
The Case Against Reality
Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
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Narrated by:
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Timothy Andrés Pabon
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By:
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Donald Hoffman
About this listen
Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth?
Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.
Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease.
The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 by Donald Hoffman. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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The Conscious Mind
- In Search of a Fundamental Theory
- By: David J. Chalmers
- Narrated by: George Cunningham
- Length: 20 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning? These questions today are among the most hotly debated issues among scientists and philosophers. Philosopher David J. Chalmers offers a cogent analysis of this heated debate as he unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.
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Chalmers' search for Consciousness
- By SelfishWizard on 11-16-21
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Spooky Action at a Distance
- The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time-and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything
- By: George Musser
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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What is space? It isn't a question that most of us normally stop to ask. Space is the venue of physics; it's where things exist, where they move and take shape. Yet over the past few decades, physicists have discovered a phenomenon that operates outside the confines of space and time. The phenomenon - the ability of one particle to affect another instantly across the vastness of space - appears to be almost magical.
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Rambling but Asks Good Questions
- By Michael on 12-19-15
By: George Musser
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Lights On
- How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe
- By: Annaka Harris
- Narrated by: Annaka Harris
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
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Is consciousness a fundamental building block of the universe, like gravity? Can humans develop new senses through neuroscience? And can artificial intelligence ever truly replicate the subjective experience of being conscious? Join Annaka Harris as she calls on distinguished experts in science and philosophy to find answers to today’s most perplexing questions about our minds and the universe at large.
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Disappointed
- By Amazon Customer on 04-01-25
By: Annaka Harris
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Consciousness, 2nd Edition
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Susan Blackmore
- Narrated by: Zehra Jane Naqvi
- Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing the debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories, while also outlining the amazing pace of discoveries in neuroscience. Covering areas such as the construction of self in the brain, mechanisms of attention, the neural correlates of consciousness, and the physiology of altered states of consciousness, Susan Blackmore highlights our latest findings.
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Biased in its conclusions, judgemental of conflicting opinions while still having a lot of science in there
- By Robert B Hayes on 10-30-24
By: Susan Blackmore
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Surfaces and Essences
- Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
- By: Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 33 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over 30 years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.
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An analogy to describe this 33-hour book
- By George C. on 11-08-19
By: Douglas Hofstadter, and others
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Complexity
- The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
- By: M. Mitchell Waldrop
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
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You won't learn anything you didn't know
- By Dennis E. Alwine on 12-26-20
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The Fabric of Reality
- The Science of Parallel Universes - and Its Implications
- By: David Deutsch
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Author of the New York Times best seller The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, explores the four most fundamental strands of human knowledge: quantum physics, and the theories of knowledge, computation, and evolution - and their unexpected connections. Taken together, these four strands reveal a deeply integrated, rational, and optimistic worldview. It describes a unified fabric of reality that is objective and comprehensible, in which human action and thought are central.
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Such a disappointment
- By Philip Cziao on 01-27-19
By: David Deutsch
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The Holographic Universe
- The Revolutionary Theory of Reality
- By: Michael Talbot
- Narrated by: Nick Mondelli
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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Nearly everyone is familiar with holograms - three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Two of the world's most eminent thinkers believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. University of London physicist David Bohm, one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, an architect of our modern understanding of the brain, have developed a remarkable new way of looking at the universe.
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Fail
- By Vadim Tarnovsky on 05-16-21
By: Michael Talbot
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The Quantum Labyrinth
- How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality
- By: Paul Halpern
- Narrated by: Brian Troxell
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1939, Richard Feynman, a brilliant graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. A lifelong friendship and enormously productive collaboration was born, despite sharp differences in personality. The soft-spoken Wheeler, though conservative in appearance, was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe. The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested. Yet they were complementary spirits.
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Neither Fish Nor Fowl
- By Brooklyn on 12-02-17
By: Paul Halpern
Accompanying PDF Is now Available!
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“The accompanying pdf”
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The theory goes like this. Imagine five people are looking at an apple. The apple can be said to exist objectively because it exists outside our personal experience. What the author explores is the possibility that each observation can be considered a separate personal experience and therefore subjective.
The premise is there is no such thing as an objective experience because each instance is processed subjectively, and collectively evolution has provided a distortion of reality that increases health and fitness at the cost of seeing a true representation of reality.
At first glance this may seem absurd. The book however, provides a convincing case, and we may need to accept that our senses may be catered to survivability and not to accuracy of what is real.
Recommended as an outside the box way of thinking.
Objective Reality May Be a Myth
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Amazing Book
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Built a foundation for consciousness as the more fundamental reality then what is perceived by limited senses.
Resonated very well with the scientific 10th century texts on consciousness in Kashmir Shaivism. These texts could show a way forward for building the grand unification models
A bold attempt towards a grander unification
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Paradox in everyday perception revealed.
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Consciousness is fundamental
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I felt that the explanations were far to many for someone who has read much of the same before. However it was very well performed and I think that if you are just digging in this is highly recommended.
Simple idea - overly (but entertainingly) explained
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This "feels" like a first book. The author posits an incredible hypothesis but the book is laid out somewhat haphazardly and meanders to topics away from the main point. For example, why create a whole chapter on optical illusions when we can all admit our eyes can deceive us?
Here's a brief summary of the book:
"We have a startling hypothesis that was confirmed by an evolutionary simulation, let's repeat that fact for 5 chapters. Also, remember that weird box thing you drew in 3rd grade... that actually proves nothing exists. Congrats for finishing! Your prize is a tomato... one meter away from your face. Can't find it? - look to the accompanying PDF*"
So... yeah, having just finished the book, I admit my annoyance BUT this isn't to say the book is unscientific or without merit.
Are you interested in the subject but don't want to waste time? Listen to chapters 1, 2, 6, and 10. Chapter 6 was my favorite because it directly addresses physics.
If you're scientifically minded and are intrigued by the idea, it's worth your time. If you're on the fence, maybe not.
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* Spoiler alert: Audible does not provide the accompanying PDF
Fascinating hyptothesis, filled with fluff
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Surely we're on the smooth cusp of something
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