Donald Hoffman - Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Mind? 

and, for me at least, one of the most disturbing.

Yeah except evolutionary psychology is total bunk and pseudoscience if you have even an elementary knowledge of how evolution actually occurs.

Not all human evolution happened in paleolithic times

WOMen likes intelligence there for intelligence

It worked for Hal;)

Yeah I was surprised to hear that as well, I'm not sure which text books he is referencing

I think you may be referring to “quantity” and not “quality”. Natural selection has allowed us to perceive only those things that we need to survive, discarding others, as you say. That is quantity. He is referring more to what is the ultimate nature of those things that we do perceive because our perception of them is a function of fitness not truth. That’s my understanding, but I can be wrong.

@@Ingmntya I think you're dead on 👍

Deleted my commented and Upvoted yours , you have said in the most elegant way to say it for those who understand. Our partial perception and understating is evolutionary and trying to perceive and understand fully will result in extinction.

His entire theory rests on the veracity of natural selection as a fundamental process in the universe, so if you grant him natural selection then his theory circumvents that issue regardless of if our perceptions are reliable or not. Like all theories, his theory has assumptions.

Damn! Same here, Nietzsche was the first thing to pop out of my head when I got in contact with Hoffman's theory.

If that is the case then evolution would select for irrationality. How could we then trust any conclusion of our own mind?

There wouldn't be irrationaity without rationality and vice versa.

@Simone De Filippo Hahahah geez man! Some people really struggle with understanding that. Though it is PAINFULLY obvious to some people (like you or I), doesn't mean it is to others! 😂

@Simone De Filippo Your baseline for rationality could be off. His question is how do you trust the rational conclusion of your mind as rational. Why do you trust the narrative logic that describes an aspect of reality as rational or irrational, and what if your immediate conclusion is wrong? What if what you consider rational is irrational to most others? Youre reducing this to a string of plot points while being a hostile idiot, ironically showing how dumb you truly are.

@Simone De Filippo I cant even tell if this is a troll or not, if so you're an absolute loser. If not you need to dedicate that "super rare IQ" you have to something more important than insulting people on the internet. You're more like a stunted child than some rare genius. I actually hope your post is true, because to be gifted intelligence and squander it so pathetically is a far more hilarious punishment than if you were just a trolling idiot.

I dont believe its an illusion one bit

Exactly

its a partialpicture and a view an angle no more no less

Not true. Scientist can make a pill that can make you temporary happy too. In fact many different pills that can put your mind in many different states. That's not mear survival.

@@yoooyoyooo Not science, scientism!

the equipment would itself be a trick. You have not fully understood the argument. You don't go from being tricked about everything to making a machine that does not tell you what you already believed. For example, you believe in light, but light may be a delusion in the brain. You would then create a machine to measure something that does not even exist lol. You would get back results perhaps caused by something entirely different, or as he believes by your own conscious mind and your own beliefs would be called evidence for your beliefs. lol Circular.

you have confused the true with the real.

DMT is forbidden in the religion of scientism just like how alcohol is haram in Islam

The adult industry could be a substitution for the beer bottles.

So Imagine that there are two organisms. Both of these organisms need to not be eaten to survive, and have only one difference. Let's say there is a patch of grass with a leopard hiding in it. The first organism will see grass as bright green and a grey leopard in the grass as grey. Because the grass is very bright compared to the leopard the organism is attracted to the grass and wants to eat it. Unfortunately this animal dies. The second organism see grass as a dull grey and the leopard as a bright red. The second organism normally would want to eat the grass but it notices the bright red leopard first before anything else and decides to leave that patch alone. We cannot state what the "true" color of the leopard was at any point in time, but we can say that second organism's perception of reality was more evolutionarily advantageous than the first. This means that evolutions primes us to see reality in order survive but perhaps not necessarily as it is. When he means truth goes extinct first he means to say that animals that see reality as "true" tend to be distracted by miscellaneous information about reality that is often "true" such as the grass being green, but don't notice the critical information like the leopard hiding in it fast enough. Therefore it is erroneous to believe that evolution has prepared us to see reality exactly as it "truly" is. Make sense?

