a) If you take a Platonic position on maths, then it’s surprising how successful maths has been, but we shouldn’t do that. For a hint on how to avoid Platonism in favour of something much more grounded, see my post on the Law of Identity.
a) Philosophy hasn’t been that successful. We have a much better idea of the range of positions that people could take and the standard arguments for and against, but we haven’t made much progress on figuring out what is true.
b) If we expect our minds to have evolved to have a particular philosophical position baked in, it might seem strange how we can do philosophy. However, this is answered for me by thinking through how the brain develops. For example, we actually don’t start off with the concept of object permanence, but we typically learn it after a particular age. Given that we already have to learn our basic adult ontology, it’s unsurprising that we can use some of the same mental tools to bootstrap up to more advanced ontologies.
Why might we have evolved to learn some of these basic ontological conceptions, rather than just having them programmed in? One reason might be that evolution has an information bottleneck in terms of only being able to write so much information into our DNA. Having these ontological conceptions pre-programmed in would mean less DNA code space available for other functions.
But beyond this, since evolution can’t plan ahead, it seems strange to me to expect it to produce a set of perfectly consistent pre-programmed in beliefs, rather than something much messier. Instead, I’d expect various heuristics to evolve independently and then for something to evolve that tries to produce something consistent out of them. And that’s pretty much what we’re doing when we’re doing philosophy.
My position is:
a) If you take a Platonic position on maths, then it’s surprising how successful maths has been, but we shouldn’t do that. For a hint on how to avoid Platonism in favour of something much more grounded, see my post on the Law of Identity.
a) Philosophy hasn’t been that successful. We have a much better idea of the range of positions that people could take and the standard arguments for and against, but we haven’t made much progress on figuring out what is true.
b) If we expect our minds to have evolved to have a particular philosophical position baked in, it might seem strange how we can do philosophy. However, this is answered for me by thinking through how the brain develops. For example, we actually don’t start off with the concept of object permanence, but we typically learn it after a particular age. Given that we already have to learn our basic adult ontology, it’s unsurprising that we can use some of the same mental tools to bootstrap up to more advanced ontologies.
Why might we have evolved to learn some of these basic ontological conceptions, rather than just having them programmed in? One reason might be that evolution has an information bottleneck in terms of only being able to write so much information into our DNA. Having these ontological conceptions pre-programmed in would mean less DNA code space available for other functions.
But beyond this, since evolution can’t plan ahead, it seems strange to me to expect it to produce a set of perfectly consistent pre-programmed in beliefs, rather than something much messier. Instead, I’d expect various heuristics to evolve independently and then for something to evolve that tries to produce something consistent out of them. And that’s pretty much what we’re doing when we’re doing philosophy.