Back in November 2016, so 5 years ago, I wrote a post in response to an academic paper by Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness, where I specifically critiqued their ideas on biological evolution. Despite co-authoring the paper, I believe this particular aspect of their paper is predominantly Hoffman’s, based on an article he wrote for New Scientist, where he expressed similar views. One of his key arguments was that natural selection favours ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.
...we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment. Instead, it generally favors perceptual strategies that are tuned to fitness.
One way to use fewer calories is to see less truth, especially truth that is not informative about fitness. (My emphasis)
What made me revisit this was an interview in Philosophy Now (Issue 147, Dec 2021/Jan 2022) with Samuel Grove, who recently published Retrieving Darwin’s Revolutionary Idea: The Reluctant Radical. According to Grove, Darwin was reluctant to publish The Decent of Man, because applying natural selection to humans was controversial, despite the success of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (full title). The connection to Hoffman’s argument is that Darwin struggled with the idea that evolution could ‘select’ for ‘truth’. To quote Grove:
Natural selection is premised on three laws: the law of inheritance, the law of variation, and the law of superfecundity (where organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive). Together, these laws produce selection, and over the course of time, evolution. Well, Darwin’s question was, how could evolution produce a subject capable of knowing these very laws? Or, why would evolution select for fidelity to truth or laws? Selection favours survival, not truth. (My emphasis again)
Darwin turned to arguments, that as Grove points out, were ‘the common garden variety racism of the time’ – specifically, ‘group selection’ that favoured Anglo Saxon groups. Apparently, Darwin was reluctant to consider ‘group selection’ (as opposed to ‘individual selection’), but did so because it led to a resolution that would have been politically acceptable in his day. I will return to this point later.
So, even according to Darwin, Hoffman may have a point, though I’m not sure that Darwin and Hoffman are even talking about the same idea of ‘truth’. More on that later.
For those unfamiliar with Hoffman, his entire argument centres on the fundamental idea that ‘nothing exists unperceived, including space and time’. For more details, read my previous post, or read his co-authored paper with Prakash. I need to say upfront that I find it hard to take Hoffman seriously. Every time I read or listen to him, I keep expecting him to say, ‘Ah, see, I fooled the lot of you.’ His ideas only make sense to me if he believes we live in a computer simulation, which he’s never claimed. In fact, that would be my first question to him, if I ever met him. It’s an idea that has some adherents. Just on that, I would like to point out that chaos is incomputable, and the Universe is chaotic on a number of levels, including evolution, as it turns out.
In a previous life, I sometimes became involved in contractual disputes on major engineering projects (in Australia and US), preparing evidence for lawyers, and having to address opponents’ arguments. What I found in a number of cases, was that people prepared simple arguments that were nevertheless compelling. In fact, they often delivered them as if they were a fait accompli. In most of these cases, I found that by digging a little deeper, they could be challenged successfully. I have to admit that I’m reminded of this when I examine Hoffman’s argument on natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’.
Partly, this is because his arguments highlight contradictions in his own premise and partly because one of his key arguments is contradicted by evidence, which, I concede, he may not be aware of.
For a start, what does Hoffman mean by ‘fitness’?
He talks about fitness in terms of predators and prey:
But in the real world where predators are on the prowl and prey must be wary, the race is often to the swift. It is the slower gazelle that becomes lunch for the swifter cheetah.
This quote is out of context, where he’s arguing that ‘swiftness’ in response, be it the gazelle or the cheetah, favours less information, therefore less time; over more information, therefore lost time. Leaving aside the fact that survival of either animal is dependent on the accuracy of their ‘modelling’ of their environment, if the animal being chased or doing the chasing ‘doesn’t exist unperceived’, then they might as well be in a dream. In fact, we often find ourselves being chased in a dream, which has no consequences to our ‘survival’ in real life. The argument contradicts the premise.
Hoffman and Prakash quote Steven Palmer from a ‘graduate-level textbook’ (1999):
Evolutionarily speaking, visual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate . . . Indeed, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate. By and large, what you see is what you get. When this is true, we have what is called veridical perception . . . perception that is consistent with the actual state of affairs in the environment. This is almost always the case with vision . . . (Authors’ emphasis)
Hoffman and Prakash then argue that ‘using Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, we find that natural selection does not, in general, favor perceptions that are true reports of objective properties of the environment’. In other words, they effectively argue that Palmer’s emphasis on ‘veridical perception’ is wrong. I can’t argue with their Monte Carlo simulations, because they don’t provide the data. However, real world evidence would suggest that Palmer is correct.
I read a story on Quora by a wildlife ranger about eagles who have had one eye damaged, usually in intra-species mid-air fights. In nearly all cases (he described one exception), an eagle who is blind in one eye needs to be euthanised because they would invariably starve to death due to an inability to catch prey. So here you have ‘fitness’ dependent on vision being accurate.
Leaving aside all this nit-picking about natural selection favouring ‘fitness’ over ‘truth’, how does it support their fundamental thesis that reality only exists in the mind? According to them, their theory of evolution ‘proves’ that reality doesn’t exist unperceived. Can you even have evolution if reality doesn’t exist (except in the mind)?
And this brings me back to Darwin, because what he didn’t consider was that, in the case of humans, cultural evolution has overtaken biological evolution, and this is unique to humanity. I wrote another post where I argue that The search for ultimate truth is unattainable, but there are 'truths' we have found throughout the history of our cultural evolution and they are in mathematics. It’s true that evolution didn’t select for this; it’s an unexpected by-product, but it has led to the understanding of laws governing the very Universe that even Darwin would be amazed to know.
