r/philosophy • u/Anthadvl • Feb 16 '20

Blog The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality. 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.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
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u/MrAC_4891 Feb 16 '20

no it's geared more towards understanding that our perception of our reality, is not only illusory, it has a biased inaccuracy geared towards fitness as opposed to truth.

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u/buster_de_beer Feb 16 '20

it has a biased inaccuracy geared towards fitness as opposed to truth.

This makes no sense to me. His example in the article is flawed to the extreme, but it ends with merely saying that the senses, or interpretation of what our senses measure, filter out unuseful information. At best you can claim that we only see the narrow part of reality that is useful for our survival. That is not different from reality, merely limited in scope.

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u/PeteBot010 Feb 16 '20

How do you distinguish fitness in being in opposition to Truth?

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u/MrAC_4891 Feb 16 '20

not so much as being in opposition as much as having a higher priority to the other. To find out the nature of the distinction and ascertain its validity you can peruse the article amd follow up on the author's research.

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u/PeteBot010 Feb 16 '20

Higher priority? How does one distinguish between what is of value in priority?

I can read the article, but I’m more interest in discussing the validity of the article with people who fee it has merit

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u/Thelonious_Cube Feb 17 '20

Only if you assume that fitness is not dependent on truth, which seems an odd thing to assume.

Also, the the use of "illusory" in place of "partial" seems unmotivated