Reality


The Case Against Reality - Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes - Donald Hoffman

 

Ted Talk:  https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language=en

Book:  https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-Evolution-Truth-ebook/dp/B07JR1FDXH/ref=sr_1_2

 

 

"Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct."  (p xiii)

 

"Our hunch, in short, is that truer perceptions are fitter perceptions. Evolution weeds out untrue perceptions. This is why our perceptions are windows on objective reality.  These hunches are wrong."  (p xi-xii)

 

"The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, 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 is just tuned to fitness. Never." - Donald Hoffman

 

"There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you." - Ibid

 

Spacetime and objects are, for human vision, the happy tradeoff. Human vision, shaped by eons of natural selection, compresses them into three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, and into objects with shapes and colors. I can’t handle hundreds of dimensions, but I can handle a few. 

 

Perhaps distances in space encode costs of acquiring resources: an apple that costs a few calories to acquire may appear just a meter away while an apple that costs far more calories may appear much further away.  (p118)

 

If physical objects such as neurons have no causal powers, then IIT identifies consciousness with a fiction.  

  

All vertebrates feature the blind spot, but cephalopods do not — an octopus has photoreceptors in front of the interneurons and blood vessels.  

 

The human eye has 7 million cones and 120 million rods each carrying compress information.  The circuitry of the eye then squashes this down to 1 million signals and forwards it to the brain, which must correct errors and decode actionable messages about fitness.  (p138)

 

My very body is an icon, hiding a complex reality of which I am ignorant. I don’t know my real actions. I know only how the icon of my body appears to interact with other icons in my interface. (p142)

 

Billions of bits enter the eye each second, but only forty win the competition for attention.  (p155)

 

Arabidopsis thaliana, a small weed that looks like wild mustard, has eleven types of photoreceptors ... (some) cyanobacteria boasts twenty-seven different photoreceptors ... p145

 

We have no grounds for claiming that our interface is veridical and [a synesthete’s] an illusion. In fact neither is veridical nor an illusion.  Each is an adaptive guide for a critical decision — what shall I put in my mouth? (p153)

 

"chromatures" - A chromature is a small colored image!patch, typically subtending just a few degrees of visual angle, typically not comprehending an entire object, and typically inhomogeneous in hue, saturation and brightness. Chromature includes color as the special case in which the patch is entirely homogeneous. The image patches we!examined above are all! xamples of chromatures. Whereas the space! of (aperture) colors is usually taken to be  three dimensional, the space of chromatures is much larger: the set of nMpixel chromatures forms a 3n dimensional space.

 

To add

 

p114 physicists - space time must go for TOE

P117 data compression

Definitions for FBT and ITP 

Doc how L M S cones mediate color perception and rods levels of gray in low light.  p138.   Find better explanation of exactly how signaling works. 

Lookup “Time, space obsolete in new view of the universe” LA Times 11/16/1999

“Einstein and the search for unification” D.  Gross, current science 89 2005

Add chromature to Terms

Appreciate the value of data compression

Paragraph end of 142 and top 143

Color psychology list p143

 

 

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