Donald Hoffman (@donaldhoffman) is a cognitive scientist, popular author and Professor of Cognitive Science at UC Irvine. He studies how our visual perception, guided by millions of years of natural selection, authors every aspect of our everyday reality.

Don has co-authored two technical books: Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception which offers a theory of consciousness and its relationship to physics and Automotive Lighting and Human Vision which applies vision science to vehicle lighting.

His newest book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See presents the modern science of visual perception to a broad audience. His new book, tentatively titled Do We See Reality?, to appear at the end of 2017, expands on his 2015 TED Talk and explains how our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us.

Hoffman has won the Distinguished Scientific Award from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award of the National Academy of Sciences and the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation.

You can listen right here on iTunes

In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover many things, including:

• How our perception differs from reality, big time
• The nature of consciousness
• Why we are what we see and believe
• How your brain constructs an alternate universe
• Possible problems with Darwin's Theory of Evolution
• Don's mathematical definition of god
• Why evolution doesn't optimize for intelligence
• How psychedelics actually impact our subjective reality
• The hard problem and how to maybe solve it
• Understanding the inner workings of science
• Why physics is probably wrong and confused
• What we can learn from VR about real life
• Why Don believed humans were just machines, and what he thinks now

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