RE: Open to explore possibility
February 17, 2021 at 10:01 pm
(This post was last modified: February 17, 2021 at 10:10 pm by Angrboda.)
(February 17, 2021 at 8:57 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(February 17, 2021 at 4:57 pm)Angrboda Wrote: Fitness is a specific type of instrumental utility.
Sure; but you argued that true propositions may have greater instrumental utility (fitness) than false ones. However, being optimized for fitness often involves (or requires) the act of hiding truths. Donald Hoffman (I'll look up the paper when I get home) has simulation experiments in which "organisms" optimized for fitness in the world always outcompete those optimized for truths in the world.
I think you or he may be being selectively biased in what you label truth or true propositions and simply ignoring fitness-oriented propositions as something other than truth. I know of a Ted talk in which one of the examples was an insect who was attracted to a specific type of surface which in nature indicated a mate. This pattern matching, due to its imprecision, was thwarted by man-made garbage which triggered the mating response, futilely. It may be true that the pattern recognition was not faithful in representing a mateable object, but that lack of representational fidelity isn't the only criterion for truth. The insect is more interested in truths which advance its mating interest, regardless of any notion of accurate representation. Truth comes in other forms than representational fidelity. The proposition to mate with the specific surface hard-wired into the insect did have instrumental utility in increasing the odds of mating. That it wasn't true in the sense of representational fidelity doesn't matter. So it may be a true proposition that worshipping a god has instrumental utility without that belief displaying an accurate representation of reality. If one lives in a strongly religious society, that can easily be the case. Truth does not only mean representational fidelity.