Tim,

The problem is that there is no mechanism in the process of natural selection for stuffing that foresight generated by brains back into the genome. Learn all you want but it isn't passed onto you kids via your genes. That's the rub. That's why natural selection is blind to the future. The idea that natural selection is blind is perfectly accurate.

That's also true for the small minority of organisms on the planet that actually have brains that predict the future. So I am talking about the instance of natural selection operating on this planet. Your idea is not a valid notion even when restricted to down to the minority instance of human evolution. I gave you that specific example of humans in the last comment.

We do not predict the future via natural selection, and our predictions about the future do not become translated into a form which can be transmitted via the genome for future selection. Natural selection can only select with hindsight. It can only select after a prediction works and only on the genes that produced the predictor and not the prediction.

BTW, the leaf fall that trees perform is a kind of prediction. It wasn't generated by induction, or foresight. It was generated by simple pruning, falsification of bad hypothesis (mutations) on whether and when to drop leaves. Natural selection produced an organism that does prediction without doing any prediction on it's own.

"Since the dolphin has evolved flippers would you therefore say that Ă˘Â€Âœnatural selection operates on flippers?"

"Yes - provided we were talking about a process that included dolphin evolution."

I'm flabbergasted by this response. There is nothing inherent about natural selection that is going to give you flippers. That's dependent on the environment, the mutations, and other factors. The process itself has no "flippers". It's a process that works fine without flippers, yet you insist that natural selection "operates on flippers" just because of a quite contengent possible outcome of that process.

Meanwhile even where flippers evolve they can also go extinct. The natural selection continues, was influenced by flipper existence at one point, but now is no longer influenced by flipper existence because all such animals are extinct. Natural selection was there all along, seems to operate just fine with or without flippers and yet you want to say that it "operates on flippers". Seems using your rather strange logic one would have to say that it "Doesn't operate on flippers" when there are none around.

Do you further claim that natural selection "operates on flippers" in the case of for example, chimps, just because in parallel there are dophins in the sea? How remote or close do these things have to be. If there is an alien on another planet with wingdings does that mean that one can say about Natural Selection while standing on Earth, "Natural Selection operates on wingdings?"

You see, to me, the term "operates on flippers" means that the flipper is an integral and mandatory requirement for the thing to work. Not something unneccesary and contengent. Otherwise, the list is endless and meaningless, and the definition pointless to saying exactly what Natural Selection is or isn't.

Boy, I can just imagine trying to teach a class of kids Natural Selection using your concept of "operates on" as a basis. This is so far out there I'm not even going to assume Yudkowski meant this in his original quote "natural selection operates on induction". I'm sure he'd reject this interpretation also. It would make his statement as profound as saying "natural selection operates on banana peels." and as silly.

Tim,

Bayes? To paraphrase you, the philosophy of science has moved on a bit since the 1700s.

I've already read Yudkowsky's article. I'm familar with Bayes since high school which is thirty years ago. I was one of those kids who found it very easy to grasp. It's just a simple mathematical fact and certainly nothing to build a philosophy of science around.

Yudkowsky writes:

"What is the so-called Bayesian Revolution now sweeping through the sciences, which claims to subsume even the experimental method itself as a special case?"

Really? So the "experimental method" which by which I assume he means the "scientific method" boils down to a special case of what, a probability calculation?

Come on, how gullible do you think I am? So under this view scientists have been, all along, calculating probability frequencies based on observations and just picking the theory that had the highest probability. Heck that sounds easy. Guess I'll just write an scientist simulating AI program over the weekend with that. We'll just replace all the real scientists with Bayesian decision models.

So, according to this view, if I go back to and do some historical investigation on The Great Devonian Controversy I should find that the scientists involved were calculating and comparing notes on the probabilities they were getting on all the Bayesian calculations they were doing. Right?

This, besides being ludicrous, is just not how people reason, as admitted by Yudkowsky in the very same article:

"Bayesian reasoning is very counterintuitive. People do not employ Bayesian reasoning intuitively, find it very difficult to learn Bayesian reasoning when tutored, and rapidly forget Bayesian methods once the tutoring is over. This holds equally true for novice students and highly trained professionals in a field. Bayesian reasoning is apparently one of those things which, like quantum mechanics or the Wason Selection Test, is inherently difficult for humans to grasp with our built-in mental faculties."

As my other comment pointed out in a quote from your own article it's pretty clear that scientists do not choose to believe or not to believe based on calculating Bayes probabilities. They do no use Bayes for good reasons. Often they don't have any underlying probabilities and have unknown distributions, but furthermore most problems don't reduce to a Bayesian probability.

