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

by Donald D. Hoffman

Their differences can transcend the personal to the theological. In one patient studied by the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, the pious left hemisphere believes in God, but the impious right does not.9 When the bell tolls and both hemispheres approach the pearly gates, will Saint Peter need an assist from King Solomon? Or was the grim solution of Solomon already applied by the scalpel of Bogen? Tough questions for a future neurotheology.

The sex with greater investment is pickier in choosing mates. The one with less investment is less choosy and competes for access to the pickier sex—in some cases with physical battles, and in other cases, such as the peacock, with impressive displays. This explains why, typically, men court and women choose.

A woman who mates with a man of resources and commitment will more likely succeed in raising kids. So selection shaped women to prefer men with resources and with status, which correlates with resources. This preference crosses cultures and intensifies in women who have more resources. It is no side effect of financial inequality.21 A man’s age and height correlate with his status and resources; women, across cultures, prefer tall and slightly older men.22 A woman can tell, from a photo of a face, if a man is prone to cheat and divert resources to other women; cheaters tend to look more masculine, but not more attractive.23 Men are less able to discern female cheaters.24 Indeed, as moose and beetles demonstrate, males with little investment sometimes fail to discern females from bottles or statues.

The notion that our brains are growing in size, and thus in their capacity to see truth, also conflicts with a fact of our evolution: our brains are shrinking.22 In the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk 10 percent—from 1,500 cubic centimeters down to 1,350—a loss of the volume of a tennis ball. Our encephalization quotient, or EQ, which compares our ratio of brain mass to body mass with the average ratio for other mammals, has plunged in an eye blink of evolutionary time. According to the fossil record, this plunge correlates slightly with climate, but heavily with population density and thus, we can presume, with social complexity. This suggests an interesting explanation: the safety net of society eases selection pressures on members; some who wouldn’t survive alone, or in small groups, can survive with a larger social net. This possibility, explored with humor in the movie Idiocracy, is speculation for now. But the plunge of our EQ is not. If it continues apace it will, within 30,000 years, send our brains back half a million years, to the size of Homo erectus. Our brains took the escalator up; they’re on the elevator down.

I must take my senses seriously. Must I therefore take them literally? No. Logic neither requires nor justifies this move.

Scientific theories, couched in the language of objects in spacetime, are theories still bound to the interface. They can’t properly describe reality any more than a theory couched in the language of pixels and icons can properly describe a computer. Some physicists, as we shall see, recognize this and have concluded that “spacetime is doomed” along with its objects.

Physics reveals that we often fail to notice what is too fast or slow, too big or small, or simply outside the band of electromagnetic waves that we can see. ITP is saying something much deeper. It says that even though we can, with the help of technology, observe all these new things, we are no closer to seeing reality as it is. We are just exploring more of our interface, more of what happens within the confines of space and time. These

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.

Einstein believed that spacetime and objects exist and have definite properties whether or not they are observed. More precisely, he believed in local realism. Realism is the claim that physical objects have definite values of physical properties—such as position, momentum, spin, charge, and polarization—even when unobserved. Locality is the claim that physical objects cannot influence each other faster than the speed of light. Local realism asserts that both realism and locality are true.

Our perceptions are a species-specific user interface, not a window on truth, and its underlying code is a sea of kludges, punctuated by islands of inadvertent brilliance. Vision does not approximate an ideal observer who recovers objective truths. It is an interface kludged together on the cheap. It tells us just enough about fitness to keep us alive in our niche long enough to raise kids.