“What on Earth is evolution, if not the keeping of DNA sequences that worked last time?
It’s also replication and variation.
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?
That seems like an argument from “failure of imagination”. Quite simply, evolution is trial and error.
There are no knowledge-generating processes without some equivalent of an inductive prior or an assumption of regularity.
This is just question begging, as I think you are aware. How did we come by the knowledge of induction? Did we induce it? Impossible! So, therefore, there must be at least one way to knowledge that doesn’t involve induction.
This stuff is all old hat. Philosophers of the 20th century like Popper and Bartley realized that the whole induction quagmire is caused by people looking for justified sources of knowledge. They concluded that justificationism is a mistake and replaced it with critical rationalism. Now there are bad scholars who claim that critical rationalism sneaks induction in through the back door. But that is just bad scholarship.
It’s a shame to still be wasting time on induction in the 21st century. Rather than rehashing old problems, shouldn’t we be building on what the best of 20th century philosophy gave us?
The maths establishing this often go under the name of No-Free-Lunch theorems.
Were the assumptions of these theorems inductively justified?
“What on Earth is evolution, if not the keeping of DNA sequences that worked last time?
It’s also replication and variation.
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?
That seems like an argument from “failure of imagination”. Quite simply, evolution is trial and error.
There are no knowledge-generating processes without some equivalent of an inductive prior or an assumption of regularity.
This is just question begging, as I think you are aware. How did we come by the knowledge of induction? Did we induce it? Impossible! So, therefore, there must be at least one way to knowledge that doesn’t involve induction.
This stuff is all old hat. Philosophers of the 20th century like Popper and Bartley realized that the whole induction quagmire is caused by people looking for justified sources of knowledge. They concluded that justificationism is a mistake and replaced it with critical rationalism. Now there are bad scholars who claim that critical rationalism sneaks induction in through the back door. But that is just bad scholarship.
It’s a shame to still be wasting time on induction in the 21st century. Rather than rehashing old problems, shouldn’t we be building on what the best of 20th century philosophy gave us?
The maths establishing this often go under the name of No-Free-Lunch theorems.
Were the assumptions of these theorems inductively justified?