This Theory Of Reality Will Melt Your Mind - 03-06-2021
Summary:
The text presents Dr. Donald Hoffman's theory of consciousness and reality from an evolutionary and quantum perspective. The primary idea is that organisms do not perceive reality as it is because such a process would consume a lot of energy and could lead to their extinction. Instead, humans and other organisms perceive reality through a simplified model, a graphical user interface, so to speak, tailored to aid their survival and reproduction.
This Interface Theory of Perception suggests that what we perceive around us, like a bottle of water, is not an actual representation of the object's nature. Instead, it's a simplified concept that our evolutionary process has adapted us to recognize and interact with, such as understanding that drinking water prevents dehydration.
This model also extends to advertising, where specific imagery, such as a burger in a McDonald's ad, is designed to interact appealingly with our evolved perception, often more effectively than reality. Even insects can be tricked into mating with inanimate objects that perfectly imitate the appearance of their female counterparts, a testament to how perception can be 'hacked.'
Dr. Hoffman's theory suggests that there is an objective reality, but it's not what our senses perceive directly. Instead, our brain constructs an image of the world every moment based on our evolved perceptions. This view becomes even more intriguing when considering quantum mechanics, which indicates that things don't exist as we understand until observed by a conscious entity.
The world, according to Dr. Hoffman, is essentially a vast network of consciousness (or "conscious agents"), with each agent being a subdivision capable of perception, decision-making, and action. These conscious agents interact and integrate in various ways, forming complex structures of experience and awareness.
Hoffman proposes that consciousness and awareness are not products of the brain, as traditionally understood, but fundamental elements of reality. Matter and neurons are tools we use to understand this vast consciousness network, fitting into our species-specific ways of perceiving.
The theory suggests that we only see a simplified version of reality to allow us to survive and reproduce. This limitation is due to our insufficient processing power to comprehend the incredibly intricate network of nested consciousness interactions.
The theory also touches on concepts of time and space, treating them as data compression algorithms for our species, helping us navigate and survive in the social network of consciousness. This implies that different species might perceive space and time in distinct ways due to their unique "data compression algorithms".
Finally, the text mentions ongoing work to validate and test these theories experimentally. The challenge lies in developing an experimental framework that could confirm that we are all units of awareness interacting with other units of awareness. Although Dr. Hoffman's theory is provocative and supported by mathematical models, it, like all models, may only be partially correct.
The conversation revolves around the exploration of consciousness and its interaction with the physical world. The participants discuss the challenge of testing the idea that we're all awareness, interacting with awareness, highlighting that it's difficult to confirm the validity of a computer model of this concept.
They suggest that time and space are data compression algorithms that help us comprehend our social network and facilitate survival. They argue that different species might experience these dimensions differently due to their distinct modes of perception.
They hypothesize that if the serotonin molecule, often associated with emotional states, is indeed a 'conscious agent' made up of smaller conscious agents, then it challenges our understanding of mental illness, medication, and the mind-body connection. Conversely, if serotonin is merely a group of atoms and electrons without the capacity to perceive, it contradicts this model, suggesting that there is a reality beyond just awareness.
They question the fundamental nature of reality and suggest that consciousness may be the root, not the result, of evolution. Consciousness is proposed to exist as agents, starting small and combining into larger, more complex agents over time. This model suggests that the highest level of consciousness, formed from all these agents, could be conceptualized as God.
The conversation explores the idea that the physical laws of the universe may be interpreted as the predictable behavior of conscious agents interacting. The unpredictability in human behavior might arise from the complexities of multiple conscious agents influencing our decisions.
Finally, the conversation touches on synesthesia, a condition where sensory experiences intermingle (like hearing colors), as a unique form of interfacing with reality. The discussion ends by asserting that, while everything might be consciousness, there are still 'rules' governing interactions in our perceived reality.
Episode: This Theory Of Reality Will Melt Your Mind - 03-06-2021
I want to pitch you this theory of consciousness and reality, and I want you to tell me as a smart person what you think. All right? Dr. Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science and computer science at University of California, Irvine. He was on our show.
He has posited this theory, and it starts with this basic idea, which is, do we see the world as it is or are we seeing some abrogation that isn't even close to reality? And he actually was able to look at this evolutionarily. He studies visual perception and how people actually perceive stuff. And what he determined through lots of different studies and also different approaches in different fields, was that organisms that see reality as it actually is go extinct. So if you see the matrix as zeros and ones, you go extinct.
And the reason is it takes a lot of energy to actually see reality in all its complexity. And so the second proposition is, well, then maybe we just see part of reality, but it's still real. It's just not all of reality. And that's what most visual scientists propose. What he proposes is, based on his cognitive models and his computer models and his simulations, is that organisms that see any aspect of reality as it is go extinct in just a few generations.
