This presentation explores the basis for scientific rationality by testing our claims about the world against nature as described by Karl Popper's evolutionary epistemology versus accepting claims based on justified true belief. The presentation is particularly concerned to show the philosophical problems with religious fundamentalism.

1. Evolutionary epistemology versus faith and
justified true belief:
―
Does science work and can we know the truth?
William P. Hall
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
william-hall@bigpond.com
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Atheists Society Lecture: 12 August 2014
Access my research papers from
Google Citations

2. Introduction
 Epistemology is a lot more than a subject for
philosophical debate
 Humanity faces a range of existential risks, e.g.,
– Anthropogenic global warming & climate change
 Rising sea levels
 Global crop failures (e.g., potato famines)
 Exotic disease pandemics (e.g., ebola)
– Peak oil / minerals
– Global scale catastrophe
 1851-scale electromagnetic storms
 Meteor strike
 How do we know this? What should we do about them:
How do we know what we think we know?
 Who do we trust? Does science provide truth? Or a
suitable basis for rational action?2

3. Faith and belief do
not provide
effective answers!

4. 9/11 & horrors of the 20th Century
 The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center
 Often suicidally committed perpetrators can
be guided by one or a few charismatic leaders
to commit massive outrages against initially
comparatively peaceful populations
– Hitler, WWII in Europe and the Holocaust
– Japan's warlords and WWII in the Pacific
– Stalin, terrors and gulags
– Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution
– The multitude of smaller "ethnic cleansings" in the
Balkans/Cambodia/Iraq/Iran/Sudan etc…
4

5. Some smaller consequences of extreme beliefs
 Historic – some smaller examples self-inflicted death
– Joseph Kibweteere's Catholic-based Movement for the Restoration
of the Ten Commandments of God (2000 – 800-1000 deaths in
Uganda from immolation.). See Venter 2006. Doomsday movements in
Africa: Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God)
– Marshall Herff Applewhite's Heaven's Gate Cult (1997 - 39
poisoned). See Zeller (2003). The euphemization of violence: The
case of Heaven’s Gate”.
– Jim Jones "Jonestown Massacre" (1978 - 913 deaths in Guyana,
mostly from suicide or murder of children (217) by parents). See
Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple
 Current
– Suicide bombers and the Sunni-Shia conflict, murder and
mayhem reported on a daily basis
5

6. How do individual people become weapons of mass
destruction?
 Contexts:
– Psychotic leaders radiating ultimate conviction
– Followers’ willingness to abdicate thoughtful responsibility
for own actions
 Charismatic leaders who convince others they have special
powers, such as the ability to heal, to speak with God directly, or
know absolute truth
 Willingness to accept on faith (and faith alone) the word of God
as proclaimed by some charismatic leader or some purported holy
document
 Big question:
– What leads seemingly ordinary people to sacrifice their
property and lives to follow charismatic leaders?
– Easier to accept and believe than to think and criticize
6

7. Cults and the primacy of true belief
 Con jobs performed by almost all religions and
cults based on faith and belief
 Sola fide (by faith alone - see Wikipedia)
– God's pardon for guilty sinners is granted to and
received through faith, conceived as excluding all
"works," alone.
– True belief is determined by faith and faith alone
 Faith in the guru/leader
 Faith in the designated scriptures
 Some will claim confirmatory manifestations
to justify true belief
– Far better to criticize all important claims7

8. My personal
problematic
“Your work is not
scientific”

9. Why understanding epistemology became personally
important to me
(Evolutiononary biology is not a physical science)
 PhD Harvard (1973) Chromosome variation, genomics, speciation and
evolution in Seceloporus lizards (cty.) Ernest E Williams & Ernst Mayr
– One of the largest studies of chromosome variation to then
– Novel theories challenging Mayr’s geographical speciation model
 Poorly received by my advisors, journals & other critics
– Referring to my draft thesis, EEW said, “I don’t like it, do it over! ” [i.e.,
the thesis, not the research]
– [Me] What’s wrong with it? [EEW] “I don’t know.”
– The data was so overwhelming he and Mayr still had to pass the work
 In 1977-79 while I was a post doc at Univ. Melbourne:
– A U. of Mich. PhD student who earlier assisted both in the field and lab
claimed “Your work is unscientific” and re-drafted it
– He failed to understand the logic of my methodology and argument
– Was he correct?
 I spent most of postdoc studying history and epistemology of science
– Too late for my job prospects as an evolutionary biologist
9

