Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans-evolve-to-see-things-as-they-really-are/

by nopinsight • 11 years ago

72 49 11 years ago

GeorgeOrr• 11 years ago

I think the author of this article kind of missed the points being made by Hoffman. For instance, he asks:

"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.

nopinsight• 11 years ago

There are many reasons to use a representation that is "similar" in some way to the real thing. These include sharing inference mechanisms to predict characteristics like physical movement, affordance, etc among a number of entities when they are represented consistently. (e.g., snakes are represented with an elongated shape; eggs, circular.)

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.

camelNotation• 11 years ago

You can suspect that, but Hoffman's research doesn't support it.

JoeAltmaier2• 11 years ago

To revisit the 'file' idea: the 'save' icon is an idealized floppy disk. But generations(!) have passed who never saw one. So now its just an icon.

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.

chc• 11 years ago

How many generations do you reckon have passed since the mid '90s?

wlesieutre• 11 years ago

The 'save' icon is fading away pretty quickly in common usage. Modern software is trending toward changes saved in realtime (driven by phones, also seen on OS X and web). When I write a note, I just make a new note, type in it, and close the app.

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.

hsitz• 11 years ago

"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."

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.

jasperry• 11 years ago

Taking the graphical user interface idea a step further, even the best user interface can't help but "leak" some details about what's going on under the hood.

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.

gshubert172• 11 years ago

I'm reminded of the fly-bat-worm example from Anathem [0]. It seems to me that the way things appear to our consciousness reflect a computationally easy (relatively easy, for our nervous systems) way to integrate different sense perceptions; say, sight, sound, and touch.

[0] excerpts from an interview with Neal Stephenson, http://www.edrants.com/segundo/neal-stephenson-bss-245/

ubernostrum2• 11 years ago

All of the philosophy in Anathem is just shuffling of names and descriptions of real work by real-world philosophers.

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.

Florin_Andrei• 11 years ago

Reading Anathem and trying to figure out the parallels with the real world is quite entertaining.

gshubert172• 11 years ago

Stephenson says in the interview that the fly-bat-worm is from Husserl. I see the link to Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?"

http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

homulilly• 11 years ago

There's no such thing as true reality since even the idea of reality is part of our survival mechanism.

AnimalMuppet3• 11 years ago

But see, even the statement "the idea of reality is part of our survival mechanism" is a statement about the nature of reality. Your statement therefore refutes itself.

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.

lawpoop3• 11 years ago

To say that there is no reality is self-refuting

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?

nathan_long2• 11 years ago

There's no such thing as true reality

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."

shkkmo2• 11 years ago

Or he could be viewing the phrase "true reality" as a linguistic construct without a referent. This even makes sense since 'truth' is more of a property of represenations of reality rather than a property of reality itself.

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.

nooron• 11 years ago

R Nozick's "Invariances" argues analogously that our survival mechanism is to construct serviceable truths. But he concludes very differently than you, saying that this relativism you expound, b/w humans and human groups, is false. I found his arguments dense but very compelling. You might as well.

abc_lisper2• 11 years ago

This would be accurate if all we know is from our senses. However Math and Science together allow us to predict things that never were accessible to our senses, but can be confirmed with them. Now, it could be that we are still operating in a sphere of limitations, but it would be surprising Math and Science didn't tease them out. For example, even though we don't "feel" quantum nature of the world, experiments can be constructed that show a visible(to our eyes) effect that is predicted apriori.

Elaborating, it is unlikely that something can be confirmed from multiple points of view(senses, math and science), unless it is true.

joe_the_user• 11 years ago

If Hoffman's argument is simply that humans don't see reality "as it is", it's clearly true but not very interesting - of course perception is flawed and a simple imperfection can be systematically corrected. Each moment, our visual system receives a distorted image of a given object and the system combines these to make a more "exact" image. We have created artificial aids to extend this process, again correcting immediate inaccuracies. The difference between humans and beetles that mate with brown bottles [1] is that humans can (sometimes) correct our sensory perceptions over time (plus Hoffman's use of "evolution's equations" in his video seems meaningless since in the abstract one can assign fitness to whatever quality one wants).

