On the Case Against Reality

This is a strong book on how we perceive the world, argued from evolutionary biology, though it drifts into incoherence in the last chapter. The argument is essentially that we’ve evolved to experience “objective reality” not in terms of truth but of fitness: we see things in ways that help us avoid danger, eat, and reproduce. It isn’t that “stuff” doesn’t exist, but that humanity’s understanding of it is not, and could never be, universal — the way we experience it is merely an interface, and spacetime, motion, and matter are all elements of that interface. Hoffman echoes a lot of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction here, with the noumena intrinsically unknowable and unperceivable.

Where the book stops making sense is the final chapter, where he argues that there is an objective reality we can know things about even if we can’t directly perceive it. He offers “conscious realism,” built from “conscious agents” (against the “physicalism” that dominates the sciences) that construct the universe. It’s interesting, but so vague as to be meaningless — the conscious agents seem to be mere “nodes” of experience, not things in themselves, with everything else arising from them. It’s a thought worth playing with, but he doesn’t push far enough into the philosophy. He’s working at the limits of what knowledge can even be, which calls for the philosophy of science and of mathematics, and while he’s deeply critical of physics on philosophical grounds, and of biology to a lesser degree, mathematics seems almost untouchable to him — his very notion of conscious agents comes out of mathematical formulae. But mightn’t mathematics also be invented within the interface? It’s a profoundly complex formal language built from a few axioms agreed to be self-evident, which may not necessarily be. Still, it was good to see this kind of work coming out of the sciences, trying to push the science of consciousness forward rather than staying stuck in philosophy. I’m not sure he’s escaped the Kantian cul-de-sac, but then no one has for more than two hundred years. Well worth reading, with its limits.