Good explanation. Thanks.

I'm late, but unbelievably fantastic clarification here. Thank you!

For example if one animal saw the actual frequencies of light it would spend hours figuring out which berries to eat. However if another animal saw colours rather the the truth (the frequencies) it would provide it with a shortcut to allow it to make quicker decisions that would give it a benefit in evolution. I picked that example as mainstream science accepts that colours don't exist in the real world they created by the brain to represent frequencies.

Exactly what i thoight when i first heard this.

Similar arguments have been made by many philosophers including C.S. Lewis, though maybe Plantinga was the most thorough.

No. Hoffman talks about perception,, Plantinga about beliefs. And Plantinga argues from philosophy of mind, which he admits to be highly controversial.

You're right, We are Eternal, our Consciousness is Eternal.

The discussion style is like reporter interviewing a politician who had paid to be asked the question that suited the politicians agenda. I am not weighing in on any of the postulations presented but simply that the production style is to communicate in layman's terms Hoffman's scientific research and ideas....

@@davidbarker4966 The underlying awkwardness between Kuhn and Hoffman comes about because Kuhn received a traditional scientific training and has published a book on what he learned accordingly. Hoffman has broken away from the traditional scientific perspective and therefore that’s the background in awkwardness even though Kuhn has a RU-vid channel called’ ‘Closer to Truth’ which canvassed a wide array of theoretical knowledge and various contributing interviewee favourite ideas.

I think his beetle case is making his evo psych argument less credible too. And a curious thought, somewhere along the way we evolved senses and they are essential to us communicating/interacting with the world. And with consciousness there must be some sort of self-preserving drive, to keep the consciousness "going", the ego. I'd start with those premises. The tiger in the bush, the unknown, triggering our senses and how that leads to survival isn't as black and white, not the way I see it. It activates fear in some and curiosity in others. And we need both. Fear as a conservative feature and stagnant force and curiosity as a progressive feature which leads to innovation/adaptation. Our senses, given that they aren't hindered, should pick up noises, visions, vibrations, smells just as a byproduct and we react different to those all the time, giving me a sort of chance-mentality to his natural selection hypothesis. I think culture is the dominant force in our development as a psychological social species. I think evo psych is focusing on only one side of the coin where my view is that the other side is the one we can do something about. I'm not discrediting the subconscious because I believe I'm aware of that part of me, but I am not willing to give it a free pass to explain our current state because we have an active conscious side that we should use in order to make our experience for ourselves and others a better one.

Could you explain?:)

You can look it up, but it's Plantinga's argument that 'darwin's doubt'--a comment Darwin made that if his theory is true, he has to doubt the entirety of his beliefs because his mind is formed not for tracking truth, but for survival--is a serious problem for naturalism. No arguments can be made by naturalists because one of their fundamental premises, qua naturalists, undercuts the logical reliability of their views. IDK why the irony of this interview wasn't pointed out (because, of course, if this guy is correct, AND he's a naturalist, he has no reason to think he's correct). ;-)

"the irony of this interview" Haha! I thought the exact same thing! :-)

Hey Rich ... I'm just theistic insofar as I think they have the winning argument here (I'm not religious at all). Soul-making requires obfuscation on God's part, right? You expect ignorance of ultimate realities (if you know God exists, or are evidentially compelled to believe, you lack the deep angst and doubt that drives moral development)... but you also expect enough logical traction to make a righteous soul (and that's what we find ... I have no knowledge of an external world, other minds, etc., but I have knowledge that, say, it's wrong to kill innocent children for kicks ... we have moral knowledge but not scientific knowledge). The trouble with naturalism seems to be there's no logical traction for anything, which of course includes naturalism.

