A wonderful talk by the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman trying to answer the big question: Do we experience the world as it really is … or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.
Donald Hoffman studies how our visual perception, guided by millions of years of natural selection, authors every aspect of our everyday reality. Donald Hoffman will be a keynote presenter at SAND15 in San Jose, CA Oct. 25-27.
In his research to uncover the underlying secrets of human perception, Donald Hoffman has discovered important clues pointing to the subjective nature of reality.
Rather than as a set of absolute physical principles, reality is best understood as a set of phenomena our brain constructs to guide our behavior. To put it simply: we actively create everything we see, and there is no aspect of reality that does not depend on consciousness.
Hoffman is a faculty member at UC Irvine and a recipient of the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.
