Saw this on the Scott Adams Blog,
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/15081666699...s-promised
What If Evolution Bred Reality Out Of Us
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/09...-out-of-us
Fundamentally, Hoffman argues, evolution and reality (the objective kind) have almost nothing to do with each other.
"Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness."
So let's unpack Hoffman's theorem for a moment. To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, "fitness" is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That's what they mean by "fitness functions."
So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment's, fitness function. The second creature couldn't care less about what's really going on in reality. What Hoffman's theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost always — win the evolution game.
To test this idea, Hoffman and collaborators have run evolutionary simulations with different kinds of fitness functions — some of those tuned to reality and some having nothing to do with reality. The non-reality functions almost always win. For Hoffman, the consequences of these studies are profound. As he told me:
"We assume the 'predicates' of perceptions — space, time, physical objects, shapes — are the right ones to describe physical reality. And this theorem says that [such] predicates are [the wrong ones] almost surely."
In other words, evolution couldn't care less if you perceive objective reality. It only wants you to have sex successfully. As a consequence, your apprehension of the world is tuned to whatever allows that to happen. Thus, your perceptions at the root level have nothing to do with some fundamental physics upon which the fundamental nature of objective independent reality is constructed.
More at the link...
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I'm really digging this theory, nothing else matters to our illogical brains besides the fitness of ourselves & our species.
Humanity is always seeking a balance or an equilibrium in the fitness of our species.
This is Survival of the Fittest, at it's core.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/15081666699...s-promised
What If Evolution Bred Reality Out Of Us
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/09...-out-of-us
Fundamentally, Hoffman argues, evolution and reality (the objective kind) have almost nothing to do with each other.
"Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness."
So let's unpack Hoffman's theorem for a moment. To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, "fitness" is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That's what they mean by "fitness functions."
So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment's, fitness function. The second creature couldn't care less about what's really going on in reality. What Hoffman's theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost always — win the evolution game.
To test this idea, Hoffman and collaborators have run evolutionary simulations with different kinds of fitness functions — some of those tuned to reality and some having nothing to do with reality. The non-reality functions almost always win. For Hoffman, the consequences of these studies are profound. As he told me:
"We assume the 'predicates' of perceptions — space, time, physical objects, shapes — are the right ones to describe physical reality. And this theorem says that [such] predicates are [the wrong ones] almost surely."
In other words, evolution couldn't care less if you perceive objective reality. It only wants you to have sex successfully. As a consequence, your apprehension of the world is tuned to whatever allows that to happen. Thus, your perceptions at the root level have nothing to do with some fundamental physics upon which the fundamental nature of objective independent reality is constructed.
More at the link...
------------------------------------------------------------
I'm really digging this theory, nothing else matters to our illogical brains besides the fitness of ourselves & our species.
Humanity is always seeking a balance or an equilibrium in the fitness of our species.
This is Survival of the Fittest, at it's core.
