
What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us? - kevinwang
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/09/06/492779594/what-if-evolution-bred-reality-out-of-us
======
obastani
Isn't Hoffman's argument pretty mundane?

The conclusion seems pretty obvious; we only see light in a certain (relevant)
spectrum, we only taste certain (relevant) chemicals, we only hear sounds in
certain (relevant) frequencies, etc., because it doesn't help us (and in fact
distracts us) to perceive more information.

Also, it seems like a big aspect he's missing is that within each relevant
spectra, we've gotten pretty well tuned to reality. And that's simply because
oftentimes, fitness is highly correlated with perceiving reality. For example,
seeing all physical objects realistically is important for survival, since if
you can't see perceive certain physical objects, then predators/prey may take
advantage of the failure (e.g., zebras blending in with tall grass).

Is there some greater point I'm missing?

~~~
earljwagner
So, in other words,

"Man is the measure of all things" – Protagoras

"We see things not as they are. We see things as we are." attributed to Anaïs
Nin

~~~
grondilu
Also Democritus:

"By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold,
color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void."

or:

"We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to
the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the
body] and impinge upon it."

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Democritus](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Democritus)

~~~
dTal
Pretty heady, enlightened stuff for 2400 years ago.

------
IANAD
I wonder how many rationalists on HN this post will piss off before it falls
off the main page.

"Reality", "science", "fact", and "logic": these are all arbitrary concepts
and disciplines that are stuck in a limited worldview. There is no true
objectivity we can experience as humans.

Just because we don't experience something or it doesn't fit with what we
consider rational thought, it doesn't mean that that thing cannot exist.

However, we learn this truth from science itself- in seeing how other living
things experience life and react and how it is so different than how we
experience it- how we aren't made to be objective.

The means of showing us truth we've relied on is flawed. At this point, the
rationalist understands why Plato divides into thing and form- because form is
the only ideal that is an anchor when you realize that our experience is
unreliable:
[https://www.northampton.edu/Documents/Subsites/HaroldWeiss/I...](https://www.northampton.edu/Documents/Subsites/HaroldWeiss/Intro%20to%20Philosophy/russo_plato1.pdf)

But, then when you accept form as the ideal and reject things, you have
rejected everything we have to understand form. So, you fail to have anything
dependably rational left.

~~~
donatj
So the options are the world is rational and understandable, or there is no
truth, everything is a lie and we're living in a Lovecraftian horror where we
are physically incapable of understanding reality.

Presented with the two options I'm inclined to believe the prior.

\- If the latter is true and I believe the prior no vice.

\- If the prior is true and you believe the latter however no virtue. There's
no sense in making an attempt to understand the world. You're missing out on
everything. Just giving up on understanding.

I'll take the prior.

~~~
gonvaled
You shouldn't choose what you believe, you should accept what is.

Otherwise you should be believing in Gods (however mutually exclusive they may
be) since:

1) If you believe in God and it doesn't exist, no harm.

2) If you do not believe in God and it does exist, you go straight to Hell.

~~~
Vokrel
The set of all possible "Gods" includes deities who punish worship, who lie to
their worshippers, who are completely two-faced in their dealings with
mortals, who have completely random intentional urgings, who put everyone
through the torture of infinite fractal realities, and/or anything else that
throws the wrench in trying to rationally deduce the "goodness" of "God".

This is also compared with the possibility that humans are faggots who will
talk about absolute bullshit to make themselves feel better. No offense to gay
people but I'm talking about the mass of humanity that seeks to "feel" more
using ass-backwards strategies because they trust their idiotic culture too
much.

I'd prefer to remain silent until overwhelming proof forces me to consider "a
being of superior influence on this reality who resides outside of visible
reality". It could definitely exist (along with the things from the set of
known unknowns and unknown unknowns). But I'm betting more on humans being
faggots.

~~~
jambox888
===============>

4chan is that way

------
btilly
This is all very nice and abstract. But let's make it concrete.

Multiple studies have found that the more realistic we are about our
prospects, the more likely we are to be depressed. The more optimistic we are,
the better we are likely to do even though we are wrong.

As a result we have a constant bias towards believing that the world is likely
to turn out better than objective evidence would show. And on this evidence we
are biased to explore new things, have babies, and so on. Which improves our
evolutionary fitness. Even though we perceive and predict the world less
accurately.

A similar cognitive bias is towards seeing patterns where there is little
evidence that they exist. That is because if something is random or a pattern,
there is little cost to acting on random data if it isn't there, and a
concrete benefit to following it if it is. So we are pattern seeking animals
at the cost of potentially becoming convinced by astrology, ghosts, religion,
and a wide variety of other superstitions.

~~~
mthoms
I've always had this exact personal belief but have never seen any relevant
studies. Are you able to share any sources? Thanks.

~~~
btilly
Our tendency to see patterns is well-documented. See
[http://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Psychiatric-
Anna...](http://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Psychiatric-Annals-
Brains-Seek-Patterns.pdf) for one of many, many articles on the topic.

The issue of depression and realism is more controversial, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism).
I'm personally inclined to accept it.

------
fnovd
I think the title has it backwards here. Reality wasn't bred _out_ of us, it
was just never bred _in_.

------
samirillian
This isn't really much different from Kant's own critique of pure reason,
where he, following Hume, agrees that we cannot know the in-itself, and
redefines metaphysics as more epistemological than ontological. More recently,
but still long before this guy's TED talk, Plantinga had a very similar
argument.

Claiming that "Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us" is just a weird way to phrase
a logical problem, and it sneaks in the same naive realism that it claims to
critique.

~~~
woodandsteel
Kant and Hume are assuming a mind-body dualism as in Descartes.

A great many important philosophers in the last century or so have rejected
this. This includes Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, the later
Wittgenstein, Strawson, Putnam, and all the Pragmatists. And of course,
Aristotle in classic Greek philosophy.

~~~
woodandsteel
Oh, and by the way, Plantinga's argument is for the purpose of promoting
Christianity, but radical mind-body dualism is quite contrary to traditional
Christian belief.

------
h4nkoslo
This is kind of trivially obvious, confirmed by every human sense having a
different response curve than other animals, different species being able to
deal with different abstractions (eg, certain dogs being able to recognize
conditionals but not predicates) and so on.

I have to wonder if he's doing a Straussian thing and "really" talking about
selected-for responses to certain obvious truths particularly relevant to
evolutionary biologists.

~~~
Darge
>certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates

Could you elaborate on that, please? That sounds very interesting, but I
couldn't find anything on my own.

~~~
wahern
Try Googling for "Chrysippus' dog". That, at least, brings up hits like
[http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/DogLogic.pdf](http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/DogLogic.pdf).
Just reading that paper made me realize that there were at least two
dimensions in which the statement

    
    
      "different species being able to deal with different abstractions (eg, certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates)"
    

could be be misinterpreted. Assuming you were looking (as was I) for
experimental evidence supporting that specific statement, I'm guessing we'll
both be disappointed. But maybe not!

------
woodandsteel
Hoffman's argument makes sense when you are talking about bacteria. But who
thinks bacteria have a conscious understanding of reality?

More complex animals, and especially humans, collect an immense amount of
sense data, from multiple sources, and use it to construct a general view of
reality. It has to be accurate because they don't have a few, simple,
stereotyped response patterns. Rather they have extremely complex patterns,
highly customized to particular, unique circumstances, and the only way that
can work is if their image of the world is itself complex and fits reality.

Here is an example that is immensely more simple than what humans do in their
living: how could you design a software program to play chess if it was just
all of the form "when x, do y"? The only way you can do it is if you have a
representation of a chessboard and use it to plot out moves, and what the
opponent might do in response. Now think of how much more you have to know
about reality in order to, for instance, go shopping. Or run a software
startup.

