Does natural selection favor veridical perceptions, those that more accurately depict the objective environment? Students of perception often claim that it does. But this claim, though influential, has not been adequately tested. Here we formalize the claim and a few alternatives. To test them, we introduce “interface games,” a class of evolutionary games in which perceptual strategies compete. We explore, in closed-form solutions and Monte Carlo simulations, some simpler games that assume frequency-dependent selection and complete mixing in infinite populations. We find that veridical perceptions can be driven to extinction by non-veridical strategies that are tuned to utility rather than objective reality. This suggests that natural selection need not favor veridical perceptions, and that the effects of selection on sensory perception deserve further study.

the journal version

A course taught by Christos Papadimitriou

Panda's Thumb says: "The reason why I am excited about these findings is that they tie together: scale free networks, Shannon information, criticality and evolution in a theoretic foundation." As an information theorist, I'm skeptical about this: to us, mutual information is just a number, unless you attach to it an operational meaning and have a coding theorem to go with it. But I will take a look.

Review of Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality by William Wimsatt (Harvard Press, 2007)