A review by cphenly
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman

1.0

I found this book to be quite tiresome. It isn't really about science; it's a philosophical argument that tries to extrapolate from the fact that our physical mechanisms for perception evolved on the basis of "perceive that which helps us to survive" the idea (which the author presents as another fact) that the reality we perceive therefore does not exist when no one is looking. The tomato, he repeatedly argues, ceases to exist when we stop looking at it. This is not a Shroedinger's cat argument; he applies it to physical reality. While I can, and do, buy the argument that our perceptions function as an interface to translate external reality into that which we are capable of perceiving, I do not buy, as an inevitable consequence, the idea that our perceptions therefore have nothing whatever to do with reality. If our perceptions have evolved to help us survive, there must be some relationship between what we perceive and reality, otherwise those perceptions would not be functional and we would not survive. Along the way, he accepts the idea that "people used to think the earth was flat," a belief he ascribes to the Pre-Socratic world. In fact, the fact of the earth's roundness was documented a century before Socrates was born, and so far as I know (and the author does not bother documenting), there are no scholarly records to suggest that people believed the earth was flat. This is an assumption. Since the author is trying to argue that we cannot base anything on unsubstantiated assumptions, his assumptions are problematic. His claims are necessarily riddled with assumptions: another is his claim that human bodies are made up almost entirely out of six of the elements. However: since he is arguing that we are incapable of perceiving reality, then he must be arguing that the elements are constructs that cease to exist when we are not looking at them, and, therefore, we only THINK that our bodies are made up of elements, since elements do not exist independent of us. The whole thing is a tiresome refutation of the usefulness of all of science to this point and the usefulness of language.