The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
April 25, 2016 11:09 AM Subscribe
I file stuff like this under "Interesting But I'd Go Crazy If I Gave It Much Thought So I Don't."
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:16 AM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:16 AM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
Duh, of course our perceptions are an illusion. Our brains (whatever that is) makes them. But reality has to be real. It's tautologically true, object permanence would require ridiculously elaborate explanations otherwise (like the devil faking everything to trick us, etc.), and there's no good reason to doubt it other than the fact our senses aren't perfect and can be fooled, which isn't evidence of anything more than that.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:20 AM on April 25, 2016 [30 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 11:20 AM on April 25, 2016 [30 favorites]
idk, my money is still on all of reality being a computer simulation
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 11:21 AM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 11:21 AM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
Borges posited that:
a) we have a series of subjective perceptions, that comprise the totality of our experience and our existence.
b) the idea that there exists an objective reality, parallel to our perceptions, matching them point by point yet somehow having a different essence and mode of being, and never being directly apprehended, was an unnecessary duplication, unsupported by any evidence and ultimately succumbing to Occam's Razor.
Which seems similar to the argument Hoffman is making, if more literary than mathematical.
posted by signal at 11:23 AM on April 25, 2016 [22 favorites]
a) we have a series of subjective perceptions, that comprise the totality of our experience and our existence.
b) the idea that there exists an objective reality, parallel to our perceptions, matching them point by point yet somehow having a different essence and mode of being, and never being directly apprehended, was an unnecessary duplication, unsupported by any evidence and ultimately succumbing to Occam's Razor.
Which seems similar to the argument Hoffman is making, if more literary than mathematical.
posted by signal at 11:23 AM on April 25, 2016 [22 favorites]
Im with and they trembled before her fury. Just a more robust version of Dwarf Fortress we all inhabit.
posted by some loser at 11:24 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by some loser at 11:24 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
I refute it thus.
posted by IndigoJones at 11:25 AM on April 25, 2016 [12 favorites]
posted by IndigoJones at 11:25 AM on April 25, 2016 [12 favorites]
Shadows on a cave wall, man.
posted by Artw at 11:26 AM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Artw at 11:26 AM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
This is a typical endpoint quicksand swamp you get into when you presume there has never been, there is not, and there ain't ever going to be anything in the universe except (atoms, a void, the laws of physics).
Anybody who is not a fancy scientist can see where the gap is right off. Are you awake? Are you sober? Trust your perceptions. They help you to not step in front of moving trucks!
posted by bukvich at 11:27 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Anybody who is not a fancy scientist can see where the gap is right off. Are you awake? Are you sober? Trust your perceptions. They help you to not step in front of moving trucks!
posted by bukvich at 11:27 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics.
This has to be the most complicated possible way to rediscover philosophy.
posted by RogerB at 11:28 AM on April 25, 2016 [39 favorites]
This has to be the most complicated possible way to rediscover philosophy.
posted by RogerB at 11:28 AM on April 25, 2016 [39 favorites]
"Computer, Arch!"
Damn still broken...
posted by mikelieman at 11:28 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
Damn still broken...
posted by mikelieman at 11:28 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go.
Another example of someone misunderstanding science, and using it to attack science. I do not understand quantum mechanics myself, but I strongly believe that the conclusion of the observer effect is emphatically not that science only matters to those who look at it.
This area has been heavily written about by past philosophers, but no where in the article are they mentioned. Therefore, this is low level reinventing the wheel.
posted by rebent at 11:29 AM on April 25, 2016 [25 favorites]
Another example of someone misunderstanding science, and using it to attack science. I do not understand quantum mechanics myself, but I strongly believe that the conclusion of the observer effect is emphatically not that science only matters to those who look at it.
This area has been heavily written about by past philosophers, but no where in the article are they mentioned. Therefore, this is low level reinventing the wheel.
posted by rebent at 11:29 AM on April 25, 2016 [25 favorites]
Well, there's a reason dogs can't see colors very well and bees can detect hues in the ultraviolet range, right? Over time, those abilities have not led to greater reproductive fitness.
