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.

"Observer Mechanics is an inquiry into the subject of perception. It suggests an approach to the study of perception that attempts to be both rigorous and general. A central thesis of Observer Mechanics is that every perceptual capacity (e.g., stereovision, auditory localization, sentence parsing, haptic recognition, and so on) can be described as an instance of a single formal structure: viz., an "observer.""

A great quote from M. Minsky: "It would seem that Perceptrons has much the same role as The Necronomicon -- that is, often cited but never read."

Abstract: "The concept of information is virtually ubiquitous in contemporary cognitive science. ... Fred Dretske''s extensive philosophical defense of a theory of informational content (semantic information) based upon the Shannon-Weaver formal theory of information is subjected to critical scrutiny. A major difficulty is identified in Dretske''s equivocations in the use of the concept of a signal bearing informational content. Gibson''s alternative conception of information (construed as analog by Dretske), while avoiding many of the problems located in the conventional use of signal, raises different but equally serious questions. It is proposed that, taken literally, the human CNS does not extract or process information at all; rather, whatever information is construed as locatable in the CNS is information only for an observer-theorist and only for certain purposes."