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Donald Hoffman's Case Against Reality
408 Plays11 months ago
Joe and Rolf discuss the ideas of perceptual psychologist Donald Hoffman, who has argued that our perceptual systems have no access to reality, since evolution is driven by fitness functions, not objective truth. He has also argued that our perception is a user interface (like a desktop on a computer, or a VR headset), and that objects such as the moon don't exist when we are not apprehending them.
Hoffman, Donald. The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes. WW Norton & Company, 2019.
Bagwell, J. N. (2023). Debunking interface theory: why Hoffman’s skepticism (really) is self-defeating. Synthese, 201(1), 25.
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Transcript
Introduction to Perception vs. Reality
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm Joe Hardy. And I'm Rolf Nelson. What is the relationship of our perception to reality? Perceptual psychologist Donald Hoffman has an interesting theory in a recent book of his called The Case Against Reality that in fact there's no relationship between our perceptions and reality at all. So this is going to be the topic of our show today.
Hoffman's Theory: Perception and Evolution
00:00:35
Speaker
And Donald Hoffman is not going to be on the show. We asked him if he wanted to participate, and he didn't respond. So that's all good. But we're going to try to steel man his argument to the extent possible, and try to make sense of it, and then talk about some of our feelings about the theory as well. So this is a big theory. So let's try to get a grasp on exactly what it is that Hoffman is claiming.
00:01:04
Speaker
So again, the book is called The Case Against Reality. And the basic idea here involves the combination of three different theoretical ideas from evolutionary psychology to more of a philosophical kind of look at things. And the first of these ideas is something that he's been working on for a number of years, which is the idea that evolution
00:01:32
Speaker
specifically does not give us truth or does not converge onto real truthful perceptions. That is that evolution works in a way that we respond to what he calls fitness payoffs or what researchers call fitness payoffs that we pass on our genes if something is more fit and more likely for us to reproduce rather than directly perceive truth.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, and here he's really talking about the idea of veridical perception or the fact that we don't see veridically. And the term veridical in this context, veridical perception means that you're seeing things and hearing things, experiencing things in a sense correctly. So there's some sense of
00:02:25
Speaker
of the truth so like perceptual illusions would be an example of this so you know most people have seen examples of illusions that make something look the wrong size or the wrong height when it's compared to something different so veridical perception would be the actual true state of the world and an illusion would be a deviation from that
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, you know, he's got a couple of different approaches to talking about why you might believe this, like, because this is not, you know, typically, I think, in most cognitive psychology today, you people experience that people talk about perception as being oriented towards verticality. In other words, that as evolution is progressing over time, beings are evolving to
00:03:15
Speaker
perceive the world more and more vertically, more and more correctly. And that there's a natural relationship between the correct perception of the world, truthful perception of the world and fitness and evolution.
Perception as a Fitness Function
00:03:28
Speaker
So these things should go together. And what he's actually saying is the opposite. He's saying, no, there is no relationship between the thing that is in the world that is the thing itself and your perception of it. There's just no relationship.
00:03:45
Speaker
And in fact, what you're experiencing is just a fitness function. It's just the thing that you're experiencing through your senses is just the thing that gives you the highest probability of surviving, essentially. And that need not have any relationship to the actual way that the world is structured.
00:04:08
Speaker
So when you perceive the color red, for example, you're not perceiving the true state of the world. You're perceiving something that's giving you information about, say, how red can influence your fitness. Maybe it could be positive and you approach it because red is a good color and it helps you survive or it's a bad color and you should move away from it. So, I mean, the core statement here is that
00:04:37
Speaker
What we're experiencing is not anything to do with the real world, that we're essentially shaped by forces of evolution to only perceive what's gonna help us survive. And that, well, in Hoffman's view, that's opposed to truth or the reality that actually exists out there.
00:05:04
Speaker
Right and so you know the way that he kind of feels like he proves this this is like his proof of this is based on some mathematical modeling.
