The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman
Donald Hoffman
Author: Donald Hoffman
Rating: ★★★
In a conventional Western philosophy degree program, the course of study is divided into two primary divisions: ancient (Greek philosophy) and modern (Descartes through present-day). The gap between is dominated by superstition and religion that ends when Descartes re-proposes a fundamentally ancient idea: “Which sense-data are able to be called into doubt (…quae in dubium revocari possunt) and which are not ([quae] perspicuae veritates in suspicionem falsitatis [non] incurrant — Meditationes)?”
According to Donald Hoffman’s book, for practical purposes, none of our senses’ apprehension of the world can be trusted, for they are liars that have been trained by the most patient and skilled algorithmic learning program ever: natural selection.
Guided by game theory payoffs, that is, natural selection, our senses have selected for a non-veridical apprehension of reality that provides humans data enough leading to offspring production for minimal resource inputs (i.e. calories).
Since our apprehension need only be “good enough” for this all-to-animal and carnal purpose, heuristics that lead to error (optical illusion, states of perception incompatible with physics’ experiments) are tolerable as long as the strategy, on the whole, produces evolutionary fitness.
Locus of Experience: The noumenon and phenomenon
Modern philosophy saw a movement from:
- Descartes: The world exists, it is veridical (noumenon is the same as the phenomenon), and we are only accidentally wrong when we misperceive
- Kant: The world exists in a veridical form (noumenon), but since we order experience by adding to it to create its phenomenological experience. Error never lies in noumenon but only phenomenon
- Hegel: The noumenon may not exist you semi-mystical mountebank. The phenomenology is all that counts and we are right and wrong in it, the end.
- Hoffman: The world exists in a veridical form, but it has been perfectly and opaquely overlain with a “wrapping” metaphor, a “computer desktop” whose interface is real and informative, but wholly a manufactured reality over the incomprehensibly complex “truth” of electrons inside of circuits. The noumenon is there and can only be peeked at cleverly from the realm of the phenomenon
Hoffman believes that recent discoveries in physics point at holes in our overlay’s design. For example, our sense is that we participate in a 3-D reality. However physics suggests that the veridical fabric of whatever reality really is (to call it even “spacetime” re-summons the non-veridical overlay of human phenomenology) is 2-D because it acts, in mathematical models where human perception is not required, as a 2-D plane (“holographic universe”).
I believe that the majority of the value of the book can be had in the first chapter or two, but to get the feel for the argument the full book is helpful.
{
"title": "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes",
"author": "Donald Hoffman",
"highlightCount": 96,
"noteCount": 5,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "Our hunch, in short, is that truer perceptions are fitter perceptions. Evolution weeds out untrue perceptions. That is why our perceptions are windows on objective reality. These hunches are wrong.",
"location": 48,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the very language of objects in space and time is simply the wrong language to describe objective reality.",
"location": 51,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the purpose of an interface is to hide the “truth” and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks",
"location": 63,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring.",
"location": 65,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "You may want truth, but you don’t need truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct.",
"location": 69,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I take my perceptions seriously, but not literally. This book is about why you should do the same, and why that matters.",
"location": 78,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "we still have no plausible story about how brain activity might generate a conscious experience.",
"location": 86,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We look, in chapter four, at the case for “No.” We encounter a startling “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.",
"location": 105,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.",
"location": 114,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.",
"location": 122,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Calories can be difficult and dangerous to procure, so evolution has shaped our senses to be misers. One consequence, we discover in chapter nine, is that vision cuts corners: you see sharp detail only within a small circular window, whose radius is the width of your thumb held at arm’s length.",
"location": 145,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Perhaps the universe itself is a massive social network of conscious agents that experience, decide, and act. If so, consciousness does not arise from matter; this is a big claim that we will explore in detail. Instead, matter and spacetime arise from consciousness—as a perceptual interface.",
"location": 158,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "we experience sensations.",
"location": 215,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "If rocks have orgasms, they’re not letting on.",
"location": 216,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "we have “propositional attitudes,”",
"location": 217,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "What is the mass of dizziness, the velocity of a headache, or the position of the wonder why Chris won’t call?",
"location": 224,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Our failure to envision a mechanism does not preclude one.",
"location": 285,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.",
"location": 454,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”",
"location": 514,
"annotation": "Nice recall to chiang's exhalation story"
},
{
"highlight": "beauty is a perception of fitness payoffs on offer,",
"location": 544,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "To prepare us for the perplexing case of objects, let’s warm up our intuitions by exploring the perception of beauty in the animal kingdom.",
