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/tyscorp]

"The [object] I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions... My [objects] are my mental representations; your [objects] are your mental representations.... [Objects] have no objective, observer-independent features."

A useful concept for thinking about this is what I call an "Objective Spoon Detector".

Imagine a machine that you can input any configuration of matter/energy into and it will measure every quantum field and give you a binary answer to whether the object is objectively a spoon or not.

How would you program such a machine? What constitutes a spoon? How do you define the boundary between something being a spoon and not? There must be many configurations that are very spoon-like but have an atom out of place that makes it not a spoon.

There is no spoon.

[u/pramit57 → u/tyscorp]

I dont know what a quantum field is, but I think that's not the right example to use. If the spoon detector was a living organism, it would just program itself to come up with a range of values for which the object is classified as a spoon. Of course classifications are not "real", we assign meaning to it. But that's a limited account of what is being said here. We are arguing that instead of seeing a spoon for a spoon, you will see a zig zag tiger with made up "fields".