Am Mi, 17. Aug 2022, um 21:52, schrieb Brent Meeker:
> On 8/17/2022 8:29 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
>> And since you, like me, are a strong believer in Darwinism, we don't
>> even have to go into the metaphysical. You might also want to consider
>> that there is no reason for evolution to provide us with direct access
>> to reality. It might also be the case that some illusion is a better
>> adaptation. Donald Hoffman goes as far as claiming that the most
>> likely situation is that we evolved to perceive such an illusion. Are
>> you familiar with his ideas?
>
> The "illusion" must have some relation to reality in order to provide
> better adaptation. But in that case why call it "illusion"? Is it an
> illusion that we don't perceive RF or gamma rays? Are dogs
> hallucinating when they smell things we don't?
It could be that actively preventing us from perceiving some aspect of reality
increases our biological fitness, but at the same time ultimately prevents us
from fully understanding reality. It could be some fundamental cognitive
distortion.
A long time ago I was programming an artificial life simulation. It was this
typical thing, a simulated environment with agents foraging for food. The
agents underwent an evolutionary process. To test the evolutionary process, I
decided to make the view range of the agents a genetic parameter without
constraints. I was fully expecting this value to quickly go to infinity. To my
surprise, when I checked the simulation the next morning, the view range had
stabilized at a relatively short value. The reason was this: agents with
infinite vision range went for big piles of food that were far away. They all
chose the same pile, and when they converged there was not enough food for
everyone, and they had spent too much energy going the distance. Of course they
could have evolved some more sophisticated strategies, but since the vision
range was a genetic parameter, it was simply easier for evolution to provide
global coordination by limiting the vision range, and then it got stuck at this
local optimum. I still think about this to this day, and wonder if such a
phenomenon has biological plausibility.
Telmo
> Brent
>
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