Then your case collapses and I am left with the straightforward intuition that reasoning correctly about how to act in the world we inhabit is more likely to promote survival, than the alternative view that incorrectly reasoning about it would be more likely to promote survival.
I don’t acknowledge that principle at all. I don’t reject reasoning I find to be fallacious on the basis that it arises ultimately from unreasoning physical processes. I reject it when/if I find it fallacious, and the underlying substrate that performs the reasoning processes are simply not a factor in that equation at all.
When I reject the claims and inferences made by a madman it is because I find them to be in conflict with my own, not because he might be a madman alone. A guy can think he’s Napoleon and I’d reject that because it conflicts with my understanding of who Napoleon was and when he lived, but if that same guy tells me he finds 2+2 = 4 I’m not going to reject it simply on the basis that he is confused about his identity. That is to say, him being a madman (on the question of his identity) does not entail the assumption that his every thought must be rejected as fallacious too.
The world just doesn’t work in the way you try to portray it here. Your analogy is terrible and you have no argument for why reasoning correctly should be thought to tend more towards survival than incorrect reasoning.
Gibberish, because point mutations don’t change the amount of genetic material.
No, it is not, not even close. You can easily test this for yourself, but I hypothesize that you are afraid to do so. You won’t even make a prediction–let’s pick 10 protein-coding genes at random from a whale of your choice.
Your faith is very fragile, correct?
What I say about the evidence, absolutely. Science is about overcoming our human tendency for wishful thinking.
You should examine evidence for yourself. What have you got to lose?
No. Do you mean NapoleOn?
No, I don’t know that. Tell us more.
I wouldn’t do it with one. Let’s do 10. It’s easy!
That you’re right or wrong. You’re afraid to learn that.
To illustrate your poor reading ability.
That you are grossly misrepresenting it.
The text, yes. The data, no. You’ve never looked at the latter, though, have you?
I don’t see how that’s apparent.
What you claimed it to be was false. This is high school-level biology.
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
–Richard Feynman
Why do you reject the scientific method? Do you consider yourself to be reliable?
@lee_merrill, I have an answer to the Bechly challenge. The razorbill and great auk diverged around 11 million years ago, and according to your criteria (as per your claims about penguins), the great auk’s flippers would be a new body plan.
Makes me wonder if @lee_merrill would consider the webbed feet of swimming birds sufficient to be a “new body plan” over the unwebbed or partially webbed ones on some of their closer relatives. If only there was some actual criteria, some rules outside of ‘come on you guys, even a four-year-old could tell’…
It was in a YouTube video with Axe, as I recall, I think I even commented on it, saying that if the scientist was right, and epigenetics is mainly responsible for large-scale changes, without requiring major rework in DNA, then organisms that are substantially different, we would expect to see little differences in their DNA. But this is not the case. Anyway! I’ve not been successful in retrieving the video, or my comments, sorry.
I did not say “No”, though, you pasted that in, I said (per Plantinga) that we can come up with innumerable scenarios for any given behavior, where it is motivated by erroneous thoughts. Your support for your view comes down to “it seems intuitive to me”. But this is not a good general principle by which to believe things, for example, it seems reasonable that you can go faster and faster, without limit. But this is not the case.
Well, you have departed from most humans, and I expect you still also apply that principle! If a delirious man tells you there are snakes in the room, do you then go look for evidence of them? I expect not, because you know his irrational delirium is causing these thoughts.
Certainly, I said so, even, that we do acknowledge that a madman can generally still be expected to find his way to the kitchen.
Well, it isn’t, it’s a principle we all recognize, and then I give examples. This is not presenting an analogy, saying X is like Y.
But what is unclear about “generating full-length strings with twelve typos (maintaining the 2-in-7 ratio)”? The full-length strings have 12 typos, 12 maintains a ratio, and the typos can occur anywhere in the string.
But these include insertions and deletions, which do change the amount of genetic material.
I can’t seem to find this statement in the post you are responding to, I need more context.
Actually discussing is helpful, I gain more confidence as people mainly reply with straw men, claims of victory, insults, and speculations on my motives. This indicates that the opposing view needs a lot of propping up, that there are no cogent replies to speak of. Or people would speak them.
I think you just discredited all you say! You are going down holding onto this mast, like the captain of a sinking ship.
Well, I do! That’s why I discuss what I believe, primarily to examine evidence for alternatives, and whether evidence for my conclusions is solid evidence. I don’t want to believe stuff that’s false, that’s a priority.
I really can’t believe the only things you believe are things you can prove for yourself. You don’t check every bridge you drive over, because you believe the state government when they say they inspect them.
If I pick a gene, and generate a tree, that would prove or disprove my view? How so?
That does not respond to my question, though. Speaking of reading ability…
You’ve picked the wrong hill to die on. Your replies are getting more and more absurd. I don’t have to replicate a paper in Nature in order to believe it.
Merriam-Webster says this: “analogy: a comparison of two otherwise unlike things based on resemblance of a particular aspect”
Right, it’s saying X is like Y, it’s a comparison of an aspect of two things, claiming a resemblance.
To make this quite clear, I am not saying we reason like madmen, if evolution is true, I’m not saying that we are all insane or something, if atoms and physics determine all the thoughts in our brains. I am saying that a principle we apply consistently to the statements of others, when they claim valid conclusions, should also be applied to the foundation of our thoughts. That’s not an analogy, that’s different, that’s asking that something we do all the time, should be done here, too.
