I have had great fun and thinking time reading Donald Hoffman’s (2019) “The Case Against Reality,” or, as his subheading asserts “How Evolution hid the Truth from Our Eyes.” Put like that, I wondered, is this a thriller or a deep dive into non-realist ontology?
Hoffman lays claim to the discovery that our sensory awareness is programmed by evolution to engage with the objects we experience, judging them not in terms of their ‘reality’ but in terms of their fitness for purpose. We direct our senses to collect signals of fitness for purpose, rather than the reality of the object concerned. He offers as an archetypal example the icon on the computer screen. The icon ‘does not deliberately misrepresent the true nature of the file. Its job is to hide that nature, to spare you the tiresome details…’ Having at one time probed the inner logic of computers and their coding, I will leave the litany of tiresome details to one side.
The implicit assumption here is that the computer icon is ontologically different from the rest of the file. Hoffman then presents a series of visual examples of how the mind interprets visual and other cues, not in terms of some fundamental truth about the reality they represent but in terms of their fitness for purpose, being our continued survival and ability to procreate.
What evidence does he deploy to support this view? He outlines a game-theoretic approach where, in a contest between players who, on one hand, make judgements about the ‘truthfulness’ of their experiences compared with those who make judgements about their fitness for purpose, the latter wins hands down. Those who judge using fitness for purpose will win the evolutionary lottery of life; they survive whilst those who worry about what’s real and what’s not, don’t. It’s as simple as that.
In the many examples he gives, he mentions the limbal rings around the iris. The famous image of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic magazine is a case in point: we find her limbal rings attractive. The answer Hoffman proposes is that they, along with clear surrounding whites to the eyes, are a marker of youthfulness in the person who has them and their consequent fitness for procreation. Well defined limbal rings and clear white eyes are a cue that our nonconscious programming associates with ‘fitness’ and from that ‘beauty’. From this, we can infer that we read a simple signal as a marker of ‘withdrawn qualities’ — qualities that exceed what we directly perceive — within the reality of the individual who possesses them.
This is all not too different from a discussion I had a decade ago with an academic interested in the memorial role of photography.. Books have been written on the topic. Making essentially the same move that Hoffman makes, I argued, to their consternation, that memory is a cognitive process whose primary purpose is not remembering the past but providing the experiential ‘tools’ for coping with the future. It’s not too hard to swallow the idea that if one group of homo sapiens remember, and processes their experiences to recall the past versus those who remember to enhance their future survivability are likely to do better. The assertion is well debated and the evolution of memory well researched (Otgaar and Howe 2014).
However, it might be argued, that our attention is drawn towards fitness as opposed to other criteria of ‘reality’ that are not fitness related. Again, this is not a novel assertion. The idea that the brain drives perception is well established and indeed that its goal is to minimise prediction error between what the senses predict and the brain expects (Friston 2009). So, what is the position that Hoffman is taking? In my view, he appears to be proposing a radical idealism where space, time, material reality (or the experience of it) are not fundamental, but that something else is. That something else is consciousness. I am not unsympathetic to his position although the logic of his position is, in my view, less than secure.
The problem with Hoffman is that he doesn’t fully consider the possibility that we may do both. We may register sensory signals in terms of their fitness for purpose, but we may also use a different order of functioning to check whether our experience is reliable, replicable, and safe to rely upon for future action. Regarding someone as attractive based on limbal rings may be supported by experimental evidence, but there is a problem in that experimental evidence often fails to survive first contact with reality, and that reality is that we invariably choose multiple, means of perception to validate anything of significance to us.
Corroboration and triangulation are well-practiced means of checking sense impressions. The sailor triangulating his or her location is attempting to secure themselves on an unknown location. The reality of our position on the ocean bed is withdrawn from direct perception, and any one of the stars, the sun, the chronometer, or indeed the satellites registering on the satnav’s iconic display are serving our quest for position but their fitness for purpose is wholly conditional on the reality of the earth in which we move. And so it is with all icons. Their function as icons is that they connect with a reality which is withdrawn but against which we assess their value. That reality is a lot deeper than sense impressions: it encompasses all of space-time, both the ‘local reality’ we perceive and whatever non-local reality underlies it.
Hoffman, D (2019). “The Case Against Reality, how evolution hid the truth from our eyes,” Penguin Random House, UK
Friston, K. (2009). "The free-energy principle: a rough guide to the brain?" Trends Cogn Sci 13(7): 293-301.
Otgaar, H. and M. L. Howe (2014). "What kind of memory has evolution wrought? Introductory article for the special issue of memory: adaptive memory: the emergence and nature of proximate mechanisms." Memory 22(1): 1-8.