What you’re missing though is that evolution doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Even if down and fur are completely identical in all properties that affect survival, a kiwi won’t grow fur and a mouse won’t grow feathers, because evolution must work with what is there.
We could come up with an infinite number of possible mental configurations that would allow a mind to accomplish everything a human mind does without the illusion of free will. If you magically created a population of human-like creatures that use one of those other methods, they might survive with no problem and evolution couldn’t differentiate between them and us.
But there is no reason to believe that those other possible mental states could actually arise through evolution from the mental model possessed by the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and much reason to suspect that those models are in fact so different from ours that they could never have arisen any more than our hair could have been replaced with down.
Ok, at least argue for a statement like this. I believe that, all things being equal, something that doesn’t make a difference in function/behavior doesn’t make a difference in reproductive fitness. That’s all that’s needed for my argument (and trivially true regarding natural selection).
Again, that’s not an argument, that’s a vague hope. Maybe things were locked in at some point in the past that the only evolutionary trajectory was such as to leave us with an illusion of free will. I mean, yeah, maybe. I wouldn’t even know how to assess the plausibility of something this vague; and certainly it doesn’t support any argument that we ended up with an illusion of free will for evolutionary reasons.
Right now we have an illusion of free will, of a subjective experience.
This subjective experience impacts the way we behave, in that our emotional state is impacted by this subjective belief and our emotional state impacts the decisions we make. Therefore our subjective experience is subject to evolutionary forces.
One could imagine a human that behaves identically to us despite having no illusion of free will or subjective experience. Just like one could imagine feathery, downy integument that’s indistinguishable from fur.
But what I cannot imagine is such feathers appearing in a mammal lineage. That’s what you are proposing. But while I see the method by which intelligent-ape-humans could evolve, I cannot see the method by which ChatGPT-apes or soul-apes or any other form of non-sentient-but-behaving-identically-to-humans-apes could evolve.
Then I defer to your superior powers of imagination, because I don’t have any clear enough image of how our subjective impressions evolved that would allow me to judge whether we should end up with an illusion of free will one way or the other.
@Half_Man_Half_Wit your reasoning fairly obviously leads to some spectacularly wrong conclusions. I’m really struggling to understand why you cannot see the gaping holes in your reasoning, but I think I discern two principal problems.
[ my bold ]
Evolution (including evolution by natural selection) is technically a change in allele frequencies in a population. In other words a change in DNA. Sure, you are correct that it is phenotype (behavior, function, trait) that leads to a difference in fitness (survival, reproduction). But there must be a complete causal chain from genotype to phenotype (from DNA to e.g. behavior) in order for natural selection to operate.
You cannot arbitrarily cut off this causal chain at some point and call everything downstream of it the phenotype (behavior or function), and then claim that natural selection does not act on anything upstream. The operation of natural selection requires the entire causal chain from DNA to function/behavior.
DNA contains the blueprint for our brains. A subjective mental state is a neuron configuration in our brains. Our brains obviously cause our behavior. It’s obviously perfectly plausible that subjective mental states modulate behavior. It would be surprising if they didn’t. You can’t arbitrarily cut of the causal chain between DNA and behavior somewhere downstream of the brain and say “natural selection only operates downstream of here”.
(I’ll make a separate post in a few minutes on the other problem with your concept of how evolution works).
Sure, but where this chain is not unique, to say that a specific genotype (in the extreme) is determined by a phenotype that’s selected for is, simply, fallacious.
No, the causal chain is irrelevant. It’s the phenotype that’s selected for, independent of how that phenotype comes about. That is why evolution acts on phenotype rather than genotype.
Sure I can. Whatever changes don’t affect the phenotype are not subject to selective pressure.
Changes to the internal state do affect the phenotype. The fact that a completely separate internal state could generate the same phenotype does not mean that a creature using strategy A can have its descendents switch to strategy B with nothing in between.
You are looking at the kiwi’s down and declaring that it is impossible to know if it evolved from feathers or from fur. It is patently absurd, no matter how dismissively you wave off those who point out the absurdity.