It's hard to imagine that Darwin did a explicit Bayesian calculation in order to choose his theory over Lamarckism, let alone come up with the theory in the first place. It's even harder to imagine that he did it implicitly in his mind when it is quite clear that a) "People do not employ Bayesian reasoning intuitively"
b) Bayes theorem only applies in special cases where you have known probabilities, and distributions.

In the Devonian Controversy no probabilities or distributions were known, no probability calculations done, and finally the winning hypothesis was NOT picked on the basis of greatest probability. There was no greatest probability and there was no winner. All competing hypotheses were rejected.

If intelligence and understanding of the natural world were just a matter of applying Bayesian logic don't you think that not just human brains, but brains in general would likely be selected for that already? We should be good at it, not bad.

The human brain has evolved lots of subunits that are good as solving lots of different kinds of problems. Heck, even crows seem to be able to count. We seem to be able to classify and model things as consistent or inconsistent, periodic, dangerous, slow, fast, level, slanted, near, far, etc. These are mental models or modules that are probably prefabricated. Yet we humans don't seem to have any prefabricated Bayesian deduction unit built in (by the way Bayes induction is based on deduction not induction, funny that). It's actually the other way round from what he wrote. Bayesian Induction is subsumed by a scientific method characterized by Popperian Falsification (actually pan-critical rationalism).

Don't be confused by the name. Popperian falsification is not merely about falsification any more than the Theory of Natural Selection is merely about "survival of the fittest". Popperian falsification is about holding beliefs tentatively and testing them. Thus one might hold as a belief that Bayesian Induction works. Although you will find that this induction is more about deducing from some assumed base probabilities. Probabilities that are founded on tentatively believing you did your measurements correctly. So on and so forth.

In his example there is plenty of room for falsification:

"1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?"

The above can be addressed from many Popperian angles. Are our assumptions correct? How did we come up with that number 1%. That could be falsified by pointing out that our sample was biased. Perhaps the women were lying about their ages. What measures were taken to verify their ages? Where did the 80% claim come from. Is that from a particular demographic that matches the woman we are talking about? So on and so forth.

It's not just a matter of plugging numbers into a Bayesian equation and the answer falls out. Yeah, you can use Bayesian logic to create a decision model. That doesn't mean you should believe or act on the result. It doesn't mean it's the primary method being used.

Tim,

I think you are confusing an emergent property created by a system with how the system operates on its own. That architects draft blueprints that result in public housing projects that leads to forced living relationships that makes it hard to evict drug dealers doesn’t mean that the discipline of architecture runs on drug dealing. Even if that drug dealing impacts the architects.

You seem to have written some simulations of natural selection. In writing those algorithms did you have to code in the ability to predict? Of course not. Can natural selection operate without prediction? Yes! Can natural selection generate organisms that have the ability to predict without prediction being built into natural selection? Of course!

”Natural selection does not involve prediction if it acts on a system which does not make predictions. It does involve prediction when it acts on a system which does make predictions.”

Perhaps if I use a technique of substitution for this you will quickly grasp the confusion here between the process of natural evolution and the emergent property of “the ability to make predictions”. You are making a category error.

”Natural selection does not involve flippers if it acts on a system which does not make flippers. It does involve flippers when it acts on a system which does make flippers.”

Since the dolphin has evolved flippers would you therefore say that “natural selection operates on flippers?” That would be very misleading. One could also go to your web page and substitute pictures of flippers wherever you’ve draw in little brains and it would still make as much sense to those who understand evolution.

Of course, the existence of brains and flippers influence the direction evolution takes and so do asteroids collisions. That doesn’t mean that natural selection operates on the basis of asteroid hits. Asteroids aren’t the primary cause for the emergent order of life. The primary cause is also not predictive.

If from political events it was predictable that nuclear war was inevitable and imminent then, do you expect humans to experience a sudden increase in mutation of alleles increasing fitness towards nuclear survivability? Would you expect those alleles to also become more frequent in the population? All this merely because a brain somewhere predicted correctly that a nuclear event was about to happen?

Think what you are saying here. How natural selection works is well known. It works on differential survival of random mutations and on prediction and proactive behavior. Natural selection itself has no mechanism for making predictions or acting proactively.

Dawkins isn’t saying that evolution isn’t powerful. It is extremely powerful. What he’s saying is that that power is not due a conscious or unconscious ability to predict, or to act on prediction.

As for my rejection of Popper meaning that I support Kuhn: philosophy of science has moved on a bit since the 1960s.

I quote from your article:

"The most general problem confronting the Bayesian philosophy is that scientists tend not to use probabilities when evaluating their theories. Instead, they tend to evaluate them in terms of their empirical adequacy and their explanatory power. The problem is that explanatory worth is not illuminated in terms of probabilities, so the Bayesian outlook cannot explain this central feature of modern science."

