A Case Against Reality and For Meditation
The world you see might be an interface like your desktop
It’s been over 18 months since I read Donald Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. I can still vividly remember it, and it keeps haunting me. Albeit in a good way.
The main argument of the book is the following:
We don’t perceive reality as it is. We have no idea, what reality looks like.
Natural selection has shaped our experience to be what it is. We only see things the way they are, because it proved to be useful. Hoffman shows that the chance of evolving an accurate view of reality is tiny. It’s utility over truth. Because if truth was the rule, we wouldn’t have survived.
Hoffman echoes Steven Pinker’s words:
We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.
To illustrate this, Hoffman uses the analogy of computers. What we see is like a user interface. We interact with a desktop, which shows folders, files, and apps. But we don’t have access to the hardware below. The desktop itself is useful and easy to use. It makes us survive. But it bears little relation to the structure below.
Or in Hoffman’s own words:
Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
What a radical take, isn’t it?
But it’s an argument after all. You can read it, and forget about it.
Because, when you’re honest: Life feels real. It catches your attention.
The question of whether it is what it is, plays little role in day-to-day life.
You simply wake up and live it. And this proves Hoffman’s point.
But not seeing the desktop for what it is creates unnecessary suffering. We get so lost in files and folders, forgetting to have fun with them.
Forgetting that we are not the software itself.
It’s a good idea to see the truth of these claims ourselves. To understand them on a deep level.
Meditation lets us achieve this.
Because when we stop and pay close attention to what we experience, we can see the interface as interface. What we recognize is the following:
- All you have is your experience of the world. You never see the essence or hardware of things. There’s nothing else but your consciousness of the world.
- Your experience is patchy, illusionary, and prone to error. It creates identities and objects, where none are.
- When you’re in a deep concentrated state, it’s possible that all sensory inputs stop. You face the emptiness below. Fully alert.
- There is a part of you that is aware of experience. A knowing, spacious, groundless part.
- This awareness is free of what it perceives, although it is not different from it.
What meditation gives you then is looking at your interface with fresh eyes. Accepting that it’s your experience and all you have. But it also lets you taste the hardware beneath.
Hoffman’s conclusion underlines this:
Consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.
This consciousness, in all its emptiness, is the subject and object of meditation.
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Thank you for reading.
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