But this is about perceptions—sensations, basically. It sounds like the evil genius thought experiment from Descartes restated without a good/evil axis. We can't trust our perceptions to fully represent reality, but we can trust that we have perceptions, and that we have means to perceive, and that we perceive when certain things act upon or react with those means. Hoffman actually says as much at the end of the interview:
posted by infinitewindow at 11:30 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
But this is about perceptions—sensations, basically. It sounds like the evil genius thought experiment from Descartes restated without a good/evil axis. We can't trust our perceptions to fully represent reality, but we can trust that we have perceptions, and that we have means to perceive, and that we perceive when certain things act upon or react with those means. Hoffman actually says as much at the end of the interview:
As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.This reminds me of the concept of qualia, basically a subjective mental or perceptual experience. We tend to define qualia objectively (for instance, red can be defined as the color of light of wavelength 650 nm), but a quale can only be experienced subjectively.
posted by infinitewindow at 11:30 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
You'd have to change the meaning of the word "reality" to come up with a world that isn't real. Whatever this is, that's reality. Simulations require something to simulate. If there's no reality, there are no simulations.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:31 AM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
posted by saulgoodman at 11:31 AM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
This area has been heavily written about by past philosophers, but no where in the article are they mentioned. Therefore, this is low level reinventing the wheel.
But Kant was never dramatically lit and photographed against a squiggly Matrix background, so.
posted by Iridic at 11:32 AM on April 25, 2016 [21 favorites]
But Kant was never dramatically lit and photographed against a squiggly Matrix background, so.
posted by Iridic at 11:32 AM on April 25, 2016 [21 favorites]
He's right generally speaking regarding the limitations of our perceptions, but:
"Something much more natural is a bell curve — say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction."
This is so dumb I can hardly believe it. The idea of fitness being a bell curve in no way implies that it "sends truth to extinction." This whole argument seems to based on a completely contrived idea, almost straw-man-like, of "reality." A straw-world.
posted by zchyrs at 11:32 AM on April 25, 2016 [17 favorites]
"Something much more natural is a bell curve — say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction."
This is so dumb I can hardly believe it. The idea of fitness being a bell curve in no way implies that it "sends truth to extinction." This whole argument seems to based on a completely contrived idea, almost straw-man-like, of "reality." A straw-world.
posted by zchyrs at 11:32 AM on April 25, 2016 [17 favorites]
The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space.
Um, no?
Atoms behave really weirdly and don't "exist" as the little billard balls we assume, but macro-scale objects persistently exist in the ordinary way. Exactly why sufficiently large collections of atoms behave like classical objects seems to be either obvious or a deep mystery depending on who you ask.
There are more exciting quantum theories that posit that space really doesn't exist, and it's entangled particles all the way down, but they're not exactly the standard interpretation.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:35 AM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
Um, no?
Atoms behave really weirdly and don't "exist" as the little billard balls we assume, but macro-scale objects persistently exist in the ordinary way. Exactly why sufficiently large collections of atoms behave like classical objects seems to be either obvious or a deep mystery depending on who you ask.
There are more exciting quantum theories that posit that space really doesn't exist, and it's entangled particles all the way down, but they're not exactly the standard interpretation.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:35 AM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
Doesn't there come a point where the best explanation of why you or I have highly consistent structures of snake-like experiences, under certain circumstances, is that there is a snake present then?
posted by thelonius at 11:39 AM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 11:39 AM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
this is low level reinventing the wheel.
Well, yeah, it is cog sci, after all.
posted by howfar at 11:39 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
Well, yeah, it is cog sci, after all.
posted by howfar at 11:39 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
Advances like Magic Leap both excite me and freak me out — I worry about accumulating too many distorting layers of stimulus between me and reality. I expect in relatively short time they will be more entrenched and permanent in our selves than accessories such as glasses. But I suppose it's some comfort to know that these new altered perceptions may be beneficial for evolutionary fitness. I just hope they enhance the richness of life as well.
posted by Kabanos at 11:40 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Kabanos at 11:40 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
I have had it with these motherfucking mental representations of snakes on this motherfucking mental representation of a train!
