Day 64
Fun with numbers
This is a short response paper I wrote up this morning for a class. There are a couple of references you won't catch, but the rest I think is really interesting stuff to ponder:
I find most interesting Dennett’s argument regarding the often probabilistic nature of cause/effect relationships. He criticizes Fodor’s Jack & Jill example by noting that it does not adequately apply to evolutionary processes, because it is taken as a singular case: “Fodor’s quaint view of causation leads him to ignore the power of effects that depend on probability. He views such phenomena as not properly causal at all.”
I am strongly sympathetic to Dennett’s view that such phenomena can certainly fall under causal nomologicality. Look at a very simple example such as flipping coins. Any given flip, sure, is indeterminate. It could go either way with a 50/50 probability. It is logically possible to flip any number of heads in a row, but sure enough the more coins one flips there is a tendency for the ratio of heads flipped to tails flipped to even itself out. I don’t imagine it a stretch to make a law about, say, a million coin tosses, as the odds of the ratio ranging outside 51/49 (i.e. 10,000 flips) in either direction are unimaginably small.
Perhaps an analogy could be made between adaptationist thinking and sub-atomic physics. It is a truism that at the sub-atomic level things do not (appear, at least) to act under any causal laws. Explaining the behaviours of these particles taken individually is essentially impossible, but when taken in massive groups, they behave quite strictly. A thermometer in a glass of water, no matter how accurate, doesn’t say anything to us about the kinetic movement of any one of its molecules. Again, it is logically possible that not a single particle in the glass actually behaves at the mean kinetic level. But a thermometer is a measurer of statistical averages, and since even in a glass of water a thermometer has literally trillions of particles to make an average of, it can be incredibly accurate in measuring the water’s temperature. I imagine it would be a stretch to say that temperature cannot legitimately be law-governed on account of the fact that sub-atomic particles aren’t law governed taken individually.
And Richard Dawkins is all about this line of thinking in The Blind Watchmaker. If we have two competing varieties of creature within a population, one of which consists of individuals who have a 51 percent chance of reproduction, and the other consisting of individuals who have a 49 percent chance of reproduction. (Assuming that the total population stays constant) the first group will inevitably outflank the second and subsume the niche for itself; it is simply a matter of time and probability taking its toll in each round of reproduction. This says absolutely nothing about what each individual creature does, and for that matter it says nothing about intentional (with a t) states within each creature. It does not have to.
This is a short response paper I wrote up this morning for a class. There are a couple of references you won't catch, but the rest I think is really interesting stuff to ponder:
I find most interesting Dennett’s argument regarding the often probabilistic nature of cause/effect relationships. He criticizes Fodor’s Jack & Jill example by noting that it does not adequately apply to evolutionary processes, because it is taken as a singular case: “Fodor’s quaint view of causation leads him to ignore the power of effects that depend on probability. He views such phenomena as not properly causal at all.”
I am strongly sympathetic to Dennett’s view that such phenomena can certainly fall under causal nomologicality. Look at a very simple example such as flipping coins. Any given flip, sure, is indeterminate. It could go either way with a 50/50 probability. It is logically possible to flip any number of heads in a row, but sure enough the more coins one flips there is a tendency for the ratio of heads flipped to tails flipped to even itself out. I don’t imagine it a stretch to make a law about, say, a million coin tosses, as the odds of the ratio ranging outside 51/49 (i.e. 10,000 flips) in either direction are unimaginably small.
Perhaps an analogy could be made between adaptationist thinking and sub-atomic physics. It is a truism that at the sub-atomic level things do not (appear, at least) to act under any causal laws. Explaining the behaviours of these particles taken individually is essentially impossible, but when taken in massive groups, they behave quite strictly. A thermometer in a glass of water, no matter how accurate, doesn’t say anything to us about the kinetic movement of any one of its molecules. Again, it is logically possible that not a single particle in the glass actually behaves at the mean kinetic level. But a thermometer is a measurer of statistical averages, and since even in a glass of water a thermometer has literally trillions of particles to make an average of, it can be incredibly accurate in measuring the water’s temperature. I imagine it would be a stretch to say that temperature cannot legitimately be law-governed on account of the fact that sub-atomic particles aren’t law governed taken individually.
And Richard Dawkins is all about this line of thinking in The Blind Watchmaker. If we have two competing varieties of creature within a population, one of which consists of individuals who have a 51 percent chance of reproduction, and the other consisting of individuals who have a 49 percent chance of reproduction. (Assuming that the total population stays constant) the first group will inevitably outflank the second and subsume the niche for itself; it is simply a matter of time and probability taking its toll in each round of reproduction. This says absolutely nothing about what each individual creature does, and for that matter it says nothing about intentional (with a t) states within each creature. It does not have to.
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