No kidding, and that's a fatal flaw if you are claiming that scientists are choosing their theories primarily based on probability.

"Charles Darwin produced large volumes of intelligent and careful observations of animal habitat, form and behavior long before he developed his theory of species development by natural selection. It was no less science for that."

How that refutes Popper he doesn't say. Popper addressed such issues. Is this guy really so ill informed as to think that Popper wasn't aware that scientists collect data. Guess what, the religious do also, for example, lists of miracles.

"At best Popperian ideas muddy the waters and at worst they corrupt progress."

I say "How so, and what a load of baloney." Popper clarified a very important issue in the demarcation of science from non-science. Collecting data isn’t one of the things that demark science from non-science. The only reason the writer of this article would bring data collection up is if he were totally ignorant of Poppers theories.

One important lesson that should be learned to “overcome bias” is to understand the theory you are criticizing before you open your mouth.

"I have noticed that research councils increasingly require that research they support be 'hypothesis driven' "

Oh, so it's not so "1960s" is it?

Not sure how this is any kind of obstacle that would "muddy the waters" or "corrupt progress". Is that what it’s supposed to be an example of? Popper says that the fundamental process is a series of guesses and refutations of those guess. Your hypothesis can be anything including “I think that X is not random but caused by something else”. In which case you are free to go out and research anything you like.

This sounds more like a complaint that they can take other peoples money via taxes to pursue whatever they feel like with out some sort of justification. Boo, hoo.

”This is like commissioning a piece of fine furniture on the basis that it should be ‘chisel driven’.”

No, it’s like expecting to get science, not art, when you are paying for science, not art. If the author doesn’t want oversight then perhaps you should raise his own funds privately, or use his own money, instead of trying to divert tax money into his pet project.

I can see why some “scientists” are objecting to Popper, it’s cutting into their ability to pursue non-science on the public dole. Much of the anti-Popper backlash has been in the area of the social sciences where they’d like to pursue things in a more post-modernist way.

Not sure how the author, using his standards, would expect to reject a request by the Catholic Church for scientific research funds from the government in order to maintain lists of saints and miracles. That is if he rejects falsification as an important breakthrough in demarking science from non-science.

Oh, and I just now noticed this guy is from the "Department of Psychology". How's that for a prediction.

"It most certainly does - if we are talking about natural selection in evolution and nature."

Unfortunately, that has things backwards. Dawkins is exactly right when he says.

"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker."

He's certainly an expert on the subject. As are Gould and the vast majority of evolutionary biologists. In fact, this is the first I've heard of this idea and you are linking to yourself as an authority. I chalk this up to your misunderstandings.

"organisms' belief that the sun will come up tomorrow "

Do organism's "believe" the sun will come up tomorrow? I'm not even sure I believe it in the inductionist sense. Nor did I even consider it as a belief as a child. It wasn't even something I considered. I certainly operated as if the sun would come up tomorrow but that doesn't mean I arrived at my behavior via inductivist belief.

Let's consider broadleaf trees dropping their leaves in the fall. Do they "believe" that winter will come? Did they arrive at that belief by "induction". Not if you understand evolution. There is absolutely no requirement for any kind of induction in order to get an organism, a plant, that drops it's leaves at the onset of winter. It's not a prediction but more analogous to the copying of an successful accident.

Every thing has a nature and will tend to behave according to that nature. That doesn't mean that the behavior being followed is necessarily held on the basis of induction. Every morning when I get out of bed I behave as if the floor will be there and has not magically transformed into a hoard of werewolves. That does not mean I decided by induction that the floor wasn't going to turn into werewolves. In fact, the possibility need not even cross my mind or any mind.

When trees drop their leaves in autumn they are behaving postdictively, not predictively. That postdictive behavior is not about classical induction, generating universals from observations.

Natural selection operated for a very long time before there were the kinds of brains that make predictions. Natural selection operates just fine without brains, without prediction and without induction.

Even in the case of artificial selection humans, in the past, have been highly restrained by what mutations nature doles out. I've bred animals and you can't just get to where you want to go. It would be great to breed a guppy that survives outdoors in the winter. My brain predicts that would be a best seller. However, it isn't happening via standard methods of breeding.

Now perhaps the brains will some day use their predictive capability to create something called genetic engineering and perhaps that will generate cold hardy guppys. However to label that "natural selection" is to misunderstand the definitions involved.

"Not even science works via Popper's theory of falsification."
Actually, it does. This is probably another area you don't fully comprehend. Kuhn was falsified long ago.

