(April 5, 2019 at 3:27 am)Acrobat Wrote:(April 4, 2019 at 10:48 pm)Thoreauvian Wrote: I personally think my assertion is a matter of logic. The more accurate our perceptions, the better adapted we are to realities.
No, it's just atheistic woo, clinging to religious sentiments about truth.
" The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never."
It's a scientific fact that our perceptions have literal blind spots and are in many ways easily fooled; and that's before even getting into bias. Fortunately we have devised a method to compensate for the limits of our perceptions, (magicians make their living from knowing a lot about those limits) the same method we use to outline those limits, basic observation, trial, and error at first; later, science. The best the argument you've outlined proves is that we perceive reality well enough not to be routinely killed by it before we finish raising our offspring; but that's 'not nuthin'.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.