On Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 6:46 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:
> > > 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. > That is truly fascinating. It brings to mind a situation where I was experimenting with alife, and after many generations they evolved swarming/social behavior, despite their inability to detect each other, all had converged to only travel in the same direction and never turn around to get food behind or too far to the side of them. Individually this strategy seemed bad, but it benefitted the group overall. Since everytime any piece of food was eaten another would appear randomly. So by sweeping across the screen in the same direction, efficiency was maximized for the individual, and all ended up eating more as a result. Or maybe there was some other reason for it. It fascinated me nonetheless. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUgWnm-Xo5R5Rjt1%2Bd57yTkKcCPvauCx9i1hH%3Dpbae96VA%40mail.gmail.com.
