< <i>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.</i> ><p>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).<p>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.