
The Case Against Reality - pepy
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?single_page=true
======
maldusiecle
I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems
like a misdirection. Given the information in the article, it's impossible to
evaluate his claims--we don't have access to the computer models he uses, or
the expertise to evaluate his proofs.

But there are a lot of gigantic red flags all throughout. Like when he says
he's mathematically proved that "an organism that sees reality as it is will
never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of
reality but is just tuned to fitness." But what it means to "see reality as it
is" is exactly what's in question! How could he possibly create a mathematical
proof of a concept that lacks a definition?

This gets even more blatant when he suggests, toward the end, that he's
"postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives." But that would
mean that "seeing reality as it is" isn't even a coherent concept! If
experience itself makes up reality, how could one's experiences _not_
correspond to reality?

The guy is a crank. What he's arguing is a shoddy version of vitalism, dressed
up in jargon.

~~~
xlm1717
It's an article edited for lay audiences. It is for people who don't have the
expertise to evaluate his proofs.

You can look up his research, though, if you want. If you have an expert
friend you can have that friend explain it to you.

You can find a list of his publications here:
[http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/](http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/)

This is one of his papers that quantifies the ideas he talks about in the
article:
[http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf](http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf)

In the paper, he does define what he means by "see reality as it is".

~~~
jackcosgrove
I get suspicious when some proof is so complex it must be mediated by an
expert. I think the burden is on the prover to make their case, rather than on
the audience to understand the case.

~~~
colordrops
Most modern math proofs are incomprehensible to anyone but experts. Is modern
math suspicious?

~~~
chongli
I don't doubt that modern math proofs have been created by experts and checked
by computers. Where I have a hard time is when the claim is made that these
complicated proofs have any basis in the real world. _That_ can't be checked
by computer.

------
cubano
I've read this article twice now, and both times the same thought struck me.
How much, really, are his "insights" much different from Plato's Allegory of
Cave philosophy?

 _Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to
the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch
shadows projected on the wall from things passing in front of a fire behind
them, and they begin to give names to these shadows_ [1]

Yes of course the details differ and the physics have drastically changed
(invoking QM's probability wave functions as the the basis of the "shadows on
the cave wall."), but the idea that all we observe isn't a true representation
of reality is one of the oldest ideas in all of western philosophy.

It reminds of that old quote from Alfred North Whitehead, a preeminent 20th
century figure..."All philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato"

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave)

~~~
esoteric_nonces
Thank you for the link!

I found 'Return to the Cave' particularly interesting.

 _The prisoners, according to Socrates, would infer from the returning man 's
blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should
not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if
they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to
drag them out of the cave._

That's the sort of quote that inspires one to study philosophy. It illustrates
perfectly the difficulty we have as humans in informing each other.

------
willchang
"Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real."

Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't
approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know?

Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie
set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is
just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We have only made
progress as a species by identifying deep, universal consistencies that have
proven more reliable than anything else we know. Various scientific
revolutions do not change the fact that the game is the same: to account for
our observations parsimoniously. Now this guys says, it's all "just" symbols.
Such bullshit.

~~~
madaxe_again
No, they're symbols which accurately represent information to us in a useful
fashion.

Consider a supercomputer simulation of a brain - a completely accurate human
mind (ignore the feasibility, this is a gedankenexperiment), which has
completely accurate eyes, ears, etc. - a full sensorium. Consider that you
place a completely accurate simulated beach ball in front of that mind.

You, the external observer, know that this is all just code running on
silicon.

The mind within the simulation, however, has no concept of outside, however
knows itself to be real, that beach ball to be real. This mind could
ultimately reason that perhaps it is merely perceiving representations of
information in a way that is useful to it. Perhaps this "space" is just
information. Perhaps _I_ am just information. I express this to another mind I
just met in the simulation, it tells me I'm nuts, such bullshit.

The thing is, it's a testable theory, and it doesn't require a simulation,
either. A holographic universe (totally testable and being tested now) would
fulfil the condition he posits, and a simulation, natural or artificial, could
too. The simulation argument also applies - if we ever manage to accurately
simulate even a small section of a universe even at massive time dilation, it
becomes rather likely that this is a simulation too.

For all we know our universe exists on the surface of a black hole.

So yeah, what we perceive is not "real", but you can pick at that thread ad
infinitum, and it's turtles all the way down, so it all becomes a bit
epistemologial.