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:46 AM on April 25, 2016 [35 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:46 AM on April 25, 2016 [35 favorites]
Still reading, but he has me at "It’s conscious agents all the way down."
posted by meinvt at 11:46 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by meinvt at 11:46 AM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
for instance, red can be defined as the color of light of wavelength 650 nm
You can experience red without coming anywhere close to 650nm light- you just need to stare at cyan for long enough and you'll see a red afterimage. And, fun fact, purple is only a subjective color, a fiction: there is no purple wavelength. It's just what your brain does when it sees lots of red and blue together. There's probably no purple "in the world."
posted by BungaDunga at 11:51 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
You can experience red without coming anywhere close to 650nm light- you just need to stare at cyan for long enough and you'll see a red afterimage. And, fun fact, purple is only a subjective color, a fiction: there is no purple wavelength. It's just what your brain does when it sees lots of red and blue together. There's probably no purple "in the world."
posted by BungaDunga at 11:51 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
but in the afterworld...
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:53 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:53 AM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
This whole argument seems to based on a completely contrived idea
It is contrived because he's using that as a simplified, metaphorical example. But he's using that example to check a model of how strong perceptions of reality ultimately don't always lead to the best-adapted organism. From the paper: "One key insight here is that perceptual information is not free. For every bit of information gleaned by perception there are typically costs in time and energy."
Colour is a good example. Many animals dispense with colour, in part or entirely and so save processing power. Dogs don't experience the (full) "reality" of colour, the distribution of those wavelengths to the extent that humans do, for example. So dogs have, in this way, a "non-true" but very suitable for them, "fit" experience of vision. And, presumably, they have evolved do this to not need to spend the energy to analyze colours.
posted by bonehead at 11:53 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
It is contrived because he's using that as a simplified, metaphorical example. But he's using that example to check a model of how strong perceptions of reality ultimately don't always lead to the best-adapted organism. From the paper: "One key insight here is that perceptual information is not free. For every bit of information gleaned by perception there are typically costs in time and energy."
Colour is a good example. Many animals dispense with colour, in part or entirely and so save processing power. Dogs don't experience the (full) "reality" of colour, the distribution of those wavelengths to the extent that humans do, for example. So dogs have, in this way, a "non-true" but very suitable for them, "fit" experience of vision. And, presumably, they have evolved do this to not need to spend the energy to analyze colours.
posted by bonehead at 11:53 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
There's probably no purple "in the world."
Well, there was until last Thursday.
posted by AFABulous at 11:56 AM on April 25, 2016 [41 favorites]
Well, there was until last Thursday.
posted by AFABulous at 11:56 AM on April 25, 2016 [41 favorites]
"This has to be the most complicated possible way to rediscover philosophy."
"There is nothing in the mind that is not first in evolutionary game model space."
posted by klangklangston at 12:00 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
"There is nothing in the mind that is not first in evolutionary game model space."
posted by klangklangston at 12:00 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
bonehead: That's what I mean when I say I think he's right insofar as talking about the limitations of our perceptions. A dog can't see red, and doesn't need to for survival; there are aspects of objective reality that extend outside the reach of the perceptions of all living creatures. But it doesn't follow that our perceptions will misrepresent reality to the degree that objectivity becomes meaningless, which is what he concludes (correct me if I'm mistaken). In fact, this is impossible, if you take the criteria of "fitness" to be a given. The concept of "fitness" doesn't even begin to make sense from a solipsistic POV.
posted by zchyrs at 12:01 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by zchyrs at 12:01 PM on April 25, 2016
Who is the master that makes the grass green?
posted by philip-random at 12:02 PM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
Agree with all of the above that he is both shallowly reinventing a lot of well-trod philosophy as well as arguing against a strawman, maximally naive-realist position that nobody who has given a moment's thought to the question seriously holds. All the quantum fluff around the article doesn't even merit a response.
posted by Pyry at 12:15 PM on April 25, 2016 [10 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 12:15 PM on April 25, 2016 [10 favorites]
Okay, I managed to follow him a couple of steps before I decided this was complete bullshit.
Like maybe, maybe there could be an instance where not perceiving something provides more of a survival advantage than perceiving it. Like how humans evolved to not see the alien masters in our midst because whenever somebody notices one of them, the aliens kill them.
