Donald Hoffman
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Biosketch
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DONALD HOFFMAN is a professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, best known for his ground-breaking studies of  perception of visual shape and for his masterful exposition of the constructive powers of the brain in the 1998 book called *Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See*.  Don is a proponent of an evolutionary view of perception. He advances the intriguing notion that perception is a species-specific user interface between the world and the mind that evolved to expedite adaptive behaviour and not to estimate truth.


Perception as a user interface  
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Don holds that evolution by	natural	selection does not,	in	general, favor	perceptions	that are	true	
descriptions of	the	objective world. Instead, research with evolutionary games shows	that	perceptual	systems	tuned	solely	to	fitness	routinely outcompete those tuned	to	truth.	Fitness	functions	depend	not	just	on	the	true	state	of	the	world,	but	also on	the	organism,	its	state,	and	the	type of	action.	Thus	fitness	and	truth are	distinct.	Natural	selection	depends	only	on	expected	fitness.	It	shapes	perceptual systems	to	guide	fitter	behaviour,	not	to	estimate truth. Therefore, Don
explores the possibility that sensory experiences constitute a multimodal user interface between the perceiver and an objective world, an interface useful precisely because it does not match, approximate, or resemble that world.

.. http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/

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