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

by Donald D. Hoffman

That revolutionized view leaves in its wake an evolutionary biology that is itself transformed. Still recognizable, after the bath in Darwin’s acid, are the landmarks of universal Darwinism: variation, selection, and heredity. But gone from objective reality are physical objects in spacetime, including those central to biology: DNA, RNA, chromosomes, organisms, and resources. This doesn’t entail solipsism. Something is there in objective reality, and we humans experience its import for our fitness in terms of DNA, RNA, chromosomes, organisms, and resources. But the FBT Theorem tells us that, whatever that something is, it is almost surely not DNA, RNA, chromosomes, organisms, or resources. It tells us that there is good reason to believe that the things that we perceive, such as DNA and RNA, don’t exist independent of our minds. The reason is that the structures of fitness payoffs, which shape what we perceive, differ from the structures of objective reality with high probability. Again, this is no support for solipsism: there is an objective reality. But that reality is utterly unlike our perceptions of objects in space and time.