10. Initial learnings from history and philosophy of
science (< 1980)
 Most philosophers seemed to live in ivory towers, away with the
black swans and other figments of imagination
 Only two offered practical answers to my problematic (ref
Maniglier on Bachelard and the concept of problematic)
– Thomas Kuhn (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
 Historical and sociological analysis
 Paradigms
 Normal vs Revolutionary Science
(Kuhn helped my understanding, but not relevant for today’s talk)
– Karl Popper
 (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery
 (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific
Knowledge
 (1972) Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach
 (1977 – with J.C. Eccles) The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for
Interactionism
 (1994) Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In Defence of
Interaction
10

11.  Popper 1959, 1963
– We can’t prove if we know the truth
– There is no such thing as induction
– Deductively falsifying a theory is deterministic
– Correspondence theory of truth
– Make bold hypotheses and try to falsify them –
what is left is better than what has been falsified
– Falsifiability demarcates science from pseudoscience
 Popper (1972 – “Objective Knowledge”) biological approach
– Knowledge is a biological phenomenon
– Knowledge is solutions to problems of life
– All knowledge is cognitively constructed (Popper is a radical constructivist!)
– Falsification doesn’t work in the real world; claims can be protected by
auxiliary hypotheses (All claims to know must be regarded as fallible)
– Three worlds ontology
– “Tetradic schema” / “general theory of evolution” to eliminate errors and
build knowledge
 Many contemporary philosophers misunderstand Objective Knowledge
– “Objective knowledge” = knowledge codified into/onto a physical
object (DNA, printed paper, pitted CD, magnetic domains)
The early Popper vs. the mature Popper
on epistemology
11

12. How do you do “science” with complex and often
chaotic systems?
 Differences between the life and physical sciences
– Deterministic vs stochastic (≠ indeterminate) causation
– Physical science
 Hypothetico-deductive approaches
 Theoretical predictions susceptible to near deterministic refutation
– Living systems
 Causally complex, non-linear, to some degree chaotic
 Can explain retrodictively but cannot predict deterministically
 Comparative approach
– Study “natural experiments”
 Shared common ancestry controls most variables
 Look for correlations between possible causes and effects
– Cycles of speculation, criticism and testing
 Extend scope phylogenetically and range of effects
– Hall (1983) Modes of speciation and evolution in the sceloporine iguanid
lizards. I. Epistemology of the comparative approach and introduction to the
problem12

13. 1. PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION AND INITIAL SPECULATIONS
2. SELECT APPROPRIATE NATURAL ‘EXPERIMENTS’ AND
‘CONTROLS’ TO ILLUSTRATE PROBLEM
3. COLLECT DATA FROM EXPERIMENTS AND CONTROLS
4. DO CROSS-CORRELATION ANALYSES OF N-DIMENSIONAL
MATRICES TO IDENTIFY SIGNIFICANT PHENOMENA
5. GENERATE MODELS THROUGH ANALOGY, INDUCTION,
ETC. WHICH PROVIDE CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS FOR
SIGNIFICANTLY CORRELATED PHENOMENA
ARE
CORRELATIONS
FOUND
?
6.
IS MODEL LOGIC
OK?
SHOULD
MATRICES BE RE-
RANKED ?
6a. IS
MODEL LOGIC
OK?
8. TEST PREDICTIONS:
a. SAME PHENOMENA OF NEW CASES
b. OTHER PHENOMENA OF ORIGINAL CASES
c. OTHER PHENOMENA OF OTHER CASES
3a. COLLECT OTHER
NEEDED DATA
4a. FURTHER CROSS
CORRELATION ANALYSES
WITH NEW DATA
5a. REVISE AND/OR REPLACE
MODEL AS INDICATED BY
NEW CORRELATION
ANALYSES
9. TEST RECONSTRUCTIONS:
DO MODELS PLAUSIBLY
RECONSTRUCT CASES
ACCORDING TO EVIDENCE?
7. TEST ASSMPTIONS:
a. DEMONSTRATIONS
b. H D EXPERIMENTS
c. SIMULATIONS
OK
?
OK
?
OK
?
AND
10. A NATURAL PHENOMENON HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED AND UNDERSTOOD,
BUT THIS UNDERSTANDING SHOULD BE HELD ONLY AS LONG AS IT
PROVIDES REALISTIC EXPLANATIONS OF OBSERVATIONS ABOUT NATURE
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
YES
YES
YESYES
YES
YES
YES
NO
NO
My answer to the
problematic:
How to understand complex
stochastic systems
scientifically?
• Build, test &
criticize as
as many
connections as
possible between
theory and
reality
13

