The best answer to "so what?" comes in Hoffman's paper: 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?". -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
