Path: ultra.sonic.net!miwok!news1.best.com!newsxfer3.itd.umich.edu!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!aristos.demon.co.uk!aristos.demon.co.uk!sam From: Sam Dodsworth Newsgroups: alt.books.cs-lewis Subject: Re: Lewis and science Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 12:13:03 +0100 Organization: Annexia Free Press Distribution: world Message-ID: <79B4TGA$yhTzEw4P@aristos.demon.co.uk> References: <5gg4ac$5o8@news.acns.nwu.edu> <1daec.smail.smayo@ziplink.net> <5igbe0$823@netnews.upenn.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: aristos.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: aristos.demon.co.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Newsreader: Turnpike Version 3.01 <7c0azr3XvpMr4dZzpifF$I+pPf> Lines: 102 Xref: ultra.sonic.net alt.books.cs-lewis:7164 In article <5igbe0$823@netnews.upenn.edu>, DAPS writes >Sam Dodsworth (sam@aristos.demon.co.uk) wrote: > >: I don't have my copy of "Miracles" to hand, but I certainly >: don't remember Lewis saying anything about adaptive value - if he had, I >: think I would have mentioned it in my "Difficulties with Miracles" post. > >He doesn't use the word "adaptive" but the concept is implicit in some of >the points he makes. I think uses the word "useful" which makes sense >for someone who has had a philosophical, not scientific, education. > I've looked again at the relevant part of Chapter Three and I honestly can't find anything that matches your description. This is the passage I was thinking of: "Once... our thoughts were not rational. That is, all our thoughts once were, as many of our thoughts still are, merely subjective events, not apprehensions of objective truth. Those which had a cause external to ourselves at all were (like our pains) responses to stimuli... But it is not conceivable that any improvement of responses could ever turn them into acts of insight, or even remotely tend to do so. The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and the truth known." I don't read this as a discussion of adaptive value - is there material elsewhere that I've missed? >: recognition of percieved truths" springs from logical thought, but it's >: only one of the things that does. This is important because some of the >: other things have considerable adaptive value - particularly the ability >: to plan, rather than simply to react. > >I'm not sure that this requires reason at all. A wholly mechanical >system, like a computer, could "plan" in the sense of working out all the >possibilities and choosing the best one. Would this count as reason? I >think that when he talks about reason, he means conscious perception of >truth. At least, that is the faculty on which his argument rests. > Several points here. First of all, I think your definition of "rational thought" is significantly more narrow than Lewis': From Chapter Four: "...logical thinking - Reasoning - had to be..." From Chapter Three: "...a chain of reasoning has no value as a means of finding truth unless each step in it is connected with what went before in the Ground-Consequent relation... On the other hand, every event in Nature must be connected with the previous events in the Cause and Effect relation. But our acts of thinking are events. Therefore the true answer to 'Why do you think this?' must begin with the Cause-Effect 'because'." I read Lewis as arguing that "acts of insight" (what you call "conscious perception of truth") are the result of chains of reasoning - that is, that they are an emergent property of logical thought. It's also worth mentioning (although I may be reading too much into your arguments) that it doesn't matter if there are alternative ways of getting the benefits of rational thought, as long as rational thought itself has adaptive value. This is one situation where we can talk about "blind chance" in evolution: a mutation will be selected for if it has adaptive value, but there's no requirement to find an optimal solution as long as what you've got is better than what there was before. There are at least forty different designs of eye found in nature and they vary wildly in efficiency, but they're all more useful than no eyes at all. (This is also why we sometimes see examples of outright bad design in nature - you've got a blind spot because the wiring in your eye is back-to-front, with nerves running over the front surface of the retina.) >: Rational thought also works with >: other faculties like language and imagination (in the broadest sense, as >: the ability to construct an internal representation of the world) to >: give us culture - an adaption that lets us transmit acquired experience >: to future generations without having to rely on the slow evolutionary >: process. > >Yes, that is a good point. Again, I think it is a particular aspect of >consciousness that Lewis's argument depends upon. He always brings it >back to the thoughts that the Naturalist is thinking "at this very >moment," saying that if they are results of an ultimately non-rational >process then they are worthless as thought. They may represent a useful >transmission of acquired experience, but exactly what has that got to do >with their being true? > Well, nothing - which is my point. Lewis' definition of truth is so narrow that we don't actually use it in everyday life. The more I look at Lewis' arguments in "Miracles" the more I'm convinced that what he's actually doing is taking one of the central problems of all philosophy - how to determine what we can know to be true - and treating it as a difficulty that's unique to Naturalism. Sam Dodsworth (sam@aristos.demon.co.uk) "Will you choose freedom without happiness or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No." - Ursula Leguin