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

by Donald D. Hoffman

ephemeral

Our senses evolved to encode fitness payoffs in a language of experiences. That language includes our experience of emotions. From anger, fear, distrust, and hate to love, joy, peace, and bliss, our emotions comprise a rich vocabulary. Specific emotions may be triggered by specific colors, a possibility now being studied by the science of color psychology.

Nuances of color can trigger nuances of emotion

The growth tips of some plants have photoreceptors that detect blue light and guide growth toward open sky.

Arabidopsis thaliana, a small weed that looks like wild mustard, has eleven types of photoreceptors, more than double the number that we employ.

Color perception has deep evolutionary roots. Discriminating colors is a powerful tool employed by millions of species to decode critical messages about fitness. It’s no surprise then that colors are firmly wired into our own emotions.

These associations between colors and objects are forged over eons by evolution, over centuries by culture, and over decades by personal experience.

The human eye can discriminate 10 million colors.

A square image with just twenty-five pixels can house more chromatures than the visible universe harbors particles, making chromatures a rich channel for messages about fitness.15

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They hide the truth and keep us alive.

Our perceptions are a user interface that evolved to guide our actions and keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Once we grasp this, and free ourselves from the conceptual straitjacket of assuming that we perceive reality as it is, then we can reverse-engineer our interface, understand how it codes information about fitness and guides our actions, and then apply this knowledge to solve practical problems—

Four percent of humans are synesthetes, who live in perceptual worlds quite foreign to the rest of us.

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Contemplating Watson’s synesthesia can free our imagination from the chokehold of preexisting objects, from the belief that our object experiences are low-resolution versions of real objects in objective reality.

synesthetic associations, although they sometimes involve cultural artifacts such as alphabets and numbers, are not simply taught in families, but are influenced by genetic inheritance.

anomalous

idiosyncratic

Each is an adaptive guide for a critical decision—what shall I put in my mouth? It is an accident of evolution, not a necessity of veridical perception,

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bona fide

The tinkering of evolution can concoct perceptual interfaces with endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful; the vast majority of these, however, are to us most inconceivable.

Evolution is not finished tinkering with the perceptual interfaces of Homo sapiens.

Evolution defies our silly stricture that our perceptions must be veridical. It freely explores endless forms of sensory interfaces, hitting now and then on novel ways to shepherd our endless foraging for fitness.

“The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives. For it applies itself infinitely more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that are present to it but do not affect it.”

The opening gambit of the visual filter is its placement of photoreceptors. Unlike the sensor of a digital camera, whose pixels are equally spaced throughout, the retina of the eye deploys more photoreceptors in the center of vision, and ever fewer toward the periphery.

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Think instead of vision, and all of our senses, as foraging instruments evolved by natural selection to hunt for critical information about fitness.

A message that says eye also says that there is a creature who owns that eye and warrants your attention.

So natural selection favors shortcuts: anything remotely like an eye wins attention, if only briefly.

Those who know its heuristics can lure it at will

heuristics

The implications for marketing are clear. A simple icon, crafted to exploit the visual codes wired by natural selection into the visual systems of consumers, can grab attention with supernormal power.

judiciously,

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.

Our memories are no more a veridical report of the past than our perceptions are of the present.

Memory and perception don’t deal in objective truths.

exogenous

scripted attention: we use our knowledge of our current context to constrain how we forage for fitness, allowing us to forage with greater speed and precision.

transitory.

parlance

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.

The reason that my perceptions can’t show me the truth, can’t show me the sun-in-itself, is that the sun-in-itself is shrouded by a cloud of fitness payoffs.

kismet

“Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.”

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