14. Scientific thinking
in the 20th Century
(skipped for today)
See extra slides

15. Evolutionary
epistemology
―
A biologically-based theory
of the growth of scientific
knowledge

16. Philosophy, “knowledge”, and “truth”
 A-priori assumptions
– There is a “real world” with law-like behaviours
– The physics of reality causes individual existences
– There are no essences beyond the reality of our
existences
– Solipsistic approaches are self-defeating
 A claim to know may truly correspond to
reality, but… Truth (or falsity) in the real
world cannot be proved
– Knowledge of the world is not identical to the
real world
– Cognition is in the world - it does not mirror it
16

17.  Problems
– “Problem of Induction” - any number of
confirmations does not prove the next
test will not be a refutation (e.g.,
Gettier)
– The biological impossibility to know if a
claim to know is true
 Vision does not form an image of
external reality
 The brain does not perceive reality, it
constructs a model
– Perception and cognition are
consequences of propagating action
potentials in a neural network.
– Action potentials stimulated by physical
perturbations to neurons
– Perception lags reality (see added slides)
Knowledge is constructed
Impossible to know whether a claim is true or not
17 Clock, via Wikimedia

18. Popper’s probable sources for biological approach to
epistemology
18
 Charles Darwin (1859) On the Origin of Species
 Konrad Lorenz – 1973 Nobel Prize (animal cognition and
knowledge)
 Donald T. Campbell cognitive scientist concerned with knowledge
growth
– (1960) Blind Variation and Selective Retention…. (paper)
– (1974) Evolutionary Epistemology (chapter)
 Karl Popper ( 1972 – knowledge is solutions to problems of life)
– (1974) “The main task of the theory of knowledge is to
understand it as continuous with animal knowledge; and … its
discontinuity – if any – from animal knowledge” p 1161,
“Replies to my Critics” in The Philosophy of Karl Popper

19. Karl Popper's first big idea from Objective Knowledge:
“three worlds” ontology
19
Energy flow
Thermodynamics
Physics
Chemistry
Biochemistry
Cybernetic
self-regulation
Cognition
Consciousness
Tacit knowledge
Genetic heredity
Recorded thought
Computer memory
Logical artifacts
Explicit knowledge
Encode/Reproduce
Recall/Decode/Instruct
World 1
Existence/Reality
World 2
World of mental or
psychological states and
processes, subjective
experiences, memory of history
Organismic/personal/situational/
subjective/tacit knowledge in
world 2 emerges from interactions
with world 1
World 3
The world of “objective”
knowledge
Produced / evaluated by
world 2 processes
“living
knowledge”
“codified
knowledge”
“life”

20. “Epistemic cut” concept clarifies validity and relationships of
Popper’s three worlds
 Popper did not physically justify his ontological proposal
 Howard Pattee 1995 “Artificial life needs a real epistemology”
– An “epistemic cut” (also known as “Heisenberg cut”) refers to strict
ontological separation in both physical and philosophical senses between:
Knowledge of reality from reality itself, e.g., description from construction, simulation from
realization, mind from brain [or cognition from physical system]. Selective evolution began with a
description-construction cut.... The highly evolved cognitive epistemology of physics requires an
epistemic cut between reversible dynamic laws and the irreversible process of measuring [or
describing]….
– Different concept from “epistemic gap” separating “phenomenological
knowledge” from “physical knowledge”
– No evidence Pattee or Popper ever cited the other
 One epistemic cut separates the blind physics of world 1 from the
cybernetic self-regulation, cognition, and living memory of world 2
 A second epistemic cut separates the self-regulating dynamics of living
entities from the knowledge encoded in books, computer memories and
DNAs and RNAs
 See Pattee (2012) Laws, Language and Life. Biosemiotics vol. 7
20

