So I'm

saying something that's even more radical than just the idea that our perceptions are simplification of reality. Most people would say, I understand that evolution is going to do things on the cheap and try to do things fast. And so we're going to get sketches of the table, not get the full detail of the table. And we'll just get sketches of things that we need to stay alive. I'm saying something more radical. I'm saying that when evolution by natural selection is shaping our perceptions, the selection forces are uniformly against anything at all like the truth. In evolutionary game theory, these functions tell you what payoffs you will get for the various actions you take, given the state of the world, given what creature you are, given your state. The whole game is to get more fitness payoffs than your competition. So if you do anything besides look at the payoffs, you're going to lose. And it turns out the fitness functions themselves are just utterly unlike objective reality. Now,

this is what you call fitness before truth. That's right. And you've done a lot of mathematics modeling, which you argue supports this. That's right. So with two of

my graduate students, Justin, Mark, and Brian Marion, we did genetic algorithms and evolutionary game simulations. We ran hundreds of thousands, even millions of randomly chosen worlds with resources that we would throw into them. And we would put creatures in these worlds. We played God. We let some creatures see all of the truth. We put others that saw nothing of the truth and were just tuned to the fitness functions. And we let them compete. And what we found uniformly was that organisms that saw the truth never outcompeted organisms of equal complexity that were just tuned to the fitness functions. They were in a world where they could wander around and forage for resources. It was foraging game, but their perceptions had to evolve and their actions had to evolve. So their initial actions were really stupid and their initial perceptions were completely crazy. But after 500 generations, the creatures that evolved were foraging optimally. And so we could look and see of those creatures that survived 500 generations and bred what kind of perceptions did they have? None of them saw the truth. All of them were tuned to the fitness functions. And in fact, I doubt in the complex world that at any stage in the genetic evolution would a true, perceiving creature ever arise. There would be no selection pressures for it to appear at any point. Now,

one of the very weird elements of reality that you argue supports this is the famous double slit experiment. And for those listeners who know exactly what the double slit experiment is, lucky you. For those who do not, it's a notoriously difficult thing to explain without visuals. And in fact, it's a notoriously difficult thing to explain with visuals. Since I'm the non scientist in the room, I'm going to attempt to explain it. Because if I can understand it, most people probably can. And this is an experiment that should be pointed out has been carried out probably thousands of times now, correct? Yes. Highly, highly consistent from experiment to experiment. This is an utterly non controversial statement about the way reality works. Specifically, light, electrons and certain other things sometimes behave like a bunch of particles and other times behave like waves. They have a strange dual nature, which becomes evident at a very, very tiny level at the quantum level. So first to visualize the particle major of light. Imagine you have one of those machines that shoots tennis balls and they're all soaked in blue paint and you're standing in front of a wall that has two large vertical slits in it. And behind the wall is a canvas, like an artist's canvas, a couple feet behind the wall. And you start firing these tennis balls. What'll happen is that most of the tennis balls are just going to bounce off the wall, but a certain set of them are going to go sailing on some angle through the left slit. And some of them are going to go sailing on another set of angles through the right slit after a certain amount of time. If you go around and you see your artwork that's resulted, you're going to see a cluster of blue spots where the tennis balls came through the left slit.