CANR
WORK TITLE: THE CASE AGAINST REALITY
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Hoffman, Donald David
BIRTHDATE: 1955
WEBSITE:
CITY: Irvine
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 160
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 29, 1955, in San Antonio, TX; son of David Pollock and Loretta Virginia Hoffman; married Rebecca Holman, 1977 (divorced, 1985); married Geralyn M. Souza (an artist, graphic designer, and photographer), 1986; children: (with Holman) Melissa Louise.
EDUCATION:University of California, Los Angeles, B.A., 1978; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D., 1983.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Hughes Aircraft Co., member of technical staff and project engineer, 1978-83; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, resident scientist at artificial intelligence laboratory, 1983; University of California, Irvine, assistant professor, 1983-86, associate professor, 1986-90, professor of cognitive science and of information and computer science, 1990—, professor of philosophy, 1996—. University of Bielefeld, visiting professor, 1995-96. Member of editorial board of Cognition.
AVOCATIONS:Running, swimming, racket sports, ice skating.
MEMBER:American Psychological Society.
AWARDS:National Science Foundation grants, 1984, 1987; Distinguished Scientific Award, American Psychological Association, 1989; Troland research award, National Academy of Science, 1994; Rustum Roy Award, Chopra Foundation.
RELIGION: Church of England.WRITINGS
Also author of magazine articles.
SIDELIGHTS
Donald D. Hoffman combines computer technology with his study of psychology to explore the ways humans process information, particularly visual information. His interest in the process of perception led him to write Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See. Filled with helpful photographs and illustrations, the book describes how humans construct their reality through what they see. Hoffman explains that vision is more than just “seeing”—it is organizing information, analyzing it, and adding additional information to create a world that makes sense. Optical illusions are explained, as is the process of perceiving color, depth, and motion. Hoffman also lists thirty-five rules that determine how humans put together a coherent image. He makes use of several disparate resources, from philosophy and cognitive theory to references to pop culture.
Many reviewers found the book an engaging, if imperfect, exploration of the human mind. Ellen Ruppel Shell in the New York Times Book Review wrote that readers who overlook the imperfections “can glean much from his insights.” Kelly Hensley in Library Journal wrote that “the book will convince everyone that the human brain is an amazing thing.” A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Visual Intelligence “an outstanding example of creative popular science … the rare book that, in line with its subject, can be thoroughly enjoyed both right side up and upside down.”
In 2019, Hoffman released The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. In this volume, he explains that humans have evolved to have senses and perceptions. However, these senses and perceptions cannot always be trusted to reflect reality. Hoffman suggests that the skewed reality that our senses communicate to us has helped us to survive through the centuries. He goes on to provide examples to support his arguments. Among the examples he discusses is human sexual attraction. When a person sees a potential mate, their senses collect many types of information that are processed by the brain in order to determine their attractiveness. Some of the ways the brain determines a person’s attractiveness are defined by evolution, such as their reproductive potential. Humans tend to find people in the prime of their reproductive periods to be more attractive than those who are not. Hoffman also discusses how we perceive ourselves. He explains that the things are senses detect when we look in the mirror do not define us fully and therefore do not present the reality of who we are.
In an assessment of The Case Against Reality in Kirkus Reviews, a contributor summarized the book’s main thesis, stating: “According to this expert account, evolution shapes our view of reality, but accuracy is not its priority.” The same contributor described the book as “a dense, lucid, and often unsettling exploration of how our brains interpret the world.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Winchester, Simon, Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain, Random House (New York, NY), 1982.
PERIODICALS
American Scientist, July-August, 1999, Evangeline A. Wheeler, review of Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See, p. 375.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2019, review of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.
Library Journal, December, 1998, Kelly Hensley, review of Visual Intelligence, p. 150.
New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1999, Ellen Ruppel Shell, review of Visual Intelligence, p. 33.
Publishers Weekly, August 31, 1998, review of Visual Intelligence, p. 56.
ONLINE
Constructivist Community website, https://constructivist.info/ (July 24, 2019), author profile.
Donald D. Hoffman website, http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff (February 8, 2007).
University of California, Irvine, Department of Cognitive Sciences website, http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/ (July 24, 2019), author faculty profile.
CV: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/media/pdf/donald-hoffman-vita.pdf
Donald D. Hoffman received a Ph.D. from MIT in 1983 and is a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research on perception, evolution, and consciousness received the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution of the American Psychological Association, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and is the subject of his TED Talk, titled "Do we see reality as it is?"
Donald D. Hoffman
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Donald D. Hoffman
Born
December 29, 1955 (age 63)
San Antonio, Texas, USA
Alma mater
UCLA (B.A. 1978)
M.I.T. (Ph.D. 1983)
Scientific career
Fields
Cognitive science
Donald David "Don" Hoffman (born December 29, 1955) is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.
Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and color, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. He has co-authored two technical books: Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception (1989) offers a theory of consciousness and its relationship to physics; Automotive Lighting and Human Vision (2005) applies vision science to vehicle lighting. His book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (1998) presents the modern science of visual perception to a broad audience. His 2015 TED Talk, "Do we see reality as it is?" explains how our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us.[1] His book "The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes" (2019) expands on the TED talk.[not verified in body]
Hoffman has won the Distinguished Scientific Award from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation. He is slated to deliver the Leibniz Public Lecture at the Leibniz Universität Hannover in 2017. He has served on the editorial board of the journal Cognition, and contributed for several years to the Edge Annual Question. A complete list of his activities and publications is given in his vita and homepage.[not verified in body]
Contents
1
Biography
2
Multimodal user interface theory
3
References
4
Bibliography
5
External links
Biography[edit]
Play media
Donald Hoffman is being interviewed for the Dutch TV-show The Mind of the Universe.
