Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine argues that what humans believe they see is more illusion than reality. An article published in The Atlantic discusses Hoffman's conclusions from 30 years of research.
His conclusions are stark: “The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.”
From the cognitive science point of view, the aptly named “hard problem” is understanding how a human brain operating with ordinary laws of physics gives rise to first-person conscious experience. From the physicist's point of view an object doesn't have an objective independent existence until an observer comes along and observes it. Physicist John Wheeler puts it like this: “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”
The Atlantic article observes that “getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. . . . . So while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality.”
Hoffman points out that “evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger [an evolutionary threat] would eat you.”
The bit about hiding stuff from us refers to the process discussed in The User Illusion by which the unconscious mind discards information such that our conscious minds and reason are aware of only a small trickle of reality.
Hoffman's comments on objective reality: “I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.”
Implications for politics: For the most part, modern civilization doesn't present the same survival threats that humans faced in evolution. Americans rarely have to run away from predators and they usually buy food and clothing in stores instead of hunting and gathering those things to survive. The cognitive capacities that supported early human survival aren't necessarily the same as what might be needed for peaceful, stable societies and nations. Despite that, we have what evolution gave us and that's all there is.
If our cognitive abilities routinely yield perceptions of reality that are little or nothing like objective reality, then it's reasonable to believe that fact and reality distortion applies to politics as much as it applies to other human endeavors.
Questions: If humans evolved to distort reality and to apply distorted or biased reason to what we think we see, is there any point in attempting to separate truth from falsity or to try to apply less biased conscious reason to the distorted realities we think we see? Is truth even relevant to politics or to long term human survival?
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