According to cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, our brains are showing us a "hacked" version of reality. His revolutionary new way of thinking about consciousness combines the study of evolution with insights into brain activity in an attempt to solve the mysteries behind how we perceive the world. Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. The world we see is not objective reality and our senses are not communicating the truth. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease. In his book, The Case Against Reality, Hoffman dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see. And even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, he explains that far from being a passive recorder of a preexisting world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience. Evolution may have shaped our perceptions to create an interface analogous to a computer desktop interface. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selectionhas favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. Trains, snakes, and even the moon may be mere icons that guide our behavior, much like the icons on your computer desktop. That doesn’t mean that they don’t represent something real out there —just as dragging a blue email icon to your trash really does delete an email file in your computer, stepping in front of a train really does kill you. But, Hoffman argues, just as the email file in your computer is not actually a blue pixelated rectangle, the actual threat posed by the train is not actually a large, elongated object occupying three dimensions of space and one of time. We must take the train seriously, but not necessarily literally, his reasoning goes. Just as direct access to the bits and voltages inside a computer would be unlikely to help us quickly write an email, Hoffman claims that direct access to the complex information in our real environment is unlikely to help us pass our genes to the next generation. Hoffman and several collaborators have put forth a mathematical argument that there is virtually zero probability that our perceptions are a true or even almost-true reflection of reality. Hoffman invites us to consider some curious features of modern physics that also suggest that our perceptions are an interface. For instance, quantum mechanics , which governs the world at the atomic and subatomic scales, shows us that particles may not actually exist in a definite location until they are directly observed. Hoffman argues that space and time interface exists in the human mind. What we’re seeing might not be real. Hoffman offers the promise of understanding the truth about the outside world. He argues that his interface theory of perception (ITP) is needed to address the gap between physical processes that take place in the brain and our conscious experiences. Even if we fully understand the neurophysiology of color perception, why, for example, does it feel like something to behold a rainbow? Why don’t the neurological processes that allow the brain to perceive color simply take place in the dark, so to speak, without subjective experience? This conundrum, known as the hard problem of consciousness , has baffled many scientists and philosophers. The hard problem of consciousnessis that we can't explain a single conscious experience. Hoffman believes the way forward is to assume that consciousness is fundamental, and that reality is, at the most basic level, a network of interacting conscious agents. Nearly all neuroscientists agree that we don’t always see the truth. Our minds can be tricked into perceiving things that aren’t there. What we see is not merely the light that hits our retina, but a far more user-generated experience on predictions. Evolution has shaped us with a very simplified interface to report the stuff that's going to keep us alive. Space and time are just a data structure. And so, it's no surprise that the stars look about as far away as the mountain, because they're both at infinity given my caloric resources. All the stuff that we're seeing, is a hallucination in the sense that it's just a visualization tool that doesn't resemble reality. Hoffman's study of perception that really tipped him over to realizing that maybe spacetime itself is just a user interface. And there is a way of interpreting the quantum stuff that's compatible with the interface theory of perception. So the idea is that reality is this vast social network of interacting conscious agents. The more connections you have, in some sense, the more fit you are. And the less connections you have, the less fit you are to survive. "I want a scientific spirituality
in which we begin to explore a world beyond space and time. But we do
it with mathematically precise models, and we start to address the big
questions about why are we here and what is human consciousness about?
Where did it come from? What's the meaning of life?
....From the physicalist framework, the answer was, there is no life after death. There is no deep meaning to life, because once your brain dissolves, that's it. And so they really did have a theory of life and transcendence: there is no such thing, there is no transcendence. But now all sorts of possibilities open up for exploration. And I'm pretty excited about it. So science and spirituality, I think, could really start to collaborate. But scientists have to let go of spacetime and spiritual traditions have to let go of dogmatism. Not easy." - Donald Hoffman
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