Do we see reality as it is? | Donald Hoffman | TED 

I used to wonder if the objects in my house existed when I was away; now I'm wondering if they exist when I'm at home.

I love that science is trying to tackle consciousness and reality now.

If my perception is real, this was a fascinating TED talk. Loved it!

Each and every person that ever existed has had a unique perspective of every moment of their existence. Even two people in the back of the crowd in this video sitting side by side, their view is almost identical just the smallest degree of difference but the difference does exist. Now if my first sentence is true then as our reality is based on our perspective we have to see that each and every person has had their own absolutely unique reality. So now we arrive at the thought that when we look at a society we are seeing a galaxy of realities all of them separate and unique. So when we say that someone is mentally ill because they have suffered a break from reality, then the question must be whose reality?

"enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true." - Adyashanti.

He was my first year and favorite professor at UCI in 2008. :)

The Universe is a vast consciousness, and we are all connected individual parts of this consciousness. We cannot see this while we are going through the human experience, but when we 'move-on' (die), that's when our perceptions expand and the blinkers come off, so we experience reality as it is. That's my take. Keeps me sane while going through this insane human experience 😃

The more I listen to hoffman the more sense he makes. This subject is insane and fascinating and also a accurate description. This makes total sense when you think about it and look at physics

The reality we see is not matter, it is “what matters”

This is probably the best TED talk I watched in my life.

We only see a very small amount in the visual spectrum, there are frequencies in the audio spectrum we can't hear as well,there you go.They have proved that photons ,which is light,behaves differently when observerd with the human eye,that is mind blowing.

I have always felt that we as humans have always been like blind worms wiggling around the belly of the universe not really capable of perceiving reality as it is but only perceiving in a way that helps us narrowingly survive to reproduce. But what Hoffman is positing is so much more deeper, and shocking.

So intriguing and thought provoking. So glad there are intelligent people out there that can go through that thought process and science without freaking out. A lot of people just simply won't go there because it crushes our perception of reality and that can be very damaging to some people, a lot of people.

13:40 "Evolution has shaped us with perception symbols", "We should take them seriously but not literally" Nicely put

This is definitely going forward! I cannot share my experiences without arousing doubts from others that these experiences aren't "hallucinations". If you open to the never ending science you leave the cozy but dark world of ordinary consciousness

I can't still fully wrap my head around the topic but I am mind blown. I think this is the best ted talk I have watched so far.

The fact that we have no real clue what reality really is amazes me. So much could be out there that we just can’t perceive

I'm about a minute in and can already tell I'm gonna have to watch this more than once.

I thought of the same metaphor years ago, calling reality an interface, just like the interface of a computer. Time & space is like the desktop, objects are like the icons & physics is like the rules governing the interaction between the icons & desktop. What's powering the interface of our reality? The code of consciousness. It's like a quantum supercomputer, taking every possible position simultaneously. It's quite surreal to hear the exact analogy used by someone else years later. I also see dreams like metaphors for how the illusion of life could be created. We each dream, create our own universes with their own rules of physics somehow, the characters within your dream all think they are separate, yet they stem from one mind. Your subconscious creates situations & fractals of itself to learn about itself & grow in a sort of sandbox environment. Imagine a mind much more powerful than ours. Instead of running 8-18 characters at once in a dream, it can run 8-800 trillion characters at once. It would also mean the entire dream world is conscious in that it is composed of thought, albeit at different levels of consciousness depending on their level of awareness of being. A person character in the dream is more conscious than a rock, yet at a certain level of growth, which appears to be one of the fundamental guiding principles, the character person realises they are an avatar, an interface for the source mind, expressing itself through you. At which point they could simultaneously have an existential crisis, a sense of solitude as not many others in their virtual world understands them, a sense of awe in the beauty of the illusion & a sense of comfort in the unknown. We are the universe experiencing itself in order to grow & learn from experience. It is likely there are many parallel universes & forms of sentience in other dimensions. it would mean the separation is all an illusion. That everyone is truly interconnected on a conscious level.

