An Evolutionary Argument Against Evolutionary Psychology
Bono:
Evolutionary psychology has philosophical implications that go way beyond those of garden variety causal determinism.
In a compatibilist understanding of free will, your decisions are free if the causal chain that lead to them include your own conscious decision process made free of any external compulsions. Thus, a person being tied to a chair is not free to decide whether he wants to stay seated or get up, but a person who gets up from a chair unimpeded was free in his decision even if it was caused by him wanting to go to the bathroom, which in turned was caused by the canned beans he had last night.
However, for evolutionary psychologists, our reasons are nothing but clever ruses invented by our brain to satisfy our consciousness (how consciousness arose in the first place they of course don't dedicate a line to), and are completely different from the "real" cause of our actions. Thus, I hang around with my best friend not because I enjoy his company, but because I want to insure that he remains friendly to me and doesn't steal any females with whom I could reproduce from me. This was supposedly an adaptive behavior for our caveman ancestors. This poses problems for the compatibilist understanding of free will because for them our consciousness is nothing but a powerless actor watching an external drama unfold.
I'll try to show that this renders evolutionary psychology self-stultifying by borrowing a page from Alvin Plantinga's book and slightly modify one argument of his for application to EP.
Evolutionary psychology carries with it the extraordinary conclusion that most of our beliefs regarding our courses of action are false. But this casts doubt not only on our beliefs as narrowly applied to volition, but to all of our beliefs. If it is accepted that forming beliefs that do not correspond with reality confers an evolutionary advantage in this case, the possibility cannot be excluded that it would confer advantages in general. This is not to say that evolutionary psychology implies that all our knowledge, including for instance the existence of the external world, is demonstrably false. But it does imply that the probability of it being true is either low or inscrutable, because it would give a reason to doubt the reliability of our belief-forming process, and as such, of all our beliefs. But this would include the evolutionary psychologist's belief that evolutionary psychology is true. If EP provides a defeater for all our beliefs, the belief that EP itself is true cannot possibly be excluded from the wider set of our beliefs.
Thus, simpliciter, EP is self-defeating and cannot rationally be accepted.
Tetro Kornbluth:
I greatly recommend this post.
Needless to say, a simliar arguement can be applied to Eliminative Materialism aswell.
anvi:
I'm with you on your critique of EP. Indeed, it's rather strange of the EP advocate to claim that our false beliefs confer evolutionary advantages on us, for if our beliefs about the external world were false or even mostly false, our survival and success in it would be entirely random, and this itself would falsify the principle of natural selection.
I'm not sure eliminative materialism is in exactly the same boat. I don't believe eliminative materialism is true. But the claim of eliminative materialism seems merely to be that all of our cognitions can be reductively explained by recourse to the physiology of the brain. That doesn't necessarily imply, in the same way that EP does, that all our "beliefs" (brain states) are false, but merely that they have physiological explanations, Don't get me wrong, I think, as you seem to, that eliminative materialism is false, but for different reasons than EP, as it's being described here, is false.
Tetro Kornbluth:
Quote from: anvikshiki on January 08, 2009, 10:28:40 AM
I'm with you on your critique of EP. Indeed, it's rather strange of the EP advocate to claim that our false beliefs confer evolutionary advantages on us, for if our beliefs about the external world were false or even mostly false, our survival and success in it would be entirely random, and this itself would falsify the principle of natural selection.
BUT THEN WE KANT ATTACK RELIGION!!1111
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Rather my intrepretation is that it claims that all our conceptual understandings - our vocabulary about are ourselves is wrong as it isn't rooted in the processes of brain (ie. We don't "believe" - rather we feel certain processes and stimulants in the brain). Of course it falls into the "you can only refute metaphysics via metaphysics" problem
(ie. The sentence: "I believe in Eliminative materialism"...). Also we believe that our actions are caused by our beliefs... how do we believe that? How does our conciousness "believing" work?
Ergo it fits into this statement Bono made:
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Thus self-refuting in the way Bono discribes - thus the reasoning of our conciousness is not something most EMs like to touch.
Matt Damon™:
I have a question: Can someone tell me what evo psych is good for? All I've heard of it is it just being used to justify horrid things like sexism
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