I feel like I understand communist theory pretty well at a basic level, and I believe in it, but I just don’t see what part of it requires belief in an objective world of matter. I don’t believe in matter and I’m still a communist. And it seems that in the 21st century most people believe in materialism but not communism. What part of “people should have access to the stuff they need to live” requires believing that such stuff is real? After all, there are nonmaterial industries and they still need communism. Workers in the music industry are producing something that nearly everyone can agree only exists in our heads. And they’re still exploited by capital, despite musical instruments being relatively cheap these days, because capital owns the system of distribution networks and access to consumers that is the means of profitability for music. Spotify isn’t material, it’s a computer program. It’s information. It’s a thoughtform. Yet it’s still a means of production that ought to be seized for the liberation of the musician worker. What does materialism have to do with any of this?
Donald Hoffman explains it very well in his book The Case Against Reality. Here’s the short version of the Fitness Beats Truth theorem:
If our ancestors had evolved to see truth, then they’d have all died before passing on their genes, because they would have been outcompeted by the organisms which perceive fitness. Perceiving truth is a waste of energy and resources. Creatures that perceive fitness will always adapt better to the environment with fewer resources.
I can’t say I’ve heard of that book. I’ll have to look into it.
About your theorem:
Tbh, I just kinda see it as an affirmation of the kind of materialism Marxism is talking about. There no eternal “Truth” to be perceived, it’s all relative. In the context of natural selection, maybe truth is the best strategy to survive. When organism are struggling for the best fitness they are entering into a complex web of material relationships with their environment. This process of natural selection has been going on for far longer than humans have been able to conceive of it. Marxism is just the theory of evolution by natural selection but for the development of human society. Unless I missed the point of your theorem…
I think you missed at least some of the point. Note that the theory of evolution holds true within any system of competing agents capable of hereditary changes. Even for memes, which can only exist in the minds of intelligent species. The theory of evolution holds true even in situations where the environment in which human beings truly exist is not a world. There must be an environment of some kind, yes, but that environment does not require matter, energy, spacetime, or any number of other symbols from our interface to exist. The FBT theorem does not depend upon there being a world in order to hold true. Rather, it erodes the concept of there being a world such as humans would understand it to be a world, because it confirms that our perceptions of the world are perceptions of fitness, not truth. Our reality is simply a tool to help us survive and reproduce. It is not passed down from God to show us truth.
That’s certainly interesting, but it implies that there is still some kind of reality, just that the way we interpret it is somewhat false, which is probably correct. This is not at all incompatible with Marxist materialism, because our perceptions of reality not being literally true is irrelevant to if we’re influenced by it or not. It merely suggests that our minds evolved a specific way of perceiving reality and, until we can fundamentally alter our brain chemistry, it will be the best we’ve got.
The difference between perception and truth is not a criticism of the materialist perspective and would arguably align with it better than the alternative.
Though I’d say that anyone making sweeping generalizations about evolutionary fitness either doesn’t understand it or is oversimplifying for effect.
I’ve taken several undergraduate courses in evolutionary biology and done a 4th year research course. I really struggle to understand what is being said.
I often try to take what others say prima facie and interpret it my own way, that is in a scientific and materialist way.
Perhaps one interpretation could be the sum total information available to our sensory organs needs to be filtered through heuristics to determine what is useful in order to contend with immediate needs so as to survive and reproduce. Any deviation from the ‘analog’ world or of whatever external material world there is and our own reductionist understanding hides the truth from us. Therefore the claim is the ownership of an epistemic advantage or insight unavailable to most others. This treads on relativism and solipsism, since if this is true, it does not do very much to help the rest of us.
I don’t know, I tried to engage respectfully but I’m still drawing blanks.
I think the academic in question is making a very simple claim while using obscuring language and methodologies.
It’s literally just that perception can do a good, and even better job of increasing fitness by latching on to not-exactly-true things, and in fact does not necessarily ever need to actually identify true things. Just true-ish things such that there can be useful response to the environment.
Kind of like how we see faces where they don’t exist. Our brains have evolved to recognize certain patterns as faces, which is surely very useful for fitness in various contexts (recognizing another human). But the perception is buggy, it’s fuzzy, it makes a pretty good number of false positives. Did we evolve to see the “truth” of existing faces, or just an approximation?
Anyways the topic is cool but I’m convinced OP doesn’t understand it.