
Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are? - nopinsight
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans-evolve-to-see-things-as-they-really-are/
======
GeorgeOrr
I think the author of this article kind of missed the points being made by
Hoffman. For instance, he asks:

"But how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place?"

Sort of presupposes that it does look like a "real" snake. The icon doesn't
necessarily have to look like anything ... we just have to evolve in a way
that gets us to jump out of the way. It's the jumping out of the way that is
adaptive, not the similarity to anything outside the system trying to survive.

To use Hoffman's analogy, it's like asking why do files on a desktop look like
the files in the computer. They don't, they are useful interfaces however.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
To revisit the 'file' idea: the 'save' icon is an idealized floppy disk. But
generations(!) have passed who never saw one. So now its just an icon.

This seems to happen to all written symbols. They quickly lose representative
form, and become symbols only. I don't think most Chinese characters look
anything like a house or a sun any more; the question is moot.

~~~
wlesieutre
The 'save' icon is fading away pretty quickly in common usage. Modern software
is trending toward changes saved in realtime (driven by phones, also seen on
OS X and web). When I write a note, I just make a new note, type in it, and
close the app.

My favorite example of old-timey icons is 'phone'.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=phone+icon&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=phone+icon&tbm=isch)

Still used everywhere, but phones just look like ▯ now.

~~~
benjarrell
The phone icon is from AIGA: [http://www.aiga.org/symbol-
signs/](http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/)

------
cokernel
I don't know why a theory has to be labeled "new" to be worth discussing. (I'm
know I'm hyperfocusing on Shermer's phrase "a new theory", sorry.)

Hoffman's argument is remarkably close to Plantinga's (1993) evolutionary
argument against naturalism, and Plantinga himself asserted, rightly or
wrongly, that "Darwin himself had worries" about the compatibility of natural
selection with the ability to reach true conclusions. And of course, the
notion of "percepts act[ing] as a species-specific user interface" was
discussed in voluminous detail by Kant.

Just to be clear, I don't have any problems with Hoffman proposing this idea,
and I don't have any problems with Shermer criticizing it. What I don't like
is the suggestion that this is somehow an idea that hasn't already been
discussed for centuries.

Edit: I guess I should always make sure I've eaten something before posting.
This came out angrier than I intended.

~~~
tpeo
Well, there's no escaping it. Either a debate solved, forgotten, or
rediscovered by another field and clothed in new jargon. It just goes on like
this until it transcends it's cycles of scholarship.

The particular expression "interface icon", for instance, might have been
equivalent to the word "representation" to 18th century psychologists if they
had GUIs.

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joe_the_user
If Hoffman's argument is _simply_ that humans don't see reality "as it is",
it's clearly true but not very interesting - of course perception is flawed
and a simple imperfection can be systematically corrected. Each moment, our
visual system receives a distorted image of a given object and the system
combines these to make a more "exact" image. We have created artificial aids
to extend this process, again correcting immediate inaccuracies. The
difference between humans and beetles that mate with brown bottles [1] is that
humans can (sometimes) correct our sensory perceptions over time (plus
Hoffman's use of "evolution's equations" in his video seems meaningless since
in the abstract one can assign fitness to whatever quality one wants).

The serious problems come in with systematic errors - especially for
philosophy which has often relied internal reflection. We know about optical
illusions and mirages. If there are higher-order things that only do we "not
know that we don't know" but ideas/approaches/beliefs that we tend to not be
aware of even when they are called to our attention. And we in fact know about
many bias humans make[1]. It would have been more interesting if Hoffman
focused his attention on these. Then again, his own biases might have
prevented this.

[1]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_a...](https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language=en#t-504084)
[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias)

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gshubert17
I'm reminded of the fly-bat-worm example from Anathem [0]. It seems to me that
the way things appear to our consciousness reflect a computationally easy
(relatively easy, for our nervous systems) way to integrate different sense
perceptions; say, sight, sound, and touch.

[0] excerpts from an interview with Neal Stephenson,
[http://www.edrants.com/segundo/neal-stephenson-
bss-245/](http://www.edrants.com/segundo/neal-stephenson-bss-245/)

~~~
ubernostrum
All of the philosophy in Anathem is just shuffling of names and descriptions
of real work by real-world philosophers.

The "Sconic thought" of Anathem is mostly Kant (as is the discussion of
beauty, which is almost a literal quotation of Kant on the sublime); the "fly-
bat-worm", and wondering what it would be like to be a bat and experience the
world through its senses is a nice allusion to Thomas Nagel.

