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

by Donald D. Hoffman

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What to do? How can you disrupt her search for a blue bottle and focus her invaluable attention on your orange bottles? You could trigger her animate-monitoring system. One way would be to stamp, say, a cat or a deer, on your bottles. This could work. But it’s far from subtle, and once the competition caught on, they could slap some animal on their bottles, and erase your competitive edge.

Suppose, for instance, you want an icon of an eye that grabs attention and feels attractive. Recall, from chapter two, that a female eye looks more attractive if it features a large iris, a dilated pupil, a bluish sclera, conspicuous highlights, and a prominent limbal ring. There are surely other critical features of an attractive eye not yet discovered. The challenge for a marketing team is to create an icon—perhaps a stylized eye, or something more abstract—that captures such features with supernormal effect. At present, given the limits of our scientific knowledge, this challenge may best be achieved through the intuitions and talent of a graphic designer. But a corporation that conducts experiments, guided by evolutionary theory, to learn how to hack the visual code of Homo sapiens for the attractiveness of eyes, could exploit its knowledge to create icons that manipulate this code to powerful effect.

In the jeans ad, the body, face, and eyes of the model all aimed one direction—away from the logo, and into empty space. The model turned his back on his own ad. His body, from head to toe, told the shopper a clear message: forget this product—there’s something of greater interest over there, on the left. If, by chance, on the left there was an ad for the jeans of a competitor, then the model would unwittingly tell shoppers that the competitor’s jeans deserve more attention than his own. This is not the best use of marketing dollars.

I love my cat and enjoy my car. But I don’t believe they exist if unperceived. Something exists. Whatever that something is, it triggers my senses to acquire a coded message about fitness in an idiom of cats, cars, and burgers—the parlance of my interface. That vernacular is simply inappropriate to describe objective reality.

I love the sun and don’t want to part with my neurons. But I don’t believe the sun existed before there were creatures to perceive it, or that my neurons exist if unperceived. Stars and neurons are just icons in the spacetime desktop of my perceptual interface.

If our senses were shaped by natural selection then our perceptions do not portray true properties of objective reality, any more than the magnifying-glass icon in my photo-editing app portrays the true shape and location of a real magnifying glass inside my computer. When I click on that icon my photo enlarges. If I ponder why it enlarges, I may conclude that the icon is the cause. I would be wrong. My mistake is a harmless and even useful fiction, as long as I just edit photos. But if I want to build my own app, then this fiction is no longer harmless. I need to understand a deeper level of cause and effect within the computer that is hidden by its interface. Similarly, for most research and medical applications it is a harmless and even useful fiction to think that neurons have causal powers—that neural activity causes my thoughts, actions, and other neural activity. But if I want to understand the ...

For most science and technology, this fictional cause and effect is handy—it helps us understand and exploit our interface. But if we try to understand our own conscious experiences, then this fiction gets in the way. Its lure, wired by evolution into even the best and brightest minds, poses the single greatest impediment to our progress.

This fiction is built into each theory of consciousness that assumes, in accord with the Astonishing Hypothesis, that consciousness arises somehow from packs of neurons.

When facing a problem like this, scientists often heed the counsel of a fourteenth-century friar, William of Ockham: choose the simplest proposal that explains the data. This nugget, known as Occam’s Razor, is not a dictate of logic like modus tollens.6 It may on occasion lead one astray. At a meeting of the Helmholtz Club, Francis Crick spotted such an occasion and remarked, “Many men have slit their throats with Occam’s Razor.”

As we have discussed, all attempts at a physicalist theory of consciousness have failed. They have produced no scientific theory and no plausible idea of how to build one. In each attempt so far, at just the moment when consciousness pops out of unconscious ingredients, a miracle occurs, and a metaphorical rabbit pops out of a hat. The failure, I think, is principled: you simply cannot cook up consciousness from unconscious ingredients.

Physicalism is not the only available monism. If we grant that there are conscious experiences, and that there are conscious agents that enjoy and act on experiences, then we can try to construct a scientific theory of consciousness that posits that conscious agents—not objects in spacetime—are fundamental, and that the world consists entirely of conscious agents.

We can convey an experience by a mere expression. This is data compression of impressive proportions. How much information is wrapped up in an experience, say, of love? It’s hard to say. Our species has explored love through countless songs and poems and, apparently, failed to fathom its depths: each new generation feels compelled to explore further, to forge ahead with new lyrics and tunes. And yet, despite its unplumbed complexity, love is conveyed with a glance. This economy of expression is possible because my universe of experience, and my perceptual interface, overlaps yours.

When we shift our gaze from humans to a bonobo or a chimpanzee, we find that the icon of each tells us far less about the conscious world that hides behind it. We share with these primates 99 percent of our DNA, but far less, it would seem, of our conscious worlds. It took the brilliance and persistence of Jane Goodall to look beyond the icon of a chimp and glimpse inside its conscious world.

The interface theory of perception contends that there is a screen—an interface—between us and objective reality. Can we hope to pierce that screen and see objective reality? Conscious realism says yes: we have met reality and it is like us. We are conscious agents, and so is objective reality. Beyond the interface lurks no Kantian noumenon, forever alien and impervious to our inquiry. Instead, we find agents like us: conscious agents. Their variety dwarfs the dazzling diversity of creatures that have paraded the earth and bequeathed to its sediments innumerable petrified mementos of their sojourn. We cannot imagine, concretely, even one new color. We cannot hope to imagine but a fraction of the varied experiences enjoyed by this multifarious host of agents. But despite our diversity, we share a unity: we are all agents, conscious agents.

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When we die, do we simply slip out of the spacetime interface of Homo sapiens? I don’t know. But we have the theory of conscious realism, and the mathematics of conscious agents. Let’s do some science.

What is spacetime? This book has offered you the red pill. Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your invention. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink. You have worn this headset all your life. What happens if you take it off?