Open to explore possibility

[John 6IX Breezy]

Imagine that you are hungry and need to eat it.  Being worried about quill missiles is maladaptive.  Understanding when the things will stick you is important.

Hmm everything has trade-offs. I'm not sure if being extra cautious makes you less successful as a hunter; but I would assume the risk of permanent injury or infection outweighs the benefits of a single meal. Even if we grant that a better understanding is useful here, the brain still stores this information as schemas and heuristics rather than raw accurate facts.

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There's a chance that the wrong reason will eventually lead to a wrong action, while the right reason would never lead there.

I don't know if the right reason never leads to problems. For example, donating your kidney to a friend (even if its the right action for the right reason) still comes with its share of risks and dangers. Truth doesn't care about your survival; and our pursuit of it can sometimes be problematic (e.g. the atomic bomb).

[John 6IX Breezy]

Fitness is a specific type of instrumental utility.

Sure; but you argued that true propositions may have greater instrumental utility (fitness) than false ones. However, being optimized for fitness often involves (or requires) the act of hiding truths. Donald Hoffman (I'll look up the paper when I get home) has simulation experiments in which "organisms" optimized for fitness in the world always outcompete those optimized for truths in the world.

[Angrboda]

Fitness is a specific type of instrumental utility.

Sure; but you argued that true propositions may have greater instrumental utility (fitness) than false ones. However, being optimized for fitness often involves (or requires) the act of hiding truths. Donald Hoffman (I'll look up the paper when I get home) has simulation experiments in which "organisms" optimized for fitness in the world always outcompete those optimized for truths in the world.

I think you or he may be being selectively biased in what you label truth or true propositions and simply ignoring fitness-oriented propositions as something other than truth. I know of a Ted talk in which one of the examples was an insect who was attracted to a specific type of surface which in nature indicated a mate. This pattern matching, due to its imprecision, was thwarted by man-made garbage which triggered the mating response, futilely. It may be true that the pattern recognition was not faithful in representing a mateable object, but that lack of representational fidelity isn't the only criterion for truth. The insect is more interested in truths which advance its mating interest, regardless of any notion of accurate representation. Truth comes in other forms than representational fidelity. The proposition to mate with the specific surface hard-wired into the insect did have instrumental utility in increasing the odds of mating. That it wasn't true in the sense of representational fidelity doesn't matter. So it may be a true proposition that worshipping a god has instrumental utility without that belief displaying an accurate representation of reality. If one lives in a strongly religious society, that can easily be the case. Truth does not only mean representational fidelity.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Here is the paper on the fitness vs truth argument:

Prakash, C., Stephens, K.D., Hoffman, D.D. (2020). Fitness beats truth in the evolution of perception. Acta Biotheoretica, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09400-0

[Angrboda]

I'll look at the paper in more detail tomorrow, but a first pass suggests this is much ado about nothing.

[Belacqua]

Here is the paper on the fitness vs truth argument:

Prakash, C., Stephens, K.D., Hoffman, D.D. (2020). Fitness beats truth in the evolution of perception. Acta Biotheoretica, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09400-0

I think the notion that human beings have some access to the truth is a hold-over from religion. I don't see how modern atheists can support it, really.

Some Christians, Gnostics, and Platonists hold that there is a spark of rationality imprisoned in our material body. They think that if we can stop the body from interfering with proper thinking, then we have a chance of knowing what the world is really like, independent of some image that our minds make. Because the soul or rational spirit has some way of being connected to the truth. 

But of course we atheists don't believe any of that. There is no rational soul independent of the body. Thinking is an activity done by meat and chemicals. Human beings are wildly irrational, and are capable of believing conflicting things at the same time, or believing X and acting on Y, or believing things they hear for which there is no evidence whatsoever. (For example, a lot of people think that Putin has significant influence in US elections!) If people are going to start arguing that natural selection favors what's true rather than just what survives best, we're going to have to throw out Darwin and start again. 

There is a lot of unexamined metaphysics at work in the thinking of many atheists.

[The Grand Nudger]

The notion of truth relies on the/a belief in the possibility of knowledge, not any specific method by which we arrive. Ghosts, meat, calculators, if we believe that we're any of those things and believe that knowledge is possible.... we believe, by default, that those things have access to truth.

I assume that you're referring to yourself and whatever unexamined metaphysics lead you to make the claims to truth above. To that end, do you believe that there is fitness in accurate communication of factual items in a population of social organisms or between members of different populations and different species, even? Evolutionary biologists do, no need to throw out darwin, lol.

[John 6IX Breezy]

I think the notion that human beings have some access to the truth is a hold-over from religion.....

If people are going to start arguing that natural selection favors what's true rather than just what survives best, we're going to have to throw out Darwin and start again. 

Yes; I agree. From the truth setting us free, to Christ being the way, the truth, and the life—I am arguing against something here that is foundational to Christianity. Several other prominent psychologists have made similar arguments about what evolution favors:

"We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness” —Steven Pinker.

[Mister Agenda]

Evolution is blind, whatever helps an organism survive to reproduce in current conditions is selected for, regardless of whether it matches reality. However, I think that perception more closely matching reality is more adaptive when conditions are changing. A frog species unique to a windswept might need to learn to recognize non-flying insects as prey on or go extinct. Under those conditions the frog that can perceive both flying and resting insects as prey has a substantial advantage.

A species like humans, that 'specializes in adaptability' and social cooperation benefits more from being able to realize when a belief is false, or even unlikely to be true, even in the short term, in the world of ever-accelerating change that we've created for ourselves. The current pandemic is an illustration, some people of the people who have died would still be alive if they hadn't held the false belief that the pandemic is a hoax or that the risk was greatly exaggerated.

[The Grand Nudger]

A non venomous snake mimics the pattern of a venomous snake.... but what utility by fitness would this have if there were no objective pattern of "venomous snake" to other organisms with sufficient ability or access to apprehend an accurate representation of the same?

The fitness over truth theory attempts to demonstrate itself by creating a game which privileges a fitness strategy, so there's no surprise that the fitness strategy wins in that instance. Bringing it into the real world, however - with the water resource collection disparity in the paper - what happens when I hit the fitness strategy machine over the head with a rock? How much water does it's brilliant strategy net it then? Knowing where it's head is, truly, is the only thing I have to know to use this strategy. I don't have to know anything about the resource we're competing over or the distribution of outcomes in monte carlo simulations.

As it turns out, we're pretty good at identifying the location of heads. So good, that we see them where they aren't.

Speaking of, consider fitness v truth in misapprehension. If the game is not getting eaten by a lion, seeing lions where there aren't lions is the winning strategy over a large enough set of direct encounters real and imagined. The game, however, is rigged - it doesn't allow for what a more accurate perception of the truth of the presence of lions would allow you to do with all the time you aren't running away from imaginary lions.

Things like building a fence against lions.