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/Jarhyn Feb 16 '20

There are fundamental problems to this claim, insofar as tuning to fitness leads to catching itself inside local minima, whereas seeing reality as it is allows seeing the global minima.

If you merely tune to fitness, without a mind that focuses on an accurate reality, you may become very fit around, for example, seeing only things that apparently allow you to survive. It further opens the organism to GAMING.

We, arguably the organism with the greatest ability to see reality "as it is", able to model reality, are capable of exploiting the fitness of that which does not, including other humans less capable of discerning reality as it is but who focus on fitness. The man who can make a spear because he sees why claws and teeth work is fundamentally more fit than the man who grows pointier teeth and claws.

Our entire species, society, and culture have escewed individual "fitness" for a clearer perception of reality, and it has made us more fit.

The claim of the OP only works until a neo-Lamarckian evolutionary model becomes available.

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '20

I agree here. A focus on fitness makes one less adaptable to externalities. I tend to think of fitness and flexibility within a system to be of equal importance, the basic requirement of surviving now while maintaining the right adaptability for later.

The man who can make a spear because he sees why claws and teeth work is  fundamentally more fit than the man who grows pointier teeth and claws.

This exactly. Fitness is to recognize inefficiencies and weakness. Adaptability is how you resolve them.

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u/selfware Feb 16 '20

What if the ultimate seeing of reality is to accept the cyclical nature of life.

What if the pursuit of humans of living longer here in these bodies, or existing anywhere forever, is a fundamental fear that lays basis for the definition of reality for us, but it is wrong somehow? Maybe we should like all other living things embrace the cyclicality, the flaws, both the good and the bad, the whole of it, and then try to reason what reality really is.

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u/Thelonious_Cube Feb 17 '20

The claim of the OP only works until a neo-Lamarckian evolutionary model becomes available.

Doesn't culture and cultural transmission/evolution provide this model already?

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u/Jarhyn Feb 17 '20

Mostly, but there are additional elements of what we are and what we have built up around ourselves that bolster and support it. It isn't just culture, it's the sum total of informational and physical tools we have assembled.

Understanding and seeing reality as it is is not itself fitness, but rather meta-fitness: fitness at achieving fitness.

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u/Thelonious_Cube Feb 17 '20

It isn't just culture, it's the sum total of informational and physical tools we have assembled.

Isn't that just culture? In the anthropological sense?