
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality - RyanMcGreal
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/
======
wyager
Ugh. Sorry, but anyone who tries to link the measurement problem and a process
as high-energy as cognition is either misled or trying to mislead you.

Here's what we know experimentally: when you measure something, it looks like
it has a definite value. (Math version: the measured value is always an
eigenvalue of the hermitian operator corresponding to the measurement. Even if
a system started in a mixed state, it always seems to end up in the eigenbasis
corresponding to the measured eigenvalue.)

"Measurement" is any process that carries information about the state of the
system. When I get hit in the back of the head with a photon from a distant
planet, I'm measuring its position.

What QM does _not_ know is why this seems to be the case. There are many
theories. (Plug for Einselection.) But just about any serious theory happens
at time and energy scales so small that it doesn't make sense to consider the
interaction of consciousness with wave function collapse. If there's no
objective reality, the "subjectivity" probably only exists at scales too small
to notice without an experimental setup.

------
milesvp
Not really. Fundamentally all he's saying is that there is a huge benefit from
seeing distortions to reality. If you prcieved all threats in a red outline as
you walked down the street, you'd be better able to avoid them.

You can also look at data display problems the same way. Take a height map of
the world, and just blindly use a rainbow mapping, and you won't be able to
see sea level. But if you pick two color spectrums, say, beige and blue, and
suddenly it pops out.

He's basically saying that it makes sense for our brain to lie to use fir the
same reason; some data is too valuable to not stand out to us. And this holds
for any given organism.

------
ythl
This seems like a meaningless argument. It's like saying:

"We are all just brains in vats in a giant floating supercomputer storage
facility in space hooked up to a networked virtual reality system! Everything
we perceive is false since the true reality is brains in vats! You think
that's a snake? Nope, just an AI being fed to your vat brain by the
supercomputer. There's no such thing as snakes."

There's no way to prove me wrong, but it's not a really useful thought
exercise either. How does that help us solve the problems we want to solve?

~~~
mordocai
For what it is worth, this is how I feel about many philosophical arguments.
Personally, I enjoy thinking about and talking about these things but when it
comes down to it they are not likely to affect my behaviors at all.

------
goatlover
Doesn't this argument undermine the validity of evolution? If we can't know
reality, then we can't know that evolution is real. If we can't know that
evolution happened, then the argument refutes itself.

At best you could argue that if evolution is real, then we can't know reality,
but then we would also be ignorant of evolution.

------
mordocai
Looking through the history, it doesn't look like this article has had
significant discussion even once. Why is this a dupe?

------
jerf
This is most likely a false argument. You have to hedge such things because
technically you can't disprove Descartes' evil demon, but beyond that, it can
be shown to be false.

First, I pull in the paper "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational
Complexity":
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf)
I particular commend to your attention the discussion in section four and the
subsection "'Reductions' That Do All The Work".

At which point, if you understood that paper, the remainder of my argument is
probably obvious. But:

Given the complexity of our incoming sense input, in order for the universe to
somehow be something completely different but still meaningfully causally
connected to our sensory input, there must be a transform function from the
real state of the universe to the sensory experience my consciousness
experiences (or "what my brain appears to be processing" or whatever you like
here; the "mysteries" of consciousness are not important to my argument, I
merely need "the thing that is not experiencing the true state of the universe
but is making decisions somehow"). Given the ready available availability of
the true (if wildly incomplete) state of the universe to these hypothetical
organisms, the transform function must have been created by evolution, co-
evolving with the organisms as they get more complicated.

When we say "all of reality is an illusion and it's wildly different than what
we experience", we can (with a bit of handwaving) observe that if reality is
supposed to be _radically_ different than our experiences, yet the transform
function somehow successfully keeps us alive as we act on our illusions, it is
not unreasonably to expect the transform function to be exponential in
complexity. I mean, I see a coherent "thing I think is my child", and if
that's actually a three-toed sloth that can't speak or play video games, it's
gonna be one heck of a transform function to maintain the illusion. However,
evolution's speed can be characterized by the rate at which it can acquire
bits. While there is some debate about what that speed may be, it generally
considered to be linear at best in the number of generations. There is no time
for such a complicated transform function to be evolved.

On the other hand, if the transform function is relatively simple, the
argument degenerates to the rather pedestrian observation that humanity has
known about for centuries if not millenia (depending on how you look at it),
that our sense perceptions are not a completely accurate reflection of
reality. But there are still significant ways in which it is a reflection of
reality.

So I can not help but think that this article is one of two things: An
impossible claim about the disparity between our sense impressions and
reality, or a pedestrian claim about the disparity between our sense
impressions and reality dressed up in very provocative, but ultimately
content-free, dressing.

Incidentally, why do the experiments he run seem to confirm his point? Scale,
of course. In a tiny little simulation, the differences between exponential
and simple transform functions are still quite small, and evolution has plenty
of room to play with outright deceptive sense functions. But as you scale up
the complexity of the simulation, evolution will not be able to sustain wild
illusions, only relatively simple transforms between reality and sense
impression, exactly as we see in the real world. ("Relatively simple" compared
to what it would take to have wildly deceptive transform functions; still
complicated and we are still learning about what our real brains do, of
course, but it's still the difference between "polynomial-but-large" and
"exponential".)

Per Descartes' demon and/or brain-in-a-vat, etc., I can't prove very much
about where our sense impressions are coming from, whether it's "real" or not.
But I can say with some confidence that, where ever those sense impressions
are coming from, be it a real universe or a simulation or whatever, I have no
reason to believe that evolution is causing me to have those sense impressions
so completely chewed on that "it's all an illusion". For that to be false
would require so much about my world to be false that the very existence of
"evolution" that his argument hinges on would not be a reliable fact to argue
with.

~~~
mordocai
I do believe he is in fact claiming what you call "a pedestrian claim about
the disparity between our sense impressions and reality dressed up in very
provacative, but ultimately content-free, dressing".

How I read it, but using your words, was that he is saying that the "transform
function" you mention could throw out a large amount of data about the "real
world" as being unimportant, so the only things we notice are those things
that evolution has deemed important enough to allow through the "transform
function". Hence, our perception of reality does not match reality.

As far as gaining anything from it, I think it is an interesting thought
exercise and if it could be proven that'd be cool(and his math about
observation actually seems quite interesting) but I don't think any of it is
likely to change human behavior in any significant way.