That said, there could be useful applications. If it turns out that there's
another spatial dimension with which our reality is better described (and it
appears there is if you like susy, brane/M theory, strings) that we can access
but only with difficulty so our sensorium excludes it that's big news -
hyperspace.

Edit: just remembered a JBS Haldane quote that applies nicely -

 _" Nature is not only queerer than we suppose -- it is queerer than we _can
_suppose. "_

~~~
eanzenberg
Unprovable, unable to generate predictions on nature: not science.

~~~
madaxe_again
Eh? One can test every theory I've mentioned in there, and many, such as the
holographic universe principle, currently are:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Experime...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Experimental_tests)

------
ccallebs
If I may make a shitty analogy...

Most humans see reality through the lens of high-level languages. A hyper-
defined DSL of Ruby. Our everyday interactions and understanding of the world
are both informed by that DSL. However, as people specialize into various
areas they realize that there exists something deeper, something closer to the
metal.

Eventually, Julie the scientist discovers that our language can be broken down
into more discrete operations than our Ruby DSL would lead us to believe.
After much study and experimentation she finds heaps of cryptic-looking code
dedicated to memory management, CPU optimization, fault tolerance, etc. The
more she studies, the more she finds. By now she's uncovered machine code and
developed an instrument to compile it down to an even more fundamental entity:
binary. You can take this analogy down to the hardware level -- I'll spare
you.

But as human beings we cannot process the world in binary and still function
normally. We can certainly think about it and after much effort place our
experiences in that context. But we need the aforementioned abstractions to
quickly and easily process that we need to run from tigers. Although we know
the Ruby DSL hides many details of reality from us by its very nature, we
ignore that out of pragmatism.

~~~
djsumdog
Computer languages are much more precise and deterministic than natural
language. The machine is actually quite simple compared to our biology.

People once believed the world was flat, that the Earth orbited the sun. Today
some think the universe is at least 13 billion years old, others only 10,000.
People on both sides think the other side is misguided, ignorant or just plain
stupid.

Think we're in a simulation? Put down your fucking bong hippie. Also get a
job. Those are important for some reason and determine your self worth. Also
self worth is a thing .. that you should have.

Evolutionary fitness has led humanity to believe powerful myths. Even you, yes
you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many
myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths.

In a million years, we will either be able to create computer simulations
powerful enough to simulate part of our universe, or we'll go extinct.
Humanity will be a spec on our 13 billion year+ universe. Either that or
someone will press the reset switch and start us over with some other
parameters.

It's not a lot of comfort to people who die in Chinese factories to give us
cell phones, or to Chesley Manning sitting in prison.

~~~
jackcosgrove
"Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news,
believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will
never know are myths."

Who actually replicates experiments to determine what they should accept and
reject? Sure, you've learned not to touch a hot stove, or that ice cream is
delicious, but how do you know the age of the earth, or what the employment
rate is? You know what you trust when it comes to abstract things. Scientists
have a track record of delivering results, so you trust what scientists say.
Fair enough - time is short and we all can't be empiricists, and scientists
themselves need to divide their labor and trust each other. But still there is
a medium delivering the good news to you, rather than you finding it for
yourself. There are better safeguards against lying than there were in the
past, but I see this more as a difference of degree rather than kind.

------
astazangasta
Okay, after thinking about this a bit longer, I would like to critique his
argument.

He asserts that we can prove that it is better for so-and-so to perceive
according to "fitness" rather than according to "truth", and maintains this is
true with mathematical rigor; fine.

This is observably true (allowing me the possibility of observation for the
space of this conversation) - predators, for example, usually have forward-
facing eyes and vertically-slitted pupils, which allows them to focus and
react to motion of prey in front of them; prey often have widely-spaced eyes
allowing a greater field of view. Fitness literally makes you see the world
differently.

However, there is an important dimension that I think he missed (or several),
which is that the fitness function governing a trait is a vast, multi-
dimensional space.

For example, using color we may distinguish between unripe, hard-to-eat fruit
(green) and ripe, healthy fruit (reddish-orange). According to his argument,
we should therefore only need to see these two colors. Of course this is
incorrect, because if our vision were so limited we'd just be running into
trees all the time. Now our fitness function is spread across two, completely
unrelated goals - suddenly, it becomes much more attractive (and simpler) to
come close to apprehending reality accurately, thereby killing two birds with
one stone. It only gets worse as the number of goals we add to our fitness
function for perception increases.