Immanuel Kant and Plato were geniuses. We don’t see reality as it really is but instead visualize ideas that are easy for our mind to understand, then all that we perceive are just symbols representing the true world. For example, Native speakers of Japanese find it difficult to distinguish between the sounds of the letters l and r whereas native speakers of English find those sounds to be completely different. This kind of thing is a regular source of difficulty for people learning a new language. It happens because, once one has learned a language, your brain categorizes sounds into groupings that are meaningful for a given language and totally ignores sound differences that are unimportant for that language. L and r aren’t different in Japanese so there is no need for Japanese people to learn how to distinguish between them. Hoffman’s theory certainly describes how the sense of smell works. We don’t perceive odors as belong to chemical types (hydroxyl, ketone, aldehyde, unsaturated, etc.) . Instead we perceive categories like fruity, floral, pungent, rotten, etc. Color is another example. Light is a continuous spectrum but our minds perceive discontinuous colors. It is hard to say whether other aspects of vision work this way. It is very unsettling to think that we don’t see the world as it is.

A quote from the movie 'Bull Durham' Susan Sarandon 'Annie' comes to mind ..."The world is made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness..."

Some studies say that schizophrenia patients are less likely to be fooled by visual illusions than others. Maybe schizophrenia patients are having some sort of information overflow due to lack of construction capabilities of brain, not connecting sensations with their meaning and mixing signals coming from their mind with their sensations. Some sort of inability to create strong neural pathways. On the other hand this weakness could be the cause for creativity. Finding loose logical connections between things that are not usually thought to be connected with each other. After all the difference between a genius and madness is said to be fine line.

I will be watching this again. One of the best TED Talks I have watched to date!

Great talk. He's actually elaborating Kant's epistemology. We create the "noumena" - the desktop - but he holds out hope that we can find out something about the unknown "dinfgen im sich" - things in themselves that lie behind the icons. He puts me in mind of Carlos Casteneda's description of the "reality" perceived when under the influence of hallucinogens - the ""nagual" of central American native culture.

Hands down. This is the best ted talk I've watched so far.

I spend a really long time watching and rewatching different parts of this video. I got a lot of new, unexpected input. I read/know many different journals/articles about human perception and construction of reality, but I still get this feeling of helplessness when being faced with the possibility of spending my life as a "human beetle", totally unaware of my blindspots in my everyday life, Thank you Donald Hoffman for this talk!

I once told a friend who had "moved to Sydney", that I was was coming to visit in two days, so they better get busy building or unpacking it from boxes or whatever it is "they" do when I explore a new area. I must admit they did a pretty good job.

What I understand from this is that we have all evolved as humans to see reality in a similar way (albeit with some differences, for example some people are colour blind, yet they still see in the same way, just without colour). Its like he points to, if we saw the complexity of reality as it really was it would be too much information to take in. I too love that science is now starting to look in this direction.

_"Reality, a user friendly interface."_ Intriguing thinking.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite" - William Blake

I love this. Very succinct and in alignment with what I have felt for many years. “Perhaps reality is some vast, interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each others conscious experiences.”

This simply sounds as re-re-discovering some of the well known terms (like conceptual/non- conceptual, the name and the form) from buddhism, hinduism, etc. and translating those -again and again - into the language of science. Another new kind of the same old ferry... which - of course - is not a bad thing, if it helps us to get through that same old river. 👍

My reality interface is still using Windows 98... :(

My love for neuroscience is unmatched. The fact that we perceive things that they are not as literally as we see them, still buffles me. It also draws me to the question, is life simply an illusion?

Everybody is saying Kant this, Budda that, and they said this many years ago, and he is re-describing it now. Yes he isn't saying anything new HOWEVER, He is Scientifically trying to prove what they said. This is a breakthrough in science.

