[Music] Like a lot of people, I was exposed to your TED talk, "Do we see reality as it is?" and was struck by the desktop interface metaphor. Could you please just explain that in brief, and then we can take that in a number of directions?

The question is, how should we understand our perceptions and the relationship to reality? Most of us just assume that we know the answer. Our perceptions show us reality, not all of it, but when I see the moon, there really is a moon. And of course, I

don't see everything about the moon, but I see what I need to see. When I see a carrot, I'm seeing the truth. I'm seeing the correct shape, the correct color, the correct weight if I pick it up. And of course, I'm not seeing this

molecular structure. So there are things I don't see, but but I'm seeing truly, if incompletely. And the interface theory of perception takes a different tack on on what perception is. It says if we take evolution by natural selection seriously,

we can ask a technical question: Would evolution by natural selection shape sensory systems to tell truths about the physical world around us, or whatever the world might be around us? That's the technical question. What is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to report

true properties of objective reality? And you can show through theorems and simulations, so my graduate students working with me on this, Brian Marion, Justin Mark, and uh, and others, and some of my colleagues, Jayton Prakash, when you sing, and I've been I've worked

On this, Robert Prentner, a number of us have worked on this, and the simulations and the mathematics all agree: the probability is zero that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to reveal any true properties of objective reality. It is precisely zero.

And one intuition about that is that fitness payoff functions – we can go into this later on if we, if you want – fitness payoff functions almost surely have no information about objective reality. They, they're not so-called homomorphisms of structures in objective

reality. And so, so if we're tuned to fitness and the fitness payoffs literally are not homomorphisms of structures in reality, then there's no way that our perceptions can be homomorphic to, to reality, to the structures of reality. So, so what

then, if we take evolution by natural selection seriously – and I think we should, not because I'm claiming it's the final story, but it's the best story we have right now. Science always, to its credit, gets new theories, and what we thought was the, the final

theory 120 years ago, we now look back on it. You know, Newton was great, but we have much better theories today. And so, I have the same view about all of our scientific theories that we have today. The reason I take them seriously is not because I think they're the final word.

It's just that we have, as human beings, no better theories. And so, these are, so we have to take our current theories seriously. And so, if we take evolution by natural selection seriously, of course, as scientists, we're going to eventually try to show its limitations.

right but what it says in his current form is that the probability is zero that our senses have shaped us to see the truth about the world around us so what have they shaped us to do well the answer within evolutionary theory is it's all

about fitness our sensory systems have shaped us to guide adaptive behavior so we can live long enough to reproduce basically and so one way to put that in a metaphor that's easier to understand is to say that natural selection didn't shape us to see

the truth but it shaped us with sensory systems that are like a user interface to the truth so you know right now we're both sitting in front of laptops and we're able to i mean i've got gigabytes of memory and all the

circuitry inside my laptop i have no idea about is the truth of that i mean i i know the words i'm not a you know i'm not a engineer of that type so i so i don't really if i had to toggle

voltages inside my computer to to do this video with you it wouldn't happen so if i actually knew the truth and i had to actually toggle all the bits and bytes and so forth and voltages in the computer to make this video happen and you had to do it

it wouldn't happen we have a very simple dumbed-down user interface that lets us control the complexity of the computer without having any expertise in what's really going on inside and that's what evolution did for us it gave us a simple user interface

that lets us stay alive long enough to reproduce, to interact with reality in the ways that we need to interact with it to stay alive and reproduce, without having any idea what that reality is. You don't have a need to know, so you don't know. And that's just the

way it is. Very few of us know exactly how the desktop interface on our computer works. And you know when you drag an icon to the trash can to delete a file, there's a lot of stuff going on inside there that's involved in dragging, you know, in deleting the file.

We're blissfully ignorant, and that's what evolution has done. It makes us blissfully ignorant about the nature of reality and gives us icons that allow us to control reality. So to be very, very clear, space and time, which we typically think of as

fundamental reality, is just the format of our 3D desktop. We have instead of a flat desktop, we have a 3D space-time desktop, and objects in 3D are merely the icons in our desktop. They're they're not pointers to objective reality in any

sense. There's the colors, the shapes, the positions that we see have nothing to do with true colors and shapes and objective reality. They're just a a nice format that evolution gave us, and that format is going to vary from species to species. You

Do We See Reality As It Is and Can We Trust Our Perceptions of Reality? | Donald Hoffman

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune’s “40 under 40.” He is an early-stage technology investor/advisor (Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ others) and the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. The Observer and other media have called Tim “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which is the first business/interview podcast to exceed 100 million downloads. It has now exceeded 900 million downloads. 

Listen to The Tim Ferriss Show podcast: https://tim.blog/podcast
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Tim Ferriss

소개 및 데스크톱 인터페이스 메타포

데스크톱 인터페이스 은유를 중심으로 지각과 현실에 대한 연사의 TED 강연을 소개합니다.

현실을 직접적으로 반영하는 지각에 대한 일반적인 가정이 도전받고 있습니다.

지각된 물체(달, 당근)의 예는 불완전하지만 정확해 보이는 지각을 설명합니다.

지각의 인터페이스 이론을 소개하며 진화가 감각 시스템을 형성하여 객관적인 현실을 드러내는지에 대해 의문을 제기합니다.

감각 시스템에 대한 진화론적 관점

객관적 현실의 진정한 속성을 드러내기 위해 감각 시스템을 형성하는 자연 선택의 가능성에 대해 논의합니다.

연구 결과(정리 및 시뮬레이션)에 따르면 감각 시스템이 진정한 객관적 현실을 드러낼 확률은 제로입니다.

피트니스 보상 기능에는 객관적인 현실에 대한 정보가 부족하여 진실을 직접적으로 인식하는 데 방해가 됩니다.

연사는 자연 선택에 의한 진화를 과학 이론으로서의 한계에도 불구하고 진지하게 받아들이는 것이 중요하다고 강조합니다.

사용자 인터페이스로서의 감각 시스템

감각 시스템은 생존과 번식을 위한 적응 행동을 유도하는 사용자 인터페이스로 설명되며, 반드시 진실을 드러내는 것은 아닙니다.

노트북의 비유는 사용자가 내부 작동을 이해하지 못한 채 단순화된 인터페이스를 통해 복잡한 시스템과 상호작용하는 방식을 설명합니다.

이 비유는 현실에 대한 단순화된 사용자 인터페이스를 제공하여 완전한 이해 없이도 생존과 번식을 가능하게 하는 진화에까지 확장됩니다.

에볼루션은 현실과의 상호작용을 위한 사용자 인터페이스를 제공하지만, 현실의 본질에 대한 액세스는 제공하지 않습니다.

인터페이스 요소로서의 공간, 시간, 오브젝트

행복한 무지라는 개념을 도입하여 현실에 대한 우리의 인식이 단순화되어 있음을 강조합니다.

공간과 시간은 근본적인 현실이 아니라 3D 데스크톱 인터페이스의 형식으로 설명됩니다.

이 3D 바탕화면에는 사물이 아이콘으로 표시되며, 객관적인 현실과 직접 연결되지 않습니다.

지각된 색상, 모양, 위치는 종에 따라 다양한 인터페이스 요소입니다.

Do We See Reality As It Is and Can We Trust Our Perceptions of Reality? | Donald Hoffman

Do We See Reality As It Is and Can We Trust Our Perceptions of Reality? | Donald Hoffman

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