The Case Against Reality omslagafbeelding

The Case Against Reality

Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

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The Case Against Reality

Van: Donald Hoffman
Verteld door: Timothy Andrés Pabon
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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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 by Donald Hoffman. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Philosophie Seelische & Geistige Gesundheit Wissenschaft

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This book is not well-suited for an audiobook. Also, what was that last chapter? You had me and made such good points and then you just got carried away by the writing itself. You "bequeathed" this chapter on us as a means of showing lots of fancy words? Really hard stop to an intriguing beginning

Which you will find in the accompanying PDF...

Er is een fout opgetreden. Probeer het over een paar minuten opnieuw.
Please remove the unnecessary repetition of "can be found in the accompanying PDF" when in same sentence or paragraph.

Otherwise great book!

Accompanying PDF

Er is een fout opgetreden. Probeer het over een paar minuten opnieuw.
Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality is built around a fascinating central idea: spacetime—and therefore the reality we perceive—is not objective reality itself. Instead, evolution has equipped us with something like a 3D virtual-reality user interface. What we see as objects, space, time, colors, and physical properties are useful representations that help us survive and reproduce, not an accurate depiction of whatever objective reality actually is. According to Hoffman, we may have no idea what that underlying reality looks like.

This is a genuinely thought-provoking premise. Hoffman spends most of the book developing it, explaining the evolutionary argument behind it and discussing the limitations and apparent “glitches” of our perceptual interface. The problem is that this part becomes repetitive. Once the basic argument is understood, considerably more time is spent reinforcing it than I felt was necessary.

Ironically, the part I found most interesting receives far less attention. Only toward the end does Hoffman introduce his theory of “conscious realism” and the concept of “conscious agents” as a possible description of what exists beyond our spacetime interface.

Here the balance of the book feels wrong. The interface theory is overexplained, while conscious realism—the much more radical and difficult proposition—is heavily underexplained. Just when the book seems ready to move from “our perceived reality is not fundamental” to the much bigger question of “then what is fundamental?”, it is almost over.

A fascinating book with a compelling central argument, but I would have preferred less repetition in establishing the case against perceived reality and substantially more development of Hoffman’s proposed alternative.

The Interface Is Overexplained, the Reality Behind It Underexplained

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The many examples of perceptual illusions are a bit tiring. The most interesting point of the hypothesis, namely what a "conscious agent" might actually be, remains elusive. I haven't really learned anything fundamentally new.

The speaker has an agreeable voice, but he sounds continually astonished, and keeps stressing the wrong words, which makes it seem that he hasn't understood the text he is reading.

Some interesting points

Er is een fout opgetreden. Probeer het over een paar minuten opnieuw.
The authors makes huge claims about the nature of reality and how we perceive it but provides not even remotely convincing enough scientific evidence to back these claims

Big claims with barely any science to back them up

Er is een fout opgetreden. Probeer het over een paar minuten opnieuw.
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