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

by Donald D. Hoffman

In like manner, I reify rocks, stars, and other icons in my interface, and pronounce them preexisting physical objects. I then reify the very format of my interface and fancy it to be a preexisting spacetime. This claim of ITP seems to agree with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.4 Exegesis of Kant is notoriously controversial, but one interpretation has him claim that rocks and stars are not mind-independent. They exist entirely in our perceptions. Some philosophers find Kant’s claim troubling. Barry Stroud, for instance, says, “What we thought was an independent world would turn out on this view not to be fully independent after all. It is difficult, to say the least, to understand a way in which that could be true.”5 To understand a way in which that could be true, we simply need to understand evolution by natural selection. According to the FBT Theorem, if selection shapes perceptions, then perceptions guide useful behaviors rather than report objective truths about an independent world. Something exists independent of us, but that something doesn’t match our perceptions. This feels difficult to understand because of our penchant to reify our interface.