Maybe you’re an empiricist, and you think seeing is believing. But how did you verify that your visual processing cortex is showing accurate data?
Maybe you’re a rationalist, and you think that logic can reason us towards objectivity. But syllogism requires premises. Premises require evidence or axioms. How did you choose your axioms?
Maybe you’re a conformist, and you think agreement with other people will correct errors in your individual perception. But other people are human too. How are you going to correct for errors in the collective genome? How do you know other people exist?
Donald Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary simulations. He compared organisms that perceive the simulated world accurately with organisms that perceive only fitness payoffs. Fitness always beats truth. Truth always goes extinct. Your ancestors were the creatures that used hacks and oversimplifications to turn the complicated world around them into a simple mental model. That simple mental model is your perception of the universe.
There is no scientific definition of an object. What makes some molecules one object and not another? Human convenience of perception. You’re not even a single species. You have tiny bacteria in every cell of your body with their own separate genome, processing glucose into ATP for you. Not to mention bacteria such as firmicutes and bacteriodes that help your digestive system process food. And are you the body containing all of these different organisms, or just a pattern of neural impulses? If your brain were simulated by an advanced computer, copying the function of every neuron, would it be you?
Well I don’t believe matter or spacetime objectively exist, so I don’t think gravity objectively exists either. To borrow from Donald Hoffman’s language, I take gravity seriously but not literally. I know that gravity represents something which is important to our species’ survival, which is why we all perceive it. But I do not think it is as simple as we perceive it to be with our eyes. I do not think it is even as simple as Einstein described it. I think the truth is much, much more complicated.
Truth is subjective.
Maybe you’re an empiricist, and you think seeing is believing. But how did you verify that your visual processing cortex is showing accurate data?
Maybe you’re a rationalist, and you think that logic can reason us towards objectivity. But syllogism requires premises. Premises require evidence or axioms. How did you choose your axioms?
Maybe you’re a conformist, and you think agreement with other people will correct errors in your individual perception. But other people are human too. How are you going to correct for errors in the collective genome? How do you know other people exist?
Donald Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary simulations. He compared organisms that perceive the simulated world accurately with organisms that perceive only fitness payoffs. Fitness always beats truth. Truth always goes extinct. Your ancestors were the creatures that used hacks and oversimplifications to turn the complicated world around them into a simple mental model. That simple mental model is your perception of the universe.
There is no scientific definition of an object. What makes some molecules one object and not another? Human convenience of perception. You’re not even a single species. You have tiny bacteria in every cell of your body with their own separate genome, processing glucose into ATP for you. Not to mention bacteria such as firmicutes and bacteriodes that help your digestive system process food. And are you the body containing all of these different organisms, or just a pattern of neural impulses? If your brain were simulated by an advanced computer, copying the function of every neuron, would it be you?
It’s subjective.
What about gravity? It doesn’t exist, we just collectively hallucinate that stuff falls
That’s just nihilism.
Well I don’t believe matter or spacetime objectively exist, so I don’t think gravity objectively exists either. To borrow from Donald Hoffman’s language, I take gravity seriously but not literally. I know that gravity represents something which is important to our species’ survival, which is why we all perceive it. But I do not think it is as simple as we perceive it to be with our eyes. I do not think it is even as simple as Einstein described it. I think the truth is much, much more complicated.