"location": 554,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "if genes get beauty wrong, they tend to go extinct. This is the pitiless logic of natural selection.",
"location": 582,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "it’s all about fitness—the central concept of evolution by natural selection.",
"location": 583,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Genes don’t elbow each other directly. They do it by proxy. They boot up bodies and minds—phenotypes—and let them duke it out.",
"location": 587,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "So what in the world is the brain computing when we look, and why?",
"location": 881,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "He assumed that our ideas-of-things truly describe the thing-in-itself, so that the same vocabulary describes both. I rejected this assumption as implausible.",
"location": 955,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "They claim that our experiences are veridical, meaning that the structure of these internal representations, and therefore of our experiences, matches the structure of the objective world.",
"location": 1014,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I doubted that natural selection favors perceptions that describe reality.",
"location": 1028,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I doubted that selection favors perceptions that could even frame true descriptions of reality.",
"location": 1029,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the lexicon of our perceptions, including space, time, and objects, is powerless to describe reality.",
"location": 1030,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“it is extremely unlikely that the fly has any explicit representation of the visual world around him—no true conception of a surface, for example.” But he thought that, despite its failure to represent the world, the fly could still survive because it can, for instance, “chase its mate with sufficiently frequent success.”",
"location": 1034,
"annotation": "The fitness rubric versus naive assumption of veridicality"
},
{
"highlight": "Perhaps the model in which the neuron stays put is an impediment to our progress in understanding the origin of consciousness.",
"location": 1074,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "In 2007, I decided to try. It was time to see if neurons stay put, or if we should pick on them.",
"location": 1077,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Truth and fitness, they claim, are not rival strategies, but rather the same strategy, seen from different perspectives.3 Thus evolution cannot render an impartial verdict. This argument fails",
"location": 1113,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Richard Dawkins proposed that Darwin’s algorithm applies to “memes,” units of cultural transmission such as “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.”",
"location": 1142,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We will find that this belief perishes: natural selection drives true perceptions to swift extinction. The very language of our perceptions—space, time, and physical objects—is simply the wrong language to describe objective reality.",
"location": 1164,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "perception reports differences in payoffs. Where there’s no difference in payoffs there’s no payoff in seeing differences.",
"location": 1389,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "How can my perceptions be useful if they aren’t true?",
"location": 1477,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the interface theory of perception (ITP).",
"location": 1482,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The language of the interface—pixels and icons—cannot describe the hardware and software it hides. A different language is needed for that:",
"location": 1492,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place? Natural selection.",
"location": 1531,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "For spoons, quarks, and stars, ITP agrees with the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley that esse is percipi—to be is to be perceived.",
"location": 1546,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "our natural impulse is to reify Maseratis and other middle-sized objects. It’s hard for us to let go of them. Fortunately, we find it much easier to let go of tastes. We happen to be less inclined to reify them.",
"location": 1640,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The coin of the evolutionary realm is fitness, and counting that coin can be adaptive.",
"location": 1726,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It remains an open question whether our species enjoys the concepts needed to understand objective reality.",
"location": 1741,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "he believed in local realism. Realism is the claim that physical objects have definite values of physical properties—such as position, momentum, spin, charge, and polarization—even when unobserved. Locality is the claim that physical objects cannot influence each other faster than the speed of light.",
"location": 1818,
"annotation": "Einstein"
},
{
"highlight": "there are experiments for which quantum theory predicts outcomes that contradict local realism.",
"location": 1827,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Experiments such as Zeilinger’s are tightening the noose around the neck of realism.",
"location": 1858,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The KS Theorem says that noncontextual realism is false.",
"location": 1862,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Certainty about what you’ll see doesn’t imply it already exists. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen were simply wrong to claim otherwise.",
"location": 1876,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Rovelli updates his worldview is to reject “the notion of an absolute, or observer-independent, state of a system; equivalently, the notion of observer-independent values of physical quantities.”14 Rovelli abandons noncontextual realism.",
"location": 1885,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“A measurement does not, as the term unfortunately suggests, reveal a pre-existing state of affairs. It is an action on the world by an agent that results in the creation of an outcome — a new experience for that agent. ‘Intervention’ might be a better term.”",
"location": 1898,
"annotation": "Is there somethung here that align to Lojban? Something about moving nouns to states to verbs?"
