Cognitive scientist explains why perceiving a false reality is beneficial

There are many wrong ways to sense the world around you, and one of them is the best way to ensure your survival. Amanda Gefter of Quanta Magazine interviewed Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine.

Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. Whats more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

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But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organisms survival?

Hoffman: Theres a metaphor thats only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and thats the desktop interface. Suppose theres a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computers desktop does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldnt possibly be true. Thats an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I dont need to know. Thats the key idea. 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 dont need to know. And thats pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.