
The case against reality - noego
https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2019/2019-07-22-hoffman-reality.php
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sdfin
The optical illusion jpg at the beginning of the article is worth looking at
[https://www.socsci.uci.edu/files/news_events/2019/opticalill...](https://www.socsci.uci.edu/files/news_events/2019/opticalillusion_880.jpg)

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blacksqr
Interview with author (2016):

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-
aga...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-
reality-20160421/)

"I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D
that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for
a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my
perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences,
and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of
actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is:
This is the structure of consciousness..."

* But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world? *

"Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and
stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In
fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the
world."

* The world is just other conscious agents? *

"I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just
points of view."

~~~
joycian
As soon as the article started mixing in the quantum mechanics quotes, my eyes
glazed over and I stopped reading. Do people really get something out of these
kinds of articles?

~~~
Viliam1234
Humans seem to have a strong desire to see magic. At the same time,
scientifically educated people feel ashamed for this desire. The solution for
them is to find magic that isn't obviously magic, so they can pretend it is
something else.

The popular solution is to use something scientifically sounding, but out of
original context. These days "quantum physics" is popular; hundred years ago
it would be "magnetism"; and of course "energy" never goes out of fashion.

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badrabbit
In these sorts of discussions I always wonder why I rarely see people comment
that attributes and concepts that are simply beyond our capacity to understand
likely exist.

An unknowable unknown is a huge variable to ignore

Considering there are species that cannot comprehend reality as we humans
perceive it,is this too far fetched of a hypothesis?

~~~
heyitsguay
Philosophically, I think that people are rarely interested in talking too much
about unknown unknowns because acknowledging them doesn't offer specific,
useful predictions about the world - sure, you need to be aware that knowledge
is approximate models, your thinking is imperfect, and be open to new data
that clashes with your assumptions, but that general point is equally
applicable to everything and therefore specific to nothing.

Practically, I think that people are rarely interested in talking too much
about unknown unknowns because it's typically a segue into talking about gods,
or souls, or why quantum physics proves free will or something. Stuff that has
been done to death a million times, is as empty as it ever was, and there is
other cooler stuff to talk about.

~~~
badrabbit
Well you talk about these things to find out truth not because they sound cool
right?

I meant specifically some specific aspect of what you're talking about could
be unknowable and you can postulate effects of the unknowable property with
respect to knowable variables is what I meant.

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aaron-santos
A more "mathematical" definition of Hoffman's theory is described in this
paper.

[http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanTime.pdf](http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanTime.pdf)

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buboard
Although these ideas of panpsychism are popular and exciting to the mind, i
would remind that mainstream cognitive science / neuroscience considers
consciousness a deterministic outcome of the laws of nature we know acting on
the neural tissue of live humans.

~~~
colordrops
The problem with this is that consciousness pre-existed cognitive science /
neuroscience and is the substrate upon which they are built, and not the other
way around, so it is an illusion that they are on the outside looking

~~~
buboard
Consciousness did not pre-exist natural laws. Consciousness was invented by
mammal brains. The problem with panpsychism is that statements like the one
you made are not only unfalsifiable, they cannot be probed empirically or even
philosophically.

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gnode
It seems to me that this theory is identical to physicalism. By defining
consciousness indistinguishably from a "world", or any interactive system
within a world which can be modelled as an algorithm and state (experiences),
it seems just as valid to say that the world creates consciousness.

Given that evolution shapes human perception, as acknowledged by the author,
it seems more sensible to say evolution has created human consciousness. This
seems especially so, when the definition of the conscious agent is so general,
as to allow any state machine.

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mellosouls
Is there anything obviously new in his claims? I couldn't see it in the
article, and there seemed a bit too much unquestioned "me and my team" style
implications of revolutionary theory building.

Perhaps I'm being too negative in my reading, or it's just marketing gone awry
and the actual book offers a more realistic grounding; but areas where there
is potential for murky crossover between philosophy and fundamental science
does seem to encourage this rather optimistic iconoclastic self-image.

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ben_w
For what it’s worth, I can make their example picture _not_ move. The illusion
of movement seems to be caused by saccades, and I’ve practiced preventing my
eyes from doing that.

~~~
alanbernstein
How does one prevent saccades? I didn't think there was any conscious control
of them.

~~~
ci5er
I can jitter my eyeballs, and maintain a more-or-less stable (percieved)
scene. I don't know that there is any real-world use for this...

~~~
wruza
I guess this has something to do with armor piercing looks you can give.

~~~
ci5er
Ha! Not really. I've sustained enough blunt force trauma to the head that I
have to work really hard to maintain enough focus to cross the street without
falling over...

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joycian
> Perception may not be reality

From a compression perspective, of course it is not ...how else would you
model your environment?

Consciousness is just a glorified 'top' command. Our visual cortex has evolved
over millions of years to distill our environment down into a much lower
dimensional space.

Additionally, I would rather have them phrase it like neural activity creates
consciousness (which in my opinion is almost a meaningless tautology).

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vcavallo
this seems like one of those articles that’ll give me a small panic attack.

if “everything you experience is just action potentials in the brain” sets one
near to existential terror, should one avoid reading this article?

~~~
monktastic1
It's even worse than that. Even brains, as physical objects, don't exist. Only
minds do, or something.

~~~
vcavallo
That's actually not as bad. At least it's cohesive. It's the sort of
"substrate jumping" of reality that is incongruous and terrifying.

I'm fine with only minds existing - as long as there are more than just mine.
.....which I'm pretty sure is a tough valley to climb out of. these are just a
bunch of stubs right now, but you can see these things come up for me a lot:
[https://blog.vinneycavallo.com/tags/existential-
dread](https://blog.vinneycavallo.com/tags/existential-dread) :)

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dang
Url changed from [https://neurosciencenews.com/visual-
reality-14590/](https://neurosciencenews.com/visual-reality-14590/), which
points to this (but doesn't link to it).

Submitted title was ""The case against reality: A new theory argues
consciousness creates neural ac..." " which our software rewrote to "The case
against reality: A new theory argues consciousness creates neural AC", since
AC usually means alternating current.

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danaris
What's with the odd ending to the title? The title of the linked article is
just "The case against reality," and the summary starts "A new theory argues
consciousness creates neural _activity_ ".

There's no mention of any "neural AC" in the article anywhere...

~~~
dang
Explained here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20559224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20559224)

