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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the perception-is-all-there-is. dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:46AM (4 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday January 30 2020, @09:46AM (#951109) Journal

    the inversion is the easy part, consider the 3d mapping and the fact that the retina has a slower response over time than what our representation is making us believe.

    We also have zero lag perceived between touch and vision, see yourself typing. But there should be one. Cool stuff.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 30 2020, @02:53PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 30 2020, @02:53PM (#951185)

    Inversion is practically irrelevant... it's just something the processing network has evolved, both structurally and training since birth.

    There's also the "I'm 14 and this is deep" realization that: what I see as red and blue, you might see as blue and red, but call them red and blue because that's what we've been taught since birth.

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    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:58PM (1 child)

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:58PM (#951377) Journal

      it's just something the processing network has evolved

      Precisely like everything else in the article. Reality is determined by consensus. "Things are not as they seem", I believe the saying goes. For instance, the person that modded my previous comment "offtopic" is confused, maybe even spiteful for some reason.

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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:23PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:23PM (#951390)

        maybe even spiteful for some reason.

        In the social reality we live in, perception is all there is.

        When there was social consensus that heavy objects fell faster than light ones, most observations seemed to back that up.

        In some potential future, we may discover that our methods for measuring time are complete bollocks and with a new way of looking at how to measure time we might gain additional mastery of it.

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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday January 31 2020, @02:46PM

    by acid andy (1683) on Friday January 31 2020, @02:46PM (#951779) Homepage Journal

    consider the 3d mapping

    Yeah that's the bit that really blows my mind. The way we perceive depth seems impossible. Our visual field appears to be a sharp, continuous two-dimensional surface. But depth is vividly apparent right there too, as a clearly visible part of that surface, right in plain sight. Yet we know mathematically there's no space to fit that depth information on such a flat 2D surface, at least without degrading the resolution--which doesn't appear to happen.* If you deliberately misalign your eyes, the 2D surface shows a double image, but when they're perfectly aligned the brain is a master at reinterpreting that effect as depth. But what the hell does that experience of depth consist of? It's part of what makes subjective experience seem so exotic.

    *I suspect in actual fact the 3D effect does correspond to a slight reduction in the sharpness and/or resolution of our mind's visual field. The left and right eye's slightly different images are superimposed in a way that's probably sacrificing a bit of visual fidelity to represent depth. Two eyes probably provide a slightly better resolution than one though, so we can't just close one eye to test this.

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