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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
By far, my favorite movie when I was a young boy was 'The Matrix'. Only in my later years I've found interest in unraveling the philosophical and symbolical nature of the 1999 masterpiece. With that in mind, I must admit to having a slight bias in my excitement for ideas that question the nature of our reality.
In this book Hoffman postulates the theory of Conscious Realism. In his theory, consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, while space-time is merely a (useful) illusion constructed by our brains which were shaped by millions of years of evolution for fitness. He argues, that what we perceive through our senses is not an objective reality, but merely an interface which helps us navigate in this reality. He employs multiple metaphors and gives different examples of phenomena seen through the lens of Conscious Realism. Throughout the book Hoffman addresses and refutes common critiques of Conscious Realism, while staying humble before the long road ahead this theory has to go before any kind of hope for adoption in the larger scientific community.
This book is a pleasant mish-mash of philosophy, quantum physics, evolutionary biology and psychology. I found it to be relatively accessible for a layman who has only recently begun to explore these topics. I felt some parts were a bit dense, but that was more to due to my own lack of insight into the more theoretical aspects of aforementioned areas. Towards the end of the book Hoffman makes a interesting point in envisioning a symbiotic relationship between science and spirituality, with perhaps Conscious Realism being the adhesive that will allow these two historically polarized areas to finally come to terms with each other. Whether it will be Hoffman's theory or some other catalyst, I do feel there is a lot of value to be gained in a synthesis of science and spirituality for us a species.
I look forward to re-reading this book once I have expanded my understanding of the underlying areas related to Conscious Realism.
In this book Hoffman postulates the theory of Conscious Realism. In his theory, consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, while space-time is merely a (useful) illusion constructed by our brains which were shaped by millions of years of evolution for fitness. He argues, that what we perceive through our senses is not an objective reality, but merely an interface which helps us navigate in this reality. He employs multiple metaphors and gives different examples of phenomena seen through the lens of Conscious Realism. Throughout the book Hoffman addresses and refutes common critiques of Conscious Realism, while staying humble before the long road ahead this theory has to go before any kind of hope for adoption in the larger scientific community.
This book is a pleasant mish-mash of philosophy, quantum physics, evolutionary biology and psychology. I found it to be relatively accessible for a layman who has only recently begun to explore these topics. I felt some parts were a bit dense, but that was more to due to my own lack of insight into the more theoretical aspects of aforementioned areas. Towards the end of the book Hoffman makes a interesting point in envisioning a symbiotic relationship between science and spirituality, with perhaps Conscious Realism being the adhesive that will allow these two historically polarized areas to finally come to terms with each other. Whether it will be Hoffman's theory or some other catalyst, I do feel there is a lot of value to be gained in a synthesis of science and spirituality for us a species.
I look forward to re-reading this book once I have expanded my understanding of the underlying areas related to Conscious Realism.
Everything is an illusion... a gamut of concepts around neuroscience, philosophy and cognitive science blended with analogies from quantum theory. A momentous work that is a must read for anyone interested in deep blending of metaphysics and physics
There's a lot to like in Donald Hoffman's book. He carefully marshals a number of strands of experimental and mathematical evidence to lend weight to his claim that, ultimately, it is extremely implausible that our experience of reality in any way corresponds to how reality actually is. This is a very bold claim, and I found the thought experiment of thinking this through to be very interesting, even if ultimately I was unconvinced by the core argument.
Hoffman has spent his professional career thinking about this problem, and he's build a very interesting view based upon it. He doesn't deny the existence of a shared "consensual" reality - that you see what looks to you like a chair and a table, and I see the same. Instead, he denies that the chair and table exist in anything like the form we think they exist in - as three dimensional medium-sized objects. Indeed, he denies they exist at all when we're not looking at them. Instead, our perception of them causes them to appear in our "user interface" for the world.
One of his most powerful metaphors is this "interface theory of perception". This says that our experience of reality is rather like the graphical user interface of a computer: the rectangular object on the screen which we click on to open a file isn't, actually, anything at all like the file really is in the computer - where it exists as a series of variations in charge or magnetic field on a solid state or spinning disk, and what looks like a file opening on the desktop is actually the cumulative action of millions of transistor state changes.
To convince us that what we think of as the world really is not at all what we think it is, Hoffman brings in a number of pieces of evidence. He spends a fair amount of time on our visual system. Here he brings together a number of visual illusions to show quite the depth of processing - with a corresponding opportunity for errors - that happens between photons striking our retina, and our perception of a chair, or a colour, or a beautiful person. This is entirely convincing to me: it's clear that a vast amount of detail of what we might perceive is both hidden from us, and also filled in by informed guesswork by various networks in our brain.
Hoffman also points to modern physics, where quantum mechanics really does tell us some apparently strange things are happening out there. Photons from distant galaxies, millions of years in transit to us, apparently have their entire history affected by actions we take now. I feel there are other stories that we might tell about all this - from Everett's multi-world hypothesis on upwards. Hoffman doesn't dwell on these, but instead uses them as another explosion under our foundational belief that the world is what it looks like.
