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96 reviews for:
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
Donald D. Hoffman
3.72 AVERAGE
96 reviews for:
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
Donald D. Hoffman
3.72 AVERAGE
OK, the idea is nuts, but Hoffman's not a troll. I'm convinced of that. He believes he has proven that Fitness-Beats-Perception (FBT) and that therefore what we see is not reality, but an interface to something that works well for us.
Hold up. Look, I understand that pain doesn't exist "out there." If I touch a hot stove, the stove does not transfer pain into my hand, but heat energy. My consciousness turns it into pain. So pain is only in my consciousness. Trippy, right?
Further, I understand that even color is not a property of reality. Light wavelengths are, but color is just a thing that is painted in our Cartesian theater space in our head that doesn't exist but still kind of does. Yellow, for instance, is entirely a creation in our consciousness because our eyes report some sorta reddish some sorta greenish thing.
Fine. Here's where it goes off the rails, though.
I realize I'm about to be some rando taking on an MIT-educated, extensively published and respected scientist, but science don't care who says it. Probably I'm an idiot, but:
He says that if there are two states of a thing, reporting true or false, for instance (like a rod in your eye reporting: is there light Y/N?), the odds of it being right are 1 in 2. Well, he doesn't explicitly say that, but he does say that the odds of 10 of them all being right is 1 in 1000, which is suspiciously close to .5 to the 10th power. He then confidently goes on to provide the number of rods and cones in our eyes and say the odds they are reporting reality is 1 in some ungodly large number.
No. That's only true if the odds of each being right is .5 (why?), AND those events are all independent. They're clearly not. In fact, the more of them there are, the more likely you're going to learn something about the truth because they're related and redundant. Your brain works with the various reports to reduce the signal (which he acknowledges later in the book), to go with the collective hunch.
To put it in simple terms, if you have 1001 people watching a coin flip, and 1000 report seeing 'heads,' and 1 reports seeing 'tails,' which result are you going to believe?
Then he presents the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) theorem, which he says was proved by one of his proteges. It was published in 2018, and I intend to see if I can get to it to read it, but I haven't yet. But I don't know what I hope to learn - it's a construct - a computer simulation, that shows the fitter something is the more likely it is to survive. Well, duh.
But he hasn't shown at all that fitness isn't close to reality, or that perceiving reality isn't a big way of getting fitness. Fitness is, I'll allow and he points out, a tradeoff between evolution pouring resources into something and the payoff. Things that take a lot of resources better pay off (big brain? better use it or something that's dumb and can live on a horrible diet of dead grass will out-compete you next drought. Hollow bones? Better be for something that really pays off like flying or your solid boned competitors will crush you). Still, there is a good payoff to knowing reality, if reality exists. He sees fitness and reality as different, independent things.
And he ties what he contends to physics. Here it's interesting. There are problems in physics. Some physicists have said "spacetime is doomed" but what they mean is not that we aren't really in a reality!
Anyway, the hypothesis he finally gets to - SPOILER! - no wait, it's in the title - is that nothing we perceive is real. Consciousness is real, and it creates everything we think exists. The moon doesn't exist if nobody is looking at it. The past didn't exist until there was a consciousness to perceive it. That's how he mostly gets past the age-old problem of how consciousness can arise from these non-conscious pieces - various molecules and energy.
Well, sorta. It still leaves us with the question, "what the hell is consciousness then!?"
And even though he got to the place he gets to through a bunch of what I think are wrong turns and magic, he might be on to something. Consciousness is a huge mystery. Maybe even though it's not proven, the hypothesis is worthwhile. Maybe he's left us in a huge void that has nothing yet, but at least has us asking (maybe) the right questions.
Hold up. Look, I understand that pain doesn't exist "out there." If I touch a hot stove, the stove does not transfer pain into my hand, but heat energy. My consciousness turns it into pain. So pain is only in my consciousness. Trippy, right?
Further, I understand that even color is not a property of reality. Light wavelengths are, but color is just a thing that is painted in our Cartesian theater space in our head that doesn't exist but still kind of does. Yellow, for instance, is entirely a creation in our consciousness because our eyes report some sorta reddish some sorta greenish thing.
Fine. Here's where it goes off the rails, though.
I realize I'm about to be some rando taking on an MIT-educated, extensively published and respected scientist, but science don't care who says it. Probably I'm an idiot, but:
He says that if there are two states of a thing, reporting true or false, for instance (like a rod in your eye reporting: is there light Y/N?), the odds of it being right are 1 in 2. Well, he doesn't explicitly say that, but he does say that the odds of 10 of them all being right is 1 in 1000, which is suspiciously close to .5 to the 10th power. He then confidently goes on to provide the number of rods and cones in our eyes and say the odds they are reporting reality is 1 in some ungodly large number.
No. That's only true if the odds of each being right is .5 (why?), AND those events are all independent. They're clearly not. In fact, the more of them there are, the more likely you're going to learn something about the truth because they're related and redundant. Your brain works with the various reports to reduce the signal (which he acknowledges later in the book), to go with the collective hunch.
To put it in simple terms, if you have 1001 people watching a coin flip, and 1000 report seeing 'heads,' and 1 reports seeing 'tails,' which result are you going to believe?
Then he presents the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) theorem, which he says was proved by one of his proteges. It was published in 2018, and I intend to see if I can get to it to read it, but I haven't yet. But I don't know what I hope to learn - it's a construct - a computer simulation, that shows the fitter something is the more likely it is to survive. Well, duh.
But he hasn't shown at all that fitness isn't close to reality, or that perceiving reality isn't a big way of getting fitness. Fitness is, I'll allow and he points out, a tradeoff between evolution pouring resources into something and the payoff. Things that take a lot of resources better pay off (big brain? better use it or something that's dumb and can live on a horrible diet of dead grass will out-compete you next drought. Hollow bones? Better be for something that really pays off like flying or your solid boned competitors will crush you). Still, there is a good payoff to knowing reality, if reality exists. He sees fitness and reality as different, independent things.
