Re:Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
by schoen on Thursday July 05, 2018 @02:21PM
(#17465524)
I don't feel like you're really engaging with any of these ideas.
> Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
The same reasoning would seem to suggest that religions that successfully encourage people to have many children are most likely to be correct because they provide one method for spreading their views (that is, having children and then teaching them to believe in the religions' doctrines). This is one way that religious views do get spread in the world and one demographic factor in religious belief, but it's hard to see the connection between this and the correctness of each belief as we might otherwise understand correctness.
> Simple teleology defeats it, in the sense that everyone who holds this view will probably die childless, and will not be very successful at spreading their views generationally.
This seems like a particularly raw invocation of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
The same reasoning would seem to suggest that religions that successfully encourage people to have many children are most likely to be correct because they provide one method for spreading their views (that is, having children and then teaching them to believe in the religions' doctrines). This is one way that religious views do get spread in the world and one demographic factor in religious belief, but it's hard to see the connection between this and the correctness of each belief as we might otherwise understand correctness.