The Death of SpaceTime & Birth of Conscious Agents

I think this is the latest lecture by Donald Hoffman re: his particular brand of Idealism:

Spacetime is doomed. It, and its particles, cannot be fundamental in physical theory, but must emerge from a more fundamental theory. I review the converging evidence for this claim from physics and evolution, and then propose a new way to think of spacetime: as a data-compressing and error-correcting channel for information about fitness. I propose that a theory of conscious agents is a good candidate for the more fundamental theory to replace spacetime. Spacetime then appears as one kind of interface for communication between conscious agents.

I think this is the latest lecture by Donald Hoffman re: his particular brand of Idealism:

I haven't watched it yet (will try tomorrow)... everything is OK on the buildup to his ideas because these are the things which fall out of QM/Relativity for me. I too am a believer that spacetime is the result of processing information that is stored quite differently to the spacetime result, again this is what other people are looking at with dimensions, branes, and stringy stuff, and a whole lot more ideas, etc. I get that processing is shared, because of a shared reality. I get individuals. But whenever I've delved into the actual details of Hoffman's ideas in the past, and looked at his explanations of them, I think he's getting things wrong.

Watched it... he doesn't delve into any detail about his own ideas in this presentation... really just setting the scene with our observations about nature... and other people's ideas about fitness... but I can tell he's still got that time/objects/individuals/information problem going on... it's like he's got some sort of blindness about time (spacetime)...

Honestly, I think anomalous phenomena, those experiences we discuss on here, which don't fit with how we understand the world are really really useful for breaking through to something new, a new perspective...

The detail of Hoffmans ideas when I've looked at them in the past just look dead and wooden, when one considers experiences like Harry Martindales Roman ghosts in the cellar of Treasurers house, York.

For instance, when we transform information... (what we understand as energy and matter within spacetime), we can pass information forwards in what we understand as time, I can move it around in spacetime, I can store it, and I can share it. Writing a note on a piece of paper is just amazing... that ability to make a transformation that can pass information forwards in spacetime relatively unchanged is really deep.

For a simplistic example... both Hoffman and I can be in the same room, I can ask somebody outside the room to secretly choose some everyday item, and place it inside a wooden box, and close the box lid. I can then ask somebody else outside the room, to bring the box inside the room, and then leave again. Hoffman and I can open the box to reveal the everyday item, we can take the item out of the box, we will both agree on what the everyday item is. I can then ask the person who originally chose the everyday item to enter the room. That person will also agree on what the everyday item is, and they will also confirm that this is the item they placed inside the box, when they were outside of the room.

That example is not a trivial thing, it's incredible to me.... what is going on here is really really deep.

I can increase the spacetime separation between the choosing person, and Hoffman and I in the same room, and the repeat the experiment. The person can be thousands of miles away, or could have chosen the item and placed it in the box months ago, it still holds somewhat true.

Now one can jump back to Harry Martindales Roman Ghosts experience... and there is a profound similarity between the item in the wooden box, and Harry Martindales Ghosts... it's the same thing going on, but players positions have changed, the objective positions have changed, and the perspective (the experience) has altered. But it's the same thing going on... and it's a clue to just how profound and deep the things that are really going on behind the item in the wooden box example really are.

[Ninshub]

In the Buddha at the Gas Pump interview that Stan posted with Daniel Hoffmann, he starts with the topic of the "doom of spacetime", and references how the idea isn't his but that of working, mainstream theoretical physicists.

He mentions looking up at videos by this one, for example, Nima Arkani-Hamed.

Here's one of his presentations on the topic, from 2018:



The union of quantum mechanics and gravity strongly suggests that spacetime as a basic concept is doomed, and there are related indications of fundamental limitations to quantum mechanics in both the early and late universe. In this talk I review these paradoxes and describe indications for a new picture where spacetime and quantum mechanics will be seen to emerge hand in hand from more primitive principles, making contact with new areas of mathematics. I give concrete examples of how these ideas work in the context of scattering amplitudes, describing particle collision experiments of the sort performed at the Large Hadron Collider.

