Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you....
Q: If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?
Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations...
I call it "conscious realism": Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. 1.
I am pretty drawn to his model, but I'm having trouble understanding it in the abstract - when he gets down to the detail of how agents interact, and how agents can actually merge - looses me there. — Wayfarer
Gefter: The world is just other conscious agents?
Hoffman: I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down. — Amanda Gefter
Hoffman says that the brain constructs or creates what we understand as 'reality' - that what we think we see 'out there' really is just neural processes. His analogy is that the objects we see around us are like the way we 'interface' with reality, but that they're no more intrinsically real than icons on the desktop of a computer, which aren't actually 'folders' or 'files' but are just symbolic representations that make it easier for us to find and initiate the processes that we want to execute (e.g. typing out a document). — Wayfarer
we as a society still have basic disagreements as to whether or not consciousness is itself a metaphysically valid agency or, else, an illusion — javra
Eah, but this a science and technology forum—so none of this here applies. — javra
Objects are exterior, and especially when we look at them, we are only seeing reflected light from a surface. — Bitter Crank
Yet, this falls in the trap of most of these "just so" theories. "Where" is it that the illusion (e.g. the desktop icons), exists? It is an infinite regress.. It's in the "mind"? What is this then? It's in the "brain"- What magical space of the neurostructure? There is always a hidden dualism lurking in these theories that cannot be explained away. — schopenhauer1
I think the more radical point is that 'exterior' is also a perception. I hasten to add, I think it's a veridical perception. But when we do see 'reflected light from a surface' - there's no actual light inside the cranium; light doesn't actually penetrate. The sensory organs process sensations including smell, touch, hearing, and combine them by the process called 'apperception' into cognitive wholes. But these are cognitive events, still. — Wayfarer
... his analogy is that the objects we see around us are like the way we 'interface' with reality, but that they're no more intrinsically real than icons on the desktop of a computer, — Wayfarer
if I hear a bell, see a tree, feel a thistle, smell a flower, taste a grape, I am not experiencing bells, trees, thistles, flowers, grapes? I'm just getting good vibrations, per the Beach Boys, and my clever little brain puts together something it chooses to name bell, tree, thistle, flower, and grape? It's possible that I could think I was eating a grape when I was actually eating his red tomato, previously located 1 meter from his eyeball. — Bitter Crank
According to evolutionary biology, h. sapiens is the result of millions (well, actually billions) of years of evolution. For all these years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and so on - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the mind that we have today.
Recently, other scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one’s respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of ‘conscious thought’ (and maybe beyond!)
Our consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call ‘ourselves’ - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the naïve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to exist, is in fact totally dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness, the bulk of which are completely unknown to us.
When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in ‘creating’ an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the lightwaves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment – either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will (hopefully) recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).
And you will do all of this without you even noticing that you are doing it; it is largely unconscious.
In other words, your consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them. Instead, your consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality - partially on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of an enormous number of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on. And this is the way in which the philosophy of 'idealism' does indeed receive support from modern science.
If we think there are subatomic particles composing the parts of the atom, and that these parts and the atoms themselves contain forces, and that atoms attach to one another in systematic ways to form molecules, and molecules and atoms line up to form crystals, and so on up to sequoias and whales, are we then to say... that all the stuff is illusory? — Bitter Crank
I don't think it's illusory tout courte, but that its reality is inextricably bound up with your perception of it. — Wayfarer
The trick is to see how the same is true of all phenomenology, like our experience of hues such as red and green. They are shards of self interested judgement hardwired down at the neurobiological level. Energy and matter are exactly what get left at the doors of perception. Consciousness starts with a logical transformation, an epistemic cut, where a digital decision has got made and now we can talk of a selfish realm of sign — apokrisis
[the perceived world] could be somewhat different, but all animal constructions of reality, including ours, have to correspond enough to the real world. Too far from enough, and sensory perception would have failed at the beginning a few billion years ago. — Bitter Crank
That brains have developed complex mechanisms to accomplish necessary means for the end of survival bothers some people. — Bitter Crank
"The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that [Bacon] had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in compliance with the world’s rulers... Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of others’ work, and capital... What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim." — Adorno and Horkheimer
the semiotic view says there is a real world out there of matter and energy. — apokrisis
The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.
What is the nature of this illusion? — schopenhauer1
There's quite a good profile of his ideas in the Atlantic. Here is his TED talk. — Wayfarer
I found the following article to be helpful in providing more information on his Multimodal User Interface theory of perception and Conscious Realism: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
Hoffman, D. (2008). Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem. Mind & Matter Vol. 6(1), pp. 87–121.
His philosophy is not: dualism, idealism, panpsychism, or physicalism. It does not contradict dual aspect monism, and MUI is consistent with species-specific semiotic modelling. Beyond that, I understand very little. — Galuchat
As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality. — Donald Hoffman
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