Hey again! How is "it" about reductionism? I thought "it" was how truth goes missing via evolutionary selective design of our brains. ??? But if you want to visit the tangential issue I brought up that distinguishes which worldview is likelier true (soul-making, God-designed vs. naturalist, no design or brute-fact forces and energies), that's fine. ;))) So, my claim was just that we have the kind of knowledge necessary for moral development (soul-making) more surely than we have knowledge of what science purports to study (a publicly observable universe of natural objects). Simply ask yourself, am I more sure that I'm living in a physical world (rather than the matrix or some simulation like Nick Bostrum urges) or that it's wrong to, say, push a screwdriver into a little girl's eye in order to teach her not to sass her mother. I think I know the moral issues better because they don't really depend on the reality of the objects of moral conduct (whether real world or matrix, I'm exactly the same morally because what makes a person good or bad is 100% psychological ... it's some combination of what we believe we're doing and what we intend under the awareness of some moral principle or other (punishments should be proportionate to the wrong they punish, say). So, from that kind of consideration I conclude the world is nicely explained by the theistic hypothesis (we have the knowledge we need for soul-making) and not so nicely explained by the naturalist hypothesis (since we can't really be justified in believing the naturalist hypothesis ... it's self-referentially defeating). It's not a great win for theism ... it doesn't tell you to be religious at all ... doesn't tell you if any particular religious practices or claims of revelation are true, etc., but it gives god-types a start, I guess. Soul-making requires obfuscation just means God has to hide (himself and the ultimate goodness of the universe) so that humans take on the burden of making the universe good themselves (and themselves good in the process, I guess).

I had to go to the bottom of the comments to find the ONE educated person. lol!

Alvin?

@@Joshua-dc1bs Yes Alvin :-)

@@bastianray6334 is this related to the evolutionary argument against naturalism?

@@pepedestroyer5974 not exactly I think his theory is against physicalism , it is not easy to explain it but it is similar to Tom Campbell's "My Big TOE " based also on the simulation reality hypothesis .

The brain creates colours which simply don't exist in the real world which is pretty amazing. If the brain can simply invent something as vivid and concrete looking as 'colour' a concept that has absolutely no grounding in reality (light only has different frequencies) then it's not inconceivable that every other sense and concept is just as wrong and iconified.

Part that we don't see the Truth is not false. We see what our biology allows us and that is very narrow view. In some sense there is no Truth there are only views. No such thing as a true view.

​@@yoooyoyooo but even if evolution gave us precise measuring tools as senses we would not know more about the world. Or am i getting it wrong?

@@heinzditer7286 I think we can never see the reality because absolute reality does not exist. What exists is only relative reality. Relative to species or even to individuals. But ofc absolute reality could exist however we can not see it so it kinda pointless talking about something we could never know.

@@yoooyoyooo maybe he means that our brain filters things out that we dont need to see. So its not our senses, but they way the brain works, which makes sense. But if the physical world is just constructed by consciousness, then our physical brain would also be constructed and could not have an influence on how we perceive the world.

@@heinzditer7286 That implies there is some sort of basic truth we don't see. He thinks that there is conciousnes with or without a brain. That is very far fetched but it can not be either proven or disproven. I think it's just brain generating a perception the way it's made. Same as any other organ it just does what it's made to be doing. Hearth thinks life is about pumping blood. Hammer thinks it's about driving nails. Same thing goes for brains they just do what they are made for.

If it doesn't work in a more structured system I can't see how it's supposed to work in a more chaotic one.

wishlist011 False perception of a rope as a snake, or of a shape in the shadows, or jumping at sudden inanimate movements or sounds. These may all be 'untrue', but they are 'fit'. I think you have to bring time into it to explain fully. For a given quantity of 'perceptual resource' it is better to be quickly wrong and survive than be slowly right and die.