Whereas organisms that see reality as a fitness icon designed to help them reproduce, thrive. So, in other words, there is no bottle of water here as such. There's no water, there's no atoms, there's no paper. There's none of that. This is a graphical user interface that I, as a human, have evolved to see to help me survive.
I see something wet that I know that if I drink it, I will not die. And so we have this shorthand hack in how we see the world. And over and over and over, he gives examples of insects who will go extinct having sex with a beer bottle because it's perfectly hacked their interface to look like a female insect. And these male insects in Australia, these beetles, will have sex with this bottle to the exclusion of beautiful females nearby because it is so perfect. This has been hacked in advertising with humans to make things look hyper appealing.
Any McDonald's ad where they're opening the burger and you see the juicy cheese and all that. By the way, the Vegans hate us, don't they? And all that, that's designed to hack our interface. And his theory is the interface theory of perception, that every species sees reality through a series of evolved hacks that allow us to reproduce. And so here's the punchline of that.
What is reality? Is there a reality? And what he argues is, yes, there is. There is an objective reality. It's not we're all not just making this up.
Our visual cortex isn't just constructing it. It's not something where and he's looked at the number of neurons in the visual cortex is way more than it takes to reconstruct an image, but just enough to construct an image. So we are constructing the world second to second in our minds every day. But the question is, based on what? And if you look he then digs into quantum mechanics.
And I read his manuscript of the book that he hasn't released yet. In quantum mechanics, they've pretty clearly established that there is no such thing as local realism. In other words, something doesn't exist until it's interacting with a conscious observer. It's a probability wave. So the moon maybe doesn't exist until conscious entities interface with it.
But what is it that we're interfacing with? And this is what when he described this in a Ted Talk and then I read his stuff and I had him on the show, I was convinced it felt intuitively correct to me. I want to see how you feel. You may say it's bullshit. The world is actually nothing but consciousness subdivided into things he calls conscious agents, which are little subdivisions of consciousness that sum up and break down, kind of the way you can have a one bit conscious agent.
And all a conscious agent is is able to it's a simple mathematical function. And he has the formulas to kind of show this, how they interact with each other and how they sum. The smallest one bit conscious agent is a plank length thing, the smallest thing you can imagine that can have three things. It can perceive, it can decide, and it can act. And the currency of reality is experience.
It's conscious experience from the tiniest levels all the way down all the way to the largest structures that we have. And so when we try to explain the consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, how does the brain, how does this three pounds of wet goo create the experience of me seeing Peter in his cool racing hat with his kind of sexy stubble, which I wish I had? Yeah, it's an icon, but I like it. I'm going to call it Mycon because I want it. How does it create that experience?
The smell of baking bread? And the answer is we've been going about it wrong. We have to invoke a miracle in our current understanding. How do we go from atoms, neurons to experience? Well, at some point, there's a jump that no one has been able to explain.
You can wave hands. What he's saying is, how about you start with the miracle, which is everything is awareness and consciousness and matter and neurons are icons that we use in a species specific way to understand this vast network of social the social network of consciousness interacting with itself. And so what I'm seeing what's that, Tom? Are you saying lexi, dude. But what is really there on your insight is this vast realm of experience and perception and awareness and thought and emotion that I don't see.
What I see is my species specific hack that allows me to get through the world, allows me to reproduce, allows me to stay alive and allows me to survive in a way because we don't have enough processing power to see what I really think is there, which is this incredibly complex series of nested consciousness all interacting. And when you talk about books like this, where they talk about submins and meditation, what you're doing is you're taking your highest instantiation, which is the kind of aggregate of all these subminds, and you're looking and listening at those inner nested consciousnesses interacting with each other. And you're also connecting to maybe the deeper connection between all of us as a higher consciousness. Sounds like woo. But in his formulas, he actually shows how these things work mathematically.
And actually the formula reduces to the heisenberg sort of formula for electron probability cloud. So it's really quite fascinating. Can it be tested experimentally? Right. So this is what he's working on.
Now, you can computer model this stuff and the problem is it's as valid as any other model because it's hard to test. So the question is, how do you test that we're all awareness, interacting with awareness? Yeah, there's a famous actually, I don't remember which physicist it was. I don't think it was fermi. But a very famous physicist once said all models are wrong, some are useful.
That's right. And he himself says this is probably only partially correct because the idea is then, well, why would evolution even happen if conscious agents just exist and they're outside of time and space? It's really just that's an important piece of this. So we're wondering about time and space and are they real? Are they an actual thing?
No, they are a species specific data compression algorithm that allow us to make sense of this social network and allow us to survive. So space and time are different for you and me? Well, we're similar because we have the same species, presumably, although you're probably more involved than me. But like a dog or a cat or a fruit fly, are all awareness interacting with other awareness? But the way they see the world in space and time is a totally different construct.
