1/3/2024 0 Comments Dodo bird found alive 2018![]() ![]() In philosophical terms, the truth-value of a thought supervenes on its survival value. Thoughts that survive long enough that there is something it is like to think the thoughts are a more basic class than truths. Or more generally, a thought is only as good as the survival robustness of the thought processes capable of thinking it. Whatever truth is, the truth value of a thought is moot if the thought doesn’t have the ability to persist, recur, be captured, and transmitted as part of an individual’s stream of consciousness or as a transmitted meme. Truth is a nebulous thing (I have nebulosity on the brain since I met up with David Chapman today) but survival is not. You could generalize that idea into a standard of merit for a thought that is more basic than its truth. It could easily grow more demanding, with the result that we go extinct. In my post last week, Think Entangled, Act Spooky, I argued that the anthropocene begins when survival in the built environment is as cognitively demanding as survival in the natural environment of evolutionary adaptation. ![]() Running fast doesn’t help if your brain tells you to run towards the lion instead of away. ![]() Though we think of running speed as the defining survival adaptation for gazelles, I suspect a host of broken-brain thinking capacity failures would prove as fatal as broken legs. The bar for ‘thinky creature’ is much lower than you might think. After all, if you fail to solve a survival problem at any point in the future, did you really solve any other sub-problem along the way?įor a sufficiently thinky creature, you could almost ignore other attributes and treat characteristic modes of thought as the primary adaptive traits. All you can say is that you kept the game going. Your species is adapted if it can think its way out of extinction threats.Īnd there is no such thing as definitively thinking your way out of a problem. You are adapted to an environment if you can routinely think your way out of problems - especially life-ending threats - that it presents. It seems almost too trivial to be worth stating, but you can obviously define adaptation in terms of thinking. When we think about the adaptive fit of a species to its environment, we think about size, speed, coloration, feeding habits, and so on, but we don’t think about thinking. Sure, we talk about brain size as though it were just another morphological variable like height, but we don’t think about thinking in Darwinian terms. ![]()
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