
The Case Against Reality - jedwhite
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?utm_source=wdfb&mbid=social_fb&amp;single_page=true
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joeblow9999
utter nonsense

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andrewfromx
"Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how
much of it there is in an objective order—very little water, medium amount of
water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a
little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium
fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness—in that case, the
organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only
because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in
reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case.
Something much more natural is a bell curve—say, too little water you die of
thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good
for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real
world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism
tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as,
say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate
quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned
to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and
large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality."

