Consider this analogy: the shape of the water in a pool conforms to the contours of the hole that it fills. The "interface" between the volume of water and the hole which it fills are perfectly suited to each other - the water conforms to a reality which the contours of the hole constrains it. Just as the water fills a hole, our species and the individuals in our species fill an ecological niche, or a "hole" in the macro environment. Our behaviors and perceptions, which form our "interface" to the environment, conform to the reality into which they fit in a manner similar to how the shape of the water conforms to the hole that contains it.
Using the principles of evolution (and a generous amount of speculation) the adherents of this approach deduce facts about the world as it existed long before modern man came on the scene. Animal life evolved behaviors that were accommodations to the many eons of pressure exerted by the demanding physical environment, and the details of those evolutionary accommodations must refer to the real external environment that shaped them.
Therefore, the mind’s concept of reality is strongly isomorphic (i.e., well matched) with that reality for the following reasons:
- Reality impinges on all living creatures, as the theory of evolution describes
- Living creatures compete for survival, utilizing whatever natural talents and tools they have to gain advantage
- More than any other type of creature, humans utilize their physical environment (tool making, planning, building, organizing) as aids to their survival
- For humans, especially, increased knowledge of and ability to model and manipulate the physical environment give strong survival advantages. Perhaps these are their most valuable survival mechanisms
- Due to competition, individuals with more accurate and effective mental representations of reality will have better chances of survival. For example, humans who correctly see the lurking wolf, the gathering storm, the hidden fruit, or the receptive mate will survive at the expense of those who incorrectly perceive these elements of the environment
- Therefore human evolution has probably imbued us with accurate (isomorphic) understanding of reality, at least within the bounds and physical capabilities of our biological senses.
This dynamic and precarious exchange between the world and individuals results in a close correspondence between physical reality and our perceptions and ideas concerning it. This accommodation is not limited only to humans, but to any adaptive living organisms capable of responding to the demands of the environment. For example, the fact of photosynthesis in plants proves that the sun has been shining on the earth for many millions of years in a manner similar to how it shines today. The seasonal migrations of birds, the winter hibernation of bears, and the changing coat colors of some rabbits and foxes are examples of adaptations that imply that the Earth’s orbit around the Sun has followed a pattern much like we see today. The Sun now shines and has shined, the Earth now moves and has moved. Living creatures’ behaviors and genetic adaptations supply proof that as it is now, it has been for a long time. Using evolution as a premise, the reality of the Solar System in which we live can be deduced.
However, some neuroscientists and philosophers of mind see it differently. Rather than humans having potentially evolved to have "accurate" perceptions of the outside world, they argue that we evolved to have "useful" conceptions of that world. Useful in the sense of confering survival advantages. So, although it is certainly useful to have an accurate idea of the danger posed by a predator, an enemy, or some other type of natural danger that one could encounter, it is primarily useful to have that perception. On the other hand, it is not particularly useful (at least to our primitive ancestors) to understand that the earth is a sphere rather than a flat surface, or that famines have natural explanations rather than being caused by angry gods. Neuroscientist, Anil Seth, sees human consciousness as primarily a "prediction engine". Instead of our conscious experience being explained by the brain just "reading through" incoming sensory data in sort of an outside-in, bottom-up direction, where the brain begins with detailed outside stimuli and arranges them into increasing complicated ideas. That's what it feels like when we wake up in the morning and it seems as if the world just pours into the mind through the transparent windows of the senses. Seth says that what is going on is very different, and that what we perceive is largely coming from the inside-out/top-down. The brain is continuously generating predictions about the causes of the sensory signals it is receiving, and that it uses sensory signals mainly just to update and modify these predictions so that it can keep track of the world in ways that are not determined by "accuracy", but by "utility". The purpose of the brain is not to represent the world in an isomorphic, maximally accurate representation of reality. Instead it represents the world in ways that are useful. It all depends on this top-down process of prediction that are just bounded by and reined in by the sensory signals we receive.