00:05:14
Speaker
that they do, where they basically try to build models of conscious agents. In other words, these systems that would react to simulated environments, essentially, and to basically give weights to whether something is perceived vertically or whether something is perceived as a function of its fitness relationship to the organism. And basically,
00:05:39
Speaker
What their modeling suggests is that the fitness optimizing perceptual function always outcompetes and drives to extinction the rheological perception models. An example that that gets used that he uses in the textbook as say you're an organism who's trying to get food. So if you perceived strictly the the pure amount of food
00:06:09
Speaker
It might not be the most fit thing because continuing to eat more and more food might not be the best strategy. But if you perceive, if you directly perceive the fitness of what you're, of what it is that you're going to eat, you may not get the number right because it may peak at some different areas. But it'll be a better strategy and it'll be more likely to.
00:06:32
Speaker
be passed on to future generations. That's right, exactly. The details of that modeling I think are a bit beyond the scope of this podcast right now. Yeah, that was me trying to simplify it a little too much maybe. Yeah, but no, I think that's right. That's exactly the direction of what he's trying to say. He's basically saying, well, so we've got these models
00:06:56
Speaker
that sort of prove that veridical perception is gonna be out-competed by perception that is driven by fitness functions. And if those two things are separable and independent in his model.
00:07:12
Speaker
I think to kind of start to steel man that a little bit, what we do know for sure is that the relationship between our sensory experiences and the world is complex and
00:07:29
Speaker
kind of strange in a way if you think about it. First of all, there's tons of physical things that are happening in the world that we never perceive or never experience. So for example, small things like quarks and atoms and molecules, we just never see that stuff except using our sensors in the lab.
00:07:52
Speaker
And so there's, there's some, you know, ultimately all the, you know, in our current, even just in our current sort of physicalist worldview of, you know, four dimensions of space and time, you know, the things that make up our bodies, you know, these interplay of energy and molecules and just how all these particles and energy systems kind of work together and energy and matter are not different. You know, that's all very strange.
00:08:20
Speaker
to our day-to-day perceptions. And so the idea is that we don't really experience any of that stuff. So to say that the red tomato is a red tomato, well, we know that it's also like, that's not the real nature of the thing. It's composite and it's synthetic and also part of everything else that's around it at some level of representation.
00:08:49
Speaker
you know, it makes sense to say that there is not a one, there's a, there is, and it's true, there's not a one-to-one relationship between our sensory experience of the world and,
Sensory Experience and Survival
00:09:00
Speaker
and the world itself. And this is, I mean, this seems more obvious in some aspects of perception than others. I think maybe with taste, it seems most clear that there's, you know, what's happening with taste is essentially there's a molecule that's, you know, landing on our, our tongues and, and interacting with, um,
00:09:18
Speaker
interacting with our taste buds. And that is not what we perceive at all. We don't perceive a molecule. And there's also no clear relationship between, you know, the shape of the molecule, the size of the molecule, and what it is that we're tasting. It seems to be pretty much determined by what's going to be good for us, right? Right. Think about like a sensation like umami. You're right. Yeah. You know, like even how to describe what that even is, is difficult.
00:09:46
Speaker
The relationship between what's the actual food is like and this sensation is quite complex and not at all direct. Well, I think with food and the sense of taste, there does seem to be a really clear relationship between what you perceive and its survival value, right? That's right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what Hoffman's saying is that that's the thing that's being optimized for.
