The Case Against Reality

The Case Against Reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes

By Donald Hoffman

Some readers would instinctively take umbrage at the outset just having read the title, rolling their eyes at what is sure to be another progressively outrageous attempt to disestablish truth and establish relativism.. And the assumption wouldn't be completely wrong.

I, on the other hand, chose this book in the hopes it would challenge scientific materialism, or scientism or physicalism or whatever ism best describes the assertion that EVERYTHING is composed of matter and energy.

Roughly the first 9/10ths of the book did not disappoint. Hoffman is the "conscious realism" Descartes. He destabilizes presumption with the contented delight of a child knocking over a tower of building blocks that someone else built. His proposal, the FBT (Fitness Beats Truth) is easy to digest at first as he begins with our inability to see even a fraction of the color spectrum, all the usual things-are-not-only-as-they-seem "aaacccssshhhuuuaaalllyyys".

But he gets to the point pretty quickly, the point effectively being nothing-not-one-darn-thing-is-as-it-seems.

He says, along with others, that the space-time continuum itself is doomed.

Not in a Hal Lindsey sense, but as the way we make sense of the world. 

I loved it.

What more outrageous but seemingly theoretically sound chestnut could you toss in the fire at a Christmas party?

If I had kept notes on his many logical and empirical objections to seeing is believing, here is where I'd insert a footnote. My footnote is ¹Read the book, I can't do everything.

To probably do injustice to the overarching point, I'll summarize by saying that "Fitness Beats Truth" bc the Truth is simply far, far too much information for us to process and utilize. Instead, evolution has made hacks of us all, simplifying, always overly, reality so that we can exist. The analogy of icons on computer screens or avatars in video games is as boring as fitness hell, but it works as well as anything to describe the graphic interfacing of reality. (What's not boring is the related question that occurred to me at his prompting: Is that tree that I see beside my gun barrel as I regen in COD Modern Warfare still there when I, QuietStorm78, am on the other side of the compound??)

He's ruthless with the scientific method, and it's possible that his bold questioning of authority will do to scientific materialism what quantum physics did to the Einstein orthodoxy.

Then he tries to ruin it all by saying that even though we don't have a clue, we can, because the scientific method will not be denied. It's the optimistic scientism that sings glibly along with the faithful as they close their eyes "We'll understand it better, by and by." 

I'm glad I read it, even the 1/10th that disappoints, because it reminds me that wonder, which I'll describe here as the incurable asking why, is inexhaustible. I instinctively believe his very generalized premise, that we are, if I could put it so, microscopic blind organisms in a underwater cave, thinking we know everything about the moon. And I wish that along with every pointy headed academic subscribing to scientific atheism, every one of us would rediscover the ability to say "I don't have a clue! And isn't it wonderful!!"