And so all of it is constructed, which transforms in my mind, let's say it's true and we'll talk about how we can test it because I think we should brainstorm ways to test it. But I think it transforms how you think about mental illness. So what is mental illness but in our reductionist materialist viewpoint, which we're very good as doctors at thinking because we've been conditioned to think that, and I think there's a lot of truth. The way we do medicine now is we are really good at moving the icons around on the desktop. We know that a serotonin icon, when put into a human icon's bloodstream, does something to a subjective description of experience from that human subject in terms of depression.
But what is really happening. We're like monkeys moving these icons around, but what's the transistors and the electrons that actually make it up? If the serotonin molecule is really a conscious agent, that's the sum of little conscious agents, and it's interacting with our conscious agent that reshifts how we think about how these medicines work, how the mind body connection. What if that's not correct? What if the serotonin agent doesn't have the ability to perceive?
So if serotonin is actually electrons, if electrons are materially real yeah. What if serotonin is simply nothing more than atoms, electrons, atoms with all of its constituent elements, right? Electrons, protons, neutrons. So if that's true, then it negates the entire model because it says something is materially real. This model says there is nothing real beyond awareness itself, and it creates reality on icons that allow it to evolve.
And this is difficult stuff to grasp as scientists, which both of us are. You are much more than me because it goes against everything we trained, which is Big Bang happened somehow. Matter organized into complex structures that through which consciousness emerged. We're saying consciousness was and subdivided into these smaller agents that combined into bigger agents and evolve over time into complex agents like ourselves that interact with other agents and social networks that probably form higher levels of consciousness. So you could actually posit what is God but all these conscious agents at its highest instantiation in a way that it knows more than almost anything because it's the sum of all these agents.
Now, how do you test it? So if serotonin is a molecule, then, yes, our reductionist approach is right, and we should continue to hammer at it. If it's wrong, we should still hammer at the reductionist approach because we're moving icons. So as Hoffman says, he says, just because the desktop trash icon on my computer desktop isn't literally a trash icon, and I'm not dragging real documents into it, that doesn't mean I drag my life's work into it and hit delete. Just because I don't take it literally doesn't mean I don't take it seriously.
So, yeah, we take our icons seriously. We should know all about them, but we're going to hit a wall. And I think we're getting there in our understanding because until we understand what is the fundamental nature of reality, we're not going to be able to manipulate it in a way that reduces suffering, which I think is what we're trying to do right? When you talk about health span, you're talking about the longest possible life with the most enjoyment or happiness or fulfillment or whatever their individual's goal is. And to me, that's like a lack of suffering.
No one wants to live to suffer unless you're a BDSM bondage person. And even that's not suffering because it's actually pleasure for them. So suffering is a mental construct. Pain is eternal. Suffering is optional because it's how we frame it.
What do you think I don't know. It's hard for me to actually internalize that because letting go of subatomic structures as sort of not being real, that would just require a lot more understanding on my part. Let me say this. Subatomic structures are absolutely real as icons. So, in other words, they mean something.
They're an image. Yeah, I think trying to imagine that they have their own state of consciousness is you know, it's not even for me to understand. It's not even that. So okay, let me dig into that a little bit because this is something that I have to think about a lot. That's a dualist belief.
So in other words, the subatomic structure, electron is an electron with some awareness. That's a belief called dualism. It means that there is matter and there's consciousness and they're related. What Hoffman's saying and what I think I intuit from this is and I could absolutely be wrong and people get violently disagreeable to this idea. There's no electron at all.
Electron is a conscious agent that we see as electron through our species specific interface. It's how we've evolved to see the world we see it as. And we don't ever see electrons. We use equipment to intuit them. But then how would we explain physical experiments that have independently validated the same construct meaning?
So, for example, when Newton came along, he was the first to define a set of physical laws. And they held pretty well until the early part of the 20th century when at one layer below the Newtonian understanding, there was a new layer of physical laws that had to be described. Many of these laws have been independently validated. And I would think that if it was all a hack meaning if we were all creating our own construct, our own icons, it strikes me as improbable that we would be converging on the same descriptions, the same experimental identifications. This is a great way to think about it.
And here's how I would think about that. We have our hack, but it's based on reality. And reality is these conscious agents exchanging experience with each other. We see it as the laws of physics. We see it as an electron binding to this and this chemical reaction happening.
And of course, it will be validated because it's actually happening in the sense that these agents are behaving relationally to each other in predictable, precise ways that we can measure and science can quantify. It's just a question of are they actually wait, but why would the electrons, the protons, behave in a predictable way when you and I can't behave in a predictable way? Because we don't behave predictably, Peter. Because we are complex instantiations of multiple conscious agents that emerge a very high level of consciousness. So part of the reason you have these voices that are telling you you're an asshole and I have them is that we have that are unconscious to us.