But then I realized this isn't a Roddy Piper movie, and that makes no damn sense at all.
posted by Naberius at 12:15 PM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
Like maybe, maybe there could be an instance where not perceiving something provides more of a survival advantage than perceiving it. Like how humans evolved to not see the alien masters in our midst because whenever somebody notices one of them, the aliens kill them.
But then I realized this isn't a Roddy Piper movie, and that makes no damn sense at all.
posted by Naberius at 12:15 PM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
I just want to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you. Apparently reality will cease to exist when I die. So sorry for the inconvenience!
posted by blue_beetle at 12:19 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by blue_beetle at 12:19 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
METAFILTER: But then I realized this isn't a Roddy Piper movie, and that makes no damn sense at all.
posted by philip-random at 12:24 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 12:24 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
"show"
posted by lalochezia at 12:27 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by lalochezia at 12:27 PM on April 25, 2016
The maddening thing about this is, it's a half-assed reinvention of Kant, that only considers that there is a problem of what objects correspond to perception, but thinks that there's no issue with whether anything at all about existence corresponds to our concepts. For example, what reason is there to consider quantum mechanics as anything other than a game with symbols that some people are good at, once you've tossed out the possibility of justifying science empirically? The article seems to take as self-evident the idea that you determine the being of objects only by considering what we know about the fundamental particles composing them. Why should we think the world works like that? Because those ideas seem self-evident to some scientists? Why should I take the proof by mathematical physics that "evolution doesn't work like that" as being informative at all? He doesn't seem to understand that these are serious problems, once you start declaring that experience is illusory.
posted by thelonius at 12:34 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 12:34 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
I'm the only thing that's real, the rest of you are all zombies and/or my self lying to itself about what it percieves. PROVE OTHERWISE.
/does that "talk amongst yourselves" coffeeklatsch gesture
posted by 3urypteris at 12:43 PM on April 25, 2016
/does that "talk amongst yourselves" coffeeklatsch gesture
posted by 3urypteris at 12:43 PM on April 25, 2016
Reminds me of the second Duino Elegy:
Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
posted by jferngler at 12:44 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
posted by jferngler at 12:44 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
The Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. They work by turning completely dark at the first sign of danger, thus preventing you from seeing anything that might alarm you. This does, however, mean that you see absolutely nothing, including where you're going.
posted by rebent at 1:01 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by rebent at 1:01 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Alan Watts called it already. It's all prickles and goo.
posted by Splunge at 1:05 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Splunge at 1:05 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
Forgot the pull quote:
But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively: it’s gooey prickles and prickly goo [and] we’re always playing with the two.
posted by Splunge at 1:07 PM on April 25, 2016
But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively: it’s gooey prickles and prickly goo [and] we’re always playing with the two.
posted by Splunge at 1:07 PM on April 25, 2016
Sooooo.... college professor gets stoned, thinks it's news?
posted by straw at 1:13 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by straw at 1:13 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
I haven't read it (just taking a quick grading break, donchaknow). But if this is the pay off:
" Hoffman actually says as much at the end of the interview:
As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality."
That's just bog standard Berkeleyian Idealism. I mean, it's exactly how one would phrase Berkeley, if you wanted to do it with contemporary science lingo (as opposed to the 1700's science lingo that he used). The next step is to posit a pan-psyche to account for existence across experience gaps (and if you are of a mind to, call it God).
posted by oddman at 1:23 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
" Hoffman actually says as much at the end of the interview:
As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality."
That's just bog standard Berkeleyian Idealism. I mean, it's exactly how one would phrase Berkeley, if you wanted to do it with contemporary science lingo (as opposed to the 1700's science lingo that he used). The next step is to posit a pan-psyche to account for existence across experience gaps (and if you are of a mind to, call it God).
posted by oddman at 1:23 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
so basically at some point epistemological evidence is gonna have to somehow be accounted for as evidence of a thing having thingness.
posted by Annika Cicada at 1:31 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Annika Cicada at 1:31 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
The problem with threads about the nature of reality is that everyone winds up reducing every other point of view to a ridiculous caricature. The people in this thread are just as guilty of building strawmen and sliding down slippery slopes as Hoffman is. Honestly, it's kind of embarrassing to read/watch.
