Havent watched past 4:18 yet, but my contest to EAAN is that while there is some bias to belief in danger, there is an obvious point at which a creature goes too far and becomes so paranoid that it ceases to function and propagate. The fact that there are borders on either side of belief and skepticism tells us that there can still be a guiding path toward truth and thus reliability on rationality. In fact most instances of fear at the rustling bush are only prevailant in areas where the Truth is that a rustling bush is a vital sign of danger. Several generations of evolution in an environment where such danger doesn't exist, the paranoid of the creatures will waste their time and energy on non-threats and become subsumed by those of them that don't. Evolution by natural selection broadly points toward Truth.
Only in areas where exploring this areas or conserving energy are strongly beneficial. I can easily see evolution selecting the frady cat over the curious one and never going back. Just like if there's no significant benefit to abandoning religion people might continue to practice it.
The argument seems to suggest we should check our beliefs in case our reasoning *was* flawed. What we observe in pretty much any other context for non-trivial beliefs is that people test them over and over again, and collaborate, since there is no reason to think we should all make the *same* flaws in reasoning. The idea that we should simply discard all beliefs because our reasoning process might have been flawed seems like a non sec for this reason. Plantinga's own worldview needs to also address the data that our reasoning processes have been observed to fail time and time again, and we are easily fooled, but can also be led to false conclusions just by natural biases and cognitive processes. Plantinga presumably follows the Christian doctrine of the fall to account for this, which is mythical, but he needs to follow the entailments of that and explain why he trusts his reasoning. If human reasoning is flawed because of the fall, how does he know any conclusion he reaches is correct? What if his reasoning led him to worship Yahweh instead of Allah? Maybe he should reject that belief because it might have been susceptible to flawed reasoning.
Excellent summary. I salute to you, sir! It is disappointing enough that common folks parade around and shake this in your face as the ultimate "gotcha" against naturalism. I guess it is expected that most of them not even get when you explain this flaw. But what's really disappointing is that educated people like Plantinga do the same. The core idea is the same as presented in Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the halting problem. Yet he not once mentions that, nor explores the implications for his own worldview.
The key thing to understand about Plantinga is that he doesn't CARE about answering that. He's a bad faith actor, a concern troll for God. His purpose is to try to argue that the Christian position is not unreasonable, and if he can't do that, he wants to burn everything else down and demonstrate no other position is any more reasonable. If you were somehow to corner him into admitting he can't be sure about X or Y, he'd just find a way to argue you can't be sure about X or Y either (or Z, if Z is something that would falsify X or Y). His interests are not in advancing human understanding, but in excusing human ignorance. He's a complete hack and he's only taken seriously because he's discovered a useful niche. Which is funny because that vaguely sounds like an Evolutionary Argument For Plantinga.
This argument is basically the slippery slope fallacy. If you can't have absolute certainty about something, then maybe there could be some thing you don't know that secretly makes everything you think you know false. So you don't know anything, and the only way you can know anything is by having absolute certainty that someone who knows everything with absolute certainty is telling you that some things are absolutely certain. It's one big fallacy sandwich.
It's not really a slippery slope fallacy. They work in a different way. The argument doesn't work the way you think it does either. It's more about the reliability of the belief formation faculties. Think of it something like at the end of the day you find one of the machines a factory is misaligned. The fact that it's misaligned means that you can't trust anything it's produced that day.
@@TrolleyDave I'd say that the reliability of belief forming processes here is a red herring. If you look at the argument carefully, there's no real attempt at analyzing this reliability (you'd need empirical evidence for that, and they can't have it). Rather, it's a sneaky attempt at implying that, because the origin of those faculties isn't in some platonic ideal of truth, then you can't be perfectly certain that they are perfectly reliable... and thus you should act as if they are entirely unreliable. The core of the argument is not in reliability: it's in the idea that if you don't have absolute epistemic knowledge, then you can have no knowledge, just dressed up so you don't notice, compared to the more explicit version of it that presuppositionalists use. It's a different version of that same "could there be something that makes everything you think you know false?" argument.
@antonioscendrategattico2302 I don't think it's a red herring. It's a sleight of hand trick using Bayesian reasoning. It's similar to the 'odds of life forming under naturalism' kind of argument. I agree there's no real attempt at analysing the reliability. But that's the point of the argument. It's little different to any other global scepticism argument. It's about undermining confidence, and instilling doubt and scepticism. I agree that it's the same as other presuppositionalist arguments in the sense.