As for your second misconception in the way evolution works - you’ve repeated some variation on this several times, but this version might be the easiest to dissect:
The fundamental problem here is that you seem to be under the impression that “adaptive” is synonymous with “necessary”. But this cannot just be semantics, it betrays a fundamental misconception of how evolution works. I would be hard pressed to think of any adaptation that I could claim is absolutely necessary.
Evolution cannot exhaustively search the entire space of possible phenotypes, the entire space of internal mechanisms that could theoretically implement the exact same behavior. The entire space of theoretical possibilities is not laid out on a dartboard, with an equal chance of hitting any theoretical possibility. Evolution can only work with the variation that is actually available, the mutations that happen to actually arise.
When an adaptive trait arises, the word “adaptive” simply means “with a relative fitness advantage over what came before”, not “the best and only possible solution”.
If there are several equally high fitness “peaks” which use different mechanisms to implement the same beneficial behavior, the one that is reached may be a matter of chance. But reaching it is still a process of natural selection and adaptation. You must also consider the fact that some fitness optima may not be accessible - “you cannot get there from here”. A phenotype that cannot evolve by incremental steps without crossing a fitness “trough” may not be found, even if it is a better solution. But, again, that does not imply that the mediocre solution that evolution does reach is not adaptive.
You are wrong. Evolution requires heritable variation. All evolution is change in DNA. Unless there is a complete causal chain between genotype and phenotype, there is no evolution by natural selection.
Sure. So the only way your “reasoning” worked was by assuming your conclusion that subjective mental state does not affect behavioral phenotype.
Not in general, no. If an animal is mating with a highly desirable mate, and loving every second of it, versus hating it all the way true (or more to the point, feeling compelled to do so despite its own wants), evolution won’t care.
And that’s not something I’ve said anywhere.
No. I’m saying it’s a fallacious argument to say it has down because it needs to preserve body heat.
No. The argument needs for there to be a necessary connection, as otherwise it’s just a blatant affirmation of the consequent. Nothing to do with evolution at all.
Natural selection acts on phenotype, not genotype. The genotype determines the phenotype, but the phenotype doesn’t determine the genotype. Different genotypes can lead to the same phenotype, and consequently, natural selection can’t distinguish between them
An animal that enjoys mating is more likely to mate than an animal that dislikes mating.
An animal that feels like it is being piloted by an external will would not change its behavior. But whereas a mechanism for the illusion of free will exists, a mechanism for a cresture that has a subjective experience but no free will does not.
The subjective experience helps the animal make decisions that bring it pleasure and avoid pain, and it is programmed to find things that help it reproduce pleasurable and things that do not help it reproduce unpleasurable.
A subjective experience without the illusion of free will is not useful in that same way, so it isn’t going to evolve.
A kiwi has down to preserve body heat. The fact that fur would also do the job is irrelevant, because it would take many intermediate steps of decreasing fitness for a proto-kiwi to lose its feathers and then grow fur. Meanwhile, a proto-kiwi can easily modify its feathers into down.
It is true that “a kiwi has down because it needs to keep warm” is incomplete, in the sense that “a kiwi has down because it needs to keep warm and it cannot evolve fur without first decreasing fitness” is a more complete statement. But neither statement is untrue.
Again, I gave examples for how the subjective mental state may differ while leading to the same behavior, so this is just a blatant and somewhat desperate misrepresentation.
You are just repeating the same fallacy over and over again. No neccessary connection is required, just sufficiency. If the ancestral state is “no temperature regulation” and fur happens to arise by mutation, and fur is sufficient for temperature regulation, natural selection will operate to favor the adaptation “fur”. Of course fur is not necessary to keep warm (other species evolved feathers, or make blankets), but it’s still adaptive where it occurs.
Your examples are theoretically possible in animals that poof into existence fully formed, like a furry kiwi or a downy mouse. They do not make sense in context of the tree of life.
Not if it feels an irresistible compulsion to mate despite its dislike, as stipulated.
And yet, there are people who experience a certain set of their actions as not being due to their control, as in alien hand syndrome or various compulsive disorders.
Maybe, but again, I don’t know these things well enough to engage in such speculations. What I do know is that it isn’t relevant to the argument, which simply stipulates that because the illusion of free will is conducive to adaptive behavior, we have that illusion, which is simply affirming the consequent.