~~~
woodandsteel
Hoffman goes wrong partly because he is violating some fundamental scientific
principles.

According to modern science, the world is organized in levels of complexity,
and for each higher level we get new phenomena that require new labels that
don't apply to the lower ones. So for instance, an election consists of
activity by human beings made of atoms, but to describe it in any meaningful
way we have to use terms that are not from physics, like candidates and
ballots.

In a similar way, when we move from the sensory and response mechanisms of
bacteria to first multiple cell organisms, and then ones with nerves and a
central nervous system, and then human beings, at each level we get phenomena
for which we need new, quite valid concepts, including accurate understanding
of reality.

~~~
woodandsteel
To make this a little clearer, I am saying the phenomena of having a
perception of reality requires very complex mechanisms that bacteria simply
don't have. Therefore to note that bacteria don't have a perception of reality
is simply irrelevant, and doesn't in any way prove humans don't. It's like
saying atoms don't reproduce, therefore animals don't either.

By the way, if, as Hoffman claims, human beings don't have a perception of
reality, then it would be meaningless to say that sometimes it is accurate and
sometimes it is inaccurate, and certainly not something that could be studied
scientifically. Does that seem really right?

~~~
woodandsteel
An important point here is that bacterial sensing is tightly efficient, with
the bacteria having only the absolute minimum needed to direct a simple
response at the right time.

Human perception, on the other hand, has a vast amount of excess. So for
instance, when you see a tree, you see hundreds of leaves, each with a fairly
complex shape, even though all of this is usually of no use. Our senses and
brains do this because with humans, you never know when some new situation
will arise where perception that is normally useless will be useful, and so it
makes sense to have vast excess in our reality perception capacities.

With bacteria, on the other hand, there are no novel situations, only a few
stereotyped ones arising over and over again, so excess capacity would be
useless and run counter to efficient survival.

~~~
woodandsteel
One more point. Hoffman claims he is making a scientific argument, and it is
based on scientific concepts like bacteria, sensing, and evolution. But if
humans can't know reality, then these concepts, developed by humans, are
false, and so his whole argument collapses. That is, if his argument is true,
then it is false.

Actually, he is really making a philosophical argument, one based in the
radical skepticism that has plagued many (but not all) Western philosophical
schools since Descartes, but dressing it up in some quite poor science.

------
aaron695
> What Hoffman's theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost
> always — win the evolution game.

It doesn't from the explanation in the article at all. It just states the
reality critter can't beat the fitness-tuned critter.

Evolution doesn't 'care' if you have extra useless things, you won't lose them
evolutionary. (Although if there is a energy or something cost it might 'care'
about this negative)

------
scythe
Is this argument circular?

Let's assume for a moment that someone believes that human beings can
"perceive reality". Adding the axiom that "evolutionary theory is mostly
correct" (which doesn't seem too bad), one concludes that because "perceiving
reality" would require a large expenditure of energy, it must be _necessary_
in order for optimal fitness, since if we are to believe it is with us, we
must have evolved to do it. Similarly, walking is "necessary". NB. "Perceiving
reality" seems to be defined by the person writing the question, which is a
conflict of interest.

(I leave out the interesting but undesirably complex hypothesis that some
strategies exist which do not involve perceiving reality but are not
accessible by evolution for unspecified reasons)

This argument takes off by constructing a fitness function where perceiving
reality is _unnecessary_. It then concludes by construction that the
perception of reality won't evolve. However, there is no real "theorem" here:
all that has happened is that it is now encoded in mathematical language that
this belief could be true or false.

------
kapv89
I have a phobia of insects(not if they are small enough for me to notice their
details), crabs, prawns etc. All the not-animal-like-life, to be honest.

One day, at a supermarket, a friend of mine teased me with a crab in her hand.
Later that day, we were discussing about this incident, and we realized that
both of us look at insects very differently.

She looks at insects etc as "things that move", ie, lacking of will, like a
toy or something. I look at them as creatures who I cannot empathize with, and
hence, whose motives I cannot understand. So they freak me out.

That conversation kind of felt like interfacing at the boundaries of our
consciousness

------
Techowl
A similar article about Hoffman was posted on HN in April, with quite a bit of
discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698)

------
dmytrish
I think that the point of view depicted in the article completely misses the
fact that we are active part of a reality we live in.

It looks like the article (I am not entitled to talk about the original
research, since I am not familiar with it by any means) unquestionably assumes
that there exists some "real" (platonic, mystical, static, eternal,
fundamental?) reality that we are unable to observe due to bounds of
evolution. What's the point of this assumption?

When I look around, I see things made by humans for humans using our ideas
about the human reality—is this reality "worse" or "less real" than some other
reality? Yes, we are far removed from, e.g., a reality of existence of a plant
or a bacteria, and the evolution drives us further from it.

Maybe it's the evolution process that creates very realities?

------
mbfg
One of the neat things (i think) is that the visual and tactile systems in our
bodies seem to always agree on what is perceived 'reality'. This on the
surface seems like an argument against this proposal. But of course we can
easily be fooling ourselves.

I once saw some experiments where they showed people some movies where the
sound was offset from the picture by some time shift, either too slow or too
fast. Within a surprisingly large range the mind could easily meld the two out
of sync signals together so that it appeared that they were synchronized. Of
course beyond the threshold that illusion fell apart, but still was pretty
interesting.

The weaving of still pictures of a movie into ... a movie is also an
interesting concept.

Maybe vision and tactile works the same way? Could one influence the other?

It's amazing how well our brains are built to pretend.

