Donald Hoffman’s version of the Matrix: Things might be Extremely Different than they Seem

I enthusiastically recommend this podcast featuring Donald Hoffman. Sam Harris and (his wife) Annaka sound, in equal parts, skeptical and intrigued, which makes for some deeply engaging conversation. Hoffman's thesis might challenge almost everything you think.  Hoffman argues that evolution has not honed us to have veridical perception (seeing things as they really are). Rather, natural selection has privileged evolutionary fitness to prevail over veridicality. This topic dovetails nicely with Andy Clark's theory of predictive processing, in which Andy portrays perception as a "controlled hallucination."

The first hour is free for non-subscribers. Here's the promo for the podcast:

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam and Annaka Harris speak with Donald Hoffman about his book The Case Against Reality. They discuss how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of the world, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, the threat of epistemological skepticism, causality as a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, a mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, and many other topics.

Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, Edge.org, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quanta. In 2015, he gave a mind-bending TED Talk titled, “Do we see reality as it is?”


This teaser for this podcast is not mere hype.



An obvious example for illustrating Hoffman's thesis is color. We don't perceive wavelengths, much less the quantum physics even deeper down. To perceive these things would be too expensive (in terms of bandwidth) for rough and ready biological processors like human brains and bodies, and we don't need to fully understand the physics of the process in order to make use of color (or sounds or pain or shapes). For most of us, most of the time, we are trapped in the Matrix.

It is critical to note that there is NO COLOR in the objects "out there." Wavelengths of light are not colored. Color is something that is created only by the interaction between whatever is out there and our ability to engage with the world because it increases biological fitness. Here's the kicker . . . for Hoffman, everything is like color.  We don't need to understand the electronics and physics of the "objects" on our computer desktops in order to make excellent use off them.  Similarly, we often make excellent use of the things that we seem to encounter in the world, but it is entirely consistent with this observation that we don't deeply understand these things or we barely understand them.  A similar concern provoked Immanual Kant to divide the world into phenomena (how things appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves).

The bottom line is that things might be incredibly useful to us as creatures trying to survive day-to-day, even when our understanding of these things is extremely lacking or even false. Useful trumps veridically-true to those of us who are often merely trying to survive to the next day. We human animals are happy to satisfice, even though we often conflate our hacked-up understandings of things with veridical truth.

In Paragraph 121 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche also pointed out that things that are untrue can often be useful:

Life is not an argument. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live--by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error

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Survivorship Bias

Many of us are somewhat anxious, but there are other people out there who lack the ability to feel any anxiety.  Many of those flagrant risk-takers are not with us any more.  They died because they drove recklessly, explored base jumping and generally lived on the edge.  Many others who are no longer with us ignored long term risks like drinking, eating and smoking to excess.  Many of them struggled with cancer, heart diseases and strokes on their way out.

What we see at any given moment are only the survivors. We are the survivors.  We are not living among a true cross-section of humanity.  It's good to remind ourselves of that, because doing risky things puts us at risk, right?  We are living among those who have hit the lottery, and that includes more than a few of the risk takers who are here because they have been extraordinarily lucky.  Those risk-takers are interesting to us.  We watch them, sometimes with admiration, intrigued that they can do dangerous things and yet survive.  They seem to defy death, disease and immense financial risks.  But, again, we forget that we are not looking at a cross-section. Many people jump in and open new restaurants even though 80% of restaurants fail within four years.  When we decide to go out to eat at a restaurant, we are choosing only among the survivors.  The streets are also populated by hundreds of invisible ghost restaurants too.

We are looking at only the lucky ones, and this can mislead us to think that it is relatively easy to do those sorts of things and yet survive.  We might cheerfully announce that we are going to engage in risky behavior without doing a Bayesian analysis. This is exacerbated by the fact that we don't know enough to know the risks, an over-confidence invited by the Dunning Kruger Effect. 

Farnham Street Blog recently took a look at the Survivor Bias:

Can we achieve anything if we try hard enough? Not necessarily. Survivorship bias leads to an erroneous understanding of cause and effect. People see correlation in mere coincidence. We all love to hear stories of those who beat the odds and became successful, holding them up as proof that the impossible is possible. We ignore failures in pursuit of a coherent narrative about success.

Few would think to write the biography of a business person who goes bankrupt and spends their entire life in debt. Or a musician who tried again and again to get signed and was ignored by record labels. Or of someone who dreams of becoming an actor, moves to LA, and ends up returning a year later, defeated and broke. After all, who wants to hear that? We want the encouragement survivorship bias provides, and the subsequent belief in our own capabilities. . . . Most leaps of faith go wrong. It does not mean we should not try, just that we should be realistic with our understanding of reality.



How could I end this article without mentioning the biggest survivorship bias of them all? The eight billion human animals now populating the surface of the earth are all survivors of long unbroken lines of ancestors. We can look around and see only these those human beings who are actually here, not those whose ancestors failed to survive long enough to pass on the next generation at every generation, extending back to the beginnings of life on earth.  This survival of the fittest, natural selection, is sometimes referred to as "breed and weed," nature's amoral culling of ever-new versions of human beings, separating the survivors from those who do not survive.

I find this to be an immensely terrifying and awe-inspiring thought. If you are lucky enough be able to read this, you are a survivor in one of the most long-shot schemes you could ever imagine.  In order for you to be here, your parents had to meet at the right time, be attracted to each other, have sex at the right time and then someone had to take enough interest in you to raise you.  This had to happen twice for your parents to exist. Eight times for your great-grandparents to exist. These numbers grow exponentially as you you look back even a few hundred years.  This is even more stunning when you consider how quickly this occurred--even a millennium is not a long period of time when you break it into generations.  I illustrated this quick passage of time with a hypothetical visual in a post I titled, "Ancestors along the Highway."

On those days when you might not feel special, then, cheer up!  You are special! You are literally a survivor in a long line of organisms extending back to shew-like mammals who found opportunities with the demise of the dinosaurs.  Your line survived all the way back to the first fish to walk on the land, Tiktaalik.  You are a survivor of the sponges, and beyond.

The odds of you being here are infinitesimally small, essentially nil.   So, again congratulations!  That said, good luck with the rest of your day.  And please remember to treat each of the people you encounter as the miraculous survivors they are.  And remember, also, that each of them is a member of your own family.  

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Marginalizing Intellectual Curiosity

Let's see. It's the weekend.  If I want to spend time with others tonight, what should I do?  Where should I go?  Who would like to spend time with me?

Here's a seemingly unrelated question: Who is more popular in most parts of American society?

a) An animated people who engages in banter about pop culture, sports, TV and movies with their like-minded friends, where loud partying and drinking alcohol are significant parts of the gathering?

b) A person who enjoys intense discussions about science and other intellectual pursuits with like-minded people in quiet places, where partying and small talk are not significant aspects of the gathering?

Today, I stumbled upon an article in Forbes that raises concerns about how those who love to study science are sometimes ostracized by others. This article by Ethan Siegel is titled, "Your Glorified Ignorance Wasn't Cool Then, And Your Scientific Illiteracy Isn't Cool Now." Here is an excerpt:

All across the country, you can see how the seeds of it develop from a very young age. When children raise their hands in class because they know the answer, their classmates hurl the familiar insults of "nerd," "geek," "dork," or "know-it-all" at them. The highest-achieving students — the gifted kids, the ones who get straight As, or the ones placed into advanced classes — are often ostracized, bullied, beat up, or worse.


The social lessons we learn early on are very simple: if you want to be part of the cool crowd, you can't appear too exceptional. You can't be too knowledgeable, too academically successful, or too smart. Someone who knows more, is more successful, or smarter than you is often seen as a threat, and so we glorify ignorance as the de facto normal position.


In my experience, it's not usually such a clear distinction as in A or B above, and there are many styles of socializing.  I'm focusing on these because am a "B" type person who found myself trapped in a few too many "A" environments over the past year. I should also make clear that I have no problem with drinking, only drunkenness, and a lot of nerdy people admittedly do enjoy alcoholic drinks.  Further, many people, nerdy or not, like to discuss the science stories they find in news sources that don't specialize in science. These things are often interesting, even when not explored in depth.

The real division lies here: Some of us take science and other intellectual pursuits much more seriously than others. Some of us read challenging and detailed science publications, and we contemplate science spontaneously, when waiting in line or walking down the street; we cannot turn it off.  Digging to deeper levels inspires us to learn even more, and this hard-earned knowledge often bears fruit in the form of connections to many other aspects of our lives. Digging deeply often enables us to challenge the way we conceive of ourselves and others.  Most people who socialize, however, get exhausted, bored, tired of discussing these topics and would rather have "fun."


Having an enthusiastic love of intellectual pursuits can be a social problem.

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New at Rock Hounding

I loved collecting rocks as a kid. I've returned to this passion. I'm brand new to a FB group called South East Missouri Rockhounds and I'm brand new to owning a rock tumbler (a Thumler brand, Model B). A couple weeks ago I scooped up some rocks from a creek near Farmington, Missouri. I just finished washing them off after tumbling them for a week with rough grit.



Wow. Such details that I couldn't originally see when I picked up the rocks. It will be fun to see how these look after several more rounds of tumbling, three weeks from now. I'll somehow turn these into Christmas gifts, even if it's merely little bags of tumbled rocks.

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