The Case Against Reality

May 27, 2019
Hoffman, a UC-Irvine cognitive science professor, devotes his intriguing but overreaching treatise to unveiling a series of interconnected, provocative hypotheses about how humans perceive the world around them. His argument rests on his Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem, which states that natural selection has shaped the perceptive capabilities of organisms to discern aspects of the environment that positively impact fitness: the ability to survive and reproduce. FBT, unlike previous ideas about the relation between perception and evolution, asserts that perception solely maximizes fitness, not truth. Hoffman recognizes FBT “is counterintuitive. How can my perceptions be useful if they aren’t true?” He attempts to reconcile this conundrum with the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP): organisms interact with their environment the same way humans do with computer screens through icons that are helpful but mask the computer’s inner workings. Hoffman proposes the concept of conscious realism, which “denies that physical objects exist when unperceived,” and asserts that conscious agents create the universe simply via their perceptions. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Hoffman also dips into his own research on visual perception to describe how humans are fooled by optical illusions. His ideas are complex and fascinating, but if they’re to be fully understood, they deserve more space than he’s accorded them in this disappointing study.

June 15, 2019
According to this expert account, evolution shapes our view of reality, but accuracy is not its priority. In his first book, Hoffman (Cognitive Science/Univ. of California, Irvine) emphasizes that evolution designed our perceptions "to keep us alive," so we must take them seriously. "But it is a mistake of logic," he writes, "to assume that if we must take our senses seriously then we are required--or even entitled--to take them literally....I explain why evolution hid objective reality and endowed us instead with an interface of objects in space and time." What we observe is simply a virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life. Having announced this disturbing premise, the author provides a steady stream of explanations of how the brain processes perceptions. Observing a member of the opposite sex, we pick up dozens of sensory cues, run them through an algorithm refined by evolution to evaluate reproductive potential, and reach a conclusion. It's not a given that the outcome--marriage, or at least children--is ideal. To those who doubt that the world we observe is simply a useful interface such as an icon for a computer text file, Hoffman suggests we look in a mirror. We see expression, flesh, hair, clothes, and other elements, often with a great deal of artificial overlay. The reality--our nature, feelings, experiences--remains hidden. Would we want it any other way? Few readers will be surprised when the author concludes with the evolution of consciousness, a subject that continues to obsess neuroscientists without producing anything more than generalities such as, "conscious experiences are tightly correlated with specific patterns of activity in neural circuits. But no scientific theory that starts with neural circuitry has been able to explain the origin of consciousness." A dense, lucid, and often unsettling exploration of how our brains interpret the world.

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