21. Popper’s second big idea: "tetradic schema“ / "evolutionary
theory of knowledge" / "general theory of evolution"
21
Pn a real-world problem faced by a
living entity
TS a tentative solution/theory.
Tentative solutions are varied
through serial/parallel iteration
EE a test or process of error
elimination
Pn+1 changed problem as faced by an
entity incorporating a surviving
solution
The whole process is iterated
 TSs may be embodied in W2 “structure” in the individual entity, or
 TSs may be expressed in words as hypotheses in W3, subject to objective
criticism; or as genetic codes in DNA, subject to natural selection
 Objective expression and criticism lets our theories die in our stead
 Through cyclic iteration, sources of errors are found and eliminated
 Tested solutions/theories become more reliable, i.e., approach reality
 Surviving TSs are the source of all knowledge!
Popper (1972), pp. 241-244

22. 22
USAF Col. John Boyd's OODA Loop process wins dogfights
and military conflicts
 Achieving strategic power depends critically on learning more, better and
faster, and reducing decision cycle times compared to competitors.
 See Osinga (2005) Science, strategy and war: the strategic theory of John
Boyd - http://tinyurl.com/26eqduv

23. 24
Popper's General Theory of Evolution + John Boyd
O = Observation of reality; O = Making sense and orienting to
observations with solutions to be tested; D = Selection of a solution or
making a “decision”
A = Application of decision or "Action" on reality
The real world is a filter that penalizes/eliminates entities that act on
mistaken decisions or errors (i.e., Darwinian selection operates)
 Self-criticism eliminates bad ideas
 If errors remain, the environment penalizes or eliminates entities
acting on the errors – Reality trumps belief
TS1
TS2
•
•
•
TSm
Pn Pn+1AOn EE EE
Self
criticism
Environmental
criticism /filter
Reality trumps belief

24. Science as a social
processes for
formalizing and
managing knowledge
to make it reliable
Vines, R., Hall, W.P. 2011. Exploring the foundations of
organizational knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers
No. 3.
Hall, W.P., Nousala, S. 2010. What is the value of peer
review – some sociotechnical considerations. Second
International Symposium on Peer Reviewing, ISPR 2010
June 29th - July 2nd, 2010 – Orlando, Florida, USA

25. Vines & Hall (2011) – Building personal and explicit knowledge
from real-world experience
 Knowledge exists at several levels of organization
– Personal tacit (W2)  Personal explicit (W3)
– Organizational common (W3)  Organizational Formal (W3)
– Formal integrated in organizational structure/dynamics (W2)
26

26. Vines & Hall (2011) Turning individual knowledge into reliable
and trustworthy organizational knowledge
27

27. Hall & Nousala (2010) - Constructing formal knowledge
28

28. Hall & Nousala (2010) - Growing and formalizing scientific,
scholarly and technical knowledge
 Building the Body of Formal Scientific Knowledge
involves cycles of knowledge building and criticism in
four hierarchical levels of cognitive organization:
Existential Reality (W1) 
1. Personal (“I”):
observe (W2)  orient  TTs  (W1) EE  (iterate) … or …
(articulate & share) (W2 & W3) 
2. Collaboration Group (“We”) :
 assimilate (W2)  articulate  express (W3)  EE (W1)  
(iterate) … or … (submit)
3. SST Discipline Members (“Them” – mostly via W3):
 peer review (EE)   (reject/revise) … or …  (publish)
4. Knowledge Society: use  … or … evolve/retract 
Maintain, extend, test society’s Body of Formal Knowledge through
use29

