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June 10 - September 23, 2023
That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring.
Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don’t need truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
I take my perceptions seriously, but not literally. This book is about why you should do the same, and why that matters.
Your algorithm, in a fraction of a second, summarizes its complex analysis with a simple feeling—ranging from hot to not.
Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.
Our senses report fitness, and an error in this report could ruin your life. So our senses use “error-correcting codes” to detect and correct errors. Spacetime is just a format our senses use to report fitness payoffs and to correct errors in these reports.
Each precious calorie you burn on perception is a calorie you must find and take from its owner—perhaps a potato or an irate wildebeest. Calories can be difficult and dangerous to procure, so evolution has shaped our senses to be misers.
Perhaps the universe itself is a massive social network of conscious agents that experience, decide, and act. If so, consciousness does not arise from matter; this is a big claim that we will explore in detail. Instead, matter and spacetime arise from consciousness—as a perceptual interface.
“How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”
‘A motion became a feeling!’
why some physical systems are conscious and others are not.
why some physical systems are alive and others are not.
the separated left and the right hemispheres may be conscious simultaneously in different and even conflicting mental experiences that run along in parallel.”
We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activity—or computer activity, or any other kind of physical activity—could cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience.
Hand waves about identity, emergence, or attentional processes that describe other brain processes are no substitute for precise laws or principles that make quantitative predictions.
Or perhaps we were short-changed by evolution, and lack the concepts needed to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness. Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness?
What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.
I don’t try to solve the mystery of consciousness. But I do try, in the coming chapters, to dethrone a belief that hinders a solution.
Reproductive success depends on collecting fitness points. Beauty tells us what and where they are.
Genes don’t elbow each other directly. They do it by proxy. They boot up bodies and minds—phenotypes—and let them duke it out.
Beauty is our best estimate of reproductive potential.
So we expect that natural selection has shaped men to find women most beautiful at about twenty. This leads to a clean prediction: men over twenty should prefer younger women; men under twenty should prefer older women.
machinations of genes fly under the radar of conscious experience and foster, but do not force, a choice of action.
Exaptation, in which a trait evolved for one function can co-opt a new function, is commonplace in nature.
With clever detective work and theorizing, your brain interprets a jumble of numbers as a coherent world, and that interpretation is what you see—the best theory your brain could muster.
He assumed that our ideas-of-things truly describe the thing-in-itself, so that the same vocabulary describes both. I rejected this assumption as implausible. But Crick thought it applied even to objects, space, and time.
I also doubted that the language of our perceptions—the language of space, time, shapes, colors, textures, smells, tastes, and so on—can frame a true description of what is there.
The idea is that perceptions that are truer, that better match the state of the objective world, are thereby fitter. So natural selection shapes our perceptions to be truer.
It’s not that on occasion a perception exaggerates, underestimates, or otherwise goes awry, it’s that the lexicon of our perceptions, including space, time, and objects, is powerless to describe reality.
Our minds were shaped by natural selection to solve life-and-death problems. Full stop. They were not shaped to commune with correctness. Whether our beliefs and perceptions happen to be true is a question that requires careful study.
Does natural selection favor true perceptions? Is it possible that we did not evolve to see truly—that our perceptions of space, time, and objects do not reveal reality as it is?
Can we ask, precisely, if natural selection favors true perceptions? Can we expect the theory of evolution to render a verdict?
The same is true of the FBT Theorem. It allows us to guess, based on principles of probability, how many creatures will evolve to see reality as it is. The key insight of the theorem is simple: the probability that fitness payoffs reflect any structure in the world plummets to zero as the complexity of the world and perception soars.
Does this mean that our perceptions lie to us? Not really. I wouldn’t say that our senses lie, any more than the desktop of my computer lies when it portrays an email as a blue, rectangular icon. Our senses, like the desktop interface, are simply doing their job, which is not to reveal the truth, but to guide useful actions. The FBT Theorem reveals that as the senses grow more complex, they have less chance to disclose any truths about objective reality.
The reason that adaptation is not a curious anomaly, but instead appears at all levels of perceptual processing, is that tracking fitness payoffs is not a curious anomaly—it is the whole game.
the FBT Theorem does not specify what the content of perceptual experiences might be. It simply concludes that experiences, whatever their contents, are not veridical.
Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: “We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.”
new metaphor of perception: each perceptual system is a user interface, like the desktop of a laptop. This interface is shaped by natural selection; it can vary from species to species, and even from creature to creature within a species. I call this the interface theory of perception (ITP).
The blue icon does not deliberately misrepresent the true nature of the file. Representing that nature is not its aim. Its job, instead, is to hide that nature—to spare you tiresome details on transistors, voltages, magnetic fields, logic gates, binary codes, and gigabytes of software. If you had to inspect that complexity, and forge your email out of bits and bytes, you might opt instead for snail mail. You pay good money for an interface to hide all that complexity—all that truth, which would interfere with the task at hand. Complexity bites: the interface keeps its fangs at bay.
Ignorance of reality can aid command of reality. This claim, out of context, is counterintuitive. But for an interface it’s obvious.
Perception is not about truth, it’s about having kids.
ITP tells us that they code instead for an interface that hides the truth about objective reality and provides us with icons—physical objects with colors, textures, shapes, motions, and smells—that allow us to manipulate that unseen reality in just the ways we need to survive and reproduce. Physical objects in spacetime are simply our icons in our desktop.
Our perceptions of the moon and other objects were not shaped to reveal objective reality, but to disclose the one thing that matters in evolution—fitness payoffs. Physical objects are satisficing displays of crucial information about payoffs that govern our survival and reproduction. They are data structures that we create and destroy.
won’t grab a rattlesnake, for the same reason I won’t carelessly drag a paintbrush icon across my artwork in a graphics app. Not because I take the icon literally—there is no paintbrush in my laptop. But I do take it seriously.
So yes, if I see a rattlesnake writhing my way, I must take it seriously. But it doesn’t follow that there is something brown, sleek, and sharp of tooth when no one observes. Snakes are just icons of our interface that guide adaptive behaviors, such as fleeing.
one implication of ITP is that competition between predator and prey can trigger an evolutionary arms race between interfaces and interface hacks (such as masquerading as a dropping).
I open my eyes and construct a spoon; that icon now exists, and I can use it to wrangle payoffs. I close my eyes. My spoon, for the moment, ceases to exist because I cease to construct it. Something continues to exist when I look away, but whatever it is, it’s not a spoon, and not any object in spacetime.
we all construct our icons in similar ways. As members of one species, we share an interface
Indeed, there is no need to posit any physical object, or a spacetime, that exists when no one observes. Space and time themselves are simply the format of our interface, and physical objects are icons that we create on the fly as we attend to different options for collecting fitness payoffs. Objects are not preexisting entities that force themselves upon our senses. They are solutions to the problem of reaping more payoffs than the competition, from the multitude of payoffs on offer.
They are not optimal solutions for grabbing payoffs, just satisficing solutions that let us nab a tad more than the competition.
