Book Review: The Case Against Reality by Donald D Hoffman

It just is. The idea is consciousness is reality and so must exist.

By consciousness it basically means your thoughts, feelings and perceptions.

These kind of views in modern times tend to come from Descartes. Descartes found he could doubt the physical world and the contents of his own perceptions but he could not doubt that he was a thinking thing, because to doubt was to think. Therefore for Descartes thought/consciousness is the foundation for establishing what reality is.

A while later, Kant argued that reality is essentially divided into two worlds - the phenomenal world, which is how things appear to our senses, and the noumenal world, which is how things actually are. He argued that empiricism can only really tell us about the phenomenal and that the noumenal was closed off to us - we speculate as to what it contained but we could never verify if we were right. The phenomenal is of course fully dependent on consciousness.

From the late 19th Century, physicalism became the dominant metaphysics in philosophy - the idea that everything, consciousness included, is ultimately physical in nature. It was also believed that empiricism was a good guide to how things actually are and so Kant's phenomenal/noumenal distinction was largely rejected.

The major push-back against physicalism arose with philosophers like Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers developing the 'hard problem of consciousness' - since consciousness is essentially subjective, there is no objective scientific test which could demonstrate what physical element, if any, gives rise to the subjective elements of consciousness. There have been various responses to this hard problem, such as: dismissing these subjective elements of consciousness as worth consideration; assuming that subjectivity is simply a feature of a certain configuration of certain physical components, in the same way that 'slipperiness' is a feature of frozen water molecules; declaring the whole thing unsolvable; reinvigorating dualism; strange ideas like panpsychism and neutral monism; and arguing that the subjective form of consciousness is the only reality.

Hoffman casts doubt on physicalist responses to the hard problem of consciousness - since our understanding of the physical comes from our own perceptions, and natural selection would cause our perceptions to favour fitness over truth, we cannot rely on that understanding - all we have is our consciousness and its perceptions. So we're back at Kant. However, unlike Kant, Hoffman proposes forgetting about the noumenal entirely - if there is an underlying reality it's inaccessible to us, Occam's Razor suggests we should just discard it and say the phenomenal is all there is.


You do though presumably have no problem assuming the physical is just "out there"? With any attempt to define reality, there needs to be at least one thing that simply just is. Hoffman is weird because he assumes that this is consciousness rather than the physical which is the common sense view, but he makes no greater a leap in doing so.