[FRIAM] query and observation

[Steven A Smith]

On 9/12/19 4:24 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> The best answer to "so what?" comes in Hoffman's paper:

Glen -

I may be missing your point badly, but your response lead me to flip my
thinking inside out and ask myself just what I mean by "so what" and
realized that *might* be the central point to Hoffman's argument.

My "so what?" perhaps illuminates Hoffman's argument:   The utility of
my perception of the sun and moon as orbiting the earth (or actually
more typically of them arcing across the surface of  one or more fixed
domes) is higher in most contexts than perceiving them as being involved
in a much more abstract (albeit elegantly simpler?) relationship
formulized by GmM/r^2.   This "utility landscape" IS the fitness
landscape for evolution.    Obviously there must be "gateways" (passes,
tunnels, etc.) from the portion of this landscape we live in everyday to
the ones say where we are trying to predict uncommon astronomical
observations (e.g.  eclipses).

I didn't mean to suggest that I didn't think the work was important or
interesting or fundamental, only that I don't see how it changes how I
live my everyday life for the most part.   I am *literally* trying to
invert my metaperceptions to see how I could be directly aware that my
perceptions are an interface, not a direct response to reality... all
easy to do intellectually (once some thought has been put into it) but
not so easy to apprehend even indirectly?

- Steve

>
>   Natural selection and veridical perceptions
>   http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/PerceptualEvolution.pdf
>
> from the abstract:
>> We find that veridical perceptions can be driven to extinction by non-veridical strategies that are tuned to utility rather than objective reality.This suggests that natural selection need not favor veridical perceptions, and that the effects of selection on sensory perception deserve further study.
> I haven't seen the book Dave mentions. But I suspect whatever it says cites these *games*. It's basically antithetic to the idea that the truth will win out over time/evolution. I.e. trust in the progress of metaphysical ideas is misplaced.
>
> Coincidentally, I found this article interesting:
>
>   Anti-Realist Pluralism: a New Approach to Folk Metaethics
>   https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-019-00447-8
>
>> Abstract
>>
>> Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument’s empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for future studies. Then we report and discuss the results of a survey that was based on this design. In our study, most of our participants denied the existence of objective truths about most or all moral issues. In particular, many of them had the intuition that whether moral sentences are true depends both on their own moral beliefs and on the dominant moral beliefs within their culture (“anti-realist pluralism”). This finding suggests that the realist presumptive argument may have to be rejected and that instead anti-realism may have a presumption in its favor.
>
>
> On 9/12/19 10:59 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> By coincidence I had dinner and beers with Glen
>> along the way, and I'm pretty sure he has brought Hoffman's work up here
>> a few times?
>> [...]   So while I think Hoffman might be dead on, I
>> still hold a bit of "so what?" and "what does it help me do?".