What is reality?

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman has researched perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain.

He believes that the world we see and experience through our senses is nothing like reality.

As someone who has been interested in heuristics and System 1 and System 2 thinking, I found this really interesting because there’s an evolutionary component. According to Hoffman,

“Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you. We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive…”

In other words, if we took too much time to understand reality, we wouldn’t react quickly enough to survive, so we’ve been programmed to not see everything that is out there.

What do you think we might be missing?