Hoffman also has some mathematics behind all of this. He has a model of consciousness - as a set of Markovian kernels (basically, things that choose amongst outcomes with different probabilities). And he also has what he calls the "Fitness Beats Truth" theorem. In this he pits mathematical creatures which prefer "fitness" against those which prefer "truth". Given such a construction, in the framework of the game theory he uses, it's no wonder that the creatures which prefer fitness tend to out-compete those which prefer truth: he defines fitness as the most important thing in his framework, so of course such creatures win. For me, this doesn't really answer the question of why, in the real world, fitness wouldn't more or less track truth. Isn't a creature which depends on features of the landscape as they actually exist - i.e., a creature for whom fitness broadly corresponds to the state of the world - out-evolve a creature whose fitness was ultimately a fantasy? That's why we haven't all become addicted to the chemicals in the world which give us the most pleasure - because ultimately, fitness needs to track back to useful features of the world, rather than the ecstasy of a drug.
Despite my reservations, I did enjoy the book, and the arguments I had with it. I'd give it three and a half stars, rounded down to three for fighting too many paper tigers, rather than steel-man arguments against his position.
Hoffman has spent his professional career thinking about this problem, and he's build a very interesting view based upon it. He doesn't deny the existence of a shared "consensual" reality - that you see what looks to you like a chair and a table, and I see the same. Instead, he denies that the chair and table exist in anything like the form we think they exist in - as three dimensional medium-sized objects. Indeed, he denies they exist at all when we're not looking at them. Instead, our perception of them causes them to appear in our "user interface" for the world.
One of his most powerful metaphors is this "interface theory of perception". This says that our experience of reality is rather like the graphical user interface of a computer: the rectangular object on the screen which we click on to open a file isn't, actually, anything at all like the file really is in the computer - where it exists as a series of variations in charge or magnetic field on a solid state or spinning disk, and what looks like a file opening on the desktop is actually the cumulative action of millions of transistor state changes.
To convince us that what we think of as the world really is not at all what we think it is, Hoffman brings in a number of pieces of evidence. He spends a fair amount of time on our visual system. Here he brings together a number of visual illusions to show quite the depth of processing - with a corresponding opportunity for errors - that happens between photons striking our retina, and our perception of a chair, or a colour, or a beautiful person. This is entirely convincing to me: it's clear that a vast amount of detail of what we might perceive is both hidden from us, and also filled in by informed guesswork by various networks in our brain.
Hoffman also points to modern physics, where quantum mechanics really does tell us some apparently strange things are happening out there. Photons from distant galaxies, millions of years in transit to us, apparently have their entire history affected by actions we take now. I feel there are other stories that we might tell about all this - from Everett's multi-world hypothesis on upwards. Hoffman doesn't dwell on these, but instead uses them as another explosion under our foundational belief that the world is what it looks like.
Hoffman also has some mathematics behind all of this. He has a model of consciousness - as a set of Markovian kernels (basically, things that choose amongst outcomes with different probabilities). And he also has what he calls the "Fitness Beats Truth" theorem. In this he pits mathematical creatures which prefer "fitness" against those which prefer "truth". Given such a construction, in the framework of the game theory he uses, it's no wonder that the creatures which prefer fitness tend to out-compete those which prefer truth: he defines fitness as the most important thing in his framework, so of course such creatures win. For me, this doesn't really answer the question of why, in the real world, fitness wouldn't more or less track truth. Isn't a creature which depends on features of the landscape as they actually exist - i.e., a creature for whom fitness broadly corresponds to the state of the world - out-evolve a creature whose fitness was ultimately a fantasy? That's why we haven't all become addicted to the chemicals in the world which give us the most pleasure - because ultimately, fitness needs to track back to useful features of the world, rather than the ecstasy of a drug.
Despite my reservations, I did enjoy the book, and the arguments I had with it. I'd give it three and a half stars, rounded down to three for fighting too many paper tigers, rather than steel-man arguments against his position.
What the hell did I just read!??
This is a real brain-bender. Is this book about the psychology of perception? The philosophy of consciousness? Ontology? Evolution? Quantum physics and the nature of spacetime? A synthesis of science and religion?
It's all of those, I think. Hoffman's thesis -- one of them, at any rate -- is that what we perceive does not necessarily represent objective reality, whatever that is. His running metaphor is that the objects and so on that we perceive are like the icons on a computer desktop. Think of the icon for a spreadsheet file. In what way does that icon faithfully represent what that file actually is? Pretty poorly! You might say the actual, true file is a long sequence of 1's and 0's. But those bits are stored in your computer's drive -- a spinning hard drive, or these days probably a solid-state drive. In either case, the bits ultimately are either tiny magnetically oriented chunks or blobs of electrons.
You might say you want to accurately perceive the world. But would you want to accurately perceive the budget for your grant proposal as a stunningly complex pattern of magnetic chunks or collections of electrons trapped in microscopic devices? Certainly not. It is much more useful to you in your everyday life to perceive the spreadsheet as a tabular collection of text and numbers and formulas.