00:10:13
Speaker
And if we're trying to steel man this a little bit, I think we can get some intuitions, you know, from taste, maybe some intuitions from color perception, if we're, you know, something we both study. So with color perception, I mean, color is essentially, you know, the light that we perceive is essentially electromagnetic energy from 400 to 700 nanometers. So it really just varies on one dimension. Yet what we perceive are
00:10:42
Speaker
these opponent colors, red and green, blue and yellow, set up in a way that is useful to us in perceiving things out there in the world, but not necessarily directly related to the physical quality of- Right, exactly. There's a relationship between redness and like a longer wavelength, you know,
00:11:09
Speaker
electromagnetic radiation compared to blue, right? I mean, that's just essentially arbitrary in that sense. I think this is also closely related to the idea of an umvault, which is the idea, and this has been repopulized again in a recent book by
Unique Perceptions Across Species
00:11:30
Speaker
at Yong called an immense world where he talks about the perceptual lives of all kinds of different organisms. And when organisms have very particular things that they respond to, you know, we like to think as humans, we're kind of aware of everything that's going on out there, but the oomf out of a human is still limited because we can only see certain ranges of light. We only respond to
00:11:56
Speaker
Now certain ranges of sound, we don't perceive electricity, we don't perceive other things that other creatures do. So we have this particular set of things that we perceive in the world. Yeah, exactly. And like, for example, you know, some insects will see ultraviolet light.
00:12:14
Speaker
And they'll experience that as visually. And we don't see that visually at all. And then other animals, we'll see in the infrared range. We don't experience that. Lots of animals don't see color or don't see as the highest dimension of color as we do. Other organisms have higher dimensional color vision than we do. And so it's like, which is correct? Which is the truth? Is it the thing that is colored or the thing that has a lot of different colors?
00:12:44
Speaker
In that sense, there isn't really a direct relationship between the truth and our experience of it. I think you can say that with those kinds of examples, but for me where this really starts to become difficult is around space and time. Hoffman would also claim that space and time are just constructs that we use.
00:13:14
Speaker
like a user interface. And we'll talk about this a little bit more in detail. But space and time are just convenient ways of representing the world, much in the way that colors are convenient ways of representing wavelengths. And this is a difficult thing, because I think we feel as though the spatial world is concrete and real in a way that maybe other things aren't. That length, width, time passing, that those things are
00:13:42
Speaker
are more real, and Hoffman would say no. That's a construct. That's something that we use in order to simplify things. Exactly. Yeah. And for sure, it's also the case that, again, to kind of steel man this a little bit more, it is the case that we certainly don't understand
00:14:05
Speaker
all of what's going on in physical reality in terms of even mathematically, many models represent that there are higher dimensions of physical reality than those that we experience. So we experience four dimensions, but many models in different ways represent the world as having higher dimensionality than that.
00:14:24
Speaker
And we don't experience those. So I think what he's saying is that there's a collapse, almost like in quantum mechanics where you perceive something and then the waveform collapses. It's similar to something that's happening in dimensionality, where in the act of experiencing it, the world is collapsing into those four dimensions. But it's actually happening in a much, the real things are happening in a totally different set of dimensions.
00:14:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And this is tricky, a little bit tricky to follow, because this is where some of the math gets a little complex, too. But the idea would be that at a higher dimensional space, when we can capture everything that exists in our world plus more, that the arrow of time doesn't exist. So there's no directionality of time. So this might capture more about reality than
00:15:23
Speaker
what we're perceiving in our four dimensions. So that would be the idea. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, that's interesting. And I think that's all again, this all I think there's some real deep insights behind each of these arguments that he makes.
00:15:41
Speaker
But I sort of lose him a little bit when he starts to talk about the idea that, you know, we're talking about like an object in the world, there's like a red tomato there. And he's saying, or the moon, he uses that example a lot. You know, when he's basically going back to the Bishop Barkley argument of saying, it doesn't exist unless someone's perceiving it. Yeah, this is a part of his his theory that
00:16:10
Speaker
that I have a difficult time with too. I think it's it's a tricky thing to wrap your head around the idea that something doesn't exist when you're it doesn't exist when you're not looking at it. Right. So basically what he's saying that I think the linking hypothesis is something like because there's no relationship between the physical reality and your experience of the physical reality.
