The Case Against Reality – Prof. Donald Hoffman on Conscious Agent Theory

January 9th, 2020

Book: The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald D. Hoffman

Via: Zubin Damania:

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12 Responses to “The Case Against Reality – Prof. Donald Hoffman on Conscious Agent Theory”

  1. dale says:

    That was heavy. I ordered the book. I’ll comment further in a year or two.

  2. Kevin says:

    Around 1997, I was in a relationship with a woman who was one of Don Hoffman’s teaching assistants. I’d guess that this woman had an IQ in the range of between 160 to 170. One night, I noticed that she had been reading something that Hoffman had written. It was covered with what looked to me like a bunch of squiggly lines and Greek symbols.

    I asked her, “What’s that about?”

    She said, “Oh it’s just Don going on about how we’re making up what we perceive to be reality.”

    “Ok,” I said, “What’s for dinner?”

    And that was it.

    Several years later, long after I’d broken up with the woman above (I didn’t want to move to New York), I became friends with a guy who happened to work in Don Hoffman’s lab. We actually used to get dinner nearby and then work on interesting coding projects in that lab.

    I met Don and let’s just say that Don is not your run of the mill, New York Times reading university professor. Well, he might read the New York Times, but what I’m saying is that.. How should I put this? Nothing that appears on Cryptogon would be news to Don.

    Anyway, that friend of mine, Don’s grad student, was convinced that the mind doesn’t exist in the brain.

    “It’s not in there and nobody is ever going to find it in there.”

    If my beanie has one propeller twirling about in the breeze, this guy’s would have dozens.

    This was around 2003. Again, I pretty much shrugged and moved on.

    A few days ago, while I was watching something completely unrelated on YouTube, Google’s AI listed this Don Hoffman interview above as, “Recommended for you.”

    I thought, “Is The Matrix trying to tell me something?” How many random brushes with Don Hoffman can a guy have over the decades?!?!

  3. dale says:

    That’s funny, and uncanny. Especially in connection with the subject of reality itself. Cat Glitch Syndrome

  4. Dennis says:

    So, let me see if I’ve got all this. Our physical senses and our brain’s survival mechanism filters are not set up to perceive deeper reality, only manifestations and representations that proceed from it. Indeed, to perceive deeper reality may actually be counterproductive evolutionarily. Conscious agents seem to have a non-physical component and our time/space universe provides a ‘place’ where they can manifest and evolve, possibly assisted in the process by the physical and limited forms through which they must operate, perhaps even through synthetic forms. Because he believes that mathematics underlies consciousness, Donald Hoffman and a bunch of other folk think it’s possible to model these phenomena. Is that a fair summary?

    After a chat we had on Christmas Day, I wrote my niece the following letter, which here I think helps prepare the ground for the rest of my comment:

    We know this universe began its existence a very long time ago. On that point almost everyone agrees. But how did it begin? Some say God, some say it came from nothing. As far as explanations go, that’s it. But how could there be a God who created this universe? And how could nothing have done the same? Interestingly, these opposites have something in common: they are both utterly beyond our capacity for intellectual understanding; push into these two explanations and your brain will quickly go into meltdown.

    That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t use our minds and think critically and examine evidence and seek to learn and grow in understanding and knowledge, but we must not fool ourselves that our intellects are adequate in themselves to understand these questions. That is obviously and almost painfully not the case.

    So, if our intellects are so limited, how can we know anything? What can we truly know? This brings us to the question of whether there are other ways of knowing true things, and that is a very big question.[END]

    I know I’m *way* down the ladder when it comes to education and scientific knowledge compared to this guy, but…

    Don uses the analogy of icons and the software and hardware that make their existence possible, and seems to see the intellect as the eye of the beholder, the agent now trying to see the truth behind the icons on the screen. From the POV of his scientific self this is fitting, but intellect is only a part of who we are, not the whole of our consciousness. He’s obviously aware of the limitations of intellect since he references Gödel, but does he see that intellect, at least in the form that we know it as the product of conscious experience and a logic developed within a time/space realm, also shares in the iconic? The dude’s obviously brilliant, so I’d be surprised if he hasn’t, and without putting it to use he won’t get much science done, so he’s obviously giving it his best shot!

    However, though intellect helps us recognise the existence of the software, when it comes to accessing it, how can the intellect, being a product of both the software and the iconic environment in which it has developed, be sufficient to pierce the veil? At one point he discusses DNA as a tool for backwards engineering, but the issue there is its information content, i.e. DNA is itself software-imprinted.

    Don says we have ‘centuries of work ahead in this framework’. Though I admire and am excited by his vision of and desire to explore a new scientific frontier and look forward to hearing how he goes, if there is an ultimate infinite conscious agent and consciousness is ‘the fundamental reality’, why would anyone (choose to?) believe the answers are so elusive while also arguing for the existence of a continuum that bridges ultimate consciousness and our consciousness — and our world and its icons? If all reality has manifested from consciousness then, logically, communication with that conscious agent must be possible, even at this very moment.

