Do we see reality as it is?
 

Do we see reality as it is? | Donald Hoffman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

Wow, and I’m still wrestling with Plato’s cave and Bishop Berkeley…. And don’t mind, if there is one. Unless it's The Matrix.

Really

There was an old Bishop named Berkeley
who thought of the real Ideally:
that there’s sound is absurd
when felled trees are unheard
unless by God’s ears. Really!

Ralph, I am — right at this very moment — listening to a much more in-depth talk about this topic. I'm finding it quite interesting, as you may.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL8wopYLM7Y

Reality is real enough, but there is no reality.

Walter, at the end of the video in my second link, Hoffman says that in a thousand years we will be playing with space-time, since it is actually the interface between us and the fundamental (or at least some deeper) reality. He says that, so far, science has probed inside what he calls our "headset," and is only just beginning to understand what's beyond the headset. He claims that, because of evolution, space-time (and everything we experience) is a construct of our senses to better enable us to find food, fight, flee, and produce offspring.

Here is a quote I just found by Donald Hoffman:

"Physical objects are the eye candy. They are there not to show us the truth but to hide the truth and let us act in ways that keep us alive. Space-time is not a fundamental reality. It's a data structure that we evolved."

Why isn't it reality? Even if it's all a data structure we evolved, it's a real data structure, isn't it, and one that we really evolved? What are the qualities of "reality" that are lacking from what we "falsely" perceive as reality?

Oh my, I shall look at the videos one of these days. (Nice new avatar on the thread.) Martin, do you think that we evolved the Big Bang and its effluvia? It seems like we are in the effluvia. A bigger question: what gave the Big Bang permission to Bang? Since parts of the effluvia can think about themselves, the Bang certainly can harbor some interesting features. I agree that the physical world is perhaps less and much more than we perceive, certainly “different” than we think. But here we are, thinking. Who or what “said”, “Go Bang”? The Bang had a substrate at least.

That's a great question, Roger. But I think he's talking about a more underlying reality than an organism's data structure.

Allen, I'm not saying that I agree with Hoffman. (He himself admits that he doesn't know what the ultimate reality is.) As Carl Sagan said,

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

(So the burden of proof is on Hoffman, which he also admits.)

This evening I was skimming through a book review of Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality. It seems to give a pretty good summary of his theories. I haven't read the book, however.

Do We See Icons or Reality? A Review of Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality, Brian Martin

https://social-epistemology.com/2019...-brian-martin/

Here's the conclusion of the review:

That brings to mind something Einstein said: “Do you really believe that the moon isn’t there when nobody looks?” Hoffman would say that the moon isn't actually there at all!

As a way of testing my understanding of Hoffman, I'll give what I think Hoffman's answer would be.

It is reality--of a sort. The same way, to use H's analogy, that an icon on your computer desktop representing a text document, is really an icon on your desktop, is really rectangular (or whatever shape it is), etc. But it isn't in any sense the whole reality of that document, which consists of processes going on in the innards of the computer.

We don't know. Maybe we can't know.

***

I think, Bob, you wrote a children's poem speculating that the blue I see may be a completely different color than the blue you see. Hoffman's idea seems to apply a similar concept, but apply it more deeply. Just as we can be confident that something real exists which both you and I experience and call blue, the reality of what we're experiencing may be different for each of us and therefore different from what either of us is experiencing.

The same, Hoffman speculates, is true of space-time and all the physical objects in it.

Yes, something exists which you and I both call space-time, but it (our perception of it) may have no more relationship to reality than the color I experience as blue has to whatever it is in reality provokes the experience blue in my brain.

It's really hard to put accurately into words! Hoffman says that's because we have the wrong language for it, which sounds like a copout when I write it down, but feels possible.

.

Martin: Here is a quote I just found by Donald Hoffman:

"Physical objects are the eye candy..."


...And imagination is our appetite.
.
.
.

Thanks for those thoughts, Max.

