The Death of SpaceTime & Birth of Conscious Agents

Donald Hoffman discusses the nature of reality, what is real, his theory of consciousness, and how this theory affects everything from artificial intelligence to alien life and the Fermi Paradox.

Presentation by neuroscientist Prof. Donald Hoffman during Essentia Foundation's 2020 online work conference. Donald Hoffman is a Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is an author of over 120 scientific papers and three books, including 'The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.' He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge, and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has a TED Talk titled 'Do we see reality as it is?' Prof. Hoffman is a member of Essentia Foundation's Academic Advisory Board.

This episode features a mindblowing conversation with Dr. Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive sciences at UC Irvine who has proven the chances that we are seeing and experiencing reality is essentially zero percent. He and James talk about emergence of consciousness, the differences between Dr. Hoffman’s viewpoints and nondualism, and the evolving implications of his provable, mathematical models.

Hoffman is obviously a bright guy, and he speaks very clearly, so I hesitate to argue against him.

However to me, his whole argument depends on the truth of evolution by RM+NS, and I don't believe this is true anymore.

I used to believe in Darwin's theory until LoneShaman at Skeptiko persuaded me to think again. If our perceptions were developed by an intelligence to give us an accurate - if limited - view of the world, then Hoffman's conclusions are toast.

Indeed his conclusions are apparently based on the mathematical properties of RM+NS, so his argument can be flipped over to read that evolution of perception would necessarily give us a distorted view of reality - so Darwin's theory is clearly wrong!

[Laird]

Your response prompted me to watch the video in the OP, David. In addition to your reasonable critique, I have two more to add.

Firstly, based on that video, it seems to me that Donald Hoffman (DH) didn't deal adequately with the critique of an audience member: that whereas DH's theory leads to the view that space+time are not real but emergent from something more primal, at the same time DH's theory presupposes space+time. More specifically, although DH might have addressed the criticism that his theory presupposes space in its suggestion that space "emerges" out of something more primitive, I don't think he addressed the criticism that his theory presupposes time: for something to "evolve" (a crucial element of his theory) implies that at an earlier point in time, it was "less fit", and that a later point in time, it was "fitter". There can, in my view, be no recourse to the "emergence" of time here: the notion of evolution entails the primacy of time, or at least that time has the same degree of primacy as that of evolution.

Secondly, I wonder what it might even mean for us to perceive the world as it "really" is. Is such a thing even hypothetically possible? I ask because it seems to me that, unless you are a hardcore idealist who believes that what we perceive (as qualia) is directly the qualia of "the universal mind" (which I don't think makes much sense anyway, but anyhow), that which is "out there" cannot be perceived "directly", because it is physical, whereas perception is mental, and therefore some sort of process of "translation" between the physical "out there" and its internal conscious perception is always going to be necessary. In this sense, to claim that we don't perceive the world as it "really" is is something of a strawman or at least an irrelevancy, because such a thing is in the first place not even meaningful.

Donald Hoffman ( @donalddhoffman) received a PhD in computational psychology from MIT and is a Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is an author of over 120 scientific papers and three books, including The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.

His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge, and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His TED Talk, titled “Do We See Reality as It Is?,” has almost 4M views.

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine and author of 'The Case Against Reality.' He believes that the world we experience is an illusion, whilst ultimate reality is composed of networks of conscious agents. Keith and Philip will probe Professor Hoffman's view from their very different perspectives on the nature of consciousness.

Rather old Hoffman paper, a few of you have already seen it, but I think it brings some clarity to his ideas:

Peeking Behind the Icons

After you put on your helmet, you find yourself on a sandy beach with nine other players dressed not in the ugly high-tech bodysuits you saw just a moment ago, but in flattering bathing suits. You’re surrounded by palms trees and blue skies, with light puffy clouds. You hear the soft screeching of gulls, and the gentle pounding of surf. You see an off-white volleyball lying before you on the sand, and a volleyball net already set up...

Then you serve and the fun begins. You and the others are soon completely absorbed as you dig, set, feint, and spike with abandon. This goes on for a few wonderful minutes.

Then, suddenly, you are plagued with philosophical worries about the game you’re now playing. Between points, and in lulls in the action, question after question comes to mind. The first is this -

Are we all seeing and playing with the same volleyball?

But what is your relational brain? Does it resemble your phenomenal brain? There’s no reason to suppose it does. In fact, as we saw with the volleyball, there’s no reason to suppose that the nature of the phenomenal brain in any way constrains the nature of the relational brain. Your phenomenal brain is simply a graphical interface that allows you to interact with your relational brain, whatever that relational brain might be. And all that’s required of a graphical interface is that it be systematically related to what it represents. The relation can be as arbitrary as you wish, as long as it’s systematic. The trash can icon on your computer screen is a graphical interface to software which can erase files on your computer disk. The trash can icon is systematically related to that erasing software, but the relation is arbitrary: the trash can icon doesn’t resemble the erasing software in any way. It could be any color or shape you wish and still successfully do the job of letting you interact with the erasing software. It could be a pig icon or a toilette icon instead of a trash can icon. All that matters is the systematic connection.