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Donald D. Hoffman

Donald David Hoffman · born 1955

Gegenwartsdenken & BewusstseinWestenGegenwart (ab 1980)

Kognitionswissenschaftler: Wahrnehmung als Benutzeroberfläche, nicht als Fenster zur Realität.

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Scientific context and criticism

The interface theory was published with peer commentaries in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2015). Several commentators found the evolutionary models interesting but argued that the conclusions are overstated: that 'not seeing the truth' does not follow from the simulations, that the theory risks undermining the science it relies on, or that it drifts toward an untestable idealism. Conscious realism is a philosophical proposal and has not been confirmed experimentally. Hoffman has replied to these critiques in print.

Sources for this note

Life

Donald Hoffman is an American cognitive scientist and professor emeritus in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He earned his PhD at MIT and worked for decades on visual perception, shape and motion recognition; Visual Intelligence (1998) explains for general readers how the brain constructs what we see. Using evolutionary game simulations with colleagues, he argued that natural selection favours perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth (the interface theory of perception). He goes further with 'conscious realism', the proposal that consciousness, not space-time and objects, is fundamental. He set these ideas out in The Case Against Reality (2019).

The system

  • Interface theory: what we see are 'desktop icons' useful for survival, not the objects themselves.
  • 'Fitness beats truth': evolutionary simulations used as the argument.
  • Conscious realism: networks of 'conscious agents' as the basic level of reality.

Key works

  • Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (1998) Amazon
  • The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (2019) Amazon

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Where to start

  • The Case Against Reality, then the 2015 Psychonomic Bulletin & Review debate for the counter-arguments.

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Explain Donald Hoffman's interface theory of perception with the desktop-icon analogy.
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Sources