More sophisticated mechanisms (those that can extract more information) are, generally speaking, more costly.
At some constant level of complexity/cost, some mechanism of perception can extract some certain amount of actionable information from what it perceives. There is then the question of which bits of information to extract.
Such bits of information can be more or less veridical (information that closely tracks what is true about what is perceived) or practical (information that closely tracks whatever is relevant to the fitness of the perceiver).
These do not necessarily track one another. In other words, one bit of practical information (X is/is not relevant to my fitness) may not correspond to one bit of real information (X is/is not quite like so). Hoffman believes that this is typically the case: that practical perceptions do not represent actual facts, but are jumbled up functions of facts about what is perceived, the context in which it is perceived, and the state of the perceiver. We cannot easily disentangle this and go backwards from our perceptions to try to recover just-the-facts.
Natural selection will favor perceptive apparatuses that extract practical information; it will not operate to preserve equivalently-costly ones that extract merely veridical information. For this reason, the latter don’t stand a chance.
Ergo, everything we perceive is natural selection’s attempt to give us handles we can manipulate to increase our fitness. We have no reason to expect that such handles represent what “is there” or exists outside of our own interfaces. (You may say your interface has the same icon on it that mine does, and that it behaves in the same way in your interface as in mine, but this does not prove that we both have true representations of some underlying fact, but merely that we both have similarly-evolved interfaces. We both say the stop sign is red, but it isn’t.)
I don’t see why that would apply to humans , since we have very large brains and for ibke behaviour.
An organism that exists in a simple life-world and has limited resources can filter out irrelevant information at an early stage of neural.processing...more perceptual than cognitive. For instance, a frog sees the boundaries of its environment (but no detail within them), small, fast-moving objects, which are reflexively treated as food, and large moving objects,.which are reflexively interpreted as threats.
An organism that exists in a complex life world can’t use simple perceptual processing to differentiate food from threat, because both exist in wide varieties. There is a limit to how much information can be hardcoded into a genome as opposed to stored culturally/memetically , and an even bigger difference in flexibility.
If a certain vegetable is poisonous unless it’s cooked in a very specific way, is it food? It’s food if it’s cooked in the right way...eg. manioc… which is culturally transmitted information...
but you have to be able to see it , before you can figure that out. Heavy perceptual filtering would make the cultural discovery impossible. Relatively unfiltered perception is a necessary but insufficient condition for memetically transmitted knowledge, which is much more powerful and flexible than genetically transmitted knowledge.
So the frog like organism that goes for heavy filtration achieves efficiency up to a point, but places a ceiling on it’s ability to exploit an environment, particularly a changing one.
No organism has a complete view of reality..all are limited by how far they can see, what frequencies they can detect. In that sense, nothing perceives reality in the sense of all reality. But within that category there is an important difference between the stimulus-response organisms and the cultural learners.
I don’t see why that would apply to humans , since we have very large brains and for ibke behaviour.
An organism that exists in a simple life-world and has limited resources can filter out irrelevant information at an early stage of neural.processing...more perceptual than cognitive. For instance, a frog sees the boundaries of its environment (but no detail within them), small, fast-moving objects, which are reflexively treated as food, and large moving objects,.which are reflexively interpreted as threats.
An organism that exists in a complex life world can’t use simple perceptual processing to differentiate food from threat, because both exist in wide varieties. There is a limit to how much information can be hardcoded into a genome as opposed to stored culturally/memetically , and an even bigger difference in flexibility.
If a certain vegetable is poisonous unless it’s cooked in a very specific way, is it food? It’s food if it’s cooked in the right way...eg. manioc… which is culturally transmitted information...
but you have to be able to see it , before you can figure that out. Heavy perceptual filtering would make the cultural discovery impossible. Relatively unfiltered perception is a necessary but insufficient condition for memetically transmitted knowledge, which is much more powerful and flexible than genetically transmitted knowledge.
So the frog like organism that goes for heavy filtration achieves efficiency up to a point, but places a ceiling on it’s ability to exploit an environment, particularly a changing one.
No organism has a complete view of reality..all are limited by how far they can see, what frequencies they can detect. In that sense, nothing perceives reality in the sense of all reality. But within that category there is an important difference between the stimulus-response organisms and the cultural learners.