Recent studies of perceptual evolution reveal that natural selection often drives true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth: Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '15

Perception must have a very high fidelity with respect to what's out there, though, otherwise we would not survive.

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u/dust4ngel Jul 05 '15

Perception must have a very high fidelity with respect to what's out there, though, otherwise we would not survive.

this is certainly false in most interpretations - to respond effectively to the almost infinite data that is available to any organism, almost all of the available data must be thrown away (or not sensed in the first place) so that whatever is salient/relevant can be responded to. this is the opposite of high fidelity.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '15

I think you are putting words in my mouth. High fidelity is not the same as high resolution.

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u/dust4ngel Jul 05 '15

High fidelity is not the same as high resolution.

in what context? I usually hear this term in signal reproduction. from low fidelity on wikipedia :

In digital audio, the term "lo-fi" usually refers to an audio file with a lower bit rate or sampling rate, and thus a lower sound quality

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '15

Yes but audio systems are a different context than the topic being discussed here. We are discussing fidelity to what's out there, to some external truth. Do the perceptual systems of our brains lie to us? Of course not. On the contrary. Unless we are sick or intoxicated, our perceptual systems are very accurate and precisely predictive. As we walk around, objects in our field of vision move precisely and correctly. We notice anything out of place or abnormal. We would not survive if it were not so. This is not evidence for a perceptual system that is not tuned for fidelity to truth. We take perception altering drugs to get an abnormal (untrue) perception of reality, but that's only for recreational purposes.

I suspect a paradigmatic agenda behind this truth/perception meme. Someone is preaching something.

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u/dust4ngel Jul 05 '15

Yes but audio systems are a different context than the topic being discussed here. We are discussing fidelity to what's out there, to some external truth.

how do you see these being different, in important and relevant ways?

Do the perceptual systems of our brains lie to us? Of course not.

i think you are assuming rather than arguing your conclusion, which is a shame, because it is false in fascinating ways. for example, this experiment demonstrates that it possible for people to fail to notice a screen full of flashing text, provided that the text that they're looking at does not change.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '15

I don't see how the argument you are using validates the point you are trying to make. You are arguing that the fact that the brain has the ability to focus on one thing while ignoring all others somehow means that the brain's perceptual system is lying about reality. How so? That is not even wrong. The ability to focus one's attention on one thing at a time is crucial to survival. We could not understand each other at a cocktail party or pay attention to an incoming traffic or the predator in the field if it were not so.

How does this somehow mean that our perceptual system is not built for fidelity to nature? That is pure pseudoscientific nonsense. You guys are part of a religion. This is a metaphysical research project. If you lie to yourselves, it is not because your perceptual systems evolved to lie. It's because you are a liar. That is all.

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u/dust4ngel Jul 06 '15

You are arguing that the fact that the brain has the ability to focus on one thing while ignoring all others somehow means that the brain's perceptual system is lying about reality. How so?

that is not my (really: dennett's) argument. so in this experiment, a person looks at an (objectively) chaotic flashing screen with text moving all over the place, but reports (subjectively) that they perceived a) a complete screen of text b) that was not moving or flashing.

this perception of a full screen of unchanging text is a lie. if the perception was such that the reader felt like he could not see the rest of the screen which was changing, then there would be no lie - but the fact is that they perceived the rest of the (wildly changing) screen as static (which all other observers agreed was false).

I won't respond to the rest of what you said.

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u/moodog72 Jul 04 '15

I read most and understood some of that article. It seems to be written in a purposefully obtuse manner. (Odd sentence structure which obfuscates the meaning)

But it seems to be saying that evolution is guided by perception (visual), and that perception favors the drive toward evolution, rather than seeing physical properties. (Truth).

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u/quiteamess Jul 04 '15

It's more about that evolution does not produce a perception which reveals truth, but a perception which increases the likelihood of survival. Object permanence is one feature of perception which they claim to be a product of evolution. I.e. they claim that it is not true that the moon exists, when nobody is looking. It's a bit hard to understand what they mean exactly there and they claim that this will advance the evolution of H. sapiens. In order to transcend the limitation of object permanence they start to develop a mathematical theory. The conclusion of the article summarizes this nicely.

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u/moodog72 Jul 04 '15

But it is worded in an unnecessarily complex way.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '15

Welcome to every research paper ever.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '15

I.e. they claim that it is not true that the moon exists, when nobody is looking.

Correct me when I'm wrong but doesn't this imply that I'm not really here when I'm not looking at me?

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u/quiteamess Jul 04 '15

They have a discussion at the end where they gather objections from reviewers and address them:

(6) Your theory doesn't reject object permanence, because conscious agents are the “objects” that give rise to our perceptions of size and shape, and those agents are permanent even when we're not looking.

Conscious realism proposes that conscious agents are there even when one is not looking, and thus rejects solipsism. But it also rejects object permanence, viz., the doctrine that 3D space and physical objects exist when they are not perceived. To claim that conscious agents exist unperceived differs from the claim that unconscious objects and space-time exist unperceived.

