"A spoon exists only when perceived.
Ditto for quarks and stars."
Hoffman's thesis with a Darwinian spin is, evolution shaped human for payoffs not to see the truth.
In fact if the truth were pursued the human species in the "then to present phase" could be extinct.
..............
In Chapter 5:
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hide the Truth from Our Eyes
DONALD HOFFMAN
Evolution has shaped our perceptions with symbols, like a streaking green dot or a biohazard triangle, that warn us and guide us without depicting the Truth.
ITP predicts another head scratcher: a spoon exists only when perceived.
Ditto for quarks and stars.
For spoons, quarks, and stars, Interface Theory of Perception agrees with the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley that esse is percipi—to be is to be perceived
When you view the line drawing in the middle,
you sometimes see a cube with face A in front, as shown on the left side of the figure.
Call it Cube A.
Other times you see a cube with face B in front, as shown on the right side of the figure.
Call it Cube B.
Now consider this question:
Which cube is there in the middle when you don’t look?
Cube A or Cube B?
Well, it makes no sense to pick one over the other.
Sometimes, when you look, you see cube A, sometimes cube B.
The answer must be that, when you don’t look, there is no cube—neither A nor B.
Each time you look you see the cube you happen to construct at that time.
When you look away, it goes away.
ITP says that the same is true for all Objects in Space and Time.
If you look and see a spoon, then there is a spoon.
But as soon as you look away, the spoon ceases to exist.
Something continues to exist, but it is not a spoon and is not in Space and Time.
The spoon is a data structure that you create when you interact with that something.
It is your description of Fitness payoffs and how to get them.
This may seem preposterous.
After all, if I put a spoon on the table then everyone in the room will agree that there is a spoon.
Surely the only way to explain such consensus is to accept the obvious—that there is a real spoon, which everyone sees.
But there is another way to explain our consensus: we all construct our icons in similar ways.
As members of one species, we share an interface (which varies a bit from person to person).
Whatever Reality might be, when we interact with it we all construct similar icons, because we all have similar needs, and similar methods for acquiring Fitness payoffs.
This is the reason we each see a cube in Fig. [the Image above]—we each construct our own cube, but in much the same way as everybody else.
The cube I see is distinct from the cube you see.
I may see cube A at the same time you see cube B.
There is no need to posit a real cube that everyone sees, and that exists when no one observes.
Indeed, there is no need to posit any Physical Object, or a SpaceTime, that exists when no one observes.
Space and Time themselves are simply the format of our interface, and Physical Objects are icons that we create on the fly as we attend to different options for collecting Fitness payoffs.
Objects are not preexisting entities that force themselves upon our Senses.
They are solutions to the problem of reaping more payoffs than the competition, from the multitude of payoffs on offer.
This is a new way of thinking about Objects.
We create them quickly, as needed, to solve Fitness-gathering problems, and dispense with them just as quickly when they have, for the moment, served their purpose.
They are not optimal solutions for grabbing payoffs, just satisficing solutions that let us nab a tad more than the competition.
... end ................
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