Good talk. I think it is fascinating, what out reality really is.

One of my favorite Ted talks to this day. Outstanding job! This really makes you think

As much as I love TED Talks, I have never understood why this question is so confounding. Now, to be fair, it does depend what you mean. "If noses didn't exist, would odors exist?" Well, that depends on what you're referring to when you say "odors." If you mean the object you detect with that sense, a collection of particles on the air, then yes. If you mean the particular sensation we experience when we smell odors, then most likely not. Do we see reality as it is? No. It's not even up for discussion. There are things we know exist that we can't see. It's either too small, too big, too slow, too fast, or simply is not in the small spectrum of light the human eye can see. We cannot see ultraviolet light the way honey bees do. We cannot detect sound reflected from small objects like bats do. And we cannot smell the pheromone scent trail ants leave behind them to do everything they do. We are limited to our senses, and therein to their thresholds. There is a word for this, it's called the Umwelt. To deep sea creatures, sound does not exist. To bacteria, taste does not exist. And to us, were it not for scientific deduction, electrons wouldn't exist. So the question then becomes, WHY do we perceive the world the way we do? Why does salt taste the way salt tastes? Is my red the same as your red? Well, answering that would require us to examine our own brains outside of our epistemic barrier, which is impossible by definition. We may gain a better understanding in the future, but we will never have a definite answer.

how do I follow up this topic? Is there a community? I love content like this and keep thinking about it

I love his humbleness...in the future Donald Hoffman may be known worldwide for genius

"Our Minds only sees the fruit of a tree that we hardly know its roots"

Genes are a miracle too. The idea that knowledge can be passed down for generations inside a tiny particle with no brain is amazing

Hi, great lectures, thinking out of the box. Extremely different physics since my BS in 1985. Because the universe is less physical than previously thought with newtonian and relativity physics, anything is possible in this experience of our consciousness that we call life. I would name our reality a "constructed reality". Including what we see and measure is a constructed reality because the instrumentation used is made to evaluate the physical properties of the universe (particle expresions of what really exist at quantum levels). I don't know much about these topics, but everyday I think more that we live a kind of "spiritual" experience in relation to the true nature of the universe.

This is a masterpiece of a TED talk!

There have been multiple instances in my life where I realized, "there is reality and it is not at all what I see day to day." It was like seeing something too big for my mind so my mind spit it out. But I saw it.

"There is no spoon"

A few yeaes ago i went through this phobia of certain shapes and geometric designs. My perception would construct these shapes and designs everywhere, objects i knew to be a certain way were entirely different. This went on for many months. I'm fine now. But sometimes i'll come across these objects or structures as they appear now and it absolutely baffles me how I once perceived them. In short, I know empirically that our minds are constructing our physical reality.

This changed my life for the better, yet I know less and less.

All of us are individual rays of sunlight that have each forgotten that we are the sun.

This is one of the best TED talks of all time. It's so simple but mind boggling to realize.

I have always wondered if all the people I pass on the street, shopping in the mall, driving in the cars next to me and even the clouds in the sky existed to others around me or even at all. I have watched both children & pets eyes follow things in the room that I do not see and I have also witnessed my own dogs ears perk up when my ears would start to ring and have yet to understand the correlation of these said experiences. This particular TED has helped me line up many what if, why & hows and I'm truly hoping to one day see what I have been missing all along, even when it was right in front of me or maybe not all!...

I used to wonder if my wife was at home when I went to work, now I know 🤨

What a fantastically modest man Don is, for all his brilliance. Also, Chris really deserves all his success I think: unlike many other conference chairs who just show up for questions afterwards as a token but then wait for the speaker to finish so they can move in in their list, he actually takes part in the conversation and *is interested*! Two brilliant men, great video

One of the best TED talks I've seen. what we seen is just the icons on a screen, not the massive reality, which we could hardly handle, that lies beyond them.