All right, first we have in the abstract “Our results suggest that extant alcid diversity is a function of Miocene diversification and differential extinction at the Pliocene–Pleistocene boundary. The relative timing of the Middle Miocene climatic optimum and the Pliocene–Pleistocene climatic transition and major diversification and extinction events in Pan-Alcidae, respectively, are consistent with a potential link between major paleoclimatic events and pan-alcid cladogenesis.”
Then referencing Wikipedia, the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum was an interval between around 17 and 14 million years ago, and the Pliocene interval was 5.33 to 2.58 million years ago. So the Pliocene–Pleistocene climatic transition would be about 2.58 million years ago, so where does this 11 million year divergence come from? I deduce a longer period here.
Which I have already responded to. You do not substantiate that erroneous reasoning should be thought more likely to promote survival by pointing out that such a relationship is merely possible.
For your argument to succeed the ratio has to significantly favor incorrect inferences → survive, over correct inference → survive.
If you cannot give any argument for why we should think this is the case (and you said “no” when asked if you could), then sorry I’m faced with a vacuous objection against the plain intuition that making correct inferences is more likely to promote survival than incorrect inferences. This is experientially verified every waking moment of existence.
Which is generally better than an appeal to mere possibility. Particularly for everyday interactions with the environment.
The fact that our intuitions can some times fail (usually when dealing with extremes of energy, velocity, size, or time) doesn’t mean we should never rely on them. Curiously, somone like you would probably believe our intuitions were designed by God, so that just makes it all the more self-defeating for you to insist they can’t be relied upon.
Intuitions fail when they concern matters very far from everyday experience, such as matters concerning the scale of atoms or smaller, or close to the speed of light. But they are excellent for everyday decisionmaking (the exact arena of discourse concerning the relationship between reasoning and survival), and evaluating other people’s behavior and intentions.
No, that’s you. If you can just declare crap like that then so can I. I hereby also declare to have greater authority than you. I mean, we can just do that, right? Since you constantly do these sorts of baseless declarations yourself you must agree.
But seriously, no i don’t think most humans would disagree with me. The fact is that the way we decide that a person is an unreliable witness to the actual state of affairs is by comparing their claims to our own experiences and those of others around us. It is after such evaluations we designate some people as “crazy”, “madmen”, “delirious”, etc.
We stop listening to or giving weight to the statements of such people not because we wonder about the substance of the entity that does their thinking (physical/material vs supernatural/immaterial), but because we have time and again found their statements to be in conflict with observational reality.
But there’s another irony to your statement here. You’re the one who thinks there is a supernatural realm in which our reasoning somehow take place. That our thinking was designed by a perfect being and is made “valid” by some sort of divine act of will. Yet somehow there are people who are delirious, crazy, mad, etc. Shouldn’t the divinely created to be valid immaterial soul-stuff sort of prevent this from being possible?
Your position is that we can only trust in our reasoning because it isn’t being run by an “unreasoning” physical process, but was divinely created and is supernatural and immaterial. Were that the case, whence madness and delirium?
It seems to me rather obvious that it is exactly because our reasoning abilities ultimately are running on physical/biological hardware that it can go awry, and that there are known physical causes of unreliable cognition. Ranging from head trauma, through lack of sleep, excessive multitasking, to narcotics, alcohol and other forms of chemical consumption.
Hey, while on the topic of excessive multitasking, isn’t it curious that you can be cognitively overburdened, and that cognitive performance degrades as you multiply tasks you try to perform simultaneously? Try juggling, standing on one leg, doing math puzzles, while having a conversation. You know what else’s performance degrades as tasks multiply? Computers. Why? Bandwidth. It’s literally a physical limitation, which I can see no good reason to exist if the mind was immaterial.
I would have to have already established that the man is delirious by comparing his claims against the reality I inhabit. Then, having established that, I can proceed to dismiss his claims.
I haven’t said it’s unclear anywhere. My paraphrazing of Axe was simply to establish agreement on what he is arguing, to see if we understand him to be saying the same thing. So we can move on.
This is a perfectly normal part of discourse. We test our mutual understanding of another person by an attempt to describe what they say in our own words. If our interlocutor can agree that we have correctly described the position despite using different words, we have established a common framework from which to proceed. That’s all I’m doing right now.
But this always takes a willingness to engage in comprehension from both parties. It takes some degree of charitability on the part of the interlocutors. We have to be willing to give the other side some benefit of doubt. If the grammar or spelling isn’t necessarily perfect, or we use synonyms, can we still give it an interpretation that restores correct meaning?
Like when you complain I use the word “fragment” and Axe doesn’t, a person who was trying to read with comprehension and charitability would understand that I simply mean that in Axe’s example he has broken up his mutations of the 42 character string into 6 individual sections of 7 characters each. Each of these 7 characters would be the “fragment.”
You having a fit about the word “fragement” betrays your unwillingness to read with comprehension and charitability. A lack of willingness to seek an interpretation that restores meaning.
It reveals you are afraid. Fearful. You have defenses up. It’s pathetic.
So let us summarize, shall we? Your initial claim was:
Which, by itself, was misworded as the topic of discussion was the evolution of body plans.
Regardless, when asked to substantiate your claim, all you could come up with is a Youtube video that you think you remember, but which may not even exist. And, by your recollection not even you found the claim in the video to be plausible.
This illustrates an important point: Those who are taken in by ID propaganda are not just uninformed or misinformed. They are fundamentally unable to think properly.