00:16:34
Speaker
The thing that you call the moon or the thing that you call the tomato is just something that is an icon in your interface. It's not a real thing in the world in any way.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I think that's the in any way part is the part that like where I start to lose them a little bit because like I get the idea that yes, there's some we in cognitive psychology, we talk about a representation. So the idea that like the thing that I'm experiencing of the red tomato is
00:17:08
Speaker
a representation of a red tomato. It's not the actual physical thing. I can't experience that directly. I can only experience it indirectly through my creative, the perceptual world that my brain creates for me moment to moment. This is how I would understand it too, or the version that makes sense to me is that when you're not looking at the moon, it's not being represented in any way.
00:17:35
Speaker
But when you look at it, you're actually creating that object in a sense, by organizing it into something meaningful and distinct from things around it. Whereas that may not have existed before you apprehended it. Correct. Yeah, exactly. But I don't know, maybe it may be going further than that. Yeah, so I think that that's the sort of sort of the question for me is like, I think what he's going is saying that the actual object itself is being collapsed.
00:18:06
Speaker
into its physical objectiveness through the act of perception. And that would be through sort of a quantum like observer kind of effect. Right, exactly, exactly. And that to me is, I mean, it's interesting. It's an interesting idea. It's a funny idea too, because it's one of those ideas that
00:18:28
Speaker
Uh, it's, it's tough to disprove, right? Oh, it's impossible to disprove. Yeah, exactly. It's almost a definition of an idea that's impossible to disprove. I got a pen here, but when I don't look at it, that pen's gone. You're wrong. You can't. Yeah. But then it has to, you know, relate to also like, you know, all kinds of different, um, sensors too. So like if a camera's taking a picture of it, then it's somehow, you know, I guess it's a question, right? Like.
00:18:59
Speaker
Does, you know, is the whole chain of like experiencing it? Like if I look at the picture, then the camera took the picture. If I don't, then it didn't. Well, I think some of the tricky part here is that he suggests that in order for it to exist, it would have to be apprehended by a conscious agent. Right. Right. But I guess he's, but he's kind of like a panpsychist as well though, isn't he?
00:19:22
Speaker
It seems so but I don't know if it does helps a lot if you if you are because then, you know, it's a lot easier because they're a lot more conscious agents. So a lot more things to do the perceiving. Well, this gets into his third claim. So just to sort of summarize a little bit so far. So the first claim that we talked about was the evolutionary claim, fitness beats truth, that fitness functions are what our perception is based on.
00:19:50
Speaker
The second claim that we mentioned briefly is the user interface theory of perception, the idea that our perception is kind of like putting on a headset, a virtual reality headset, and we have a particular interface with the world, but that's not really what the world is. It's really something very different than what our experience of it is, or through this kind of filter.
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah, and then sort of the analogy there with a computer is like, if there's an icon on your desktop that has like a folder kind of shape to it, that's not that's a no sense like a folder, you know, it's just your inner it's an interface, it's an icon. And so there's no relation, there's no real relationship between the ones and zeros, and this icon.
00:20:32
Speaker
That's the argument that he's making, that like when I see a red tomato, it's a similar kind of red tomato icon. There's no relationship between what's up. So don't mistake the folder on your desktop with the actual thing. Right. So in the third part of these claims is the most radical one, I think.
Conscious Realism: A New Perspective
00:20:55
Speaker
And this is the idea of conscious realism, the idea that nothing exists except conscious agents.
00:21:02
Speaker
He would claim that materialism doesn't exist, physicalism doesn't exist. There's no such thing as atoms, molecules, quarks. These may be useful things for us in our interface with the world, but they don't exist as such.
00:21:16
Speaker
Well, this is a big one, right? This is a, this is also where it's a little unclear. And then I think this is, we were talking about this before the show, like it's a little unclear exactly what he's saying here because conscious realism, you know, is also realism is a part of it as well. So at different points in the book, he does say for sure that there is a real world out there in some, you know, but it's like in what sense, you know, basically.
