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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:56PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:56PM (#951376)

    So they both see the same reality but the emphasis is different.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 31 2020, @12:15AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 31 2020, @12:15AM (#951496) Journal

    So they both see the same reality but the emphasis is different.

    Sorta. One can argue they are perceiving other traits of the reality.
    As in "perception of the quantity in absolute terms" and the "perception of the potential effect of the quantity trait on the survival" are two different things.
    My guts are telling me that the postulated equivalence between the two is faulty, even if the model implemented on the computer would have some value.

    There is a difference between the two: even if the second is a "build-in by evolution" biological capability and the first is absent to the direct perception, the human can still measure it using tools and techniques not directly derived by darwinian evolution.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford