New book “The Case Aaginst Reality - How evolution hid the truth from our eyes”. Apparently you’re not just wrong about your outdoor cat. This has me a little exasperated, so I’m looking for some back up.
The gist seems to be that evolution set us up to perceive our world in terms of Darwinian “fitness” - rather than objective “truth” (in the book’s term fitness beats truth). Therefore (and here is where I think he’s stretching his point a tad) objective reality as we conceive it as space, time, and objects in space and time - DOES NOT EXIST. Apparently some (familiar) visual illusions help make his point, also he pulls in a “because of quantum” (Bell’s inequality) argument - but I haven’t read yet how that links in.
Here’s a couple of tasters for both style and content.
OK. Is this all drivel, utter drivel? Are any real scientists (physicists etc.) on board with it, of should we let him argue it out with the Flat Earth people? (actually none of this (conscious realism) would conflict with a flat-earth outlook, so, some other contrarian bunch - we’re all actually living in the Matrix!).
I’d agree that a mammal brain evolved for hunting and gathering on the plains of Africa is perhaps not perfect for truly understanding the universe as a whole; but I was actually surprised at the poor quality of the drivel quoted in the OP.
Please, for goodness sake please, do not introduce Machinaforce to this philosophy.
I am not entirely clear on how we know there is a difference between reality, and what we are evolved to see as reality, but perhaps that’s just me. The part about how there isn’t anything except consciousness is woo, IMO - if that were true, there wouldn’t be any Darwinian pressure to shape our evolution, nor that of any other species.
Yes, it is drivel. Evolution is the survival of change over time, and evolutionary concepts have been adopted in numerous non-biological fields. Darwin, writing fast to beat the competition, described mechanisms that drive biological evolution. Others have revised that model, but Darwinism isn’t needed to model stellar evolution. And “survival of the fittest” isn’t Darwinism.
The cited author wrote, “…consciousness not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.” That means that either 1) every object down to atomic scale and beyond is conscious, or 2) nothing exists because neutrinos aren’t conscious, or 3) the notion is drivel.
Does ‘Darwinian’ evolution bias our perceptions? Sure. Does it bias our instrument readings? Yes, which is why we build subtler instruments. Is reality a dream? Drop a large boulder on your bare foot and find out. But carefully…
I think the consensus here is that his conclusions are truly and objectively 100% wank.
Also poorly explained (the text is rambling and repetitive) and now on page 99 he starts with the god bothering (in the form of Vogon poetry).
This book is going into next-door’s skip*
Thanks everyone for letting me know I can just forget I ever came across this bollocks.
I going back to reading “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli, which likes to quote poetry, has space-time diagrams populated with smurfs and is translated from Italian(?) but which is much more readable and explains its concepts infinitely better than Donald D. Hoffman.
actually it’s a library book so it’s not going in the skip. But I am not reading another syllable.
I’ll see if the kiosks have an “opportunity cost refund” option, but that would probably be more appropriate for “Fall/Dodge in Hell” which I wasted the best part of a week reading. At least Don Hoffman’s wankery got (metaphorically) thrown at the wall after about 45 minutes, then (metaphorically-again) shredded, burned and binned after “consulting” here.
Does this have anything to do with the idea that Columbus’ ships were invisible to the indigenous people because they couldn’t conceive of anything like them?
Clearly we would expect evolution to make our perception accord with visible reality. That will clearly enhance survival and all that. On the other hand, we did not evolve to “see” reality at a deeper, say atomic, level so all that is inference. Interesting to note that until Einstein’s Brownian motion paper, many physicists did not believe in atoms because they could not see them. They explained Brownian motion so well that they were convinced. The Milliken oil drop experiment demonstrated pretty convincingly the reality of electrons.
But nothing in evolution prepared us for quantum mechanics. Nothing. That’s why Feymann famously said that anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is lying. I assume that was what the reference to Bell’s theorem is all about. Roughly speaking Bell’s theorem implies that we either have to give up causality or locality.
Not really. The premise is that we (Homo sapiens) “interface” with the world via an understanding of space, time and objects in space & time that IS NOT REALITY. He doesn’t say what we’d all do faced with something inconceivable like the alien(s) from Arrival or Solaris (or anything actually interesting like that).
See the links that Shodan posted. I think the whole “conscious realism” concept is sort of bankrupt and dull (and I’ve only just come across it). Like I said, I’m going back to books by real scientists (the book explaining subatomic physics using LEGO bricks looks promising).
This is the best example of Not Even Wrong I’ve seen in quite a while. The author misunderstands basic ideas and goes on to draw conclusions from them which have absolutely nothing to do with anything anyone else thinks. It’s impossible to simply answer his critiques without upending the whole mess, which is what some people confuse for the philosophy being correct.