Three Charges Against Reality

There's something for scientists and for beatniks. The common thread: reality isn't what you think. Here we go.

Science first: I discovered Don Hoffman on this Lex Fridman podcast. He's a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California. The thesis of his book The Case Against Reality is simple: evolution doesn't care about truth. Working from models grounded in evolutionary game theory, he concludes that our perception of the world is biased toward survival. In other words, our brain has no qualms about ignoring or distorting the truth as long as it gives us an adaptive edge. It's not its fault: millions of years of evolution programmed it that way.

So a species that perceived every subtle variation in a signal could be at a disadvantage against one that saw things in a much more black-and-white way (red = danger!), but much easier to process in an emergency. In this race – as in many others – neither aesthetes nor poets survive.

On the beatnik side, I've been working my way through Seeing That Frees by the late Rob Burbea for over a year.

I'd describe it as an advanced meditation book centered on the notion of "emptiness", which I've talked about here before. The core idea is that reality is much less real than we imagine. We're convinced there's a "solid" material world that lasts over time and goes on existing when we stop looking at it. Through a series of meditations on impermanence, non-attachment and dependent arising, Rob Burbea shows that reality is partly an inner fabrication, built and unbuilt as consciousness moves. He teaches us to use different ways of seeing the world as tools we can pick up and put down, to gain freedom.

To my friends, I sum these ideas up in one sentence: "reality is made of the thoughts you can't get rid of." The day I understood that, a lot of things changed.

Finally, somewhere between science, philosophy and New Age, there's Why Materialism Is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup.

Kastrup started out as a Brazilian computer engineering researcher who worked at CERN, among other places. When he set out to build a "conscious" computer program, he got interested in the problem of consciousness from a philosophical angle, and came out of it with a metaphysical theory that brings idealism back into fashion. His idea goes like this: today, it's impossible to understand how matter creates consciousness – David Chalmers's famous "hard problem". So he flips it around: consciousness creates matter. The laws of physics would no longer follow from the standard model, but would be regularities in a shared consciousness that each of us perceives only part of. According to him, we "think" matter. It sounds a bit crazy, but his whole point is to show, through an Occam's razor kind of argument, why it's "less crazy" than the materialist hypothesis.

Of course, we're deep in metaphysics here, so none of this will change how you pick your socks in the morning anytime soon. But eventually, it should.

UPDATE: All these thoughts led me to imagine the film "Permis de Conscience" (Consciousness License) – which I'll probably never make.