Are our perceptual systems structured to view the world truthfully?

[@chickenp7038]

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.

[@infuriatinglyopaque57]

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).

[@seriousbusiness2293]

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.

[@jyjjy7]

@@seriousbusiness2293 I think these are just examples of your sensory system malfunctioning as is breaks down due to environmental degradation rather than an aspect of evolutionary design

[@seriousbusiness2293]

I'd disagree somewhat. The body can measure temperature quite precisely in a the "livable" range which is evolutionary important (one degree can decide if you have fever). Beyond that range we are talking about imminent danger, it's not important to know the precise temperature anymore, it's only important to recognize a extreme temperature based pain and save the body imideatly.

[@The9thDoctor]

also, i bet if you experienced excruciating levels of hot and cold on a many times per day basis you'd quickly have different perceptions of them than you do now.

[@be1tube]

I see two errors: treating the environment as having a fixed utility and not considering that one has a veridical perception of utility. Different situations have different utilities depending on the response. Hot needs sweat and cold needs clothes. With those responses, utility can be equalized. And you need to distinguish them to respond appropriately. Second, the "utility based" perception at the bottom 10:14 is a perception of a true characteristic of the environment (how good it is for the agent), it's just not the aspect of the environment Hoffman was interested in. Choosing a good basis for perception that filters out noise is what agents should do. When one creates a noisy environment, one should not call the signal plus the noise "the truth" and call the agent incorrect for ignoring the noise.

[@TheEarlVix]

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!

[@jyjjy7]

In what way is Hoffman a great thinker?

[@OpenSourceAnarchist]

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

[@OpenSourceAnarchist]

I posted this before 2:00 lmao

[@jyjjy7]

Just the title of the paper suggests the conclusions here are opposed to Hoffman's

[@ahmedkhan25]

See my separate comment above but I’m all for critiques of Hoffman even thought secretly I think he might be right about the whole universe being a Construct of consciousness- but yes this paper is a nice critique

[@jyjjy7]

@@ahmedkhan25 Why would consciousness involve phenomenal/sensory modeling of something consciousness itself is also constructing? The most charitable interpretation I can muster for the popularity of analytic idealism is that reality is seemingly best modelled computationally/procedurally and so is consciousness. However while consciousness is a computation, computation is not consciousness. It's basic categorical confusion. You eventually get to a point in all analytical idealist thought where you must adopt the idea that that simple predictable dynamics and "consciousness" are equivalent concepts when that just doesn't really make sense. You have the example above in OP treating Markov kernels as synonymous with consciousness rather than a generalized information theoretic formalization of dynamics.

[@OpenSourceAnarchist]

@@jyjjy7 I'm not going into this in a YT comment, but Hoffman is not an analytic idealist. He's best described as a micro/macro/cosmic idealist at all levels on Chalmers' scale (even though he claims Hoffman is a macro idealist) because he defines conscious agents in terms of complexity of possible experiences, i.e. the simplest agent is 1-bit with 2 possible internal experiences, and Hoffman is working on a formal mathematical description that you can look up if you are interested. The "conscious" part comes from the ability to have and decide with internal states. I have no idea why you think Hoffman thinks consciousness is a computation. That is the categorical confusion. And "OP" (me) did say "if you think Markov kernels are the fundamental element of reality", I am not treating them as synonymous with consciousness. For all I know they're a good model of simple organisms and possibly all systems at scale, but whether they're ontologically real as simples or fundamental is taking Hoffman on faith. If anything I subscribe to Wolfram's model of reality as fundamentally computational and deterministic (and branching through a multi-way system, but I'm really not explaining that in a comment!)

[@nathanhelmburger]

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.

[@angelorf]

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

[@mathematicalninja2756]

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

[@adommoore7805]

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.

[@huytruonguic]

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

[@jyjjy7]

@@huytruonguic *and reproduction. Sometimes these goals are counter to each other, as every non-virgin male preying mantis knows... for the few seconds its head can know things after being severed at least

[@jeffreyscott4997]

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.

[@jyjjy7]

What is color but a symbolic abstraction of photon frequency?

[@jeffreyscott4997]

@jyjjy7 Color is the subjective experience of the excitation of a certain class of neurons. To know what causes that excitation requires the application of reason - that is, judgements. My point is that if what causes them differentially were something else than what it is (say, evolutionary advantage), that would be what it represents. "It doesn't actually represent what it represents, it represents something else" would have to be true for our perceptions to lie to us, but that's a self-contradiction. Only if you have some source of "what it should represent" from outside of what it does represent, can you make any sense of it "misrepresenting" reality to make sense. But where is that to be found? In other words, applying the legend of the first graph to the second graph is an "illegal move".

[@jyjjy7]

@@jeffreyscott4997 Your response is curious to me, given we know how photons and retinas work, to the point of using that knowledge in the development of technology like the screen you are reading this on which only actually emits three wavelengths of light but tricks your visual system into thinking it can display millions. Are you asking for an epistemology justification for believing the scientific facts derived from perception being used to explain perceptions themselves? The technology thing I mentioned makes a good case, it works, to the point that we've discovered the underlying quantum mechanical nature of reality, one absent from naive phenomenal perception but can seemingly adequately explain those perceptions as symbolic abstraction of patterns in nerve impulses attenuated by the excitations of 3 specific molecules in the cones of your retinas. Given the remarkable utility of scientific knowledge and the resultant technologies along with the explanatory utility it offers consistent with observation to the astonishing precision of the standard model of particle physics... Yeah of course science is necessarily just a model itself, but models are all we have really. I don't know why you think you are intellectually entitled to absolute ontologic certainty but you are going to be disappointed, you basically explained that to yourself above though. And sure, fine, it could all still just be a dream or a trick or a simulation or whatever but if so... gj God or demon or hyperdimensional teenager in his mom's hyperbasement that's about to enjoy seeing how we handle a war between Israel and Iran lulz, but that's all weak speculative fantasy. They are ideas, not knowledge like science has to offer with real utility, other than psychosocial perhaps?