Furthermore: the space of "goals" is itself a function of the genetic
diversity in your population. A species with a lot of spare genetic diversity
lying around will be able to refine traits with selection much more
efficiently. This means we can develop all sorts of wonderful toys (like a
face-matcher) that can augment our perception of reality.

Of course, in the end, we're just modeling reality, we can't Know it in some
Buddhist sense; but there is good reason to believe that perception should
lean heavily towards a simple objective representation of reality, and that
fitness is not such a close rein on it all the time.

~~~
gradi3nt
This is a very nice argument!

Our senses are still only tuned in to detect portions of "reality" that are
relevant to life on earth. For example, our eyes detect the band of EM
radiation most useful during daytime on Earth. But even though are eyes are
narrow band and highly non-linear sensors, they (+our other equally flawed
senses) have served us pretty well as far as understanding the true nature of
EM waves.

I guess my point is that our senses still aren't evolving to detect reality in
some sort of true pure mathematical sense.

~~~
astazangasta
>evolving to detect reality in some sort of true pure mathematical sense.

I don't think this exists; a perfect description of reality IS reality. Let us
contemplate our finitude and be humbled.

------
mbrock
John Searle was interviewed in the latest episode of _The Partially Examined
Life_ about his new book, _Seeing Things As They Are_.

He says that the fallacious argument that we only see mental representations
and not reality is "so bad I call it The Bad Argument."

The interview is quite amusing, and it might be interesting to read both his
book and Hoffman's.

~~~
gohrt
Interesting, because Searle is the a famous advocate for an argument
essentially equivalent to the Bad Argument:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

~~~
yarrel
The Chinese Room is my favourite proof that thought is physically impossible.

------
jcoffland
Imagine two neutral networks trained on different data. Their internal data is
likely completely different yet, for the most part, they can still agree on
the classification of new observations when they both observe a common
external reality regardless of how they model that reality internally.

This completely destroys the evolution argument in the article that concludes
that reality is subjective. An organism may learn to perceive more or less
water as a color rather than a quantity because the internal representation
does not matter a bit.

To me it was already obvious that your red is not the same as mine. If your
internal model which represents red is more like my internal model for
quantity of water it does not matter at all as long as we can still make the
same distinctions of little water vs a lot of water that allow is to survive.
The article's conclusion that this means reality is observer dependent does
not follow.

------
kazinator
The idea that the world is _" nothing like"_ the one you experience through
your senses is completely ... stupid.

What you experience through the senses is a valid _aspect_ of the world, which
is incomplete, but accurate within its limitations, and largely non-
conflicting with other ways of observing which reveal other aspects.

Physics, quantum or otherwise, doesn't flat-out invalidate what you see around
you.

Besides, all scientific instruments translate deeper observations which we
_cannot_ make with our senses into a representation available to our senses.
(In some cases, just numbers which can be visualized, and often direct
visualizations). A scientific instrument is in the world, and I can experience
its output with my senses.

> _Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your
> computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and
> rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course
> not._

Of course not, because the file is blue, rectangular and lives in the lower
right corner of your _desktop_. (The desktop isn't to be confused with the
computer).

This is real; the aggregate digital object which includes the icon position
and color, as well as other information such as a name, modification time
stamp and content, does in fact have among its undeniable attributes that it's
in the lower right corner of a virtual graphically visualized space known as a
desktop and that its color is blue. The position, shape and color are merely
not a _complete_ set of its attributes.

------
esoteric_nonces
Is there a logical concept or some sort of 'phrase' that describes the 'inside
and outside of box' problem? My vocabulary is lacking.

In computing, we know quite well that a system's inputs and outputs don't have
to be coupled as well as they seem.

I can produce a program '/bin/sha256sum' which drops the sha256sum of a file
onto stdout, unless said file is a JPEG image depicting a Shiba Inu, in which
case it puts 'such file'.

In computing this is really kind of an obvious result. If we have a debugger
or a disassembler we might be able to find that behaviour without actually
encountering it. But if it's a HTTP API, we really have no way of knowing
what's going to happen.

We can gather lots of empirical evidence, but we have no reason to believe
that 5M results or 25M results or 50M results increase our certainty that it
'always does X'. (Simply, it's not provable).

It seems to me to be tautological to say that 'reality may not be what it
seems', in that sense, because we know that we cannot be certain that it even
acts the same way at t=t and t=t+1.

Even if we found some sort of 'higher state' \- if we found the source code to
the program that actually runs all there is - what's above that? Turtles all
the way down!