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

cokernel• 11 years ago

I don't know why a theory has to be labeled "new" to be worth discussing. (I'm know I'm hyperfocusing on Shermer's phrase "a new theory", sorry.)

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.

tpeo• 11 years ago

Well, there's no escaping it. Either a debate solved, forgotten, or rediscovered by another field and clothed in new jargon. It just goes on like this until it transcends it's cycles of scholarship.

The particular expression "interface icon", for instance, might have been equivalent to the word "representation" to 18th century psychologists if they had GUIs.

cowardlydragon• 11 years ago

"First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive?"

Reality is depressing.

RobertoG• 11 years ago

Resources constrains. Unnecessary details are pruned.

(depression is probably adaptive).

Puts• 11 years ago

"Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views."

What happened to hyperlinks? :p

NoMoreNicksLeft• 11 years ago

ITP is well worth serious consideration and testing, but I have my doubts. First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive?

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.

chillacy4• 11 years ago

Hah politics is a fun one. There are so many different opinions, and everyone thinks they've got the right answer. I guess it's something similar to how every religion thinks they're the right one.

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?

hcarvalhoalves• 11 years ago

To test his theory, Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary computer simulations in which digital organisms whose perceptual systems are tuned exclusively for truth are outcompeted by those tuned solely for fitness. Because natural selection depends only on expected fitness, evolution shaped our sensory systems toward fitter behavior, not truthful representation.

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).

asgard10243• 11 years ago

I think he is quite right, but the real blind spots are way higher in the human thought than object representation. Perhaps that's how it has to be, at the very top level of cognition, there is no other mechanism for correcting errors, except perhaps somewhat following behavior of other people, which may also be completely foolish (or may be deliberately obscured).

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.

stevetrewick• 11 years ago

despite evidence

Such as?

asgard10243• 11 years ago

Eh, where to start.. Probably with the Peter Thiel's famous line "competition is for losers". Then you have things like industry associations or unions the sole purpose of which is to advocate non-free market for a certain group of people. Governments (comprised of people, not aliens!) enacting things like subsidies, intellectual property, limited liability, social security, privacy and many other regulation ensure that free market doesn't happen.

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.

chillacy4• 11 years ago

the real blind spots are way higher in the human thought than object representation

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

asgard10243• 11 years ago

Not quite, I think even most cognitive biases can be corrected at higher level of thought. It's more like cognitive dissonances and the strategies you use to cope with them, but it's hard to tell without knowing the architecture of the brain.

fallingfrog• 11 years ago

Yeah, I think the author is missing the point. The distortions aren't so crude as a beer bottle, but they are there. Human beings see the world mostly in terms of tools, people, and most of all narrative arc. You think of your life as having a beginning, middle, and end, it all forms a cohesive story and events happen to push the story forward. But of course that's a lie we tell ourselves, in fact we're just survival machines. For other animals the central abstractions are different; watch cats closely enough and you'll see that they are blind to tools and narrative but mostly just see food, terrain and other cats. That's why they walk on your laptop- they have no way to encapsulate the concept of a "tool" in their mental world. It's just terrain.

chillacy4• 11 years ago

This is the point I was hoping others would bring up. The base reality is that we're all atoms and energy, and there isn't a clear boundary between the water in your body and the water you're swimming in, and (to quote Dr Manhattan) a recently deceased body has as just many atoms as it had when the body was alive 10 minutes ago.

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...

tmalsburg2• 11 years ago

This idea is hardly surprising for anyone familiar with neural networks. If you train a deep auto-encoder (optimized for a truthful representation) you get a different set of abstract feature detectors than when you train a deep net that maps the perceptual input to some behavioral code.

Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?

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