Do we see the real reality or a false reality?

[Independent voter]

Yeah this sounds like something stoners would say, "dude, dude, what if the reality we see is not the real reality?"

But the guys in the article have PhD's and give TED talks etc so we have to take them seriously. I think it's interesting to think about at least.

I was thinking about it the other day, if we do live in a simulation, what if we are programed not to see the glitches in the matrix? There could be a hole in the simulation right next to you and you'd never see it because you are programed not to see it.



more of the article at the link

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/201...lity-out-of-us



For decades Hoffman, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying the links between evolution, perception and intelligence (both natural and machine). Based on that body of work, he thinks we've been missing something fundamental when it comes to fundamental reality.

Fundamentally, Hoffman argues, evolution and reality (the objective kind) have almost nothing to do with each other.
Hoffman's been making a lot of news in recent months with these claims. His March 2015 TED talk went viral, gaining more than 2 million views. After a friend sent me the video, I was keen to learn more. I called Dr. Hoffman and he graciously set aside some time for us to talk. What followed was a delightful conversation with a guy who does, indeed, have a big radical idea. At the same time, Hoffman doesn't come off as someone with an axe to grind. He seems genuinely open and truly curious. At his core, Hoffman says, he's a scientist with a theory that must either live or die by data.
So, what exactly is Hoffman's big radical idea? He begins with a precisely formulated theorem:

"Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, 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 that is just tuned to fitness."

So let's unpack Hoffman's theorem for a moment. To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, "fitness" is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That's what they mean by "fitness functions."

So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment's, fitness function. The second creature couldn't care less about what's really going on in reality. What Hoffman's theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost always — win the evolution game.

To see how this works, consider an example Hoffman describes in an interview with Quanta Magazine. He begins by imagining a resource like water whose real-world quantity has be objectively ordered — very little water, medium amounts of water, lots of water. According to Hoffman, most fitness functions won't be direct responses to something like this ordering. Instead they will be like bell curves. Too little water is bad (death by desiccation) but so is too much water (death by drowning). That means evolution would tune the organism's behavior so that too little and too much water would both be bad and both generate the same kind of response (perception). Only the moderate amount of water would generate a different response. As Hoffman puts it:

"... an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won't see any distinction between small and large — it only sees red — even though such a distinction exists in reality."

To test this idea, Hoffman and collaborators have run evolutionary simulations with different kinds of fitness functions — some of those tuned to reality and some having nothing to do with reality. The non-reality functions almost always win. For Hoffman, the consequences of these studies are profound. As he told me:

"We assume the 'predicates' of perceptions — space, time, physical objects, shapes — are the right ones to describe physical reality. And this theorem says that [such] predicates are [the wrong ones] almost surely."

In other words, evolution couldn't care less if you perceive objective reality. It only wants you to have sex successfully. As a consequence, your apprehension of the world is tuned to whatever allows that to happen. Thus, your perceptions at the root level have nothing to do with some fundamental physics upon which the fundamental nature of objective independent reality is constructed.

[May90]

Simple fact: there is a blind spot in our sight. Do we see it? Nope, our brain interpolates what we see to it. Same way, brain interpolates everything we see into our world view. Our deepest beliefs, we will hold true even if the proof of their faultiness is shoved in our face. They are the reality for us.

[Independent voter]

Like how subatomic quantum theory doesn't make any sense? I wonder if it's just because we aren't seeing reality as it really is. Maybe I'm extrapolating.

Once we create AIs they will see the true reality, at least I think they will.

[I Push Buttons]

Obviously the guy's notion that we don't perceive reality as it really is accurate, like he said, we perceive it in the way best suited for our survival. We don't see the quanta that make up a bush, we see a bush. But the rest of what he says sounds like bullshit.

We have already seen another version of reality, at the quantum scale. We know very little about it. Perhaps we should focus on that and not some other hypothetical "real reality" based on nothing other than biological entities evolving to see what keeps them alive instead of evolving to see everything.

[Shadowferal]

Old idea...

Allegory of the Cave

Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from things passing in front of a fire behind them, and they begin to give names to these shadows. The shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be taken with what was said before, namely the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line. In particular, he likens our perception of the world around us "to the habitation in prison, the firelight there to the sunlight here, the ascent and the view of the upper world [to] the rising of the soul into the world of the mind".
-------------------

Free your mind.

[Rooflesstoofless]

We perceive the world through a narrow band of senses so yes there is more to reality than we know.

[unbound]

Not really controversial.

There are many, many aspects of reality that we still can't perceive (currently called dark matter and dark energy), but we know it is there due to its influence. You are only able to physically see a very, very narrow part of the EM spectrum. You can can only hear a limited ranged of audio frequencies. Most of what you see and hear, therefore, is your brain filtering and interpreting what it can. We get caught up in pareidolia all the time.

Basically, at best, we only see a very narrow slice of the reality around us.

[Dezerte]

Well, we do rely on our brain's interpretation of the world. I'm speaking from the psychological perspective though, so no 'matrix' or simulation - but many of these illusions of the brain are understood or at the very least accounted for. Optical illusions are perhaps the best example, as they are so easily proven, but we could go into more complex issues such as generalization, prejudice and our brain's tendency to fill in the blanks.

There is much our brains lie to us about, and I find this topic very interesting.

[Vash The Stampede]

Humans never see reality. We interpret reality. Even math is just an interpretation of the universe, not the actual universe. The light we see is a fraction of the light spectrum. The sound we hear is limited in range. Humans are the best at interpreting our environment, but it isn't actual. For example, a dog or cat looks in a mirror and thinks it sees another dog or cat, while a human knows it's looking at itself.

On top of that the human mind makes its own universe. To one of the House Wife's of whatever, they see the world starting from their home to their local hair dresser, while a scientist sees it from his home to the edge of the universe. We create our own little world in our minds that never reflects reality, or just reflects a small fraction of it.

Even the way we see light has changed. Ancient Greeks were believed to see color differently, and as a result their statues were colored vibrantly.


We think we see the color pink, but in reality there's no pink.