Hoffman’s Conscious Realism: The Case Against Reality

Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman's “Case Against Reality” argues that our visual perceptions are not veridical of ultimate reality because evolution selects for fitness to reproduce, not for access to ontological truth (Hoffman, 2019a). “This is consistent with the interface theory of perception, which claims that natural selection shapes perceptual systems not to provide veridical perceptions, but to serve as species-specific interfaces that guide adaptive behavior” (Prakash et al., 2020).

Perception as Interface, Not Reality

Hoffman likens our perceptions of objects around us to “interfaces” constructed by natural selection, taking as analogy the file icons on our computer screens, which may look like little paper folders but are in truth written in the complex binary code of machine language. Similarly, he says, evolution has shaped our perceptions, not as true depictions of an animal-independent world, but rather as simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us (Hoffman, 2019a).

Continuing his computer-screen interface analogy, he says, “The pixels are in the screen, still part of the desktop interface. Similarly, tiny nuclei and electrons are in spacetime, still part of our spacetime interface.” But “spacetime is not objective reality and does not resemble reality, whatever reality might be” (Hoffman, 2019b).

Conscious Realism and Its Implications

Hoffman's ultimate ontology is what he calls “conscious realism,” which states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences. This means, fundamentally, that instead of assuming that “particles in spacetime are fundamental, and somehow create consciousness when they form neurons and brains,” he proposes the reverse: “consciousness is fundamental, and it creates spacetime and objects.”

He posits a mathematical theory of consciousness that “reality is a vast social network of interacting ‘conscious agents,’ in which each agent has a range of possible experiences, and each agent can act to influence the experiences of other agents.”

What follows for Hoffman is that “no object within spacetime is itself a conscious agent; spacetime is simply a format for conscious experiences—an interface—employed by agents like us, and physical objects are just icons in that interface” (Hoffman, 2019b).

Remarkably, Hoffman reverses the arrow of causation for the abundance of experimental evidence correlating mental states of the mind with physical states of the brain. These correlations arise, he states, “because consciousness creates brain activity and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world” (Hoffman, 2008).

Hoffman is clear: “Consciousness is fundamental in the universe. It is not a product of space and time or anything inside space and time. I think that efforts to derive consciousness from spacetime, either by identity theories or causal theories, have proven ineffective, and I've been forced to take the view that consciousness is actually fundamental in the universe” (Hoffman, 2013).