------
hv23
Some of the ideas in here echo Huxley's theories of mind as expressed in The
Doors of Perception — that of the mind as a "filter" for true reality.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_at_Large](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_at_Large)

"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever
happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in
the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us
from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and
irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise
perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and
special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such
a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large."

Cursory reading of texts in timeless traditions like Zen, Advaita Vedanta,
Hinduism, and other mystic philosophical systems will reveal similar concepts
— as will self-inquiry.

That we're beginning to approach a scientific/mathematical explanation of
these metaphysical principles is no surprise to me.

------
nomisbocaj
"Professor Does LSD for the First Time"

------
sogen
Two things: 1.- It's very interesting that the brain+eye can't fix some
perceptions, that's why it's impossible to _correctly_ see optical illusions
like these: [http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01121/same-
color...](http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01121/same-color-
illusio_1121075i.jpg)

2.- ...it's fine as long as the future doesn't make us live in here:
[http://imgur.com/gallery/hD2Tm1O](http://imgur.com/gallery/hD2Tm1O) (Safe for
work: it's a picture of Mark Zuckerberg and about 200 people using VR
headsets, with the Matrix pods as background)

------
pierrebai
Well, I think the main flaw is that reasonable people could think that
survival fitness and perception reflecting reality and very closely related.
The argument that there could be a better survivability fitness than
reflecting reality is overblown by Professor Hoffman. It's not like we don't
already know that our perceptions can be misguided, optical illusion thrives
on it. It's also extremely hard to believe we could come up with such a
successful device as science if our perception of the universe was so off. If
there is a divergence, it's in fringe effects (like optical illusions) and low
percent or sub-percent, not a major shift and distorsion.

It's a fun idea to entertain, but I'm worried that someone with a PhD could
hold that our perceptions are so far off.

------
daveloyall
A quick scroll through the comments here revealed that most of you missed the
point.

He's not saying we are quantum hand-waving. He's describing a BIV
situation[1]. He's saying that things look weird when we look closely _because
reality isn 't there_.

We're neural networks. We always have been. Reality is a layer, one that
appears to me to be designed to constrain growth through resource limitations
and "garbage collection" (death).

Hello, World!

1\. [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-
externa...](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externalism/)

------
pklausler
The article is either really profound or a giant wankathon, and I still can't
tell which after reading it twice.

~~~
aklemm
I'm going to start using the Profound vs. Wankathon dichotomy as much as
possible from here on out.

~~~
pklausler
I'm glad that you found the distinction to be profound, and I'd also rather
not hear about it in the case that you found it to be otherwise.

------
evo_9
Reading the comment throughout this thread it's no wonder progress is so slow
in this field. Anyone attempting to approach it from a new direction is a
fraud, apparently.

I found it to be a very fascinating read.

------
prmph
Your perception is reality; different observers may perceive the same thing in
different ways, but their perceptions are no less valid because of not
corresponding to another observer's "truth". In a sense, even if people
perceive falsehood, that perception, in and of itself, is real

------
anotherevan
This reminded me of a fascinating TED talk[1] by Vilayanur Ramachandran where
he talks about three unusual neurological conditions. In particular, a case of
Capgras Syndrome where the person had an injury that severed the connection
between the visual processing and emotional processing parts of the brain.
When he saw a loved one, he would be convinced it was an imposter because of
this.

What struck me was how complex our perception of the world around us is. How
the way our brains perceive reality can be so different to each other, and to
actual reality. Pretty amazing.

[1]
[https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_min...](https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind)

------
abalashov
"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."

So, in other words, he drew the same conclusion that Wittgenstein did over
half a century ago (approaching it from the vantage point of language), but
dressed up in more up-to-date accoutrements in analytic philosophy?

------
furyofantares
I don't think philosophy is capable of surviving a summary article with choice
quotes.

------
amelius
> If it’s conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view,
> what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description
> of the world.

It seems to me that the logical conclusion is that science is some kind of
introspection.

------
HillaryBriss
> an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some
> resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see
> intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions
> will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction
> between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction
> exists in reality.

But, what about the fact that, we, as human thinkers, are _aware_ that this is
what's going on in our own perception?

Doesn't that give us an ability to both imagine a model of reality beyond our
perception and also to test that model?

------
astazangasta
Great interview, but he spent his life studying this shit to get to where this
book was, written in 1966:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Reality)

Many of the ideas he's talking about are discussed therein; perception and
"reality" is an assemblage of ideas, not an objective "truth" waiting to be
discovered.

~~~
coldtea
It's not just about the ideas -- it's about how they are explained and with
what rigor.

The same way that 19th chemistry didn't "got where Democritus was" when he
formulated his atomic theory -- it came to the same concept, yes, but what for
him was just an idea put out there, for them it was a solid theory, with
experiments, deductions made of it, etc.

