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Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Onl

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

bobthechef 5y ago
Is that a true statement? Has Peter Watts transcended his humanity and entered the ethereal realm of gods where he is no longer subject to that which he claims humans are subject?
- scotty79 5y ago
  Yes. Pretty much. For example your conscious awareness processes all the time just 2% of the image your eyes actually see.
  - throwaway316943 5y ago
    And how would you solve the compression problem of dealing with all that data? Our brains are running a similar algorithm to mpeg-4 where we discard redundant data and make some basic predictions about movement. If they didn’t we’d waste a lot of time paying attention to unimportant things in our visual field.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      Those are not necessarily unimportant things. These are just things we don't have a capacity to notice because of crap hardware we have to process this information. We don't conciously process 2% of what we see because only 2% is relevant. We do that because hardware needed to process more wouldn't pass through birth canal.
      - throwaway316943 5y ago
        The 2% off visual data that we process is essentially just the stuff that is changing. It’s not some secret hidden knowledge, we can still intentionally examine things closely and see all there is to see.
        blamestross 5y ago
        How many dots are in this image?: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsG6MSpWAAAdTob?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsG6MSpWAAAdTob?format=jpg&name=... After you give up counting them, here is an explanation: https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-you-can-t-see-all-12-black-dots-in-this-crazy-optical-illusion https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-you-can-t-see-all-12...
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Suppose you have at an old analog clock with a second hand that ticks. Look somewhere else in the room, then look at the clock. The first tick as you're looking at it takes much longer to occur, or at least that's the way it will seem to you. The human eye doesn't move continuously, but moves in short rapid jumps. [0]. Your eye isn't perfect, and during those rapid jumps it produces blurry images. Rather than feeding those blurry images to the image recognition centers of the brain, those images are thrown out. That prevents your brain from using known-faulty data, but now you have a problem because motion tracking requires continuity. So you cheat. You take some of the images that arrived after the blurry images, extrapolate backwards to make an estimation of how things looked before, and then feed those to the motion tracking [1]. The neat thing is that this depends on how the second hand of your analog clock moves. If it ticks every second, then the brain's back-extrapolation to fill in the missing images sees a stationary second hand, and assumes that it was stationary in the past. If it rotates smoothly instead of ticking, then the brain's back-extrapolation sees the motion, assumes that the motion was constant during the past, and back-extrapolates accordingly. So if you glance over to a ticking clock, the first tick feels like it takes longer, but you don't have the same effect glancing over to a smooth motion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
- the_af 5y ago
  Aside of what the other commenters replied (in support of the assertion), please bear in mind "Blindsight" is a scifi novel. Peter Watts is not a scientist, he's a writer of fiction. Whether he believes what he wrote in his book is uncertain, but remember this is primarily a work of fiction.
  - blamestross 5y ago
    He's a marine biologist, but not a neurologist. It's a work of fiction but it is one that folks in graduate neurophysiology courses have been encouraged to read. and it has a bibliography at the end
Valmar 5y ago
This seems illogical. This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual, and how different human individuals react differently to the same things depending on their pre-existing understandings of their worlds. So this statement cannot be true.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Can you expand more on your distinction between talking about brains being bad and talking about individuals being good? Are you saying all brains are the same, and something else makes us different?
- pjc50 5y ago
  > This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual The individual is the brain-in-a-body? There isn't a claim that all brains are identical.
huetius 5y ago
Then the same applies to Mr. Watts’ statement, and we are therefore under no obligation to take it as true.
- the_af 5y ago
  Peter Watts is an author of fiction and "Blindsight" is a scifi novel, so you better not take it as true! That said, it's consistent that both the statement could be deceptive (in the sense it describes) but still assert something that could generally be true. It could even be deceptive in tone or some details, but the gist of what it says still be true.
- ijcaatst 5y ago
  Not sure I follow your logic. Watts is essentially using deductive reasoning: 1. The set of beliefs that are true are not equivalent to the set of beliefs that promote fitness 2. The brain is designed to promote fitness 3. The brain may hold beliefs that are not true You are saying that Watts' statement is undermining itself, that the conclusion undermines either of the premises. But neither 1 or 2 is in contradiction to 3. Now he takes the conclusion a bit further and argues that not only may we hold untrue beliefs but that with time we will hold a substantial number of untrue beliefs. He does not justify this in this quote but again, this statement is not contradicted by 3. Or are you saying that since he argues that the brain lies to us then we can't trust our brains which in turn invalidates any reasoning demonstrated by a brain?
  - huetius 5y ago
    In what way is the object in your first premise perceptible to the subject in Mr. Watts’ quote? It would require a faculty “higher” than the brain, which is restricted in access to only a subset of the object, no?
    - ijcaatst 5y ago
      Ah, ok. So you are saying that we cannot know whether or not the first premise is true because the brain does not have full knowledge of its own beliefs. I would argue that this is irrelevant. We would only need to demonstrate one belief that is useful for fitness but that is factually untrue in order to prove the first premise. The belief that bad spirits cause disease is untrue but useful as it compels you to avoid dead bodies which actually may cause disease. We have now (in an admittedly loose sense of the word) proven the first premise. Unless we assume 3 implies a Pascal's demon scenario where all attempts to identify any set of beliefs and evaluate their truth value or usefulness for fitness will only provide illusory insights I believe that 3 does not contradict 1.
OhWellLol 5y ago
The levels of buttmad the replies to this has generated shows how very little the self-appointed intellectual titans of HackerNews understand neurology.
blamestross 5y ago
Responses to this have been interesting... There is a lot of evidence that humans are over agressively pattern matchers. Another poster pointed out some examples like the limitations of human vision (there is a hole in your vision that your brain fills in with whatever is thinks is there for example). Look up cognitive biases sometimes, or any old optical illusion. Those are just the fun edge cases where you get to see examples of the lies the over agressively pattern matchers of your sensorium tell you. I didn't expect this to be controversial. It is a basic assumption of my life that what I perceive is only roughly correlated with "the truth". Really I meant this as a statement about machine learning doing whatever it's fitness function tells it to, and that the fitness function we select only hopefully correlates with reality.
mr_overalls 5y ago
Buddhist philosophers would agree with you. See Yogacara and Madhyamaka schools, who both agree that the ordinary appearance of the world is akin to a magical illusion.
enaaem 5y ago
Yeah it is not about truth but about cost and the cost can sometimes be catastrophic (death). For example it is better to mistake a rock for a bear than a bear for a rock.

