7 ms·

Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?

72 points by nopinsight 11y ago

GeorgeOrr 11y ago
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.
- nopinsight 11y ago
  There are many reasons to use a representation that is "similar" in some way to the real thing. These include sharing inference mechanisms to predict characteristics like physical movement, affordance, etc among a number of entities when they are represented consistently. (e.g., snakes are represented with an elongated shape; eggs, circular.) In theory, it could be possible to devise a system of representations that have such desired properties despite their differences from reality. But I suspect that in practice the most efficient choice would be to mimic certain essential features of reality.
  - camelNotation 11y ago
    You can suspect that, but Hoffman's research doesn't support it.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  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.
  - chc 11y ago
    How many generations do you reckon have passed since the mid '90s?
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Well, 20 years, maybe 2? The kids I know have no idea what those icons mean; the young adults I know may have some idea but have never seen the items pictured outside of an old movie.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    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.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Well, that doesn’t work everywhere, though.
    - benjarrell 11y ago
      The phone icon is from AIGA: http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/ http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/
- hsitz 11y ago
  "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." Well, the icon does have to look like _something_, if we're going to see it. So seems good question of why it looks like a snake, rather than something else, whether there's something about the "real" snake that constrains how we must see it if we're to use icon to successfully adapt our behavior. E.g., an icon of a snake that was shaped like, e.g., a sphere or a box, would not be very helpful if we wanted to pick the snake up with a stick to move it out of the way.
- jasperry 11y ago
  Taking the graphical user interface idea a step further, even the best user interface can't help but "leak" some details about what's going on under the hood. And I'd argue that given the high-level general processing ability of our brains--Turing machines can simulate anything computable--we actually have a tendency to recognize that leakage and build better models of reality, if only a small step at a time. Most of the time, the "interface" presented to us by our senses is very workable and lets us survive without needing to know too much. But as we keep trying to integrate new pieces of data, we do come to realize that our models are too simplistic, and we have to revise our models. So we do, slowly, over the course of our own lifetimes and over the course of of civilization, dig deeper into the reality behind things. That's what I consider intellectual progress. Think about how some people develop critical thinking capabilities even though they live in regimes that basically feed them comforting lies 24/7. On the one hand, we often want to hide from reality to stay in our comfort zone, but when reality as currently handled becomes too painful, we do exhibit the ability to learn a better model.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gshubert17 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - Florin_Andrei 11y ago
    Reading Anathem and trying to figure out the parallels with the real world is quite entertaining.
  - gshubert17 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
homulilly 11y ago
There's no such thing as true reality since even the idea of reality is part of our survival mechanism.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  But see, even the statement "the idea of reality is part of our survival mechanism" is a statement about the nature of reality. Your statement therefore refutes itself. To say that there is no reality is self-refuting. To say that there is a reality but nothing is true of that reality is also self-refuting. Therefore, some things have to be true about reality. We may not know what they are (we may not even be able to discover what they are), but there is a reality that is more than our senses and perceptions. Some things must be true of that reality.
  - lawpoop 11y ago
    > To say that there is no reality is self-refuting If there is no reality, why must logic persist? (I.e. that there is such a thing as truth, statements can be true or false, statements can be contradictory and therefore false, etc). If we can throw out reality, why not logic along with it? Doesn't it actually have to leave along with reality? If there "truly" is no reality, there is no logic, either, since logic is part of reality. Right?
    - abc_lisper 11y ago
      Second theorem of Godel's Incompleteness?
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      > If there "truly" is no reality, there is no logic, either, since logic is part of reality. Right? But see, you're making a logical argument there. If your position was right, then you can't do that... The only way you can say that there is no reality is by making a statement that you claim is true about reality. The only way you have argued that there is no logic is on the basis of a logical argument.
joe_the_user 11y ago
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_as_it_is?language=en#t-504084 https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias
cokernel 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
cowardlydragon 11y ago
"First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive?" Reality is depressing.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  Resources constrains. Unnecessary details are pruned. (depression is probably adaptive).
Puts 11y ago
"Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views." What happened to hyperlinks? :p
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
> 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 11y ago
  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?
hcarvalhoalves 11y ago
> 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).
asgard1024 11y ago
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.
- stevetrewick 11y ago
  >despite evidence Such as?
  - asgard1024 11y ago
    Eh, where to start.. Probably with the Peter Thiel's famous line "competition is for losers". Then you have things like industry associations or unions the sole purpose of which is to advocate non-free market for a certain group of people. Governments (comprised of people, not aliens!) enacting things like subsidies, intellectual property, limited liability, social security, privacy and many other regulation ensure that free market doesn't happen. Free market predicts zero margin but most industries operate pretty far from that, for a good reason. It's also undesirable from the workers perspective - free market translates as subsistence wages. Everybody is running from the free market as fast as they can; there is a reason why "price war" is called "war" - it's an exhausting and ugly enterprise.
- chillacy 11y ago
  > 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
fallingfrog 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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/1585429201 http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp...
tmalsburg2 11y ago
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.