Not sure what kind of fallacy it is but it sure as hell is dumb. How can one be sure that the thing that has absolute certainty (how can you even be certain of this thing's existence anyway apart form an a priori assertion driving the desired conclusion) is being received with absolute certainty particularly given so many claims about this absolute certainty having a myriad of different attributes and desires?
exactly that's why you have religion - to enjoy unreliability of your facilities and that's why we have science - to overcome unreliability of our facilities
@@TrolleyDave not you personally but that guy from this video's splashscreen... Plantinga I guess... one who thinks he is a philosopher... P.S. didn't watch the video, sry... just leaving a comment :)
Somebody running the EAAN could accept that beliefs can be revised as information comes in. What they would argue is that the faculties are not reliable, so therefore we may reject information that leads us to truth in favour of information that keeps us alive.
@@TrolleyDave I agree with this which is why beliefs like the reality of the physical world that directly affect survival are really likely to be true while beliefs like religion that have no clear connection to survival are probably unreliable.
Plantinga has spent his career desperately trying to word salad a new reality into existence. Academic philosophy has given us some truly insightful avenues to pursue to try and understand more about our world. It has also given us the vacuous nonsense that is the flagrant, sophist apologetics of people such as Plantinga. It's beyond me how he could present his comically bad modal argument, and still be at all considered a serious person; in any other area of academics it would be a serious problem if you repeatedly demonstrated that you either are intentionally arguing in circles, using sophistry, or that you are unintentionally arguing in circles, because your reasoning and application of logic is flawed.
The moment you started to articulate the first premise of the EAAN alarm bells were ringing in my head. And rightly so, as it turns out. How has this critical early-warning system been disabled in the minds of people who conconct such nonsense that would otherwise stop them in their tracks? It's truly baffling.
This is the first time I've heard of EAAN and am struggling how to understand it, since it generalizes cognitive faculties as a single monolithic thing, and reliability as a binary. It smacks a bit of Descartes' evil demon, which Descartes fails to adequately dispel. We deal with epistimological unreliabilities all the time, which is why we don't depend on single experiments or single evidence, but multiple measurements. We check and double check our logical steps and run them by critics to assure they are sound. I also challenge the assertion that naturalism defies theism, as it only asserts there are no supernatural gods (such as the Abrahamic deity). This naturalist asserts _I don't know_ what fulfills the roles we attribute to God, e.g. how the big bang was triggered, whether the earth figures into an intended function, what created the creators of the creators of the creators of the universe, etc. What I know is, the world _appears convincingly_ to be a material one, with no distinct spiritual or etheric counterparts that can be detected via side channel attacks. Ghosts are not a thing. Ball lightning is. Unidentified areal phenomena is sometimes witnessed and remains unidentified. It will likely be identified someday as fauna or meteorological. Biological evolution is a robust model. It's not a question of whether brains of rational cognition could evolve but how. And yes, our brains are limited in their cognitive capacity, which is why we have to measure several times for each cut. But then, ever since Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity, I expect hypotheses I don't understand and cannot be simplified to where I can to be deceptive or presented in bad faith. So I am assuming the same might be true for EAAN. At the same time, I failed calculus 1B: integration so I may not be the sharpest light on the tree.
We can act with the proclivity that we are not brains in cats given we have no data to suggest that we are, and our intuitions only suggest we have no internal and external world. If there is no data for a brain in a cat and our intuitions don't sense anything to suggest being brains in cats - and it's not clear whether they ever could or not - acting with the proclivity that the external world exists is rational, even if it doesn't.
_"Your_ brain thinks it was developed through evolution. Evolution, as you understand it, is an imperfect process; therefore you must also conclude your brain is imperfect and you therefore cannot rely on its conclusions, such as being developed through evolution. _My_ brain, on the other hand, recognises that it was created by God. God's process of creation was perfect, therefore my conclusion is reliable." This is the Begging the Question fallacy.
It's not really a begging the question fallacy as far as I can see. Not sure if I've done a video on that fallacy in my fallacy series yet, but from what I know of the fallacy it doesn't match it. Would you mind expanding on why you think it is?
Havent watched past 4:18 yet, but my contest to EAAN is that while there is some bias to belief in danger, there is an obvious point at which a creature goes too far and becomes so paranoid that it ceases to function and propagate.
The fact that there are borders on either side of belief and skepticism tells us that there can still be a guiding path toward truth and thus reliability on rationality.
In fact most instances of fear at the rustling bush are only prevailant in areas where the Truth is that a rustling bush is a vital sign of danger.
Several generations of evolution in an environment where such danger doesn't exist, the paranoid of the creatures will waste their time and energy on non-threats and become subsumed by those of them that don't.
Evolution by natural selection broadly points toward Truth.
Great answer. :) Did you finish watching the video?
Only in areas where exploring this areas or conserving energy are strongly beneficial. I can easily see evolution selecting the frady cat over the curious one and never going back. Just like if there's no significant benefit to abandoning religion people might continue to practice it.