[@jyjjy7]

@@jeffreyscott4997 Your response is curious to me, given we know how photons and retinas work, to the point of using that knowledge in the development of technology like the screen you are reading this on which only actually emits three wavelengths of light but tricks your visual system into thinking it can display millions. Are you asking for an epistemology justification for believing the scientific facts derived from perception being used to explain perceptions themselves? The technology thing I mentioned makes a good case, it works, to the point that we've discovered the underlying quantum mechanical nature of reality, one absent from naive phenomenal perception but can seemingly adequately explain those perceptions as symbolic abstraction of patterns in nerve impulses attenuated by the excitations of 3 specific molecules in the cones of your retinas. Given the remarkable utility of scientific knowledge and the resultant technologies along with the explanatory utility it offers consistent with observation to the astonishing precision of the standard model of particle physics... Yeah of course science is necessarily just a model itself, but models are all we have really. I don't know why you think you are intellectually entitled to absolute ontologic certainty but you are going to be disappointed, you basically explained that to yourself above though. And sure, fine, it could all still just be a dream or a trick or a simulation or whatever but if so... gj God or demon or hyperdimensional teenager in his mom's hyperbasement that's about to enjoy seeing how we handle a war between Israel and Iran lulz, but that's all weak speculative fantasy. They are ideas, not knowledge like science has to offer with real utility, other than psychosocial perhaps? Maybe we can never justify calling the map the territory but the map is only a map to whatever degree it accurately portrays real aspects of the territory it depicts. Whatever the hell is causing our phenomenal perceptions I would say we at the very least know it ACTS like quantum field theory, or really wants us to think it does. Edit: Note QFT itself is an *effective* field theory and requires an arbitrary ultraviolet cutoff to function and therefore not a candidate for fundamental ontology, as it breaks down at high energies/small scales of space and time.

[@zerotwo7319]

Means that our cells specialize to certain stimuli to the detriment of other signals. E.g you can't see radio frequencies or see the magnetic field, or the infrared but some insects can. It is a type of filter. Usefull but not truthful.

[@BjornHeijligers]

@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!

[@Tunadorable]

No actual published paper, but here's a GitHub repo with the code, results, and a pdf of the original pre-rough-draft that I was working on in 2022. Please forgive my ugly inefficient code, I was actually using this project to learn python for the first time. And thanks! github.com/evintunador/SenPer

[@StephenRayner]

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

[@zerotwo7319]

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.

[@jyjjy7]

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.

[@ahmedkhan25]

(Unfortunately KZbin comments are not the greatest place for intellectual conversations) - but let me give it a shot: 1. Hoffman is make a wild paradigm shifting claim, yes, but also one that jives with Idealist metaphysics and other ways of understanding our reality, but yes extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. so this paper is definitely shooting at one of his claims of his overall theory by using straightforward simulations. But thinking wider, it still opens the door for the claim that Evolution is only focused on organisms perceiving the emergent aspect of physical phenomena in the world at large and that this particular perspective may not be telling the whole truth about the Universe. => We don't think of temperature as a statistical measure of billions of molecules moving but as a feeling of hot or cold for example, We already know this from Quantum Mechanics that the wave function and wave particle duality is not something the human mind can easily grasp, for example. Also that Time itself is likely not to be a fundamental in Reality and itself arises. So reductionism is showing the limits of our understanding 2. In terms of scientific community, We live in a hard realist/physicalist world, ie the shut up an calculate, which I totally understand is needed, buy this has (by ignoring serious philosophy in the education of our scientists and analytical approach to metaphysics) also led to a crisis in theoretical physics and stagnation in our understanding of the limits of physics when we consider Space and Time to be the fundamental. Given that so much of this community is focused on Quantitative evidence we might be shooting ourselves in the foot by not looking at other approaches. Simulation theory and Emergence and "InfoDynamics". for example: pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/13/10/105308/2915332/The-second-law-of-infodynamics-and-its and this: www.essentiafoundation.org/entropy-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/reading/ 3. Yes Decorater Permuations are weird.. but I'll wait to see what he (and since he is in his 70s) his students adn the new young generation of High Energy Physicists (AND AI) might come up - I would def not count of Nima Arkani Hamid the phsyicst however -this guy has a good chance of being the next Einstein..kzbin.info/www/bejne/fX2aaKKFo9eDsLs

[@moji2363]

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.

[@jyjjy7]

@@moji2363 That any aspect of the universe is infinite is pure speculation. That black hole entropy has a limit seems to indicate there are not infinite degrees of freedom in a given area of spacetime, while the apparent flatness of spacetime may be just that; apparent rather than actual, just like the apparent flatness of the Earth. But anyways yes, our conscious perceptions are a sparse course grained symbolic model of local physics as derivable from patterns in sensory impulses. That said these patterns certainly do contain real information about the statistical properties of large collections of quantum mechanical interactions. Emergent properties are real, in fact properties/dynamics that aren't emergent are pure philosophical speculation. Even if such a thing were to exist it may be completely inaccessible to observes operating at our scale of size and energy.

[@Tunadorable]

“at least effectively infinite relative to the amount of complexity our brains can actually feasibly model” might’ve been better

[@jyjjy7]

@@Tunadorable Yeah, physical infinities are permanently in the category of speculation. It's impossible to distinguish between something that's larger than your ability to measure and something actually infinite

[@lefthookouchmcarm4520]

Did this disprove it?

[@wanfuse]

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.

[@GNARGNARHEAD]

interesting 🤔