What If Evolution Bred Reality Out of Us?
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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?
"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
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"
"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."
No. We see things as they are observable through our senses. We're working with noisy and incomplete information, but still information that ultimately comes from the world rather than from us.
"We should view genes, not organisms, as the fundamental unit of propagation. They optimize for their own survival, not necessarily the organisms." --- this is an insight.
A testable hypothesis being, "altruistic behavior that seems detrimental to organisms clearly exists, detrimental to the organisms survival. Perhaps this behavior propagates because genes that encourage this type of behavior ensure survival of other copies of themselves within other organisms in the population."
I'm having a hard time discerning A) the exact insight here and B) whether or not there's a hypothesis to go along with it.
Richard Dawkins wrote a book on just that. "The Selfish Gene" (~1970). However, recent epigenetics discounts just the gene as the sole 'unit' of propogation.
Reality and perception are heavily overloaded words. For example, you interpret perception in terms of excitations from spectral stimuli. For Hoffman's theories to make sense (i.e. applying the Principle of Charity), we need to define perception in terms of a mental model of the cause+effect relationship among physical things.
Both of are you admitting that our modes of perception discard relevant information, which could cause us to make wrong deductions. But we need Hoffman's more encompassing definition to allow us to say that perception is intrinsically and irredeemably at odds with reality. The problem is that were he strictly correct, Hoffman would never be able to make the statement in the first place. The false reality isn't absolute if you can deduce that there exists another reality. And like with cryptography, that little chink in the armor plus applied logic is often all you need to tear down the wall.
Clearly humans are capable of seeing past the immediate false realities our brains construct, permitting us to examine indirect realities (which may or may not be the same thing as "objective reality", whatever that's supposed to mean). Which suggests that there isn't a single "reality" that we perceive as humans; there are different levels and dimensions of perception and "reality" which we could identify with similar rigor, and clearly Hoffman's assertion cannot apply to them all equally. And the assertions are obvious trivialities if he's referring to the basic mental models we construct in our daily lives.
To put it more concretely, science and math allow us to see past our immediate physical senses and mental modeling, at least in so far as they allow us to make predictions which we can and do subsequently verify. That much is clear, and that destroys Hoffman's argument in as much as it relies on handwaving about genetics and evolution. The rest of the argument would appear to just rest on ground well trodden by various philosophies of epistemology, semiotics, etc. And that's a quagmire I'd personally prefer to stay clear of because it's not at all clear we understand what the relevant questions are.
I never studied semiotics, but I think we could all do better to keep in mind that words are funny things, and just like the way we perceive physical reality, we tend to subconsciously fill in the gaps (or assume they're filled in) to construct reasonable interpretations of theories. Reading summaries of Hoffman's ideas my first thought was that he's relying on special definitions of overloaded words. Which suggests 1) his theory, if sound, only makes sense within his unique conceptual framework and thus the conclusions don't mean what they superficially mean, and 2) there are a lot of obscured, hidden premises that are either wrong or speculative.
Pedantism is a virtue, not a vice. When someone says that being overly pedantic is not constructive, my first thought that is that 1) yes, that's a good assessment, but 2) if it's possible to be overly pedantic (but still reasonable) then the fact it's being unproductive is more a reflection of a lack of substance in a discussion. If people can point at meaningful problems with interpretation of words and phrases, that suggests the discussion is built on sand. Similarly, unless a hypothesis is testable and falsifiable, people should put little stock into it. Hoffman's notions are so abstract (literally, semantically) that my instinct is to turn and run. Which isn't to say he might not be on to something, but untangling the mess is probably more effort than discovering anew whatever useful insight lay beneath it all.
It's more than that. Building a whole range of fit animals whose brain-design is approximately correct in-general ends up being much simpler and easier than custom-building a highly fit but generally wrong brain for each animal.
"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/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.
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.
Otherwise you should be believing in Gods (however mutually exclusive they may be) since:
1) If you believe in God and it doesn't exist, no harm.
