Nice try Tyler. What individuals “do” does not define what natural selection does.
One could also say: “In practice, natural selection produces intelligent agents, who can predict, and then they make selective choices that affect who lives, who dies and who reproduces.”
That does NOT mean that natural selection operates via a predictive process. Ask any good biologist and they will tell you than natural selection is not predictive. That’s why species go extinct all the time.
Natural selection is a non-inductive proces that can produce individual organisms that can “do induction”. The process of natural selection is “Trial and error” which is quite literally analogous to Poppers theory of falsification.
BTW, it is not at all clear the intelligent agent operates primarily using “induction” either. Induction is primarily useful in learning but that’s only part of intelligence. Furthermore, even in the sub-function of learning it is not at all clear that induction is a primary algorithm. Clearly your brain needs to first model the world in order to classify observations in order to attribute them to anything. The induction itself is not primary. The model building capabilities themselves are the product of a non-inductive process.
Actually, seeing as how humans are so incredibly bad at Bayesian induction it’s a wonder anyone believes that we use induction at all. One would think that if our primary systems work on Baysian induction we’d be able to somehow tap into that.
Try explaining to yourself how you do induction and you will see that even you don’t do it in areas that you think you do. Do you really believe the sun comes up tomorrow because of induction? … or do you have a mental model of how the sun operates that you contengently believe in? When you learn some new aspect about the sun do you try to devise a new mental model or do you just change the odds it operates one way or another. My brain certainly doesn’t operate on odds.
Nice try Tyler. What individuals “do” does not define what natural selection does.
One could also say: “In practice, natural selection produces intelligent agents, who can predict, and then they make selective choices that affect who lives, who dies and who reproduces.”
That does NOT mean that natural selection operates via a predictive process. Ask any good biologist and they will tell you than natural selection is not predictive. That’s why species go extinct all the time.
Natural selection is a non-inductive proces that can produce individual organisms that can “do induction”. The process of natural selection is “Trial and error” which is quite literally analogous to Poppers theory of falsification.
BTW, it is not at all clear the intelligent agent operates primarily using “induction” either. Induction is primarily useful in learning but that’s only part of intelligence. Furthermore, even in the sub-function of learning it is not at all clear that induction is a primary algorithm. Clearly your brain needs to first model the world in order to classify observations in order to attribute them to anything. The induction itself is not primary. The model building capabilities themselves are the product of a non-inductive process.
Actually, seeing as how humans are so incredibly bad at Bayesian induction it’s a wonder anyone believes that we use induction at all. One would think that if our primary systems work on Baysian induction we’d be able to somehow tap into that.
Try explaining to yourself how you do induction and you will see that even you don’t do it in areas that you think you do. Do you really believe the sun comes up tomorrow because of induction? … or do you have a mental model of how the sun operates that you contengently believe in? When you learn some new aspect about the sun do you try to devise a new mental model or do you just change the odds it operates one way or another. My brain certainly doesn’t operate on odds.