This feels like some kind of naturalistic fallacy—it was made by evolution, therefore it is somehow meaningful.
Evolution is just a stupid process that sometimes even can bring you to extinction. Worshiping evolution is like worshiping the water for flowing downhill. Of course I don’t mean “worship” in the original religious sense here, but rather in the sense which atheists often do without realizing they are doing it: verbally denying the supernatural, but still alieving that the thing has some higher meaning, higher purpose, is an exception to the rules, a separate magisterium, or any of the dozens of excuses that all say: “the usual rules of thinking do not apply here.”
What evolution does, is what evolution does, nothing more. If evolution caused X, all that it means is that historically, under specific circumstances, the animals with X had a higher chance of reproduction. First, it is probably a crude hack, not a finely tuned solution. It is merely better than nothing, or better than the previous version; that is enough to make an evolutionary advantage. Second, as they say in finance: “past performance does not guarantee future results”. Just because eating everything that contained a lot of sugar increased your fittness in the ancient jungle, it does not mean it will do the same thing now. If this is true for your digestion, then it is also true for your mind.
The mind is not a separate magisterium. It is yet another system which evolved by crude hack after crude hack, with no intelligent design, with short-term improvements prefered to hypothetical better long-term alternatives, with a lot of randomness, interdependent with other things in the environment. If you can believe that your digestion is not perfect, by the same reasoning you should be able to believe that your mind is not perfect. Imagining that human body consists of 99 imperfect organs and 1 perfect one, that would be a very unlikely hypothesis requiring a lot of evidence; not something we should assume as a null hypothesis. (Unless you would believe that the whole human body is flawless. Then I would have a question about why we are not super resistant to illness, why we have allergies, etc.)
Okay, your turn: Is there any reason to believe in perfection of human mind, without believing in the perfection of all the other human organs? (Hint: all of them were shaped by evolution.)
Yes, I may be incurring in the fallacy “it is a product of evolution therefore it is not flawed”, but I think it hasn’t been refuted in this discussion.
past performance does not guarantee future results
I think this is the key, out cognitive biases are there because they were useful for our biological objectives, but they were built in an evolving environment so if that environment changes then they can become obsolete.
Therefore I would prefer to characterize our cognitive biases as potentially obsolete rather than flaws. A flaw seems to be the product of error, that it was never useful, which I think is not possible in evolution, but obsolete is the product of change so the “past performance” phrase is more suitable in my opinion.
Is there any reason to believe in perfection of human mind, without believing in the perfection of all the other human organs?
Because of the same reason I believe our cognitive biases are not flawed, I don’t agree our organs have flaws either. All organisms with their internal organs seems to be fit for their niche in nature.
But that doesn’t mean some organs don’t need to change, e.g. 10,000 years ago we didn’t eat wheat, but now that we do we all need adapt our digestive system to that.
Conclusion: Since evolution is an adaptation to change and change is constant then we may experience some traits to be obsolete, therefore I cannot say we are entirely “fit” to the current environment, but that does not mean they are flaws since they were functional at least in some past environment, if not still i the present.
Adaptation takes time. Maybe the environment is changing faster than the organs evolve. Also, evolution finds local optima, not global ones, so it can get stuck at suboptimal designs which any incremental changes would only make worse.
This feels like some kind of naturalistic fallacy—it was made by evolution, therefore it is somehow meaningful.
Evolution is just a stupid process that sometimes even can bring you to extinction. Worshiping evolution is like worshiping the water for flowing downhill. Of course I don’t mean “worship” in the original religious sense here, but rather in the sense which atheists often do without realizing they are doing it: verbally denying the supernatural, but still alieving that the thing has some higher meaning, higher purpose, is an exception to the rules, a separate magisterium, or any of the dozens of excuses that all say: “the usual rules of thinking do not apply here.”
What evolution does, is what evolution does, nothing more. If evolution caused X, all that it means is that historically, under specific circumstances, the animals with X had a higher chance of reproduction. First, it is probably a crude hack, not a finely tuned solution. It is merely better than nothing, or better than the previous version; that is enough to make an evolutionary advantage. Second, as they say in finance: “past performance does not guarantee future results”. Just because eating everything that contained a lot of sugar increased your fittness in the ancient jungle, it does not mean it will do the same thing now. If this is true for your digestion, then it is also true for your mind.
The mind is not a separate magisterium. It is yet another system which evolved by crude hack after crude hack, with no intelligent design, with short-term improvements prefered to hypothetical better long-term alternatives, with a lot of randomness, interdependent with other things in the environment. If you can believe that your digestion is not perfect, by the same reasoning you should be able to believe that your mind is not perfect. Imagining that human body consists of 99 imperfect organs and 1 perfect one, that would be a very unlikely hypothesis requiring a lot of evidence; not something we should assume as a null hypothesis. (Unless you would believe that the whole human body is flawless. Then I would have a question about why we are not super resistant to illness, why we have allergies, etc.)
Okay, your turn: Is there any reason to believe in perfection of human mind, without believing in the perfection of all the other human organs? (Hint: all of them were shaped by evolution.)
Even that is only true for a narrow reading of the sentence.
That’s where it stops being true. Genetic drift is part of evolution and can lead to worse versions.
Yes, I may be incurring in the fallacy “it is a product of evolution therefore it is not flawed”, but I think it hasn’t been refuted in this discussion.
I think this is the key, out cognitive biases are there because they were useful for our biological objectives, but they were built in an evolving environment so if that environment changes then they can become obsolete.
Therefore I would prefer to characterize our cognitive biases as potentially obsolete rather than flaws. A flaw seems to be the product of error, that it was never useful, which I think is not possible in evolution, but obsolete is the product of change so the “past performance” phrase is more suitable in my opinion.
Because of the same reason I believe our cognitive biases are not flawed, I don’t agree our organs have flaws either. All organisms with their internal organs seems to be fit for their niche in nature.
But that doesn’t mean some organs don’t need to change, e.g. 10,000 years ago we didn’t eat wheat, but now that we do we all need adapt our digestive system to that.
Conclusion: Since evolution is an adaptation to change and change is constant then we may experience some traits to be obsolete, therefore I cannot say we are entirely “fit” to the current environment, but that does not mean they are flaws since they were functional at least in some past environment, if not still i the present.
Adaptation takes time. Maybe the environment is changing faster than the organs evolve. Also, evolution finds local optima, not global ones, so it can get stuck at suboptimal designs which any incremental changes would only make worse.