posted by yeolcoatl at 1:35 PM on April 25, 2016 [15 favorites]
posted by yeolcoatl at 1:35 PM on April 25, 2016 [15 favorites]
ctrl-f "Kant"
👍
bonus Kant story:
"...for fear of obstructing the circulation of the blood, he never would wear garters; yet, as he found it difficult to keep up his stockings without them, he had invented for himself a most elaborate substitute, which I will describe. In a little pocket, somewhat smaller than a watch-pocket, but occupying pretty nearly the same situation as a watch pocket on each thigh, there was placed a small box, something like a watch-case, but smaller; into this box was introduced a watch-spring in a wheel, round about which wheel was wound an elastic cord, for regulating the force of which there was a separate contrivance. To the two ends of this cord were attached hooks, which hooks were carried through a small apeture in the pockets, and so, passing down the inner and outer side of the thigh, caught hold of two loops which were fixed on the off side and the near side of each stocking."
posted by leotrotsky at 1:37 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
👍
bonus Kant story:
"...for fear of obstructing the circulation of the blood, he never would wear garters; yet, as he found it difficult to keep up his stockings without them, he had invented for himself a most elaborate substitute, which I will describe. In a little pocket, somewhat smaller than a watch-pocket, but occupying pretty nearly the same situation as a watch pocket on each thigh, there was placed a small box, something like a watch-case, but smaller; into this box was introduced a watch-spring in a wheel, round about which wheel was wound an elastic cord, for regulating the force of which there was a separate contrivance. To the two ends of this cord were attached hooks, which hooks were carried through a small apeture in the pockets, and so, passing down the inner and outer side of the thigh, caught hold of two loops which were fixed on the off side and the near side of each stocking."
posted by leotrotsky at 1:37 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
Threads like this on Metafilter always perplex me. I don't know if this guy is right or wrong, but it sure doesn't seem like he's just spitballing. His PhD is from MIT, he's got a pretty solid job, his publication and presentation history seems fairly solid. Maybe he is full of shit, but I feel like if he is likely his colleagues are calling him on it in ways more sophisticated than most Mefites can manage. I feel pretty confident, for instance, that other people know who Kant was and what he was on about.
The drive on Metafilter to act like we've all already asked and answered the hard questions is a strange one.
posted by OmieWise at 1:37 PM on April 25, 2016 [22 favorites]
The drive on Metafilter to act like we've all already asked and answered the hard questions is a strange one.
posted by OmieWise at 1:37 PM on April 25, 2016 [22 favorites]
"Something much more natural is a bell curve — say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction."
This is so dumb I can hardly believe it. The idea of fitness being a bell curve in no way implies that it "sends truth to extinction." This whole argument seems to based on a completely contrived idea, almost straw-man-like, of "reality." A straw-world.
Describing water and death as a bell curve is absurd. Death is pretty much a step function.
posted by srboisvert at 1:38 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
This is so dumb I can hardly believe it. The idea of fitness being a bell curve in no way implies that it "sends truth to extinction." This whole argument seems to based on a completely contrived idea, almost straw-man-like, of "reality." A straw-world.
Describing water and death as a bell curve is absurd. Death is pretty much a step function.
posted by srboisvert at 1:38 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
His PhD is from MIT, he's got a pretty solid job, his publication and presentation history seems fairly solid.
Academics live in silos, and brilliance in one domain doesn't map to another, particularly in areas that have intuitive and seductive wrong answers. Philosophy has lots of these. Any time you're seeing words like consciousness or reality, together with a lack of engagement (or even awareness) of the long history of very clever people wrestling with these topics, caution flags should be shooting up.
At least it isn't a physicist this time.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:42 PM on April 25, 2016 [16 favorites]
Academics live in silos, and brilliance in one domain doesn't map to another, particularly in areas that have intuitive and seductive wrong answers. Philosophy has lots of these. Any time you're seeing words like consciousness or reality, together with a lack of engagement (or even awareness) of the long history of very clever people wrestling with these topics, caution flags should be shooting up.
