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Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues that evolution has cloaked us in a perceptional virtual reality. For our own good.
The idea that we can't perceive objective reality in totality isn't new. We know everyone comes installed with cognitive biases and ego defense mechanisms. Our senses can be tricked by mirages and magicians. And for every person who sees a duck, another sees a rabbit.
But Hoffman's hypothesis, which he wrote about in a recent issue of New Scientist, takes it a step further. He argues our perceptions don't contain the slightest approximation of reality; rather, they evolved to feed us a collective delusion to improve our fitness.
Using evolutionary game theory, Hoffman and his collaborators created computer simulations to observe how "truth strategies" (which see objective reality as is) compared with "pay-off strategies" (which focus on survival value). The simulations put organisms in an environment with a resource necessary to survival but only in Goldilocks proportions.
Consider water. Too much water, the organism drowns. Too little, it dies of thirst. Between these extremes, the organism slakes its thirst and lives on to breed another day.
Truth-strategy organisms who see the water level on a color scale — from red for low to green for high — see the reality of the water level. However, they don't know whether the water level is high enough to kill them. Pay-off-strategy organisms, conversely, simply see red when water levels would kill them and green for levels that won't. They are better equipped to survive.
"Evolution ruthlessly selects against truth strategies and for pay-off strategies," writes Hoffman. "An organism that sees objective reality is always less fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees fitness pay-offs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct."
Since humans aren't extinct, the simulation suggests we see an approximation of reality that shows us what we need to see, not how things really are.
Meanwhile, European researchers say Objective reality may not exist. At least, on the subatomic scale.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:40AM (2 children)
Everybody claiming that what we perceive is not really real should be slapped in the face out of the blue, claiming it's the fault of that clown riding the blue unicorn that the guy OBVIOUSLY hasn't perceived.
This is again, like looking at the code of a game simulation during execution instead of the game. Doesn't make sense. The true representation of the game is the game world, the one where there is MEANING. The underlying representation is not the truer truth, is one interesting, maybe vital, but ultimately IRRELEVANT implementation aspect.
So, the game world is not the implementation? of course it fucking isn't. Tautology. Is our representation good enough not to get us killed on the highway? mostly yes. Does the infrastructure tell us something about the hypothetical creator of the infrastructure? no because your research is still modeled in an impersonal and randomly behaving universe which is a system of belief that has also proven rather weak, so you probably will keep building on this interpretation like people kept building on epicycles.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:25PM (1 child)
Our brains try to use perception (our senses) to create a digital representation of an analog world. If you record (measure) a speech with two different microphones or two different cameras and play them on two different TVs and speakers they will sound and look slightly different. But the representation that our brains make (the words and meanings we interpret) for the most part are the same (close enough).
Likewise we may have ears that hear sounds differently (some people hear 'better' than others), we have different voices, different handwriting, use different fonts (the analog world is messy and has variety) but, for the most part, as long as the signals and objects receiving those signals (our senses) are within a tolerance we can filter the noise and come up with a meaningful and consistent signal.
If two people say the store is across the street with two different voices and two different people hear it with two different ears even though there is variety in our voices and perceptions we can both filter the ‘noise’ and come to the same conclusion over what’s being said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:27PM
errr ... meaningful and consistent interpretation.