"A straw man AFAICT - nobody said "primarily" - and yes, organisms' belief that the sun will come up tomorrow shows that they are performing induction."

When you say that something "operates by induction" the word primarily is implicit. I was only making it explicit. Exposing the bias. Don't we want to overcome that?

Now I must stop commenting lest I transgress the limits. Your confusion requires much more verbiage than this but such is not allowed here. This policy tending to maintain the bias here in the direction of the blog owners.

Nice try Tyler. What individuals "do" does not define what natural selection does.

One could also say: "In practice, natural selection produces intelligent agents, who can predict, and then they make selective choices that affect who lives, who dies and who reproduces."

That does NOT mean that natural selection operates via a predictive process. Ask any good biologist and they will tell you than natural selection is not predictive. That's why species go extinct all the time.

Natural selection is a non-inductive proces that can produce individual organisms that can "do induction". The process of natural selection is "Trial and error" which is quite literally analogous to Poppers theory of falsification.

BTW, it is not at all clear the intelligent agent operates primarily using "induction" either. Induction is primarily useful in learning but that's only part of intelligence. Furthermore, even in the sub-function of learning it is not at all clear that induction is a primary algorithm. Clearly your brain needs to first model the world in order to classify observations in order to attribute them to anything. The induction itself is not primary. The model building capabilities themselves are the product of a non-inductive process.

Actually, seeing as how humans are so incredibly bad at Bayesian induction it's a wonder anyone believes that we use induction at all. One would think that if our primary systems work on Baysian induction we'd be able to somehow tap into that.

Try explaining to yourself how you do induction and you will see that even you don't do it in areas that you think you do. Do you really believe the sun comes up tomorrow because of induction? ... or do you have a mental model of how the sun operates that you contengently believe in? When you learn some new aspect about the sun do you try to devise a new mental model or do you just change the odds it operates one way or another. My brain certainly doesn't operate on odds.

"produced by inductive natural selection;"

Natural selection is not an inductive process.

Eliezer,

I vaguely remember from the last time I visited this site that you are in the inductivist camp. In several articles you seemed to express a deep belief in Bayesian reasoning.

I think that while you are an intelligent guy but I think your abandonment of falsification in favor of induction is one of your primary mistakes. Falsification subsumes induction. Popper wins over Bayes.

Any presumed inductivism has foundations in trial and error, and not the other way around. Poppers construction is so much more straightforward than this convoluted edifice you are creating.

Once you understand falsification there is no problem explaining why science isn’t based on “faith”. That’s because once you accept falsification as the basis for science it is clear that one is not using mere induction.

At this point I’m wondering if you are a full blown inductionist. Do you believe that my beliefs are founded upon induction? Do you believe that because you believe I have no way to avoid the use of induction? I had a long discussion once with an inductivist and for the life of me I couldn’t get him to understand the difference between being founded upon and using.

I don’t even believe that I am using induction in many of the cases where inductivists claim that I am. I don’t assume the floor will be there when I step out of bed in the morning because of induction, nor do I believe sun will rise tomorrow because of induction.

I believe those things because I have well tested models. Models about how wood behaves, and models about how objects behave. Often I don’t even believe what is purported to be my belief.

The question, “will the sun rise tomorrow” has a broader meaning than “The sun will rise on August 24, 2008” in this discussion. In fact, I don’t explicitly and specifically hold such beliefs in any sort of long term storage. I don’t have a buffer for whether the sun is going to rise on the 24th, the 25th, and so forth. I don’t have enough memory for that. Nor do I determine the values to place in each of those buffers by an algorithm of induction.

I only think the question refers to August the 24th with further clarification by the speaker. I think he means “how do we know the sun will keep rising” and not that the questioner had any particular concern about the 24th.

I did run into a guy at a park who asked me if I believed the world would end on December 21, 2012. I had no idea what he was on about till he mentioned something about the Mayan calendar.

So in fact, in this discussion, when we are talking about the question of “will the sun will rise tomorrow” we aren’t concerned about whether any single new observation will match priors we are concerned about the principles upon which the sun operates. We are talking models, not observations.

As a child I remember just assuming the sun would rise. I don’t in fact remember any process of induction I went through to justify it. Of course that doesn’t mean my brain might not be operating via induction unbeknownst to me. The same could be said of animals. They two operate on the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow.

They even have specific built in behaviors that are geared towards this. It’s pretty clear that where these assumption are encoded outside the brain, that the encoding was done by evolutionary processes and we know natural selection does not operate via induction.

