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.
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.
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?
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.
I think, from talking to you, that we both believe in a “knows things” brain: we can know things, including that there are limitations to our knowledge, and certain vulnerabilities that can lead us to know wrongly. The kinds of arguments you have been making are predicated on our thoughts having truth value, as such.
The “fitness machine” brain’s thoughts have no truth value, only fitness value. It does not experience “reality as it exists, at all.” As such it cannot even determine that there is truth value to its self-evaluation as a “fitness machine.” Even worse, it has no access to its objective function as a fitness maximizer, so it can’t even tell if its own thoughts are, indeed, fitness-enhancing! So yeah, fitness brain is susceptible to the “demon” scenario you described.
If we want to posit that the “fitness machine” brain can indeed “know things,” we need to specify how. This doesn’t seem obvious at all to me.
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.
The individual is the brain-in-a-body? There isn't a claim that all brains are identical.
After you give up counting them, here is an explanation: https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-you-can-t-see-all-12...
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 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
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