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What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us?
- SubiculumCode 10y agomeh. These are not new ideas, and probably seem rather obvious to those who think about evolution and fitness functions. I suppose however, there is some good in making this point more salient to cognitive science theoriticians however.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoand why was that worth -2 moderation? I AM a cognitive neuroscientist; I certainly am not denegrating them. Cognitive scientists are used to contrasting percepts with objective reality, hence all the facinating illusions they love to demonstrate. Evolutionary theorists are used to counterintuitive ideas that result from putting fitness functions at the forefront. I would not have thought that putting the two together is a new idea.
- empath75 10y agoBecause not everyone had time to think deeply about every field that everyone on HN specializes in and it's sort of pointless to complain that an article about your specialty doesn't teach you personally anything new.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoTo be specific, I was not conplaining about the article. It is an interesting subject. I was providing context for those reading the popularized article which tends to oversell these things. but whatevs
- powera 10y agoThis is complete and total bullshit. I'd love to see any demonstration of a model of an intelligent organism with no sense of reality at all but that still functions properly. Barring any evidence, the whole article is simply "if you assume the impossible, then magical unicorn rainbows". (or else it's just extrapolating claims about the intelligence of amoebas way too literally) And remember: They laughed at Bozo the Clown too.
- fnovd 10y agoIt's not saying that intelligent organisms have no sense of reality, rather that they only see as much of reality as is advantageous to their reproduction and continued existence.
- Retric 10y agoEvolution does not fine tune things that closely. Sure, we can't tell which specific frequency's something reflects. That's a well known limitation. It's also kind of boring. If we had gaps in our hearing range that may support the theory, but a more accurate assessment is detecting the world has costs. Organisms only collect as much sensory information as they need to survive. But, the same is true of running speed. To be predictive you would have to find a new and active distortion in sensing based on some prediction.
- powera 10y agoWhich is a vacuous claim. I don't perceive FM radio waves, or the weather on Jupiter. Does that mean that I don't have a sense of reality?
- DominikR 10y agoActually yes, these things and many beyond that are knowable, yet you don't know them. Therefore you only have a sense for a subset of reality, just as you can't see the whole spectrum of light or hear every sound. But this extreme example is not really relevant for this discussion, at least that's my humble opinion.
- empath75 10y agoYou also can't detect the Higgs field, or neutrinos or dark matter and energy, or gravity waves, or really vast amounts of forces and particles that are nonetheless very real. Most of 'reality' is totally invisible to us because it doesn't help us survive.
- tristanj 10y ago> I'd love to see any demonstration of a model of an intelligent organism with no sense of reality at all but that still functions properly That is a strawman argument. Hoffman's actual theory is that "under evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness." This is taken from the more in-depth in the Quanta interview [0] linked in the submitted article. [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-arg...
- fnovd 10y agoI think the title has it backwards here. Reality wasn't bred out of us, it was just never bred in.
- aaron695 10y ago> What Hoffman's theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost always — win the evolution game. It doesn't from the explanation in the article at all. It just states the reality critter can't beat the fitness-tuned critter. Evolution doesn't 'care' if you have extra useless things, you won't lose them evolutionary. (Although if there is a energy or something cost it might 'care' about this negative)
- Techowl 10y agoA similar article about Hoffman was posted on HN in April, with quite a bit of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698
- hubrix 10y agothere are some concrete examples of this though. we see the visible spectrum, a particular subset of EM spectrum that's a pretty good enough abstraction to get around in the world, it's a heuristic for the spectrum that's "good enough". we hear a subset of the audio spectrum, it's "good enough". etc etc...
- dkarapetyan 10y agoThe water example showcases the germ of the idea pretty well. Stimuli don't need to be in 1-1 or even linear correspondence with physiological responses to those stimuli. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding his argument.