And he ties what he contends to physics. Here it's interesting. There are problems in physics. Some physicists have said "spacetime is doomed" but what they mean is not that we aren't really in a reality!
Anyway, the hypothesis he finally gets to - SPOILER! - no wait, it's in the title - is that nothing we perceive is real. Consciousness is real, and it creates everything we think exists. The moon doesn't exist if nobody is looking at it. The past didn't exist until there was a consciousness to perceive it. That's how he mostly gets past the age-old problem of how consciousness can arise from these non-conscious pieces - various molecules and energy.
Well, sorta. It still leaves us with the question, "what the hell is consciousness then!?"
And even though he got to the place he gets to through a bunch of what I think are wrong turns and magic, he might be on to something. Consciousness is a huge mystery. Maybe even though it's not proven, the hypothesis is worthwhile. Maybe he's left us in a huge void that has nothing yet, but at least has us asking (maybe) the right questions.
This absolutely fascinating book changed the way I look at the world. It posits theories that assert that the world is not at all what we think it is. It suggests that every experience we have is like a set of icons on a computer screen, simplifying what’s really happening underneath. Hoffman writes that nothing we sense is real, and goes about proving it in a variety of mind-boggling ways.
According to the theory, as we evolved, the way we perceived our unseen and infinitely complex existence has become a simplified interface because the true nature of our existence is too calorically expensive.
All our perceptions and actions have one goal: “fitness payoffs,” which increase the chances of survival of our DNA. Treading the familiar path of Darwinism, this assures that humans most capable of surviving to reproductive age will be most likely to pass along those traits to the next generation.
The most astonishing claim in The Case Against Reality: Space and time do not actually exist, but serve as a user-friendly canvas on which our efforts to obtain fitness payoffs play themselves out. Being a life-long space-and-time dweller, that concept alone stretches my comprehension to its boundaries and beyond.
These ideas are currently turning the world of physics upside down, perhaps changing everything as we know it in the realm of quantum physics and the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness, as well as the Theory of Everything.
I’m eager to see what becomes of this theory and if the truth of our existence emerges from it. In the meantime, this will require a lot of thought, something I greatly value when reading mind-bending books like this. If you're up for a wild ride, The Case Against Reality is the book for you. Whew!
According to the theory, as we evolved, the way we perceived our unseen and infinitely complex existence has become a simplified interface because the true nature of our existence is too calorically expensive.
All our perceptions and actions have one goal: “fitness payoffs,” which increase the chances of survival of our DNA. Treading the familiar path of Darwinism, this assures that humans most capable of surviving to reproductive age will be most likely to pass along those traits to the next generation.
The most astonishing claim in The Case Against Reality: Space and time do not actually exist, but serve as a user-friendly canvas on which our efforts to obtain fitness payoffs play themselves out. Being a life-long space-and-time dweller, that concept alone stretches my comprehension to its boundaries and beyond.
These ideas are currently turning the world of physics upside down, perhaps changing everything as we know it in the realm of quantum physics and the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness, as well as the Theory of Everything.
I’m eager to see what becomes of this theory and if the truth of our existence emerges from it. In the meantime, this will require a lot of thought, something I greatly value when reading mind-bending books like this. If you're up for a wild ride, The Case Against Reality is the book for you. Whew!
annoyingly compelling. give it a smash if you're not too cool for existential crises.
Really poor. Rhetorically irritating, and, I suspect, dangerously philosophically illiterate. I've been told many times to avoid evolutionary psychology and I suspect now I know why: sweeping, strikingly socio-politically conservative theses are subjected to very brief, very partial experimentation and then treated as proven. It's clear almost from the outset that the same will be true of Hoffman's overarching thesis, and other reviews seem to confirm this.
Este es un libro increíble que argumenta que la realidad no es de la forma en que la percibimos, y lo hace desde la teoría evolutiva, la mecánica cuántica y con nuestra experiencia cotidiana. Es la primera vez que escucho una teoría sólida de por qué el espacio-tiempo es una noción anticuada y la consciencia debe tomar su lugar como la base de nuestras teorías.
La única razón por la que no le doy cinco estrellas es porque es muy repetitivo a ratos y aunque algunas personas puedan beneficiarse de la cantidad de ejemplos que el autor da, yo los encontré tediosos y no aportaban mucho después del primero. Así, como libro puede llegar a ser pesado y hasta mal escrito. Su valor no está ahí, y alentaría a cualquier persona que esté interesada en el tema a que lo lea. Vale la pena.
La única razón por la que no le doy cinco estrellas es porque es muy repetitivo a ratos y aunque algunas personas puedan beneficiarse de la cantidad de ejemplos que el autor da, yo los encontré tediosos y no aportaban mucho después del primero. Así, como libro puede llegar a ser pesado y hasta mal escrito. Su valor no está ahí, y alentaría a cualquier persona que esté interesada en el tema a que lo lea. Vale la pena.
A good thought provoking book arguing that what we see is an interface (like a desktop) rather than the true nature of reality. I felt that this book was more philosophical rather than scientific but it still was an interesting read.
Interesting and was quite convinced while I read it. It was kind of repetitive at some point coming back to the main thesis in a very annoying way all the time. The early chapter on personal attraction kinda made me suspicious because of all the evo psych bullshit that exists but was alright. After having thought about it for a while now though I'm not very convinced. It puts this heavy emphasis on evolution and while I can kind of go along with the general thesis on our perception being based on fitness I have the feeling that the conclusions it draws on what that means for us as a species would need more evidence (see my thoughts on evo psych).