Donald Hoffman

Donald Hoffman, Ph.D.Cognitive Scientist and Author, Department of Cognitive Sciences, U.C. Irvine

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and author of more than 90 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (W.W. Norton, 2000). He received his BA from UCLA in Quantitative Psychology and his Ph.D. from MIT in Computational Psychology. He joined the faculty of UC Irvine in 1983, where he is now a full professor in the departments of cognitive science, computer science and philosophy. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences for his research on the relationship of consciousness and the physical world.

This is from 2014 

Physicists have told us from Rutherford in 1916 or so that physical things are mostly empty space. What Hoffman is saying goes far beyond this. He says that this is a mistake - tyhe same mistake as the following, if you imagine little computer screen creatures saying, we know computer screen objects aren't real, becuase we can see the pixels and the space between the pixels, which are real. But the only computer screen reality is all the electronic workings of hte computer which they still can't see. Hoffman is pointing out that we are just doing the same as the computer screen people when we point to atoms and other particles as being a deeper reality. They aren't, they are still all part of our species-specific user interface. 

Camera theory of perception - not true. 

It feels like you're seeing what is already there, but in fact what you're doing is constructing a reality within about 100mS. 

We are constructing in response to other conscious agents. 

Vision is a process of construction. 

He criticises the standard view of evolution, whereby we evolve to see the truth. Our perceptions don't match reality. We evolve not to see the truth. 

Stephen Pinker "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness." 

examples - The Jewel beetle in Australia. 

Poor design of human eye compared to octopus. 

Evolutionary Game Theory - Implications from Evolution

Truth goes extinct. Just tuned to fitness. Truth seeing organisms don't even get a stage to come on stage before they go extinct. 

Fitness is distinct from truth. 

Hoffman argues that natural selection is necessarily directed toward fitness payoffs and that organisms develop internal models of reality that increase these fitness payoffs. This means that organisms develop a perception of the world that is directed towards fitness, and not of reality (or truth). This led him to argue that evolution has developed sensory systems in organisms that have high fitness but don't offer a correct perception of reality.

Compare computer desktop to our reality. Our spatial reality is to help us get things done - it's to hide the truth so things are simple enough for us to make decisions. Later he uses GTA as an analogy.

Each species has its own interface. ( this causes me a level of confusion. Why are we able to see other species adapting their icon as they appear to other species when it makes no difference to us? - because something is changing in the root reality that we can perceive. But why?). 

Neurons can not cause consciousness because they are a species specific symbol. There is no causation. Neural activity causes nothing. 

Wikipedia 

His 2015 TED Talk, "Do we see reality as it is?" explains how our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us.^[3]

Hoffman notes that the commonly held view that brain activity causes conscious experience has, so far, proved to be intractable in terms of scientific explanation. Hoffman proposes a solution to the hard problem of consciousness by adopting the converse view that consciousness causes brain activity and, in fact, creates all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, Hoffman has developed and combined two theories: the "multimodal user interface" (MUI) theory of perception and "conscious realism".

"very simple formalism" 

Turing - launched the theory of computation - a little machine with finite set of states, finite set of symbols, simple transition rules, and any computation can be done with a Turing machine. 

We need a consciousness equivalent of this. 

Conscious Agent

experience -> actions -> world -> experiences 

this can be translated into mathematics. 

The world consists of conscious agents. The real reality is just consciousness. Our reality is a desktop interface. 

Replacing the W with another conscious agent: 

you can have any number of CAs. 

Two conscious agents interacting satisfy the definition of one conscious agent. 

Given any pseudograph of conscious agents (CAs), any subset of CAs can be combined to form a new CA. 

Conscious Agent Networks (CANs) have the power of Universal Turing Machines. 

We have lots of models of unconscious processing - all of these can be re-expressed as networks of conscious processing. 

Consciousness itself can be modelled. 

Hoffman assumes consciousness is fundamental and assumes that all of physics can emerge from that - and it does. 

"The states of the (2) agents become entangled over the long term." 

its the same equation as the wave function of a free particle. 

He's written a paper on this

Chris Field - ? collaborator. 

all of space-time emerges from models of consciousness. Maybe even gravity waves - ? 

Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory[edit]

MUI theory^[4] states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs". Hoffman uses the metaphor of a computer desktop and icons - the icons of a computer desktop provide a functional interface so that the user does not have to deal with the underlying programming and electronics in order to use the computer efficiently. Similarly, objects that we perceive in time and space are metaphorical icons that act as our interface to the world and enable us to function as efficiently as possible without having to deal with the overwhelming amount of data underlying reality.^[5] This theory implies Epiphysicalism, i.e., physical objects, such as quarks and brains and stars are constructed by conscious agents but such physical objects have no causal power.^[4] While Panpsychism claims that Rocks, mountains, the moon, etc. are conscious, "Conscious Realism" in this theory (Multimodal user interface theory) does not. Instead, what it claims is all such objects are icons within the user interface of a conscious agent, but that does not entail the claim that the objects themselves are conscious.^[4]

The interface theory of perception[edit]

The interface theory of perception is the idea that our perceptual experiences don't necessarily map onto what exists in the reality of itself. This is in contrast to the popular view of critical realism which argues that some of our perceptual experiences map onto the reality of the natural world. In the critical realist's view, primary qualities like height and weight represent actual qualities of reality, whereas secondary qualities don't. Within the interface theory of perception, neither primary nor secondary qualities necessarily map onto reality.^[6]

Perception of the physical world is a byproduct of consciousness[edit]

Together, MUI theory and Conscious Realism form the foundation for an overall theory that the physical world is not objective but is an epiphenomenon (secondary phenomenon) caused by consciousness. Hoffman has said that some form of reality may exist, but maybe completely different from the reality our brains model and perceive.^[8] Reality may not be made of space-time and physical objects.^[3] Through supposing that consciousness is fundamental, Hoffman provides a possible solution to the hard problem of consciousness, which wrestles with the notion of why we seem to have conscious immediate experiences, and how sentient beings could arise from seemingly non-sentient matter. Hoffman argues that consciousness is more fundamental than the objects and patterns perceived by consciousness.^{[9][better source needed]} We have conscious experiences because consciousness is posited as a fundamental aspect of reality. The problem of how sentient beings arise from seemingly non-sentient matter is also addressed because it alters the notion of non-sentient matter. Perceptions of non-sentient matter are mere byproducts of consciousness and don't necessarily reflect reality. This means the causal notion of non-sentient matter developing into sentient beings is up to question.

Deepak Chopra and Donald Hoffman: Reality is Eye Candy in 2018

Realism 

conscious world behind the interface that we can't see - look into a mirror to see a demonstration of this. 

we have a dumbed down reality/ interface because we can't deal with the complexity. 

then we assume that the limits of our interface are really an insight into objective reality. 

Eg, we look at a rock and we assume there's nothing alive (or a an ant and assume there's no internal subjective experience in or of the ant). 

Hoffman says the rock (or ant) is a dumbed down consciousness. My interface has given up. 

He's not saying rocks are conscious - but an experience of a conscious agent that our model is too dumbed down to see as alive or conscious. 

Different species may well have very different conscious experiences. 

conscious experiences can leak from species to species - because our interfaces consist of symbols. So - leakage/ overlaps/ cross overs exist. 

Beyond Us: Competition with Donald Hoffman | Bernardo Kastrup & Fred Matser