At least it isn't a physicist this time.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:42 PM on April 25, 2016 [16 favorites]
Maybe he is full of shit, but I feel like if he is likely his colleagues are calling him on it in ways more sophisticated than most Mefites can manage
Not that I really disagree about the MeFi-specific part of what you're saying, but I've been the "colleague" in some vague sense of people very much like this, and the latter belief seems ill-founded to me. I'd say at least that, independently of your position on this MeFi thread, it is very possible to think that there are many well-credentialed cognitive neuroscientist/psych people who have a pretty noticeably shaky understanding of philosophy outside the little philosophy-of-mind bailiwick to which they're directly professionally accountable.
posted by RogerB at 1:43 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
Not that I really disagree about the MeFi-specific part of what you're saying, but I've been the "colleague" in some vague sense of people very much like this, and the latter belief seems ill-founded to me. I'd say at least that, independently of your position on this MeFi thread, it is very possible to think that there are many well-credentialed cognitive neuroscientist/psych people who have a pretty noticeably shaky understanding of philosophy outside the little philosophy-of-mind bailiwick to which they're directly professionally accountable.
posted by RogerB at 1:43 PM on April 25, 2016 [11 favorites]
The drive on Metafilter to act like we've all already asked and answered the hard questions is a strange one.
I like the approach Hoffman took, which I've never read about in philosophy or neuroscience. What he does, in the paragraphs about the corpus callosum, the abstractions, and his simulation plus analytical proof for networked, feedback model of consciousness—all this I think of as a very a nice application of material that CS researchers learn from theory of computation, and complexity theory. And for example the paragraph about Penrose puts into relief what Hoffman does mean when he brings in quantum mechanical computation.
So I think understanding, and critiquing, his approach requires a degree of facility with Turing machines and related concepts. Reading the interview triggered for me many parallels in the stuff I used to study. It's a particular school of thought, but in my evaluation I don't think is something that threatens or obviates the other more established perspectives in philosophy, biology, psychology, etc.
posted by polymodus at 1:52 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
I like the approach Hoffman took, which I've never read about in philosophy or neuroscience. What he does, in the paragraphs about the corpus callosum, the abstractions, and his simulation plus analytical proof for networked, feedback model of consciousness—all this I think of as a very a nice application of material that CS researchers learn from theory of computation, and complexity theory. And for example the paragraph about Penrose puts into relief what Hoffman does mean when he brings in quantum mechanical computation.
So I think understanding, and critiquing, his approach requires a degree of facility with Turing machines and related concepts. Reading the interview triggered for me many parallels in the stuff I used to study. It's a particular school of thought, but in my evaluation I don't think is something that threatens or obviates the other more established perspectives in philosophy, biology, psychology, etc.
posted by polymodus at 1:52 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Our interpretation of reality is flawed and that is obvious. Cover your ears for a couple of days and then hear sound...I have played around with this idea in my fiction for a long time now, but I am surprised how people accept their sensory input with question.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 1:57 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 1:57 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
Actually there's one subtlety—In my understanding, there are issues in eliminativism where a feedback model is proposed as a solution/critique. This is one of the subsections from the plato.stanford page on eliminativism, I think. So Hoffman's approach pretty consistent with certain arguments in philosophy.
posted by polymodus at 1:58 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by polymodus at 1:58 PM on April 25, 2016
So my takeaway from all this is that humanity is just a horde of quantum strawpeople tumbling down a long slippery slope made of quantum strawturtles (all the way down). Which is certainly an amusing image to visualize, if you can.
The slope = time.
posted by Pryde at 2:00 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
The slope = time.
posted by Pryde at 2:00 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Weird to think that evolution could be more fundamental than reality.
posted by Segundus at 2:14 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Segundus at 2:14 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm wondering if maybe he is doing with quantum physics that thing we do with genetics where we give it way too much power to shape our destinies?
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:14 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:14 PM on April 25, 2016
"The outcomes of measurements are experiences."
Christopher Fuchs
"The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go."
What immediately came to mind, reading the last quote reiterated, now here reiterated, is sewing thread, and the spools it comes on. Forever those spools have been made to match everyone's theoretical home sewing machines. So if that idea has to go, how do we get thread, car parts, plungers, for those theoretical sewer blockages? What? No more sewing patterns?
TS Eliot
"the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor flesh-less;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement."
posted by Oyéah at 2:16 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Christopher Fuchs
"The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go."
