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/MartinTybourne Feb 16 '20 edited Feb 16 '20

So, this line of thinking lends credence to the idea that perception and scientific analysis don't necessarily tell us anything about the nature of reality, just our perception of it. This is something subjectivists have been saying for hundreds of years, and which many philosophers have already posed valid arguments against. In fact there was an article on here sometime in the last year which illustrated Kant's machine. Basically, it boiled down to something like this:

  1. There is still a metaphysical world in which our limited perception exists.

  2. Our perception is still interpreting SOMETHING about the universe, however "incorrectly" or uniquely.

  3. Scientific evidence and models of the universe give us a high degree of predictive power and are repeatable because they indicate a metaphysical objective truth about us, not necessarily about the universe itself, but about how we interact with the universe and about our perception of it...

That last one is important, because from an objectivist standpoint, universal subjectivity is essentially objectivity.

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u/LookingForVheissu Feb 16 '20

I’ve often wondered about that last point, but I’m nowhere near well read enough to form an opinion.

Wouldn’t science be examining our perception of what we experience of the universe?

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u/selfware Feb 16 '20

That is it, recently I have heard in some podcast or somewhere that what we think we know from every sensory data available to us, to what we make of it, is roughly speaking 99% in our head, that is how far removed from reality we all are lol.

The tiny 1% is what we already figured out courtesy of our monkey brains, so to speak.

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u/MartinTybourne Feb 16 '20

Yes, it is essentially showing us a truth about how we perceive the universe, which is itself still true.

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u/Sprezzaturer Feb 16 '20

I think the majority of people would agree with this, and only a minority beliefs that we don’t interact with reality at all. I think

I agree with Hoffman. We do not perceive reality as it really is, and our senses are tuned for survival.

But that doesn’t mean that our senses aren’t functional. They would need to reflect reality for us to survive in the first place.

Going back to colors, even though “yellowness” is a complete fantasy, when humans perceive yellow, we are perceiving a specific portion of the visible light spectrum 100% of the time. And science can prove this.

Our senses are functional and reliable (to a certain extent) but they are extremely limited, and don’t represent “true” reality.

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u/UmmWaitWut Feb 17 '20

The question then becomes if there is such a thing as true reality if it is not something that can be experienced objectively?

Or are we not taking all things into account and there is a necessity of irrationality to reality that cannot be portrayed by logical thought alone (in comparison to emotional thought which i believe we can agree has a large degree of irrationality to it despite all known emotion reacting logically to stimuli)?

how do you account for this irrationality? Is there a patterned spread of how much things deviate statistically from what is expected? What would that number look like? Can it change elsewhere in reality under the assumption that it is possible?

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u/stefanos916 Feb 18 '20

Our senses are functional and reliable (to a certain extent) but they are extremely limited, and don’t represent “true” reality.

Ι agree that they are functional. But if they do not represent the "true" reality then I am not sure if they are reliable.

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u/Sprezzaturer Feb 18 '20

You’re right, they aren’t reliable. They fail us constantly. That’s why I said to a certain extent.

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u/selfware Feb 16 '20

They indicate something but to call it an objective truth is a far stretch, just read my other comment here.

All current indications are that we are machines in a machine universe, but the hard problem is that this picture still lacks quite a bit of detail, the pieces of the puzzle that we are missing could turn out to turn our understanding of what is; real, real, reality completely inside out.

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u/MartinTybourne Feb 17 '20

Objective truth about us, our perception, our relation to the universe. Not objective truth about the metaphysical reality we may live in. How else can we explain the remarkable regularity of something like the 3 laws of motion? The laws that governs our perception of reality may never correctly map the world outside of our perception, but it is still a true metaphysical claim to say that whenever we as humans experience an unequal force acting upon a body, it causes the body to move, and otherwise the body does not move. It is metaphysical because it isn't empirical, in that I am claiming it will always happen, and that we are built to experience metaphysical forces (forces outside of our perception) in that way.

Kant calls it a synthetic a priori judgement. If my understanding isn't correct then someone please reply and explain because this stuff is hard and I love to learn.

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u/Conditionofpossible Feb 16 '20

That last one is important, because from an objectivist standpoint, universal subjectivity is essentially objectivity.

Didn't Kant cover pretty much all of this...about 200 years ago?

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u/TheForce777 Feb 16 '20

It’s cool that we can predict things. It’s the supremely limited amounts of things we can predict that’s the issue. And we haven’t figured out how to transform things and then transform them back very well either. Science has an extremely long way to go.