Q&A: The Match Between the Knowing Human Being and the World as It Is in Itself
The Match Between the Knowing Human Being and the World as It Is in Itself
Question
Have a good week,
a0
On page 108 of That Which Is and That Which Is Not, under the section “A General Diagnosis,” there is a summary of the previous insights, and an example is brought about the formation of the eye, alongside the question of what is the source of the trust we place in the senses.
a0
I didnt understand (even after reading The Science of Freedom, and reading the entire trilogy) why the example of evolution is missing something.
I understand that the question is not how the sensory organs were formed, but what justifies the trust we place in them;
but why isnt evolutionary formation also a good enough explanation for justifying that trust?
Evolution refined creatures with organs that reflect reality in the best possible way, and so they identified threats better and survived…
You did mention, in the lectures as well, the fact that not every survival value necessarily overlaps with truth and reality;
but arent distinctions of this sort subtleties whose significance is limited to the very late period of the last few hundred years (a very specific segment in evolutionary terms)?
a0
At the end of the day, if there is a fairly simple explanation here, according to which in a defined process the sensory organs developed over the generations and represent reality well enough for every practical need (= survival), what compels us to say that there is some additional matching factor between them and the world?
a0
So what, then, is missing from the relatively simple explanation according to which these are machines that were refined to sense things almost as they really are, with a neural center that interprets the observations in a way that is relatively close to reality… a0
True, there are deviations, and we gradually become aware of the limitations of the senses through research, and get even closer to the truth, but in 99% of cases overall the senses correspond pretty well to reality.
a0
As for the continuation Who says there is even something there being reflected…? a0
well, regarding its basic existence, one can become convinced of it statistically as closely as one likes by sharing the testimony of as many separate people as one likes regarding shared events: as long as we accept that they are not products of our imagination but separate entities, then their experiencing the event alongside us confirms its basic existence, at least in the communicated aspects (as opposed to purely conscious experiences such as how each color is subjectively experienced).
a0
I also remember the text of Locke or Berkeley claiming that everything is nothing but in our consciousness.
But as you sharpened in the philosophy courseeven before my suggestion there of a proof from the agreement among testimonies regarding a shared eventthe very act of addressing people (even before being present at an event) already implicitly assumes that there is a world with people in it (= separate entities, to whom the text is addressed).
a0
Thank you,
Answer
It seems to me that I explained there that our trust in evolution itself depends on our trust in the senses.
Beyond that, I explained that our trust in our senses existed even before we knew about evolution. And it doesnt seem to have changed nowadays either (even someone who has never heard of evolution fully trusts his eyes).
Moreover, our trust is complete, and every deviation requires an explanation. If evolution were the justification, we wouldnt need to look for explanations for deviations and errors. Evolution still hasnt finished the job.
All these claims are also true regarding the existence of other people in your later question.
Discussion on Answer
I explained everything, and I dont understand what isnt clear.
The feedback that confirms trust in the senses is itself also obtained through the senses. When I cast doubt on all the senses, there is no way to confirm that. Evolutionary theory itself is based on trust in the senses, and trust in them existed to the same degree even before it, so it is clear that it was not created because we rely on it (I am not asking what creates the fit between the senses and the world, but what creates our trust in that fit).
The growing quantity of observations says nothing for two reasons: 1. The problem of induction. 2. The observations themselves come by way of the senses. Why believe them?
Think of someone who trusts the predictions of the Munich octopus regarding the result of a future football match. He has no basis for this, but he has a wonderful explanation: the octopus has divine inspiration. How does he know? Because he trusts the octopus. The explanation is excellent, except that it has no basis outside itself. And even if the octopus gives him game results that confirm its predictions, it is the octopus itself that gives them to him.
I explained the issue of deviations well. You are repeating the same questions that have already been answered. I dont know what more I can say than that.
We are repeating ourselves.
Jumping from the senses to reality is like jumping from the ability to read a computer screen to the ability to understand how the computer works.
Computer displays were matched so that we could read them, and we were matched in order to survive in our environment (in terms of the result, that is like saying the environment was matched to us).
But that doesnt mean that someone who reads from a computer screen understands how the computer works, and it doesnt mean that someone who survives understands how the world works. It only means there is a correlation that comes from the fit.
And how exactly does that refute the proposal of an evolutionary explanation?
Because I agree with the claims themselves, but I dont understand why they constitute a refutation.
The order in which things developed, as I see it, is:
1. We came to realize, even before evolution was formulated as an organized theory (though it certainly operated as a mechanism), that our trust in the senses is justified at least within our consciousness of the world: we realized this through countless outcomes directly experienced in situations in which we trusted the senses versus situations in which we ignored them / didnt manage to react in time. At this stage, it could still be that, as the empiricists said, everything exists only in our consciousness and there is no world.
2. To this I added that: the sharing of testimonies (which assumes only that the entities we perceive are indeed separate and not merely in our imagination) is an illustration of the objectivity of sensation (aside from the subjective dimension, which will always remain the private domain of consciousness and is not the issue here) which also allows someone who lived before Darwin to recognize the objectivity of the senses, even if not to point to the mechanism of their formation. (And in this I agree with your claim that trust did not begin with evolution, but note that I am not proposing it as an explanation for the trust, for which a growing quantity of confirming observations is enough, but as an explanation for the formation not through God.)
3. Evolution, which was formulated later, gives the explanation for the formation of the mechanism by which the fit developed (already agreed upon, 1+2, and not itself requiring any evolution) between the senses and the world.
So if before the formulation of evolution the fit was an agreed-upon but surprising fact and therefore required an explanation of its source (which you attribute to God) then Darwin offers a simpler mechanism (and I am asking what you find lacking in it).
4. Explanations of deviations what do you mean by this seemingly teleological consideration? Evolution has certainly not finished the job.
But that doesnt mean we should bury our heads in the sand and stop looking for deviations.
A. We are capable of speeding up understanding and refining it beyond what has evolved in us so far evolutionarily.
B. Some would even say that this itself is part of evolution… In the end, recognizing illusions such as those found in Kahneman-Tversky research has economic value = survival value for the individual.
C. Even if we discover things for which more time would not seem to help (if we could estimate the gradient of evolutionary progress in the direction of some particular understanding) it is still possible that we have ended up in a local minimum in the space of the survival function for the current vector of parameter values.
In any case, I dont see here an argument that supposedly exposes that we do not believe in evolutions ability to refine our senses to reflect reality…
At most, it is recognition of the finite pace at which it occurs, and the fact that it is a process still underway and constantly adapting to the space of parameters relevant to survival.
The truth is that I also dont understand in what way the explanation of God as a matching factor is preferable in this context, if we identify deviations.
It seems to me that identifying in advance deviations that evolution has not yet led us to is easier to accept than deviations in senses for whose fitting to the world God Himself is directly responsible (?!)
Id be happy for an explanation.
Thank you