Donald D. Hoffman
Donald David Hoffman (born December 29, 1955) is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
Hoffman studies Consciousness, visual perception, and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and color, the evolution of perception, and the mind–body problem. He has co-authored two technical books; Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception (1989) offers a theory of consciousness and its relationship to physics; Automotive Lighting and Human Vision (2005) applies vision science to vehicle lighting. His book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (1998) presents the modern science of visual perception to a broad audience.
His 2015 TED Talk, “Do we see reality as it is?” argues that our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us. He followed this up with a book in 2019, “The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes”.
The interface theory of perception, proposed by Donald Hoffman, suggests that our perception is not a truthful, detailed representation of reality, but rather an evolutionary user interface, like a computer’s desktop, that hides complexity to guide adaptive behavior. This theory argues that perception has been shaped by natural selection to optimize for “fitness,” or survival and reproduction, not for accurately seeing the world as it is. Under this model, our perceptions are useful icons that have been selected for their functional utility, not for their verisimilitude to reality itself.
Key concepts
- Evolutionary function: Perception is a product of evolution and has been shaped by natural selection to favor useful actions over accurate representations of reality.
- User interface analogy: The theory uses the analogy of a computer’s desktop interface, which uses icons (like a file folder) to represent complex files, while hiding the underlying code. Similarly, our perception uses simplified icons to represent reality, hiding its true, complex nature to guide us.
- Fitness over truth: The primary goal of perception is to guide behavior that increases fitness, not to provide a veridical (truthful) view of the world.
- Species-specific: Each species has its own unique interface, tailored to its specific ecological niche and the actions it needs to perform to survive. For example, a hungry cheetah and a cow would perceive a piece of beef differently because the fitness consequences are different for each organism.
AI responses may include mistakes.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26384988/
[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-44039-001
[3] https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/interface.pdf
[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans-evolve-to-see-things-as-they-really-are/
[5] https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/Hoffman-Stevens-Handbook.pdf