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Evolution Cloaked Us in a Perceptional Virtual Reality

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

JoeMerchant writes:

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: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday January 31 2020, @01:55AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 31 2020, @01:55AM (#951547) Journal

    Care to explain what you're thinking here?

    Sure, here I go. So, in regards with this theory as proposed by the cognitive theorist Donald Hoffman and referenced in TFA...

    I would have expected khallow to show a very high dose of skepticism, to my surprise he just took one step on the path of exploring the consequences.

    Now, the probability of this theory to be true (and, thus, extend or overwrite the current theories) is indeed not null. But this probability is very low**; until this probability doesn't increase, the act of extrapolating its consequences is of the same nature as thinking "what one will do with the money if the one would be to win the lottery".

    ----

    ** arguments for assessing the probability of the proposed theory to be true at "win the lottery" level of low:


    1. proposes a radical paradigm shift that is not based in any shortfall of the current theories. His base is not different from the proposal of "Suppose all matter and energy is made of tiny, vibrating strings" [xkcd.com]
    2. exotic theories have been plenty along the history of human, and the present is not [wikipedia.org] lacking [wikipedia.org] them [rationalwiki.org].
    3. the person that proposes it doesn't seem to have a body of work large enough outside of his "cognitive psychology" field. One wonders what are the chances for him to take a uneducated guess and be right
    4. there's no indication that the author of the theory even considers ways of confirming/falsifying the theory - he's suggested approach is "let's ignore our observations - our evolution injected flaws in them - and start with a mathematical theory of consciousness as a baseline". Ummm... then what?
    5. the only justification to start launch in this endeavor is "I ran a computer simulation and one population of the simulated beings were more successful in surviving in my simulated environ" - without any considerations on why his model is correct, what are the limits of the model or even if the model is relevant for the objective reality. In essence, it's no different than saying "I played this video game last night and I had an epiphany: we should scratch all scientific theories, ignore everything until now and create a mathematical model of consciousness that would explain how electrons gets to project their existence on the human race psyche".
    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 31 2020, @02:50AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 31 2020, @02:50AM (#951596) Journal
    I've been kind to string theory too. I doubt this guy will rid us of those pesky electrons, but kicking out anything useful with respect to consciousness, would be worth doing.