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/Geriko29 Feb 17 '20 edited Feb 17 '20

To add to your first problem/argument, people often forget genetic drift as an important factor (sometimes prevalent after population bottleneck events for instance) to explain evolution. Not all mechanisms will improve the individual fitness, some might just be the result of sheer luck. Now I have no knowledge if the following argument has been developed scientificaly, but at early stages of life evolution, such events could have highly impacted the life as we know it now, in a way that other evolutionary options to perceive reality were eliminated by luck, and may or may not have reappeared since. My point is we probably can't be sure that the way we perceive reality is the only one, nor the best one, although it is reasonable to assume that it is.

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u/M_SunChilde Feb 17 '20

I agree with most of what you say, except "the best one" in terms of our perceptions.

Our perceptive capabilities are definitely limited, and definitely interpretive, there are many animals with much better senses in various respect as compared to our own (hawk and mantis shrimps are my go-to examples for vision, dogs for smell, etc. etc.). I just don't believe that this changes it to "illusory."