As advanced by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, From. Adam Frank at NPR:
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. More.
Frank finds the idea attractive:
Indeed, criticisms both closely reasoned and otherwise can be found from a variety of sources. For myself, I find the logic in Hoffman’s ideas both exciting and potentially appealing because of other philosophical biases I carry around in my head. Also, it’s clear from the body of his work that Hoffman has been seriously attacking the problem from a range of angles for a while.
But the ideas are also so radical that I’m inclined to think they’re wrong (as most ideas this radical tend to be). It’s gonna take a lot of proof to tip the scales in my (and most others’) view.
Actually, if the idea proves culturally and politically attractive, it would take very little proof. It will be merely the next extension of “evolution,” as: Tom Wolfe notes in The Kingdom of Speech,
By now, 2014 [when Chomsky’s critic Everett appeared], Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded n the very anatomy, the very central nervous system of all modern people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier life form—even if you had to go all the way bak to Darwin’s “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had evolved… from something. Everett’s notin that speech had not evolved from anything—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was unthinkable to to the vast majority of modern people. They had all been so deep-steeped in the Theory that anyone casting doubt upon it obviously had the mentality of a Flat Earther or a Methodist. (pp. 253–54)
See also: A cognitive scientist’s “evolutionary argument against reality”
Follow UD News at Twitter!
The supremacy of “fitness” over truth—unadorned reality—is, of course, total nonsense, but deadly nonsense. A Big Lie always has at its root some sin looking to be justified, usually idolatry and all the evils it invites in, and it always ends in tens of millions dead.
“The fear of the LORD,” Solomon wrote, “is the beginning of wisdom, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Not yawn at wisdom and instruction, not dispassionately disagree, but hate with full emotional involvement. There is a guilty conscience to be silenced, and there is no measure out of bounds, no action that is not justified to try to quiet that awful voice.
The fitness of Progressives, it seems, requires the rapid and vicious liquidation of those who love the truth, and who insist there is an external reality that applies to everyone alike, and who declare that this reality is moral all the way down.
Fitness functions. Of such deadly nonsense Auschwitzes are made.
At 13:40: “Evolution has shaped us with perceptual symbols that are designed to keep us alive.” (emphasis added)
It’s Berra’s Blunder all the way down!
And although Hoffman tries to limit his results to just visual perceptions and ignore the conclusions as applied to our cognitive faculties more generally, the following article rightly points out that there is no reason to presuppose that his results should not be applied more generally to our cognitive faculties overall since evolution is supposedly ultimately responsible for everything we are and think:
Moreover, there is the small matter of ‘reliable observation/perception’ being a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself:
Thus, since the mathematics of population genetics forces Darwinists to believe that their observations/perceptions of reality are illusory, then either Darwinian evolution must be false at some fundamental level or else all of science must necessarily be undermined.
Humorously, I think many hard-core Darwinists would opt for the latter option as the best answer 🙂
In what should be needless to say, a worldview that undermines the scientific method itself by holding all our observations of reality are illusory is NOT a worldview that can be firmly grounded within the scientific method!
Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the math of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the math of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory!
Verses and Music:
First creature is Atheist, second creature Mormon? Yes, the Mormon will have more babies. Higher IQ’s too.
Donald Hoffman: “Why? Why have we made so little progress?”
Maybe because materialistic premises are not only simplistic……reductionist, but completely wrong?