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purview
impartial
natural selection drives true perceptions to extinction.
natural selection drives true perceptions to swift extinction.
The very language of our perceptions—space, time, and physical objects—is simply the wrong language to describe objective reality.
Fitness is no mirror of the world. Instead, fitness depends in complex ways on the state of the world, the state of the organism, and the frequencies of strategies.
perturbation)
conjectured
Truth sees the structure of objective reality as best as possible; Fitness sees none of objective reality, but is tuned to the relevant fitness payoffs—payoffs that depend on objective reality, but also on the organism, its state, and its action.
FBT THEOREM: Fitness drives Truth to extinction with probability at least (N–3)/(N–1).
Consider an eye with ten photoreceptors, each having two states. The FBT Theorem says the chance that this eye sees reality is at most two in a thousand. For twenty photoreceptors, the chance is two in a million; for forty photoreceptors, one in ten billion; for eighty, one in a hundred sextillion. The human eye has one hundred and thirty million photoreceptors. The chance is effectively zero.
Seeing truth hides fitness, and seeing fitness hides truth.
we didn’t discover oxygen until 1772. Instead, our senses report fitness: we feel a headache if there is insufficient oxygen, and lightheaded if there is too much.
our senses don’t perceive ultraviolet radiation; indeed, we didn’t discover this radiation until 1801. Instead, our senses report fitness: we feel sunburn if...
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The truth won’t make you free, it will make you extinct.
Natural selection favors perceptions that assist us in scoring fitness points.
infinitesimal
Truth goes extinct when competing with Fitness.
the fly, due to its simplicity, sees no truth, but that mankind, due to its complexity, sees some.20 He thought that our larger brains permit “the gradual movement toward the difficult task of representing progressively more objective aspects of the visual world.”21 This suits our intuition, but conflicts with the logic of evolution,
In the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk 10 percent—from 1,500 cubic centimeters down to 1,350—a loss of the volume of a tennis ball.
encephalization
the safety net of society eases selection pressures on members; some who wouldn’t survive alone,
apace
Our brains took the escalator up; they’re on the elevator down.
the lexicon of our perceptions—including space, time, shape, hue, saturation, brightness, texture, taste, sound, smell, and motion—
It’s not simply that this or that perception is wrong. It’s that none of our perceptions, being couched in this language, could possibly be right.
solipsism.
Something is there in objective reality, and we humans experience its import for our fitness in terms of DNA, RNA, chromosomes, organisms, and resources.
there is good reason to believe that the things that we perceive, such as DNA and RNA, don’t exist independent of our minds.
The reason is that the structures of fitness payoffs, which shape what we perceive, differ from the structures of objective reality with high probability.
reality is utterly unlike our perceptions of objects ...
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“omniscient realism”—we see all of reality as it is.
“naive realism”—we see some, but not all, of reality as it is.
“critical realism”—the structure of our perceptions preserves some of the...
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espouse
if reality outside the observer has any structure beyond probability, then natural selection will shape perception to ignore it.
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.
mercurial.
protean
amortization
“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.”
How can my perceptions be useful if they aren’t true?
You pay good money for an interface to hide all that complexity—
evolution shaped our senses to be a user interface, tailored to the needs of our species.
Our interface hides objective reality and guides adaptive behavior in our niche.
Perception is not about truth, it’s about having kids.
winning genes do not code for perceiving truth. 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.
The language of space and time, of physical objects with shapes, positions, momenta, spins, polarizations, colors, textures, and smells, is the right language to describe fitness payoffs. But it is fundamentally the wrong language to describe objective reality. We cannot properly describe the inner workings of a computer in the language of desktops and pixels; similarly, we cannot describe objective reality in the language of spacetime and physical objects.
must take my senses seriously. Must I therefore take them literally? No.
figments