Agents that are making decisions in the background that are feeding it up to our higher instantiation. It's very unpredictable. It's a complex system. The simplest systems, in other words, one bit, two bit, twelve bit, 100 bit conscious agents behave predictably because they have three actions perceived aside act. It might be that the one bit conscious agent can only have two perceptions, two actions.
And so it sums up scientifically, mathematically, as absolute predictability. But wait a second. If you collapse that to one and one, you could have a reductionist world if you had no choice, if all of the subparticles had no choice right. Wouldn't that it would become a semantic game. Well, if none of the particles had a choice, meaning you always knew how they were going to behave.
Right. Well, then it's the same as being materialist. It's saying they have no consciousness. So that's right. The definition of this is they have choice.
And here's something that's even more interesting, which, again, I just can't so probabilistically that just strikes me as impossible. Yeah, right. Because you couldn't have the order that we have in the universe if there was any choice to be made at that level. Again, I'm saying this as a guy who's bullshitting because he's hearing about this for the first time. But that's my sort of initial reaction, is I don't understand how you could preserve any order in the universe if there was any choice to be made in that regard.
Yeah. So what's interesting is when you look at actual quantum mechanics, there is uncertainty at the quantum level. There is uncertainty, but there is a predictive. Yeah, but exactly. It's defined by a probability function.
Right. But it collapses to something that's known once it's observed. Correct. So what is observation but two conscious agents interacting and exchanging experience that then allows this particular conscious agent to settle into a particular choice? So to me, it's not exclusive of that, having choice at the smallest level.
Now, again, this is the simplest of choices. Yeah. And one thing you said was interesting to me because I struggle with this, which was if we all see things differently as a hack, how can there be reality? How can there be objective, predictable, scientifically valid reality? Well, look at it this way.
So he gives the example, which I think is very powerful, of synesthetes. So people who have synesthesia, which is they experience the world very differently. Instead they smell colors or they hear sounds. Sorry. No, of course you hear sounds.
That's normal. You hear sights and you see colors when you hear sounds. And he gives examples of a guy who anytime he tastes mint in his hand, he feels a basket of ivy. And it turns out that guy is a synesthete. So his interface is a mutation.
Something has changed in the way how do you know that without functional MRI? Or is that the way that one can validate? He's actually done some of that on these guys. It's interesting. And there's parts of the brain that light up with touch, light up when he's actually thinking about mint or something.
So you've disaligned it, for lack of a better word. The relationship between the external and internal sensory, the cortex has basically been remapped. There's some remapping. Now, I would argue that the cortex is an icon we use to actually consciousness interacting with itself. But imagine that person now is a mutation of some kind that interfaces with the world differently because he can feel mint.
It turns out he's a glorious chef. So he has a career as a professional chef because he's able to take flavors and tactically feel them to him. It's real. That's interesting. It's like a basket.
He's putting his hand in a basket of ivy when he tastes something else. I forgot he would make a horrible surgeon. Could you imagine having to taste all of those body parts to be able because you rely on your feelings like chilled monkey brains. Dr. Jones.
No, it's true. So a surgeon would go extinct having that skill, but a chef would evolve. Now imagine evolution starts to put pressures on us where only the best chefs get laid and have sex and reproduce. Now, that becomes the default. That's the default.
So he's saying. But see, to me, that is totally explainable through Darwinian biology, right? That is completely understandable. So Darwin is essential for this theory as well. In fact, the core universal principles of Darwinism have nothing to do with DNA and molecules.
They have to do with is something heritable is. There evolutionary pressure on it and those sort of things. And that works just as well with conscious agents as it does with material stuff. So conscious agents can evolve over time to have perceptions that actually allow them to succeed in this social network where they're competing. And again, forgive me for just not having a goddamn clue what you're talking about.
Why is it that if that bottle is an icon, you can't make it lift up off the table by thinking about it? Because in the social network of conscious agents that happen to be this way, that is not a perceptual decision or an action. Why can't you override it? Because, well, there are rules between how these things actually interact. In other words, it's not a free for all.
It's not magical thinking. It's not like, well, just because everything's awareness I create like Deepak Chopra, he'll say something like, everything is consciousness. And so you can secrete, which is my way of using secret as a verb. You can secrete success and happiness and all that. Well, that's not true.
That's magical thinking. What we're saying is no, there are have you seen the big lebowski? Dude. Dude. The dude.
Abides. Stop. There are rules, dude. Okay? This isn't fucking 'Nam, all right?
There are rules. And the rules are these things behave just one of the worst parts about trying to be health conscious is that you can't drink white Russians as liberally as the Big Lebowski. Who says so?