00:21:43
Speaker
That's where the realism comes in. There is something that is being interacted with. He takes the primary thing to be conscious agents. This almost feels like a giant leap beyond anything else that he's been talking about so far, but it effectively denies the idea that there are physical things in the world. Physical things.
00:22:11
Speaker
you know, on the order of the dimensionality. That should be taken literally. That should be taken literally. He talks about the idea that things should be taken seriously, but not literally. So like the idea that like, you know, the snake, you don't want to grab a snake and shake it, you know, because it'll bite you, even though it's not a snake and you're not shaking it and it's not biting you, you're still going to die. You're still going to have an effect.
00:22:37
Speaker
So, but that's the part that, that's the part to me that like, well, I get real hung up. Cause like, how does evolution act? He's he only two things that he believes that are real are consciousness and evolution. Yep. There's the only two things he believes in, right? And so it's like how, but he never, I don't think ever adequately addresses how do those two things interface?
00:23:05
Speaker
He has this interface theory, but just says that it's an interface. He doesn't say how those things interface. Yeah, and this is where it gets a little complicated, I think, in terms of a story. Because if you don't believe that the moon exists till somebody's looked at it, that the moon hasn't been around for billions of years, that it's only been around since there was a conscious agent to apprehend it in some sort of way, then
00:23:35
Speaker
Well, this is, I mean, that's a radical claim, right? Right. I mean, unless the moon itself is a conscious agent, which, which I think he's saying it is. I mean, I thought that's, that's why it's a little bit of a question, right? Because it's like, yeah, I think he is a panpsychist, but he doesn't, he doesn't lay that out so explicitly. So panpsychists just for terminological reasons. So panpsychist would be the idea that
00:24:03
Speaker
everything is conscious, or the entire universe is conscious to some degree or another, or rock is conscious, just do a very, you know, a very small degree, something like that. Yeah, exactly. It's something, you know, something along the lines of, you know, that our consciousness is like the universe understanding itself. And the idea, I kind of like that idea, you know, in general, I don't, I certainly don't hate it. But I understand the motivation for it.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah, I get the motivation. I think it's the way that it connects in his theory that I find kind of problematic. What is the mechanism of action that upon which evolution is acting? Yeah, you know, like if it's not a physical thing, if it's like, I think of evolution of like, if I fall out of a tree, I'm heavy, I slant, you know, I have momentum, I slam into this,
00:24:57
Speaker
earth that's like big and much, much more massive than I am. And, you know, it ends poorly for me. And like, we can talk about like, what that what mass is, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But like, it feels like there's, there's something that feels to me, like, extremely real, that they're like, that there is something
00:25:21
Speaker
that is called mass, well, that we call mass, but there's something behind that. There's some, cause there's some real way in which that affects me directly, which is evolution, right? My fitness is directly impacted by gravity, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So you don't have gravity, like where, so where does gravity come from? Why does like our consciousness create gravity according to this theory? Like,
00:25:48
Speaker
I think one of the one of the difficulties with this is that what lies beyond is inscrutable, that essentially what the theory is saying is that evolution has not given us the ability to perceive the truth. What is the truth? Well, we don't know. We have no idea. Right. So it doesn't it doesn't propose an alternative theory here. It doesn't propose, you know, something that, you know,
00:26:16
Speaker
what reality really is. It's just that it's not what we perceive. The other aspect of this is the brain. What Hoffman talks about is that there are no neurons. The brain itself, we assign this special characteristic to it that it's like the thing that is responsible for our cognition, for our experience of the world.
00:26:45
Speaker
And he's like, but there are no neurons, there is no brain. And to me, it's like, I don't know how useful that is, as a theory. I think I get the motivation for it. And again, the reason why he's doing this is because he's arguing against the idea that consciousness arises from a particular physical configuration.
