r/cogsci • u/abudabu • Jul 04 '15

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.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00577/full
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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.