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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: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:01PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:01PM (#951189) Journal

    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.

    Suppose that the approximation of reality that we need to see to survive is extremely close to how things really are?

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:53PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:53PM (#951290) Journal

    We have known for a long time that our direct observation is not close to reality. Study a bit of color theory, though there are lots of other places where this is made blatantly clear.

    To be specific, we've got three different cones (except some women who have four different cones) that are "called" red, green, and blue. This is misleading. All three are generally sensitive to light, with a peak in sensitivity at a different frequency, and the "red" cone has a peak sensitivity in the orange, but is "suppressed" by the "green" cone, so a deeper red is actually seen by decreasing the green frequency. And the sensitivity varies over a range with the frequency, so brightness isn't directly observable either. (Except by the rods.) Etc. And that's an oversimplification. Different people have slightly different peaks of sensitivity. And color is determined by weighing the activation of cones that respond to several different frequencies, and different people weigh things slightly differently. There are specialty color perception charts, but you can't reproduce them on a printer or a display, because they don't use just mixes of three colors.

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:01PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:01PM (#951339) Journal

      I am aware of that.

      Of course, our vision system is "good enough" to give us an excellent chance of survival in many novel situations. (avoid falling off a cliff at night)

      I also suspect that it is closer to reality than some would like to think.

      Similarly our ears. We may not have a "true" perception of the sounds in the world. That is, what we perceive in our brain through the apparatus in our ears. But I suspect it is probably pretty close to reality. So close that millennia worth of people take it for granted and don't often discover strange discrepancies from reality.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.