What Your Eyes Hide From You — And Why

There's one thing you have never doubted: when you open your eyes, what you see is what's there. But what if your perception was tuned not to truth, but to survival? In Western Australia, male jewel beetles mistook a beer bottle for a female and wouldn't leave the glass. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman built a theory on mistakes like that: the world you see is an interface, like the desktop on a computer. His critics disagree. What remains when you hear both sides? Sources: — Gwynne & Rentz, Beetles on the bottle, J. Aust. Ent. Soc., 1983 — Mark, Marion & Hoffman, Natural selection and veridical perceptions, J. Theor. Biol., 2010 — Hoffman, Singh & Prakash, The interface theory of perception, Psychon. Bull. Rev., 2015 (with commentaries) — Prakash et al., Fitness beats truth in the evolution of perception, Acta Biotheoretica, 2020/2021 — Berke, Walter-Terrill, Jara-Ettinger & Scholl, Cognitive Science, 2022 — Bagwell, Synthese, 2023; Hoffman & Singh, J. Consciousness Studies, 2024 — Króliczak, Heard, Goodale & Gregory, Brain Research, 2006 — Fine et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2003; Huber et al., Psychological Science, 2015 — Dalton & Wysocki, Perception & Psychophysics, 1996 — Tinbergen & Perdeck, Behaviour, 1950; J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1934) — D. Hoffman, TED 2015 “Do we see reality as it is?”; interview, Quanta Magazine, 2016 Chapters: 00:00 One thing you never doubted 02:19 Beetles on the bottle 04:29 Are we machines? 06:43 Truth goes extinct 09:43 The desktop 12:34 What the paper says 14:57 Many goals 17:10 Who stands outside? 18:56 What nobody disputes 21:15 What isn't there for you 23:12 Thirst 25:01 The account 25:51 What remains