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The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid…
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The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (originale 2019; edizione 2022)

di Donald Hoffman (Autore)

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287691,215 (4.01)5
Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. 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. The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more "attractive" body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.… (altro)
Utente:ThufirHawat
Titolo:The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
Autori:Donald Hoffman (Autore)
Info:WW Norton (2022), 272 pages
Collezioni:La tua biblioteca
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The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes di Donald Hoffman (2019)

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Our picture of the world—the way it appears, for example, if you glance up for a moment from this book review and look around at wherever it is you happen to be right now—is plainly very different from the way it actually is. I think I was around twelve years old when I first realised this myself, at school just looking at one of those wall-posters with radio waves at one end, gamma rays at the other and that narrow coloured band of “visible light” arbitrarily set in the middle: first, just how little of what there is, how thin a sliver, we see; and then, that much the same is true for sounds, scents, touch and all the rest. The “world” as we experience it is an accurate, but severely reduced, simplification.
    The Case Against Reality is an odd book. For a start, reading it I had the feeling that Donald Hoffman is setting up a straw man here, then knocking it down, setting it back up, knocking it down again… His claim is that most people think their picture of reality is a true one (“veridical” is the word he uses endlessly), then he can demolish this and tell us how wildly wrong we all are. But how many of us believe this in the first place? The overwhelming majority of human beings are not reflective enough (or far too busy more like, feeding the kids, doing a day’s work, worrying about the bills, their health, the planet) to have ever given the matter any thought. And of those who have, do any of us believe we’re experiencing things exactly as they are?
    Then there’s the conclusion the book turns out to be heading towards (in perhaps the final ten pages or so out of two hundred). This is something he calls “conscious realism”, which as best as I can understand it seems to be a form of idealism (in the Bishop Berkeley meaning of that word): “consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents”.
    Finally, there’s the endless repetition, which soon gets pretty tedious. I may be quite wrong about this, but it crossed my mind that, his ideas having already been savaged by fellow academics, this book was aimed at convincing them rather than the rest of us. The repetition also had me wondering whether he fully believes his own ideas; it almost sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as well. He didn’t convince me. ( )
  justlurking | Mar 28, 2024 |
Finished reading with less enthusiasm than I began. I dont think it was necesarrily a waste of time because he puts out a topic that I find particularly interesting, what is the nature of reality. It was a fascinating idea that he puts forth and I guess others like Deepak Chopra have put forth this idea that consciousness is not dependent on brains. Although it was interesting, it seems like there is a ways to go until one is justified to hold such a view. It is a heavy question to grapple with. ( )
  coldmustard | Mar 21, 2024 |
This was a weird book, in a way that I've seen before. Start with an introduction that doesn't really say where the book is going. Add a giant heap of data, some of it potentially fascinating in itself. Sprinkle lightly with US right-wing tells. Eventually conclude something that runs against common belief, and perhaps common sense. A non-alert reader - or one made more comfortable and trusting by right-wing tells - is likely to conclude the conclusion must in fact be valid, as the heaps of data wouldn't have been emphasized unless they supported the conclusion.

My capsule summary of the book's arguments:
1) Human perception is not veridical. (The author likes this word. The way he uses it, it's presumably a cross between "accurate" and "true", with extra connotations.)
2) Evolution tells us that whatever perceptions we have got that way because of usefulness at creating copies of our genes, not accuracy per se.
3) Therefore our perceptions have no more connection with reality than icons on a computer screen are connected with the details of the apps inside.
4) Therefore the universe is really built from consciousness, not matter.
5) And since consciousness can combine in layers, they do so combine, giving rise to the existence of god; at least this god is unlikely to have all the more paradoxical attributes commonly attributed to the Christian God.

We get chapter after chapter of examples establishing #1. These discuss every optical illusion he could think of, weird reactions to super-stimuli in animals as well as people, and lists of things we can't perceive directly but other creatures can.

On the way from #1 to #3 we have something he calls the Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem, which he usually refers to as the FBT theorem, and treats like a fundamental truth. The initial form is unobjectionable, if a tad odd; in some cases, it makes sense for an organism that thrives in a middle state (e.g. of salinity) to perceive this in terms of worse-for-me and better-for-me rather than "too little", "more but still too little" etc. I don't recall now whether he produced any examples of organisms that do this, but it makes sense in computer modelling. But from this we get "it's all rubbish" rather than "there's plenty we can't perceive, some we simplify extremely, and some where we apply heuristics that get it wrong". He does discuss the transition, trying to motivate it, and did such a bad job of convincing me that I can't remember his argument.

Steps #4 and #5 come all at once, in pretty much the last chapter, and the bit about god is more like a throw-away comment than like his usual lengthy attempts to motivate his beliefs.

I gave this a 3.5 rather than a 3 because it at least appears to be an original offering, though I'd be inclined to place its author somewhere in philosophy, not cognitive science. (He is, however, a professor of cognitive science, not philosophy.)

Moreover, it has real footnotes. I did find a couple of oddities there, such as footnotes to articles with titles that suggested they didn't support the sentence they were on, but did support other parts of the paragraph. (They were not on the last sentence of the paragraph, so should have supported the specific sentence.) But I was unable to read the works cited - far too much peer-reviewed science is pay-walled - and as we've seen with this book itself, sometimes titles don't indicate everything in the work cited.

