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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 JoeMerchant on Friday January 31 2020, @03:13PM (9 children)
Which is yet another factor in favor of the importance of the squishy non measurable metrics which dominate life.
We've already shown that it's possible on small scale, but just like colonization of the sea floor (which is even harder, in many ways)... it's more a matter of that squishy "collective will to do so" than it is any particular concrete "law of nature" that's stopping us.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday February 01 2020, @01:23AM (8 children)
Can you please remind me when this happened and how big/small was the scale?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @03:31AM (7 children)
Anywhere from one to a dozen people have been living continuously in LEO for up to a year at a time for many decades now - that's more than enough time in micro-gravity to get to Mars.
There was that handful of three man missions to the nearest neighbor, land, return safely, all that jazz.
The various "Biosphere" projects demonstrating long term sustainability of closed micro-ecosystems.
Even long term submarine missions are a kind of demonstration in principle that we can live in artificial environments long term, if we choose to, and most of them don't crack up and go horror movie on themselves.
7+ billion people on the planet, plenty of volunteers for just about any mission profile you can dream up, and even if 99% of them aren't up to the task, that still leaves more than enough to man (and woman) the early missions.
Oh, and don't forget: Matt Damon - Space Pirate - grew those potatoes ;-)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday February 01 2020, @04:55AM (6 children)
Don't delude yourself mate, that's picnic in you own backyard, not even getting out from your neighborhood.
The level of energies required to travel between stars in reasonable times is some orders of magnitude higher - our best to date is less than 1day-light away, after 40+ years since departure.
If one would be to considers intergalatic travel...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @05:14PM (5 children)
Whoa, whoa, WHOA! Let's get to Mars first, eh? I'm not even concerned about the logistics of interstellar travel until we can demonstrate the collective will to support the establishment of Moon/Mars colonies.
And, yes, the Space shuttle / ISS missions are puny, weak sauce, timidly cowering inside the magnetosphere... real men put it out there for the solar wind to rip through - and I think that's going to be the real challenge for all these things. When we establish practical methods to shuttle people safely from LEO to LMO and back, interstellar is just scaling up that tech to run a generation ship that gets there when it gets there.
The most amusing part of these kind of thought experiments are the early interstellar ships that will probably be passed by ships launched a generation later, again, if we can hold the squishy politics together long enough to do that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday February 01 2020, @07:55PM (4 children)
We were talking about how much the rest of the Universe cares about the blue dot and what the humans can do to make the Universe care more.
Getting to Mars doesn't change much the equation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 01 2020, @10:43PM (3 children)
Control of fire changed the equation, as did control of nuclear fission/fusion, and orbital and extrasolar propulsion capability. Colonization outside the original biosphere, that's another level still, and a necessary step on the path to making more than a speck of difference in the galaxy.
If you want to get philosophical about the Universe's indifference, even after we dominate the Milky Way, that's just one of ~100 billion galaxies. Also... timescales, our ascendance from powered atmospheric flight to extrasolar probes has been virtually instantaneous on the universal timescale. Going from soup in the ocean to where we are now did take a noticeable amount of time, but we have the potential to dominate (the habitable parts of) the Milky Way within ~1,000,000 years, or about 1/4,000th of the time it took to get from ocean goo to here, if we truly break that pesky boom-bust cycle that civilization seems so prone to.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday February 02 2020, @08:55PM (2 children)
Being a bit pedantic here, but the control of nuclear fusion is still due. For some 50 years or thereabouts... which may give you a hint about the validity of extrapolation in regards with technological progress.
One may argue we, the humans, managed to pick the low hanging fruits in regards with energy control and, as we started to climb the levels of power that a biological being can safely control, the rate of technological advances slows down.
For example:
- in re fusion reactors, one of the big problems are those pesky high energy neutrons - hard to control using fields and making the substance based shielding brittle over time. May be sufficient for solar system exploration (assuming we get to control it) but not for interstellar manned flights.
- we didn't get to the point where we use even fission reactors for space propulsion - and we 'control' the fission for 80+years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 02 2020, @09:29PM (1 child)
That depends on your definition of control - agreed that using it for constructive purposes is a ways off, but Putin can order up a nuclear fusion event anywhere on or near above the surface of the Earth within 90 minutes, or so we're told.
Also to consider: Og the Neanderthal probably cooked his deer over a campfire, but it wasn't until Samuel Watt's steam engine in the 1800s that "controlled fire power" really took off as a widespread economic engine driving technology (unless you count guns as economically beneficial - like nuclear ICBMs, that's kind of a matter of perspective w.r.t. which end of the barrel you are on.)
Agreed, Ray Kurzweil is an idiot in that regard, however... extrapolations also miss quantum leaps forward, which, like large asteroid strikes, happen at quite unpredictable intervals.
That all depends on how much patience you have. Even at Voyager 2 speeds, we can be at Alpha Centauri within 75,000 years. Kick that up with readily achievable propulsion tech and I wouldn't be shocked to shave that number to 10,000 years or less. Sounds dreary dreadfully long, onboard society may well break down in that time, assuming "Hypersleep" remains bullshit... Still, with the will to act, at those kinds of speeds the Milky Way could be ours in less than 0.1% of the time we think our Sun has remaining.
Again, that squishy political crap comes into play... launching large chunks of hot isotopes, particularly in a starring role like the engine, on full disclosure missions gets a lot of backlash in the funding department. The tech is there, fission powered ion engines have a lot of potential (pun intended), what's lacking is the will to deploy and further develop it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday February 02 2020, @10:07PM
Actively use anything nuclear at these time scales and, with the current technological level, expect the cargo to reach destination as a genetic mush.
Not that not using it guarantees otherwise, a single supergiant fast X-ray transient [wikipedia.org] will achieve the same effect. And the longer you travel in space, the higher the probability to get unlucky.
Agreed, lotsa potential, but I'm skeptical that only the will is what's missing.
Low specific impulse, especially when you consider some megatons of useful cargo to be moved between stars will come to play nasty in the execution - like anything from theory to practice.
Specifically, add to the mass of that cargo the mass of the propulsion and we are speaking about something that's a bit difficult to scale up with today's capabilities (the rocket equation applies to the ion engines too).
Maybe it will become doable starting from the asteroid belt, assembling the whole starship in a very shallow grav well, but we are so far from there. Not only one needs to find the materials and extract them (heck, plenty of energy required for that extraction too), but it will take collaboration at... (umm, can't use global, can I?)... solar system scale, when we barely manage to survive a low level of collaboration at Earth scale. (getting starship manufacturing in the asteroid belt to work will highly likely require self-sustaining mining posts. As they become self-sustaining, guess what will be their first 'political' reaction?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford