I would have left a curmudgeonly comment but you (sensibly) left comments off the post.īut just to say: Hoffman’s piece is seriously confused about some basic philosophical issues concerning the nature of representation and veridicality, and his confusions completely undermine his arguments - including the evolutionary game theoretic argument, which just build them in. “just saw that you posted a link to Hoffman’s latest repackaging of the no-selection-for-veridical-perception thing he has been circulating for years. Leither has opened up the comments section.
The Leiter blog post has been updated with a comment from Jonathan Cohen. He closely examines the meaning of veridical and critiques the assumptions of the simulations using that examination. They seem more philosophy than science, but the Anderson one does question the scientific assumptions and generalizability of Hoffman’s simulations.ĮTA: The Cohen article linked in his comment on the Leiter blog is in this issue. I’ve glanced through many of the articles. There is a review article on this theory with various responses here: He also has an new general audience book out. Hoffman has made appearances in several podcasts and has written for other pop sciences sites. And there are many articles by he and his colleagues at his web site on his observer theory of perception.īut is it just a pet theory that few others in the sciences of perception research pay attention to? I suspect the answer is yes. The results of Monte Carlo simulations are now buttressed by the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem: For an infinitely large class of generically chosen worlds, for generically chosen probabilities of states on the worlds, and for generically chosen fitness functions, an organism that accurately estimates reality is never, in an infinite class of evolutionary games, more fit than an organism of equal complexity that does not estimate objective reality but is instead tuned to the relevant fitness functions. Fitness functions, not objective reality, are the coin of the realm in evolutionary competition. Thus a fitness function depends not just on the state of objective reality, but also, and crucially, on the organism, its state and action. And for a cow looking to do anything, it does not.
For a sated cheetah looking to mate, it does not. For a hungry cheetah looking to eat, the beef enhances fitness. What is the fitness conveyed by, say, a piece of raw beef? The answer depends on the organism, its state, and its action. The key idea here is the fitness function. The following extract, taken from here, gives some indication of what he means: For one thing, I may get a new reading assignment from Gregory. But life is too short for me to spend time with that paper. Also how he can draw conclusions about reality from evolution when science is based on illusions. Perhaps he explains how it relates to idealism there. I’ll leave that for JMac.ĮTA: Wiki article on Donald Hoffman links to a pdf of a paper he wrote defending his consciousness-first theory. The bit on the world being fundamentality consciousness (or the shared virtual reality of conscious agents?) sounds like some new age version of idealism. Otherwise, there is a lot there that we have covered at TSZ: scientific realism, nature of perception, primary versus secondary properties (shape versus color), illusionism ( he re-uses Dennett’s icons on a desktop), nature of truth, mental representation and its relation to reality, EAAN, evolutionary niches. I saw nothing on perception in the SEP or Wiki articles on EGT. Is anyone familiar with how he uses Evolutionary Game Theory and fitness payoffs? He claims simulations based on this theory show that fitness payoffs mean evolutionary success does not imply that successful organisms have developed sensorimotor systems which latch onto the causal structure of reality relevant to surviving in their niche.
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