On the negative side:
- chapter 2 basically conflates "beauty", "attractiveness", and "amount of lust this object provokes right now in the critter judging it as more or less beautiful"
- chapter 9 mostly consists of an extended paean to advertisers creatively using wired-in human tendencies to get the general public to mis-perceive the value of the merchandise - and divert attention to it, complete with suggestions for additional ways to accomplish this highly desirable feat.
- there were plenty of examples of perceptual illusions printed in the book, complete with text telling the reader what they would see. Some of these illusions fell flat with me. That functioned as an instant visceral argument against the veridicality of the entire book. Though like as not they failed (a) because I'm familiar with the illusions (b) I'm on the autistic spectrum (c) the printer did a bad job of rendering the illusions properly.
- The author affects a style where he pronounces The Truth. He rarely or never phrases anything in a way that suggests "this is our current best understanding, based on research". When he mentions alternatives that disagree with him, it's always a prelude to arguing against them, in terms that he might well refer to as "demonstrating that they are false". The only time I recall him expressing uncertainty was (a) the actual nature of the space-time we don't perceive accurately (b) the attributes of the god he conjured up in the final chapter. (There may well have been more, though.) And he walked back (a) later, explaining that because the true reality is consciousness, anything he'd previously said about space-time was merely a kind of place holder.)

Also, FWIW, the whole thing smelled of net.argument. This is a book written to convince, and probably informed by debate - either on-line discussion or formal debating. Admitting uncertainty just isn't done in that context. Apparently most people believe better if the source pretends omniscience, at least on the topic at hand. Or at least people writing to convince others tend to believe that method works. ( )
1 vota ArlieS | May 30, 2023 |
Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality is the best popular science book I have read in many years. It discusses evolution, human perception, theoretical physics, and other fundamental topics on the way to an alternative scientific ontology that Hoffman calls conscious realism. Important elements in his argument include the abysmal failure to account for consciousness on the basis of physicalism, the "Fitness Beats Truth theorem," the bankruptcy of perceivable spacetime as a basis for physics, an "interface theory of perception," and ultimately the Conscious Agent Thesis.

The prose is lively and not at all condescending. With the exception of a brief appendix, Hoffman avoids dry technical detail and pursues unorthodox concepts in judicious ways that intelligent readers should be able to follow.

In a few passages of the book, Hoffman comes off as a tad evil, as when he describes his mercenary expert testimony on behalf of T-Mobile in a trademark lawsuit asserting their exclusive ownership of a color (147-8), or when he talks about "hacking" perceptual processes for "marketing and product design" (172). I'm willing to allow that these elements made the book more creditable to the commercial press, but ick.

On a related note, he observes that, "evolutionary psychology ... has been accused of ... justifying unsavory moral and political ideas," an accusation he finds "misguided" (50). While I agree with him that the core concepts and inquiry of evolutionary psychology do not actually justify pernicious ideologies, it is true that attempts have repeatedly been made to use them thus--a difficulty that might have been addressed in an explanatory end note. This omission by Hoffman fits awkwardly with his repeated use of tropes from The Matrix--notably "the red pill"--that have been adopted as banners of misogynist and paranoid subcultures. (Sorry they perverted your gnostic metaphor, Wachowskis.)

I only point out these failings because I think they should be disregarded in light of the book's larger accomplishment. "No mystery of science offers greater intrigue, or greater perplexity, than the provenance of quotidian experiences" (178), and Hoffman's proposal for a way to clear the perplexity is a valuable one. He observes that while his ontological postulates buck the intellectual trends in his field of cognitive science, they are "not radically new," and he instances philosophical and mystical precursors from antiquity and modern thought (195-6). And I would add that both the Interface Theory of Perception and the Conscious Agent Thesis comport strongly with psychedelically-informed intuition.

Hoffman also rejects the non-overlapping magisteria of Stephen Jay Gould, who promotes a crypto-dualism by erecting an epistemological wall between science and religion (197). Instead, Hoffman suggests that his own ideas may help to contribute to "an uneasy truce and eventual rapprochement" between spirituality and disciplined inquiry (199). I agree that this provocative book can be a paving stone of the path by which the method of science might pursue the aim of religion.
1 vota paradoxosalpha | May 19, 2022 |
The book begins with a look at the different ways in which our perceptions may deceive us, how fitness and the propagation of our genes play conscious and unconscious roles in our behaviors and mental fabrications/assessments of our world. The book continues to build. It covers split-brain surgeries and mating habits of animals. Along the way, it is helping to show its case and sometimes that is not overt. At least, not to me. After my second reading of the book, I picked up the breadcrumbs and followed the path more easily. It leads to quite a different, but entirely plausible, understanding that what we see and know is but a representation of, or more like an interface of, all that there is. We do not perceive reality but we perceive our interface that helps us in terms of fitness (survival) and propagation. From a Buddhist perspective, or from that of physics (e.g., Higgs-Boson), there are strong corollaries. You can find the same in a Christian perspective - do we really believe we see the Truth - we see all that there is as it really is - or that we have an interface that allows us with certain degrees of success to navigate all that there is within limits that are productive but not accurate. This is a fascinating read to explore that theme. ( )
1 vota natezen | Mar 3, 2021 |
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Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. 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. The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more "attractive" body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.

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