First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on September 04, 2023. View the original post.
[Donald Hoffman](https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/) argues that all of spacetime is an abstraction for a deeper and unobserved reality. According to this line of reasoning, spacetime only exists when it's being perceived. What do you think?
The Reality Illusion
Introduction
Whatever reality is, it's not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction. -Donald Hoffman
In browsing through the available eBooks from my local library, I came across The Case Against Reality by UC Irvine Professor Emeritus, Donald Hoffman, and I read it over the weekend. The book presents a fascinating discussion on the nature of reality, a topic that has intrigued me for years.
In this book, Hoffman uses three major frameworks to argue that consciousness - not spacetime - is at the root of reality, and that our perceived reality is very different from the objective reality that actually exists.
The crux of Hoffman's argument relies on something of his own creation, called the Fitness Beats Truth Theorem (FBT), which he conjectured and claims that Chetan Prakash proved. According to this theorem, if perception agents that optimize for evolutionary fitness compete in evolution against perception agents that optimize for truth, natural selection favors the fitness-optimizers and the truth-optimizers go extinct.
In addition to the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, Hoffman also introduces us to the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP). According to this theory, the "reality" that we observe is something akin to an operating system interface. In this view, the things we see are nothing more than avatars and icons that provide useful shortcuts in order to allow us to survive for long enough to reproduce. A file icon on a computer desktop doesn't say anything about the underlying bits on the hard disk. Similarly, ITP argues that when we see an apple or a train or a snake, we're not seeing the reality of those objects, just abstractions that evolution has given us in order to guide our decisions. Provocatively, Hoffman argues that these representations don't even exist at all when nobody is perceiving them.
