Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception
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Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception Chetan Prakash1 · Kyle D. Stephens2 · Donald D. Hoffman3 · Manish Singh4 · Chris Fields5 Received: 25 November 2019 / Accepted: 3 November 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Does natural selection favor veridical percepts—those that accurately (if not exhaustively) depict objective reality? Perceptual and cognitive scientists standardly claim that it does. Here we formalize this claim using the tools of evolutionary game theory and Bayesian decision theory. We state and prove the “Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem” which shows that the claim is false: If one starts with the assumption that perception involves inference to states of the objective world, then the FBT Theorem shows that a strategy that simply seeks to maximize expected-fitness payoff, with no attempt to estimate the “true” world state, does consistently better. More precisely, the FBT Theorem provides a quantitative measure of the extent to which the fitness-only strategy dominates the truth strategy, and of how this dominance increases with the size of the perceptual space. The FBT Theorem supports the Interface Theory of Perception (e.g. Hoffman et al. in Psychon Bull Rev https://doi. org/10.3758/s13423-015-0890-8, 2015), which proposes that our perceptual systems have evolved to provide a species-specific interface to guide adaptive behavior, and not to provide a veridical representation of objective reality. Keywords Perception · Veridicality · Evolutionary psychology · Bayesian decision theory · Fitness · Evolutionary game theory · Interface theory of perception
* Manish Singh [email protected] 1
Department of Mathematics (Emeritus), California State University, San Bernardino, USA
2
Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USA
3
Department of Cognitive Sciences (Emeritus), University of California, Irvine, USA
4
Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
5
Caunes Minervois, France
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C. Prakash et al.
1 Introduction It is standard in the perceptual and cognitive sciences to assume that more accurate percepts are fitter percepts and, therefore, that natural selection drives perception to be increasingly veridical, i.e., to reflect the objective world in an increasingly accurate manner (e.g. Geisler and Diehl 2003; Palmer 1999; Pizlo et al. 2014). This assumption forms the justification for the prevalent view that human perception is, for the most part, veridical. For example, in his classic book Vision, Marr (1982) argued that: We … very definitely do compute explicit properties of the real visible surfaces out there, and one interesting aspect of the evolution of visual systems is the gradual movement toward the difficult task of representing progressively more objective aspects of the visual world. (p. 340) Our visually perceived world is three-dimensional, and is inhabited by objects of various shapes, sizes, colors, and motions. Perceptual and cognitiv
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