Notice that a first person perspective doesn’t necessarily have much to do with adaptations or evolution. If you build a robot, it too is at the centre of its world—simply because that’s where its sensors and actuators are. This makes maximizing inclusive fitness seem like a bit of a side issue.
Calling what is essentially a product of locality an “illusion” still seems very odd to me. We really are at the centre of our perspectives on the world. That isn’t an illusion, it’s a true fact.
There’s a huge difference between the descriptive center-of-the-world and the evaluative centre-of-the-world. The most altruistic person still literally sees everything from their geometrical perspective.
Surely, that’s not really the topic. For instance, I am not fooled by my perspective into thinking that I am literally at the center of the universe. Nor are most educated humans. My observations are compatible with me being at many locations in the universe—relative to any edges that future astronomers might conceivably discover. I don’t see much of an illusion there.
It’s true that early humans often believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. However, that seems a bit different.
Tim, for sure, outright messianic delusions are uncommon (cf. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/05/jesus_jesus_jesus.html) But I wonder if you may underestimate just how pervasive—albeit normally implicit—is the bias imparted by the fact the whole world seems centered on one’s body image. An egocentric world-simulation lends a sense one is in some way special—that this here-and-now is privileged. Sentients in other times and places and Everett branches (etc) have only a second-rate ontological status. Yes, of course, if set out explicitly, such egocentric bias is absurd. But our behaviour towards other sentients suggests to me this distortion of perspective is all too real.
I’m still uncomfortable with the proposed “illusion” terminology. If all perceptions are illusions, we would need some other terminology in order to distinguish relatively accurate perceptions from misleading ones. However, it seems to me that that’s what the word “illusion” is for in the first place.
I’d prefer to describe a camera’s representation of the world as “incomplete” or “limited”, rather than as an “illusion”.
Tim, when dreaming, one has a generic delusion, i.e. the background assumption that one is awake, and a specific delusion, i.e. the particular content of one’s dream. But given we’re constructing a FAQ of ideal rational agency, no such radical scepticism about perception is at stake - merely eliminating a source of systematic bias that is generic to cognitive agents evolved under pressure of natural selection. For sure, there may be some deluded folk who don’t recognise it’s a bias and who believe instead they really are the centre of the universe—and therefore their interests and preferences carry special ontological weight. But Luke’s FAQ is expressly about normative decision theory. The FAQ explicitly contrasts itself with descriptive decision theory, which “studies how non-ideal agents (e.g. humans) actually choose.”
Notice that a first person perspective doesn’t necessarily have much to do with adaptations or evolution. If you build a robot, it too is at the centre of its world—simply because that’s where its sensors and actuators are. This makes maximizing inclusive fitness seem like a bit of a side issue.
Calling what is essentially a product of locality an “illusion” still seems very odd to me. We really are at the centre of our perspectives on the world. That isn’t an illusion, it’s a true fact.
There’s a huge difference between the descriptive center-of-the-world and the evaluative centre-of-the-world. The most altruistic person still literally sees everything from their geometrical perspective.
Surely, that’s not really the topic. For instance, I am not fooled by my perspective into thinking that I am literally at the center of the universe. Nor are most educated humans. My observations are compatible with me being at many locations in the universe—relative to any edges that future astronomers might conceivably discover. I don’t see much of an illusion there.
It’s true that early humans often believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. However, that seems a bit different.
Tim, for sure, outright messianic delusions are uncommon (cf. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/05/jesus_jesus_jesus.html) But I wonder if you may underestimate just how pervasive—albeit normally implicit—is the bias imparted by the fact the whole world seems centered on one’s body image. An egocentric world-simulation lends a sense one is in some way special—that this here-and-now is privileged. Sentients in other times and places and Everett branches (etc) have only a second-rate ontological status. Yes, of course, if set out explicitly, such egocentric bias is absurd. But our behaviour towards other sentients suggests to me this distortion of perspective is all too real.
I’m still uncomfortable with the proposed “illusion” terminology. If all perceptions are illusions, we would need some other terminology in order to distinguish relatively accurate perceptions from misleading ones. However, it seems to me that that’s what the word “illusion” is for in the first place.
I’d prefer to describe a camera’s representation of the world as “incomplete” or “limited”, rather than as an “illusion”.
Tim, when dreaming, one has a generic delusion, i.e. the background assumption that one is awake, and a specific delusion, i.e. the particular content of one’s dream. But given we’re constructing a FAQ of ideal rational agency, no such radical scepticism about perception is at stake - merely eliminating a source of systematic bias that is generic to cognitive agents evolved under pressure of natural selection. For sure, there may be some deluded folk who don’t recognise it’s a bias and who believe instead they really are the centre of the universe—and therefore their interests and preferences carry special ontological weight. But Luke’s FAQ is expressly about normative decision theory. The FAQ explicitly contrasts itself with descriptive decision theory, which “studies how non-ideal agents (e.g. humans) actually choose.”
But what DP was talking about is thinking you are more important.