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

by Donald D. Hoffman

the purpose of an interface is to hide the “truth” and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks

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.

natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.

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.

“Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.”

FBT THEOREM: Fitness drives Truth to extinction with probability at least (N–3)/(N–1).

each perceptual system is a user interface,

This interface is shaped by natural selection; it can vary from species to species, and even from creature to creature within a species. I call this the interface theory of perception (ITP).

ITP claims that evolution shaped our senses to be a user interface, tailored to the needs of our species. Our interface hides objective reality and guides adaptive behavior in our niche.

Our perceptions of space, time, and objects were shaped by natural selection not to be veridical—not to reveal or reconstruct objective reality—but to let us live long enough to raise offspring.

courtesy of evolution: an illusion is a perception that fails to guide adaptive behavior. It’s that simple. Evolution shapes our perceptions to guide adaptive behavior, not to see truth. So illusions are failures to guide adaptive behavior, not failures to see truth.

If our senses were shaped by natural selection, then the FBT Theorem tells us we don’t see reality as it is. ITP tells us that our perceptions constitute an interface, specific to our species. It hides reality and helps us raise kids. Spacetime is the desktop of this interface and physical objects are among its icons. ITP makes bold and testable predictions. It predicts that spoons and stars—all objects in space and time—do not exist when unperceived or unobserved. Something exists when I see a spoon, and that something, whatever it is, triggers my perceptual system to create a spoon and to endow it with a position, a shape, a motion, and other physical properties. But when I look away, I no longer create that spoon and it ceases to exist, along with its physical properties.

There is a world that exists even if I don’t look: solipsism is false. But my perceptions, like observations in quantum theory, don’t disclose that world. They counsel me—imperfectly, but well enough—how to act to be fit.

Quantum theory and evolutionary biology, so interpreted, together weave a remarkably consistent story. Quantum theory explains that measurements reveal no objective truths, just consequences for agents of their actions. Evolution tells us why—natural selection shapes the senses to reveal fitness consequences for agents of their actions. We are surprised that measurement and perception are so personal. We expected them to report objective and impersonal truths, albeit fallibly and in part. But when two pillars of science side with each other, and against our intuition, it’s time to reconsider our intuition.

spacetime and its objects are not fundamental. Instead he proposed the doctrine of “It from bit”: information, not matter, is fundamental; the “its” of matter arise from bits of information.

the amount of information you can cram into a region of space is proportional to the area of the surface surrounding that space.32 That’s right, the area, not the volume.

the Planck length.33 It’s tiny—about as tiny compared to a proton as the United States is to the entire visible universe.

the holographic principle—the momentous discovery, discussed in chapter six, that the amount of data you can store in a region of space depends on the area surrounding that region, not on its volume.

There is much to explore about spacetime and objects as compressed encodings of fitness payoffs. For instance, what aspect of fitness is captured by space, and what by objects? How do shapes, colors, textures, and motions arise in the compression of fitness? Why does the compression of fitness lead us to have perceptions that are formatted in different modalities—vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch? Perhaps distances in space encode costs of acquiring resources: an apple that costs few calories to acquire may appear just a meter away, while an apple that costs far more calories may appear much further away. A predator may appear more distant the more calories it must expend to get me. Recent experiments support this idea.

Fig. 10: The “perceive-decide-act” (PDA) loop. Natural selection shapes this loop so that experiences guide actions that enhance fitness. © DONALD HOFFMAN The PDA loop is shaped by an essential feature of evolution—the fitness-payoff functions. The fitness of an action depends on the state of the world, but also on the organism (the agent) and its state. Each time an agent acts on the world, it changes the state of the world, and reaps a fitness reward (or punishment). Only an agent that acts in ways that reap enough fitness rewards will survive and reproduce. Natural selection favors agents with PDA loops properly tuned to fitness. For such an agent, its “perceive” arrow sends it messages about fitness, and its experiences represent these messages about fitness. The messages and experiences are all about fitness, not about the state of the world. The experiences of the agent become an interface—not perfect, but good enough. It guides actions that glean enough fitness points to survive long enough to rear offspring.

Should be PDC perceive decide change or influence or effect

Experiences and actions are not free. The larger your repertoire, the more calories you need, so there are selection pressures to keep these repertoires small. But if your repertoires are too small, you may lack essential data about fitness or critical actions that could enhance fitness. Different agents evolve different solutions, different ways to balance the competing forces of selection. Humans probably have a larger repertoire of experiences than beetles; bears have a larger repertoire of olfactory experiences than humans. There is no consummate solution—just workable schemes that let agents survive in available niches.

in all solutions, the repertoire of experiences and actions is small compared to the complexity of the relevant fitness payoffs. All messages about fitness that an agent perceives must compress information about fitness into a manageable size and useful format, without losing critical information.

Spacetime is not an objective reality independent of any observer. It is an interface shaped by natural selection to convey messages about fitness. In the visual example of the cube we see this spacetime interface in action, complete with error correction, superposition, entanglement, and holographic inflation.

There is no objective spacetime and no preexisting objects in spacetime whose true properties we try to recover. Instead, spacetime and objects are simply a coding system for messages about fitness.

In short, we do not recover the true shape in three dimensions of a preexisting object—there are no such objects. Instead, we recover a message about fitness that happens to use shapes in three dimensions as a coding language.

Our senses forage for fitness, not truth. They dispatch news about fitness payoffs: how to find them, get them, and keep them.

The implications for marketing are clear. A simple icon, crafted to exploit the visual codes wired by natural selection into the visual systems of consumers, can grab attention with supernormal power. Such an icon can be subtle and thus difficult for a competitor to reverse-engineer, and yet highly effective. For icons used in branding, emotional import is also critical. The goal is not just to grab attention, but to grab the right kind. This typically requires an icon that associates with the brand a specific, positive feeling—say, prestigious and wealthy, or rugged and healthy. An icon that brandishes fangs will grab attention, but—apart from ads for vampire movies and Halloween costumes—attention of the wrong kind. A well-crafted icon can exaggerate, judiciously, visual features that draw attention and trigger a desired feeling.

Memory and perception don’t deal in objective truths. Both deal in fitness, the only coin of the evolutionary realm.

Our eyes are reporters on the fitness beat, searching for a scoop, looking for intelligence about fitness that is worth decoding. A message, once decoded, typically appears in a standard format. We see the decoded message as an object in space, whose category, shape, location, and orientation inform us how to act to glean the fitness points we need. We gumshoe for fitness on the cheap, attending to just a fraction of the leads on offer. Exogenous cues can grab our attention: depth, flicker, and movement; contrasts in size, color, brightness, or orientation. Endogenous goals can alter the salience of exogenous cues. Looking for a pear makes its distinctive green more salient. We constantly scan for anything animate. We may also scan for high-calorie foods. This repertoire of strategies in our search for fitness payoffs makes the process of searching itself more fit. But we have another technique in our repertoire: scripted attention.

This is an example of scripted attention: we use our knowledge of our current context to constrain how we forage for fitness, allowing us to forage with greater speed and precision. In the context of viewing a person, our script leads us to attend where the person’s face and body appear to be focused.

Our script for people directs us to follow their gaze. But it does more. It directs us to look at hands. What is that hand up to? Where is it pointing? What is it holding? A weapon? Food? The hand of another person can, in an instant, alter your fitness for better or worse. Attending to hands is itself a fit strategy.

Conscious realism claims that consciousness is the fundamental nature of objective reality.

To say that consciousness is fundamental is not to say that human consciousness is fundamental or distinctive.

Objects, shapes, space, and time reside in consciousness. If the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated.