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

by Donald D. Hoffman

I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on . . . reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. —GALILEO GALILEI

Thomas Huxley was flummoxed by this mystery in 1869: “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”3

Note how Science states the question: What is the biological basis of consciousness? It reveals the kind of answer that most researchers expect—that there is a biological basis for consciousness, that consciousness is somehow caused by, or arises from, or is identical to, certain kinds of biological processes. Given this assumption, the goal is to find the biological basis and describe how consciousness arises from it.

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.

We know far more neuroscience than Huxley did in 1869. Yet each scientific theory that tries to conjure consciousness from the complexity of interactions among brain, body, and environment always invokes a miracle—at precisely that critical point where experience blossoms from complexity.

if we propose that conscious experiences emerge from brain processes, then we must give the laws or principles that describe precisely when, and how, each specific experience emerges. Until then, these ideas aren’t even wrong.

Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness? Perhaps we don’t need more data. Perhaps what we need is a mutation that lets us understand the data we have.

But before punting the hard problem of consciousness, we might consider a different possibility: perhaps we possess the necessary intelligence and are hindered by a false belief.

What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.

we can prove that if our perceptions were shaped by natural selection then they almost surely evolved to hide reality. They just report fitness.

Galileo argued that we misread our perceptions in other ways: “I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”27 We naturally think that a tomato is still there—including its taste, odor, and color—even when we don’t look. Galileo disagreed. He held that the tomato is there, but not its taste, odor, and color—these are properties of perception, not of reality as it is apart from perception. If consciousness disappeared, so would they.

We will see in chapter four that evolution by natural selection entails a counterintuitive theorem: the probability is zero that we see reality as it is.

We discarded a flat earth and a geocentric universe. We realized that we had misread our perceptions, and we corrected our errors. It wasn’t easy. In the process, mundane intuitions and Church doctrines were shattered. But these corrections were mere warm-ups. Now we must jettison spacetime itself, and everything in it. What kind of creatures are we? According to evolution, not creatures that see reality as it is. And that profoundly affects how we think about the relation between brains and consciousness. If space and time exist only in our perceptions, then how can anything within space and time, such as neurons and their activity, create our consciousness?

Evolutionary psychology makes new, and surprising, predictions about our judgments of human beauty. Each time, for instance, that you glance at a face, you scrutinize its eyes—scoring them on a checklist of details—and arrive, through unconscious deliberation, at a verdict on their beauty. What women find attractive about the eyes of a man sometimes differs from what men find attractive about the eyes of a woman.

priapistic

Genes that are more adept at elbowing their way into the next generation are said to be fitter.

The likelihood of success in getting pregnant for females aged twenty is about 86 percent; at age thirty, it is about 63 percent; at age forty, it is about 36 percent; and at age fifty, it is about zero.12

Our minds were shaped by natural selection to solve life-and-death problems. Full stop.

no theory that starts with neurons and neural activity can account for observations about conscious experiences and their correlations with neural activity.

Universal Darwinism, unlike the modern theory of biological evolution, does not assume the existence of physical objects in space and time. It is an abstract algorithm, with no commitment to substrates that implement it.

Darwin’s acid dissolves the claim that objective reality consists of spacetime and objects—such as DNA, chromosomes, and organisms. What remains is universal Darwinism, which we can employ even after we jettison spacetime

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

The truth won’t make you free, it will make you extinct.

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.

there is an objective reality. But that reality is utterly unlike our perceptions of objects in space and time.

veridical

The FBT Theorem asserts that if reality outside the observer has any structure beyond probability, then natural selection will shape perception to ignore it. The theorem makes no assumptions about the states of reality beyond the claim that we can discuss their probabilities. This claim could be false. But if it is, then a science of reality is impossible, for there would be no way to relate probabilistic outcomes of experiments to probabilistic claims about reality. Perhaps a science of reality is not possible. I hope otherwise.

The key insight of the theorem is simple: the probability that fitness payoffs reflect any structure in the world plummets to zero as the complexity of the world and perception soars.

Does this mean that our perceptions lie to us? Not really. I wouldn’t say that our senses lie, any more than the desktop of my computer lies when it portrays an email as a blue, rectangular icon. Our senses, like the desktop interface, are simply doing their job, which is not to reveal the truth, but to guide useful actions.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: “We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.”

This requires us to devise a more fundamental framework—without space, time, and physical objects—for understanding reality. We will need to understand the dynamics of this new framework. When we project this dynamics back into the spacetime interface of Homo sapiens, we should get back Darwinian evolution.