2) If you do not believe in God and it does exist, you go straight to Hell.
3)Believe in the wrong God and go to Hell anyway
Seriously. Pascal's wager is the dumbest wager I've ever heard.
This is also compared with the possibility that humans are faggots who will talk about absolute bullshit to make themselves feel better. No offense to gay people but I'm talking about the mass of humanity that seeks to "feel" more using ass-backwards strategies because they trust their idiotic culture too much.
I'd prefer to remain silent until overwhelming proof forces me to consider "a being of superior influence on this reality who resides outside of visible reality". It could definitely exist (along with the things from the set of known unknowns and unknown unknowns). But I'm betting more on humans being faggots.
4chan is that way
Random chaos is way too staticky for Lovecraft. The snow on old TVs when they've got no signal is random noise. Lovecraftianness requires distinct things with tentacles and little bubble-eyes everywhere. Totally different aesthetics ;-).
This sounds like a restatement of the warm/cold reality thing. Most religious people are not actually deficient in capacity to reason but basically can't accept the cold universe where we pop screaming out of our mothers, live pointlessly and die in pain knowing that whatever we accomplished is transitory and amounts to nothing.
As opposed to, we're playing some kind of game where we get points for kind acts, piety, being nice to old folk, making money, etc, then we get rewarded for all of this in the afterlife by our loving creator.
There is no true objectivity
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.
The issue of depression and realism is more controversial, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism. I'm personally inclined to accept it.
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.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate on that, please? That sounds very interesting, but I couldn't find anything on my own.
"different species being able to deal with different abstractions (eg, certain dogs being able to recognize conditionals but not predicates)"
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.
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.
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?
Human perception, on the other hand, has a vast amount of excess. So for instance, when you see a tree, you see hundreds of leaves, each with a fairly complex shape, even though all of this is usually of no use. Our senses and brains do this because with humans, you never know when some new situation will arise where perception that is normally useless will be useful, and so it makes sense to have vast excess in our reality perception capacities.
With bacteria, on the other hand, there are no novel situations, only a few stereotyped ones arising over and over again, so excess capacity would be useless and run counter to efficient survival.
Actually, he is really making a philosophical argument, one based in the radical skepticism that has plagued many (but not all) Western philosophical schools since Descartes, but dressing it up in some quite poor science.
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)
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
It's a matter of precision-weighting. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23811293
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).
[0] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00... [1] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829085
(He needs to read more Husserl.)
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.
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.
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
A term coined by the inventor of LSD, and it seems unlikely it's a coincidence.
See Blindsight by Peter Watts.
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".
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.
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.
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.
But this extreme example is not really relevant for this discussion, at least that's my humble opinion.
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-arg...
The missing piece is something where getting the wrong information has value. But, that's harder than simply incorrectly interpreting information.
I'm not quite clear on your point of view, can you clarify? The phrases "blind spots" and "other organisms" are very vague. I'll try to rephrase it into something manageable. This is what I think you are saying:
Humans [cannot see behind their heads] because they can operate just fine while
[not seeing behind their heads]. However, [other species] [can see behind their
heads], thus [seeing behind one's head] is not selected for.
Do let know if this is correct, and I'll get back to you.
> The missing piece is something where getting the wrong information has value
I'm unclear where this disagrees. That's exactly the point of Hoffman's theory: an (sometimes) incorrect view of the world may have more value than the actual (correct) view of the world.
Squid for example use a different arrangement without that hole. So, while people are not getting accurate information, the gap is arbitrary and not selected for by evolution.
If both he and the press are hyperbolic about the absurdity of his claims, I feel justified in saying that the claims he's making in these articles are on-their-face absurd.
Now also realize that we touch absolutely nothing. And yet we perceive solid things, as if they were solid. But again they are not. We just feel electro-magnetic force.
Following with QC, there isn't really anything such as particles.. the world is just fields of various types. Only when we go and look at the fields do we see particles, but they are just excitations in the fields.
