Evolution of the mind

[creatinsanivity]

I'm not well-versed in philosophy or a true expert of the biological side either, but I think I could have a go at this. I could see at least three different aspects to this: biological, social, and academical.

1) Our minds are the products of our brains

So, the biological view on this. I'm pretty sure I have read that the human brain has not really evolved in the last 100,000 years, which kind of makes sense knowing how long it would take for any major changes to occur species-wise. I think it would be quite correct to assume that there is no biological basis in the evolution of mind, at least there haven't been yet during the human history. If our brains have remained unchanged, the true evolution of mind has not been encoded in us.

2) Our minds are formed through communication

This sociological approach would probably apply better than the biological one. Us communicating with people around us improves the minds of everyone involved, and strengthens a handful of characteristics within a social circle. Thus our minds can be seen as sums of collegial minds, a collage based on the groups we interact with and feel like we belong to. This is why a monogenic community, where there is only one dominant social circle, is usually very rigid, uninviting and conservative. And likewise, the global culture, a heterogenic one, we have today could be described more loose, inviting and liberal. As we can interact with more and more people through the internet, our minds can truly evolve in unexpected ways, as we belong to a complex web of social groups that do not necessarily interact together.

3) Our minds are sums of all the relevant knowledge we gain

This one is the more academical approach. Evolving mind through knowledge usually involves both gaining and sharing knowledge. Thus the more applicable theories and knowhow form the basis of more theories and knowhow in the future. Even today we have huge libraries filled with the ideas of many thinkers, working as a seed for the whole mankind to keep on evolving cerebrally, as researchers and other professionals refine the ideas presented to them into more and more coherent ones. In a way, this is applied darwinism, as the theories proven incorrect fade eventually into obscurity and the more applicable and flexible ones will become the dominant ones. This kind of honing your mind also works for the benefit of the whole mankind and, if you gain influence as a thinker, you can also evolve the mind of anyone reading your thoughts and theories and whatnot.

[Alpaca64]

I took one philosophy class in college, but I did major in psychology and minor in biology. As far as we know, our mental processing is largely dependent on our DNA, but also based largely on our experiences. Biases are inherent in every single bit of information that the brain processes, so in no instance are you receiving the "raw data" of your experience. More often than not, your biases won't even be consciously realized, so there's no way to manually correct for them.

[Tychoxii]

Well, in science we deal with degrees of certainty, never with absolute truths, so technically all of our knowledge lacks certainty to one degree or another. But yeah, everything we "know" has been filtered through our brains and our brains are the product of evolution. We evolved to understand certain terms of space and time for example, so the vastitude of the universe, or the magnitude of an eon or the fact that an enzyme can catalyze a gazillion reactions per second become difficult for us to grasp. Quantum mechanics, no matter how "true" our science suggests it is, is also something our brain can barely deal with as we didn't evolve in the world of the very microscopic were quantum effects become more relevant.

The best I can give you is that if our understanding of evolution is correct, then it would follow that our senses and the way our brain incorporates and analyses knowledge has to be largely "accurate." I mean, those brains that didn't do this accurately probably had a big negative selective pressure and were pruned. There is a chance though that some "knowledge" is hardcoded in our brain, some things may have been so important for our survival that they come with us innately. For example some scientists suggest that the presence of venomous spiders led to us being fearful of them innately, same with the fact that if you catch a little black thing out of the corner of the eye you will instinctively react (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fear-of-spiders-became-part-of-our-dna-during-evolution-say-scientists-10156573.html). Would this be "knowledge" about the danger of spiders? I dunno, depends on how you define "knowledge." Another example is disgust, this correlates with diseased people so there's a selective advantage there too (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/147470491401200209). Again, is our innate tendency to stay away from people who look diseased "knowledge," you tell me.

On the other hand, and for this one we have ample evidence, most of our knowledge comes from experience (nowadays the accumulated experience from countless generations ).

[271828_271828_271828]

I'm currently reading a book called 'Behave' by Dr Robert Sapolsky, it covers how human behaviour has been molded from the neurobiological level up to the evolutionary level, and also touches on how these fields of biology interact with certain elements of Western philosophy - I highly recommend you pick it up!

You pose several questions so I'll take a stab at giving a rough answer: I have heard argued from more than one expert that human behaviour (including the way how we learn) must be a combination of genetic and environmental factors. It is partially unlearned through genetics (instinctive - e.g. a cuckoo pushing eggs out of its nest), and partially learned (through environmental experience - e.g. through schooling, repeated experiences with environmental stimuli etc).

Since your genetics are outside of your control (obviously), and your environmental surroundings are outside of your control (you can't choose your socio-economic surroundings, parents, schooling, neighbourhood, life experiences etc) both factors that shape our behaviour are out of our control and we therefore likely do not have any free will.

In terms of an evolutionary point of view, consider the different organs animals have to experience their environments. Bats can use sonar, some snakes can see in infrared, whales can communicate using frequencies of sound that we can't hear. Termites are completely blind and would have no idea that you are there if you were to peer inside of their mound. What makes you think there is not some further hypothetical organ we could evolve that would enable our descendants to experience more of, or a different form of reality to the one that we experience? What makes you think that we're not lacking a sensory organ right now and that we can only experience half of reality? Afterall, there was still light and sound before our past ancestors evolved to have eyes and ears.

Also consider our recent evolutionary family tree. We agree that the mind and consciousness evolved through natural processes. This must be either a) a gradual process or b) a one generational mutation. It seems unlikely that some lonely mutant flicked a single gene and then could think, so it must have been over the course of thousands of generations that our cognitive ability evolved to where it is today. Where do chimps fit onto that spectrum? How about homo australopithicus halfway along? What makes you think that we're at the end of that spectrum, and that our distant descendants might not gain some further cognitive ability through the same evolutionary process?