I think it's pretty obvious that there's a whole lot of reality that we don't perceive and are incapable of perceiving, but I still don't think that means that the fraction of reality that we can indeed perceive and experience is any less real or somehow invalid. If you're a dog, there are things that your master knows and experiences that are literally beyond your hope of comprehension, but that doesn't make it any less real when he scratches your belly or throws a stick for you to fetch.

You seem to assume that the dog understands there's another being doing the scratching or throwing, a being that differs in a significant way from, say, a steak or a bowl of dog food. But it's possible that all the dog understands is that one smell should be eaten and the other smell should be made googly eyes at, and each results in a good feeling of a different sort.

The human scratching the dog's belly is real. So is whatever the dog perceives that prompts him to do what he needs to do to get the scratching. But that doesn't mean that they're the same thing or even that they exist on the same plane (or level?) of reality.

I like that, Jim!

It's possible that we are not only incapable of knowing, but might never know. On the other hand, who knows what we'll know thousands of years from now (when we are either part machine or wholly machines).

Yes, since what we perceive as color is merely somehow correlated to a wavelength of the electromagnetic field (called light). Bees can see ultraviolet, and pit vipers can sense infrared (night vision).

That's what I understand he's saying. But I'm still trying to fathom the gist of his "theory," which I think he is still working out. He's working on what's called the hard problem of consciousness, a subject that no scientist understands yet. But if we ever do, then AI will potentially become conscious and self-aware.

I just saw this in Wikipedia. It doesn't mention his new book, so it's probably not a recent article, but seems to explain Hoffman's theory in a nutshell.

Regarding the perception of color (and other senses), here’s a paragraph from the book review:

Fitness enables an organism to survive and reproduce, but evolutionary theory says nothing about whether the development of perceptual capacities necessarily tailors them to register reality. Hoffman gives many examples suggesting the divergence between fitness-tuned-perceptions and reality. Other species have quite different perceptual systems. The cyanobacterium has 27 types of photoreceptors (compared to 4 for humans); bees can see ultraviolet light; flies find the smell of faeces appealing. It is usual to think that all organisms sense the same reality, just registering different intensities or aspects of the same objects, but Hoffman turns this around, saying that the perceptions of different species can be so radically different that it is more logical to think that perceptions create an organism’s personal reality.

Yes, I assume that, just as I assume that you are a being that differs in a significant way from a book or a chair. Can I prove it? No, I can't. You may just be a robot or a simulation, an advanced form of Alexa. But I don't think we should be philosophical conspiracy theorists who conclude that we are each of us the only real consciousness and that all other beings are mechanical zombies without a rich internal life that at least in some ways is like our own.

For me so much of this is poignantly expressed in Bishop's great poem, "In the Waiting Room." She's just seven years old, but it's not strange to me that even a seven-year old gets right to the heart of the problem (and, incidentally, let this be a lesson to all children's poets: children are as deep and thoughtful as adults):

But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Those final three lines are pretty much where I leave off, as well. Nothing stranger could ever happen. I truly don't think we'll ever understand it.

Beautiful poem, Bob.

I wasn't asking you to ponder the difference between the scratcher and the food, but of the dog's perception of that difference. Clearly I lack the skill and/or vocabulary to clearly communicate about such issues.

Thank you, Martin, for introducing me to Hoffman. I'm particularly intrigued by his claim that natural selection proves that a being accurately perceiving reality would not, in the long run, survive. In the 20-minute clip, he glosses over the proof of this counterintuitive conclusion by claiming to have run simulations. Even if he shared the simulations, I would lack the expertise to check their accuracy, but I'm eager to better understand the proof.

No. That is actually not possible. 25000 years of co-evolution calls bullshit on that. Anybody who has lived alongside a dog and actually been awake during that experience knows that to be utter nonsense. If this sort of negation is the end result of the amazing work in the Ted talk I would chuck in the garbage bin. But I don't think that is what dude is really heading for. Nothing personal. Nonsense though. Zero waffle factor.

You’re welcome, Max. I’m glad you found this stuff interesting, and also glad that the topic has inspired some lively discussion. I was just listening (I’m about 1/3 of the way through it) to this conversation, which I’m finding to be a more thorough analysis of the subject.

