Using John Maynard Smith’s application of game theory to evolution,Â
different strategies for coping with the natural world can be set against each other in simulations to see which approaches are fitter in the sense of producing more offspring. […] we can study how âtruthâ? strategies, which see objective reality as it is, fare against âpay-offâ? strategies, which see only survival value.Â
The objective truth I started seeing a decade ago, in simulations conducted together with my graduate students Justin Mark and Brian Marion at the University of California, Irvine, is that evolution ruthlessly selects against truth strategies and for pay-off strategies. An organism that sees objective reality is always less fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees fitness pay-offs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct.
The means by which we interact with the environment and construct a universe of perceptions, they consider to be our space-time interface to whatever is really going on (creating space and time, inter alia). They say that theyÂ
are currently trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness by building a theory in which the underlying reality emerges from a vast network of interacting conscious agents and their experiences. Our space-time interface together with shapes, colours and other sensory pproperties is as a visualisation tool that some agents, like us, uuse to simplify and interact with this network.
Our hypothesis, of course, is probably wrong. But the point of science is to be precise, so we can find out precisely what is wrong with the idea. Our theory of interacting conscious agents fails if its predictions donât square with well-tested results of classical physics, quantum theory, general relativity, evolution by natural selection and so on in our space-time interface.
And the argument turns on itself. We used the theory of evolution by natural selection to discover that what we perceive isnât objective reality, but an interface with it. Now we realise that evolution itself may be just an interface projection of deeper dynamics stemming from a network of conscious agents. The goal ahead is to work out those dynamics in detail, and figure out how, precisely, they map onto our space-time interface. This will allow us to make empirical predictions testable by experiments within our subjective reality.
Science so far has focused its search on this immediate reality. What it has found can guide our theories and test our predictions as we try to look beyond it, to find the nature of objective reality. Can we do it? Just like I take out life insurance, Iâm betting we can.
References to:
Mark, Justin T.; Brian B.Marion; Donald D.Hoffman. 2010. Natural selection and veridical perceptions. Journal of Theoretical Biology 266.4:504-515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.07.020
Above quotations are from a recent summary in NS available from my Dropbox folder: