Quote:
Originally Posted by lagtight
The late, great W.V.O. Quine defined Ontology as the branch of Philosophy that endeavours to answer the question, What is there? (or perhaps What exists?) And Quine noted that the answer to either question was quite simple: Everything!
At some point philosophy just turns into wordplay. This is that point. But, he is right.
A better question than "what exists" is "how do we know what exists." Epistemology has to be determined first.
Hoffman is claiming that the universal acid of evolution eats through our knowledge of objective reality; fitness trumps reality as a determinant of our perceptions.
One thing has always bothered me - why do we see objects and not the component parts? When I see a dog I do not see the atomic structure. So in a sense, we have been fooled by poor vision until we discovered better ways of seeing. We know some animals see colors we do not. The next leap is spacetime - could the way we interact with the world be determined by fitness? I don't see why not. Evidence is lacking but then evidence is lacking that the world as we see it exists as we see it.
Last edited by esspoker; 06-24-2021 at 11:10 PM.