In my opinion, if you’re going to propose a radical new theory about reality, you really need to get the known details right. Donald Hoffman is the proposer, suggesting that we scarcely glimpse reality at all – just enough to survive, really – but then he throws in this whopper in an article in NewScientist (3 August 2019, paywall):
The objection that a lion must be objectively real because anyone who looks over there sees a lion that we can all agree looks like a lion – so it isn’t unique to our subjective experience – isn’t a valid one, either. Humans agree about what we see because we have all evolved a similar interface. The interfaces of some other species, such as prey mammals, may have icons for lions that are similar to ours, and that guide actions similar to ours, such as keeping far away from them.
Excuse me, but I haven’t evolved anything tangible. My species certainly has, but that collective evolution makes our sensory apparatus – or interface – more or less identical, with the exception of those still changing, either randomly (and therefore irrelevantly), or in response to evolutionary pressures.
The balance of the article postulates that there’s something deeper than reality going on out there. I find what they’re talking about to be congruent with my on-again, off-again theory that we’re all in a computer simulator which features a late-resolution feature at the quantum level.