@@TrolleyDaveYeah, seems you make a similar point in the second half of your reply.
Excellent vid. The validity of treating reason as reliable is not a presupposition but rather an evidence-based conclusion.
It's a bit of both.
The argument seems to suggest we should check our beliefs in case our reasoning *was* flawed.
What we observe in pretty much any other context for non-trivial beliefs is that people test them over and over again, and collaborate, since there is no reason to think we should all make the *same* flaws in reasoning.
The idea that we should simply discard all beliefs because our reasoning process might have been flawed seems like a non sec for this reason.
Plantinga's own worldview needs to also address the data that our reasoning processes have been observed to fail time and time again, and we are easily fooled, but can also be led to false conclusions just by natural biases and cognitive processes.
Plantinga presumably follows the Christian doctrine of the fall to account for this, which is mythical, but he needs to follow the entailments of that and explain why he trusts his reasoning. If human reasoning is flawed because of the fall, how does he know any conclusion he reaches is correct? What if his reasoning led him to worship Yahweh instead of Allah? Maybe he should reject that belief because it might have been susceptible to flawed reasoning.
Excellent summary. I salute to you, sir!
It is disappointing enough that common folks parade around and shake this in your face as the ultimate "gotcha" against naturalism. I guess it is expected that most of them not even get when you explain this flaw.
But what's really disappointing is that educated people like Plantinga do the same. The core idea is the same as presented in Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the halting problem. Yet he not once mentions that, nor explores the implications for his own worldview.
The key thing to understand about Plantinga is that he doesn't CARE about answering that. He's a bad faith actor, a concern troll for God. His purpose is to try to argue that the Christian position is not unreasonable, and if he can't do that, he wants to burn everything else down and demonstrate no other position is any more reasonable. If you were somehow to corner him into admitting he can't be sure about X or Y, he'd just find a way to argue you can't be sure about X or Y either (or Z, if Z is something that would falsify X or Y). His interests are not in advancing human understanding, but in excusing human ignorance.
He's a complete hack and he's only taken seriously because he's discovered a useful niche. Which is funny because that vaguely sounds like an Evolutionary Argument For Plantinga.
This argument is basically the slippery slope fallacy. If you can't have absolute certainty about something, then maybe there could be some thing you don't know that secretly makes everything you think you know false. So you don't know anything, and the only way you can know anything is by having absolute certainty that someone who knows everything with absolute certainty is telling you that some things are absolutely certain.
It's one big fallacy sandwich.
It's not really a slippery slope fallacy. They work in a different way. The argument doesn't work the way you think it does either. It's more about the reliability of the belief formation faculties.
Think of it something like at the end of the day you find one of the machines a factory is misaligned. The fact that it's misaligned means that you can't trust anything it's produced that day.
@@TrolleyDave I'd say that the reliability of belief forming processes here is a red herring. If you look at the argument carefully, there's no real attempt at analyzing this reliability (you'd need empirical evidence for that, and they can't have it).
Rather, it's a sneaky attempt at implying that, because the origin of those faculties isn't in some platonic ideal of truth, then you can't be perfectly certain that they are perfectly reliable... and thus you should act as if they are entirely unreliable.
The core of the argument is not in reliability: it's in the idea that if you don't have absolute epistemic knowledge, then you can have no knowledge, just dressed up so you don't notice, compared to the more explicit version of it that presuppositionalists use. It's a different version of that same "could there be something that makes everything you think you know false?" argument.
@antonioscendrategattico2302 I don't think it's a red herring. It's a sleight of hand trick using Bayesian reasoning. It's similar to the 'odds of life forming under naturalism' kind of argument.
I agree there's no real attempt at analysing the reliability. But that's the point of the argument. It's little different to any other global scepticism argument. It's about undermining confidence, and instilling doubt and scepticism. I agree that it's the same as other presuppositionalist arguments in the sense.
@@TrolleyDave I think we are saying the same thing then.
Not sure what kind of fallacy it is but it sure as hell is dumb. How can one be sure that the thing that has absolute certainty (how can you even be certain of this thing's existence anyway apart form an a priori assertion driving the desired conclusion) is being received with absolute certainty particularly given so many claims about this absolute certainty having a myriad of different attributes and desires?
exactly
that's why you have religion - to enjoy unreliability of your facilities and that's why we have science - to overcome unreliability of our facilities
What religion do you think I have when taking into account that I'm a strong/explicit/positive atheist?
@@TrolleyDave not you personally but that guy from this video's splashscreen... Plantinga I guess... one who thinks he is a philosopher...
P.S. didn't watch the video, sry... just leaving a comment :)
What i don't understand is why Plantinga is so fixated on the order of gaining experiences. To me beliefs can be revised as information comes in.