~~~
throwanem
I remember seeing a report of a study in which a fake arm, cleverly
manipulated within the subjects' fields of view, often succeeded in overriding
both tactile and proprioceptive senses - some of the subjects thought the fake
arm was _their_ arm, because they saw it doing what they expected their own
arm to do. As I recall, some subjects reported significant confusion and some
discomfort on recognizing the actual nature of events, and I should think
that's no wonder.

I don't have a cite to hand. I'll look for one if you like, but it's been so
long that you'd probably be able to find it at least as quickly as I could.
Fascinating stuff, in any case, and perhaps somewhat germane here.

~~~
kernelbandwidth
Maybe not the same source, but V.S. Ramachandran's book, Phantoms in the
Brain, covers his use of a set-up like that to help patients recover from
phantom limb syndrome. Shockingly effective for what is, essentially, just an
illusionist's trick.

------
anotheryou
I'd think abstraction mimics many truths.

It makes sense to grasp concepts like "huge/small amount of something" and it
might even be less effort than hard wiring much and little red to the same
neuron.

Also seeing "too much red" and "too little red" as the same, is no
misconception and still seeing the truth. You won't be fooled it no thinking
there is no red, when there is a lot, you would probably perceive too much or
too little red as "in the danger zone" which is a true statement either way
(given that too much and too little red is most often dangerous for your
fitness).

------
goblin89
The paper “Objects of consciousness” by Donald D. Hoffman[0][1] is an
interesting read—if only for its attempt to build a formal model of
consciousness and define what it means to “observe”, in the quantum sense.

[0]
[http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full)
[1] Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829085)

~~~
hprotagonist
It's so cute when neuroscientists try to be philosophers. They're so poorly
cut out for the job.

(He needs to read more Husserl.)

~~~
redial
They said the same thing of physicist, biologists, geologists, chemists, etc.
before, that is until they found themselves _irrelevant_. I suspect in time,
it will happen again.

~~~
hprotagonist
which they is this?

~~~
throwanem
Philosophers, I think. But the field as a whole seems to treat relevance as an
afterthought.

~~~
hprotagonist
in part this is because whenever something relevant comes up, it gets a name
that is not philosophy.

Also because we're still shaking off perception of philosophers as useless
navel-gazing victorians; post WWI, the field has become substantially more
akin to formal math and logic.

