We're experiencing an internal interpretation of just a tiny part of the raw reality outside ourselves.
https://www.futurity.org/reality-perception-evolution-donald-hoffman-2116082-2/
It all goes back to evolution. Our senses evolved and were shaped by natural selection. We might guess that evolution favors true perceptions, which accurately describe reality. But it doesn’t. I and my grad students created computer simulations of evolutionary competitions between creatures with different kinds of perceptions. We found that organisms that saw truth went extinct when they competed against organisms that saw no truth, only—what evolutionary theorists call—”fitness payoffs.”
Think of it like a video game. You have to hunt for points as fast as you can, and if you get enough, you get to advance to the next level. If you don’t, you die. Evolution is the same. We’re hunting for “fitness payoffs.” And if you get them, your offspring advances to the next level. Fitness payoffs are really what it’s all about.
Most of my scientific colleagues think that if you’re looking for fitness payoffs, you’re looking for the truth. My team and I found that to be wrong. Fitness payoffs themselves don’t have info about the truth—they are what you have come to understand are important for survival and reproduction. If you’re chasing fitness payoffs, you slowly lose info about the true structure of the world in favor of what is important for helping you pass on your genes. Inevitably, then, you can’t see the true structure of the world. Organisms that see reality as it is are never more fit than those just tuned to see fitness payoffs.
A way to think about this concept is looking at the world as a user interface—a mask. Three-dimensional space is really just like a desktop on a computer. The stuff we see is just there as an icon. An icon of a book that’s blue doesn’t mean the book and its contents are actually blue—it’s a simple symbol representing something much bigger. Not seeing the truth actually helps you—if we had to know all the truth about the computer and how to operate every circuit to make each action needed, we wouldn’t use it. Evolution literally hides the truth from us on purpose. Perception lets us control the truth while we’re utterly clueless about what actually.
It all goes back to evolution. Our senses evolved and were shaped by natural selection. We might guess that evolution favors true perceptions, which accurately describe reality. But it doesn’t. I and my grad students created computer simulations of evolutionary competitions between creatures with different kinds of perceptions. We found that organisms that saw truth went extinct when they competed against organisms that saw no truth, only—what evolutionary theorists call—”fitness payoffs.”
Think of it like a video game. You have to hunt for points as fast as you can, and if you get enough, you get to advance to the next level. If you don’t, you die. Evolution is the same. We’re hunting for “fitness payoffs.” And if you get them, your offspring advances to the next level. Fitness payoffs are really what it’s all about.
Most of my scientific colleagues think that if you’re looking for fitness payoffs, you’re looking for the truth. My team and I found that to be wrong. Fitness payoffs themselves don’t have info about the truth—they are what you have come to understand are important for survival and reproduction. If you’re chasing fitness payoffs, you slowly lose info about the true structure of the world in favor of what is important for helping you pass on your genes. Inevitably, then, you can’t see the true structure of the world. Organisms that see reality as it is are never more fit than those just tuned to see fitness payoffs.
A way to think about this concept is looking at the world as a user interface—a mask. Three-dimensional space is really just like a desktop on a computer. The stuff we see is just there as an icon. An icon of a book that’s blue doesn’t mean the book and its contents are actually blue—it’s a simple symbol representing something much bigger. Not seeing the truth actually helps you—if we had to know all the truth about the computer and how to operate every circuit to make each action needed, we wouldn’t use it. Evolution literally hides the truth from us on purpose. Perception lets us control the truth while we’re utterly clueless about what actually.
