Progress after the Royal Society conference?

[Joe_Felsenstein]

@lee_merrill

@Joe_Felsenstein

OK, so Lee Merrill’s argument is not that imperfect processes like those in evolution could not produce the reasoning that we see in humans and animals? I thought that was his argument.

That is my argument, actually, though I acknowledge that maybe a tornado could assemble a laptop with a working theorem-proving program, with some valid reasoning, that is not human reasoning, though humans can prove valid theorems, our reasoning does not come from unreasoning causes.

OK, so evolution of animal nervous systems is not ruled out by Lee Merill’s argument. So Merrill’s argument is that imperfect processes could produce reasoning, just not valid reasoning.

I suspect that Lee Merrill does not think evolutionary processes such as natural selection can do much of anything, but his
argument involving imperfect processes is not why.

(And Merrill knows nothing about whether I consider ChatGPT my “friend”).