Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater
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?
|
As a way of testing my understanding of Hoffman, I'll give what I think Hoffman's answer would be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater
Why isn't it reality?
|
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater
What are the qualities of "reality" that are lacking from what we "falsely" perceive as reality?
|
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.