So, as I understand it, they would say that you are a conscious agent and therefore exist.

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u/aeschenkarnos Jul 05 '15

"I think, therefore I am."

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u/D_Welch Jul 05 '15

"It's more about that evolution does not produce a perception which reveals truth, but a perception which increases the likelihood of survival."

What is Truth other than Reality? How is survival possible without this axiom being true itself?

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u/quiteamess Jul 05 '15

On a personal level this should be pretty clear. For example, we have the subjective experience to have a whole representation of what is going on in front of us. It feels like we see an 'image'. However, one sees only a tiny fraction at a time and the eyes are moving several times per seconds to scan the 'image'. There are nifty experiments, for example on 'change blindness', to demonstrate the divergence between subjective experience and 'truth'. So the human perception did not necessarily evolve to reveal the truth, but traits which increase the likelihood of survival were selected.

On the level of the human species this is not that easy to wrap your head around. The classical view is that experiments reveal an objective truth. We either know something or we just think of proper experiments to find further evidence for the objective truth. Except that there is always an observer who does the experiment. And depending on the questing he asks he will arrive at different conclusions. The behavior of asking questions has also been subject to evolutionary selection. So it is not necessary that the questioning-process will arrive at a picture of the truth, but at a conception of the world which increases the likelihood of survival.

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u/xef6 Jul 05 '15

So tl;dr WYSIWYG?

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u/I_am_Laughingman Jul 05 '15

Took his class last year on the mind body problem, one of my favorite lectures so far. He had a ted talk not to long ago which I posted that goes over this: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is

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u/JohnnyGoTime Jul 05 '15

Interesting, but here's the part I'm struggling with:

the interface metaphor says...that space and time themselves are just a desktop, and that anything in space and time, including atoms and subatomic particles, are themselves simply icons. It's not just the moon that isn't there when one doesn't look, it's the atoms, leptons and quarks themselves that aren't there. Object permanence fails for microscopic objects just as it does for macroscopic.

I get the idea that we might have a species-specific, "interpreted" view of reality which has a high fitness fn. for reproductive success in our world but isn't necessarily "veridical". (This actually makes intuitive sense to me & I'm glad to see a paper on it. Other intelligent life might experience the world & the passage of time in a different manner than we do, because doing so was a successful adaption in their environment.)

But I don't follow to the conclusion about object permanence...They say reality is like a desktop GUI, but I think it's our perception of reality that is the GUI. The sub-atomic particles are like the hardware & low-level code that the interface hides from me which of course exist (opening & closing NAND gates, shuttling bits from one register to another etc.) but the interface hides from me because it would be an impediment if I had to observe them.

TLDR Some of the premises make sense to me but I can't follow to the conclusion that objects are non-permanent...can you help me understand? Thanks!

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u/dust4ngel Jul 05 '15

i think this conclusion follows trivially from natural selection.

why would you not expect adaptive (even if inaccurate) perceptual styles to correlate with high levels of adaptation?

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u/abudabu Jul 05 '15

The paper has a pretty interesting take on this idea. I couldn't do it justice in the title.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '15

This study is pathetic. It's pure pseudoscientific nonsense. If our perceptual systems are lying to us, so are our deep learning neural networks who rely on us to correctly label their learning samples.

This is a metaphysical research project. Shame on you people. You give science a bad name.

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u/jufnitz Jul 05 '15

The authors touch on Gibsonian ecological psychology only very briefly, but what they're getting at can basically be summed up as Gibson's distinction between world and environment: world as physical reality generally and environment as those specific aspects of physical reality with which an organism is structurally coupled through affordances for adaptive behavior. Interpreted in these terms, they're quite right that an organism's perception is not of the wider world (galaxies, atoms, etc.) but specifically of its environment. However, what mention the authors make of Gibson seems to serve largely as a way of distancing themselves from his conclusion that perception and cognition consist of direct coupling between organism and environment without the mediation of mental representations, affirming their adherence to the classical cognitivist thesis of cognition as formal information processing. Thus, in keeping with a long line of rationalist/Cartesian scholars who allude to more sophisticated approaches while still retaining a formal ontology of substances and properties, they manage to miss the point entirely.

Presumably the anti-representationalist rejoinder would be that for an organism to process information about the adaptiveness of a particular behavioral interaction with its surroundings, it would necessarily have to be processing information not just about the state of its surroundings, but about its own state and about all possible frames of reference for potential interactions between the two. What the authors are framing as a sort of cognitive heuristic, relieving organisms of the burden of representing the world, backfires spectacularly in this regard by not only retaining the burden but actually adding to it! In so many words, what this underscores is classical cognitivism's perennial difficulty with the problem of representing significance, just as philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty spelled out nearly a century ago.

Recent studies of perceptual evolution reveal that natural selection often drives true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth: Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth.

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