Is there an Infinite Mind? | Donald Hoffman Ph.D. | Waking Cosmos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az18Onc0e58&t=1240s

I've had many dogs over the years. I think I know them pretty well. They are amazing at reading our thoughts and emotions from tiny little clues from our body language and tone of voice that we, ourselves, are not even aware of.

And I also know that, like Andrew, Hoffman is talking about something far deeper than most of us would imagine. The question is: do spacetime, quantum particles/fields, and the four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) somehow produce consciousness, or does consciousness itself produce spacetime, etc.? In other words, are the known laws of physics fundamental, or is consciousness what is fundamental? I don't know, but I think it's interesting to ponder.

To put it another way, are dogs and humans real? Is consciousness an illusion? Or is it the fundamental reality of the universe? (Now I'm going to walk my dog and then go listen to the rest of the video.)

Martin, my problem is deciding if you are real, or a percussionist fantasy of mine.

Clearly my dog analogy--which I didn't get from Hoffman--was unhelpful. I'm still not convinced that our observation of dogs' behavior tells us tells us with certainty very much about what they perceive, by which I don't mean to argue that my picture of their perception is plausible.

As I dig deeper, I'm finding potential stumbling blocks for Hoffman's theory, but nothing yet that I know enough to be able call a definite stumble.

Offhand, it sounds like smeared out solipsistic pantheism without the theism. Now, though the universe we experience can seem somewhat annoyingly weird sometimes, I’d like more structure than this appears to offer. But then, I haven’t listened to the videos.

I'm a percussionist only when a "conscious agent" (like you) hears me play percussion! Even the sounds you hear might only be your personal perception. The vibrations of the air are merely the interface between you and some deeper reality (according to his theory).

it sounds like smeared out solipsistic pantheism without the theism

That could be except for the fact that Hoffman says that he has made a rigorous mathematical formula of his theory of what he calls "conscious realism," which is a network of conscious agents. That seems rather like some universal Facebook or Twitter. (I'm still listening, on and off, to that last video I linked to above.) I'm getting more familiar with many of the details of his hypotheses. But it still sounds to me rather far-fetched.

Don't worry, Max. I don't get it all either. I'll have to listen to the rest of the video before I really feel I'm starting to understand it. But, as Hoffman says himself, the theory is quite radical and probably false. But I find it interesting in that it encompasses theories about spacetime and quantum mechanics.

O caloric, o phlogiston, where are you when the times cry out for your mathematical rigor once again? O quantum instability as big as all outdoors 13.8 billion of our years ago, what were you unstable in, cream cheese or reverse imaginary time (so called)? Are you hiding at the i•t hardware store thinking about all those generations of exploding and reforming stars that gave us gold and neat stuff (hah) like Cobalt 60? O Martin, percussionist of percussors, are you imitating the Large Bang with your drumsticks? O YouTube videos of Lagrange common sense that I sort of understand (not having taught it), bring me a least action that I can do to make extraterrestrials understand that they aren’t here in any physical sense, and that they should stay in their own backyard. Nimby. O, I must eat more breakfast before I brew more coffee and yell at Plato’s classroom. O mammoths and trilobites, I love you and miss you desperately. Merry Christmas, mammoths and Denisovans. Merry Christmas and a Happy Better New Year!!

I love it, Allen!

I stayed up too late last night watching that silly podcast and now am a bit tired (not having rested my imaginary body after taking several long imaginary walks yesterday), but I learned a little more about what Hoffman was trying to say.

I guess the gist of it is this: Consciousness is all there is. Particles don’t exist. And there is a vast network of conscious agents interacting and producing a vaster consciousness. (I need to watch the end of the podcast to find out what the ultimate vast consciousness is supposed to be like.)

