If you’re looking to have an existential crisis, boy do I have the book for you!
This read marks the denouement of a long-running, very esoteric rabbit hole I’ve been digging myself for a while. I’ve been binge-listening through Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason podcast, which had me doing a lot of pretty hardcore sittin’ and thinkin’. Academically, I’ve been spending a lot of time investigating the research surrounding the various ways evolution has shaped human behavior and cognition. The title of this book alone tickled all the parts of my brain necessary for me to pick it up.
SUMMARY
Hoffman argues for a theory that he calls conscious realism: instead of matter and spacetime being the building blocks of reality, consciousness may represent reality at the most fundamental level. Our perceptions of the physical world are just representations of fitness payoffs, heuristics that evolution has shaped into our mind so that it can more easily and appropriately interact with reality. This, he calls the Multimodal User Interface (MUI) theory, best illustrated with his analogy of the computer screen. When you interact with a computer desktop, you understand that the symbols on the screen aren’t literally depicting the files on your computer. Computer files are a bunch of ones and zeroes and electricity moving through computer chips, but it’s much easier for us to understand their meaning when these are depicted as symbolic icons on the desktop. Such, says Hoffman, is life.
While it does sound like a very red pill, galaxy-brain take, Hoffman does an admirable job backing up his claim with research. Hoffman himself is a published cognitive psychologist at U.C. Irvine whose research on cognition, sensation/perception, and evolutionary psychology is fascinating to read about by itself. One major self-citation is his Fitness Beats Truth experiment, in which he utilizes evolutionary game theory to demonstrate that perceiving fitness is a more effective evolutionary strategy than perceiving the truth of things (see the desktop computer analogy). He cites research in similar fields, such as studies of split-brain patients: people with severe, treatment-resistant epilepsy that had their brain’s left and right hemispheres surgically separated. Research on these individuals suggests that this operation essentially creates two separate consciousnesses that coexist in the same body. If one hemisphere is instructed to get up and walk across the room, the person will get up and do it. When the opposite hemisphere is asked why they had done this, instead of saying that they were instructed to or that they don’t know, they will come up with a reason that sounds plausible. They will say that they’d gotten up to get a drink of water, felt like stretching their legs, etc. These patients report that, aside from not having seizures anymore, nothing about their lives feels all that different from how it had been before the surgery. The idea that two separate consciousnesses can live in one head, both being completely unaware of the existence of the other, is some pretty kooky stuff.
Hoffman also goes multidisciplinary, citing concepts and research in philosophy, physics, and astronomy. Much of it is pretty standard popular science. He talks about research in quantum mechanics that appears to identify some correlation between the researcher’s conscious decisions and the behavior of particles in superposition, the assertion among some physicists that “spacetime is doomed,” etc.. These are no more my fields of expertise than they are Hoffman’s. Matthew von Hippel, a doctoral-level physicist and science communicator, addresses these claims much more intelligently than I could in his review of Hoffman’s book: https://4gravitons.com/2024/02/23/book-review-the-case-against-reality/
MY TAKEAWAYS
I don’t know if I strictly believe Hoffman’s conclusions (even the man himself has communicated in interviews that he’s probably off in major ways), but I think many of the points he brings up are both thought-provoking and incredibly relevant to the field of mental health. He demonstrates that our perceptions, thoughts, and emotions are not a one-to-one representation of reality, even though we tend to believe they are. There’s a concept for this in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which I draw from frequently, called cognitive fusion. If we feel fear, we assume that real danger is nearby. If you have the thought, “I’m so stupid,” there’s a tendency to believe that you must be at least partly accurate. Cognitive defusion, one primary goal in ACT, is the process of detangling our beliefs about reality from the truth of reality itself. Our thoughts and feelings are important because they’re real (insofar as they’re really happening to us), and they do signify a reaction to something, but that doesn’t mean you have to absorb them as infallible truths about yourself and the world. To reference Hoffman, we can take our perceptions seriously without taking them literally.
We also tend to view our consciousness as a singular, cohesive whole. People often find it very distressing to be “of two minds” about something, or they feel frustrated with themselves for struggling to change behavior they’ve already identified as unhelpful. Hoffman’s exploration of split-brain patients illustrates that it is very possible for a functional human mind to 1. engage in processes that are not a part of conscious awareness and 2. confidently craft narrative explanations for events and behaviors and be completely wrong.
Unfortunately, once again, we’ve got to give a point to Freud. He was talking about the subconscious from the jump. When you think about it, it does make sense. If we had to consciously decide to execute every bodily process necessary to keep us alive, we’d never have time to do anything else. The brain is constantly doing things in the background that you don’t usually need to worry yourself over, only filling you in when an executive decision needs to be made. (Note: For those interested in learning more about this, strongly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow.)
This tiered method of cognitive processing, where we only get to know what’s going on when there’s a problem to solve, prompts a question: Why are we wrong so much? The discussion of evolutionary psychology in Hoffman’s book emphasizes the reasons why this is the case. Many people misunderstand the concept of “survival of the fittest,” thinking it means that evolution should be popping out killer mega-buff super geniuses. Not so. “Fitness,” in this case, refers to fitness in the environment the creature is in, like how well a shoe fits your foot. A living thing that strikes a balance between calories in and calories out - with enough energy left over to procreate - is a perfect fit. The reason why our brains are so often wrong is because ancestral humanity didn’t get a lot of benefit out of being right. What they did benefit from was adapting well to the environment. Sometimes this involves forming thoughts, beliefs, and behavior patterns that, while not technically based in reality, enable us to move more smoothly through our world. Fitness beats truth.
The big trouble we come across in counseling is that we are no longer ancestral humans. Historically, if we adapted to think and behave in a certain way, we had good reason to expect that the environment those traits developed in was the environment we would be in pretty much forever. At minimum, change was something that happened gradually, over the course of years. Modern humans have created an environment that is constantly changing. Adaptations that were useful in one environment may be entirely counter-productive in the next, but we didn’t evolve to have to change so quickly. Those patterns are sticky. The function of counseling, much of the time, is to assist in expediting the change process using the best methods we have available.
WHY WASTE TIME SAY LOT WORD WHEN FEW WORD DO TRICK (TLDR)
Overall, I liked the book! Kind of a wacky hypothesis this dude’s working with, but who says science can’t be wacky? Definitely made me question reality for a bit, and gave me reason to look at the world with fresh eyes. I revel in the experience of trying on new perspectives, and this one was a doozy. Much of the science he talks about is really interesting on its own, and it reveals a few really fascinating things about human nature (my bread and butter) and our place in the world.
