Donald Hoffman | The Case Against Reality

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Transcript:
Many of the awe-inspiring images of distant stars and galaxies wouldn’t actually look the way you‘re used to, if perceived by the naked eye. Not only due to their great distance from earth, but also because humans can only see a very narrow slice of the elctromagnetic spectrum. That‘s why these images are often edited in order to highlight parts that would otherwise be invisble. There are other animals that are able to experience a much broader range of colours. A flower field looks very different to a butterfly, which can see infrared and UV-light. Our perception of the world of sounds is also limited in comparison with other animals. Blue whales communicate over great distances by making noises that are too deep for our ears to register.
Not only do we lack the sensory organs to perceive all of reality, often it is those senses that are creating illusions and distortions of reality. Our brain falsely interprets sensory input, giving the impression of something that isn‘t really there.
So our perceptions don‘t represent reality perfectly, but surely they give a reasonbly accurate picture, otherwise evolution would have weeded us out by now. If you fail to see the tiger in the bushes or blindly step infront of an incoming train, you won‘t be around long enough to create offspring.

Professor of cognitive science Donald Hoffman claims that the world we perceive has actually nothing in common with reality. And surprisingly, it‘s evolution by natural selection that has provided us with this kind of simulation. He showed with the help of mathematical models, that organisms that see reality as it is, will never reproduce as successfully as organisms that are only tuned to perceive fitness payoffs. But how can be falsy perceiving reality possibly be beneficial to an organism? Donald Hoffman gives the analogy of a computer desktop.

The little symbol of a file tells you nothing about the inner architecture of the computer and about how the information is acutally stored. But it provides a useful interface that allows you to use the computer. If you had to tinker with electrical signals and 1s and 0s everytime you wanted to delete a file instead of just dragging it to the recyclebin, you would‘t get very far.
The same is true of the perception of the world, it has been shaped by evolution to avoid things that harm our fitness and seek out things that nurture it, and there is no reason to believe that truth and fitness payoffs are in anyway aligned.

But the fact that we live in a world with simulated tigers and trains, doesn‘t mean we don‘t have to take these things seriously. While the thing we call „train“ may be unimaginably strange and nothing like what we perceive, it is a useful mental representation, that informs us about how to act in a situation like this. So regardless of what the nature of reality truly is, it‘s still a good idea to avoid stepping infront of the incoming train.