TPF : Imagination & Simulation

[Gnomon]

Imagination (Partial Simulations)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/605366


It makes sense if survival is the prime directive, the be all and end all of life in general and humans in particular. I don't see how that's got anything to do with why mind-generated silumations are done in halves - some senses are not activated as mentioned in the OP. — TheMadFool

I think Donald Hoffman's notion of our senses as an "interface" between us and the real world, may offer a clue to "what gives?" In The Case Against Reality, Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, he has concluded that our sensory perceptions have “almost surely evolved to hide reality. They just report fitness”. Even so, humans have also evolved another form of “perception” that we call “conception”.

And that’s where the philosophical debates divide. Via conception, we can imagine things we can’t see, and we sometimes find those subjective “ideals” to be more important than the objectively real objects of the physical realm. That sometimes leads to Faith, in which we “believe in things unseen”. Most of what we "know" about the physical world takes the form of abstractions or simulations (or "silumations", if you prefer), that contain only enough detail to allow us to survive the hazards of nature long enough to replicate our genes. But that pragmatic worldview falls far short of omniscience. So, "what gives" is an illusion of reality, not the ding an sich.


Interface : Window to Reality : Reality is not what you see
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html

[Gnomon]

I was wondering how if our senses don't give an accurate picture of reality, it would aid us in survival? That goes against the received wisdom that to be in touch with reality is key to living a happy and healthy life (most cases of death and injury occur when we believe falsehoods or ignore facts). — TheMadFool

In his analogy with icons on a computer screen, Hoffman explains how a low-resolution representation of Reality is good-enough to keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Computer users interact with crude icons that represent messy reality in abstract outline, while hiding the complex mechanical and information-processing going on down below the surface.

However, philosophers, and scientists, (unlike most animals) are not content with "good-enough", and bare survival. Instead, they strive, not for pragmatic Science, but for ideal Omniscience ; not for adapting ourselves to the world, but for modifying Nature to suit human nature.


Interface Reality :
In other words, what we think we see, is not absolute reality but our own ideas about reality. Donald Hoffman calls those mental models “Icons”, serving as symbols that merely represent the unseen information processes within the computer system.
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
Note -- According to Hoffman, our symbolic interface gives an adequate (not accurate) picture of reality

Icon :
Semiotics. a sign or representation that stands for its object by virtue of a resemblance or analogy to it.
Note -- our senses and brains convert incoming signals from the environment (that are already encoded into abstract patterns of color & contrast) into neural patterns, that are abstracted further, and merged with prior knowledge from memory, into the low resolution patterns we call thoughts and ideas. Although those ideas are merely crude analogies of reality, they form our beliefs about reality. So, yes, we can be deluded by incomplete representations (perhaps based on "fake news") into believing falsehoods. Fortunately, some of us are aware of that pitfall, and take steps to make our symbols & icons & beliefs more accurate, by obtaining more & more detailed information to flesh-out our not-quite-good-enough mental models..