What about the mental processes of animals. Must the fact that animals mentally operate on the presumption that “the sun will rise tomorrow” mean that they much have somewhere deep inside an inductive module to deal with the sun rising. I don’t think so. It isn’t even clear that they believe that they believe “the sun will rise tomorrow” either specifically or generally.

Even if they do it is not clear that induction plays a part in such a belief. It may be that natural selection has built up a many different possible mental models for operational possibilities and that observation is only used to classify things as fitting one of these predefined models.

Heck, I can even build new categories of models on the fly this way, this too on the basis of trial and error. A flexible mind finding that the behavior of some object in the real world does not quite fit one of the categories can take guesses at ways to tweak the model to better fit.

So it is not at all clear that anything has been foundationally been arrived at via induction.

In fact, if my memory serves me when I first inquired about the sun I was seeking a more sophisticated model. I knew I already had it categorized as the kind of object that behaved the same way as it did in the past, but was concerned that perhaps I was mistaken and that it might be categorized in some other way. Perhaps as something that doesn’t follow such a simple rule.

Now I’m not even sure I asked the question precisely as “will the sun rise tomorrow” but I do remember my mental transitions. At first I don’t remember even thinking about it. Later I modified my beliefs in various ways and I don’t recall in what order, or why. I came to understand the sun rose repetitively, on a schedule, etc.

I do remember certain specific transitions. Like the time I realized because of tweaking of other models that, in fact, the statement “The sun will rise tomorrow” taken generally is not true. That I know certainly came to mind when I learned the sun was going to burn out in six billion years. My model, in the sense I believed the “sun will rise tomorrow” meaning the next day would come on schedule, was wrong.

In my view, “things that act Bayesian” is just another model. Thus, I never found the argument that Bayes refutes Popper very compelling. Reading many of the articles linked off this one I see that you seem to be spinning your wheels. Popper covered the issue of justification much more satisfactorily than you have with your article, http://lesswrong.com/lw/s0/where_recursive_justification_hits_bottom/”">“Where Recursive Justification Hits Rock Bottom”.

The proper answer is that justification doesn’t hit rock bottom and that science isn’t about absolute proof. Science is about having tentative beliefs that are open to change given more information based on models that are open to falsification by whatever means.

Pursuing a foundationalist philosophical belief system is a fools errand once you understand that there is no base foundation to knowledge. The entire question of whether knowledge is based on faith vs. empiricism evaporates with this understanding. Proper knowledge is based on neither.

I could go on with this. I have thought these things through to a very great extent but I know you have a comment length restriction here and I’ve probably already violated it. That’s a shame because it limits the discussion and allows you to continue in your biases.

You are definitely on the wrong track here with your discussions on morality also. You are missing the fundamentality of natural selection in all this, both to constrain our creations and to how it arises. In my view, the Pebblesorters morality is already divorced from survival and therefore it should be of no concern to themselves whatever if their AI becomes uncontrollable, builds it’s own civilization, etc. Fish, in fact, do create piles of pebbles despite their beliefs and you expressed no belief on their part that they must destroy incorrectly piled pebbles created by nature. So why should they have moral cares if their AI wins independence and goes of and does the “wrong” thing.

For them to be concerned about the AI requires broader assumptions than you have made explicit in your assumption. Assumptions like feeling responsible for chains of events you have set in place. There are assumptions that are objectively required to even consider something a morality. Otherwise we have classified incorrectly. In fact, the pebble sorters are suffering from an obsessive delusion and not a true morality. Pebblesorting fails to fit even the most simplistic criteria for a morality.

Since I am limited in both length and quantity of posts and I don’t feel like splitting this into multiple posts over multiple articles. This is in response to many of your articles. Invisible Frameworks, Mirrors and Paintings, Pebblesorters, When Recursive Justification Hits Rock Bottom, etc.

I could post it on an older thread to be buried a hundred comments deep but that two isn’t a rational choice as I’d like people to actually see it. To see that this abandonment of falsification for induction is based on faulty reasoning. I’m concerned about this because I have been watching science become increasingly corrupted by politics over my lifetime and one of the main levers used to do this is the argument that real scientists don’t use falsification (while totally misunderstanding what the term means) but induction.

"First time you ever see an apple fall down, you observe the position goes as the square of time, .."

Well no actually you don't. Not unless you prebuild the system to know about time and squaring, etc. Have you no respect for evolution? Evolution is how you get to the point where you have semantics.

"Howson believes it is time to ditch Popper's notion of capturing the scientific process using deductive logic."

Another person who doesn't understand Popper. It's as if the guy believed cars were nothing but wheels. Deduction is only part of Poppers theory. The theory can in fact subsume just about any method (till it's shown not to work). It's really just disciplined evolution. It's certainly not merely about using deduction.