00:27:12
Speaker
He is looking at the field and saying, listen, this is the way we've been approaching it since Descartes or whatever, that we're looking, and especially in the recent resurgence in interesting consciousness, that we're looking for the neural correlates of consciousness. We're trying to explain what's important to us, our consciousness, in terms of the physical interactions of our neurons and
00:27:39
Speaker
how it arises from physical matter. And he's saying, we've got nothing there. There's no good physicalist theory about where consciousness arises. It's a hard problem of consciousness, right? He's saying, well, let's just start from the other direction. Let's say consciousness is fundamental. Let's start from there, because that's all we know, right? Sort of a little bit of a Descartes. I don't know anything, but I know that I think. Let's start from that position.
00:28:06
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah. And, you know, what's me there is, is kind of interesting is that
00:28:13
Speaker
If we think about perceptions and we think about neuroscience and the brain, it's true that there is a distinction between the thing that we're experiencing and the physical thing that we're interacting with that's causing that sensation. Like wavelength and color. Exactly. We were talking about
00:28:37
Speaker
sound and how we hear words. There's a relationship between the frequencies of the vibration of air that is created by our voices and the way that those airwaves impinge on the ear that then creates neurochemical signals that are processed by our ear and then our brain. And ultimately, we create words out of that
00:29:07
Speaker
There's no word, like there's no words in the air, right? Like the words are created in our brain, but there is a very definite structure between the airwaves and every subsequent step that creates the word. It's very predictable. Right. And it works in every, in everyone who understands a certain language will understand that word. So yeah, exactly.
00:29:33
Speaker
objective in that sense. It has different kind of reality status than just an arbitrary relationship between airwaves and your experience of it goes through the brain. If you take out that part of the brain, you won't be able to experience that. It seems like abandoning that sense that there is some kind of isomorphism between something in the world and your experience of it, I don't know how helpful it is.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, right. I think that's another good point. You mentioned the word isomorphism and just the idea that there's some clear relation between the two. We would think, okay, we're not perceiving reality directly, but at least there's a relationship between the two that's predictable. Hoffman would say, no, there's no relationship at all. Right, exactly.
00:30:24
Speaker
in terms of the quantum mechanics kind of aspect of it, if you get to that level, sure, all these things are probabilistic, but there's still a relationship between locations and all this stuff. And when you perceive it, there's a collapse of these waveforms.
00:30:47
Speaker
It's still there's some underlying regularity to it. It's not it's not random. It's not entirely random, right? It's there's some underlying relationship between what you experience and and the thing itself. I want to make sure have we gotten have we represented his his ideas clearly enough? I don't know. These are I mean, they're complicated ideas. So I'm sure we must be missing some some aspects of this and and
00:31:16
Speaker
I would encourage listeners to read the book to get a fuller flavor of this. Yeah. It's an interesting book and it's definitely worth reading. I agree.
Critiques and Counterarguments
00:31:27
Speaker
If we've got the basic outline of things, what's your evaluation, Joe? I found it to be quite thought-provoking in terms of
00:31:39
Speaker
I really like the idea. I've always been attracted to idealism, this kind of Bishop Barkley stuff, that consciousness is sort of primary and creates the world. And there's some very interesting direct link between
00:31:57
Speaker
that and the nature of what we understand today from our best physicalist kind of neuroscience that there's something constructive in our experience of the world. And I always love to talk about Sir Isaac Newton and the rays themselves are not colored. In other words, that color, it's not red, it's not inherent in the wavelength of the light. It's our experience of it. I love that stuff. That's what got me interested in psychology in the first place.
00:32:25
Speaker
because it's just, it's cool because it's weird and it's not like what you think it would be. It's counterintuitive. And so it does, it does some interesting things, but I found his arguments extremely frustrating when he got into the
00:32:40
Speaker
world of this conscious agents and how his models prove that perception is not veridical and that there's no, there's necessarily no relationship between the physical thing in the world and your experience of it. I didn't see none of, I didn't find any of his arguments all that compelling. I mean, that was a sort of where I land on it. Where do you sort of land on it?
