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A review by ddrake
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman
5.0
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...!)