He says his theory is akin to panpsychism. The main difference is that most versions of panpsychism are dualistic (mind/matter), which suggests magic and is unscientific. (Electrons have not only their quantum mechanical properties like spin and momentum but supposedly have some kind of rudimentary consciousness.) Whereas Hoffman’s theory gets around the dualism by saying that there is nothing besides consciousness — not my snare drum sticks, nor my dog, nor my neurons, nor the quarks and electrons that make up me, nor the photons of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Biggest Bang there ever was.

I’m sure you know that, if you tune a radio between stations, a small part of the static you hear is the remnant radiation from the still bonging bang. Same with an old TV. I guess Hoffman would say that this uniform background of weak microwave radiation is just a figment of a “conscious agent’s” imagination. And also the gravitational waves from a pair of merging black holes that LIGO recently detected are not real either?

You had mentioned The Bang, which got me wondering what Hoffman would say about it. Are The Bang and everything else just parts of the “icons on the desktop”? That sounds pretty fishy to me.

I just started listening to this interview, which takes a totally different look at the topic of consciousness:

David Chalmers: The Hard Problem of Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #69

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW59lMvxmY4

Have a super-duper holiday!

It doesn’t take an overbeardly bombasticator to discover that consciousness—though it may be implicit or potentially latent in the energy structure of the world as we know it—is an epiphenomenon: a “superstructure” that can develop upon and through a material “base”. Anyone who has gotten even slightly inebriated knows that things have changed. All as a result of new a liquid in the system. What happens to consciousness during intense sexual arousal is also available free of charge to consenting adults, though the cause is less obvious. So, consciousness as we know it — or I know it — isn’t automatically universal. What is wrong with this philosophical infant, Hoffman? I have week’s worth of ninety minute lectures ready to drop on paying customers. Like Sam Johnson kicking a rock, I refute him with a bottle of Tom Lehrer single malt.

Here's a fun debate:

The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLbSlC0Pucw

If you can identify it, maybe I can do a better job avoiding it.

Yes, we see reality as it is. It is impossible not to. Reality is always there and is always seen correctly through the medium it is looked at and under the influences that are upon it, for the medium and influences are part of the reality and it needs to follow its own rules of how it changes in different conditions. It is correct to see reality one way in the darkness and one way in the brightness, one way when you are intoxicated, one way when you are sober, one way through this animal's eyes, one way through that animal's: reality itself is what makes the difference, not "non-reality" or some "lie". We see reality according to reality, because there is no other means to see reality: reality is everything, including the speck of control we have over it.

Hoffman’s book (which I haven't finished reading) argues convincingly that our perceptions might not show reality—an intriguing idea. But his assumption that objective reality is vastly unlikely be the “reality” we perceive still seems an assumption. In fact, in places, I think I catch outright errors in his thinking. I share two here to give you smart folks a chance to show me that I’m wrong, as you’ve recently helped me solve other more mundane problems.

In chapter 4, to dispute the claim that (I understand to be that) his theory can’t be accurate because it does not propose a reality to replace the one we think we perceive, he writes “Suppose that I tell you that p is some particular claim and q is some particular claim, but I refuse to tell you what either claim is. Then … suppose that I … claim ‘if either p is true or q is true then it follows that p is true.’ … You know that this claim is false, even though you don’t know the contents of p or q."

That’s plain wrong (right?)—in way that doesn’t invalidate his theory, but does fail to falsify the counterargument. It’s easy to choose a p and q for which it is true that “if either p is true or q is true then it follows that p is true.” For instance:

p = All Australians are at least 10 feet tall.
q = All Australians are at least 11 feet tall.

It is also possible (probable, it seems to me) that objective reality and the fitness payoffs natural selection has fashioned our senses to perceive are at least as closely related as these two claims.

**

Hoffman admits that fitness payoffs change depending on an organism’s needs. A hungry teen, he says, perceives great fitness payoffs in a pizza. But six slices later, the same teen reacts differently to the same pizza. The fitness payoffs are no longer there. Doesn’t this falsify Hoffman’s belief that perceiving fitness payoffs makes it unlikely that we accurately perceive reality? If our perception of fitness payoffs showed something unreal, wouldn’t that unreal thing change as the fitness payoffs it was designed to direct us toward changed?