The double slit experiment was profound on many levels. Matter at a fundamental level behaves differently when observed. Now, what if the perception of reality every human senses was completely different....but the way we describe it to each other matches each of our individual perceptions? For instance, I see a red rose. The color and shape of it are how I perceive it. To another person the shape of the rose might be completely different and that persons red might be blue. Even though we are seeing completely different perceptions of rose, we describe it so that we agree it is perceived by both of us exactly the same. This being said, the world might be completely and utterly different for each of us in how it's perceived. Only our description of it causes us to believe that what we perceive as reality is the same for everyone.

Great talk Prof. Hoffman! 👌🏻

Thank you for providing this video in this time of uncertainty and isolation. I believe that this is the best time to get to know the significance of one's existence and sense of self ... time to shine introverts!!!

This was BRILLIANTLY done! Amazing, understandable, demonstrable, logical, well spoken, easy to conceptualize. Very good job sir!

the best and mind opening talk on ted talk.

Absolutely brilliant!

WELCOME to The Matrix. You’ve lived here all your life.

TED becoming my favorite channel....great bedtime stuff

Amazing! Spell bounding analysis of self realisation or existance. Actually close to madness. Whether it is the mind, or the eye, or any of the abstract attributes we are endowed with, It is all a gift of The Ever lasting, The Self subsisting.

Watching this episode the second time. First time I didn't think I would watch it again with such interest.

Cognitive dissonance is necessary in order to process new information that challenges our old paradigm in the process of seeing reality as it is.

19:06 "Perception is not about seeing truth, it's about having kids." This is so obvious once you realize it, and explains so much about human behavior, but might be difficult to see or accept before you do realize it.

"There's something that exists when you don't look but it isn't spacetime and physical objects." This is the most interesting statement that I have ever contemplated.

I think this goes in line with Kant's argument: we perceive things through a prior constructions of our sensational faculties, and there is a 'things in themself' to be, as a 'first/absolute reality' which is unreachable to us, or to any other consciously active organisms.

When I was young a stray cat got in my house.. I heard a noise.. was scared and looked over the bannister.. my brain painted a dwarf complete with boots running down the hall... I froze in fear... The next glance was I saw the stray cat.... I laughed in relief but for that fight or flight reflex my brain altered reality....

I think we may be one dimension short of being able to actually figure the universe out.

Ok, here I go with my own thoughts on the video above. On one hand, I find it EXCELLENT. Ted is an example of a higher evolved Human species. He is not the only one who had shared ideas of that sort with us, but he sure did it in a specific and very smart way, including even humor into his presentation. The only reason why I didn't give this video a like is because Ted was emphasizing and favorizing both the spherical shape of the Earth AND Science, which a person like him should NEVER do, because that collides with the essence of his talk. The thing is, if you doubt reality, you doubt EVERY THING there in. You can't doubt some past beliefs that later became replaced with better once, and at the same time NOT DOUBT the present ones, as if they were FINAL or EXACT REFLECTIONS of Reality. Nevertheless, this video is VERY GOOD, and that's why I'll share it on my FB and subscribe, although I won't give it a like for the reason mentioned above.

Listening to this talk that scene from the Matrix where Cypher is having dinner with Agent Smith and he talks about the steak he's eating that doesn't exist yet his brain is telling him its juicy and tasty.and that's what he experiences yet there's no steak comes to mind. Maybe that movie was onto something. Fascinating subject. Thank you. I love Ted talks.

I heard this concept as a child while listening to the elders reading the Hindu text - the Ramayana. It’s called MAYA. Took many years to begin to understand it. Thanks for shedding light.

The speech was brilliant, intuitive and the storytelling could easily lead to a bestseller. I Am a also a big fan of the Matrix but still... I don't think it was a necessary reference in such an inspiring speech. Great work TED, keep the good work !

