The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality | Hacker News Reader

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

quantamagazine.org

18 pointsDeusExMachina14 comments

Previously:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698

I think this article stretches some terms and statements to say things that sound reasonable, but aren't quite right. I noticed the pattern a few times:

1) Yes, QM talks about observations making a difference. But to say that "objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go"? There's a lot of steps in between where the work isn't shown.

2) Yes, scientists who ignore QM are using "300 year old physics". But somehow mechanical engineers (and even electrical engineers) still manage to create things that work without ever thinking about physics beyond 1900. There's definitely an argument that could be made that brains need QM to be understood - but again, it's not immediately obvious that this should be the case.

3)Yes, an organism that sees only "fitness" can outcompete one that sees "reality". But that doesn't mean that there's no relationship between "fitness" and "reality".

I think the main argument of this article is mostly a philosophical point about consciousness and perception, and to be fair, that discussion is really important! But I think there's a huge step missing between the science of QM and the brain that's being discussed, and the conclusions that are being drawn.

It reads like a classic case of a researcher going way outside his domain of expertise.

He appears by all accounts to be a well respected cognitive scientist, and I'm more than willing to accept (tentatively) his thesis that evolution doesn't optimise for an accurate understanding of reality, but the stuff about QM demonstrates an understanding on par with someone who's flipped through a high school textbook.

To point 3, see Peter Watts novel Blindsight [1]. In it, he makes the case that consciousness is not necessarily aligned with the fitness function; that's curiously similar to the argument Hoffman makes that "correctly perceiving reality" is not necessarily always an improvement upon the fitness function.

However, from my admittedly layman's poor understanding of QM, his "conscious agents all the way down" doesn't mesh with our current understanding of QM. That is, I've not read anywhere that current QM theory and practice postulates nothing exists until a conscious observer pays attention to it. Can someone with a physics background please chime in on what Hoffman is referring to?

[1] http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Newtonian physics is an assumption of QM. (It's traditionally called the "classical limit.") QM would be nearly useless if 300 year old physics weren't correct. It's just that 300 year old physics is not a complete picture of reality, which may have been something its developer's improperly assumed.

My work lately has lead me to think there are two parts to the "self", the intelligence and the simulation running around it within the brain. The intelligence uses the senses to better augment the simulation to represent external reality. Sometimes I think that leads us to believe that reality isn't "real" but this is just the limit of our perceptual self. When our internal simulation gets a bit off or were poke at its resolution too much we notice the gaps, and this leads some people to erroneously declare their is no reality when I think in fact they are just poking holes in their own cognitive model. Ones flaws does not reject the others existence.

When you drill into this concept is goes a long ways in describing everything from Platos cave to this guys hunches.

It also opens up some interesting possibilities that our intelligence could but remote in some fashion while we still perceive ourselves within our body... Or lots of other things.

All in all though I think our social nature is used to validate our internal simulations. Just the fact that other intelligences are creating similar models leads me to think there is an objective reality.

Are you familiar with Thinking, Fast and Slow? It's late here, and I've had a long day, so I will leave it as an exercise for you to lookup and learn how there is considerable support for the idea that there are at least two parts to each of us (not quite as you describe, but you may find this interesting).

Actually I've spoken to Danny in person about his book, he lives down the street. My final line about socializing to make our simulations more accurate comes directly from a conversation with him.

> Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order — very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness — in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve — say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction.

My that seem like BS. I can't quite figure what on earth the argument is supposed to be but too much or too little water being bad for you sending "truth to extinction" just seems nonsense. Maybe it's some kind of late April fools joke?

Here's the argument as far as I can tell:

"Assume your fitness function is correct. Now assume it doesn't match reality. Therefore, your fitness function is incorrect, and thus fitness functions are useless."

> thus fitness functions are useless."

or perhaps: thus fitness functions should be taken seriously, but not literally?

Basically if your evolution fitness only depends on perceiving some sensory input that's in a certain range, you're only going to evolve to see that input that falls within that range. You can 'see' only the range of visible light, because that's all that was useful to us when we were evolving. There's everything from microwaves to radio waves that are also floating around, and we can't perceive them at all.

I think if we were utterly reliant on our senses to perceive reality, this would be a good argument in favor of realities ultimate inaccessibility. But we can actually reach beyond our natural senses to see things like microwaves and radiowaves.

The question is now: What else is out there that we haven't been evolved to perceive? In a way, most of the really useful science of the past several centuries have been finding new ways to discover those aspects of reality that are hidden to our primitive primate brains.

The argument he's making isn't about 'philosophical reality' as much as it's about conscious reality.

Two points in the article that stand out for me are:

1. it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally.

That literalness narrows us, keeps us in the confines of language. Seriousness let's us act/respond, literalness is extra.

2. The experiences of everyday life — my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate — that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

Returning/remembering the sensual world, the everydayness of things, less cluttered by our literal interpretation is a way of reconnecting with "reality". It is a move away from metaphysics by questioning the metaphysics we may hold without realizing it.

Jesus, this crushed my beliefs. Philosophers arguing about "identity" are just arguing about a knack of the human perception of the world. There is no such thing as a thing.

Additionally, his answer to "But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?" makes me think. Entire complexes can be completely meaningless to another. A piece of data, an arrangement of bits, is just that. An arrangement of bits. It is only something to us. It is something to me, and it is something else to you.

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