The Case Against Reality

Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

De: Donald Hoffman

Narrado por: Timothy Andrés Pabon

Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth?

Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. 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 grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.

Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, 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. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and 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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 by Donald Hoffman. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Fascinating hyptothesis, filled with fluff

I heard about this book on Sam Harris's podcast.

This "feels" like a first book. The author posits an incredible hypothesis but the book is laid out somewhat haphazardly and meanders to topics away from the main point. For example, why create a whole chapter on optical illusions when we can all admit our eyes can deceive us?

Here's a brief summary of the book:
"We have a startling hypothesis that was confirmed by an evolutionary simulation, let's repeat that fact for 5 chapters. Also, remember that weird box thing you drew in 3rd grade... that actually proves nothing exists. Congrats for finishing! Your prize is a tomato... one meter away from your face. Can't find it? - look to the accompanying PDF*"

So... yeah, having just finished the book, I admit my annoyance BUT this isn't to say the book is unscientific or without merit.

Are you interested in the subject but don't want to waste time? Listen to chapters 1, 2, 6, and 10. Chapter 6 was my favorite because it directly addresses physics.

If you're scientifically minded and are intrigued by the idea, it's worth your time. If you're on the fence, maybe not.

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* Spoiler alert: Audible does not provide the accompanying PDF

Surely we're on the smooth cusp of something

We seem to be passing through a period of existential crisis in physics and neuroscience in particular, at the moment. Possibly it is the modern paradigm to be in crisis, but it seems particularly poignant right now. In any case, this is one of a small bookshelf of must-reads for comprehending this 'moment'.

Mind-bending but also lacking

Hoffman creates a compelling argument as to why he believes the world we perceive is almost certainly nothing like "objective reality" at all. Buckle your seatbelts because Kansas, as well as space and time itself, is going bye-bye.

His "fitness beats truth" theorem is interesting and seems to me to be almost certainly true. The first six chapters lay the groundwork for his ideas and can be sort of repetitive – you can get a basic understanding of these chapters from his appearance on the After On Podcast, also titled The Case Against Reality. His repetition of the "Desktop" metaphor to describe Interface Theory of Perception or ITP gets pretty old fast – we get it, you think our perception is like a desktop and what we see are like icons – but that's my biggest gripe.

Even if you're not convinced by his arguments, it's worth reading just to imagine the implications such an understanding of consciousness could have on the future of science, religion and the way we understand what it means to be human. An easy and fascinating afternoon read!

The performance of the book is lacking, however, AND THERE'S NO "accompanying PDF" which is mentioned many times in later chapters!

Missing promissed PDF

The audio repeatedly refers to accompanied PDF but audible does not provide it and its needed to follow the book closely. I am also afraid the author blames the lack of current full understanding of brain consciousness connections as support for his speculations while doing the same error of logic...not this/yet therefore that......

Reality Bytes

extraordinary information if you can suffer through the mind numbing redundancies and lullabye voice narrating

Very good deconstruction of our intuitions about reality, but...

The first nine chapters of this were great, but the chapter 10 just gets into complete conjecture (albeit a scientifically rigorous conjecture) without any evidence other than our intuitions. A huge departure from the rest of the book. Overall very good.

Impossible to follow distracting errors

I am sure there is an important concept in this book, but it is lost in huge discussions of eye sex. You get lost in obvious errors like the author saying that dog eyes do not have white in them because of predatorial night adaptations while you dog is looking sidewise at you with white eyes. His basic premise resonates, that our senses are lying to us to keep us alive, but it is not well supported or developed in this book.

I expected to hear about guirks of human perception, but got so much more.

Yes, you’ll learn about what, how and why we perceive the world, but this book is so much more: „The Case Against Reality” goes into epistemological and onthological territory so deep and convincing, that I had to revise my views on myself and the world. Sometimes hard and complicated, it needs a lot of focus and attention on your part, but you’ll find out a great deal about evolution, quantum mechanics, the inner lives of famous thinkers and consciousness. No previous physics and philosophy training needed, although it casts a new light on the history of both. Oh, and Mr. Timothy Andrés Pabon does a great job interpreting it for audio. Truly amazing stuff.

Wow! Absolutey Beautiful a delight to listen

I've felt Quantum physics exposes the domain of our truer larger subjective reality for some time.
In this book you'll hear our subjective consciousness expressed in terms of physics, game theory icon metaphor, psychology and psycho analysis as it asserts consciousness is the most veridical perspective or best metaphor for understanding our realities, selves and God.

If sounds too complex or deep, reserve your judgement till hearing the last chapter.
At this point having listened to the first 5 chapters multiple times and hearing the last chapter (reconciling the realm of subjective religion and scientific method), I can hardly wait to get a hard copy to study in depth.

Fascinating but ill-suited to audio

This is a brilliant book, bold and balanced, with an almost outrageously ambitious principal claim, namely that the very nature of existence is entirely distinct from anything we perceive; existing, most likely, outside of space/time, which is claimed to be a function of our fitness-evolved operating system much like our physical senses. It is not terribly enthralling as prose, lacking compellingly personal narration and often getting bogged down in seemingly tangential matters of insect behavior and the like. The real trouble with listening to this book is both the highly technical nature (a challenge for even a fairly ambitious lay reader like myself) and, moreover, the continual referencing to the accompanying PDF. This would be all well and good for a student sitting at a desk and carefully cross-referencing the audio and PDF (ideally with a physical copy of the book in hand, too), but is less than ideal for what can fairly be considered a typical audio-book experience: listening while exercising, driving, cooking, walking, or otherwise being occupied with one's eyes and/or hands, making it impossible to keep stopping to check a PDF. Sadly, I think I missed a fair bit of the argumentation because of this poor fit of content to format. I may return to it if/when I have time to study the PDF while listening. As it is, I feel I'm left with more or less the same depth of understanding I got from hearing Hoffman articulate his thesis on a couple of podcasts, which were, of course, much shorter, free, and, I'm afraid, considerably more lively. Hoffman may ultimately rank among the great geniuses of science, should his arguments hold up. Nothing in this review or any other lay review can or should take anything away from that. Kudos to him. If you find this topic enthralling, as I do, just be forewarned that you shouldn't expect to get nearly all you should out of this book in audio format in the typical set and setting of audiobook listening.