If our faculties of awareness are wholly the product of unguided evolutionary forces, then they do not provide us with any true awareness of anything (including that). As we are aware of some things, we are not wholly the product of unguided evolutionary forces.

1. If our faculties of awareness are wholly the product of unguided evolutionary forces, then they do not give us an awareness of anything
2. Our faculties of awareness do provide us with some awareness of something
3. Therefore our faculties of awareness are not wholly the product of unguided evolutionary forces


Here is my argument for the truth of the first premise. Imagine some clouds form into shapes that appear to spell out "there's a pie in your the oven". Are you being told something? No. If unguided - by which I mean, unguided by any agency - natural forces produced those shapes in the sky, then it was not imparting information to you. It was just pure fluke that, to you, the clouds appeared to be trying to tell you something. They were not 'trying' to tell you anything, for they are not agents and so are not in the 'trying' business.

Does anything change if, coincidentally, there is in fact a pie in your the oven? Obviously not. If you acquired the true belief that there is a pie in your oven in this way, then although your belief is - by coincidence - true, this does not magically mean that you were being given information by the clouds, and your belief, though true, does not constitute knowledge.

At first the analysis we might give here is that the reason you don't 'know' that there is a pie in your oven is that it was just coincidental that the clouds formed those shapes and that the belief these shapes caused you to acquire was in fact true.

But I think that can't be correct, for just imagine that putting the pie in the oven somehow did actually cause the clouds to form into those shapes. Imagine, if you like, that the steam coming out of your oven as the pie cooks is what forms into those shapes and that this wouldn't have happened had there been no pie in your oven. Well, it seems just as clear in this case that you did not acquire knowledge that there was a pie in your oven from those cloud shapes, just a true belief.

It seems to me that what's preventing you from acquiring knowledge in this sort of case is that you have acquired a true belief from an 'apparent' representation, not a real one. It is not sufficient that your belief about the pie was caused by a pie - that is, caused by something answering to the content of your belief - for it nevertheless remains the case that the pie was not trying to communicate with you (likewise for the clouds the pie created). That is, the pie was not using the clouds as a means of communicating its location to you.

If that's correct, then surely this applies to all of the beliefs that one acquires? For example, imagine that it seems to you that you are perceiving a pie in the oven and this is how you have acquired the belief that there is a pie in the oven. However, you are actually having an accurate dream. That is, your body is indeed in front of the oven and your eyes are so positioned that, were you to awake, you would perceive the pie in the oven. But you are actually fast asleep and, by pure coincidence, you are dreaming that you are in exactly the position you are actually in and seeing exactly what you would in fact be seeing were you not dreaming (such that if you were to awake right now, this would seem like blinking).

Well, it seems just as clear in this case that your belief that there is a pie in the oven does not constitute knowledge that there is a pie in the oven. And though it is a huge coincidence that the content of your dream experience is introspectively indiscernible from what you'd have seen had you been awake, we have seen already that this is not what explains why your belief fails to constitute an item of knowledge.

What explains this failure to know is the fact that no one was trying to convey to you that there was a pie in the oven by means of your dream states. And that will hold true of your perceptual states as well, or at least it will if the faculty that puts you in them is one that is wholly the product of unguided evolutionary forces.

So, in essence if our faculties of awareness - or rather, 'faculties of awareness' - are wholly the product of unguided evolutionary forces, then none of us are 'perceiving' reality at all. Rather, we are - at best - having accurate dreams. But accurate dreams do not furnish us with knowledge.

What about the second premise? Well, I take it that any attempt to deny this premise will undermine itself. For if, on the basis of what I have said above combined with a conviction that we are indeed a product of unguided evolutionary processes, you are persuaded that we are not aware of anything, then you will have to admit that you are not aware of that too. Which makes no real sense.