------
keithwhor
The problem here is that the concept presented isn't scientifically rigorous
as applied to human consciousness and perception. One, fitness simulations are
reductive by design and trying to draw analogies from them to explain complex
subjective phenomena is a stretch. Two, we need a testable hypothesis - I
haven't seen one presented here.

It's an interesting _concept_ , but the author provides us an example - an
organism responding to a fitness function optimizing for Y resource where X <
Y < Z doesn't distinguish between X and Z, just that X and Z are both "bad" \-
reducing complex quantities to binary outcomes. To then suggest physical
reality could be "hidden" in these sorts of reductions without an analogy or
testable example just seems philosophical.

The best supportive example I can come up with is - we obviously don't see
"reality." Visible light, for example, is only a tiny fraction of the entire
electromagnetic spectrum. Our ability to perceive and differentiate
wavelengths in this range has been selected for. But language and formal logic
--- abstract relationships, mathematics --- seems to be something we've
_discovered_ that describes a Universe of relationships we can't possibly
entirely perceive. But we still _utilize_ this reality, as we've incidentally
discovered the rest of the EM spectrum by its interactions with other aspects
of reality we _can_ measure and the ability to describe abstract relationships
(language).

So I guess I'm a bit confused, and I admit ignorance here --- my 2c here is an
off-the-cuff response to the article provided without digging deeper. Is the
argument there are rules and laws of the Universe we can't possibly understand
or perceive (physical constants, relationships)? If so --- that's plausibly
true, but if something doesn't interact with the Universe in a way we can
measure, it may as well not exist. Or is the argument that the way we describe
and interpret the Universe (language, logic) is inherently flawed because it's
been developed or "discovered" based on selection for the ability to use
language between extreme quantities of "language resources" we can't possibly
measure? The latter is interesting, because it's perhaps a unique perspective
on mental illness and drug hallucinations / delusions (schizophrenia, LSD) but
still _not testable_.

Just musings. Neat philosophically. Would like to see something concrete here,
but seems to be a prime candidate for circular reasoning - we can never test
this hypothesis because we can never know what is, by definition, unknowable
to us.

~~~
pixl97
>Is the argument there are rules and laws of the Universe we can't possibly
understand or perceive (physical constants, relationships)?

No, probably not. But instead that our filter biases make us miss most of that
invisible universe. Which brings us to the point, what else are we missing? We
did not know of most of the universe until we invented the scientific method
to overcome the biases of our own mind.

> The latter is interesting, because it's perhaps a unique perspective on
> mental illness and drug hallucinations / delusions (schizophrenia, LSD) but
> still not testable.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel)

A term coined by the inventor of LSD, and it seems unlikely it's a
coincidence.

~~~
tamana
Hofmann invented LSD, not Leary or Hoffman

------
0003
>"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."

See Blindsight by Peter Watts.

[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

------
hprotagonist
> While there clearly is a world separate from us, Hoffman says, evolution
> does not give us access to that.

Ok. So what? If we can't get out of "the cage", but manipulations of state
still "work", isn't this moot?

I happen to think we _can_ get out of the cage -- that there _are_
nonspatiotemporal entities we can perceive. We usually call them "integers".

------
dkarapetyan
The water example showcases the germ of the idea pretty well. Stimuli don't
need to be in 1-1 or even linear correspondence with physiological responses
to those stimuli. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding his argument.

------
Elrac
I've only read the linked article, not the more in-depth source mentioned
there. But based on just that information, I'm deeply unimpressed by Hoffman's
work. From where I stand, his idea is both poorly informed (as in, it seems
like he's not made a credible effort to examine his premises) and, ironically,
proven wrong by reality. That's a pretty contentious statement for a non-
expert to make about a presumed expert, so I'll try to explain myself.

First, like some other commenters, I'm happy to concede that at a trivial
level H. is quite correct. The world around us as perceived by the unaided
human is mapped inside his brain to a vague, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes
obscured and very often distorted image of reality. There are entire books on
optical illusions; the trade of stage magic and various kinds of crime rely on
systematic human misperceptions.

