Donald Hoffman
Cognitive Scientist, UC Irvine
About
Donald Hoffman is professor emeritus in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine, where he earned his doctorate in computational psychology from MIT in 1983 under David Marr and Whitman Richards. His interface theory of perception holds that perceptual experience does not match or approximate the properties of the objective world, but provides a simplified, species-specific interface. With Chetan Prakash, Kyle Stephens, Manish Singh and Chris Fields he proved the Fitness-Beats-Truth theorem, which shows that a strategy maximising expected fitness payoff — making no attempt to estimate the true state of the world — consistently outperforms one that tries to perceive reality accurately. From this he argues for conscious realism, a non-physicalist monism in which consciousness is fundamental and physical particles are icons inside a conscious agent's interface. He wrote Visual Intelligence (1998) and The Case Against Reality (2019).
Key Contributions
- Formulated the interface theory of perception: what we see is a species-specific interface, not an approximation of the world
- Co-proved the Fitness-Beats-Truth theorem, giving the claim a formal result rather than an intuition, and showing the advantage grows with the size of the perceptual space
- Proposed conscious realism, in which consciousness is fundamental and spacetime is not
- Wrote The Case Against Reality, which put evolutionary game theory and the hard problem of consciousness in the same argument for general readers
- Trained under David Marr, whose computational theory of vision his own work departs from at the foundations
- The leap from the formal theorem to conscious realism is where most of his critics part company: the mathematics does not carry you all the way to the metaphysics