- IANAD 10y agoI wonder how many rationalists on HN this post will piss off before it falls off the main page. "Reality", "science", "fact", and "logic": these are all arbitrary concepts and disciplines that are stuck in a limited worldview. There is no true objectivity we can experience as humans. Just because we don't experience something or it doesn't fit with what we consider rational thought, it doesn't mean that that thing cannot exist. However, we learn this truth from science itself- in seeing how other living things experience life and react and how it is so different than how we experience it- how we aren't made to be objective. The means of showing us truth we've relied on is flawed. At this point, the rationalist understands why Plato divides into thing and form- because form is the only ideal that is an anchor when you realize that our experience is unreliable: https://www.northampton.edu/Documents/Subsites/HaroldWeiss/Intro%20to%20Philosophy/russo_plato1.pdf https://www.northampton.edu/Documents/Subsites/HaroldWeiss/I... But, then when you accept form as the ideal and reject things, you have rejected everything we have to understand form. So, you fail to have anything dependably rational left.
- ajmurmann 10y agoThis strongly reminds me of things touched on in Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening. Early on he mentions that done medieval philosophers thought that crabs emerge out of tree trunks and later transform into ducks. Obviously that's total nonsense from our perspective but it might be a good enough heuristic like the world being flat is a really good assumption for everyday use.
- donatj 10y agoSo the options are the world is rational and understandable, or there is no truth, everything is a lie and we're living in a Lovecraftian horror where we are physically incapable of understanding reality. Presented with the two options I'm inclined to believe the prior. - If the latter is true and I believe the prior no vice. - If the prior is true and you believe the latter however no virtue. There's no sense in making an attempt to understand the world. You're missing out on everything. Just giving up on understanding. I'll take the prior.
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- 0003 10y ago>"Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness." See Blindsight by Peter Watts. http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
- h4nkoslo 10y agoThis is kind of trivially obvious, confirmed by every human sense having a different response curve than other animals, different species being able to deal with different abstractions (eg, certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates) and so on. I have to wonder if he's doing a Straussian thing and "really" talking about selected-for responses to certain obvious truths particularly relevant to evolutionary biologists.
- Darge 10y ago>certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates Could you elaborate on that, please? That sounds very interesting, but I couldn't find anything on my own.
- wahern 10y agoTry Googling for "Chrysippus' dog". That, at least, brings up hits like http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/DogLogic.pdf http://my.fit.edu/~aberdein/DogLogic.pdf. Just reading that paper made me realize that there were at least two dimensions in which the statement "different species being able to deal with different abstractions (eg, certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates)" could be be misinterpreted. Assuming you were looking (as was I) for experimental evidence supporting that specific statement, I'm guessing we'll both be disappointed. But maybe not!
- goblin89 10y agoThe paper “Objects of consciousness” by Donald D. Hoffman[0][1] is an interesting read—if only for its attempt to build a formal model of consciousness and define what it means to “observe”, in the quantum sense. [0] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00... [1] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829085
- hprotagonist 10y agoIt's so cute when neuroscientists try to be philosophers. They're so poorly cut out for the job. (He needs to read more Husserl.)
- redial 10y agoThey said the same thing of physicist, biologists, geologists, chemists, etc. before, that is until they found themselves irrelevant. I suspect in time, it will happen again.
- hprotagonist 10y agowhich they is this?
- throwanem 10y agoPhilosophers, I think. But the field as a whole seems to treat relevance as an afterthought.
- hprotagonist 10y agoin part this is because whenever something relevant comes up, it gets a name that is not philosophy. Also because we're still shaking off perception of philosophers as useless navel-gazing victorians; post WWI, the field has become substantially more akin to formal math and logic.