29. Hall (unpub) - Creating & managing formal knowledge
30

30. Take Home
Vines, R., Hall, W.P. 2011. Exploring the foundations of
organizational knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers
No. 3.
Hall, W.P., Nousala, S. 2010. What is the value of peer
review – some sociotechnical considerations. Second
International Symposium on Peer Reviewing, ISPR 2010
June 29th - July 2nd, 2010 – Orlando, Florida, USA
• All claims to know are
fallible
• Don’t accept what you are
told or read uncritically
• Consider sources
• Gurus have vested interests
• Science works pretty well
• Test important claims
where you can

31. Scientific thinking
in the 20th Century

32. Fundamentalism
 See: American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Fundamentalism Project
in the Religious Movements 1998 Homepage section on fundamentalism:
http://tinyurl.com/moexo3j)
 Fundamentalist sectarianism
– Elect or chosen membership
– Sharp group boundaries
– Charismatic authoritarian leaders
– Mandated behavioral requirements
– Idealism as basis for personal and communal identity
– Stress absolutism and inerrancy in their sources of revelation
– Belief that truth is revealed and unified
– Arcane so outsiders cannot understand communal truth
– Members are part of a cosmic struggle
– Reinterpret events in light of this cosmic struggle
– Demonization of their opposition;
– Selective in what parts of their tradition they stress
– Attempt to overturn modern culture and its power.
34

33. Henry Blaskowski on Quora
 The central 'faith' of science is that the world exists and is
observable. Everything else stems from that.
It is a faith in that it is indistinguishable from the "brain in a
jar"/Matrix theory of life. No, we can't prove we are not
just a brain in a jar, that we are making all this up. So, if we
are in that state, science is just false.
But if the world exists, then science requires no faith, just
observation [and a bit more].
35

34. 20th Century Epistemology tries to explain the
power of science to understand world
 Plato’s “justified true belief”, Vienna Circle & Logical
Positivism
– Truth is knowable
 Post WWII
– Constructivism and radical constructivism
 Knowledge is constructed – does not/cannot “reflect” external
reality
– The historian
 Thomas Kuhn
– Anti-Nazi’s
 Michael Polanyi
 Karl Popper
– Popper’s “irrationalist” students
 Imre Lakatos
 P.K. Feyerabend36

35. Problems with Logical Positivism
 Gettier’s Problems
– Any number of confirmations does not prove the next test will be a
refutation
 The biological impossibility to know if a claim to know
is true
– The brain does not perceive the world
 Cognition is a consequence of propagating action potentials in a
neural network.
 Action potentials stimulated by physical perturbations to neurons
– Vision does not form an image of external reality
 Photons are not the objects reflecting them
 Photons striking retina are converted into neural action
potentials in primary photoreceptor cells
 Neurons aggregate in the retina respond to lines, brightness,
changing contrast, movements
 A mental construction is not identical to the external reality37

36. Constructivism
 Basic constructivist tenants
– World is independent of human minds
– “Knowledge” of the world is always a human construct
– There is little point to be concerned about external reality
because you cannot know what it is
 Social constructivism
– Social relationships and interactions construct socially held
perceptions of reality and knowledge. Truth is what people
believe to be true
 Radical constructivism
– Knowledge cannot be transported from one mind into another
– Individual knowledge and understanding depends on personal
interpretation of experience, not what "actually" occurs.
38

37. Major scientific advances
 19th Century
– Darwinian theory of natural selection
– Maxwell’s equations / theory of electromagnetism
 20th Century
– Chromosomal/genetic theory of inheritance
– Relativity
– Atomic theory
– Electrodynamics/unification of forces
– Quantum theory
– Synthetic theory of evolution
– Plate tectonics
 All based on theoretical speculation tested in practice
 Prior science largely based on natural history observations
39

38. Human knowledge/dominance of the world appears
to grow through time
 Pragmatic observation – human power over nature
has grown through time
 Thomas Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1960)
– Key ideas
 Paradigms
– World views
– Disciplinary matrices
– Incommensurable usages of same words
 Normal science
 Revolutions
 This is constructivist historical interpretation not
epistemology
40

