Why the world is imagined: A summary

Why the world is imagined: A summary

by B.Kastrup

I want to summarize below, in language accessible to anyone, the key points of the philosophy explicated in much more detail in those books. So here we go...

The lining up between Kastrup and Hoffman is nice as it helps me to see congruent arguments. I think the physical world as iconography is paralleled in both writer's works.

Here Kastrup says:

I thus submit that the brain—in fact, the whole body—is merely the image of a process of localization in universal consciousness; a localization of experience that, from a first-person perspective, makes up our private inner lives. The body-brain system is like a whirlpool in the stream of universal experiences.

The brain doesn’t generate experience for the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. Yet, brain activity correlates with inner experience—the localized contents of the whirlpool—because it is what the latter looks like from a second-person perspective, just as lightning is what atmospheric electric discharge looks like from the outside.

And in his writing on Interface Theory of Perception Hoffman notes:

ITP predicts, as we discussed above, that no physical object in spacetime has definite values of any
dynamical properties when it is not observed. No electron has a position, no atom has a momentum, when it
is not observed. All careful tests of this prediction find violations of Bell’s inequalities, a result that is
compatible with, indeed predicted by, ITP.

ITP predicts that neurons, being just one kind of physical object in spacetime, do not exist when they are
not observed. This entails that neurons cause none of our behaviors, none of our mental states, none of our conscious experiences: Something that does not exist when it is not observed cannot be a fundamental
cause of anything.

There does seem to be a difference though - it seems to me Bernardo would not deny the stability of non-conscious objects, and would state they retain their "solidity" though being fixed by Mind@Large.

I've always been a bit confused by what Hoffman means by saying physical objects don't maintain their reality when not observed. It seems he is trying to speak in terms of a video game, where code "instantiates" the environment based on the locations of the players...but AFAIK he never makes this explicit?

The lining up between Kastrup and Hoffman is nice as it helps me to see congruent arguments. I think the physical world as iconography is paralleled in both writer's works.

Here Kastrup says:



And in his writing on Interface Theory of Perception Hoffman notes:


There does seem to be a difference though - it seems to me Bernardo would not deny the stability of non-conscious objects, and would state they retain their "solidity" though being fixed by Mind@Large.

I've always been a bit confused by what Hoffman means by saying physical objects don't maintain their reality when not observed. It seems he is trying to speak in terms of a video game, where code "instantiates" the environment based on the locations of the players...but AFAIK he never makes this explicit?

I agree that Hoffman is confusing. I think that it is because he really is confused. He says: 

"ITP predicts that neurons, being just one kind of physical object in spacetime, do not exist when they are

not observed. This entails that neurons cause none of our behaviors, none of our mental states, none of our conscious experiences: Something that does not exist when it is not observed cannot be a fundamental
cause of anything."

It's obvious (at least to me) that there is an objective world that continues to exist without being actually observed by human beings. Of course there could be a giant computer and hugely powerful entity in the sky that maintains a record of everything whatsoever so that whatever becomes humanly observed is materialized as necessary along with all the internal evidence that it is part and parcel and continuous in time with the rest of the observed natural world. Humans can't reasonably be imagined as having this power themselves. Occam's razor here - there's almost certainly an objective world. 

Hoffman doesn't seem to have reasoned this out. He also doesn't seem to have reasoned out that the more likely case (if everything is really information) is that there is an objective world from the human standpoint, but that it is still ultimately mental stuff not material, and all this is necessarily held in the mind of some unimaginably powerful being. The only thing that he is right about in his statement quoted above seems to be that neurons don't cause mental states. The dualist would hold that it is correlation not causation - the spirit is what causes human mental states, as manifested and filtered through the neural mechanism. Much empirical evidence could be cited here.

I agree that Hoffman is confusing. I think that it is because he really is confused. He says: 

My feeling is that Hoffman is extremely intelligent, and knows exactly what he is saying, but he wants to stay in academia, so he somewhat blurs his description. I understand this site does interviews with interesting people, and I certainly think he would be worth interviewing.

It's obvious (at least to me) that there is an objective world that continues to exist without being actually observed by human beings.

What Hoffman does seem to be saying, is that reality may be unbelievably different from what we think it is - that all our science is warped by the fact that our perceptions are optimised for reproduction and 'fitness'.

I think there is plenty of evidence to doubt the concept of evolution by natural selection, and maybe he does too, but again, saying that would end his academic career.

On way of reading Hoffman, is that assuming evolution is true, all these weird things must follow.

Of course there could be a giant computer and hugely powerful entity in the sky that maintains a record of everything whatsoever so that whatever becomes humanly observed is 

I don't believe in the giant computer theory, and in any case, unless we believe in a computer of unbounded complexity, it would surely be defeated by entanglement processes.

I like the idea that a lot of the physical world that we encounter, may be symbolic. If we shake hands with someone, or hug them, or even have sex with them (at least with a condom on), there is a real sense in which those acts are symbolic - nothing of any significance is physically changed - the value of these acts is in what they represent to us.

Thinking about this some more, I suspect what Hoffman is trying to say is that since our interface is made of icons divorced from reality (in the same way a file icon is not an accurate representation for the physical computer memory) then anything within the interface is not a true representation.

So a "neuron" only exists within observation because it is an icon representing a portion of true reality. Where I think Hoffman could be more clear is that *something* does exist even when not observed, for example the quantum bits of information Seth Lloyd posits are the substrata of our reality.

I agree with David001 that an interview with Hoffman would be great!