- keithwhor 10y agoThe problem here is that the concept presented isn't scientifically rigorous as applied to human consciousness and perception. One, fitness simulations are reductive by design and trying to draw analogies from them to explain complex subjective phenomena is a stretch. Two, we need a testable hypothesis - I haven't seen one presented here. It's an interesting concept, but the author provides us an example - an organism responding to a fitness function optimizing for Y resource where X < Y < Z doesn't distinguish between X and Z, just that X and Z are both "bad" - reducing complex quantities to binary outcomes. To then suggest physical reality could be "hidden" in these sorts of reductions without an analogy or testable example just seems philosophical. The best supportive example I can come up with is - we obviously don't see "reality." Visible light, for example, is only a tiny fraction of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Our ability to perceive and differentiate wavelengths in this range has been selected for. But language and formal logic --- abstract relationships, mathematics --- seems to be something we've discovered that describes a Universe of relationships we can't possibly entirely perceive. But we still utilize this reality, as we've incidentally discovered the rest of the EM spectrum by its interactions with other aspects of reality we can measure and the ability to describe abstract relationships (language). So I guess I'm a bit confused, and I admit ignorance here --- my 2c here is an off-the-cuff response to the article provided without digging deeper. Is the argument there are rules and laws of the Universe we can't possibly understand or perceive (physical constants, relationships)? If so --- that's plausibly true, but if something doesn't interact with the Universe in a way we can measure, it may as well not exist. Or is the argument that the way we describe and interpret the Universe (language, logic) is inherently flawed because it's been developed or "discovered" based on selection for the ability to use language between extreme quantities of "language resources" we can't possibly measure? The latter is interesting, because it's perhaps a unique perspective on mental illness and drug hallucinations / delusions (schizophrenia, LSD) but still not testable. Just musings. Neat philosophically. Would like to see something concrete here, but seems to be a prime candidate for circular reasoning - we can never test this hypothesis because we can never know what is, by definition, unknowable to us.
- pixl97 10y ago>Is the argument there are rules and laws of the Universe we can't possibly understand or perceive (physical constants, relationships)? No, probably not. But instead that our filter biases make us miss most of that invisible universe. Which brings us to the point, what else are we missing? We did not know of most of the universe until we invented the scientific method to overcome the biases of our own mind. > The latter is interesting, because it's perhaps a unique perspective on mental illness and drug hallucinations / delusions (schizophrenia, LSD) but still not testable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel A term coined by the inventor of LSD, and it seems unlikely it's a coincidence.
- scythe 10y agoIs this argument circular? Let's assume for a moment that someone believes that human beings can "perceive reality". Adding the axiom that "evolutionary theory is mostly correct" (which doesn't seem too bad), one concludes that because "perceiving reality" would require a large expenditure of energy, it must be necessary in order for optimal fitness, since if we are to believe it is with us, we must have evolved to do it. Similarly, walking is "necessary". NB. "Perceiving reality" seems to be defined by the person writing the question, which is a conflict of interest. (I leave out the interesting but undesirably complex hypothesis that some strategies exist which do not involve perceiving reality but are not accessible by evolution for unspecified reasons) This argument takes off by constructing a fitness function where perceiving reality is unnecessary. It then concludes by construction that the perception of reality won't evolve. However, there is no real "theorem" here: all that has happened is that it is now encoded in mathematical language that this belief could be true or false.
- obastani 10y agoIsn't Hoffman's argument pretty mundane? The conclusion seems pretty obvious; we only see light in a certain (relevant) spectrum, we only taste certain (relevant) chemicals, we only hear sounds in certain (relevant) frequencies, etc., because it doesn't help us (and in fact distracts us) to perceive more information. Also, it seems like a big aspect he's missing is that within each relevant spectra, we've gotten pretty well tuned to reality. And that's simply because oftentimes, fitness is highly correlated with perceiving reality. For example, seeing all physical objects realistically is important for survival, since if you can't see perceive certain physical objects, then predators/prey may take advantage of the failure (e.g., zebras blending in with tall grass). Is there some greater point I'm missing?
- earljwagner 10y agoSo, in other words, "Man is the measure of all things" – Protagoras "We see things not as they are. We see things as we are." attributed to Anaïs Nin
- pixl97 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel Nothing like a little LSD to give a little insight to the world. The mind isn't a learning device, it is a filtering device. Much along the same lines of "The web is a collection of everything we know. Still you'll be lost if you don't use a search engine to filter everything you don't want out"
- hprotagonist 10y agoand let's not forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley
- grondilu 10y agoAlso Democritus: "By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void." or: "We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Democritus https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Democritus
- hprotagonist 10y ago> While there clearly is a world separate from us, Hoffman says, evolution does not give us access to that. Ok. So what? If we can't get out of "the cage", but manipulations of state still "work", isn't this moot? I happen to think we _can_ get out of the cage -- that there _are_ nonspatiotemporal entities we can perceive. We usually call them "integers".