The biggest thing school ever taught me was “The brain is meant to keep you healthy, not happy.” Visuals often times make us healthy and happy or the exact opposite-and in fact there is nearly a 50/50 chance at all times that the visualization and perception of reality as it is or as we assume it is may help us or harm us. Essentially, to the survival standard of the brain, why would we take that risk, when a safer and more reliable outcome is exactly as he’s explained? That we evolve to not seeing reality as it is and instead only seeing what helps us be healthy?

Quite incredible the parallelism with the perception of reality as it is as it was thought by the Buddha. I'm a bit surprised Prof. Hoffman did not mention that, as it has nothing to do with a religion, and I cannot believe that he's not aware or not interested in the striking similarities, nevertheless maybe he did not want to estraniate the audience too much.

Great stuff! All good fodder for the interest in Consciousness. From my perspective, the bigger news from Donald's talk is how this POV of our perception of reality puts a unique spin on Evolution and Natural De-selection.

In my opinion one of the best talks in a long time.

So intriguing…I’m gonna have to watch this six more times.

Very interesting. It is almost intuitive once you grasp the overall point he is making.

He’s such a great guy. Mild mannered and zero ego

Who else is here after watching him being interviewed by a person i will not name. Kept being cut off so I am here 🤗

The commercial interruptions seem to be a new feature of TED Talks. What is going on? I do not recall this happening before the last month or so.

I love that he doesn't try to be a comedian every other sentence 💟

I like Donald Hoffman. In this talk he suggests an idea and demonstrates it through analogies. Proving it will be more difficult.

One other thing I just remembered. My parents told me this happened to them when driving home from Wisconsin to Arizona. They were hungry, it was around 7pm or so. They decided to stop to eat before they got to their hotel. They found this rest stop off the freeway so to speak. When they went inside what looked like a restaurant, they said everyone in the place looked as though they were not of the living. They ordered their food, and when it came it looked so awful they just decided to pay and leave. They used to make this trip a lot, very regularly. The next time they drove through, which was not long after, just a matter of months, they decided to see if the place was still there, and in business. More out of curiosity than anything else. They were not going to go in again. When they took the exit they found nothing around that resembled the place they went to. They knew it was the same exit and the right place because they were in the habit of always mapping their trips, and each stop. This helped them avoid places they didn't like, and conversely the places they did like. They asked someone at a gas station about the place, and they told them there was a place around there about 5 or more years ago but it hadn't been there for quite a long time. So it again, begs the question, were they so hungry that their minds reconstructed this place. Seems unlikely, especially since they both experienced it. But I know it kind of freaked my parents out when they were told the place had been gone for over 5 years. They said when you looked at the area where it was, you could actually tell nothing had been there for years just based on the vegitation growth and general appearance of the area, but it was apparent that something was there at one time.

I keep being baffled by his final thoughts on the role of conscienceness and it's role in the reality behind our interface. He says: Perhaps reality is a vast interacting network, of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each others conscious experiences." Why would conscienceness not be another layer on top of the 'interface' of spacetime, actually further removed from reality, rather closer to it? Like a monitoring program to make sense (meaning) of the interface?

As a photographer and documentarian, I can't believe our eyes are 130 mega pixels. Other than everything else he said, this is really blowing my mind.

Keeps things simple but worthwhile. Excellent presentation

Very very good talk. Don Hoffman is def onto something for sure.

This is a valuable discussion of questions that have troubled philosophers for centuries. Some of these concepts are the subject of Immanuel Cant's Critique of Pure Reason, written in 1781. "...through the transcendental idealism of objects (as appearance) and their form of appearance. Kant regards the former "as mere representations and not as things in themselves", and the latter as "only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves". - Wikipedia entry for the Critique of Pure Reason. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and a remarkable and enigmatic man who gave away a fortune to live a simple life, also investigated this area in the early 20th Century with his Duck/Rabbit inquiry into visual perception.

This is incredibly confusing but fascinating to me. Makes me wonder if going by this line of thinking, are people real? I mean are our bodies just icons?

