RE: How we determine facts.
January 7, 2015 at 2:05 pm
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2015 at 2:10 pm by JuliaL.)
Rhythm Wrote:-Our brains didn't evolve to seek truth.
(January 7, 2015 at 12:59 pm)Heywood Wrote:(January 6, 2015 at 9:34 pm)ManMachine Wrote: My favourite quote of the last 12 months.
MM
There is a lot of truth to his claim. Evolution rewards behavior....not truth. It doesn't matter why the gazelle runs from a lion and survives to reproduce. The gazelles genes get passed on if it ran away from the lion because it "thought" the lion was playing a chasing game or if it ran away from the lion because it "thought" the lion would try to eat it.
Wha? Seeking truth is exactly what evolution winnows out of variability.
Truth being defined as an accurate ability to predict the future. That's why
we got frontal lobes: to create models to predict future events and guide
current behavior to align our best interests with them. Now
finding Truth, well, that's a different matter.
I don't hold with the true means 'in accordance with the actual state of
affairs ' definition because it fails to consider the accessibility of reality or
the asynchronous confusion as to our concept of 'now' given the lag
between information impinging on our senses and the processing time
involved before it is presented to self.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat? 
