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

by Donald D. Hoffman

virtuoso

plaything

Could conscious experiences bubble out of a computer simulation?

Occam’s Razor,

monism

conscious experiences can be generated by packs of neurons, which are themselves cooked up from unconscious ingredients.

you simply cannot cook up consciousness from unconscious ingredients.

posits

affliction,

an organism that sees objective reality cannot dominate an organism of equal complexity that instead sees fitness—clashes with physicalism and warns of its demise.

panpsychism,

obstinacy

A person’s face is a small portal into their rich world of conscious experiences.

The curve of lips and squint of eyes that form a smile no more capture the experience of real joy than the letters j-o-y

we are insiders, we know firsthand what transpires behind the scene when a face fashions a genuine smile.

This economy of expression is possible because my universe of experience, and my perceptual interface, overlaps yours.

But as we shift our gaze again, from a chimp to a cat, then to a mouse, an ant, a bacterium, virus, rock, molecule, atom, and quark, each successive icon that appears in our interface tells us less and less about the efflorescence of consciousness behind the icon—

But we are embedded in an infinite network of conscious agents whose complexity exceeds our finite capacities. So our interface must ignore all but a sliver of this complexity.

For that sliver, it must deploy its capacities judiciously—more detail here, less there, next to nothing elsewhere.

The decline is in our interface, in our perceptions. But we externalize it; we pin it on reality.

Conscious realism pins the decline where it belongs—on our interface, not on an unconscious objective reality.

Conscious Agent

Conscious agents offer a promising new framework for the construction of theories in cognitive neuroscience. This framework does not assume that biological neurons and their networks are the building blocks of cognition. Instead it takes consciousness as fundamental and then has the task of showing how spacetime, matter, and neurobiology can emerge as components of the perceptual interface of certain conscious agents.

When two or more agents interact, each retains its individual agency, but together they also instantiate a new agent.

instantiate.

Planck scale,

The interface theory of perception contends that there is a screen—an interface—between us and objective reality.

Kantian

noumenon,

imper...

Their variety dwarfs the dazzling diversity of creatures that have paraded the earth and bequeathed to its sediments innumerable ...

parlance

vast majority of our mental processes are unconscious.

The richer your experience of your internal decisions and actions, the more latitude you have for nuanced interactions with the outside world.

purveyor

“natural selection is the only known natural process that pushes populations of organisms thermodynamically uphill into higher degrees of functional order, or even offsets the inevitable increase in disorder that would otherwise take place.”

demarcate,

winnowing

We did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth.

We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion. As a result, our reasoning is plagued with foibles, such as a bias toward information that supports what we already believe.

Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry.

spacetime and objects are the perceptual interface used by Homo sapiens.

The scientific study of physical objects in spacetime, even when conducted by large teams of scientists using advanced technologies, is necessarily a study of first-person experiences.

But each physical object we study by experiment is just an icon in an interface, not an element of objective reality beyond that interface.

Intersubjective

hodgepodge

hoary

anathema

iconoclastic

sacrosanct