The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

by Donald D. Hoffman

That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring.

Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.

Perhaps the universe itself is a massive social network of conscious agents that experience, decide, and act. If so, consciousness does not arise from matter; this is a big claim that we will explore in detail. Instead, matter and spacetime arise from consciousness—as a perceptual interface.

If you can accept that the technology of virtual reality will one day create for you a compelling experience that is nothing like your experience when you take off the headset, then why be so certain that, when you remove the headset, you’re seeing reality as it is? The purpose of this book is to help you take off the next headset, the one you didn’t know you were wearing all along.

Or perhaps we were short-changed by evolution, and lack the concepts needed to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness. Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness?

What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.

‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?’ I replied: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’ ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?’

We discarded a flat earth and a geocentric universe. We realized that we had misread our perceptions, and we corrected our errors. It wasn’t easy. In the process, mundane intuitions and Church doctrines were shattered. But these corrections were mere warm-ups. Now we must jettison spacetime itself, and everything in it.