahakian, Mabel Lewis Sahakian (1966)
"Pan-phenomenalism" is somewhat akin to
panexperientientialism, in that both posit phenomenal characteristics or capacity being ubiquitous and existing either prior to their conception and arrangement as "consciousness" or that experience outruns cognition (awareness, intellect). The term "pan-phenomenalism" was never coined by
David Hume himself, but was a later label concocted for subsuming some of his views (like bundle-theory) under. In that context, Hume (again) considered his "impressions" (phenomena) to actually be antecedent to their coordination as a mind or psychological system, and thus they weren't fundamentally "mental".
The earliest flavor of
neutral monism shared roots with phenomenalism, as well as
dual-aspect tendencies. Here's an early example of dual-aspectism from Charles Peirce:
"Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness." --Man's Glassy Essence
The word / doctrine of "phenomenalism" is derived from "phenomenal". The etymological source of "phenomenal" is the ancient Greek word "phainein", which means "show forth" (as in a showing or a manifestation).
Erwin Schrödinger:
"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?" --What is Life? Mind and Matter
Henri Poincare:
[A] reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible. But what we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to us all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony then which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can obtain. --The Value Of Science
Circa 1908 or 1909, Vladimir Lenin wrote a book criticizing a particular positivist movement affiliated with Ernst Mach that was infiltrating Marxist / dialectical materialist philosophy in Russia. Before venturing into his counter-attack on them, Lenin opened the topic something like this...
V. I. Lenin:
Anyone in the least acquainted with philosophical literature must know that scarcely a single contemporary professor of philosophy (or of theology) can be found who is not directly or indirectly engaged in refuting materialism. They have declared materialism refuted a thousand times, yet are continuing to refute it for the thousand and first time. All our revisionists are engaged in refuting materialism, pretending, however, that actually they are only refuting the materialist Plekhanov, and not the materialist Engels, nor the materialist Feuerbach, nor the materialist views of J. Dietzgen -- and, moreover, that they are refuting materialism from the standpoint of "recent" and "modern" positivism, natural science, and so forth. . . .
I shall refer to those arguments by which materialism is being combated by . . . . Machians. I shall use this latter term throughout as a synonym for "empirio-criticist" because it is shorter and simpler and has already acquired rights of citizenship in Russian literature. That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature . . . .
The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. --Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
I mean what's the difference between the carbon in a rock and the carbon in your body? That rock carbon can become a thinker and that thinker's carbon a rock.