The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

Things that make you go hmmm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcgbLwn_yYE

"As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine....."

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/


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That's awesome Adder - thanks for posting

It doesn't surprise me that a Jedi has posted this article (I saw this article a few days ago and thought it might be of interest here but didn't act on that thought).

I think humans perceive the world in a generally similar manner because of the similarity of our sense organs and how the brain organizes perception, but what we think regarding what is perceived differs.

Reality changes as our knowledge changes.

Some books on that hypothesis:

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

Another hypothesis is that language is another contributing factor in structuring our understanding of what we perceive.

See linguistic relativity or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Can we, for example, see something we don't have a word for?
Or see a phenomenon in a distinctive way because there is a vocabulary regarding it.

thank you Adder!

i found this youtube a little while back, but the length of the video made me hesitate and i kind of went on to other things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSBbGr0pELQ

human beings are not capable of knowing reality

this is a consequence of our basic biology

which imo renders assertions about the lack of order or meaning in the universe, just as uncertain as assertions of its existence

i dont even think that we are in a position to say which is more likely with any certainty

Heh, you can tell this guy is neither an evolutionary biologist nor a game theorist or mathematician of any other stripe...

I am scanning the associated paper right now. It is already starting by assuming that the "true" world - what ever it be - can in principle be represented by a set. They admit that this is a needed assumption for their argument, yet unless they can make the same argument from its negation, the conclusion remains contingent upon it. If I were to guess knowing what I do not so much about the nature of reality as about set theory, I'd have to say that without some severe abstractions the world can probably not in fact be represented by a set in a naive way like that...
It carries on more assumptions about expected payoffs for the truth-seeing being vs the non-truth-seeing survivor. Now, it is fair to speculate about such things and point out that there are models under which the efficient survivor would prevail over the actual truth-seer, and I suppose I agree with the authors in that accuracy and utility are distinct properties of perceptions as defined in the paper and it is not fair to assume overlap absent further information about the given situation. A clarification along these lines is explicitly given in the discussion section of the paper. In fact, that section outlining conclusions and limitations of the paper sounds very unlike what Mr. Hoffman says in this video...

http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/PerceptualEvolution.pdf

Every time I read about the observer effect or things like this article I have two reactions, usually right after the other. The first is "Holy cow this changes everything, my life will never be the same." The second is "That's cool and all, but how does that actually change anything on a practical level for me?"

It is good to think about how our perception creates our reality but some times I feel like quantum physics is just thinking about stuff to think about it. I know that's not really it but some times it feels that way. :laugh:

We can never know what the snake actually is, only what our brain tells us it is. Deep, but since I can't know why worry about it?

I did really like the desktop analogy. That file on my computer desktop isn't actually a file in my computer.