Are our perceptual systems structured to view the world truthfully?

Donald Hoffman's been saying this since the 90s. His Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory and interface theory of perception are very convincing. Love his books on cognitive science as a cog sci guy myself, and his theory of conscious realism/conscious agents is pretty intriguing if you think Markov kernels are the fundamental element of reality :D

You run a brilliant channel buddy. I really appreciate the quality of your content. Hey, like the way you say "this Hoffman guy". Funny haha Donald Hoffman is a great thinker. You sure got me clicking on your video!

but why would the eyes adjust to the fitness and not the brain. having a true perception system with a good brain seems more robust.

Evolution doesn't care about something being wasteful, as long as it isn't so wasteful to the point of getting your lineage extinct, And in fact, to some extent it is beneficial to not be too specialized as something that before was useless or even wasteful, might suddenly become beneficial when environmental conditions change.

interesting 🤔

I don't even understand how Hoffman is taken seriously. We KNOW what our perceptions are based on, we know how retinas work, we know how noses work, ears, etc. That our perceptions are not what is actually going on is a fact we've known for a long time now, but we know exactly to what extent and it what ways our visual perceptions differ from the underlying reality of photons and retinas for example.

And here's the thing, you have to ignore that most modern scientific understanding is not based on naive conscious perception, but rather data gathered by devices. These ideas can't apply to any technologically gathered data as technology is not something that "evolved". In fact that technology even works demands that the principles on which it is based contain the level of truth necessary to implement that technology's functionality.

Hoffman's claims are kinda interesting in context of raw conscious perception, or would have been before we figured out how sensory perceptions work, but extending them to question physics itself as discovered through science is borderline insane, and you can get rid of the borderline when it comes to Hoffman's absurdist infinity math by which he conjures up God after deciding nothing is real...

Edit: I forgot to point out Hoffman's ideas are highly dependant on denying the reality of emergent properties, while appealing to some fundamental ontology that is nowhere in sight as the only real truth. You have to be ok with logic like molecules don't exist because they are actually made of atoms which also dont exist because they are made of quarks and electrons, but wait! there's more, particles don't exist, only quantum fields exist, but no wait, quantum fields aren't a thing, I like the amplitudehedron better or decorated permutations, yes let me settle on decorated permutations and say that despite my whole theory is that all human knowledge including these decorated permutations is total bullshit disconnected from reality I can use them as the basis of math that proves God. Yeesh.

I think a good example would be temperature. We can feel hot and cold and that feeling intensifies the further we stray from our ideal body temperature, but on the extreme ends a Flame can produce a cool sensation and frost bites can feel warm.

What does it even mean to say that our perceptions are or are not truthful? Our perceptions do not present us with propositions. There is nothing abstract or conceptual in a perception.

evolution is not a single path, but a statistical distribution of "good enough" options. basically your using a symbolic replacement for components of reality, and its symbols are an evolutionary generated, good enough set of symbols. Instead of one symbol its many, this is why KANs are so interesting. optimize function or choose optimal one for a task.

Great video! Hoffman’s ideas are fun to think about, and he’s been really prolific at advocating them on podcasts - which has resulted in many lay people taking his ideas for granted, despite the existence of sensible counter arguments.

Would be interesting to see how these sorts of evolutionary simulations play out with more complex environments, and more flexible agents - e.g., mid-sized ANN agents with the potential to acquire a wide range of compressed representations.

Here are some relevant papers at the intersection of cogsci & deep learning - which touch on these issues to some extent, and which might overlap more with your current interests than those using the more simplistic toy simulations:

Unsupervised learning predicts human perception and misperception of gloss. Nature Human Behaviour (2021)

Sensory perception relies on fitness-maximizing codes. Nature Human Behaviour, (2023)

Neural representation in active inference: Using generative models to interact with—and understand—the lived world. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2024).

@tunadorable Awesome video on the evolutionary consequences of reality sensing. I'm impressed you actually did your own work in this field. Making the distinction between sensation systems and perception systems is genius in my book. Do you have any papers or publication on that work ?

