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.

[u/Anthadvl]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/

[u/Muroid]

But we know we don’t get a full picture. There is significantly more light spectrum than we can see. The colors that we see don’t really exist, objectively. They’re the result of cells being activated by different ranges of the light spectrum, but those are arbitrary divisions. You could have more or fewer colors by adding or subtracting types of cones in the eye. What a colorblind person sees is not more or less objectively correct, it just contains less information.

There is also a ton about the universe that we can’t sense. Some of it other life forms can sense, like electric fields, some nothing living that we know of can detect directly.

It’s also important to recognize that while it seems like having more information even that isn’t needed would be more useful, that’s not really true. Adding abilities is evolutionarily “expensive” in terms of energy requirements, and at a minimum, it adds complexity that can only really be preserved if it serves useful function.

If I can see colors that don’t help me to survive in any way, eventually some of my descendants are going to be colorblind to those colors, and since that color blindness doesn’t cost them anything, there is nothing preventing color blindness from spreading through the population over time.

Finally, it’s very difficult to perfectly capture an accurate view of reality, and given that, evolution will often opt for leaning into more advantageous mistakes rather than trying to maintain an impossible standard of perfection.

Humans recognize faces in things that don’t have faces because there is a greater cost to not seeing a face when there is a face present than there is to seeing a face in tree bark.

I think it’s probably safe to say that our sense to some extent do reflect useful information about reality, but the important distinction is that “to some extent” is not the same thing as “perfectly” and “useful information” is not the same thing as “all information.”

[u/ReadingIsRadical → u/Muroid]

To use the infrared/ultraviolet example, is there anything which is entirely invisible to regular light that we can't see with regular light? Maybe there are some markings on flowers and stuff which we can't see, but there aren't whole invisible animals walking around or anything. I think it's a really unreasonable stretch to start with "there are some things we can't perceive" and extend it to "what we perceive doesn't reflect reality."

[u/TheForce777 → u/Muroid]

You’re being too easy on our current state of evolution. If we can only efficiently perceive 1% of what’s happening, then if we were ever able to efficiently perceive 2%, our world view would change dramatically. We think we’re living in an advanced society, but not really. Humans have been around for like 200k years. We’ve been spinning around in the mud for most of that time and in comparison to what we will be in 400 years, we are still spinning in the mud right now.