Donald D. Hoffman
Before getting to The Case Against Reality, we need to talk about my favourite read this year – “Being You“. The second half of that book has some reality-shattering theses. One of them is ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.’ Reality is thus an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Not to know the world, but to survive it! The end of the book also brings up the fascinating FEP (free energy principle) and specifically how it applies to living systems and consciousness. In this context, it boils down to this – being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Any living system, to resist entropy, must occupy states which it expects to be in. Biology meets physics. Why am I bringing this up? Because The Case Against Reality touches upon both of these aspects I was fascinated by.
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