May I introduce you to the concept of "Sense making"? In my career as data scientist I used to work with piramid model with "data" at the bottom, adding metadata provides "information", recognizing patterns provides "knowledge" and the ability to solve problems, being able to use the knowledge to predict the consequences of actions results in "wisdom". Only in the last 10 years have I come to appreciate that the choice of language and concepts at the lower levels fundamentally impacts what can be achieved at the higher levels and that a process of "Sense making" is required to inject new words and /or prune old words is an essential part of sustainable adaptive planning. Of course maybe this is already trivial for you. in that case:

Keep up the great work!

you look stoopid

Didn't expect the part about your own experiments to be more interesting than the research than you're describing in the first part!

the paper gives a beautiful analogy to something very intuitive, being that natural selection only selects for survival

I know I don't have the technical vocabulary to explain things in a standardized way.. 😅 so I use terms like "sensory fidelity". But I find it interesting how certain perceptions are more or less evolved based on this complex dynamic of necessity.

Like, how we have often high degrees of fidelity with certain smells, tied strongly to memory, because those smells signify important survival related data. Yet other smells which also would give us important survival data, we simply cannot detect at all.

C02 for example, most biology cannot detect it. And pockets of it under lakes, or sands, can leak creating traps where thousands of creatures wander into these areas unknowingly, since they cannot smell this gas. And then die by breathing in this invisible substance.

But it makes sense because, biology doesn't encounter this phenomenon regularly enough to have devoted evolution toward detecting it. So, it's ultimately interesting how, in the struggle for systemic equilibrium, life cannot just endlessly add new features, but must make the most fit possible combination within the parameters of the likely energy consumption, which must be met.

Adding new things to a sense, or increasing the fidelity of a sense is naturally an issue of available nutrition, and a systems capacity for converting food into usable energy fast enough. The limitations make for the diversity.

As was mentioned though, the brains ability to change faster than the actual structure of the sensors. Just like in computing and robotics, the hardware is a harder problem than the software. So it's as if nature has made it possible to tweak and update the deep hardware structure to compensate for dynamic change. Similar to software patches, only accumulative in how the change occurs. Yet, far more rapidly than evolutionary time for the hardware of the species.

I often wonder how the new dynamic between necessity and intent will play out in this technological era, as we take the reigns of our own evolution. I would imagine that as solutions are innovated, not only will our fidelity increase, but also our sensory toolset. Leading to and incredible ability to accurately interpret the vibrational substrate.

Reality appears to be infinitely complex, with countless emergent properties, each having numerous values. Regardless of how sophisticated our interface with reality becomes, it can never fully capture this complexity. This leads us to a crucial point: at some stage, we must translate infinite complexity into a finite model within our brains.
This is where the concept of interface becomes significant. Our senses are inherently limited, necessitating the translation of phenomena into sensory inputs or feelings we can process. From an evolutionary standpoint, there's little benefit in perceiving quantum properties, the intricacies of the standard model, or covalent bonds. Instead, evolution has equipped us with more practical responses, such as feeling nauseous when oxygen levels are inappropriate.
While it's true that accommodating more objectives may lead to a more truthful representation, this doesn't negate the fundamental limitation of our interface with reality. No matter how many objectives we incorporate, we're still dealing with a simplified model of an infinitely complex universe.

Seems like this applies more to a simple creature with a simple behavioral repertoire. For a complex animal, perceiving the world accurately (where possible ) is generically advantageous because the exact moment to moment details of a high fitness percept are constantly changing throughout life. A safe sleeping location doesn't look like food , and neither of those look like an opportunity to mate.

This is basic stuff. Lots of philosophers and even games like soma already knew this. The guy who wrote the paper is just taking advantage that computer science guys generaly don't know philosophers like nietzsche and probably many other names and theories that already explain that. This probably has many names in diferent fields.
Our cells specialize to stimuli, specialization means lack of diversity. A computer might see the world just as sum. There won't be any other type of operation to that 'perception of logic gates'.
Some insects can see the infrared spectrum, isn't it part of reality? That means our perceptions aren't truthful.

Inaccuracy is fine, inconsistency however would be a big issue.

I think truth is even more fundamental than perception after watching your video