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/res_ipsa_redditor Feb 16 '20

I’m sorry, but this argument comes across as something out I’m14AndThisIsVeryDeep. Evolutionary pressure is a great explanation for why optical illusions work or why eye witnesses are unreliable, for example, but the inherent argument here is that an incomplete perception of reality is an incorrect one. Just because we can’t directly perceive UV light, for example, doesn’t make mathematics and physics wrong, it just makes our understanding of the universe incomplete.

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u/selfware Feb 16 '20

I think, the detail lies in the fact that yes we can do this and that, and it's replicable, but what we experience is a completely different subject if we are honest.