Quotes from Donald D. Hoffman

This critique also misreads the Copernican revolution. Yes, our perceptions misled us about our place in the universe. But its deeper message is this: our perceptions can mislead us about the very nature of the universe itself. We are prone to falsely believe that certain limitations and idiosyncrasies of our perceptions are genuine insights into objective reality.

To construct is the essence of vision. Dispense with construction and you dispense with vision. Everything you experience by sight is your construction.

as Einstein put it 'Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.

Exaptation, in which a trait evolved for one function can co-opt a new function, is commonplace in nature. We use sex to procreate, but also to bond, play, heal, and enjoy pleasure.

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.31 To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

There are as many cubes as there are observers constructing cubes. And when you look away, your cube ceases to be.

If you play a video game on your computer, such as "Doom" or "Uncharted", you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D.

The math is not the territory.

Hence our decline of insight as we shift our gaze from human to ant to quark. Our decline of insight should not be mistaken for an insight into decline—a progressive poverty inherent in objective reality. The decline is in our interface, in our perceptions. But we externalize it; we pin it on reality. Then we erect, from this erroneous reification, an ontology of physicalism.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."36

Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton said, "I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.

Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation." —JALALUDDIN RUMI

In the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk 10 percent—from 1,500 cubic centimeters down to 1,350—a loss of the volume of a tennis ball.

A glimpse of an eye is, for purposes of triggering the animate-monitoring system, a glimpse of the beast peering through that eye.

Which raises a perplexing question: What about the big bang? Didn't it happen 13 billion 799 million years ago, before any observers?

Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.

Or perhaps we were short-changed by evolution, and lack the concepts needed to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness. Cats can't do calculus and monkeys can't do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness?

What we call 'reality,' consists of an elaborate papier-mâché construction of imagination and theory filled in between a few iron posts of observation."22 We

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

Once we know the rules that human vision uses to decode messages about fitness, we can use those rules to send the messages we want. Consider jeans.

For principled reasons, Einstein's spacetime cannot be foundational in physics

This broader notion of fitness is called "inclusive fitness" to distinguish it from the notion of "personal fitness," which we have discussed until now.50 The two notions are not at odds. Inclusive fitness simply recognizes a broader spectrum of strategies by which genes muscle into the next generation.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.