What immediately came to mind, reading the last quote reiterated, now here reiterated, is sewing thread, and the spools it comes on. Forever those spools have been made to match everyone's theoretical home sewing machines. So if that idea has to go, how do we get thread, car parts, plungers, for those theoretical sewer blockages? What? No more sewing patterns?
TS Eliot
"the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor flesh-less;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement."
posted by Oyéah at 2:16 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
What is the benefit of this model of reality? I'm struggling to find any.
posted by yesster at 2:18 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by yesster at 2:18 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
"there is no brain"
My head asplode
It probably imploded, no? Science!
posted by nzero at 2:24 PM on April 25, 2016
My head asplode
It probably imploded, no? Science!
posted by nzero at 2:24 PM on April 25, 2016
I agree with the above comments about Kant. Presumably someone has mentioned to this guy the similarities with Kant's theory. Why does the article not place this theory within the existing discourse of perceptions/world?
If you are basically making a more mathematically "robust" version of Kant's model of perception, why not discuss this so that anyone with a vague knowledge of Kant can understand the positioning of your work?
posted by mary8nne at 2:25 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
If you are basically making a more mathematically "robust" version of Kant's model of perception, why not discuss this so that anyone with a vague knowledge of Kant can understand the positioning of your work?
posted by mary8nne at 2:25 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Maybe he is full of shit, but I feel like if he is likely his colleagues are calling him on it in ways more sophisticated than most Mefites can manage.
A lot of Mefites have advanced degrees in the stuff that he is failing to consider and acknowledge. I think we can probably judge for ourselves the level of criticism we are able to manage.
posted by howfar at 2:25 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
A lot of Mefites have advanced degrees in the stuff that he is failing to consider and acknowledge. I think we can probably judge for ourselves the level of criticism we are able to manage.
posted by howfar at 2:25 PM on April 25, 2016 [6 favorites]
you know what, this guy (person the FPP is about) can bite my ass, I'm gonna go shred at the skatepark with my imaginary awesome skateboard tricks.
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:26 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:26 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
A lot of this interview seemed kinda silly but this part was interesting:
"I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down."
posted by gold-in-green at 2:34 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
"I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down."
posted by gold-in-green at 2:34 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
"What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.
Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent."
- Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 1920.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:53 PM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent."
- Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 1920.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:53 PM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
This really seems to be the story of thing that happens when an academic discovers pot and Mage The Ascension at the same time.
But really, we're missing the important question: would this be any better for stopping the countdown of a bomb?
posted by happyroach at 2:58 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
But really, we're missing the important question: would this be any better for stopping the countdown of a bomb?
posted by happyroach at 2:58 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
I guess I should add that everybody saying that this is a rehash of old-school run of the mill philosophy is right. And unfortunately, whenever somebody is reinventing the wheel, it will invariably turn out to be square and with the axle located somewhere in the nearest beehive or something.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:04 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:04 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
"Science presents, and will ever present, not the faithful image of an objective reality that exists, albeit beyond our reach, but rather the image of the relationship between man and an unknown reality"
-Andre Maurois
posted by clavdivs at 3:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
-Andre Maurois
posted by clavdivs at 3:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
I guess I should add that everybody saying that this is a rehash of old-school run of the mill philosophy is right. And unfortunately, whenever somebody is reinventing the wheel, it will invariably turn out to be square and with the axle located somewhere in the nearest beehive or something.
But this isn't right. He's not just re-doing it; he's doing algorithmic work giving a quantitative argument. The article mentions proof and simulation. He's also using Turing's ideas. Have old-school philosophers been doing that? No. I think a more informative view is to think it as reconvergence, taking different intellectual approaches yet getting similar ideas back. That seems acceptable to me, as part of the process.
posted by polymodus at 3:24 PM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
But this isn't right. He's not just re-doing it; he's doing algorithmic work giving a quantitative argument. The article mentions proof and simulation. He's also using Turing's ideas. Have old-school philosophers been doing that? No. I think a more informative view is to think it as reconvergence, taking different intellectual approaches yet getting similar ideas back. That seems acceptable to me, as part of the process.
posted by polymodus at 3:24 PM on April 25, 2016 [9 favorites]
It's weird to login to MeFi only to find a bunch of people talking shit about your uncle. Don't read the comments, even here. He's definitely familiar with the philosophy related to this, I recall discussing Schopenhauer's color theory with him back in 2004 or so. (Who in turn influenced Borges, mentioned upthread)
I may be biased, but it feels like polymodus has it right, he's converging on a similar place as philosophy but from a quantitative rather than logical proof. There's value in both.