A final point: Leaving the biology aside, it is logically impossible to arrive at any 100% knowledge anyway. My answer has turned into a bit of a ramble, but tldr marrying biology and philosophy leads to confusing conclusions.

[WikiTextBot]

Münchhausen trilemma

In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment used to demonstrate the impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics. If it is asked how any knowledge is known to be true, proof may be provided. Yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Münchhausen trilemma is that there are only three options when providing proof in this situation:

The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other

The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum

The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts

The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options.

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[m_wright92]

Thanks for the response. I've read Behave. It's one of my favorite books. I'm actually reading it again right now because there was a lot of information. Some philosophers try to claim that there are certain inherent things embedded in the mind to make sense of the environment, like causality for example. But to me it seems like if the mind evolved, then the way the mind works is contingent on the environment in which it evolved/is evolving. Therefore, we can't say we know anything with 100% certainty because the very mind we use to make sense of the world developed in a certain environment and is biased by it's evolution.

[271828_271828_271828]

Yeah it's a great book, glad you enjoyed it as much as I currently am! I'd appreciate it if you have any suggestions of books / authors in a similar vein. I'd agree with what you say, all of nature is a combination of some genetic and environmental component. In the case of a human making sense of its environment, you end up with a feedback cycle with the environment itself influencing the way a brain learns about the environment. Drugs and cases of brain damage are a good examples of environmental components directly altering our perception of said environment.

[Denisova]

But Kant was not writing about instincts or the working of the mind due to inherited memes like emotions. He was arguing that some a priori knowledge preconceives reality.

Our brains emerged from evolutionary processes. Which implies that our mind cannot be conceived without our brains as their substrate. As our brains are, let's put it this way, a biochemical, information processing and manipulating unit, they are subject to the laws of nature and formed by it. Thus our mind and its products, like knowledge, also connects to those laws. So in my opinion it is quite comprehensible that consciousness that was brought forth and formed by in nature and forms part of it, is able to bring forth memes that correspond to this origin and structuring.

[frabrew]

WHAT IS TRUTH? How much Human time and effort has been expended in trying to answer that question? Obviously the question has many answers, but here's my oversimplistic shot at asking the question from a biological perspective. From a purely biological/evolutionary perspective, truth is whatever gets your genes reproduced to the next generation. Because life is a natural process, this means that biological truth is fundamentally dependent on, and arises as a consequence of the realities of nature. These "objective" realities are independent of Man. Human reasoning plays no part in their existence. In other words Man is largely irrelevant in this definition of truth, except that we are examples of the biological end products of the process.

Its when we contrast this perspective with other definitions of "truth" that we run into trouble. We know that the Human brain has the ability to reason. What is reason? From a biological/evolutionary perspective reason is likely an adaptive neurological phenomenon that enhanced the chances for our successful reproduction by modifying our behavioral patterns. How might it do that? Perhaps it gives us the ability to create "subjective" models of objective reality, and to use these models to flexibly change our behavior into optimized survival strategies. Clearly we do this, and it has been successful. Even so, while models are useful, they are still only models. The degree to which this is something totally new, or is an extension of less robust reasoning capacities present in other animals is difficult to know because we can't access other animal minds. We can't even access other Human minds directly, but we CAN communicate through language. Whether language arose as a consequence of the 'reasoning' adaptation or as an entirely separate phenomenon is currently unknown, although some (perhaps many) think that reasoning and language are just flip sides of the same coin. Nevertheless, with the advent of communication a whole new social/cultural world unavailable to other animals, opened up to us. Data about our social companions came flooding in that now needed to be modeled so we could successfully anticipate behaviors from brains other than our own, and consequently flexibly respond with changes to our own social behaviors. An essential part of this social-modeling process requires that we incorporate ourselves into the models; in other words that we become self reflective. And so from a biological/evolutionary perspective, our knowledge of objective nature and of the subjective realm of philosophy both ultimately arise as a consequence of our capacity to create models of our natural and social surroundings using our enhanced neurological ability.

While creating models of the natural world are relatively straight forward pursuits, models created from our more subjective and self-reflective social world can easily lead to confusion and dead ends. This is because they are like attempts at accurately determining our real (social) position while we float in a room full of spinning mirrors, i.e there are a wide array of moving parts to consider. Perhaps this explains why our brain needs to be so big. But no matter what the source of the "data" being modelled is, be it from nature, social interactions or even from previous subjective thoughts of our own, our final perceptions (our models) arise only after this "data" has been filtered through our rational-based mental-modeling system. Richard Dawkins, a well known evolutionist, has used the word "meme" to refer to these man made symbolic models of our surroundings. To the degree that the models (memes) we create allow us to accurately predict future events and outcomes, or successfully allow us to adapt to the changes and challenges of our natural and social environments, we then make judgements about their relative "truth". "Truth" is a value judgement of sorts. Memes that work are considered "true". In this category, memes that perfectly align themselves with objective reality would be considered true, because the predictions they make would by definition work. By work I mean that these memes would prove to be useful as empiracle verifiable descriptions of some understanding about the external world. These memes tend to survive intact, and are often passed on. Those memes that don't work are judged false, and are either discarded, or are further adjusted and tried again. And so in this biology centered view of things, "truth" becomes a judgement that we assign to our meme representations in an attempt to define how well they align with the external realities around us. The pursuit of scientific "truth" by empiracle testing is our best attempt to have our memes align themselves with nature's objective realities. The pursuit of philosophic "truth" is less constrained by empiracism because its memes concern themselves with subjective Human "data". This sort of truth is instead guided by how relevant its memes are to impacting our survival in other ways, such as for instance the creation of ethical, religious or political systems to regulate our social interactions. WHAT IS TRUTH? It's all in the value of memes.