Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
"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.
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.
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.
My favorite example of old-timey icons is 'phone'. https://www.google.com/search?q=phone+icon&tbm=isch
Still used everywhere, but phones just look like ▯ now.
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.
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.
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.
The particular expression "interface icon", for instance, might have been equivalent to the word "representation" to 18th century psychologists if they had GUIs.
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_a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias
[0] excerpts from an interview with Neal Stephenson, http://www.edrants.com/segundo/neal-stephenson-bss-245/
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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).
What happened to hyperlinks? :p
I just commented here: 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.
Such as?
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.
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)
Kahneman discusses that and more in Thinking Fast & Slow
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.
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?
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.
In other words, we're attributing a truth-and-falsehood finding property to logic that it doesn't actually posses. So in the grand sense, it's meaningless, whatever it is we think we're getting from logic. It's like saying the Iraqi explosive detecting wand actually detects explosive. It's a phony tool, it doesn't work, but we trick ourselves into believing that it does.
True. Your position logically refutes itself, but if logic is meaningless, that doesn't matter. But your argument sure doesn't give me any reason to believe it. You've created something that cannot be refuted, but that doesn't make it useful, sane, or convincing.
If you accept this idea, then all logical discourse (or even all logical thought) is worthless, and is no different than illogic. Do you really think that's the world we live in? Do you really want it to be?
And, if it is the world we live in, I guess I don't want it to be, since I think this reality could be a lot better.
Not a sane choice.
Interesting. When you say "there's no such thing as X", aren't you imagining a sphere of existence in which, whether we want it to or not, "X" does not appear?
Would you not call that sphere of existence "reality"?
If you're saying we can't perceive reality, well, that's what's being argued about in the article. If you're saying reality doesn't exist, you're contradicting yourself.
To put it another way, "there's no such thing as truth" is a claim about what's true. Imagine that you say "there's no such thing as truth" and I say "yes there is". What can you say? "You're wrong"? I would reply, "if I can be wrong, it means there is a Real Truth for my statement to contradict."
> What can you say? "You're wrong"?
I could say "ok, show truth to me or explain why you think truth exists"
I could also say "What value (fitness) does believing that assertion provide me"?
Obviously, if you assume that truth is necessary to evaluate statements or beliefs, then stating that truth doesn't exist will lead you to contradictions. However, there are plenty of other methods of evaluation are frequently used.
I would in fact argue argue that 'truth' is very rarely directly among the properties of an idea that we commonly use when evaluate it. The reputation of the source, coherence with other beliefs, effects on social identity, and cognitive efficiency seem to be the most common properties.
The idea that I can explain or argue anything presupposes that some things are true and other things can be shown to follow logically from them or be disproved by contradiction.
> I would in fact argue argue that 'truth' is very rarely directly among the properties of an idea that we commonly use when evaluate it.
Whether people commonly seek truth is a separate question from whether truth exists. "Do people evaluate ideas based on whether they're true or whether they make them feel good?" is a valid question, and you may be right in your answer. But look - "you may be right" means "your description may conform to the actual truth." We just can't even form sentences without assuming that some things are true and others aren't.
The idea that communication is dependent on pre-existing notions of truth and logic is flatly false. Now you might presuppose those notions when you communicate, but that doesn't make that presupposition necessary for communication.
> Whether people commonly seek truth is a separate question from whether truth exists.
True :). I'm not trying to convince you that truth doesn't exist. I'm trying to convince you that you can evaluate the phrase "truth does not exist" without pre-supposing the existence of truth. This is because you can (and people commonly do) evaluate such a phrase on attributes other than their 'truth'.
The phrase "you may be right" can mean all KINDS of things from "I don't have a definitive counter argument" to "It is possible your statement is true" to "I don't want to argue about that anymore".
I think you are too focused on how you tend to perceive the world and communicate about it. People don't all think and talk the same way you do and assuming that they do is doing them and yourself a disservice.
Elaborating, it is unlikely that something can be confirmed from multiple points of view(senses, math and science), unless it is true.
Reality is depressing.
(depression is probably adaptive).