What on Earth is evolution, if not the keeping of DNA sequences that worked last time? It’s less efficient than human induction and stupider, because it works only with DNA strings and is incapable of noticing simpler and more fundamental generalizations like physics equations. But of course it’s a crude form of inductive optimization. What else would it be? There are no knowledge-generating processes without some equivalent of an inductive prior or an assumption of regularity. The maths establishing this often go under the name of No-Free-Lunch theorems.
Evolution does not increase a species’ implicit knowledge of the niche by replicating genes. Mutation (evolution’s conjectures) creates potential new knowledge of the niche. Selection decreases the “false” implicit conjectures of mutations and previous genetic models of the niche.
So induction does not increase the implicit knowledge of gene sequences. Trial (mutation) and error (falsification) of implicit theories does. This is the process that the critical rationalist says happens but more efficiently with humans.
What on Earth is evolution, if not the keeping of DNA sequences that worked last time? It’s less efficient than human induction and stupider, because it works only with DNA strings and is incapable of noticing simpler and more fundamental generalizations like physics equations. But of course it’s a crude form of inductive optimization. What else would it be? There are no knowledge-generating processes without some equivalent of an inductive prior or an assumption of regularity. The maths establishing this often go under the name of No-Free-Lunch theorems.
Evolution does not increase a species’ implicit knowledge of the niche by replicating genes. Mutation (evolution’s conjectures) creates potential new knowledge of the niche. Selection decreases the “false” implicit conjectures of mutations and previous genetic models of the niche.
So induction does not increase the implicit knowledge of gene sequences.
Trial (mutation) and error (falsification) of implicit theories does. This is the process that the critical rationalist says happens but more efficiently with humans.