I'm coming into this a little after the fact, but this is one of my pet peeves. Here's an example of how the truth would be detrimental to fitness. Many males fight and suffer injuries and the risk of death for the opportunity to mate, more so in particular species, like elk or sea lions etc. If those males had a "true" perception of the world, they would see that passing on their genes is of no value to them as an individual at all. They are being used by the species for its continuation, and to opt out would allow them to just get fat and enjoy their short lives without participating in the barbaric nonsense of reproduction. Hence, reduced fitness. It's hard for you perhaps to see this since you as a human are also being used and controlled by these same forces. If you try hard enough, and think outside the box, you may see that you are mistaken "about a great many things", as a wise man once said!

His argument was to show that evolution does not necessarily evolve true perceptions. The beetle had an evolutionary niche to look for something large, brown, shiny and bumpy. Hilariously, the beer bottles sufficed for a female. 😆

Exactly his point!

Good point.

Yes

its not conclusive in essence, but it has given us a really good reason to consider the possibility that perceptions are not isomorphous to objective reality.

Trajk Logik It's about the veracity of your perceptions of the world. You do not need to see the truth to survive and thrive. Do you think that the folders and files on your computer are real? No, but it does not matter because you do not need to be a programmer or a processor designer to write in Word app. That's why interface is so powerful and deceiving: it hides the true complexity of the world "out there" to make your life possible.

Yes it is an improvement in fitness. For example all scientists agree colour doesn't have any grounding in reality the brain creates colour to make life easier for us. For example if one animal saw light frequencies (the truth) they would spend hours figuring out what all the fuzzy photons and light waves zipping around mean, whilst another animal that visualised the frequencies as colours in its brain could decide which berries to eat much quicker and would outcompete the animal that saw the truth.

i'd say it generally is in people who survive ; but there are exceptions

Human beings can't know 100% truth. We're hardwired to only know the parts that are useful for our IMMEDIATE survival above all else. Those of us who try or at least those of us who'd like to try and understand the true nature of things end up going extinct..

Human beings have a collective crabs in a barrel mentality. We like to drag down anyone who's figured out how to navigate reality without playing the silly games we make up.

maybe conscience leaps outside its sysytem

You're right, Mr Kuhn often expose him self as a ignorant.

What do you think of dog breeding? Or different ethnic groups amongst humans? If your wife was asian and got a black kid with you, would you not question anything because you don't believe in physical traits of biological organisms being heritable?

Christ Almighty these evolution deniers are mind numbing.

And if falsehood is more beneficial to survival, It will be perpetuated

Julian Walker This was a portion of a much larger conversation, and Donald Hoffman's body of research is complicated and novel. I suggest his TED talk for what he means about "the truth goes to extinction". In my opinion, he's one of two or three of the most promising living thinkers, along with with the likes of Stuart Kauffman, who are unconstrained by academic politics and dogmas.

Immanuel Kant i have seen it. it is equally incoherent and left field. let's reconvene in 10 years when his "research" has amounted to absolutely nothing. he will make no meaningful contributions to human knowledge.

Julian Walker That is the typical response to a novel idea; first it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, then it is accepted as self-evident. It seems to me that a lot of people are having difficulty intuiting what he is trying to say, based only and ignorantly upon prior academic prejudices and habbits.

The only tragic thing here, is that you are an obvious Dunning-Kruger victim, and an intellectual lightweight and hence, can't seem to grasp that. Donald Hoffman is MIT educated cognitive scientist, with a rigorous mathematical theory about consciousness. Someone like Christof Koch is expressing similar views through his model that he devolved with Tonnini - Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness. What he means by truth is attack on "Naive Realism", and fallacious assertions of materialism. Objective "Naive Realist" reality has been de-materialized by physicists decades ago, and falsified by Leggett's Inequalities. The bizarre thing is that you have liked the videos by Michael Shermer and Sam Harris who are both nobodies and unqualified to address these topics, on whom they are both clueless. But also you adhere to eastern new age Yogic woo woo at the same time, truly bizarre combination. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Maybe if you spend some time reading relevant philosophers of science like James Ladyman and learn about Ontology, Epistemology and phenomenology you would stop embarrassing your self in the comment section.