Evolution, Hoffman says, works similarly, and since accurately perceiving the objective nature of the world (in the sense of what is actually stored for my spreadsheet, and so on) doesn't lead to reproductive success, natural selection has yielded organisms whose perception works more at the level of "this is the budget for our grant proposal" and not "this is a complex pattern of thousands of blobs of electrons".
(Coincidentally, I am right now taking an operating systems course and reading [b:Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces|17374825|Operating Systems Three Easy Pieces|Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360887934l/17374825._SY75_.jpg|24163446] and this very week we are learning about persistent storage with hard drives and SSDs...!)
This is a real brain-bender. Is this book about the psychology of perception? The philosophy of consciousness? Ontology? Evolution? Quantum physics and the nature of spacetime? A synthesis of science and religion?
It's all of those, I think. Hoffman's thesis -- one of them, at any rate -- is that what we perceive does not necessarily represent objective reality, whatever that is. His running metaphor is that the objects and so on that we perceive are like the icons on a computer desktop. Think of the icon for a spreadsheet file. In what way does that icon faithfully represent what that file actually is? Pretty poorly! You might say the actual, true file is a long sequence of 1's and 0's. But those bits are stored in your computer's drive -- a spinning hard drive, or these days probably a solid-state drive. In either case, the bits ultimately are either tiny magnetically oriented chunks or blobs of electrons.
You might say you want to accurately perceive the world. But would you want to accurately perceive the budget for your grant proposal as a stunningly complex pattern of magnetic chunks or collections of electrons trapped in microscopic devices? Certainly not. It is much more useful to you in your everyday life to perceive the spreadsheet as a tabular collection of text and numbers and formulas.
Evolution, Hoffman says, works similarly, and since accurately perceiving the objective nature of the world (in the sense of what is actually stored for my spreadsheet, and so on) doesn't lead to reproductive success, natural selection has yielded organisms whose perception works more at the level of "this is the budget for our grant proposal" and not "this is a complex pattern of thousands of blobs of electrons".
(Coincidentally, I am right now taking an operating systems course and reading [b:Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces|17374825|Operating Systems Three Easy Pieces|Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1360887934l/17374825._SY75_.jpg|24163446] and this very week we are learning about persistent storage with hard drives and SSDs...!)
I find this a difficult book to rate. While beginning reading it, I found its main thesis vague and a bit obvious even. Reality is not what we see, does not everyone with a basic scientific education knows this? At small scales, it is all molecules, atoms and quantum processes while time-space behaves counter-intuitively at galactic scales. We, poor creatures, evolved at the medium size, are not naturally equipped to handle these realities. It is thus evident that what we see is not what there is. For example, everyone would agree that the scent of menthol is something constructed in our minds, not a fundamental property of the molecule.
Hoffman's statement, however, is stronger than merely arguing that there is a mismatch between our senses and the world. According to him, there is no objective reality. There is no moon if you are not looking. Much of the book's argumentation is based on discussing optical illusions and other quirks of our vision system, which feels at times not very convincing.
I had to give it a bit of thought to rate this book. The main point of this book feels at times both self-evident as well as bizarre. However, I did actually enjoy reading it, and many of the ideas and examples were quite impressive. Especially in the last chapter, where Hoffman introduces the Conscious Agent Thesis, which would, in theory, lay a mathematical foundation for consciousness is very interesting.
Hoffman's statement, however, is stronger than merely arguing that there is a mismatch between our senses and the world. According to him, there is no objective reality. There is no moon if you are not looking. Much of the book's argumentation is based on discussing optical illusions and other quirks of our vision system, which feels at times not very convincing.
I had to give it a bit of thought to rate this book. The main point of this book feels at times both self-evident as well as bizarre. However, I did actually enjoy reading it, and many of the ideas and examples were quite impressive. Especially in the last chapter, where Hoffman introduces the Conscious Agent Thesis, which would, in theory, lay a mathematical foundation for consciousness is very interesting.
Dnf. Shame, the premise is great, and I agree with it. The problem is that the premise is simple, though unintuitive (that there is no reason to assume that we would naturally evolve to see the world as it is, that logic is a tool for monkeys looking for sex and food and not necessarily fitting for math and discovery) but in the end the book is without substance without it, it being an unprovable idea (without inventing an alternative to our pre-installed logic, you cannot discuss the faults of logic, as you’ll use the same ideas you’re trying to ditch). He grasps at straws with the Holographic Principal, and returns to the same analogies again and again. Also, terrible *terrible* pop-culture references, this is embarrassing to read at times.
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I am giving it two stars because I am no longer a child. Otherwise this is among the worst books I have read in a long time. Yes, it is meant for Deep Physic Enthusiasts and no I did not know so. Yet it is difficult, cumbersome and overall unyielding to read. I am not giving 1 star because of the 11 chapters, only the 2nd chapter was truly amazing.
PS - I heard most of this on audiobook. Not easy to listen and follow. Too many examples, diagrams - reminded me of studying.
PS - I heard most of this on audiobook. Not easy to listen and follow. Too many examples, diagrams - reminded me of studying.
challenging
informative