Hoffman: I really do think that you exist, that you have conscious experiences. And as a scientist I don't go there. The problem with the brain and the VAT thing is that, of course I can't disprove it, right? No one can disprove the possibility of solipsism. So Hoffman has really just shot himself on the foot by not telling us if he doesn't tell us exactly what perceptions are saying about objective reality, then he can't tell us that they're not true.
In his new book, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, the U.C. Irvine cognitive scientist Dr. Donald Hoffman challenges the leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality. 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 argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. His evolutionary model contends that 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, 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.
In this conversation, Hoffman and Shermer get deep into the weeds of:
- the nature of reality (ontology)
- how we know anything about reality (epistemology)
- the possibility that we’re living in a simulation
- the possibility that we’re just a brain in a vat
- the problem of other minds (that I’m the only sentient conscious being while everyone else is a zombie)
- the hard problem of consciousness
- what it means to ask “what’s it like to be a bat?”
- does the moon exist if there are no conscious sentient beings anywhere in the universe?
- is spacetime doomed?
- quantum physics and consciousness
- the microtubule theory of consciousness
- the global workspace theory of consciousness, and
- how Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception differs from Jordan Peterson’s Archetypal Theory of Truth (Shermer’s label for Peterson’s evolutionary theory of truth).
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