Donald Hoffman - Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Mind?

thought I like you I've been thinking about consciousness and to begin with we say well where did consciousness come from obviously it came from an evolutionary process and so there's a whole subculture of people talking about the evolutionary psychology of all different kinds of traits including consciousness yes how does this work well as far as perception and evolution goes and consciousness the standard view in the field is that natural selection has shaped us to have conscious experiences that truly reflect the state of the world that our perceptions are as they say veridical true to the state of the world and the argument is quite simple those of our ancestors that didn't see cruelly we're at a disadvantage in the competition with those of our ancestors who did see truly and as a result they were less likely to have kids less likely to survive long enough to have kids so we're the offspring of those who saw truly and therefore on evolutionary grounds we can expect that our our senses are in general reliable not perfect because if your senses are attuned to the world goes the theory that you are more likely to eat lunch than be lunch that's right you're more likely to to avoid that tiger and to catch prey yourself because you're seeing the truth and you're more likely to you know avoid the cliffs and the snakes and so forth so so if you see truly you will have greater fitness than those who who don't see truly and you'll have more kids and so your genes for seeing truly will get passed on and your get amplified over generations absolutely the idea would be that they spread throughout so that very few of us will have perceptions that are marginally you know that are false okay so maybe a few you know people with psychological problems might have you know perceptions that are odd and schizophrenia something like that but that's that's a rarity most of us can trust our perceptions so that's this the standard view and I think that it uh turley it's oddly pulse it mistakes some of the key points of evolutionary theory as well that's a radical claim and when what you're saying now is critiquing what is only this standard theory but it seems like a very intuitive theory if that almost sounds obviously correct and you're saying it is actually wrong that's right it seems obviously correct and it's actually in the textbooks in the standard for example vision science textbooks the argument is given that evolution guarantees that our perceptions are generally true okay so the burden is on you it certainly is to explain to me and everyone else why you have such a dramatic challenge to the accepted conventional wisdom so first I'll give an intuition then I'll give a little bit of more hard reasons why the first intuition is that evolution is about fitness in the first place so and fitness and truth are very very distinct notions Fitness depends not only on the state of the world but also on the organism and the state of the organism so for example a steak could have high fitness value for a hungry lion that wants to eat it's going to have much lower Fitness value for that lion if it's full and it wants to mate and the steak probably has no fitness value to a cow in any state so there the notion of what is the fitness of a particular aspect of the world is relative to the organism and its state so it's not about truth it's about fitness that evolution is concerned with so then the question that I dressed in my lab with my graduate students Justin mark and Brian Merriam and others was let's run what are called evolutionary games so the Darwin's theory has been made mathematically precise an evolutionary game theory we can create any worlds we want to in the computer and we can create organisms in those worlds with perceptual systems tailored the way we want some that see all of the truth so I'm going to see part of the truth some that see no truth but they're only tuned to the fitness functions in that world and we run these evolutionary simulations and what we find is that truth goes extinct almost all the time truth goes extinct yeah extinct but that's right so that's a remarkable word to talk about truth about what's really out there in the world it it it really is it was it's a bit of a surprising result we found that the only time the truth has any chance of survival is if Fitness functions involve are in some sense almost the same as the structure of the world so for example if you have a resource like water and and the resource can have a very little amount of water all the way up to very big amount of water and so that's a linear order they call it of the amount of water and if the fitness of the water for the organism is dependent you you know is very little for a small amount of water and very large for a large amount of water so it's what we call monotonic then truth has a chance to survive but any other function and it doesn't have a chance any non monotonic function and it and the truth organisms and our simulations will go extinct and we've done this with evolutionary game theory I should mention we've also done it with genetic algorithms so we try to actually get populations of organisms with genes that we randomly mutate and have them breed and reproduce them and we can't even get truth to breed so so truth never even rises to the point where can actually compete so a critical assumption here is that what is required for fitness for a given species is different in some ways than the way the world is really structured that's a a critical assumption that you make in order for the result to occur that evolution drives truth being a URI at your perception being of reality to extinction I mean you need that assumption that's right now that so the N I agree with you so the assumption that the condition is that if Fitness is not essentially the same thing as truth then truth will go extinct but mathematically it's almost always the case that Fitness is distinct from the structure of truth that they're not isomorphic or homomorphic it's something specific examples in the real world as far as human fitness is concerned so yeah so for example in the case of the water example a little while if you have too little water you die of thirst too much you've drowned yeah a couple a couple glasses of water is just right so here's a fitness function that is penalizing you for too little reward you for just the right amount and then penalize you for too much salt too little you die too much you die just the right amount so this is homeostasis is ubiquitous in human life and it's about homeostasis I mean not too little not too much and so it means that in general Fitness is a non monotonic function of the structures in the world so what we did was we in the computer can simulate hundreds of thousands of different worlds with different numbers of territories and resources different Fitness functions so we do what are called Monte Carlo simulations we run millions of trials we can create organisms that can see all the truth in those worlds part of the truth none of the truth that are tuned to fitness or not and so we run you know many hundreds of hours of simulations millions of trials and we can't reach organism artificial organism that you have how many Fitness functions would you have that you would compare Fitness functions with reality oh we would try several different Fitness functions so we could try we'll try monotonic Fitness functions often Gaussian Fitness functions are reasonable Fitness functions so we would we'll throw in two or three like different Fitness functions like that to try and run millions of trials millions of trials that's right and and we'll have different strategies compete against each other and what we find is that natural selection drives true perceptions to Swift extinction that's just a startling statement it's absolutely startling and it has strong implications it means that our what does it mean for us what does it mean in terms of our perceptions of the world we can't trust it we can trust it to survive but and mate and eat but in terms of understanding the world what does it mean yeah it means that our perceptions are a great guide to keep us alive they're very very useful they're for fitness but if we think that they're giving us an insight into the ultimate nature of objective reality they're not so the Joule bill is an interesting example of this it's it's this beetle the Outback of Australia the males are brown glossy and have bumpy wing cases the males are you know can fly the females are flightless the males fly along looking for females when they find a available female they alight and mate another species out in the Australian outback the homo sapiens the male of that species likes full beer bottles doesn't like empties and tosses the empties out into the desert it turns out the bottles are bumpy glossy and just the right shade of brown to tickle the fancy of these male jewel beetles they swarm the bottles they forsake the females and the species almost went extinct the government of Australia had to actually pass laws to save the species and what this shows here's a beetle a species that had survived for hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of years quite well the male's had found the females and made it sounds like their perceptions were true indicators of what the females were not at all apparently they had a little trick something that's bumpy and glossy and brown you know find it and made it the bigger the better so throw a beer bottle out there the whole thing came crashing down the species could have gone extinct and that's what evolution does for us it gives us perceptual systems that are not there to tell us the truth they're tricks and hacks that lets you survive long enough to reproduce

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 51,981

Keywords: Donald Hoffman, Closer To Truth, Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Social Psychology, Mind, Brain, Neuroscience

Id: KIGcRLAYSoM

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 17 2016