Abstract

Donald Hoffman, in his book The Case Against Reality and in a number of scientific publications (together with several coauthors), has argued that we see none of reality veridically. Supposedly, evolution unavoidably drives organisms with even partially veridical perception to extinction. This conclusion was claimed to follow both from evolutionary game theory-based simulations and from abstract mathematical work. I analyze these arguments in more detail than has been done before, leading to what seem to be novel objections to it: On the one hand, I show that simulations that incorporate aspects of evolution that Hoffman himself acknowledges as valid, yield results inconsistent with Hoffman’s claim. On the other hand, I point out that the attempted inference from the mathematical theorem to Hoffman’s conclusion suffers from a number of problems, including that it relies on an assumption that begs the question against the realist.