~~~
astazangasta
Nah - these are just the same ideas in a different intellectual framework, the
level of rigor is only apparent because we're attuned to mathematical models
as the best means of reasoning. It's just about what you accept as valid proof
(math rather than sociology), I don't think they're actually more profound
understandings of the underlying concept.

~~~
coldtea
Funny, because (from what I've seen around here) you actually chanced upon a
rare person on HN (me) that doesn't consider math/hard science automatically
"more profound" than sociology and informal argumentation/reasoning on a
subject.

That said, though, having it in math enables ways to re-use and test that
knowledge that having it in sociological reasoning does not -- even if the
understanding both methods reached is comparable.

~~~
astazangasta
I disagree that math is that great. A mathematical model is a formal
description of some sort, but a mental model is just a different kind of
ontological descriptor; both are merely machines to process inputs and produce
some sort of output. You might argue that it's better to be able to observe
and tweak the mathematical model than to use one built on purely human
semantics, but, mathematical models, by virtue of their simplicity, are
generally poor at dealing with complexity (see my other comment in this thread
for a critique of his model). This is why we're tending these days towards
more complex, harder-to-understand learning systems like neural networks; you
get an answer composed of primitives you don't really understand very well.
This is basically the same as sociology.

~~~
coldtea
> _I disagree that math is that great. A mathematical model is a formal
> description of some sort, but a mental model is just a different kind of
> ontological descriptor; both are merely machines to process inputs and
> produce some sort of output._

That doesn't say much though.

A cheap numeric calculator (not turing complete, the plain type) and a high
end PC are both "merely machines to process inputs and produce some sort of
output".

It's the precise kind of machines that each is and the exact kind of
processing that it can do that's important -- not just their general
similarities.

> _You might argue that it 's better to be able to observe and tweak the
> mathematical model than to use one built on purely human semantics, but,
> mathematical models, by virtue of their simplicity, are generally poor at
> dealing with complexity_

Yes, but they're very good at dealing with very precise formulations. It's not
necessary when doing an analysis of field X to deal with the whole of X's
extend and complexity at all times. A very specific answer to a small non-
complex part of X can be very worthy itself.

(The same way Newton's theory is very good to determine the angle of cannon
shots with even if it's a bad model for anything really complex speed and mass
wise -- only in this case, the "less complex" theory gives more precise
answers for its subdomain, whereas with Newton vs Einstein it's the inverse).

~~~
astazangasta
Newton's theory is a simple three-variable model that describes a simple power
law relationship between them. Holy fuck, would it be fantastic if ANY ASPECT
of biochemistry or biology could be modeled with such a simple description. As
a biologist I can tell you this is very far from the case. This is a huge
problem with the field of biology, actually, that the models (and ideas of
complexity) we have to bring to bear were developed in physics where the
parametrizations are simple and clean and provide high predictive value.

This math simply doesn't work when you throw it against a biology problem.
Precise formulations don't exist when you're dealing with, say, the
interactions between two 100-amino acid folded proteins. Physics operates on
simple rules that work everywhere; biology operates on complex rule sets that
are often broken. The math is just not up to snuff, here.

------
haberman
Yes I think this guy goes too far. But to take a more moderate stance, I think
it's really interesting that while we can perceive EM waves and sound, we can
do so only within limited frequency bands. The reality we perceive is a subset
of the available data. And we are also much more sensitive to motion, for
example, than gradual change. So I think a much weaker version of the
article's point is true and interesting.

------
mizzao
If we can't trust our senses, then there isn't much point trying to prove what
we can't see. These models _themselves_ and their predictions are subject to
the meta-problem that we can't trust that our evolutionary adaptations aren't
transmogrifying them in some way.

------
coldtea
There's a very interesting insight in the interview:

> _Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw
> more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less
> accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for
> those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be
> quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so
> we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly
> false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that
> it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a
> given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The
> mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that
> says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees
> reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity
> that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never._

Which reminds me of this:

 _Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men 's heads?
Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave
been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at
present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we!

Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to
food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced
too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability
of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality.

The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal
— an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another —
created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception
of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic,
although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a
long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain
unperceived.

The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static]
had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux".

