
The Case Against Reality - bilifuduo
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?utm_source=aefb&amp;single_page=true
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< _As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our
perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the
real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves
fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive
is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that
world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we
bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t,
wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be
forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of
what it’s really like. Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of
cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine._ >

This fallacy has been refuted a million times going all the way back to the
Greeks. Any attack on the validity of the senses has to use knowledge acquired
via the senses to "prove" the senses are invalid. It is self-contradiction and
thinking in a circle. How did we learn that perceptual illusions are "fake"
apart from further analysis and a wider context of sensory data? The classic
example is the bent-pencil-in-the-water trick. We learn this is an illusion
(and eventually much more about the properties of light, water, etc.) by
pulling the pencil out of the water and examining it directly with our senses
(our eyes, and if you are a serious doubter you can actually touch the pencil
to see it is straight not bent).

Hoffman is just regurgitating what he learned in college which is primarily
the Kantian attack on consciousness. Kant's view is that we can never know
"true reality" because our perception of reality is mediate by our senses. But
this is a denial of consciousness (it is unavoidably based on sense data) and
implicitly a call for "consciousness" to be in contact with reality by no
means whatsoever, i.e. non-causally.

