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92 reviews for:
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
Donald D. Hoffman
3.7 AVERAGE
92 reviews for:
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
Donald D. Hoffman
3.7 AVERAGE
Wow
Okay this is proper mind blowing stuff. The idea that reality is not some out there objective thing but rather an interface that has been developed between an unknown environment and an agent that evolves biasing fitness over truth. By the end of the book mushrooms have been eaten but there’s so much scope for thought that it really is worth the very literal trip.
Okay this is proper mind blowing stuff. The idea that reality is not some out there objective thing but rather an interface that has been developed between an unknown environment and an agent that evolves biasing fitness over truth. By the end of the book mushrooms have been eaten but there’s so much scope for thought that it really is worth the very literal trip.
80-90% of this book is good or better. What's not good is awful, like "the moon isn't there when no one's looking" or the attempt to introduce spirituality. I have a lot more to say about this book; we'll see if I get around to it.
Poorly written and weakly argued. A 20 page essay stretched into 200. There's an interesting idea at the core of this, but Donald Hoffman is the wrong person to make the case for it. Hard to take a book like this seriously that repeatedly quotes the Matrix and cites Elon Musk as a "serious thinker".
What we find here is a bit like H.P. Lovecraft minus the more horrible of the cosmic horror. Heres the gist: we filter reality. Knowing what exists independent of our senses is impossible, and I'm never really seeing objective reality but rather a human-specific interpretation of it. Ah well, c'est la vie! — or a close enough facsimile of it, at least. It's the sort of thought experiment that is sure to shake things up in academic circles where brainy folks cook up theories of everything, but which impacts my daily life in laypersonland not a whit.
3 stars. It's nice to take your brain down less-frequented alleyways and rough it up now and again. The book is pretty short and decently engaging throughout. Hoffman puts in enough flourishes to add occasional levity and flair, but often falls into a repetitive drone of info already shared previously.
3 stars. It's nice to take your brain down less-frequented alleyways and rough it up now and again. The book is pretty short and decently engaging throughout. Hoffman puts in enough flourishes to add occasional levity and flair, but often falls into a repetitive drone of info already shared previously.
What if what we see isn't actually there? What if the things we see, taste, touch, smell, and hear are actually renderings of compressed information that our perceptions create in order to allow us survive as a species? It is not that the spoon doesn't exist; it's that the spoon isn't a spoon when we don't look at it.
What if spacetime isn't part of actuality, but is a perceptual tool, or icon, that we've evolved to navigate us to what we need and away from what we don’t need. Could spacetime be a perceptual tool to keep us alive long enough to reproduce as a species?
But, this isn’t Solipsism because what if there is an objective reality, one ruled by conscious agents that our perceptions don’t actually allow us to see?
Hoffman posits all of these questions and more in his book “The Case Against Reality” through the theory of Conscious Realism. At its core, the book looks at our perceptions as evolutionarily built to show not reality, but a world of fitness payoffs meant to help us survive, or at least live enough to reproduce. It offers an exciting new way to understand our world, and it provides us with references to articles for and against his work, which is a nice way to allow us all to dive into the rabbit hole a little deeper.
I read this book after following Hoffman for quite some time, and it did not disappoint. If you’re into questioning reality and wondering who and what we are, this is a must read. 5/5.
Remember, the spoon as we know it may not be there, but it is still to be taken seriously.
What if spacetime isn't part of actuality, but is a perceptual tool, or icon, that we've evolved to navigate us to what we need and away from what we don’t need. Could spacetime be a perceptual tool to keep us alive long enough to reproduce as a species?
But, this isn’t Solipsism because what if there is an objective reality, one ruled by conscious agents that our perceptions don’t actually allow us to see?
Hoffman posits all of these questions and more in his book “The Case Against Reality” through the theory of Conscious Realism. At its core, the book looks at our perceptions as evolutionarily built to show not reality, but a world of fitness payoffs meant to help us survive, or at least live enough to reproduce. It offers an exciting new way to understand our world, and it provides us with references to articles for and against his work, which is a nice way to allow us all to dive into the rabbit hole a little deeper.
I read this book after following Hoffman for quite some time, and it did not disappoint. If you’re into questioning reality and wondering who and what we are, this is a must read. 5/5.
Remember, the spoon as we know it may not be there, but it is still to be taken seriously.
I'm abandoning this book halfway because it's repetitive, tedious and somewhat obvious. Other reviews also have problems with the quantum section, so will just skip.
It takes a relatively whopping amount, 200 pages, for one to say that the world we see is the world we've evolved to see in order to survive, and that everything is a functional node in a probabilistic system...
Or maybe I just got it wrong.
But, as far as I could see it, Hoffman tried his best to sell this book as revolutionary, as a "different way of thinking about reality!", and it simply isn't the case.
Or maybe I just got it wrong.
But, as far as I could see it, Hoffman tried his best to sell this book as revolutionary, as a "different way of thinking about reality!", and it simply isn't the case.
I didn’t enjoy this as much as I had hoped I would. Some interesting theory here, but I don’t think I’m buying it.
Objective reality exists, Hoffman denies it but never really creates a convincing argument.
Objective reality exists, Hoffman denies it but never really creates a convincing argument.
Too much in this book is presented with conclusions that don't have the mechanism of evidence adequately explained. Just declaring that something is proven, and even giving the citation for it, sites not mean that the reader gets the benefit of understanding WHY the particular conclusion is definitive. Also, I find the analogies to be fault. Saying that a necker cube illusion provides a cube that is neither facing towards bit away from the viewer, but that perception makes it so, does not extend to the moon either existing or not depending on whether it is being observed. Likewise, I am right on board with the comments relating the computer icon being different from the file and the file that we interact with being different from the computer code which is reduced to electrical activity (I extended the description there). However, that analogy has limits and does not necessarily extend to the bottom that the moon is not real.
The argument that a spoon is "something"when not observed, and the observer makes it a spoon makes sense in understanding a way of perceiving and labeling objects, but then this is used to go further into questioning what the material, shape, and location of the soon may be off not observed.
I also find the same point being reiterated without moving forward.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this book gets bigger down in it's own thrill over solipsistic reality.
The argument that a spoon is "something"when not observed, and the observer makes it a spoon makes sense in understanding a way of perceiving and labeling objects, but then this is used to go further into questioning what the material, shape, and location of the soon may be off not observed.
I also find the same point being reiterated without moving forward.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this book gets bigger down in it's own thrill over solipsistic reality.
Dressed up with cognitive and evolutionary science but essentially makes the same point Kant did in the 18th century. We don't see things for what they are but instead by what we are. Our cognitive apparatus developed through natural selection shapes our perception of reality which is likely very different from the pictures in our heads. Very much a point reiterated since the days of the empiricists if not Plato.