In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical
inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been
preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend
judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than
deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with
extraordinary assiduity.

The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to
a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all
very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the
struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in
us._

Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza (with small edits in [] to make the passage
clearer)

------
starshadowx2
I posted this two/three days ago and it didn't get any traction, glad it's
gotten more today.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11567365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11567365)

------
arunix
_But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus
callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses._

Is there any evidence supporting that claim?

~~~
maxerickson
That there is a strong effect is fairly well documented:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-
brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain)

Whether there are two full consciousnesses I think is not established.

------
dataphyte
“There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do
we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?” -- Frank Herbert

------
fyhhvvfddhv
The guy on lsd still gets eaten by the tiger.

------
danielam
"All Cretans are liars" said Epimenides...a Cretan.

------
omegaworks
What is this guy smoking?

~~~
djsumdog
Probably something that's legal in Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Colorado.

~~~
lgas
Tobacco?

------
PeterWhittaker
It isn't necessarily necessary to invoke QM to make sense of this, though QM
and GR have their place in the detailed formulation of various functions.

With a good read and a little work, one finds that one's experience of the
"world" (whatever that is; fortunately, we don't need to know; cf below) can
be summarized as:

    
    
      Xi = ΣPjiIj
      Ai = Di(Xi)
      Iij = ΣPijAi
    

Your experience (Xi) is the probability-weighted sum of the impacts (Ij) of
all actions, yours and others, aka, "the world", which we model as a space of
actions; this includes your digestion, my writing this, your reading this, the
temperature in your surroundings, what happened to each of us yesterday, etc.

Your actions, Ai, result from a decision function (Di) that takes your
experience-space as its only input; the decision function is arbitrarily
complex, but has order likely less than O(n __c), since you make decisions in
real time (dithering is still a decision, in this sense; you are choosing to
continue to attempt to choose to act)... ...unless we are a tightly coupled
simulation in NP space and achieve momentary "consciousness" (whatever that
means) whenever the simulation reaches "consensus" (but that's overly
complicated, so let's use Occam's Razor and stick with the simpler model...
...at least until it fails).

In this case, the limit on "c" would be set by your wetware: Evolutionarily,
we are optimized for decisions with order less than

    
    
      O(n**c)
    

Any other decisions get us eaten by tigers (because we took too long). The
better our wetware, the more complex and thorough can be Di and still produce
result(s) in time to keep us alive.

This means our basic decision-making apparatus is short-term optimized,
suggesting that many of our decisions for long-term effects will be "bad",
i.e., sub-optimal, because we decide for survival and fitness, not optimal -
or even good - long-term consequences.

Your impact on anything, including yourself (i) and everything else (Σj), Iij,
is the probability-weighted sum of your actions.

This is an even simpler view than the article expresses: He suggests it when
discussing that positing the existence of a world, W, is unnecessary, but then
digresses to a theory of conscious agents... ...which is also unnecessary, but
which may be illuminating.

In the above formulation, a world, W, is replaced with probability-weighted
mappings of actions (of one's self and of others) as impacts (on one's self
and on others). These probability-mappings may be arbitrarily complex;
determining their order is a real poser....

At the very least, any Ij that takes more than time T to "reach" you does not
impact your current Xi (though it may impact future Xi).

Interesting. The probability mapping could have a time-based (light cone?)
component, or the simple formulation could be replaced with one involving
Xif(Xic, Ijic).

------
imaginenore
There's so much misinformation in the article. The two major errors are:

> _quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until
> we come along to observe them_

No, that's not how it works. When physicists say "observation" in quantum
mechanics, they really mean "any interaction, including molecular, photon,
electron, etc".

> _or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a
> jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our
> brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation
> of an external reality_

Again, no. We built tons of devices that are independent of our senses. If
they return consistent results, it means that's what reality is. And it
doesn't matter if it's simulated or not, we have to deal with it, and we call
it "reality".

------
cloudhead
> A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the
> one we experience through our senses.

Actually the world -is- the world we experience through our senses. There's no
"other" world. This article is full of shit. Whatever it is he calls "reality
as it is" is the same reality we perceive through our cognitive functions,
there is no other way to apprehend reality.

------
fyhhvvfddhv
The tiger don't care if you're on LSD. It will still eat you. And the universe
don't need an observer for shit to happen. In 10 years I bet the current
quantum theories /interpretations will make us laugh our asses off

~~~
LifeQuestioner
Which is based on your reality and your assumption that a tiger WILL eat you
and has nothing better to do.

