The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You Can’t Get There From Here

Reality has no intrinsic properties. Reality exists but existence is not a property. Hoffman’s thesis is that human beings, in fact all life, have evolved such that they impose properties on reality that are relevant to their survival as individuals and as a species. We do not simply notice certain properties about reality - length, colour, texture, taste smell, certain frequencies of vibration, etc. - we are literally the source of these properties. They would not be there unless they were noticed by us.

I know, I know. This is a bit like finding out in old age that the woman who brought you up is not your mother. The realisation that the creation stories in the book of Genesis are essentially true might come as another shock. Evolution has separated the sea from the land, allowed us to see a spectrum of light, and populated the world around us with useful, beautiful, as well as less useful and decidedly dangerous things. And we have given these things names as we perceive them.

Confronted with the proposition that everything about the world except its being is actually in our heads, has, I’m sure a similar impact to Darwin’s announcement that apes are our cousins and that our joint ancestors climbed out of the ooze together. The proposition initially appears incomprehensible.* Surely this is some sort of deconstructionist ploy by some wily Frenchmen to undermine both confidence in our own judgement and the foundations of civilised society. I know what the objective properties of a tomato are as I hold it in my hand. Truth doesn’t depend upon perception; it’s the way things really are.

This is a difficult belief to overcome. The redness and lovely sweet/sharp taste of a tomato are facts that can’t be doubted. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, I refute any claim to the contrary by simply eating it.** But think about how a tomato appears and tastes to a bat, or a fungus, or a fruit fly. The first, uninterested in the tomato entirely, may only clock the entire tomato plant as a single entity without colour or taste. The fungus may not even notice the tomato until it has fallen from the vine and become desiccated. All the fruit fly senses is a cloud of sweetness from neuronal activity that we can only imagine; the tomato may be indistinguishable to it from a potato, or a garbage dump.

The obvious point is that the reality is perceived depends on the sensory apparatus at hand. The senses developed through evolutionary adaptation therefore determine what is seen, felt, heard, tasted, feared, and desired. The perceptions of human beings may be differentialy unique but they are not superior to those of the bat, fungus or fruit fly. They are a sensory interpretation of reality which have proven useful for each species. But they are not reality. They are not even aspects of reality. They are ‘merely’ chemical, visual, and nuclear interactions with reality (the last being particularly important for the bacteria which ‘eat’ radioactive material).

The reason that this is difficult to accept, as difficult to accept perhaps as the Church’s difficulty in accepting Galileo’s assertion that the earth revolves around the sun when it obviously doesn’t, is the same reason that we can discuss the difficulty at all: language. Even if bats, fungi, and fruit flies had a language, it would be incomprehensible to human beings because we cannot perceive the world as they do. So we could care less about their language, including their concepts, categories of thought, and intra-species arguments about the way the world really is.

But we are entirely immersed in human language. We are quite literally in each other’s heads through language. The words, syntax, concepts, and literal connections we make among them ‘live’ simultaneously in billions of people. Just like the bacteria that live in our guts, we depend upon this linguistic virus for our existence. Yet as Hoffman points out, language promotes our success as a species, it does not reveal reality. Hoffman uses the apt metaphor of computer desktop ikons to make the point:

“You may want truth, but you don’t need truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.”

In fact language protects us from reality and allows us to function with complex, cooperative social skills. Language forces us together in order to help us survive in a unique way. We usually call this benignly invasive presence ‘culture,’ but what it consists of in practical terms is words which we use to form concepts, explanations, and theories of what reality is and how it works. We share these casually with our children, our friends and with people we have never met because they cost almost nothing to produce and create power in proportion to their dissemination.

The problem, of course, is that we tend to take these words as reality. Or as we euphemistically say, as ‘representing reality.’ However, representation is not the function of the words we use; they don’t ‘stand for’ discrete bits of reality, just as the bat’s sonic radar image, the fungus’s appreciation of radioactivity as food, or the fruit fly’s perception of an intoxicating haze. These are all purely imaginary constructions (or if one prefers: interpretations of what is there) which result from the interaction of the organism and its environment. None of these interpretations is ‘true’ or ‘correct’ except in the pragmatic sense that it fosters the well-being of the organism. In this sense it ‘fits’ with the environmental reality. But these interpretations are not approximations, or even partial descriptions, of the ‘essence,’ the ‘substance,’ or the ‘structure’ of the object(s) involved. They gave nothing to do with reality.

This is the case with systematic scientific measurement as well as with casual everyday perception. And it applies to the most fundamental concepts like space and time. Immanuel Kant, it turns out, was correct: these are categories of our minds not characteristics of the cosmos. Einstein’s theories suggests how arbitrary, how dysfunctional they are in other circumstances than planning a road trip from A to B. Quantum experiments similarly show that our distinctions ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ simply cannot be applied coherently about light. ‘Space-time’ and ‘particle-waves’ are merely garish designations that have no more accuracy about what exists than our more conventional terms. Obviously we can do more with them, that is we can combine them with other words to suggest possible implications (scientists call them hypotheses) which can then be ‘tested’ against still other words (called measurements) to judge whether all the new words fit more coherently together than the old words, and under what circumstances.

That is, in all of science as well as in everyday life, our intellectual hands never leave our linguistic sleeves. Whatever magic that is apparently produced by modern science and technological development is all ‘done with mirrors.’ We tweak reality to see how it responds in light of new concepts and theories; but we never get inside its linguistic skin. This is not a methodological defect but a benign gift supplied by the decisively complete separation of our language-abilities from our existential engagement with the world. Without this isolation of language from reality, we would be unable to think creatively, work cooperatively, or develop our survival skills from generation to generation. Language ability, our facility to keep reality at bay, is our most important evolutionary adaptation.

* it is relevant here to point out that it has been theology which has kept the idea of existence as not-a-property-of-things-which-exist alive through the centuries. That is, existence is not an attribute - something re-discovered in 20th Century philosophy. This may be difficult to grasp since our usual language leads us into the mistake of expressing existence as somehow ‘belonging’ to an object. In theology, for example, to say ‘God exists’ actually says nothing about the character of divinity. It is semantically equivalent to the expression ‘Reality exists.’ God is therefore often called Ultimate Reality. That is, existence as a property of neither God nor of Reality is what allows us to talk about both without immediate contradiction.

**This is the so-called argument ad lapidem named in honour of the good doctor who refuted Bishop Berkeley’s thesis about the immateriality of the world by kicking a stone. Although I have encountered it from time to time among GR correspondents, it is nonetheless a fallacy. In any case, my point here is not about the materiality of the world, whatever that is, but about its properties, or rather the properties we assign to it.

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