Issues of fundamental importance:
“As we go about our
daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures,
tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and
think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we
realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather
our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal
simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our
simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have
weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but
surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.
Not so, says Donald
D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California,
Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception,
artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his
conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is
nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank
for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving
truth to extinction.”