The Idea of Ideas sorts Hoffman cleanly. Evolved perception is empirical. His simulations are rational. The claim that perception has no meaningful correspondence with reality is speculative. The claim that consciousness creates spacetime is even more speculative. His reliance on math as a kind of proof is a common mistake in science. The major error here is only in presenting a speculative idea, a hypothesis, as something more.
Here are the details.
First, Donald Hoffman starts with a good idea. We do not experience reality raw. Evolution shaped our senses to simplify the world and guide behavior, but the map is not the territory. That part is within established science.
His evolutionary simulations are interesting too, but they remain models. His models that are disconnected from reality are speculative and false in a logical setting. His models that show empirical patterns are rationally true. That part of his work is also well within established science, but let’s be clear about which models model reality and which ones model the speculative ideas of Hoffman.
Where I part ways with Hoffman is his claim that evolved perceptions have no meaningful connection to reality. His argument treats fitness and truth as though they are opposites. They are not. A gazelle does not need to understand a lion fully to react. Evolution evolved many triggers for survival. Evolution may favor simplified truth over exhaustive, but survival still requires enough correspondence with reality to act successfully.
And as I concluded in chapter 22 of 30 Philosophers, whether this world is base reality, a simulation, or something stranger, it is still the only material world. Hoffman takes the possibility of a deeper reality and mistakenly uses it to undermine the reality already beneath his feet.