Hoffman was born in an army hospital at San Antonio, Texas, in 1955. His parents are David and Loretta Hoffman. His father was an army private, went on to earn a Master of Science degree in chemistry on the G.I. Bill, and worked as a quality assurance engineer. He later became an ordained minister and earned a Master of Arts degree in counseling. Hoffman's mother was first a homemaker, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in microbiology, became a computer programmer writing software for banks, and earned a Master of Arts degree in counseling. Both are active in counseling. Hoffman has two younger siblings. His brother Jim is the business operations manager for the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at JPL/ CalTech/NASA in Pasadena, California, which builds many of the Earth Science satellites and instruments for NASA and NOAA. His sister Cheryl is a homemaker and home-school teacher. Hoffman married Rebecca Holman in 1977 and they divorced in 1985. His wife, Geralyn Souza, whom he married in 1986, is an artist, graphic designer and award-winning photographer. Hoffman is an amateur photographer with a Flickr page. He has a daughter, Melissa Louise Nunez, who is a lawyer, a son-in law, Jay Nunez, also a lawyer, and three grand children, Joaquin, Noemi and Cayetano.[citation needed]
Hoffman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in quantitative psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978, and earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in computational psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1983 under David Marr and Whitman Richards. He was briefly a Research Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT, and then became an assistant professor at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) in 1983. He has remained on the faculty of UCI since then, with a sabbatical during the 1995-1996 academic year at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung of Bielefeld University.[citation needed]
Donald D. Hoffman
Multimodal user interface theory[edit]
Hoffman's "multimodal user interface" (MUI) theory of perception states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Together with "conscious realism", the theory that "the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and empirically explored in the normal scientific manner", writes Hoffman, "these theses provide a solution to the mind-body problem. They also entail epiphysicalism: consciousness creates physical objects and properties, but physical objects and properties have no causal powers."[2][non-primary source needed]
References[edit]
^ https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?language=en
^ Hoffman, Donald (2008). "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem". Mind and Matter. 6 (1): 87–121. [1]
Bibliography[edit]
Bennett, Bruce M. (1989). Observer mechanics : a formal theory of perception. Hoffman, Donald D., Prakash, Chetan. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0120886359. OCLC 19590702.
Hoffman, Donald D. (1998). Visual intelligence : how we create what we see (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0393046699. OCLC 38542585.
Automotive lighting and human vision. Wördenweber, Burkard. Berlin: Springer. 2007. ISBN 9783540366973. OCLC 185022114.
Hoffman, Donald (2008). "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem". Mind and Matter. 6 (1): 87–121. [2]
Hoffman, Donald D. (2019). The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. [S.l.]: Allen Lane. ISBN 0241262623. OCLC 1085154114.
Author: Donald D. Hoffman
https://constructivist.info/authors/donald-d-hoffman
Bio Note: Donald D. Hoffman PhD Computational Psychology, MIT 1983, is a cognitive scientist and author of more than 100 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (2000). He joined the faculty of UC Irvine in 1983, where he is now a full professor in the departments of cognitive science, computer science and philosophy. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. Hoffman’s research has led to a “user interface” theory of perception, which proposes that natural selection shapes our perceptions not to report truth but simply to guide adaptive behavior.
Affiliation: University of California, Irvine, USA
Homepage: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/
QUOTED: "According to this expert account, evolution shapes our view of reality, but accuracy is not its priority."
"a dense, lucid, and often unsettling exploration of how our brains interpret the world."
Hoffman, Donald D.: THE CASE AGAINST REALITY
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2019):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hoffman, Donald D. THE CASE AGAINST REALITY Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 8, 13 ISBN: 978-0-393-25469-3
According to this expert account, evolution shapes our view of reality, but accuracy is not its priority.
In his first book, Hoffman (Cognitive Science/Univ. of California, Irvine) emphasizes that evolution designed our perceptions "to keep us alive," so we must take them seriously. "But it is a mistake of logic," he writes, "to assume that if we must take our senses seriously then we are required--or even entitled--to take them literally….I explain why evolution hid objective reality and endowed us instead with an interface of objects in space and time." What we observe is simply a virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life. Having announced this disturbing premise, the author provides a steady stream of explanations of how the brain processes perceptions. Observing a member of the opposite sex, we pick up dozens of sensory cues, run them through an algorithm refined by evolution to evaluate reproductive potential, and reach a conclusion. It's not a given that the outcome--marriage, or at least children--is ideal. To those who doubt that the world we observe is simply a useful interface such as an icon for a computer text file, Hoffman suggests we look in a mirror. We see expression, flesh, hair, clothes, and other elements, often with a great deal of artificial overlay. The reality--our nature, feelings, experiences--remains hidden. Would we want it any other way? Few readers will be surprised when the author concludes with the evolution of consciousness, a subject that continues to obsess neuroscientists without producing anything more than generalities such as, "conscious experiences are tightly correlated with specific patterns of activity in neural circuits. But no scientific theory that starts with neural circuitry has been able to explain the origin of consciousness."
A dense, lucid, and often unsettling exploration of how our brains interpret the world.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hoffman, Donald D.: THE CASE AGAINST REALITY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2019. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A588726858/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c529cb9e. Accessed 13 July 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A588726858