In 1969, Willard V. O. Quine wrote that evolutionary processed likely resulted in people endowed with a cognition that reliably tracked "truth", in that it would be generally more conducive to survival fitness than believing falsehoods. This hypothesis may have some truth to it, and fortunately, it is one that can (and has been) empirically tested. It turns out that, yes, we are able to discern some "true" aspects of reality in the "medium-sized" scope and range that we humans typically experience the world. We can make reasonable judgements about things just large enough to see up to objects hundreds or thousands of miles in size, and in time durations ranging from a fraction of a second to many years. But outside those size and time ranges, we are actually not very proficient. Evolutionary pressures apparently did not select for the natural ability to have good intuitions about things that occur far outside those ranges. Our proficiencey in inferring large and small scale structures, and durations measured in millenia (or longer) or events that occur many times faster than the blink of an eye was of no relevance to our ancestor's reproductive fitness.
As Michael Dahlen wrote in an article published in 2011,
If a professional baseball player saw “things in a limited and distorted way,” that is, if his perception of the movement and location of a baseball was something other than what it actually is, then he would not be able to consistently hit ninety-five mile per hour fastballs. If a cardiac surgeon’s mind had a built-in disposition toward illusion then he would not be able to successfully perform a coronary artery bypass surgery. If a pilot’s knowledge of his airplane, its controls, and its location in the sky did not correspond to reality, then he would not be able to lift his airplane off the ground, fly it across a continent, and safely land it at his targeted destination. If science could never penetrate to things as they really are, then the great innovators of our time would not have been able to create all the marvels of modern technology. For that matter, if reality is inaccessible to human beings and if our perception of reality did not at the very least resemble reality itself, then we would not be able to perform even the simplest of activities such as eating, walking, reading, or brushing our teeth.
Of all creatures, we humans have the most highly developed ability to form abstractions and accurate models of the world. Ironically, we alone fall victim to outrageous self-induced delusions and misperceptions of that same world. The cognitive biases to which we are heir may have their origin in the same muscular mental faculties that give us our acute, correct perceptions. Only we, who could imagine a distant future and remote past, could also envision imaginary spirits, demons, heavens, hells, and other benevolent and malevolent agents that inhabit those strange regions. Some of these distortions may result from evolutionary pressure and, in fact, have adaptive properties.
- The “just world” phenomenon helps us persevere against the odds in the face of adversity.
- The “authority bias” causes us to have undue respect for what we perceive as authority, helping keep tribal order.
- The “ostrich effect” allows us to ignore bad news and focus on the positive.
- Pareidolia (the tendency to see patterns where there are none) causes us to flee from imaginary tigers as well as see the image of Mary in a piece of toast. However, it is far better to run from an imagined danger than to fail to evade a true one. Evolution has shaped us to act on the dictum, “discretion is the better part of valor”.
- Numerous statistical judgement errors that most of us make such as overgeneralization, the gamblers fallacy, confirmation bias, the base rate fallacy, and others. For some reason, most people don't seem to have a good intuitive sense of probability and statistics (which is what allows state and national lotteries to keep bringing in billions of dollars per year).
- A species-wide preoccupation with assigning supernatural "agency" to unexplained phenomena. Anthropological, archaeological, and historical evidence shows that throughout our history, and probably into pre-history, mankind has ascribed the power to create and influence events in life to non-corporeal, supernatural beings. Whether these were conceived of as animistic elemental or organic spirits, deceased ancestors, multiple gods for multiple purposes, or a single monotheistic god, spirits appear to have haunted human experience since the beginning of time. This misperception of reality, as crippling as it seems it should be, might be a strange side effect of our large brains and ability to form abstractions and mental models. For better or worse, it has tagged along with our culture for millenia.
