I'm completely struck by this paragraph. Let me try to explain why I think it doesn't make sense at all.
Hoffman: Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order—very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water.
Ok, I'm still following so far.
Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness—in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality.
In the first place, of course, it is entirely your supposition that the fitness function is linear - in fact, I think there's a very simple experiment to prove it isn't. Do all animals when confronted with a large body of water try to drink it all and end up drowning? Do animals simply charge at the ocean and die? They don't? Well then.
Also notice how he doesn't really define what is "the truth about the water". There are certainly a lot of truths about water - that it is H2O, that it is liquid at certain temperatures, that it dissolves some salts, etc. The closest thing I can interpret from the text (which is unclear) is that "the truth about the water" means, to some organism, something like "more of it will make me fitter" - which is of course a subjective statement. If he defines truth to be subjective like that, then what a surprise that he concludes that we can't really see the world as is!
Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve—say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival.
Great. We're in the same page then.
Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction.
Come fucking on. The only thing you proved is that you supposition about the fitness function being linear is wrong. He's litterally saying, "oh, the first shit theory off the top of my head about the complex behavior of animals is wrong - I guess that means no one can access reality!"
And of course he's still unclear what does he mean by truth. If the "truth" means the subjective thought of some animal that more water will always make it more fit then sure, that's completely extinct. I still can't see how it has much to do about us being able to know that water is H2O, for example.
For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness.
Your point being? First, let me point out how computer-model-centric this is. The only reason some organism might see water as "red" or "green" and not, you know, larger and smaller sizes of water is if that's the only damn thing it's ever tracking. Yeah, sure, that's how evolution works, there's not payout for coordinating different kinds of information, specially the relative sizes of objects, right?
Also, so what if it interprets what it sees in a particular way? You could say the same thing about how we se color - "oh, you're not really seeing blue, you are only interpreting a certain kind of wavelength in a certain way". I think we can all agree this kind of thought is in general useless.
Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality.
First of all, your last fucking sentences say the organism sees red AND green. That's a distinction. And of course it completely obviates actual, true biological complexity. For an organism to sense something, it needs to have a way to sense it - an eye for example. Now I know that in a computer you can just program it to sense something, but that doesn't make much sense in reality does it? And if an eye can't make distinctions it's an useless eye, probably not an eye at all. But if it can make distinctions - and the more corresponding to reality the better the organism's fitness - and on top of that the organism has the capability to reason and its species has a long tradition of industry to expand on the organism's natural capabilities of perception (e.g. building telescopes) and its societies have means of storing information and collecting data and comparing theories and... well, you get the point.