00:33:02
Speaker
I think the I think the different components of this can be treated somewhat independently. So the first the idea of fitness beats truth, I have an issue with that too. I think there's some difficulty with with the idea. And I think most perceptual psychologists out there would not argue with the idea that we evolved to, you know, we evolved to see fitness, and that's important.
00:33:31
Speaker
But I don't think that precludes the idea of perceiving truth. In any given simulation that you run, whenever you would pit something like fitness versus something else, fitness is always going to win because that's what evolution is, right? But that doesn't preclude the idea that through a more, maybe a more complicated, longer term process that we find that a representation that's more objective, that
00:34:00
Speaker
can be tested more thoroughly and that other people agree with might be something that our perception eventually converges on. In his model, he's got one objective function, which is the fitness function, and the other is like veridical perception.
00:34:27
Speaker
And he's got these as like independent variables in his model that are unrelated. And I feel like that's the arbitrary kind of magic in his model that makes it work the way that it does. It's not clear that it could evolve.
00:34:44
Speaker
in that way entirely separately. Because if you rather start with the premise that there is something physical in the world, it's maybe strange and not like what we experience at all. Like in other words, our experience, the quality of the thing that we experience, the feeling of it may not be related in any way to the actual physical underlying thing. But there is a
00:35:07
Speaker
reliable relationship between, say, wavelength and our experience of color. Lower wavelength things are like blue, and higher wavelength things are like red. And we reliably will experience that. And that will allow us, that will allow evolution to act on that because we like to eat things that are nice and ripe, and we don't like to eat things that are rotten, and color has helped us kind of parse those things out. And so it's the rottenness that we're really detecting
00:35:37
Speaker
But it can only act on what it has to act on, which is this iterative physical relationship between the wavelength of the light and your experience of that. I mean, I think like you say, if you make the assumption that there is an objective world and our sensory systems are poking against that, then it kind of makes sense that eventually we would
00:36:03
Speaker
we would discern some of the nature of it. If you start with the assumption that there is no physical world, well then, yeah, okay, it's harder to assume that our perceptual systems will come to represent something that doesn't exist, right?
00:36:17
Speaker
So, well, yeah. And then, and then he, you know, he even actually in the, in the book, even actually quotes Neo from the matrix. Yeah. Oh, not Neo. Who's the Trinity? No, no. Who's the Morpheus? Morpheus. Thank you. He actually, yeah. He even quotes Morpheus from the matrix, you know, and is talking about like the blue pill versus the red pill. I mean, it's like, if, if it all starts with consciousness,
00:36:46
Speaker
then really the physical world, the four-dimensional, I think this is exactly what he's saying, I think, in the book, the four-dimensional physical world that we experience, space and time, that we experience with our senses, with our sense auras, like with our machines that we use, pictures, all this stuff, all that stuff is a simulation. And, okay.
00:37:08
Speaker
It's a simulation. All right, fine. Nothing is different. We still should act as though it is like the physical world, just this whole thing of taking things literally versus seriously. In fact, I know David Chalmers, who is the philosopher who came up with the idea of a hard problem, has recently been working on some ideas about VR and the nature of reality. His claim is that virtual reality is reality. If it's convincing enough, it is reality.
00:37:37
Speaker
In this case, if there's nothing that we're really missing, what is it that we're not perceiving, then why shouldn't we take this for reality? If it's a fully contained system and there's nothing that we're missing out on, there's no incompleteness that we're experiencing, then why shouldn't this count as reality?