},
{
"highlight": "“Quantum mechanics evidences that there is no such thing as a mere ‘observer (or register) of reality.’ The observing equipment, the registering device, ‘participates in the defining of reality.’ In this sense the universe does not sit ‘out there.’ ”",
"location": 1929,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "we try to observe the slits closely, we always see a photon go through just one slit, never both. Moreover, if we observe which slit it goes through then the interference pattern disappears.",
"location": 1942,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“In the delayed-choice experiment we, by a decision in the here and now, have an irretrievable influence on what we will want to say about the past—a strange inversion of the normal order of time.”28",
"location": 1958,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“No space. No time. Heaven did not hand down the word ‘time’. Man invented it.",
"location": 1978,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Einstein put it ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.’ ”30",
"location": 1980,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "why should bits replace spacetime?",
"location": 1990,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking showed that the amount of information you can cram into a region of space is proportional to the area of the surface surrounding that space.32 That’s right, the area, not the volume.",
"location": 2001,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This rule is called the “holographic principle.”",
"location": 2005,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience—the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people—is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional (2D) surface.",
"location": 2022,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Quantum theory says that information is never destroyed. General relativity says that it can cross an event horizon and be erased. This is a serious paradox.",
"location": 2044,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "If we relinquish the divine view from nowhere, then quantum theory and general relativity can peacefully coexist.",
"location": 2071,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "suggest, a data-compressing and error-correcting code for fitness.",
"location": 2153,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Spacetime is doomed. There is no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics. That’s very startling, because what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So, if there’s no spacetime, it’s not clear what physics is about.”",
"location": 2159,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "the momentous discovery, discussed in chapter six, that the amount of data you can store in a region of space depends on the area surrounding that region, not on its volume. This new outlook on spacetime and objects flows from the idea that our perceptions have evolved to encode fitness payoffs,",
"location": 2193,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "spacetime and objects do just that. But how? I propose that they do it, in part, by data compression and error correction of fitness information.",
"location": 2196,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We see objects in three dimensions not because we reconstruct objective reality, but because this is the format of a compression algorithm that evolution happened to build into us.",
"location": 2207,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "we mistakenly believe that its spacetime format is the objective reality in which we live. This mistake is understandable and even excusable: our data format constrains not just how we see, but how we think.",
"location": 2211,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "turn to error correction",
"location": 2223,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Two dimensions contain all the information in any 3D space. This is the well-established holographic principle of Susskind and 't Hooft that we discussed in the last chapter. It is counterintuitive, and belies our assumption that 3D space is an objective reality that our senses reconstruct. But it makes sense if you assume that our senses report fitness and need redundancy—such as an extra dimension of space—to ensure that their reports aren’t crippled by noise.",
"location": 2236,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "The picture that emerges is that spacetime and objects are a code used by our senses to report fitness.",
"location": 2247,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This picture is not endorsed by most vision scientists. Instead, they assume that vision is veridical, that it reconstructs real objects in spacetime.",
"location": 2249,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "It shows precisely how perceptions and actions can enjoy a symmetry—such as translation, rotation, mirror, and Lorentz—in a world that lacks any symmetry.",
"location": 2268,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Symmetries are simple programs that we use to compress data and correct errors. The symmetries in our perceptions reveal how we compress and encode information, not the nature of objective reality.",
"location": 2274,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "claim of quantum physicists that all physical processes are information processes, and that no information is ever destroyed.",
"location": 2302,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "This prediction of ITP—that the appearance of causal interactions between physical objects in spacetime is a fiction—has interesting support from quantum computations that lack causal order.",
"location": 2314,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "computers have now been built in which there is no definite causal order of operations.",
"location": 2318,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "There is no objective spacetime and no preexisting objects in spacetime whose true properties we try to recover. Instead, spacetime and objects are simply a coding system for messages about fitness.",
"location": 2460,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "spacetime is not an ancient theater erected long before any stirrings of life. It is a data structure that we create now to track and capture fitness payoffs.",
"location": 2486,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "colors and textures code critical data on fitness,",
"location": 2491,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Your hand itself is an icon of your interface, not an objective reality.",
"location": 2576,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Discriminating colors is a powerful tool employed by millions of species to decode critical messages about fitness.",
"location": 2650,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Watson is revealing. He perceives a complex object—a smooth column of glass, a basket of ivy—not as a veridical perception of a mind-independent object, but simply as a useful data structure for representing properties of a taste.",
"location": 2733,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "we forage for fitness. We search the visual field for a message about fitness that may be worth the effort to examine in detail. Most messages aren’t worth this effort. Natural selection has shaped us to ignore them.",
"location": 2880,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Change blindness is not a failure to see the true state of objective reality, it’s a choice to discard news about fitness that’s unlikely to alter our fitness.",
"location": 2882,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "vision is no passive camera. It is an impatient hunter for fitness payoffs.",
"location": 2928,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Our interface is wired to detect and monitor predators and prey.",
"location": 3088,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "scripted attention: we use our knowledge of our current context to constrain how we forage for fitness, allowing us to forage with greater speed and precision.",
"location": 3127,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "I love the sun and don’t want to part with my neurons. But I don’t believe the sun existed before there were creatures to perceive it, or that my neurons exist if unperceived.",
"location": 3151,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "“Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.” —JALALUDDIN RUMI",
"location": 3172,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "To reject physicalism, and embrace conscious realism, is to embrace pseudoscience.”",
"location": 3294,
"annotation": "Counter"
},
{
"highlight": "We have been taken in. We have mistaken the limits of our interface for an insight into reality.",
"location": 3338,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "An agent simply lacks the resources to experience all the experiences of all the agents in its instantiation, even though those agents contribute to its very self.",
"location": 3442,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "We did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion.",
"location": 3496,
"annotation": ""
},
{
"highlight": "Conscious realism claims that consciousness is the fundamental nature of objective reality.",
"location": 3576,
"annotation": ""
}
]
}