The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (Unabridged)
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4.1 • 34 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
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.
Customer Reviews
Awesome Read!
At some point you question existence.
We can philosophize all day long until the cows come home but some of us want more than that.
This book provides that “more” thing we seek.
You can believe whatever you want to believe in certain parts of the world that is.
This is the kind of stuff that needs to be taught at an early age in my opinion.
Repetitive and Sketchy
The author suggests an interesting theory of “Conscious Realism”, but does not flesh it out. Much of this book repeats over and over again the idea that things are created by observation; then, they disappear when they are no longer observed. Using this argument, the author also takes a one-size-fits-all approach to criticize panpsychism; but panpsychism has a wide variety of flavors, and the criticism betrays a very limited understanding of the subject. The premise that there is a non-material (e.g., non-spacetime) reality that is, perhaps, a deeper consciousness, is a promising path beyond the limits of what is doomed (e.g., physicalism); but the book puts too much emphasis on ideas dependent on a holographic universe.