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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: 2) by acid andy on Friday January 31 2020, @11:06AM (2 children)
I need to brush up on my Hoffman, but as I understand it he's attracted to a type of Idealism [wikipedia.org] where subjective consciousness may be the primary form of existence and everything else may be constructed from it.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday January 31 2020, @11:25AM (1 child)
Just in case you didn't notice, he is the cognitive psychologist the TFA is about (don't try to find him between the classics)
Ummm... maybe, but it doesn't seem likely to me. At least not as a strict form of idealism.
He still assumes an objective reality which is reflected (better or worse, in term of evolutionary fitness) by senses. It's a bit far from the idealist ontological position, which takes the mind/spirit as the primary cause.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday January 31 2020, @01:44PM
Well he's too recent to be considered a classic but I came across him popping up between modern philosophers like Dennett and Chalmers in my quest to explore the philosophy of mind.
Yeah I'm not especially convinced by what little I've heard of Hoffman's philosophy, however I do find his ideas extremely thought-provoking. His bit about our perceived reality being optimized for survival at the expense of accuracy, to the extent that he suggests it's so inaccurate as to be "wrong" is certainly interesting but so far what he means by "rightness" or "wrongness" hasn't been completely clear to me and I'm not even sure if he'd completely made up his mind on that, beyond open-ended speculation and clickbaity phrases.
Yeah, I find Idealism a slightly strange philosophy because, unless Solipsism is true or my sense of understanding the world is all an illusion, we can still build artificial sensors, machines and instruments to measure the objective reality and perform repeatable scientific experiments on it. The information represented in that repeatable behavior is what constitutes objective reality to me and that part of it is almost certainly real as far as I'm concerned. If someone wants to claim it's not real, then they need to clearly define what "real" means to them to prove to me that they're not just playing linguistic games.
I suppose a strict Idealist might say that this so-called reality of repeatable physical experiments is just a high level abstraction from the true stuff of only mind underlying it, a bit like how biology, organs and bodies are just high level ways of classifying arrangements of quarks (or are they?).
For me the distinction becomes important if and when the high level stuff can be replaced with something different. That's the acid test. If Idealism were true, perhaps you could build a wildly different objective reality on top of it instead of this one we all know and love to hate so well.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?