Have we evolved to construct reality?

Have we evolved to construct reality?

Heather Ashbach

A new book, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (W. W. Norton, 2019), applies this concept to the whole of human consciousness—how we see, think, feel, and interact with the world around us. And author Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, thinks we’ve been looking at it all wrong.

“As a scientist, I propose a theory and then try to prove the theory wrong, to test its validity,” he says. “Because there is no mathematical theory explaining the pattern of neural activity that creates consciousness, it may mean we are making a false assumption.”

There are tons of correlations between brain activity and specific conscious experiences. Area V4 of the brain is coordinated with color experience. If I stimulate that area with a magnet, I can make you lose all color experience. Turn the magnet off and your color experience comes back. This is really important data. If I do the same in Area V5—you lose all motion perception. There are hundreds of correlations like this—specific patterns of activity. This is important data, but it’s just data. It’s not a theory. The question is—for scientists—what mathematical theory actually explains them? And we don’t have one. Why? Because most approaches assume that brain activity causes conscious experience. But no one has an idea about how to boot up conscious experience from the brain; there are no theories that explain this.

Our failure to find a theory suggests that we may be making a false assumption.

What I’m doing from a science perspective is bringing mathematical rigor to what those in the spiritual community have been thinking for hundreds of years. But I’m iconoclastic—just because something has been believed for thousands of years doesn’t make it true. This is very different from the standard religious view. I think it’s important to have mutual respect—we can get to a point where the science side can learn from the spiritual traditions and likewise the spiritual side can learn not to hold ideas too tightly. How can you learn if you’re not willing to let go of what might be false? It gets in the way of genuine progress.

This seems to be the latest video of Hoffman going into his Idealism:

Hoffman's concept is frustratingly nebulous, at least as he attempts to describe it in this article. 

"If we can’t start with neurons and boot up consciousness, let’s start with consciousness and boot up neurons. And that’s what I’m working on now—a mathematical model of consciousness. And it has to be precise.

If we've mistaken our perceptions for the truth, our entire perception of spacetime and physical objects is misleading.

The idea is that reality is a vast social network of interacting consciousnesses. Each conscious agent has experience and can make freewill actions. So it’s a very vast social network. Think of the Twitterverse. There are millions of users and billions of tweets. Trying to see and understand it all is too much. In big data, we use graphical interfaces that hide all of the chatter and instead give summaries. Evolution did that for us. Spacetime and physical objects are just our visualization tools that help us to interact within this vast social network without even seeing it."

How does this relate to the everyday invariantly mechanistic and cause-and-effect interactive dualism-like interaction of thousands of automobile drivers on the Los Angeles freeways? All this closely coordinated activity of thousands of individual humans with other humans in an apparent physical objective reality would instantly degenerate into chaos, mayhem and multiple collisions and accidents if there was not actually a fixed objective physical reality interfaced with by conscious human beings, with that interface being determined by invariant laws of motion.  There are of course innumerable other examples of this.

If you narrow down nature to just a tiny tiny piece, QM shows us that each observation of nature is different. Observations actually change the system. We also find nature works probabilistically. Your classical laws are just approximations, all physics is now probabilistic. Classical physics died in the 1920’s and was replaced by a new and more accurate generalisation... called quantum mechanics.

This does indeed seem to be the case. But regardless of the ultimate nature of its elementary particle building blocks the human level of physical reality (as exemplified by the freeway traffic example) behaves exactly as if it were a combination of matter and energy behaving according to determinism and classical physics along with the intervention of immaterial consciousness embodied in human beings. This may ultimately just be a very close approximation, but this is extremely close to being just as if there is an objective physical reality interfacing with immaterial consciousness via physical brains, as posited by interactive dualism. Rather than being as if it is "a vast social network of interacting consciousnesses" (Hoffman's terminology).

Why should reality present itself so falsely to humans? I think there is a mysterious teleology in this.

All this closely coordinated activity of thousands of individual humans with other humans in an apparent physical objective reality would instantly degenerate into chaos, mayhem and multiple collisions and accidents

Why would this happen? Keep in mind Hoffman's Conscious Agents are not humans or, at the least, not just humans.

I look at Hoffman's Conscious Realism as the Idealist version of the P2P Simulation Hypothesis.

How does this relate to the everyday invariantly mechanistic and cause-and-effect interactive dualism-like interaction of thousands of automobile drivers on the Los Angeles freeways? All this closely coordinated activity of thousands of individual humans with other humans in an apparent physical objective reality would instantly degenerate into chaos, mayhem and multiple collisions and accidents if there was not actually a fixed objective physical reality interfaced with by conscious human beings, with that interface being determined by invariant laws of motion.  There are of course innumerable other examples of this.

You presume that there must be an "objective physical reality", when you cannot know this. Your senses via your physical body tell you that it seems to be like, but you have no way of knowing that this is the case. This physical reality's apparent solidity could just as easily be an illusion by the physical senses, for all you know. For all any of us know.

The apparent laws of physics that regulate matter, or as Bernardo Kastrup calls them, habits, do not have to be independent of mind. Obviously, our minds didn't create them ~ other minds did, the minds that constructed this reality, formulate, and enforce, said laws, habits. They are designed to limit what conscious beings can do in this reality, and seem to enforce that one must be bound to a body in order to interact with this reality.

As the religion of Voudon shows, it seems that not only do human Souls "inhabit" or project through the physical form, other beings can temporarily possess the body. In Voudon, the priests will call in spirits to converse with them, to ask them questions, ask for favours after a sacrifice, and so on.

Based on my speculations, the physical realm is not divorced from the spiritual realms, but exists within it, interpenetrating it. Meaning that outside spirits can observe the happenings of this realm whenever they please, even if they cannot cause change upon it 99% of the time. It's as if there's a barrier preventing ease of access from both sides, preventing outside spirits easy access, but also preventing the incarnate easy access to... beyond.

Shamans, mediums, psychics, and others with spiritual, paranormal abilities... they have an easier time reaching out to the spiritual realms, but also, outside spirits have an easier time contacting them. No wonder go-between is an apt term for such gifted people, whether by honed talent, or by insight being gifted by the spirits.

You presume that there must be an "objective physical reality", when you cannot know this. Your senses via your physical body tell you that it seems to be like, but you have no way of knowing that this is the case. This physical reality's apparent solidity could just as easily be an illusion by the physical senses, for all you know. For all any of us know.

At our level of physical dimensions our reality "pushes back" against our actions in a feedback that is exactly the innumerable expected ways it would if it were an actual objective physical reality.  Our continued lives as physical beings depends on that unerring interaction. For instance, the automobile exactly obeys the control commands of its driver to avoid the oncoming vehicle based on classical dynamical calculations of potential collision unless steering and speed is changed just so. As I mentioned, there would be chaos and mayhem on the freeways if this were not the case, if our reality did not behave exactly as if there were an objective physical reality.    

The apparent laws of physics that regulate matter, or as Bernardo Kastrup calls them, habits, do not have to be independent of mind. Obviously, our minds didn't create them ~ other minds did, the minds that constructed this reality, formulate, and enforce, said laws, habits. They are designed to limit what conscious beings can do in this reality, and seem to enforce that one must be bound to a body in order to interact with this reality.

This is a good clarification, and I am not hostile to it. The laws of physics are independent of human minds. This is a fact of our reality and we have to live with it whether we like it or not.

Then the question becomes, what are these other minds, and do they really have any concern over our benefit as human beings in such decisions or choices? This of course also relates to the issue of what or who is it that chooses the next reincarnational life (if that is the mechanism) and how such choices or other mechanisms of rebirth can be so obviously cruel to human beings. Of course that is another entire topic already discussed in another thread.

The origin of our reality's intricate and complex apparent design of physical laws extremely fine-tuned to allow our existence does seem to beg for a teleological mind-related explanation, but whatever this mind or minds is, it's not us.