packe777 thanks for your diagnosis based on a lot of mistaken assumptions -i appreciate the time and effort you put in to trying to pigeonhole me! :) i am familiar with much of what you refer to, and some of it less so -always learning, i am sure, like yourself. i do not buy the argument from authority here regarding his MIT credentials.... a point which may have been apparent in my initial comment. his reasoning is incoherent -and no amount of pseudointellectual posturing around physics and philosophy changes that observation. there is nothing in his TED talk, or in these interview excerpts that clarifies the distinction he is making between a functional fit in terms of perception and reality, as an evolutionary imperative that gives survival advantages, and this abstract notion of "truth" that he never defines, but nonetheless claims is other than whether or not the cliff or the predator is actually there and has implications for our well-being/survival. a few other observations: 1) the fact that evolution is a blind process that still makes us prone to many intuitive mistakes, unintentional spandrels, being susceptible to "super stimuli" that actually are detrimental -does not show that it has no relationship to what is true, only that it is imperfect in its adaptations. 2) it seems like maybe (if i am generous) a lot of his case comes down perhaps to understanding that what is true depends on the level of analysis. for us living organisms at the magnitude we are functional, of course being well adapted to perceive the environment as accurately as possible is a valuable and central driver of the fine tuning via evolution of our perceptual apparatus. of course other things are true, like mathematics or quantum mechanics, or even neuroscience, that have remained outside of what we could perceive and conceive of until reason and eventually science emerged. for example, we know things now about the cosmos, physics, and the brain, that correct and expand upon the perceptions that had evolved for thousands of years before.... and so in that sense, sure -there are truths that the evolution of consciousness up until that point could not access. the reason being that they had no discernible survival value, and become available only to new levels of inquiry that ride upon the previous capacities available to us. what i don't hear him addressing in any lucid, coherent way are these things: a) what does he mean by truth, and what are the specific truths that go extinct in the evolutionary process? b) what is the correlation between becoming radically divergent with truth (or accurate perception) and the creature itself becoming extinct? c) what are some examples of creatures in whom "truth has gone extinct" (in which specific ways) but who continue to exist and thrive? d) if truth as he describes it is not about accurate perception of the real world organisms have to navigate -what is it? as for your bombast around "naive realism" and " the fallacious assertions of materialism," as kuhn points out to hoffman, those are radical claims and the burden of proof is on you... my experience with most quasi academic philosopher types who reject materialism is that they are usually so far up their own asses that they never really say anything coherent, except to deny self-evident facts and hastily point out that they don't agree with people like sheldrake and chopra, even when their positions are the ones giving people like sheldrake and chopra ammunition to make their nonsense seem legitimate in pseudointellectual ways. so, go ahead, prove me wrong..... answer me this: what is the alternative to materialism yand a neurobiological model of consciousness that you find compelling, and is hoffman advancing it with reference to what he says in this interview? i am familiar with koch (who i really enjoyed until his recent midlife crisis tango with pantheism) and tononi -but i am always open to learning, so rather than trying to bully me with your degrees and insults and vocabulary, try this: tell me specifically what i am missing so far....maybe you are a better communicator than hoffman. i would actually love to find the coherent thread in hoffman's reasoning, even if only to disagree with it! :) just kidding -i am sure i would find it interesting, and you can demonstrate the superiority you trumpet here, by schooling me. i stand at the ready! oh and by the way, even more so than arguments from authority and postmodern relativist nonsesnse, i am not susceptible to woo of any kind -though i am fascinated with how neuroscience and physiologically referenced models of psychology overlap with practices like meditation and yoga. for me that exploration is entirely naturalistic and rooted not one iota in supernaturalism or magical thinking