    The question then becomes one of ways of knowing. As a good scientist and thinker, Don recognises that scientific knowledge has its limits and concedes that there are truths, true things, ultimates, that are not intellectually knowable. Zubin points out there are also experiential truths and that some true things might only be known in non-intellectual ways. But then scientist Don says ‘the tools of science are up to the job’ and these experiences, these conscious phenomena, can be quantified in a lab and measured. However, the problem is that such measurements are also necessarily iconic; they are downstream and though they (hopefully) can provide many clues and guide us to deeper understanding and further questions, they are not (yet?) direct measurements of consciousness.

    Admittedly, to follow this path of reasoning you must make provision for the belief that there are other forms of knowing true things than the intellectual. Such a viewpoint is far from popular when it comes to hard science, but is not itself irrational, despite the irrationality often displayed by those who make such claims.

    Basically, I think his goal of achieving a ’scientific spirituality’ strikes me as a form of natural theology, a desire to identify and define agents and model their operations and relationships. Cool stuff if you can pull it off (as long as the result isn’t some kind of disastrous techno-religio-fascist society), but a precise definition of sight and hearing and an explanation of its mathematics and means can never substitute for the experience of the senses themselves, so on the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ it’s back to square one only with a new set of icons, of symbolic representations…but perhaps this is exactly what Don wants believing they can serve as the portal Zubin mentions; mathematics has unlocked all manner of riches in the physical realm so what might such formulas and spells liberate from the realms of the psyche?

    I’ll finish off with four quotes I think relevant to this topic. I’d be surprised if Don hasn’t read all of them. The third is in reference to the question of knowing and to Don’s ‘infinite candy shop’: and most of you will be familiar with the last:

    There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.
    —David Bohm, ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order’

    I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time.
    —CS Lewis, ‘The Great Divorce’

    Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.
    —Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians

    “We need to be very careful with artificial intelligence…we are summoning the demon.”
    —Elon Musk

  5. Loveandlight says:

    This seems like a good opportunity to point out that the Hermetic Law of Mentalism says that life, existence, the Universe and whatever may exist beyond the Universe, are all “mind”, and what we call “matter” proceeds from “mind”, not the other way around.

  6. Kevin says:

    I’m about half way through the book. I don’t pretend to comprehend it all. Even though the information is meant for laypeople, I still struggle.

    The thing that stands out most of all to me is the total inability of anyone to explain the “hard problem of consciousness.”

    I like this:

    “We have scientific laws that predict black holes, the dynamics of quarks, and the evolution of the universe. Yet we have no clue how to formulate laws, principles, or mechanisms that predict our quotidian experiences of tasting herbs and hearing street noise.”

    haha

  7. NH says:

    @Kevin–seems like there might be at least two levels of The Matrix going on—the (almost) unknowable Universe level and the nascent human-created AI level(with 25+ years of your electronic data) which has a whole range of human types having operational control of it. From basically decent people working for the alphabet agencies tasked with keeping us “safe” using minimally harmful methods, to the worst billionaire/trillionaire devils without the slightest conscience.

    Maybe your first two brushes with Don was The Matrix/universe, while the third brush was The Matrix/AI.

    @Dennis—A magnificent comment, worthy of being printed and hung on the refrigerator.

    I too respect the intellect of and effort made by Don & company to elucidate the mysteries of consciousness. But, there is the danger of over-reliance on the incredibly powerful tool of mathematics, especially in this realm. Even in cosmology, which seems kind of simple in comparison, there was a very unfortunate move to over-reliance on mathematics a hundred years ago. We ended up with (missing) dark matter, (missing) dark energy and a whole string of other erroneous ideas which need to be corrected.

    Check out Plasma Cosmology, Electric Sun and Electric Universe Theory—the relevance to Don’s work being that when you zoom your focus out far enough, the structure of the Universe resembles brain tissue.

  8. Dennis says:

    @NH
    Thank you for your kind words! Also for your recommendation on the electric universe. What you describe sounds fractal-like. I did a little reading on the concept about 10 years ago, and it seemed then that aspects of the idea were being ignored for being outside the box, but there were other things that I had trouble seeing conceptually, specifically the generation and transfer of huge charges between celestial bodies at an interstellar level, but I will have another look…

  9. NH says:

    Yeah, when you look at the conductive pathways between planets, stars, quasars, galaxies etc, known as Birkeland current filaments, and you look at the ubiquitous presence of plasma throughout the Universe, it does seem fractal-like in relation to cell biology. It’s also perfectly fractal in the sense that experiments in the lab have recreated precisely what is observed in the heavens. The Safire Project is one of the newest efforts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTaXfbvGf8E

    The predictive and explanatory power of Plasma Cosmology/Electric Universe science really shakes the paradigm we’ve had in place for a very long time—the surprising thing too is it just makes intuitive sense—it would do us a world of good to listen to some electrical engineers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZrGecDJbL8 and experimental plasma physicists instead of just worshiping at the alter of the string theorists, etc.

    Physicist Wal Thornhill has some great info in his archive from about 2002-2009: http://www.holoscience.com/wp/

    And Ben Davidson has a daily briefing on current space weather and lots of cutting-edge science: https://suspicious0bservers.org/

    The Thunderbolts Project has been around a long time and is very cool:
    https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/

  10. NH says:

    A couple months later the Safire Project makes some remarkable claims regarding commercial fusion energy and the transmutation of dangerous nuclear waste:

    https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2020/03/10/special-feature-the-safire-sun/

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