2

 "Fitness payoffs erase information about the structure of the world."

-Donald Hoffman

I want to briefly investigate an aspect of the above quote (which quote yesterday's post centered on, as well). 

Namely, I want to ask the question "if this quote were true, would it also then be true that increasing a conscious agent's knowledge about the structure of the world necessarily negatively impacts said agent's fitness prospects?".

We could certainly say that the quote implies that if no erasure of information about the structure of the world occurs, then also no fitness payoff was realized, but this does not strictly mean that erasing information decreases fitness payoffs. 

However, it is important to note that the arithmetic of information perception may have some counterintuitive features. If we look at a forest, we see many trees. Each of these trees has one or more name, a certain number of rings, a certain type of leaf, a number of other species inhabiting it, and a great many other attributes. When we focus in on a single tree, it is much easier to consider these many attributes, but to do so, we must to some extent forget the forest. A single tree may seem to us to contain more information than a forest because our minds have an easier time unzipping the information contained within the tree when we forget about the forest at large, but this perception is likely illusory because the information contained in any given tree must be less than the information contained within the conjugation of that tree and any other information-containing object (in this example, the rest of the forest).

1

 It's recently seemed to me a good idea to post at least a paragraph to this or some other blog at least once a day, mainly for mental exercise, but also for the other benefits that writing and sharing one's writing bring (which I will not attempt to enumerate). As I am in between tasks at the moment, and it would make me nervous to spend time deliberating on a topic, today I'm just going to share a quote I came across and felt compelled to write down yesterday and some very brief thoughts on the same.

This is the quote:

"Fitness payoffs erase information about the structure of the world."

-Donald Hoffman

This quote came from the quotee's appearance on Episode #3 of Paras Chopra's Bold Conjectures podcast.

I've been listening to a lot of interviews of Dr. Hoffman in the past few years and find that this quote contains as distilled an essence of his main big idea as could be hoped for. This idea, however, is more radical than you might think from the out-of-context presentation. He's not just saying that, say, increasing the acuity of one sense must come at an expense to the others or that this merely distorts one's map of reality; he's saying that space-time itself is a construct of consciousness whose relationship to actual reality is roughly equivalent to the relationship between a computer's user interface and its inner workings.

I will try to write more on this later.