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And what does it buy you to to say that it's not, you know, yeah, so I don't know that there's a there's a clear way that in his in his theory that you would preference one or the other, but even believing that there is
00:38:12
Speaker
you know, some physical reality. Let's say that we, because the reality is the thing that we say co-create, even if we were just gonna go there, like you experience it, I experience it. So together we're experiencing the same reality. There's some like reality status to it there. We're both sharing that we are experiencing the same thing. None of that even precludes that there might be, that the reality itself,
00:38:39
Speaker
might be a lot weirder than we even know. That like this 11 dimensional space, you know, might be what really is going on. But that there's doesn't mean that even if that's true, doesn't mean that there isn't some shared common truth that we are experiencing in some way. Right? It can both be true. They can both be true. It Yeah, it does also in a sense seem
00:39:06
Speaker
No matter how many layers of the matrix you pull off, you're still going to say that you're not really experiencing reality, so ground truth reality. You'll never get there. There's no scientific theory that'll suggest that you're now at ground truth reality and there's no further to go. Nothing bigger, nothing smaller. That's where I really want to agree with them.
00:39:36
Speaker
I think that, and I think that's exactly the level which like his ideas are super appealing.
Perception Layers and Reality
00:39:41
Speaker
Cause it's like, yeah, like there, like there is, it's probably really weird how things work and like dark matter. We don't know anything about dark matter. Like what the hell is that? Like, you know, but there's, there's always the hope that someday you'll be, that we'll be able to understand what dark matter is and how it's, you know, related to our experience of the world and something. And here's an interesting thing. I think one of the things that, that gets a little, um,
00:40:04
Speaker
confused in discussing these issues, I think is the difference between perception and then a conceptual idea, right? So we can have, you know, we can, we can perceive something, but then we also have an interpretation of it too. But I mean, if it's the if the reality that we're missing out on is the reality of quarks and, you know, bosons and leptons and that stuff, I don't know that we could have evolved to have a perceptual system that would perceive that, you know, if it's really through a series of
00:40:34
Speaker
you know, adaptive choices and, and that sort of thing. It's not clear we could have a perceptual system that is plugged into all these quantum mechanical effects. Yeah, there's there's certain, but again, that's, but that's, you know, assuming that there is a physical reality that has certain, you know, reliable characteristics that are consistent. So one thing we could talk a little bit about is a critique of this that came out, must have been about a year ago now,
00:41:04
Speaker
which is an article by Bagwell that we'll put up on the show notes, called Debunking Interface Theory, why Hoffman's skepticism is self-defeating. And this is an argument, so he's a philosopher, and the argument's a little longer than this, but the basic idea is that we can't use evolutionary biology or we can't use evolution as a basis for our claims,
00:41:33
Speaker
because we're claiming that we can't trust our own perception. So how is it that we know that we came about by a process of evolution? And I guess what Hoffman would say a bit is that his theory, his interface theory still allows for scientific discovery, because you can still act on your perceptions to
00:42:01
Speaker
run experiments and trust the output of those experiments within the context of the simulation? I don't
Evolutionary Claims under Scrutiny
00:42:07
Speaker
know. I'm not exactly sure why. He definitely said that you could do science, but why? What do you think Bagwell would say about that? I think the idea is that what Hoffman's using is not evolutionary biology. He's trying to abstract something even more out from it that
00:42:30
Speaker
Evolution or Darwinism is true in a universal sense, something he's called universal Darwinism, that it applies even if, you know, whether we're just conscious agents or whether, you know, physical, you know, atoms and biology really exists, it can be applied to both situations. It's universally true in some sort of sense that reproduction by natural selection
00:42:58
Speaker
happens whether you're a physical system or just a bunch of conscious agents. Right, exactly. It doesn't need to be a living being in order for evolution to act on it. Yeah. All right. Well, hopefully we've given you at least an introduction to this idea. And we do think that Hoffman's ideas are interesting and they've provoked an awful lot of thought in us. And we hope that this is something that
00:43:27
Speaker
resonates with you too. Again, I would highly suggest reading more on the subject if you're interested, because we've only covered the really bare details and some of the basic ideas. So I don't want this to just be an advertisement for his book, but the name of the book is The Case Against Reality, Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, and it came out in 2019.
00:43:52
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Good book, interesting ideas, and I think we haven't quite solved the problem of consciousness yet, but we're making progress there. I think we're just about there. Probably next episode we'll solve it. All right, thanks for listening.