Cognitive Thrift 33 – Survival
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Cognitive game theory will imply some things to do with both an individual member and species survival with respect to cognitive evolutionary game theory.
Rick Rosner: Before we talk about game theory, we have to talk about the struggle between individual survival and species survival. We’re evolved beings. Evolution doesn’t care about anything. It’s not a willed force. There’s a thing called teleology. An idea, a bad idea, that evolution wants us to go in particular directions.
Evolution can’t want anything. It is not an entity with will.
Jacobsen: It’s a process. What are some examples of a teleological view in ancient and modern times?
Rosner: Teleological process – eyes are used by people that advocate creationism and intelligent design as something that couldn’t have evolved all by themselves. That the hand of some divine entity must’ve gotten in there because they are too complicate to just show up on their own.
Mixed in that is the idea that evolution pushed towards eyes. that evolution wants us to have eyes, but evolution can’t want anything. It’s a process, and it can exert adaptive forces, but those forces aren’t willed.
Those forces – and forces isn’t a good term, but I don’t better because I am ignorant – are helpful in surviving, eyes are helpful in surviving. Eyes get better and better where any extra betterness was being extra helpful for the organism. Economically, plus there’s the whole landscape of what
dammit (phone)
Evolution doesn’t want us to have eyes, but evolution has evolved at various times throughout evolutionary history because eyes are helpful, but there’s no divine push towards it.
In a sympathetic view, what would seem like a more generous statement to those – the majority of people with that teleological view in the world, which tends to tie into it?
There’s no generosity to be given to people that cynically exploit anti-science views to push their political agenda. It is people with their own agenda trying to sound scientific with a pseudo scientific theory, and it is just trying to sneak creationism in.
So there’s no generosity with them.
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