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Why are our eyes, and all of our senses, reliable guides? Most of us have a hunch: they tell us the truth.
Our senses are simply a window on this objective reality.
Our senses do not, we assume, show us the whole truth of objective reality.
Why do our senses exist to reveal the truth? Again, we have a hunch: evolution. Those of our ancestors who saw reality more accurately had an advantage over those who saw it less accurately, especially in critical activities such as feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. As a result, they were more likely to pass on their genes, which coded for more accurate perceptions. We are the offspring of those who, in each generation, saw objective reality more accurately. Therefore, we can be confident that we see it accurately.
Our hunch, in short, is that truer perceptions are fitter perceptions. Evolution weeds out untrue perceptions. That is why our perceptions are windows on objective reality.
wrong about this or that detail. It’s that the very language of objects in space and time is simply the wrong language to describe objective reality.
theorem
Democritus, around 400 BCE, famously claimed that our perceptions of hot, cold, sweet, bitter, and color are conventions, not reality.
The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the “truth” of the computer—where “truth,” in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software. Rather, the purpose of an interface is to hide the “truth” and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks such as crafting emails and editing photos. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends would never hear from you.
That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring.
Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your d...
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These icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth ab...
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Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, bu...
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Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
Evolution has shaped our senses to keep us alive.
But it is a mistake of logic to assume that if we must take our senses seriously then we are required—or even entitled—to take them literally.
our consciousness can be split in half with a scalpel, and the two halves can have different personalities, with different likes, dislikes, and religious beliefs: one-half can be an atheist while the other believes in God.
When you glance at another person, you immediately—and unconsciously—pick up dozens of sensory clues, and run them through a sophisticated algorithm, forged by evolution, that decides one thing: reproductive potential—the likelihood that this person could successfully raise offspring.
claim that our senses evolved to report truths about objective reality. Not the full spectrum of truth—just what we need to raise kids.
“Can we trust our senses to tell us truths about reality?”
natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.
At this point, our intuitions falter: How could our senses be useful if they don’t report the truth?
Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.
Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.
If spacetime is not a foundational, preexisting stage on which the drama of the universe unfolds, then what is it?
spacetime is just a data format—much like data structures in your mobile device—that...
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Our senses report fitness, and an error in this report could ruin your life. So our senses use “error-correcting codes” to detect and correct errors. Spacetime is just a format our senses use to report ...
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Colors can trigger emotions and memories that enhance our fitness by guiding our actions.
evocative
If you understand our codes for fitness, then you can intelligently hack them for your benefit.
But evolution is not done with our sensory codes for fitness. It still experiments with novel interfaces for our enterprising species.
misers.
We think we see the whole field of vision in great detail, but we’ve been duped:
Only within that small window does your sensory interface construct a detailed report of fitness payoffs.
You create a suitable object—your description of payoffs—with a glance. You destroy it and create another with your next glance.
flouts
If our senses hide reality behind an interface, then what is that reality?
When you look at yourself in a mirror you see skin, hair, eyes, lips, and the expression of your face. But you know that hidden behind your face is a far richer world:
The face you see is just an interface.
Perhaps the universe itself is a massive social network of conscious agents that experience, decide, and act. If so, consciousness does not arise from matter;
matter and spacetime arise from consciousness—as a per...
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If you can accept that the technology of virtual reality will one day create for you a compelling experience that is nothing like your experience when you take off the headset, then why be so certain that, when you remove the headset, you’re seeing reality as it is?
The purpose of this book is to help you take off the next headset, the one you didn’t know you were wearing all along.
“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.”
epithet
The human brain harbors 86 billion neurons
dendrites.
The brain is divided into two hemispheres, left and right. Each hemisphere has 43 billion neurons. Their axons subdivide, like branches of a tree, to allow trillions of links among them. But, in contrast to the rich interconnections within a hemisphere, the bond between hemispheres is a tiny cable, the corpus callosum, with just over 200 million axons—roughly one axon between hemispheres for every two hundred within a hemisphere.
If rocks have orgasms, they’re not letting on.
Your propositional attitudes predict and explain your behavior. If Chris calls and says he’ll arrive on the train tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, then your attribution of propositional attitudes to Chris—that he wants and intends to take the train—allows you to predict where he will be tomorrow at nine, indeed with greater facility than if you knew the state of each particle of his body.
