Big Think
27 minutes
Why Natural Selection Favors Fitness Payoffs Over Accurate Perception of Reality
This is a theory from evolutionary cognitive science and evolutionary game theory (Hoffman's "interface theory of perception") arguing that natural selection shapes sensory systems to track fitness payoffs rather than to represent objective reality accurately, since a mathematically provable theorem shows an organism perceiving truth is never fitter than an equally complex organism tuned only to fitness. Fitness payoffs are functions of world state, organism state, and action that provably destroy structural information about the world as the number of possible world-states and payoff-values grows, making truth-tracking and fitness-tracking perceptual strategies fundamentally at odds. The theory extends Galileo/Locke's primary-secondary quality distinction to claim that even space, time, and physical objects (not just color, taste, smell) are perceptual constructions rather than mind-independent objective reality, raising implications for physicalism versus a phenomenal/experience-first ontology.