Back when I first read Anathem I kept a running set of notes mapping the
book's presentation of philosophy to the real-world thinkers and schools they
corresponded to. Might have to dig it up again.

~~~
gshubert17
Stephenson says in the interview that the fly-bat-worm is from Husserl. I see
the link to Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?"

[http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf](http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf)

~~~
ubernostrum
I didn't do enough Husserl, so Nagel was what I went to with "what's it like
to be a bat".

I will say it's very clear that Stephenson read his Kant when prepping to
write Anathem; as a basic layperson's introduction to Kant's critical
philosophy, the book is quite good.

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fallingfrog
Yeah, I think the author is missing the point. The distortions aren't so crude
as a beer bottle, but they are there. Human beings see the world mostly in
terms of tools, people, and most of all narrative arc. You think of your life
as having a beginning, middle, and end, it all forms a cohesive story and
events happen to push the story forward. But of course that's a lie we tell
ourselves, in fact we're just survival machines. For other animals the central
abstractions are different; watch cats closely enough and you'll see that they
are blind to tools and narrative but mostly just see food, terrain and other
cats. That's why they walk on your laptop- they have no way to encapsulate the
concept of a "tool" in their mental world. It's just terrain.

~~~
chillacy
This is the point I was hoping others would bring up. The base reality is that
we're all atoms and energy, and there isn't a clear boundary between the water
in your body and the water you're swimming in, and (to quote Dr Manhattan) a
recently deceased body has as just many atoms as it had when the body was
alive 10 minutes ago.

On top of this we've built all these abstractions... like how to socially
interact, how to recognize membranes as a face, etc. (also interesting: those
with severe autism seem to lack some of these abstractions)

When buddhists speak of seeing reality or things as they really are, they
speak of discarding these abstractions and seeing raw experience.

I started learning how to draw because part of the process is discarding these
abstractions (oh that's an eye, I know how eyes look) and instead drawing in
terms of shapes and lines: moving down, closer to physical reality. This book
has been very interesting for this: [http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-
Brain-Definitive/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-
Definitive/dp/1585429201)

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NoMoreNicksLeft
> ITP is well worth serious consideration and testing, but I have my doubts.
> First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive?

It's like the author has never listened to anyone speak about politics. If you
see distorted reality, you have access to some high-quality college-aged twits
as mates. (Or at church, depending on your political preferences.)

There are too many absurd beliefs to list that, if you can talk yourself into
them, open up large new social circles and the reproductive opportunities that
go with that.

~~~
chillacy
Hah politics is a fun one. There are so many different opinions, and everyone
thinks they've got the right answer. I guess it's something similar to how
every religion thinks they're the right one.

Psychology tells us that this happens because we tend to form opinions first
and find facts to support our existing opinions while our brain ignores
contrary evidence. But I wonder why that evolved in the first place... it
doesn't seem like that helps survival. Maybe social cohesion?

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hcarvalhoalves
> To test his theory, Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary computer
> simulations in which digital organisms whose perceptual systems are tuned
> exclusively for truth are outcompeted by those tuned solely for fitness.
> Because natural selection depends only on expected fitness, evolution shaped
> our sensory systems toward fitter behavior, not truthful representation.

So, this simulation required defining a truthiness function to compare against
a fitness function.

Where it doesn't make sense to me: what a "truthiness" function looks like?

If we _do_ know how to define such function (even in the context of a
simulation), we gain no new insight from the simulation; if we _do not_ know,
then it's not unexpected a fitness function performs better than a flawed
truthiness function, and there's also no new insight from the simulation.

Sounds like circular reasoning to me (I guess that's expected when you're
dealing with epistemology).

------
Puts
"Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views."

What happened to hyperlinks? :p

------
asgard1024
I think he is quite right, but the real blind spots are way higher in the
human thought than object representation. Perhaps that's how it has to be, at
the very top level of cognition, there is no other mechanism for correcting
errors, except perhaps somewhat following behavior of other people, which may
also be completely foolish (or may be deliberately obscured).

I just commented here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10460022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10460022)
Maybe, just like the beetle looks for a good bottle, we need a good narrative
(or friend recommendation) to find the news or idea interesting.

Or another example, many believe in free markets, despite evidence (which can
be interpreted as an argument both for and against free markets) that people
(including the believers) don't want to participate in free markets.

The thing called "ego" often seems to act against the true reality. It would
be my prime candidate for the blind spot in human thought.

~~~
chillacy
> the real blind spots are way higher in the human thought than object
> representation

Ah yea, the fun stuff like cognitive biases. One famous example is priming,
which introduces time dependencies that most people do not pay attention to
(when asked they believe that their decisions were not influenced by a past
event):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_\(psychology\))

Kahneman discusses that and more in Thinking Fast & Slow

~~~
asgard1024
Not quite, I think even most cognitive biases can be corrected at higher level
of thought. It's more like cognitive dissonances and the strategies you use to
cope with them, but it's hard to tell without knowing the architecture of the
brain.

~~~
chillacy
Sure, I think you can attempt to correct for if you know about them, but
that's still extra work, and it's still compensation that you can over or
undershoot. And then of course they don't really teach this in public schools,
so most people just aren't aware. I do think we're doing an okay job in some
areas, like pilot training, the scientific method, etc. But we're doing a
terrible job in other important fields, like politics

------
tmalsburg2
This idea is hardly surprising for anyone familiar with neural networks. If
you train a deep auto-encoder (optimized for a truthful representation) you
get a different set of abstract feature detectors than when you train a deep
net that maps the perceptual input to some behavioral code.

------
homulilly
There's no such thing as true reality since even the idea of reality is part
of our survival mechanism.

~~~
nathan_long
> There's no such thing as true reality

Interesting. When you say "there's no such thing as X", aren't you imagining a
sphere of existence in which, whether we want it to or not, "X" does not
appear?

Would you not call that sphere of existence "reality"?

If you're saying we can't perceive reality, well, that's what's being argued
about in the article. If you're saying reality doesn't exist, you're
contradicting yourself.

To put it another way, "there's no such thing as truth" is a claim about
what's true. Imagine that you say "there's no such thing as truth" and I say
"yes there is". What can you say? "You're wrong"? I would reply, "if I can be
wrong, it means there is a Real Truth for my statement to contradict."

~~~
shkkmo
Or he could be viewing the phrase "true reality" as a linguistic construct
without a referent. This even makes sense since 'truth' is more of a property
of represenations of reality rather than a property of reality itself.

> What can you say? "You're wrong"?

I could say "ok, show truth to me or explain why you think truth exists"

I could also say "What value (fitness) does believing that assertion provide
me"?

Obviously, if you assume that truth is necessary to evaluate statements or
beliefs, then stating that truth doesn't exist will lead you to
contradictions. However, there are plenty of other methods of evaluation are
frequently used.

I would in fact argue argue that 'truth' is very rarely directly among the
properties of an idea that we commonly use when evaluate it. The reputation of
the source, coherence with other beliefs, effects on social identity, and
cognitive efficiency seem to be the most common properties.

~~~
nathan_long
> I could say "ok, show truth to me or explain why you think truth exists"

The idea that I can explain or argue anything presupposes that some things are
true and other things can be shown to follow logically from them or be
disproved by contradiction.

> I would in fact argue argue that 'truth' is very rarely directly among the
> properties of an idea that we commonly use when evaluate it.

Whether people commonly seek truth is a separate question from whether truth
exists. "Do people evaluate ideas based on whether they're true or whether
they make them feel good?" is a valid question, and you may be right in your
answer. But look - "you may be right" means "your description may conform to
the actual truth." We just can't even form sentences without assuming that
some things are true and others aren't.

~~~
shkkmo
> The idea that I can explain or argue anything presupposes that some things
> are true and other things can be shown to follow logically from them or be
> disproved by contradiction.

The idea that communication is dependent on pre-existing notions of truth and
logic is flatly false. Now you might presuppose those notions when you
communicate, but that doesn't make that presupposition necessary for
communication.

> Whether people commonly seek truth is a separate question from whether truth
> exists.

True :). I'm not trying to convince you that truth doesn't exist. I'm trying
to convince you that you can evaluate the phrase "truth does not exist"
without pre-supposing the existence of truth. This is because you can (and
people commonly do) evaluate such a phrase on attributes other than their
'truth'.

The phrase "you may be right" can mean all KINDS of things from "I don't have
a definitive counter argument" to "It is possible your statement is true" to
"I don't want to argue about that anymore".

I think you are too focused on how you tend to perceive the world and
communicate about it. People don't all think and talk the same way you do and
assuming that they do is doing them and yourself a disservice.

------
cowardlydragon
"First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive?"

Reality is depressing.

~~~
RobertoG
Resources constrains. Unnecessary details are pruned.

(depression is probably adaptive).

