Life on a Desktop Interface

 

From Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (xii-xiii):

The idea that our perceptions mislead us about objective reality, in hole or in part, has a long history. Democritus, around 400 BCE, famously claimed that our perceptions of hot, cold, sweet, bitter, and color are  conventions, not reality. A few decades later, Plato likened our perceptions and conceptions to flickering shadows cast on the walls of a caver by an unseen reality. Philosophers ever since have debated the relation between perception and reality. The theory of evolution injects new rigor into this debate.

How can our senses be useful—how can they kep us alive—if they don't tell us the truth about objective reality? A metaphor can help our intuitions. Suppose you're writing an email, and the icon for its file is blue, rectangular, and in the center of your desktop. Does this mean that the file itself is blue, rectangular, and in the center of your computer? Of course not. The color of the icon is not the color of the file. Files have no color. The shape and position of the icon are not the true shape and position of the file. In fact, the language of shape, position, and color cannot describe computer files.

The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the "truth" of the computer—where "truth," in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software. Rather, the purpose of an interace is to hide the "truth" and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful taks such as crafting emails and editing photos. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends would never hear from you. 

That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enought to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop—a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop. These icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth about objective reality. Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don't need truth. Perceiving truth wwould drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons