Is Reality Really Real? With Donald Hoffman

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:00)
Coming up on StarTalk's special edition, is reality real?

**Gary O'Reilly** (0:05)
Do you want it to be?

**Chuck Nice** (0:06)
I'm gonna say no, because then I do not owe anything to Visa.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:11)
Coming up, what neuroscience says about the nature of reality, StarTalk special edition. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
This is StarTalk special edition. Today, we're gonna be exploring the nature of reality.

**Gary O'Reilly** (0:42)
Really?

**Chuck Nice** (0:45)
Really reality.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:47)
We got Gary O'Reilly. Gary, right to my right, former soccer pro, announcer and my co-host. And we got actor-comedian Chuck Nice.

**Chuck Nice** (0:57)
Yes.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (0:57)
How you doing, man? Oh, the Lord of Nice.

**Chuck Nice** (0:59)
The Lord of Nice. Wow, I've never... Well, okay.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:01)
Yeah, yeah. I like that. Deal with it. So set the picture here. What did you put together?

**Gary O'Reilly** (1:06)
In theoretical physics, they often ask questions about the nature of reality. But what about looking at reality from the neuroscience lens?
Today, we're going to talk about the limits to our perception, the role of consciousness, and the nature of reality itself. Yes, Neil, time to bring in our guest. This one's going to go deep, so I'm looking forward to it.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:28)
All right, let's see where it takes us. We've got Professor Donald Hoffman. Donald, welcome to StarTalk.

**Donald Hoffman** (1:33)
Thank you very much, Neil. Good to be with you, all of you.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (1:36)
Yeah, you're Professor Emeritus. You're not that old. In the Department of Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine, right there in Irvine, California, you're obviously a cognitive neuroscientist and an author. I have most recently here, and if you have another book, let me know, The Case Against Reality.
Shots fired.

**Chuck Nice** (1:57)
Let me tell you, I'm an expert in that.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:00)
Shots fired. How evolution hid the truth from our eyes.

**Chuck Nice** (2:06)
Love it. I love it.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:09)
All right. So what are you saying?
We don't really see the full picture? I mean, I agree with you. Who would disagree with that? But you're bringing in evolution to blame for this. So can you catch us up on what you mean by that?

**Donald Hoffman** (2:24)
That's right. So the standard view is that evolution shapes organisms to be fit.
And surely to be fit, we should see the world pretty accurately. Right? You want to see a cliff. If there's a cliff and not fall off, you want to see what is a mate and so forth. So...

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:42)
Just to be clear, when you say fit, you don't mean like in a fitness center.

**Chuck Nice** (2:46)
No. Right.
It's not a crunch gym thing.

**Donald Hoffman** (2:49)
It's not a crunch.

**Chuck Nice** (2:50)
Right.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (2:51)
Please remind us what evolutionarily, what the word fit means.

**Donald Hoffman** (2:55)
That's right. So in Darwin's theory, fitness really means the chance that you're going to have offspring successfully. So fitness is really one thing. What's the probability that you will survive long enough to raise your offspring successfully? That's what it means.

**Chuck Nice** (3:11)
Wow.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:11)
Okay.

**Chuck Nice** (3:12)
Clearly Darwin had no children.
Because he would know, they will kill you. And I don't mean like murder. I mean just have them.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:20)
We'll kill you.

**Chuck Nice** (3:23)
Okay.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:24)
So we're trained to not run off the cliff, to run the opposite direction of lions. What else are we really good at?

**Donald Hoffman** (3:32)
Well, avoiding poisons and things like that, finding right mates. So we're not... We don't try to mate with trees or rocks or things like that. So we...

**Chuck Nice** (3:40)
Speak for yourself there, Don.
I'm sorry, guys. I'm sorry. I had to do that.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:48)
You did.

**Gary O'Reilly** (3:49)
And so many people have conjured up an image of a drunken Saturday night.

**Chuck Nice** (3:54)
I'm sorry. Go ahead, Don. Continue.

**Neil deGrasse Tyson** (3:56)
Right.

**Donald Hoffman** (3:57)
So the standard view, not only among people who are sort of just partially acquainted with evolutionary theory, but for people who are deeply acquainted with the theory, is to assume that Darwin's theory entails that most of the time we see reality as it is. Of course, not all of the time. There are illusions and so forth. But the idea would be, if you're going to be fit in Darwin's sense of being reproductively successful, then you need to see reality as it is. And what I have done with some colleagues, Chetan Prakash, Ramesh Singh and others, is to look at the mathematics of evolution. It turns out Darwin wasn't the mathematician, but a century after he published his theory, mathematicians turned it into mathematics, and it's called evolutionary game theory. John Maynard Smith and others worked on this. So we can now ask specific mathematical questions of Darwin's theory. And the answer when we look at the mathematics is that the probability is zero, that any organism has ever been shaped at any time to see any aspect of objective reality as it is, it's just precisely zero. I didn't expect that when I went into it. I expected to have the answer be that we saw reality some of the time, but maybe not as often as we thought we would. Steven Pinker has published a paper on that idea. He has some good arguments for why there are pressures from evolution not to see reality as it is.