Donald Hoffman

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught from 1983 until his retirement. He earned a B.A. in Quantitative Psychology from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Computational Psychology from MIT. His research spans visual perception, evolutionary game theory, and the foundations of consciousness. His work has been supported by the NSF, the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Defense, and he has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles.

Hoffman is the originator of the Interface Theory of Perception, which argues that evolution shaped perceptual systems to track fitness payoffs rather than objective reality. His Fitness-Beats-Truth theorem formalizes this claim mathematically, demonstrating that truth-tracking strategies are reliably outcompeted in evolutionary models. Together with Chetan Prakash, he developed the Conscious Agents framework: a formal mathematical model in which networks of interacting conscious observers generate the structures that physics describes as spacetime and matter. His books include Visual Intelligence (1998) and The Case Against Reality (2019). He has received the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences.

At the Trace Institute, Hoffman serves as Founder and Scientific Director. He holds that the observer has been systematically excluded from the foundations of modern science, and that resolving this omission requires a new mathematical framework rather than incremental adjustments to existing models. The Institute's work is, in large part, the continuation and formalization of a research program he has been developing for four decades.