72 points by nopinsight 11y ago

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.

nopinsight 11y ago
There are many reasons to use a representation that is "similar" in some way to the real thing. These include sharing inference mechanisms to predict characteristics like physical movement, affordance, etc among a number of entities when they are represented consistently. (e.g., snakes are represented with an elongated shape; eggs, circular.) In theory, it could be possible to devise a system of representations that have such desired properties despite their differences from reality. But I suspect that in practice the most efficient choice would be to mimic certain essential features of reality.
- camelNotation 11y ago
  You can suspect that, but Hoffman's research doesn't support it.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
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.
- chc 11y ago
  How many generations do you reckon have passed since the mid '90s?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Well, 20 years, maybe 2? The kids I know have no idea what those icons mean; the young adults I know may have some idea but have never seen the items pictured outside of an old movie.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  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.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Well, that doesn’t work everywhere, though.
  - benjarrell 11y ago
    The phone icon is from AIGA: http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/ http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/
hsitz 11y ago
"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." Well, the icon does have to look like _something_, if we're going to see it. So seems good question of why it looks like a snake, rather than something else, whether there's something about the "real" snake that constrains how we must see it if we're to use icon to successfully adapt our behavior. E.g., an icon of a snake that was shaped like, e.g., a sphere or a box, would not be very helpful if we wanted to pick the snake up with a stick to move it out of the way.
jasperry 11y ago
Taking the graphical user interface idea a step further, even the best user interface can't help but "leak" some details about what's going on under the hood. And I'd argue that given the high-level general processing ability of our brains--Turing machines can simulate anything computable--we actually have a tendency to recognize that leakage and build better models of reality, if only a small step at a time. Most of the time, the "interface" presented to us by our senses is very workable and lets us survive without needing to know too much. But as we keep trying to integrate new pieces of data, we do come to realize that our models are too simplistic, and we have to revise our models. So we do, slowly, over the course of our own lifetimes and over the course of of civilization, dig deeper into the reality behind things. That's what I consider intellectual progress. Think about how some people develop critical thinking capabilities even though they live in regimes that basically feed them comforting lies 24/7. On the one hand, we often want to hide from reality to stay in our comfort zone, but when reality as currently handled becomes too painful, we do exhibit the ability to learn a better model.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gshubert17 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  Reading Anathem and trying to figure out the parallels with the real world is quite entertaining.
- gshubert17 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

homulilly 11y ago

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

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
But see, even the statement "the idea of reality is part of our survival mechanism" is a statement about the nature of reality. Your statement therefore refutes itself. To say that there is no reality is self-refuting. To say that there is a reality but nothing is true of that reality is also self-refuting. Therefore, some things have to be true about reality. We may not know what they are (we may not even be able to discover what they are), but there is a reality that is more than our senses and perceptions. Some things must be true of that reality.
- lawpoop 11y ago
  > To say that there is no reality is self-refuting If there is no reality, why must logic persist? (I.e. that there is such a thing as truth, statements can be true or false, statements can be contradictory and therefore false, etc). If we can throw out reality, why not logic along with it? Doesn't it actually have to leave along with reality? If there "truly" is no reality, there is no logic, either, since logic is part of reality. Right?
  - abc_lisper 11y ago
    Second theorem of Godel's Incompleteness?
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    > If there "truly" is no reality, there is no logic, either, since logic is part of reality. Right? But see, you're making a logical argument there. If your position was right, then you can't do that... The only way you can say that there is no reality is by making a statement that you claim is true about reality. The only way you have argued that there is no logic is on the basis of a logical argument.

joe_the_user 11y ago

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

cokernel 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

cowardlydragon 11y ago

"First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive?" Reality is depressing.

RobertoG 11y ago
Resources constrains. Unnecessary details are pruned. (depression is probably adaptive).

Puts 11y ago

"Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views." What happened to hyperlinks? :p

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

> 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 11y ago
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?

hcarvalhoalves 11y ago

> 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).

asgard1024 11y ago

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.

stevetrewick 11y ago
>despite evidence Such as?
- asgard1024 11y ago
  Eh, where to start.. Probably with the Peter Thiel's famous line "competition is for losers". Then you have things like industry associations or unions the sole purpose of which is to advocate non-free market for a certain group of people. Governments (comprised of people, not aliens!) enacting things like subsidies, intellectual property, limited liability, social security, privacy and many other regulation ensure that free market doesn't happen. Free market predicts zero margin but most industries operate pretty far from that, for a good reason. It's also undesirable from the workers perspective - free market translates as subsistence wages. Everybody is running from the free market as fast as they can; there is a reason why "price war" is called "war" - it's an exhausting and ugly enterprise.
chillacy 11y ago
> 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

fallingfrog 11y ago

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 11y ago
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/1585429201 http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp...

tmalsburg2 11y ago

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.