Reality, Russian Dolls, Rocks and Ripples

What if we’re completely wrong about the nature of reality? Miracles just might happen.

I’ve written before about Don Hoffman’s book, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid The Truth From Our Eyes, and you might want to read that blog post first if you haven’t already — especially if what I write below strikes you as completely bonkers. At the moment it’s an unproven theory, but for me it resonates with other reading I’ve done, in both the psychological and spiritual realms, and if true, it opens up all kinds of exciting possibilities for societal transformation.

In his book, Hoffman, a quantitative psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, sets out a radical new theory of reality, based primarily on evolutionary biology and backed up with mathematics. I will offer a short and necessarily crude summary of his theories, and then focus on the aspects that I find the most fascinating, and explain why.

This theory does great violence to most people’s intuitions about what is objectively real and what is not, but I invite you to suspend disbelief and consider that it just might be true, and if so, whether it could start to reconcile science and spirituality. I have a mental picture of science and spirituality divorcing each other around the time of Galileo and the Age of Enlightenment in the 17 thcentury, and…