The Case Against Reality Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about understanding how the world as we perceive it is not based on truth, but fitness. Fitness is the maximisation of survivability. It takes our cognitive science and applies the acid of Darwin´s theory of evolution to it.

🎨 Impressions

I liked the book for sure. I had good experiences reading it, and it resonated with me. I found the impact of this book to be quite profound, as I have thought about the books premise a lot after reading and understand more about the actual impact of the teachings of the book. Seeing everything through the lens of: "We are evolved to look at things this way," rather than "This is the way things are" has drastically changed my perception of the world.
I got a new way of thinking about how we are perceiving the world. Fitness beats the truth.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Each hemisphere has 43 billion neurons.
On the other hand, we differ from rocks in two key respects. First, we experience sensations. We taste chocolate, suffer headaches, smell garlic, hear trumpets, see tomatoes, feel dizzy, and enjoy orgasms. If rocks have orgasms, they’re not letting on. Second, we have “propositional attitudes,” such as the belief that rocks don’t have headaches, the fear that stocks might fall, the wish to vacation in Tahiti, and the wonder why Chris won’t
Double helix of DNA, which proved the vitalists wrong. This structure, with its four-letter code and penchant for replication, brilliantly solved the problem of cooking up life, mechanistically, from purely physical ingredients.
Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness?
But evolution disagrees. We will see in chapter four that evolution by natural selection entails a counterintuitive theorem: the probability is zero that we see reality as it is
Century after Hume, Darwin laid the foundation—evolution by natural selection—for a psychology that explains why: beauty is a perception of fitness payoffs on offer, such as the payoff for eating that apple or dating that person.
Male jewel beetles, Julodimorpha bakewelli, have a thing for beautiful females. The males fly about, searching for females, which are shiny, dimpled, and brown. Recently, some male primates of the Homo sapiens species have been driving through the beetle’s haunts in Western Australia and littering the outback with emptied beer bottles, known as “stubbies.” As it happened, some of the stubbies were shiny, dimpled, and just the right shade of brown to catch the fancy of male beetles. Forsaking real females, the male beetles swooned over stubbies with their genitalia everted, and doggedly tried to mate despite glassy rebuffs. (A classic case of the male leaving the female for the bottle.) Adding injury to insult, ants of the species Iridomyrmex discors learned to loiter near stubbies, wait for the befuddled and priapistic beetles, and then devour them, genitalia first, as they failed to have their way. The poor beetles teetered on extinction, and Australia had to change its beer bottles to save its beetles.
It’s all about struggles between genes. Which is to say, it’s all about fitness—the central concept of evolution by natural selection. Genes that are more adept at elbowing their way into the next generation are said to be fitter.
Oscar Wilde understood this logic well. “Moderation,” he wrote, “is a fatal thing. . . . Nothing succeeds like excess.”
The white sclera of the human eye advertises gaze direction, making it a tool for social communication. It also advertises emotion and health. The sclera is covered by the conjunctiva, a thin membrane containing tiny blood vessels.
Discovery that genes influence our emotions and behaviour does not justify an oppressive status quo any more than the discovery that genes influence cancer justifies cancer.
The term qualia is sometimes used by philosophers to refer to subjective, conscious experiences—what it’s like to see the redness of red or smell the aroma of coffee.
This is spelled out in the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem, which I conjectured and Chetan Prakash proved.
Dennett was right—Darwin’s idea is a “universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionised world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognisable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”
Similarly, the psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have found that our logical reasoning works best when we argue with others.
Players of Minecraft grow ever more adept at dealing with its worlds. But they do so by mastering an interface, not by growing ever closer to the truth.
Ever since 1911, when Ernest Rutherford discovered that the atom is mostly empty space, with just a tiny nucleus at its center, physicists have told us that reality is quite different from what we see.
This confluence of physics and evolution has not been obvious. In 1987, William Bartley described a conference in which the physicist John Wheeler presented his take on quantum theory. Sir Karl Popper, a famous philosopher of science, “turned to him and quietly said: ‘What you say is contradicted by biology.’ It was a dramatic moment. . . . And then the biologists . . . broke into delighted applause. It was as if someone had finally said what they had been thinking.”
Quantum theory smashed our intuitions about objects, by denying that they have definite values of physical properties that are independent of whether, or how, they are observed.
“There is no spoon.” —SPOON BOY, THE MATRIX
Science can demystify the exotic. This talent leads to new technology—from cell phones to satellites—which can seem, in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, “indistinguishable from magic.” Science can also mystify the mundane. It can plunge us without warning down a rabbit hole of the curious and curiouser.
Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton said, “I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.”
For instance, Dennis Proffitt and his collaborators found that people given a drink containing glucose make shorter estimates of distance than those given a drink containing no carbohydrates (and, instead, an artificial sweetener); people who are more aerobically fit make shorter estimates of distance than those who are less fit. This suggests that our perception of a distance depends not just on the energy cost, but rather on the ratio of the energy cost to our available energy.
Two dimensions contain all the information in any 3D space.
Most plants have a blue receptor that regulates their circadian rhythms, such as their daily opening and closing of leaves. This receptor, cryptochrome, is the same receptor that regulates the circadian rhythms of animals, including humans.
Plants can also get “jet lag.” If you artificially shift the time of day when they receive blue light, they take a few days to adjust their rhythms, so that their leaves again open and close in synchrony with the light.
Watson’s interface was no less dynamic than ours: “The shape changes with each moment, just as flavor does. . . . French cooking is my favorite precisely because it makes the shapes change in fabulous ways.”
Phenomenon known as “change blindness.” We hunt in vain, until we happen to stumble upon a difference, whereupon we can’t help but see it thereafter.
A male Homo sapiens doesn’t just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au naturel; if the implants impart an upper convexity not seen in nature, he likes it far more. A caricature of a face isn’t just identified as well as a photograph, it is identified more quickly.
Evolution shapes the perceptions of an organism to track fitness—not truth—as cheaply as possible given the demands of its niche. Supernormal stimuli hint at the resulting codes for fitness. In its niche, a herring-gull chick can succeed with a simple code: a larger red disk means a better chance for food.
“Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.” —JALALUDDIN RUMI
“Cognitive neuroscience reveals that the vast majority of our mental processes are unconscious. We are unaware of the sophisticated processes by which we understand and produce speech, make decisions, learn, walk, understand, or transform images at the eye into visual worlds. Surely this vast swath of unconscious processing contradicts the claim of conscious realism that reality consists entirely of conscious agents.