39. Time-lines for
constructing
knowledge
from reality
(animated slides explained
by references below)
Martin, C.P., Philp, W., Hall, W.P. 2009. Temporal convergence
for knowledge management. Australasian Journal of
Information Systems 15(2), 133-148.
Hall, W.P., Else, S., Martin, C., Philp, W. 2011. Time-based
frameworks for valuing knowledge: maintaining strategic
knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers No. 1: 1-28.
(OASIS Seminar Presentation, Department of Information
Systems, University of Melbourne, 27 July 2007)

40. Slide 42
Information transformations in the living entity
through time
World 1
Living system
Cell
Multicellular organism
Social organisation
State
Perturbations
Observations
(data)
Classification
Meaning
An "attractor basin"
Related
information
Memory of history
Semantic
processing to
form knowledge
Predict, propose
Intelligence
World 2
Hall, W.P., Else, S., Martin, C., Philp, W. 2011. Time-based
frameworks for valuing knowledge: maintaining strategic
knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers No. 1: 1-28.
(OASIS Seminar Presentation, Department of Information
Systems, University of Melbourne, 27 July 2007)

41. Slide 43
Processing Paradigm
(may include W3)
Another view
Decision
Medium/
Environment Autopoietic system
World State 1
Perturbation
Transduction
Observation Memory
Classification
Evaluation
Synthesis
Assemble
Response
Internal changes
Effect action
Effect
Time
World State 2
Iterate
Observed internal changes
World 1 World 2
World 3

42. Time-based cognitive
processes in
observing the world
to reach a goal
Based on Boyd’s OODA Loop

43. From the paper

44. immutable past
the world
t1
t1 – time of observation
t2
t2 – orientation & sensemaking
t4 – effect action
calendar time
“now” as it
inexorably
progresses
through time
intended
future
×
×
×
divergen
t
divergen
t
divergent
futures
×
stochastic
future
convergent future
OODA
t4
t3 – planning & decision
t3
Anticipating and controlling
the future from now
Animated slide
Click to advance

45. immutable past
the world
t1
t2
calendar time
intended
future
×
×
×
divergent
futures
divergent
futures
divergent
futures
×
stochastic
future
convergent future
OODA
t4
t3
Perceivable world
Cognitive edge
journey thus far
chart: received and constructed world
view that remains extant and
authoritative for a single OODA cycle.
perceivable world: the world that the
entity can observe at t1 in relationship to
the chart. This is the external reality
(W1) the entity can observe and
understand in W2 (i.e., within its
"cognitive edge"
journey thus far: the memory of history
at t2 as constructed in W2. Memories
tend to focus on prospective and
retrospective associations with events
(event-relative time) and can also be
chronological in nature (calendar time)
chart
“now” as it
inexorably
progresses
through
time
recent past: recent sensory data in
calendar time concerning the perceivable
world at t1 (i.e., observations) the entity
can project forward to construct a
concept of the present situation (i.e., at
t3), or some future situation. Recent past
is constructed in W2 based on what
existed in W1 leading up to t1.
recent
past
Present: calendar time: when an action is
executed.
• perceived present: the entity's
constructed understanding in W2 of its
situation in the world at time t3;
• actual present: the entity's
instantaneous situation in W1 at time t4.
perceived
present
Proximal future: the entity's anticipated
future situation in the world (W2) at t4 as
a consequence of its actions at t1+j, where
j is a time-step unit—typically on
completing the next OODA cycle. This
anticipation is based on observed recent
past, perceived present and forecasting
of the future up to t4.
OODA
t1+j
proximal
future
Intended future: the entity's intended
goal or situation in the world farther in
the future (at tgs, where gs is a goal-
state and tgs is the moment when that
goal is realised). Intentions are not
necessarily time specific but are always
associated with an event or goal-state
(i.e., the arrival of a set point in calendar
time can also be considered to be an
event).
tgs
• convergent future: the entity’s
mapping of the proximal future against an
intended future in which tgs can be
specified. t1 and t1+j can also be mapped
to tgs and then tgs+1 forecasted in the
form of some subsequent goal.
• divergent future: a world state where
the entity’s actions in the proximal future
(t1+j) failed to achieve the world state of
the intended future at tgs.
Animated slide
Click to advance