bobthechef 5y ago

Is that a true statement? Has Peter Watts transcended his humanity and entered the ethereal realm of gods where he is no longer subject to that which he claims humans are subject?

scotty79 5y ago
Yes. Pretty much. For example your conscious awareness processes all the time just 2% of the image your eyes actually see.
- throwaway316943 5y ago
  And how would you solve the compression problem of dealing with all that data? Our brains are running a similar algorithm to mpeg-4 where we discard redundant data and make some basic predictions about movement. If they didn’t we’d waste a lot of time paying attention to unimportant things in our visual field.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Those are not necessarily unimportant things. These are just things we don't have a capacity to notice because of crap hardware we have to process this information. We don't conciously process 2% of what we see because only 2% is relevant. We do that because hardware needed to process more wouldn't pass through birth canal.
    - throwaway316943 5y ago
      The 2% off visual data that we process is essentially just the stuff that is changing. It’s not some secret hidden knowledge, we can still intentionally examine things closely and see all there is to see.
      - blamestross 5y ago
        How many dots are in this image?: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsG6MSpWAAAdTob?format=jpg&name=small https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsG6MSpWAAAdTob?format=jpg&name=... After you give up counting them, here is an explanation: https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-you-can-t-see-all-12-black-dots-in-this-crazy-optical-illusion https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-you-can-t-see-all-12...
MereInterest 5y ago
Suppose you have at an old analog clock with a second hand that ticks. Look somewhere else in the room, then look at the clock. The first tick as you're looking at it takes much longer to occur, or at least that's the way it will seem to you. The human eye doesn't move continuously, but moves in short rapid jumps. [0]. Your eye isn't perfect, and during those rapid jumps it produces blurry images. Rather than feeding those blurry images to the image recognition centers of the brain, those images are thrown out. That prevents your brain from using known-faulty data, but now you have a problem because motion tracking requires continuity. So you cheat. You take some of the images that arrived after the blurry images, extrapolate backwards to make an estimation of how things looked before, and then feed those to the motion tracking [1]. The neat thing is that this depends on how the second hand of your analog clock moves. If it ticks every second, then the brain's back-extrapolation to fill in the missing images sees a stationary second hand, and assumes that it was stationary in the past. If it rotates smoothly instead of ticking, then the brain's back-extrapolation sees the motion, assumes that the motion was constant during the past, and back-extrapolates accordingly. So if you glance over to a ticking clock, the first tick feels like it takes longer, but you don't have the same effect glancing over to a smooth motion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
the_af 5y ago
Aside of what the other commenters replied (in support of the assertion), please bear in mind "Blindsight" is a scifi novel. Peter Watts is not a scientist, he's a writer of fiction. Whether he believes what he wrote in his book is uncertain, but remember this is primarily a work of fiction.
- blamestross 5y ago
  He's a marine biologist, but not a neurologist. It's a work of fiction but it is one that folks in graduate neurophysiology courses have been encouraged to read. and it has a bibliography at the end

