Donald Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist working at the University of California, Irvine. He is making waves with a new theory suggesting that, instead of presenting reality as it "really is", our perception is like a desktop interface enabling us to use reality effectively.

Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality, fleshes out the notion that we do not perceive reality objectively, and argues for a mathematical, rather than spatio-temporal, model of reality.

"One of the deepest and most original thinkers of his generation” – Steven Pinker