Post: #1

Saw this on the Scott Adams Blog,
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/15081666699...s-promised


What If Evolution Bred Reality Out Of Us

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/09...-out-of-us

Fundamentally, Hoffman argues, evolution and reality (the objective kind) have almost nothing to do with each other.





"Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness."

So let's unpack Hoffman's theorem for a moment. To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, "fitness" is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That's what they mean by "fitness functions."

So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment's, fitness function. The second creature couldn't care less about what's really going on in reality. What Hoffman's theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost always — win the evolution game.

To test this idea, Hoffman and collaborators have run evolutionary simulations with different kinds of fitness functions — some of those tuned to reality and some having nothing to do with reality. The non-reality functions almost always win. For Hoffman, the consequences of these studies are profound. As he told me:

"We assume the 'predicates' of perceptions — space, time, physical objects, shapes — are the right ones to describe physical reality. And this theorem says that [such] predicates are [the wrong ones] almost surely."

In other words, evolution couldn't care less if you perceive objective reality. It only wants you to have sex successfully. As a consequence, your apprehension of the world is tuned to whatever allows that to happen. Thus, your perceptions at the root level have nothing to do with some fundamental physics upon which the fundamental nature of objective independent reality is constructed.

More at the link...
------------------------------------------------------------
I'm really digging this theory, nothing else matters to our illogical brains besides the fitness of ourselves & our species.
Humanity is always seeking a balance or an equilibrium in the fitness of our species.
This is Survival of the Fittest, at it's core.

Post: #2

Evolution bred the divine into us. I've seen more and more evolutionary biologists talk about how the deductionist approach is wrong (everything comes from simple smaller pieces) and that the margins of error for life is miniscule and in addition, the 'soul' does reside in the brain, but only in sufficiently advanced brains are we able to tap into this kind of cosmic conscious.

Post: #3

This explains both Game and Religion.

Post: #4

I've long ago realised that all human beings are inherently biased. In fact, no one is more biased than someone who claims to be unbiased. An unbiased person is simply someone who is not cognitively aware of all their biases running in the background.

We all naturally operate with bias, which distorts our reality perception. You can be aware of your bias, and take conscious methods to try to compensate for it (for example, by relying on the scientific method) but you will never be able to rid yourself of your bias.

We do not interact with reality directly. We interact with a mirror model of reality that is built inside our brains. And this model is under no pressure to be accurate, only to be useful.

Post: #5

Like NLP says, "the map is not the terrain"

Post: #6

I read the article a while ago as well as the interview with Hoffman; still processing it. As I was reading the article my first thoughts was that it reminded me of ideas that Kant and Nietzsche had been put out centuries ago. Kant talked about how time and space are not objective features of the outside world but rather something our minds imposes on the framework of reality and that there's a part of reality called the "thing in itself" that we are forever cut off from due to the limitations in human perceptions. Nietzsche criticized in Beyond Good and Evil the classic Western idea of how there's an objective absolute truth that we can eventually reach and he also like Hoffman in the interview suggested that what has survived over the course of humanity hasn't been ideas that are more "true" but ideas that allow for an organism to survive and procreate in the face of adversity.

Hoffman refers to his stance as "conscious realism" but if anything it seems to resemble Kant's "transcendental idealism". And like the many flavors of idealistic philosophy it seems counter-intuitive at first but I find the more I think about it the more it seems plausible to me though I'm still hesitant to say how much I really buy into it. It definitely does fascinate me more then plain "what you see is what you get" realism. I also do agree that as long as we're only humans there's always going to be a part of reality we will never be able to access.

Post: #7

One needs a good awareness of his surroundings in order to survive to reproduce.
Our five senses are how we deduce our reality.
An example is our fight or flight responses in our reptillian brains.
Social Darwinism usually eliminates people from the gene pool that have an unrealistic view of our collective reality.

Post: #8

He may be right, even though he seems to reduce everything to (sexual) fitness, and hence to some kind of an internal reality principle like gravity. Well, philosophy, a reality science of the highest order, is such unnecessary enterprise, isn't it? However, we still may choose to rescind sex and choose philosophy even though no reality principle hides behind philosophizing. That means that sexual fitness is not always enough to understand the imperfectness of evolution.... In an evolutionary perfect world shouldn't be any philosophy, should any?

In philosophical terms, it seems to be another rehash of the only self-conceived American philosophy, namely pragmatism.
It could be named the evolutionary pragmatism, where what is sexual is pragmatic is true...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/

The very fact that the simple propagating of a species became the point of reference (not God, or liberation to higher spheres) is not only godless, but simply boring, and mundane; a kind of descent of man... Well, it is a corollary for what Michel Foucault used to say, namely that the practice of religion is boring, but writing about religion is exciting; but the opposite goes for sex: writing about it is boring, but practicing excites you (at least for a time being).

We wanted to believe that we are more than animals; but nowadays we are sadly transfixed by the quest for our animal identity.... Is this simply because we started to seek the Platonic Triad (Good, Beautiful, True) in Nature only (well, what has happened to mathematics...?!)....?! Look, in this theory true can be only things that are natural.

Post: #9

(09-25-2016 01:17 AM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  Like NLP says, "the map is not the terrain"

Hah! Thanks for reminding me of NLP and old school game.

Post: #10

I liked the article because it matches what I know about neuroscience and the evolution of morality. But I don't think the author realizes that his thesis will never become popular because knowing it doesn't help you pick up a cute Ukrainian in an NYC bar.

Post: #11

I think there is something to this. You only have to see how people cling to their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary to realise that objective reality is not a big consideration for a lot of people.

Post: #12

Beware of theories that contradict everyday experience.