Valmar 5y ago

This seems illogical. This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual, and how different human individuals react differently to the same things depending on their pre-existing understandings of their worlds. So this statement cannot be true.

robertlagrant 5y ago
Can you expand more on your distinction between talking about brains being bad and talking about individuals being good? Are you saying all brains are the same, and something else makes us different?
pjc50 5y ago
> This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual The individual is the brain-in-a-body? There isn't a claim that all brains are identical.

huetius 5y ago

Then the same applies to Mr. Watts’ statement, and we are therefore under no obligation to take it as true.

the_af 5y ago
Peter Watts is an author of fiction and "Blindsight" is a scifi novel, so you better not take it as true! That said, it's consistent that both the statement could be deceptive (in the sense it describes) but still assert something that could generally be true. It could even be deceptive in tone or some details, but the gist of what it says still be true.
ijcaatst 5y ago
Not sure I follow your logic. Watts is essentially using deductive reasoning: 1. The set of beliefs that are true are not equivalent to the set of beliefs that promote fitness 2. The brain is designed to promote fitness 3. The brain may hold beliefs that are not true You are saying that Watts' statement is undermining itself, that the conclusion undermines either of the premises. But neither 1 or 2 is in contradiction to 3. Now he takes the conclusion a bit further and argues that not only may we hold untrue beliefs but that with time we will hold a substantial number of untrue beliefs. He does not justify this in this quote but again, this statement is not contradicted by 3. Or are you saying that since he argues that the brain lies to us then we can't trust our brains which in turn invalidates any reasoning demonstrated by a brain?
- huetius 5y ago
  In what way is the object in your first premise perceptible to the subject in Mr. Watts’ quote? It would require a faculty “higher” than the brain, which is restricted in access to only a subset of the object, no?
  - ijcaatst 5y ago
    Ah, ok. So you are saying that we cannot know whether or not the first premise is true because the brain does not have full knowledge of its own beliefs. I would argue that this is irrelevant. We would only need to demonstrate one belief that is useful for fitness but that is factually untrue in order to prove the first premise. The belief that bad spirits cause disease is untrue but useful as it compels you to avoid dead bodies which actually may cause disease. We have now (in an admittedly loose sense of the word) proven the first premise. Unless we assume 3 implies a Pascal's demon scenario where all attempts to identify any set of beliefs and evaluate their truth value or usefulness for fitness will only provide illusory insights I believe that 3 does not contradict 1.

OhWellLol 5y ago

The levels of buttmad the replies to this has generated shows how very little the self-appointed intellectual titans of HackerNews understand neurology.

blamestross 5y ago

Responses to this have been interesting... There is a lot of evidence that humans are over agressively pattern matchers. Another poster pointed out some examples like the limitations of human vision (there is a hole in your vision that your brain fills in with whatever is thinks is there for example). Look up cognitive biases sometimes, or any old optical illusion. Those are just the fun edge cases where you get to see examples of the lies the over agressively pattern matchers of your sensorium tell you. I didn't expect this to be controversial. It is a basic assumption of my life that what I perceive is only roughly correlated with "the truth". Really I meant this as a statement about machine learning doing whatever it's fitness function tells it to, and that the fitness function we select only hopefully correlates with reality.

mr_overalls 5y ago

Buddhist philosophers would agree with you. See Yogacara and Madhyamaka schools, who both agree that the ordinary appearance of the world is akin to a magical illusion.

enaaem 5y ago

Yeah it is not about truth but about cost and the cost can sometimes be catastrophic (death). For example it is better to mistake a rock for a bear than a bear for a rock.