"In his new book, UCI vision scientist Donald Hoffman says evolution has trained humans to construct reality, rather than to see the world as it truly is"
The case against reality
By Heather Ashbach
Perception is not objective reality. Case in point: The above image is stationary and flat…just try telling your brain that. In his new book, The Case Against Reality, UCI cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman applies this concept to the whole of human consciousness – how we see, think, feel and interact with the world around us. And he thinks we’ve been looking at it all wrong.
“I’m interested in understanding human conscious experiences and their relationship to the activity of our bodies and brains as we interact within our environment – and that includes the technical challenge of building computer models that mimic it, which is why I’m working on creating a model that explains consciousness,” he says.
Current scientific approaches assume there to be a pattern of neural activity that makes us experience things like the taste of a nut or the appearance of the color red. But, says Hoffman, there are no formal theories that explain this.
“As a scientist, I propose a theory and then try to prove the theory wrong, to test its validity,” he says. “Because there is no mathematical theory explaining the pattern of neural activity that creates consciousness, it may mean we are making a false assumption.” He argues instead that consciousness creates neural activity – that humans have evolved to see what’s needed for survival. Perceptions, he says, are a user interface, but not necessarily reality.
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