Somebody running the EAAN could accept that beliefs can be revised as information comes in. What they would argue is that the faculties are not reliable, so therefore we may reject information that leads us to truth in favour of information that keeps us alive.
@@TrolleyDave I agree with this which is why beliefs like the reality of the physical world that directly affect survival are really likely to be true while beliefs like religion that have no clear connection to survival are probably unreliable.
Thank you!
My pleasure GG. Hopefully it was helpful! I might do a video on the whole 'I'm talking epistemology not ontology' argument in the near future.
@@TrolleyDave notify me if you do. I'd like to see that.
Plantinga has spent his career desperately trying to word salad a new reality into existence.
Academic philosophy has given us some truly insightful avenues to pursue to try and understand more about our world.
It has also given us the vacuous nonsense that is the flagrant, sophist apologetics of people such as Plantinga. It's beyond me how he could present his comically bad modal argument, and still be at all considered a serious person; in any other area of academics it would be a serious problem if you repeatedly demonstrated that you either are intentionally arguing in circles, using sophistry, or that you are unintentionally arguing in circles, because your reasoning and application of logic is flawed.
This is a great articulation of the EAAN's flaws. Thank you.
Thank you, that's very kind of you to say so.
The moment you started to articulate the first premise of the EAAN alarm bells were ringing in my head. And rightly so, as it turns out. How has this critical early-warning system been disabled in the minds of people who conconct such nonsense that would otherwise stop them in their tracks? It's truly baffling.
What's wrong with my articulation of the EAAN?
@@TrolleyDave I think he’s saying the first premise of EAAN is enough to show how fallacious the argument is
@@darkyodd Ahh, my mistake and my apologies then.
This is the first time I've heard of EAAN and am struggling how to understand it, since it generalizes cognitive faculties as a single monolithic thing, and reliability as a binary.
It smacks a bit of Descartes' evil demon, which Descartes fails to adequately dispel.
We deal with epistimological unreliabilities all the time, which is why we don't depend on single experiments or single evidence, but multiple measurements. We check and double check our logical steps and run them by critics to assure they are sound.
I also challenge the assertion that naturalism defies theism, as it only asserts there are no supernatural gods (such as the Abrahamic deity). This naturalist asserts _I don't know_ what fulfills the roles we attribute to God, e.g. how the big bang was triggered, whether the earth figures into an intended function, what created the creators of the creators of the creators of the universe, etc. What I know is, the world _appears convincingly_ to be a material one, with no distinct spiritual or etheric counterparts that can be detected via side channel attacks.
Ghosts are not a thing. Ball lightning is. Unidentified areal phenomena is sometimes witnessed and remains unidentified. It will likely be identified someday as fauna or meteorological.
Biological evolution is a robust model. It's not a question of whether brains of rational cognition could evolve but how. And yes, our brains are limited in their cognitive capacity, which is why we have to measure several times for each cut.
But then, ever since Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity, I expect hypotheses I don't understand and cannot be simplified to where I can to be deceptive or presented in bad faith. So I am assuming the same might be true for EAAN. At the same time, I failed calculus 1B: integration so I may not be the sharpest light on the tree.
Word.
We can act with the proclivity that we are not brains in cats given we have no data to suggest that we are, and our intuitions only suggest we have no internal and external world.
If there is no data for a brain in a cat and our intuitions don't sense anything to suggest being brains in cats - and it's not clear whether they ever could or not - acting with the proclivity that the external world exists is rational, even if it doesn't.
My spell checker is having fun today.
_"Your_ brain thinks it was developed through evolution. Evolution, as you understand it, is an imperfect process; therefore you must also conclude your brain is imperfect and you therefore cannot rely on its conclusions, such as being developed through evolution. _My_ brain, on the other hand, recognises that it was created by God. God's process of creation was perfect, therefore my conclusion is reliable."
This is the Begging the Question fallacy.
Not to mention that every brain is known to be fallible so clearly the second conclusion is false.
It's not really a begging the question fallacy as far as I can see. Not sure if I've done a video on that fallacy in my fallacy series yet, but from what I know of the fallacy it doesn't match it. Would you mind expanding on why you think it is?
@@goldenalt3166This is one of the key ideas to putting a counter to the EAAN in my opinion.
Sorry. I couldn't bear the vocal fry so I switched off.
Good for you. Stand tall and feel proud for your strong and powerful intellect.
@@TrolleyDave Fry is fake, and _ipso facto_ irritates me. I accept - that is my problem.
@@frogandspanner What do you mean by 'fry is fake'?
@@TrolleyDave ua-cam.com/video/Q0yL2GezneU/v-deo.htmlsi=0FVtkMFsYNQXvhw5
@@frogandspannerCheers, will have a watch of that later.