(Of course, the pizza has changed in the sense of being six slices lighter, but the fitness payoffs of a given pizza are different to a teen who hasn't eaten in several hours than to one who has just consumed a different pizza, without, I think, changing the pizza as perceived by the teen.)

Added: Maybe the pizza issue is resolved by regarding what I've dismissed as the teen's changing reaction as part of the teen's perception? The pizza's smell, look, feel, and taste are the same whether or not the teen's eaten, but the whole package is perceived as a "delicious pizza" when it points the teen toward a(n unknown, according to Hoffman) fitness payoff, and as a "disgusting pizza" when it warns the teen away from the fitness penalty that we (from the standpoint of our limited perspective) describe as overeating.

I would like to quibble with the question as Martin posed it. Please delete the words "as it is" since if you don't see reality as it is you are not seeing reality.

I wonder if we see irreality as it isn't?

Max, if I'm reading it correctly, the wording 'if either p is true or q is true' is a binary that specifically excludes situations in which both p and q are true.

(Then again, a certain part of Fiddler on the Roof comes to mind....)

Max, Julie, et alii. Julie is partly correct. I’m double plus nonplussed that we (y’all) are still wasting time with Hoffman — unless he is being seriously misunderstood all around.

If P or Q is true, then P is true is rubbish!

We can write “P or Q” as P V Q, where the symbol V is an inclusive Disjunction. That’s all I will touch on here.

When I teach this, I jump up on the classroom desk to illustrate Conjunction (the “And”, symbolized by an inverted V [like a Greek uppercase lambda: Λ] by standing with my legs wide part in a Λ shape] to show how I stand on both legs at once—thus standing on one leg AND the other at the same moment. Both Q and P MUST be true for the conjunction to be true.

An inclusive Disjunction (OR) I show by sticking both arms out straight above my head in a V display. I can tap a basketball into the hoop with one hand OR the other OR both at the same time.

There is not one student, no matter how unprepared who doesn’t get the message, ever, with me on the desk waving my arms: V is not Λ.

Anyway, starting a logical inference with a Disjunction is very uncommon, and P V Q (true) implying that P is true is wrong. Just plain erroneous.

Apart from the picturesque material above that merely emphasizes what Hoffman himself says, my problem with much of this thread is that the answer to its question is easily seen to be No. Stuff is there; we are thinking stuff; there is stuff we don’t see like stinks; stuff outside us exists that we don’t hear, and stuff that we don’t taste or smell, like some poisonous chemicals such as carbon monoxide, QED: we directly sense some of the reality stuff. Beyond physical stuff, we might think we know something—however, do beware of wish fulfillment.

Thank you, Julie and Allen.

I don't share your attitude about Hoffman, Allen. An idea doesn't have to be right to be intriguing.

Funny stuff, Roger. "Reality" is hard to write about precisely, because it can mean so many different things. Even an illusion is real in some sense.

Oliver Sax did some interesting work a couple or three levels above Reality to examine how damage and alternate processes within brains reveal pathways from sensation to meaning in people. "Anthropologist on Mars" and "River of Consciousness" are two books that take different tacks, both rooted in biology, to look critically at consciousness. The mechanisms that receive physical stimulus, process the signals, and bring them into mind are multiple and specific. To me it seems obvious that perceptions are narrowly filtered, species and individual unique windows, best located to respond to food, sex and predators. But this is more the influence of Dawkins than Sax. Dr Sax seemed a kind and gentle man.

Like Max, I think Hoffman’s ideas are intriguing, which was why I started this thread. But having gotten somewhat more familiar with his theory, I am having trouble buying it. It seems far more likely that consciousness emerges (in a way scientists are still striving to understand) from more fundamental things (such as particles and fields) rather than the other way around. I found this summary of Hoffman’s theory (from Wikipedia). By the way, Roger Penrose’s ideas (which are far too complex for me) about how consciousness arises are also intriguing. Though difficult and controversial, his theories about consciousness are at least based (as far as I know) on physics rather than some sort of monism.