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trifles.”
One trifle in the search for beauty is a feature of the human eye called the limbal ring,
genes can lie about fitness.
mendacious
surreptitiously
The lies of genes in the quest for fitness can cross the border from cynical to sinister.
conspicuous
Beauty is our best estimate of reproductive potential.
unfettered
compunction,
Fitness points are the coin of the realm: the more one collects, the greater one’s chance to succeed in reproduction.
Machiavellian genes nab fitness points, not as honest wages, but as filthy lucre.
dearth
Fitness points depend on the organism, its state, and its action.
judiciously:
conceited.”
finagle
glean
limbal ring,
brevity
Exaptation,
If our senses evolved and were shaped by natural selection, then spacetime and physical objects, like beauty, reside in the eye of the beholder.
They inform us about fitness—not about truth or objective reality.
veridical
I think perception to be like science: a process of constructing theories given the available evidence. We see the theories we believe. As you say, “seeing is believing.”
Neuroscientists assure us that each time we open our eyes, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses spring into action.
Roughly one-third of the brain’s cortex, one-third of our most advanced computing power, is engaged in vision—
The standard reply by neuroscientists is that the brain is constructing, in real time, our perceptions of objects such as apples and waterfalls.1 It constructs them because the eye itself does not see apples and waterfalls; instead, it has about 130 million photoreceptors, and each of them sees just one thing: how many photons of light it just captured.
“seeing is an active, constructive process,” that what we see “is a symbolic interpretation of the world,” that “in fact we have no direct knowledge of objects in the world,” and that seeing is believing your best theory.
But then I set up my paradox. If we construct everything we see, and if we see neurons, then we construct neurons. But what we construct doesn’t exist until we construct it (too bad; it would be much cheaper to move into my dream mansion before constructing it). So neurons don’t exist until we construct them.
The idea-of-the-sun does not exist prior to its construction—but the sun-in-itself did!”
solipsism,
According to this solipsism, if I see you then you exist, but only as my experience. When I close...
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qualia.”
The term qualia is sometimes used by philosophers to refer to subjective, conscious experiences—
perturbation
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.
those of our predecessors who saw reality more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw it less accurately. They were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for more accurate perceptions.
We are the offspring of those who, in each generation, saw more accurately. So we can be confident that, after thousands of such generations, we see reality as it is. Not all of reality, of course. Just the parts that matter for survival in our niche.
and accurate view of reality, exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively.”
More deeply, I doubted that selection favors perceptions that could even frame true descriptions of reality.
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.
very little objective information about the world is obtained. The information is all very subjective.”
“it is extremely unlikely that the fly has any explicit representation of the visual world around him—no true conception of a surface, for example.” But he thought that, despite its failure to represent the world, the fly could still survive because it can, for instance, “chase its mate with sufficiently frequent success.”8
natural selection can favor simple, subjective perceptions, that don’t represent objective reality, if they do guide adaptive action.
When does natural selection favor veridical perceptions over subjective perceptions?
“Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.”
computing the truth is costly in time and energy, and so we often use heuristics that risk being false or out of date.
Fitness Beats Truth
irremediably
