Box of delight

Cognitive scientist Donald H. Hoffman asserts that not only do we invent our own personal views of reality, it’s an evolutionary 

necessity.

Professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine Donald H. Hoffman has doubts that reality is much like what we think it is. We live in a mental construction, he says, a sort of utilitarian fantasy, of our own devising. And it’s not a problem that it may not be a true representation of reality — in fact, it may be evolutionarily necessary. His study, “Natural selection and verdical perceptions” concludes, among other things, that “perceptual information is shaped by natural selection to reflect utility, not to depict reality.”