The correspondence between the person who knows the world and himself
Good week
On page 108 of “That which is and that which is not” under the section on general diagnosis, a summary of the previous insights is presented and an example is given of the formation of the eye, along with a question about the source of the trust we place in the senses.
I didn’t understand (even after reading The Science of Freedom, and reading the entire trilogy) why the example of evolution was missing something.
I understand that the question is not how the sense organs were created but what is the justification for the trust we place in them;
But why is evolutionary formation not a good enough explanation to justify trust?
Evolution has honed the creatures with organs that best reflect reality, and therefore they have better identified threats and survived…
You did indeed also mention in your lectures the fact that not every survival value necessarily coincides with truth and reality;
But aren’t such distinctions subtleties whose significance is limited to the very late period of the last few hundred years (a specific segment in evolutionary terms)?
Ultimately, if there is a fairly simple explanation here, according to which, in a defined process, the sensory organs have been refined over the generations and well represent reality for every practical (=survival) need, what compels us to say that there is another correlative factor between them and the world?
So what is lacking in the relative sense, simply that there are machines here that have been honed to sense things almost as they are, with a nervous center that interprets the observations in a way that is relatively close to reality…
It is true that there are exceptions, and we are gradually becoming familiar with the limitations of the senses through research, and are getting closer to the truth, but in 99% of cases, the senses are generally quite consistent with reality.
Regarding the sequel – “Who said there was anything there that was reflected at all…?” –
So its fundamental existence is easy to prove statistically as close as we want by sharing the testimonies of as many separate people as we want about common events: as long as we accept that they are not figments of our imagination but separate entities, their experiencing the event alongside us confirms its fundamental existence, even in the most well-known aspects (for the sake of purely conscious experiences, such as how we subjectively experience each color).
I also remember the text by Locke or Berkeley that claims that everything exists only in our consciousness.
But as you emphasized in the philosophy course – even before I suggested there was evidence from the congruence in the testimonies surrounding a common event – the very reference to people (even before presence at the event) – already implicitly assumes that there is a world with people (== separate entities, to whom the text is addressed).
thanks,
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And how does this actually refute the proposal for an evolutionary explanation?
Because I agree with the claims in themselves but I don't understand why they constitute a refutation.
The order of development of things, in my opinion, is:
1. We realized, even before evolution was formulated as a systematic theory, (but it certainly worked as a mechanism) that our trust in the senses is justified at least within our knowledge of the world: we realized through countless results that we experienced directly in situations in which we trusted the senses in situations in which we ignored them / did not have time to react in time. At this stage, it is still possible that, as the empiricists say, everything is in our knowledge alone and there is no world.
2. To this I added that: the sharing of evidence (which assumes only that the entities we perceive are indeed separate and not just in our imagination) – is an illustration of the objectivity of sensation (except for the subjective aspect that will always remain in the sole possession of knowledge and is not the subject here) – Which allows even those who preceded Darwin in time to recognize the objectivity of the senses, even if they do not point to the mechanism of their formation. (And in this I agree with your claim that faith did not begin with evolution, but note that I do not offer it as an explanation for faith, for which an increasing amount of confirmed observations is sufficient, but rather as an explanation for formation not by God)
3. The evolution formulated below provides the explanation for the formation of the mechanism in which the correspondence (which has long been agreed upon, 1 + 2, and does not in itself distil any evolution) between the senses and the world developed.
Thus, if before the formulation of evolution the correspondence was an agreed upon but surprising fact and therefore distils an explanation of its origin (which you attribute to God) – then Darwin offers a simpler mechanism (and I ask what you are missing from it).
4. Explanations of anomalies – What do you mean by this seemingly teleological consideration? Evolution certainly hasn't finished its work yet.
But that doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand and stop looking for anomalies.
A. We can accelerate understanding and refine it beyond what we have evolved to date
B. Some would say that even though it is part of evolution… in the end, recognizing illusions such as the Kahneman-Tversky studies has economic = survival value for the individual
C. Even if we discover things that it doesn't seem like more time would help (if we could estimate the gradient of evolutionary progress toward a particular understanding) – we may still have hit a local minimum in the survival function space for the current vector of parameter values.
In any case, I don't see an argument here that reveals that we supposedly don't believe in evolution's ability to hone our senses to reflect reality…
At most, recognition of the final pace at which it occurs, and the fact that it is a process that is still in progress and is constantly being adapted to the space of parameters relevant to survival.
The truth is that I also do not understand why the explanation of God as a coordinating factor is preferable in this context, if we identify anomalies.
It seems to me that precisely the preliminary identification of anomalies that evolution has not yet led us to is easier to accept than anomalies in the senses that God himself is directly responsible for adapting (?!) to the world…
I would be happy to explain
Thank you
I have explained everything, and I do not understand what is not clear.
The feedback that confirms trust in the senses is also made by the senses. When I doubt all the senses, there is no way to confirm this. The theory of evolution itself is based on trust in the senses, and trust in them existed to the same extent before it, and therefore it is clear that it did not arise because we rely on it (I am not asking what creates the correspondence between the senses and the world, but what creates our trust in this correspondence).
The increasing amount of observations does not mean anything for two reasons: 1. The problem of induction. 2. The observations themselves are by the power of the senses. Why believe them?
Think of someone who gives trust to the predictions of the Munich squid for the results of a future football game. He has no basis for this, but he has a great explanation: the squid has the Holy Spirit. How does he know? Because he has faith in the squid. The explanation is excellent, but it has no basis outside himself. And even if the squid brings him game results that confirm his predictions, it is the squid itself that gives them to him.
I explained the matter of anomalies well. You are repeating the same questions that have already been answered. I don't know what more I can say.
We are repeating ourselves.
Jumping from the senses to reality is like jumping from being able to read a computer screen to being able to understand how a computer works.
Computer screens have been adapted so that we can read them, and we have been adapted to survive in our environment (in terms of the result, it is like saying that the environment has been adapted to us).
But that does not mean that the person who reads the computer screen understands how the computer works, and that does not mean that the person who survives understands how the world works. It just means that there is a correlation that comes from the adaptation.
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