Zero to 1: Evolutionary Games, Fitness vs Reality, and The World vs Our World
Perception vs Reality
4 KEY INSIGHTS
I.
Donald Hoffman and his team ran hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with many randomly chosen worlds and organisms.
In every simulation, the organisms that saw only fitness drove the organisms that saw reality to extinction.
II.
Our perception’s purpose is to help us survive and procreate.
As a result, we perceive the world through our values and beliefs, which helps construct our experience and give it meaning.
III.
We live in a world of meaning and experience it according to our values.
IV.
We don’t live in the world, we live in our own world.
2 QUOTES
I.
“We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.” Steven Pinker
II.
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." - Anaïs Nin
When we perceive the world, what we experience isn’t reality as it is but our limitations.
III.
"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do." - Alva Noë
Your brain is actively generating this experience, interpreting it according to your values and beliefs, and generating the meaning you are experiencing.
You can appreciate how easy it is to see the world in a vastly different light.
1 QUESTION FOR YOU
How might understanding perception help us manage conflicts and misunderstandings between people?
Here is the Deep Dive on Perception & The Answer to the Months Question👇
The Science of Perception & How we Hallucinate our Own Reality
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Bonus Article
How AI is Shaping our Perceptions & Transforming our World
Simulations have transformed the way we see the world. Simulations are copies of reality, and as they grow and multiply, they drown out the underlying reality, leading to a situation in which we first and foremost see the copies and take them as reality.