Are we Living in an Evolution-Designed Matrix?

A response to an Atlantic interview with Professor David Hoffman.

I think this quote sums up the gist of the article:

"Hoffman: We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally...Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations."

My issue with this view is that we already have a reasonably good model for how reality is mapped to our perception; it's called psychophysics. Sound waves frequencies are mapped to pitches on a logarithmic scale, light wavelengths within a certain spectral range are more or less mapped linearly to colors, etc. Our perception does play tricks on us, but we can usually design experiments to find out exactly what those tricks are. Like in the context of optical illusions, you might see a gray square on a light background as darker than the same square on a dark background. But you can experimentally probe those things by using a computer monitor and changing the intensity of the different lights in the screen so that you can measure exactly what color - in terms of the light components - those pixels are.

The same thing goes for snakes and trains. Snakes and trains are different, and if you don't trust your naked eye you can take a piece of each and put them under a microscope and notice that the micro-structure of each object is very different: the snake's skin is composed of cells, the metal wall of a train is a rigid object. Evolution didn't design us to see cells with a microscope, but when we do use a microscope we can confirm our suspicion that a snake is organized in a fundamentally different way than the door of a train.

Basically what I'm getting at is that for most of our senses, we have many ways of independently verifying whether our observations are accurate or not, and many of those independent methods are very, very unlikely to have been selected for by evolution because they employ technology that wasn't available in the evolutionary environment. You'd have to be an extreme conspiracy theorist -- a la Descarte's demon -- to believe that evolution conspired to make all of those different methods fail in the exact same way. It's multiplying entities far beyond necessity.