- btilly 10y agoThis is all very nice and abstract. But let's make it concrete. Multiple studies have found that the more realistic we are about our prospects, the more likely we are to be depressed. The more optimistic we are, the better we are likely to do even though we are wrong. As a result we have a constant bias towards believing that the world is likely to turn out better than objective evidence would show. And on this evidence we are biased to explore new things, have babies, and so on. Which improves our evolutionary fitness. Even though we perceive and predict the world less accurately. A similar cognitive bias is towards seeing patterns where there is little evidence that they exist. That is because if something is random or a pattern, there is little cost to acting on random data if it isn't there, and a concrete benefit to following it if it is. So we are pattern seeking animals at the cost of potentially becoming convinced by astrology, ghosts, religion, and a wide variety of other superstitions.
- mthoms 10y agoI've always had this exact personal belief but have never seen any relevant studies. Are you able to share any sources? Thanks.
- btilly 10y agoOur tendency to see patterns is well-documented. See http://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Psychiatric-Annals-Brains-Seek-Patterns.pdf http://www.drjudithorloff.com/Free-Articles/Psychiatric-Anna... for one of many, many articles on the topic. The issue of depression and realism is more controversial, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism. I'm personally inclined to accept it.
- tamana 10y agoWanting to survive and reproduce, promotes survival and reproduction. What is rational at the gene-kin level is not necessarily optimal at an individual level.
- mbfg 10y agoOne of the neat things (i think) is that the visual and tactile systems in our bodies seem to always agree on what is perceived 'reality'. This on the surface seems like an argument against this proposal. But of course we can easily be fooling ourselves. I once saw some experiments where they showed people some movies where the sound was offset from the picture by some time shift, either too slow or too fast. Within a surprisingly large range the mind could easily meld the two out of sync signals together so that it appeared that they were synchronized. Of course beyond the threshold that illusion fell apart, but still was pretty interesting. The weaving of still pictures of a movie into ... a movie is also an interesting concept. Maybe vision and tactile works the same way? Could one influence the other? It's amazing how well our brains are built to pretend.
- throwanem 10y agoI remember seeing a report of a study in which a fake arm, cleverly manipulated within the subjects' fields of view, often succeeded in overriding both tactile and proprioceptive senses - some of the subjects thought the fake arm was their arm, because they saw it doing what they expected their own arm to do. As I recall, some subjects reported significant confusion and some discomfort on recognizing the actual nature of events, and I should think that's no wonder. I don't have a cite to hand. I'll look for one if you like, but it's been so long that you'd probably be able to find it at least as quickly as I could. Fascinating stuff, in any case, and perhaps somewhat germane here.
- kernelbandwidth 10y agoMaybe not the same source, but V.S. Ramachandran's book, Phantoms in the Brain, covers his use of a set-up like that to help patients recover from phantom limb syndrome. Shockingly effective for what is, essentially, just an illusionist's trick.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago>One of the neat things (i think) is that the visual and tactile systems in our bodies seem to always agree on what is perceived 'reality'. It's a matter of precision-weighting. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23811293 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23811293
- hclivess 10y agoThis is a known fact. No clue why this has 12k clicks.
- samirillian 10y agoThis isn't really much different from Kant's own critique of pure reason, where he, following Hume, agrees that we cannot know the in-itself, and redefines metaphysics as more epistemological than ontological. More recently, but still long before this guy's TED talk, Plantinga had a very similar argument. Claiming that "Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us" is just a weird way to phrase a logical problem, and it sneaks in the same naive realism that it claims to critique.
- woodandsteel 10y agoKant and Hume are assuming a mind-body dualism as in Descartes. A great many important philosophers in the last century or so have rejected this. This includes Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, the later Wittgenstein, Strawson, Putnam, and all the Pragmatists. And of course, Aristotle in classic Greek philosophy.
- woodandsteel 10y agoOh, and by the way, Plantinga's argument is for the purpose of promoting Christianity, but radical mind-body dualism is quite contrary to traditional Christian belief.
