Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, The

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Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no-our visual perceptions are not a window on reality, but are interfaces constructed by natural selection. Think about it- though the file icon we see on our desktops is shaped like a small page on our screens, the file itself is made of a series of numbers, of ones and zeros stored in an intangible way. Using thirty years of his own research, as well as others' work in evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, computer science, information theory, and philosophy, Hoffman proves that evolution has shaped our perceptions into illusions. The sensory simplifications that once maximized our performance and reproductive fitness are now impressions that can be manipulated by marketing and design. The world is nothing like what we see through our eyes, and The Case Against Reality explains why.Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no-our visual perceptions are not a window on reality, but are interfaces constructed by natural selection. Think about it- though the file icon we see on our desktops is shaped like a small page on our screens, the file itself is made of a series of numbers, of ones and zeros stored in an intangible way. Using thirty years of his own research, as well as others' work in evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, computer science, information theory, and philosophy, Hoffman proves that evolution has shaped our perceptions into illusions. The sensory simplifications that once maximized our performance and reproductive fitness are now impressions that can be manipulated by marketing and design. The world is nothing like what we see through our eyes, and The Case Against Reality explains why.
Donald D. Hoffman is a Full Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author Visual Intelligence(Norton, 1998), as well as over one hundred scholarly articles on various aspects of human perception and cognition. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. His TED Talk entitled Do we see reality as it is? (2015) has been viewed over 2.5 million times.