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.

[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.

[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.

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?