In the Buddha at the Gas Pump interview that Stan posted with Daniel Hoffmann, he starts with the topic of the "doom of spacetime", and references how the idea isn't his but that of working, mainstream theoretical physicists.

He mentions looking up at videos by this one, for example, Nima Arkani-Hamed.

Here's one of his presentations on the topic, from 2018:



The union of quantum mechanics and gravity strongly suggests that spacetime as a basic concept is doomed, and there are related indications of fundamental limitations to quantum mechanics in both the early and late universe. In this talk I review these paradoxes and describe indications for a new picture where spacetime and quantum mechanics will be seen to emerge hand in hand from more primitive principles, making contact with new areas of mathematics. I give concrete examples of how these ideas work in the context of scattering amplitudes, describing particle collision experiments of the sort performed at the Large Hadron Collider.

This was a really excellent lecture by Nima Arkani-Hamed, well worth watching... more than once...

[Ninshub]

Yeah, I'm still going through it, but very well explained.

Fact, Fiction, and Fitness

by Chetan Prakash , Chris Fields, Donald D. Hoffman, Robert Prentner and Manish Singh

Abstract

A theory of consciousness, whatever else it may do, must address the structure of experience. Our perceptual experiences are richly structured. Simply seeing a red apple, swaying between green leaves on a stout tree, involves symmetries, geometries, orders, topologies, and algebras of events. Are these structures also present in the world, fully independent of their observation? Perceptual theorists of many persuasions—from computational to radical embodied—say yes: perception veridically presents to observers structures that exist in an observer-independent world; and it does so because natural selection shapes perceptual systems to be increasingly veridical. Here we study four structures: total orders, permutation groups, cyclic groups, and measurable spaces. We ask whether the payoff functions that drive evolution by natural selection are homomorphisms of these structures. We prove, in each case, that generically the answer is no: as the number of world states and payoff values go to infinity, the probability that a payoff function is a homomorphism goes to zero. We conclude that natural selection almost surely shapes perceptions of these structures to be non-veridical. This is consistent with the interface theory of perception, which claims that natural selection shapes perceptual systems not to provide veridical perceptions, but to serve as species-specific interfaces that guide adaptive behavior. Our results present a constraint for any theory of consciousness which assumes that structure in perceptual experience is shaped by natural selection.

Fact, Fiction, and Fitness

by Chetan Prakash , Chris Fields, Donald D. Hoffman, Robert Prentner and Manish Singh

Do you think it tells us anything more, beyond what we've already had confirmed by experimentation... such as Edwin Lands experiments about colour... or countless quantum experiments showing that naive realism is buggered...?

I think we're left wondering about the real significance of Hoffman's suggestion that our Reality isn't an accurate perception... I mean, don't you think you're left navel gazing about the significance and perceptual accuracy of the TV series 'Friends'... and then realise Hoffman's given you a ball of string without an end that's available for you to pull on... and you wonder just exactly where does this paper get you?

I swear whenever I hear a title with 'conscious agents' in it I just instinctively know it's going to involve Donald Hoffman 

Do you think it tells us anything more, beyond what we've already had confirmed by experimentation... such as Edwin Lands experiments about colour... or countless quantum experiments showing that naive realism is buggered...?

I think we're left wondering about the real significance of Hoffman's suggestion that our Reality isn't an accurate perception... I mean, don't you think you're left navel gazing about the significance and perceptual accuracy of the TV series 'Friends'... and then realise Hoffman's given you a ball of string without an end that's available for you to pull on... and you wonder just exactly where does this paper get you?

Heh not quite navel gazing, maybe more trying to move a tank through the power generated by a hamster wheel - I think Hoffman has to go to mathematics to argue his assertion, continually refining the case with proofs based around the modeling of evolution.

The challenge for him is we probably need evidence from physics and biology to make his case, but he himself needs to convince people in those fields that his idea is worth even considering. Maths is probably the only recourse he has in the meantime.

I do wonder how exactly one goes about proving the validity of his argument - do we just have more and more disconnects in our basic theories that don't make sense? And how then does connect this to his other theory, that reality is made from the interaction of conscious agents?