To put my point a bit differently I think your argument would disappear if you tried to define imagine/reason more precisely.
Humans certainly aren’t perfect at imagining. In fact if you ask most people to imagine a heavy object and a much heavier object falling they will predict the much heavier object hits first and I can give a host of other examples of the same thing. So certainly we can’t require perfection to count as imagining or reasoning.
Neither do we want to define reasoning in terms of speaking english sentences or anything similar. I mean we can imagine the possibility of intelligent alien blobs of gas that have no language at all (or at least that we can understand). Besides using this definition would just make the claims trivial.
The best approach I can think of to making these terms more precisce is by defining reasoning ability in terms of ability to respond in a survival enhancing way to a diverse set of conditions. However, when we try to define it this way it is far from clear that complexes of genes aren’t just as good at reasoning as people are.
Sure it’s weird that something like this might be the case but it’s damn weird that induction works at all so why not believe it can be captured in a large number of relatively simple heuristics.
To put my point a bit differently I think your argument would disappear if you tried to define imagine/reason more precisely.
Humans certainly aren’t perfect at imagining. In fact if you ask most people to imagine a heavy object and a much heavier object falling they will predict the much heavier object hits first and I can give a host of other examples of the same thing. So certainly we can’t require perfection to count as imagining or reasoning.
Neither do we want to define reasoning in terms of speaking english sentences or anything similar. I mean we can imagine the possibility of intelligent alien blobs of gas that have no language at all (or at least that we can understand). Besides using this definition would just make the claims trivial.
The best approach I can think of to making these terms more precisce is by defining reasoning ability in terms of ability to respond in a survival enhancing way to a diverse set of conditions. However, when we try to define it this way it is far from clear that complexes of genes aren’t just as good at reasoning as people are.
Sure it’s weird that something like this might be the case but it’s damn weird that induction works at all so why not believe it can be captured in a large number of relatively simple heuristics.