12 Quotes by Donald D. Hoffman

If you play a video game on your computer, such as “Doom” or “Uncharted”, you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D.

Hence our decline of insight as we shift our gaze from human to ant to quark. Our decline of insight should not be mistaken for an insight into decline – a progressive poverty inherent in objective reality. The decline is in our interface, in our perceptions. But we externalize it; we pin it on reality. Then we erect, from this erroneous reification, an ontology of physicalism.

In the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk 10 percent – from 1,500 cubic centimeters down to 1,350 – a loss of the volume of a tennis ball.