There's an obvious, perfectly good reason for this: the human system of vision
is simply not a pixel-perfect 3D camera connected to petabytes of fast digital
storage, and the same applies to our other senses. Given a perfect recording
of the world at least in our vicinities, abundant energy and sufficient time,
we could come up with highly effective survival strategies. But the real world
doesn't afford us these luxuries, so evolution crafted us into organisms tuned
for a reasonable approximation to an optimal compromise of this ideal. Thus,
our mental model of the world is a crude abstraction, with survival-relevant
information emphasized and other details brushed over. This is not a survival-
optimized transformation of reality but a constraint-enforced one. A highly
sophisticated system built on the shoestring budget that nature affords us.
It's proven to be superior at survival to many competing models but I don't
agree it works better for misrepresenting reality. Rather, it works _at all_
by necessarily sacrificing detail and accuracy in representing reality.

But none of this supports H.'s contention that we are blithely unaware of
reality, or unable to apprehend it. There is a reality out there, and the
depth and accuracy of our model is a function of how much time and energy
we're willing to expend on mapping it. A given beach, sharply defined, has a
finite and very countable set of grains of sand. If we really, really cared to
know, we could build machines to count them for us. Similarly, we can or could
know the shape of every coastline of every continent. Some day, humanity may
have high-quality reality mappings of every planet within X light-years of our
solar system. We can in principle understand the function of every gene in our
genomes. We don't have to talk about how we perceive colors, because
spectroscopes can tell us the exact, reproducible wavelength of every beam of
light emitted by a given object. We could exchange this information with
aliens having completely different bodies and brains, should we discover them,
and if their science is as advanced as ours and we're careful to define our
terms and measurements on observable nature, we'd have a common understanding
of that reality.

But how do we know that our reality is real? How do we ascertain truth? I say
we can base a pretty solid epistemology on a confluence of observed phenomena.
If we encounter an obstacle we can't see through, if it's grey in color,
weighs about 6 tons, stands on 4 legs, has a long nose, occasionally moves
around and eats bananas by the bushel, then we can safely assume we've found
an elephant. If it's a chunk of some yellow shiny solid that displaces 18
grams of water per cc, and samples drilled from arbitrary locations in it
uniformly have atomic weights of X (?), melting points of Y degrees, fail to
react with sulphuric acid and show a chromatographic signature consistent with
that of gold, then by golly, it's a chunk of gold!

As humanity, not as individual naked humans, we've amassed a large and ever
growing body of knowledge about the world around us, and (fortunately for our
sanity and our ability to make sense of reality) the properties of objects and
phenomena in our environment are consistent and convergent. There are no 1
gram elephants, there is no sodium that doesn't react violently with water,
there are no snowflakes whose basic structure isn't hexagonal. We know that
our image of reality is good because we're able to extrapolate from what we
know and observe to what we haven't observed yet, to make predictions about
what we'll observe and have those predictions prove mostly true.

The author and his (perhaps coincidental and unintended) idol Plantinga fail
to acknowledge humanity's ability to create models of reality of whose
accuracy (within limits) we can be confident because they're part of a huge
network of mutually supporting sub-models with excellent predictive power.
And, more importantly, that our ability to create such mappings is a human
ability that we have evolved to have. A goodly part of this evolution is
cultural rather than biological, and a goodly part of our senses are
mechanical and external rather than built into our wetware, but our evolution
and that of our apparatus is quite natural insofar as everything that we
humans, natural beings in a natural world, are natural too and a part of
nature.

Hoffman's conjecture is completely, utterly wrong: Evolution has in fact
"bred" in humans the ability to discover reality, and this ability has
incidentally given us dominion, at least in the short term and for whatever
that's worth, over all other species on the planet, including our own
ancestors and close cousins. Our ability to apprehend reality has made us so
fit that, barring various possible disasters, we could survive the death of
the Sun and Earth.

If Hoffman wants to support his claim that a creature who views too much and
too little water as similar instances of "bad amounts of water" would display
a higher degree of evolutionary fitness than us, I feel he has his work cut
out for him.

------
hubrix
there are some concrete examples of this though. we see the visible spectrum,
a particular subset of EM spectrum that's a pretty good enough abstraction to
get around in the world, it's a heuristic for the spectrum that's "good
enough". we hear a subset of the audio spectrum, it's "good enough". etc
etc...

------
SubiculumCode
meh. These are not new ideas, and probably seem rather obvious to those who
think about evolution and fitness functions. I suppose however, there is some
good in making this point more salient to cognitive science theoriticians
however.

~~~
SubiculumCode
and why was that worth -2 moderation? I AM a cognitive neuroscientist; I
certainly am not denegrating them. Cognitive scientists are used to
contrasting percepts with objective reality, hence all the facinating
illusions they love to demonstrate. Evolutionary theorists are used to
counterintuitive ideas that result from putting fitness functions at the
forefront. I would not have thought that putting the two together is a new
idea.

~~~
empath75
Because not everyone had time to think deeply about every field that everyone
on HN specializes in and it's sort of pointless to complain that an article
about your specialty doesn't teach you personally anything new.

~~~
SubiculumCode
To be specific, I was not conplaining about the article. It is an interesting
subject. I was providing context for those reading the popularized article
which tends to oversell these things. but whatevs

------
powera
This is complete and total bullshit.

I'd love to see any demonstration of a model of an intelligent organism with
no sense of reality at all but that still functions properly. Barring any
evidence, the whole article is simply "if you assume the impossible, then
magical unicorn rainbows". (or else it's just extrapolating claims about the
intelligence of amoebas way too literally)

And remember: They laughed at Bozo the Clown too.

~~~
tristanj
> _I 'd love to see any demonstration of a model of an intelligent organism
> with no sense of reality at all but that still functions properly_

That is a strawman argument. Hoffman's actual theory is that "under evolution
by natural selection, 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 is
just tuned to fitness." This is taken from the more in-depth in the Quanta
interview [0] linked in the submitted article.

[0] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-
arg...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-
against-reality/)

~~~
Retric
Which lacks predictive power. Humans have a blind spot because they can
operate just fine while having a blind spot. However other organisms don't
have a blind spot thus blind spots are not selected for.

The missing piece is something where getting the wrong information has value.
But, that's harder than simply incorrectly interpreting information.

~~~
tristanj
> _Humans have a blind spot because they can operate just fine while having a
> blind spot. However other organisms don 't have a blind spot thus blind
> spots are not selected for._

I'm not quite clear on your point of view, can you clarify? The phrases "blind
spots" and "other organisms" are very vague. I'll try to rephrase it into
something manageable. This is what I think you are saying:

    
    
        Humans [cannot see behind their heads] because they can operate just fine while
        [not seeing behind their heads]. However, [other species] [can see behind their
        heads], thus [seeing behind one's head] is not selected for.
    

The "other organisms" are other species, as logically, the "other organisms"
don't have "a blind spot" and therefore could not be human, which do have "a
blind spot".

Do let know if this is correct, and I'll get back to you.

> _The missing piece is something where getting the wrong information has
> value_

I'm unclear where this disagrees. That's exactly the point of Hoffman's
theory: an (sometimes) incorrect view of the world may have more value than
the actual (correct) view of the world.

~~~
Retric
The optic nerve blocks part of you vision, which you are not aware of.
[https://visionaryeyecare.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/eye-
test-f...](https://visionaryeyecare.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/eye-test-find-
your-blind-spot-in-each-eye/)

Squid for example use a different arrangement without that hole. So, while
people are not getting accurate information, the gap is arbitrary and not
selected for by evolution.

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hclivess
This is a known fact. No clue why this has 12k clicks.