- Elrac 10y agoI've only read the linked article, not the more in-depth source mentioned there. But based on just that information, I'm deeply unimpressed by Hoffman's work. From where I stand, his idea is both poorly informed (as in, it seems like he's not made a credible effort to examine his premises) and, ironically, proven wrong by reality. That's a pretty contentious statement for a non-expert to make about a presumed expert, so I'll try to explain myself. First, like some other commenters, I'm happy to concede that at a trivial level H. is quite correct. The world around us as perceived by the unaided human is mapped inside his brain to a vague, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes obscured and very often distorted image of reality. There are entire books on optical illusions; the trade of stage magic and various kinds of crime rely on systematic human misperceptions. There's an obvious, perfectly good reason for this: the human system of vision is simply not a pixel-perfect 3D camera connected to petabytes of fast digital storage, and the same applies to our other senses. Given a perfect recording of the world at least in our vicinities, abundant energy and sufficient time, we could come up with highly effective survival strategies. But the real world doesn't afford us these luxuries, so evolution crafted us into organisms tuned for a reasonable approximation to an optimal compromise of this ideal. Thus, our mental model of the world is a crude abstraction, with survival-relevant information emphasized and other details brushed over. This is not a survival-optimized transformation of reality but a constraint-enforced one. A highly sophisticated system built on the shoestring budget that nature affords us. It's proven to be superior at survival to many competing models but I don't agree it works better for misrepresenting reality. Rather, it works _at all_ by necessarily sacrificing detail and accuracy in representing reality. But none of this supports H.'s contention that we are blithely unaware of reality, or unable to apprehend it. There is a reality out there, and the depth and accuracy of our model is a function of how much time and energy we're willing to expend on mapping it. A given beach, sharply defined, has a finite and very countable set of grains of sand. If we really, really cared to know, we could build machines to count them for us. Similarly, we can or could know the shape of every coastline of every continent. Some day, humanity may have high-quality reality mappings of every planet within X light-years of our solar system. We can in principle understand the function of every gene in our genomes. We don't have to talk about how we perceive colors, because spectroscopes can tell us the exact, reproducible wavelength of every beam of light emitted by a given object. We could exchange this information with aliens having completely different bodies and brains, should we discover them, and if their science is as advanced as ours and we're careful to define our terms and measurements on observable nature, we'd have a common understanding of that reality. But how do we know that our reality is real? How do we ascertain truth? I say we can base a pretty solid epistemology on a confluence of observed phenomena. If we encounter an obstacle we can't see through, if it's grey in color, weighs about 6 tons, stands on 4 legs, has a long nose, occasionally moves around and eats bananas by the bushel, then we can safely assume we've found an elephant. If it's a chunk of some yellow shiny solid that displaces 18 grams of water per cc, and samples drilled from arbitrary locations in it uniformly have atomic weights of X (?), melting points of Y degrees, fail to react with sulphuric acid and show a chromatographic signature consistent with that of gold, then by golly, it's a chunk of gold! As humanity, not as individual naked humans, we've amassed a large and ever growing body of knowledge about the world around us, and (fortunately for our sanity and our ability to make sense of reality) the properties of objects and phenomena in our environment are consistent and convergent. There are no 1 gram elephants, there is no sodium that doesn't react violently with water, there are no snowflakes whose basic structure isn't hexagonal. We know that our image of reality is good because we're able to extrapolate from what we know and observe to what we haven't observed yet, to make predictions about what we'll observe and have those predictions prove mostly true. The author and his (perhaps coincidental and unintended) idol Plantinga fail to acknowledge humanity's ability to create models of reality of whose accuracy (within limits) we can be confident because they're part of a huge network of mutually supporting sub-models with excellent predictive power. And, more importantly, that our ability to create such mappings is a human ability that we have evolved to have. A goodly part of this evolution is cultural rather than biological, and a goodly part of our senses are mechanical and external rather than built into our wetware, but our evolution and that of our apparatus is quite natural insofar as everything that we humans, natural beings in a natural world, are natural too and a part of nature. Hoffman's conjecture is completely, utterly wrong: Evolution has in fact "bred" in humans the ability to discover reality, and this ability has incidentally given us dominion, at least in the short term and for whatever that's worth, over all other species on the planet, including our own ancestors and close cousins. Our ability to apprehend reality has made us so fit that, barring various possible disasters, we could survive the death of the Sun and Earth. If Hoffman wants to support his claim that a creature who views too much and too little water as similar instances of "bad amounts of water" would display a higher degree of evolutionary fitness than us, I feel he has his work cut out for him.
