Truth versus usefulness

Alvin Plantinga

As I said in a previous post, natural selection is the statistical observation that, in general, individuals better adapted to their environment tend to leave more descendants than those less adapted. It is, therefore, a question of usefulness. A trait that will increase the reproduction of an individual is, in principle, statistically favored by natural selection.

In my popular science book published in Spanish (Biological evolution and cultural evolution in the history of life and man) I mentioned that 

Evolution acts in the same way, both on life and on culture, although its way of acting is adapted to the specific environment on which it is applied (genes, nervous systems or cultural elements). 

Neurons and free will

In another post in this blog I have described the four theories used by philosophers to try and solve the problem of human mind: What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is free will? Are we actually free, or are we determined, just like meat machines?

At the end of last year, Javier Pérez Castells published a book where he addresses some of these issues from a scientific and philosophical point of view. Its title (in Spanish) is the same as the title of this post. In particular, chapter 8 of the book describes some of the models with which various scientists and philosophers have tried to explain how we make decisions more complex than those studied by the experiments performed by Libet, Fried and Haynes, which don’t go much further that pressing a button or raising a hand. These models are called two-stage, because they try to explain our decisions assuming that they are made in two phases: the first, more or less random, in which the brain generates the available alternatives, followed by a second phase, when we actually make a decision, after weighing those alternatives.

Physical Time and Inner Time

William Blake

We know that physical time goes on regularly, but inner time (our sensation of the passage of time) is very variable. The two times do not have to match. Sometimes, watching at our inner time, a minute can look like hours, while in other cases the hours fly away. An English poet, William Blake, expressed it well in a famous poem:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour

(Auguries of Innocence, 1803?)

There is a long history of literary works, in which a character enters aesthetic or religious ecstasy, or simply falls asleep, and on returning to reality discovers that many years have passed, sometimes centuries. This subgenre (called by scholars sleeper legends) has representatives in many literatures. In Spanish literature, it is reflected in the legend of the monk and the little bird, associated with the monastery of Leire. In this legend, a monk who enters in ecstasy while a bird is singing, discovers upon awakening that three centuries have gone by. Among medieval French lays there is a legend about the knight Guingamor, who arrived in a wonderful city and stayed there for three days, but when he left, he found that three centuries had passed. And in the United States literature we have the famous story by Washington Irving titled Rip van Winkle, whose protagonist falls asleep one night and wakes up 20 years later.

Four ideas by Alvin Plantinga about God and materialism

Alvin Plantinga

Taking advantage of the awarding of the Templeton Prize to the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga, this post will try to review a few of his thoughts in the debate between theism and materialism. As it is impossible to review all his work in detail, I will mention just four of his ideas:

1. The Mozart argument for the existence of God. Why are we able to appreciate beauty? According to the materialistic hypothesis, there is no explanation why evolution has led us to this, as it is difficult to see how this trait could be useful for our survival. Instead of good music, we should appreciate cacophony, which is more abundant in nature. If we assume that God exists, however, this fact is easy to explain, because God appreciates beauty (in fact, God is beauty). This argument, along with many others, is in this web address.

Brain transplant and personal identity

Daniel Dennett

In the previous post I wrote about brain transplants, but we must still consider the problem of how a brain transplant would affect our personal identity. Is our identity associated with the brain, and therefore would it be transferred to a different body in the case of a brain transplant? Or could something else happen?

In the first place, I must point out that this digression is not scientific, but philosophical, as for the time being a brain transplant is pure science fiction. It is not feasible now, and it does not seem probable that it will become so in a long time, assuming that it is possible to perform it successfully. This means that I am leaning on the void, the same thing I have criticized a few times when others do it...

In 1978, the American philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a philosophical essay on this problem entitled Where am I?, where he used the science fiction genre to pose the problem of personal identity in the event of hypothetical scientific advances, such as the maintenance of an active living brain out of the body (although connected with it by wifi), or downloading the contents of a human brain into a computer.