Each of these (and many, many others) is a clear deviation of our perceptions from what is in the “real world”. This is a real strike against the foundations of the evolutionary approach to reality. If we can be so wrong in so many areas, how many more incorrect concepts are inherent in our relationship with the world?
Some small comfort might be taken from the fact that experts in these sorts of cognitive biases have exhaustively studied these odd phenomena and explained them in great detail. And rigorous, scientific approaches to their study show them to be what they are – incorrect, ingrained, and intuitive responses to the world that, in the modern times, lead us astray more than help us cope. To quote the late Perry Deangeles:
- “Thinking critically is a chore. It does not come naturally or easily. And if the fruits of such efforts are not carefully displayed to young minds, then they will not harvest them. Every school child must be implanted with the wonder of the atom, not the thrall of magic.”
Some have taken a position opposing Evolutionary Philosophy for theological reasons. Most famous of these is Alvin Plantinga in his book, Warrant and Proper Function. Plantinga, who Time Magazine named "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God”, sees no reason to assume a positive correlation between “true beliefs” and survival if evolution is driven purely by natural forces. Only if God directs evolution would the evolved beliefs and behaviors of man have a chance of being “true” (i.e., isomorphic with reality) because God would somehow want us to see reality as it really is. If only driven by natural processes, the driving force would be survival, not a "true" perception of reality. Somehow he neglects the very important consideration that "true" beliefs about the world DO have survival benefits. His position is so audacious, far fetched, and in violation of any semblance of parsimony that I will let him speak for himself. He presents a hypothetical caveman, “Paul”, who sees a tiger and runs away from it (as we would expect). However, if evolution is a natural rather than a supernatural process, caveman Paul's reasons for running away include every explanation EXCEPT one involving a realization of the imminent danger the tiger poses for him:
- Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief... Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it... Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.
This type of shamelessly tortured logic is frustrating and quite irritating. It shows that the leading opponents of naturalism, rationality, and empiricism will stop at nothing to defeat them. They don’t aim at gaining actual knowledge or in increased understanding, but only in inventing post-hoc explanations to defend their established dogmas through any means available.
Still, as closely as our mental models fit the world of common experience, we continue to be troubled by persistent misperceptions - superstitions, inability to make sense of probabilities and statistics, and difficulties conceiving of quantities and sizes on the extreme micro or macro scale. We have evolved no intuitive sense regarding physical realities outside those we experience in our daily living. Until the last few hundred years, we had no idea of how reality was structured at levels outside the normal human scale - at the very small, very large, very fast, very slow, very near, and very far. We had no idea of the micro world of bacteria, cells, molecules, and atoms. Theories of the structure of our planet, the solar system, and at the cosmic scale of other stars were naive and completely wrong. Physical processes operating at the snail's pace of geology, or at the relativistic pace of light were either misperceived or not perceived at all. Understanding of these things had no survival benefit during most of human history. Our intuitions had been adapted to the environment we evolved in. This environment did not include relativistic speeds, massive gravity, galaxy sized objects, or sub-atomic scales. There had been no selective pressure from our environment to adapt to these aspects of reality that fell outside our experience. Because these mismatches between our intuition and reality all involved things that were not part of our evolutionary history (e.g., we don't live near the speed of light) we evolved no natural understanding of them. The scientific and technical tools we use to understand them don't come naturally - science is not an instinct, but is an attempt to overthrow instinctive misperceptions.
These deviations from the isomorphism that Evolutionary Philosophy promotes are troubling and are possibly not adequately answered. They leave wide open the doors to objection - if we are wrong in these areas, we could be wrong in other areas that we believe we understand and perceive correctly.
However, humanity has shown itself capable of rising above its evolutionary limitations. As counter-intuitive as some aspects of reality may be, we are able to move past our historically ingrained prejudices against them and embrace them as true when the evidence is overwhelmingly in their favor. The tools of modern civilization are allowing us to perceive and understand aspects of reality that were never even imagined in previous generations.
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