An Essay review of Donald Hoffman's book, "The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes."
Conscious perceptions as the only reality: a plausible heuristic theory
In this tantalizing 200-pager, Professor Donald Hoffman recycles an old idea, carefully adding in, two novel evolutionary twists of his own.
The old standard is that what is seen through our nervous system is not exactly how the world really is. In fact, we have often seen this very theme repeated across philosophical and scientific history, from Plato's metaphorical reflections in a cave, to Kant's noumenon, to various molecular models of the atom, to quantum theory, and on to Einstein's conflation of space and time into a single dimension, just to name a few.
But here Professor Hoffman throws evolution into this volatile theoretical mix as a new and decisive variable.
In his first theoretical foray, which he calls "Fitness Beats Truth," the author contends that natural selection sculpts organismic perceptions in such a way that the only world available to us is that shaped to maximize fitness. Crucially, this holds true even when such perceptions do not accord with reality.
Apparently lying to our genes also maximizes fitness.
Professor Hoffman says that lying to genes is okay because, beyond fitness, reality is little more than a residual probability space, laying fallow somewhere on the outskirts of the Einsteinian universe.
Thus, genes that win the fitness race are not required to code for perceiving the truth of reality because the structure of reality beyond space and time can be ignored and goes harmlessly unregistered by human perception.
Professor Hoffman's second twist is no less plausible or any less complicated. He calls it "the Interface Theory of Perception."
In this twist, he contends that, like icons on a computer desktop, our senses sidestep the complexity of reality by creating interactive interfaces that symbolically stand-in for the hidden complexity. We observe and interact with these interfaces (that are in fact evolutionarily-generated representational shortcuts), rather than with the full-blown complexity of reality itself.
And of course, the payoff of this arrangement too, is improved fitness.
Thus, when all is said and done, the author contends that each of us is a conscious agent who creates his/her own evolutionarily-generated symbolic shortcuts to a more complex reality through our perceptions, experience and actions. And, it is this network of conscious agents that culminates in the only reality we can ever know: reality as consciousness, or "conscious realism."
From these two plausible evolutionary twists, the author somehow then churns this skeletal proto-theory into a gigantic inferential leap: that "consciousness is the fundamental reality." Full stop.
Thus, poof!, in one fell swoop, the author does away with material reality altogether, replacing it with his own very plausible, but nevertheless postulated, and almost entirely heuristic, "conscious realism."
It is obviously a very tantalizingly tasty morsel of a theory. But one that remains in the realm of novel assertions, untested and probably untestable.
Unsurprisingly, the author's most spirited defense of this sexy proto-theory is not much of a defense at all. But an offense: A hostile frontal attack on the limitations of scientifically-defined material reality itself.
With great relish, Professor Hoffman points to Plank's constant as marking the clear end of space-time. Which, it most assuredly is.
Yet, while this remains an incontestable fact, it is still a mere detail. Hardly an argument. And above all, it cannot be allowed to stand as a defense for a very bold set of theoretical conjectures, that, at the very least, require the rigors of sound scientific testing with empirical data.
But further to this point, the author shields his science-shaking assertions behind a dubious non-sequitur: that the mind-body problem is unlikely to ever be solved.
However, in this regard, there is at least one renowned neuroscientist who would beg to differ with this suggestion.
The late Dr Richard Pico (also in a grand style matching that of Professor Hoffman's, even possessing the same kind of heuristic panache), has, at least in principle, produced, in his 2011 book "Consciousness in Four Dimensions," a heuristic solution to the mind-body problem.
In doing so, he unwittingly appears to have saved the "materialist project" by completely defining consciousness through neurobiomechanics as the third of three posited entropic orders. The first two entropic orders, of course, are the "Big Bang" and "life" itself.
But then Professor Pico does much more than just make assertions. He traces each evolutionary development from the beginning of its first two entropic orders, to the third: consciousness itself.
His theory takes us from the "Big Bang," the first entropic order, at the universe's very beginning; through the second entropic order, of life. That is, from cells, to the neuron, to the billions of disparity calculations shuttling sensory information up through the nervous system to and from the brain, through hundreds of billions of perceptual nerve impulse trains winding right up the nervous system into the prefrontal lobe's integration module. Where the third entropic order manifests as consciousness: a "combining in time" of past and present memories with various independent sensory trains and disparity computations. Finally yielding, for the first time in the history of the universe, a third entropic order and a new fourth dimension.
But most importantly, this new entropic order issues forth a solitary output each 200ms of processing cycle time. That output is called "an idea," the unit (or the unit-vector) of consciousness itself.
In summary, even though heuristic plausibility goes a long way towards good theory-building, in both the Hoffman and the Pico cases, it does not go nearly far enough. And even with my predilection to give daring theorizers a lot of running room, as I did with Professor Pico, in this case, theoretical prudence dictates that we await more testable formulations before accepting Dr Hoffman's assertions at face value.
It must be said too that in Pico's case there are clear, multiple, independent avenues that lend themselves to easily being tested. Not so in this author's case.
Despite this, and to his credit, Professor Hoffman did cause a ripple in the fabric of the landscape of scientific theorizing. However, his creative genius of producing interesting and novel ideas is only a reminder that grand scientific assertions require delicate, independent and repeatedly confirmed follow-up testing to move the dial from the realm of mere assertions, closer to proven theories. Five stars for boldness.
