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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

Do our brains use a reasoning process invented by our brains?

Could our brains have come up with a way of describing a process that was already there before?

Well, when (and if, I guess) we do finally properly understand how our brains work, then we'll know (somewhat tautologically) that they do use a reasoning process discovered by our brains.

Discovered not invented.

Does it exist somewhere in a platonic realm of forms?

If our brains are Bayesian, evolution is what invented it.

When I studied biology it was drilled into us that evolution doesn't have agency. Has that changed?

Not as such, no, but if a heritable trait increases the likelihood of survival to reproduction, there is little other than unnecessary pedantry in the way of saying in a lay forum that evolution "invented" it.

I don't mean "invented" in the sense of conscious design process with foresight or intentions. I just mean the way the blind evolutionary process creates any "design".

You don't need to have "agency" to invent.

LSD and sticky notes were invented by accident -- as were tons of other things.

Sure, one could add several pedantic reservations here, if they wanted to be thick on purpose, but the meaning of the parent's statement is clear. This series of passive aggressive counter-questions seems to violate the principle of charity.

It's good that you are concerned with the principle of charity, perhaps you should apply it here?

It's pretty obvious that evolution didn't "invent" anything because accident or not, to invent requires an originator or discoverer which is to say an entity with agency. It's as absurd as saying relativity invented black holes.

>It's pretty obvious that evolution didn't "invent" anything because accident or not, to invent requires an originator or discoverer which is to say an entity with agency.

And yet everybody understood what the parent means, which is that it was created by an evolutionary process.

And also everybody understands that the pedantic minutiae of whether "invent" can be used here is beside the actual point the parent makes.

Something doesn't have to exist in a "platonic realm of forms" to be discovered.

It's enough that it exists in the real world.

Is god in the image of a man? Probably not.

You're downvoted, but I think you were just pointing out the reverse causality in the parent post, right? I.e. even if our brains are Bayesian, it's not that "they use a process discovered by them", it's just that they managed to decode what is the process that they were already using. Which doesn't seem ridiculous at all.

It's not even a matter of causality, it's just a category error. Are there cranial phenomena that are analogous to Bayesian statistics? I don't see why not. But that doesn't mean that is how the brain operates. It's a matter of membership not isomorphism.

Invented? How do you know it didn’t exist before?

Who’s asking?

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