I sometimes walk around and think what if i shut off all the perceptions that i know are only in my body/head, and thought about what was left. There really wouldn't be anything at all what we think there is.
I'm not concluding that this guy is right or wrong, but I think we have an almost impossibility in comprehending that this could actually be the case. Given that we are 90% fooled, why couldn't we be 100% fooled?
If you made a force field in a tubular shape about 8 inches long, with a smooth rubber tactile force, that was squishable, but still somewhat firm, .. would it be a banana? If you moved that force field close to your mouth would it provide sustenance (whatever that means)?
Would you be touching a real thing?
However, on closer inspection (such as taking a bite) you would be able to tell that it wasn't a banana: the theory that the object is a banana is falsifiable. If, on the other hand, the machine can produce a simulated banana that is indistinguishable from a real one in all respects, then we can say that the object _is_ a banana.
Your point can be generalized to Descartes' evil demon, or the simulation argument. Imagine a machine that can provide arbitrary sensory inputs to the brain by simulating your body as well as the universe it inhabits.
The simulator has complete control over all reality, so that all perceptions are illusions; there is no "physical" reality, only a simulated one.
To me, this is a reduction to absurdity. If a simulated universe is indistinguishable from a real one, then we (as inhabitants of the simulated universe) should say that it is a real universe, as the simulation theory is unfalsifiable.
(If we discovered that we are in fact living inside a simulation because the simulation code was buggy and we hacked it from inside, then a Simuluation Argument Believer could just say that the "real" universe is also just another level of the simulation. This is why the _metaphysical_ Simulation Argument is unfalsifiable.)
Similarly, if a machine can produce a perfect copy of a real banana, then the copy is also actually a banana. And if a banana feels solid, then it actually is a solid object, and we aren't touching "nothing". It is irrelevant whether the feeling is produced by electromagnetic forces, or some special Platonic "solid" surface that doesn't actually exist.
Edit: for further context see Scientific realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_realism
We would have evolved to see those wavelengths, if it was useful to do so. Like how bees can see ultraviolet markings on flowers.
And yet we perceive solid things, as if they were solid. But again they are not. We just feel electro-magnetic force.
That's what "solid" actually means if you reduce it far enough.
You still have to wonder why the brain created color to differentiate wavelengths. If we could not see and were speculating on how you could discern wavelengths, maybe you would guess that there would be some sort of frequency pattern that differentiated. But no... color? What is color, really? I'm not sure i even know the answer to that.
Color is the classic quale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia), so if you did have a convincing answer to that you could be famous :)
What happens when the fitness function is not static (as it often is in the real world)? My gut instinct is that an organism that perceives actual reality (or some close analog thereof) will be more adaptable to a changing environment than one that is optimized for static conditions.
Perhaps Hoffman has taken this into account (I don't know -- that's why I'm asking).
Sure, maybe there's no point in us knowing the difference between hot and cold, as long as we avoid contact with both of them. Only wait, there is a point - if we know the difference, we can take different actions in response to each in order to respond in a more survivable manner to both. And this is indeed what we see - as well as abstracted signals (like 'pain') we have signals which measure our environment more directly (like 'hot' and 'cold'). These signals raise our fitness because they let us know not only that we should take action, but in what direction that action should be taken.
This reminds me of Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception", by the way.
Dark blue isn't really any 'darker' in terms of energy content spectrum than orange is, its our brains that have evolved to make this association that X spectrum is dark and Y spectrum is bright.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this reaction seems "tuned" rather than "reality-based". That is, one reaction to a novel theory is to consider an exaggerated caricature of the theory, because that's easier to dismiss than the theory itself. Dismissing novel theories leaves more time for foraging. b^)
Having observed the behavior of prey animals, one might find oneself more open to this theory. Prey animals like deer or turkey largely ignore other, larger prey animals like elk or moose. The presence of a single small dog, however, will set them totally on edge. It's difficult to say that a moose is in any "real" sense less dangerous than a small dog. However, it is sensible that evolutionary tuning would focus more on dog-like animals.