the case against reality donald d hoffman

On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. Sure, when we stop and think about it - or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion - we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions - sights, sounds, textures, tastes - are an accurate portrayal of the real world.

The case against reality donald d hoffman