This is truly exciting! We are on the brink of a deeper understanding of reality and therefore our selves.

This needed to be so much longer each thought felt incomplete. Still a great start I would love to hear more in-depth thoughts from him on this theory.

Being blind to our own blindness makes uncomfortable but hard to refute sense. Becoming aware that as humans we may be forever cut off from experiencing reality by our very own nature. Like trying to work out the inner structure and workings of a computer by studying the pixels on its monitor.

Coming here after watching his Lex fridman interview. The question I still have is how we can gather information outside of the “interface”. I imagine a hacked videogame where you replaced all assets of guns with subway sandwiches. In the game the sandwiches will shoot bullets. Between the NPCs and characters the dialogue will still be about guns and so on. To us outside the interface this would all be good fun. The question remains though how can we get passed all the subway sandwiches clouding our judgment of fundamental reality???

omg i thought i was going insane i straight up think about like all this everynight by myself

George Berkeley and Kant. Exactly what came to mind while watching this.

A fellow inmate at the homeless shelter recommended this to me, and I'm glad he did. I'd like to know what he thinks of Rosch, Berlin, Kay, and Lakoff. A bit of Austin, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche couldn't hurt, either. But not Kuhn, who throws too many ashtrays for my comfort. There's a lot of evidence that space and time are not the real deal. First and most trivially, Special Relativity connects space and time into spacetime. Now, the energy-momentum quaternion (yes, yes, I know physicists like vectors or putting _i_ in or weird operators, but I like quaternions) transforms the same way, suggesting a connection. General Relativity confirms this. First, the energy-momentum tensor *is* the spacetime curvature. Second, the equation of the Schwarzschild radius is r=2M, which connects mass with space and so the energy-momentum thingie with the spacetime thingie. Then there's Bell's inequality and spooky action at a distance, which "action" somehow cannot transmit Shannon information at superluminal speeds. And there's Feynman's sum over histories approach to _e.g._ the two-slit experiment, which kind of fixes what is obviously not a classical trajectory into pseudo-trajectories that result in amplitudes. Also the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which suggests that concepts such as momentum and position, as well as energy and the rate of change of energy, cannot simultaneously be measured to arbitrarily good precision. So there have to be quantum fluctuations; otherwise we'd know that the energy level was 0 and not changing. And also the electron doesn't just drop into the nucleus, because we'd know where it was and that it wasn't moving. On the level of cognitive science, though, it all makes sense. We have structures unfortunately called topographic maps near the surface. Brains are wrinkled for more of them. They work a bit like 1980s video games or, better, cellular automata. They deal inherently in position and motion. So those are the things we look for. Oh, by the way, they also do Aristotelian two-valued logic, which is why it's so slow. Every syllogism has to be "run" on one of these topographic maps. There is something like logic in neurons, which are sort of hybrid AND/OR gates, and neurotransmitter-mediated switches to and from inhibition, which puts a NOT in. I have a hypothesis that real neural networks, which of course cannot use backpropagation, which is neurologically implausible, use this to reverse the effects of wrong Hebbian learning. So, you work on a problem, fail, and get frustrated. This changes your neurotransmitter effects and flips some neurons to NOT. The essentially randomly reconfigured network maybe lets you see the problem in a new light. I could go on, but that's enough. Now you can go back to the presumption that homeless are just drug-addled wastrels, which my empirical evidence shows is rather popular in the TED set.

I am a big fan of Hoffman and known he is very close to the truth of reality, in that what we see in merely an interface. And so if I met him there is one question I would like to ask him: it is probably a silly question and I more or less have figured it out myself, but I would just like to hear his take on it: OK - so if what our eye sees is merely a code that our brain then creates a user interface reality; why then do we see the same image on a photograph? I mean the camera is separate from the brain; should it not just show a code? My own idea was that the photo is also part of the interface reality - in other words, like a folder copying a folder on the computer desktop. Still I would like to hear Hoffman's explanation.