this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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No offense, but do you have any proof? That's kinda the thing about idealism, once you become separated from trying to analyze the testable, material world around us you can kinda just assert whatever you want to be true. That's why Marxists care so much about materialism. Deviating from it can result in some really weird, ineffective stuff. Like maybe we just need to get enough people together to think communism into existence.
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.
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.
There is no evolutionary niche better served by perceiving truth than fitness, except perhaps for the niche that humanity has created for itself by inventing technology that is capable of destroying the Earth's habitability to human life. And a situation like that has never existed on earth before now, so there is no way any organism can have adapted to it.
It's very unclear what you're trying to say because you're using terms with common definitions in evolutionary biology but in ways that make no sense, but also difficult to understand as profound or meaningful if I try to understand them with other definitions.
For example, fitness isn't an evolutionary niche at all. In evolution, niches are relevant to fitness, as they are patterns of (often mutually-excluding) ecological roles played by different organisms over time and space, suggesting some common constraints and situations in the overall fitness landscape. But fitness is not itself a niche. I have no idea what you mean by niche otherwise, but it doesn't make in the context of the field you're wading into.
Anyways I'll try to explain this more by addressing the rest.
This is also not a niche. No other organism, to our knowledge, has such a role or can have it ecologically framed. It's like saying Elon Musk is the best person on the "South African failson that owns SpaceX" team. It's just the one guy, there's no team.
So what? There's no clear point here.
It really feels like you've read some pop science and maybe didn't really understand it. Do you think that's possible?