- kapv89 10y agoI have a phobia of insects(not if they are small enough for me to notice their details), crabs, prawns etc. All the not-animal-like-life, to be honest. One day, at a supermarket, a friend of mine teased me with a crab in her hand. Later that day, we were discussing about this incident, and we realized that both of us look at insects very differently. She looks at insects etc as "things that move", ie, lacking of will, like a toy or something. I look at them as creatures who I cannot empathize with, and hence, whose motives I cannot understand. So they freak me out. That conversation kind of felt like interfacing at the boundaries of our consciousness
- dmytrish 10y agoI think that the point of view depicted in the article completely misses the fact that we are active part of a reality we live in. It looks like the article (I am not entitled to talk about the original research, since I am not familiar with it by any means) unquestionably assumes that there exists some "real" (platonic, mystical, static, eternal, fundamental?) reality that we are unable to observe due to bounds of evolution. What's the point of this assumption? When I look around, I see things made by humans for humans using our ideas about the human reality—is this reality "worse" or "less real" than some other reality? Yes, we are far removed from, e.g., a reality of existence of a plant or a bacteria, and the evolution drives us further from it. Maybe it's the evolution process that creates very realities?
- woodandsteel 10y agoHoffman's argument makes sense when you are talking about bacteria. But who thinks bacteria have a conscious understanding of reality? More complex animals, and especially humans, collect an immense amount of sense data, from multiple sources, and use it to construct a general view of reality. It has to be accurate because they don't have a few, simple, stereotyped response patterns. Rather they have extremely complex patterns, highly customized to particular, unique circumstances, and the only way that can work is if their image of the world is itself complex and fits reality. Here is an example that is immensely more simple than what humans do in their living: how could you design a software program to play chess if it was just all of the form "when x, do y"? The only way you can do it is if you have a representation of a chessboard and use it to plot out moves, and what the opponent might do in response. Now think of how much more you have to know about reality in order to, for instance, go shopping. Or run a software startup.
- woodandsteel 10y agoHoffman goes wrong partly because he is violating some fundamental scientific principles. According to modern science, the world is organized in levels of complexity, and for each higher level we get new phenomena that require new labels that don't apply to the lower ones. So for instance, an election consists of activity by human beings made of atoms, but to describe it in any meaningful way we have to use terms that are not from physics, like candidates and ballots. In a similar way, when we move from the sensory and response mechanisms of bacteria to first multiple cell organisms, and then ones with nerves and a central nervous system, and then human beings, at each level we get phenomena for which we need new, quite valid concepts, including accurate understanding of reality.
- woodandsteel 10y agoTo make this a little clearer, I am saying the phenomena of having a perception of reality requires very complex mechanisms that bacteria simply don't have. Therefore to note that bacteria don't have a perception of reality is simply irrelevant, and doesn't in any way prove humans don't. It's like saying atoms don't reproduce, therefore animals don't either. By the way, if, as Hoffman claims, human beings don't have a perception of reality, then it would be meaningless to say that sometimes it is accurate and sometimes it is inaccurate, and certainly not something that could be studied scientifically. Does that seem really right?
- anotheryou 10y agoI'd think abstraction mimics many truths. It makes sense to grasp concepts like "huge/small amount of something" and it might even be less effort than hard wiring much and little red to the same neuron. Also seeing "too much red" and "too little red" as the same, is no misconception and still seeing the truth. You won't be fooled it no thinking there is no red, when there is a lot, you would probably perceive too much or too little red as "in the danger zone" which is a true statement either way (given that too much and too little red is most often dangerous for your fitness).