The Case Against Reality

Agreed.

When I see such arguments I immediately become skeptical because I start seeing a political argument being made, or at least, an argument driven by political leanings.

When I say political, I do not mean party political, but generally being on the left side of the spectrum.

I've known enough philosophers who do their level best to bring science down a peg, seeing it as power struggle between the different ways of "knowing" Think postmodernism and the quest to relativise everything.

Science is about reaching an expert consensus of the most probably explanation of the available evidence. It is not a democratization of thought - it is evidence that matters not majority opinion or vote of scientists.

More generally, it takes a lifetime of study to truly understand even a small aspect of physics. How can you expect someone to explain a lifetime of study in an article for lay people without glossing over the details? I trust the opinions of one physics professor about quantum mechanics much more than 1 million lay people.

I think you've misunderstood my objection on every level. I'm not saying that every pop scientific article should be written so that a layperson can understand all proofs involved, and so on. I'm saying that given what I, as a layperson, can see in the article, his claims seems suspicious. They don't seem logically coherent. They seem to contradict themselves in obvious ways.

If a thinker can't present his ideas in a logically coherent way, there's no reason for me to go through the very time-consuming process of reading a long series of academic papers.

Reading his definition in that paper makes me even more suspicious of his argument here. It's a common problem among academics in specialist fields that they demonstrate a limited claim, and then state a much stronger claim for a popular audience. The claim in the abstract of the paper is that "perceptual systems tuned solely to fitness routinely outcompete those tuned to truth." The claim in the interview is that "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." Those aren't the same. The first is much stronger.

My suspicion is that he's taking his eccentric or exaggerated views and presenting them on the same level as the more reasonable ideas from his research.

Some of the ideas in here echo Huxley's theories of mind as expressed in The Doors of Perception — that of the mind as a "filter" for true reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_at_Large

"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large."

Cursory reading of texts in timeless traditions like Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Hinduism, and other mystic philosophical systems will reveal similar concepts — as will self-inquiry.

That we're beginning to approach a scientific/mathematical explanation of these metaphysical principles is no surprise to me.

Well, I think the main flaw is that reasonable people could think that survival fitness and perception reflecting reality and very closely related. The argument that there could be a better survivability fitness than reflecting reality is overblown by Professor Hoffman. It's not like we don't already know that our perceptions can be misguided, optical illusion thrives on it. It's also extremely hard to believe we could come up with such a successful device as science if our perception of the universe was so off. If there is a divergence, it's in fringe effects (like optical illusions) and low percent or sub-percent, not a major shift and distorsion.

It's a fun idea to entertain, but I'm worried that someone with a PhD could hold that our perceptions are so far off.