Seems like some people replace the teleological model of “it evolved this way because the Spirit of Nature wanted it to evolve this way” by a simplistic pseudo-evolutionary model of “it evolved because it helps you to survive and get more sex”.
Nope. Some things evolve as side effects of the things that help us “survive and get more sex”; because they are cheaper solutions, or because the random algorithm found them first. There are historical coincidences and path-dependency.
For example, that fact that we have five fingers on each hand doesn’t prove that having five fingers is inherently more sexy or more useful for survival than six or four. Instead, historically, the fish that were our ancestors had five bones in their fins (I hope I remember this correctly), and there was a series of mutations that transformed them into fingers. So, “having fingers” was an advantage over “having no fingers”, but the number five got there by coincidence. Trying to prove that five is the perfect number of fingers would be trying to prove too much.
Analogically, having an imperfect brain was an advantage over having no brain. But many traits of the brain are similar historical artefacts, or design trade-offs, or even historical artefacts of the design trade-offs of our ancestors. A different history could lead to brains with different quirks. Using “neural nets” (as opposed to something else) already is a design decision that brings some artifacts. Having the brain divided into multiple components is another design decision; etc. Each path only proves that going this path was better than not going there; it doesn’t prove that this path is better than all possible alternatives. Some paths could later turn out to be dead ends.
I agree that treating humans as “rational beings with objectives” can be a nice first approximation, but later it’s just adding more epicycles on a fundamentally wrong assumption.
Seems like some people replace the teleological model of “it evolved this way because the Spirit of Nature wanted it to evolve this way” by a simplistic pseudo-evolutionary model of “it evolved because it helps you to survive and get more sex”.
Nope. Some things evolve as side effects of the things that help us “survive and get more sex”; because they are cheaper solutions, or because the random algorithm found them first. There are historical coincidences and path-dependency.
For example, that fact that we have five fingers on each hand doesn’t prove that having five fingers is inherently more sexy or more useful for survival than six or four. Instead, historically, the fish that were our ancestors had five bones in their fins (I hope I remember this correctly), and there was a series of mutations that transformed them into fingers. So, “having fingers” was an advantage over “having no fingers”, but the number five got there by coincidence. Trying to prove that five is the perfect number of fingers would be trying to prove too much.
Analogically, having an imperfect brain was an advantage over having no brain. But many traits of the brain are similar historical artefacts, or design trade-offs, or even historical artefacts of the design trade-offs of our ancestors. A different history could lead to brains with different quirks. Using “neural nets” (as opposed to something else) already is a design decision that brings some artifacts. Having the brain divided into multiple components is another design decision; etc. Each path only proves that going this path was better than not going there; it doesn’t prove that this path is better than all possible alternatives. Some paths could later turn out to be dead ends.
I agree that treating humans as “rational beings with objectives” can be a nice first approximation, but later it’s just adding more epicycles on a fundamentally wrong assumption.