#3 Donald Hoffman - Reality is an evolved illusion

Bold Conjectures with Paras Chopra

Do we see reality as it is?
I discuss this question with Donald Hoffman who is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He studies consciousness and perception from an evolutionary point of view. His research has led him to make a bold claim that while we do not yet know what the underlying reality could be like. Rather, reality as we know it now – including space, time, and objects – is a useful fiction that evolution invented for us.
His TED talk on our perception of reality has been watched over 3 million times, and in his recent pop-science book for the wider audience, The Case Against Reality, he makes a convincing case on how our perceived reality is an illusion that has evolved to help us survive and reproduce.
1:46 – Towards building a mathematical understanding perception
5:12 – Evolutionary game theory to help understand perception
6:26 – Computing truth is expensive, so evolution get rids of it
8:00 – Mathematical proof that evolution doesn’t tune us to see the truth
9:56 – David Marr’s ideas and inverse optics
11:30 – What are fitness payoffs? Why do they matter? How are they determined?
16:23 – Maximizing for truth vs maximizing for winning
18:40 – Illusions that show physical reality doesn’t exist
23:21 – Physical reality not being fundamental as a scientific claim
24:23 – Existing physics points to spacetime not being fundamental
30:25 – The basics of the interface theory of perception
34:40 – We have to guess mathematically the deeper structure of reality
38:00 – Model-free planning in reinforcement learning
44:45 – Why should we care about what is objective reality?
49:20 – How can we use science to go beyond physical reality?
56:57 – Reality is a huge social network of conscious agents
1:03:41 – Predictions from the mathematics of conscious agents
1:09:26 – “We will be able to warp space and time”
1:09:35 – Bridging conscious agents to physical reality
1:15:32 – How far along have we come in his journey of building a fundamental theory of reality based on consciousness?
1:17:31 – Is mathematics part of the underlying reality or is it a useful fiction too?
1:30:12 – Does your research on reality and consciousness impact your personal life and beliefs?