Why am I commenting? Oh well.
posted by JauntyFedora at 4:27 PM on April 25, 2016 [17 favorites]
I may be biased, but it feels like polymodus has it right, he's converging on a similar place as philosophy but from a quantitative rather than logical proof. There's value in both.
Why am I commenting? Oh well.
posted by JauntyFedora at 4:27 PM on April 25, 2016 [17 favorites]
Deese carts.
posted by Artw at 4:28 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Artw at 4:28 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Have old-school philosophers been doing that?
Depends entirely on what you mean by "old-school philosophers." I can definitely point you to contemporary philosophers who offer proofs, use simulations, and make use of Turing's ideas. (The paper (pdf) actually cites one such contemporary philosopher: Brian Skyrms.) Simulation wasn't really a thing until fairly recently, and Turing is a 20th century thinker, so it would be a bit weird to take Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, or James to task for not running simulations or engaging with Turing. What I find jarring is when a contemporary writer who seems to be reconstructing something in the neighborhood of Leibniz's monadology engages with none of the relevant historical precedents. I mean, he doesn't even mention people in his own field (like Gustav Fechner) who had similar views back in the 19th century!
Anyway, panpsychism is an ancient idea with a long history of refinement in philosophy. One reason to pay attention to the philosophical literature is that philosophers often make and develop moves -- positions, views, arguments, responses -- that are not obvious when you are just starting out thinking about a problem. So, when I see someone make such bold claims as Hoffman is making without engaging at all with the philosophical literature, I am skeptical that they are seeing all of the terrain clearly enough. And it's not like he has to read everything. He could engage with contemporary panpsychists (like Galen Strawson) or their opponents. But I don't see Strawson or anyone else working on panpsychism cited in the interview or in the paper. (Not surprising about the paper, which doesn't really engage the same issues.)
Similarly, insofar as the paper is taken to support a big bold philosophical claim, the argument is one of a class of arguments that philosophers have been devoting a lot of thought to for the last ten years or so: evolutionary debunking arguments (pdf). These are probably best known as criticisms of moral realism. But the basic argument has been used by philosophers to attack not only moral realism but Platonism about mathematics, presentism about time, realist views of color perception, conservative accounts of ordinary objects, and on and on. I know because Dan Korman, a colleague of mine, is doing some interesting new work on debunking arguments (for an introduction, take a look at Chapter 7 of his book, and today I just wrapped up two weeks of discussion of debunking arguments in the context of ordinary objects (like tables and trees) with students in my metaphysics class. (The paper here is relevant enough to what I've been covering with my class that I'll probably pass it around to them.) Many, many philosophers have been developing defenses against the kind of debunking argument on offer here. But I don't see any of them cited. And this isn't reaching back into the 17th century. Moreover, as people have already observed in this thread: wielding a debunking argument without landing yourself in global skepticism is actually really difficult.
On preview: Apologies, JauntyFedora, if I'm being too harsh. The paper itself is really interesting -- though it doesn't get into any of the issues about consciousness or panpsychism (Hoffman's "conscious realism" if I'm understanding correctly) that the Quanta piece does.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 4:51 PM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
Depends entirely on what you mean by "old-school philosophers." I can definitely point you to contemporary philosophers who offer proofs, use simulations, and make use of Turing's ideas. (The paper (pdf) actually cites one such contemporary philosopher: Brian Skyrms.) Simulation wasn't really a thing until fairly recently, and Turing is a 20th century thinker, so it would be a bit weird to take Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, or James to task for not running simulations or engaging with Turing. What I find jarring is when a contemporary writer who seems to be reconstructing something in the neighborhood of Leibniz's monadology engages with none of the relevant historical precedents. I mean, he doesn't even mention people in his own field (like Gustav Fechner) who had similar views back in the 19th century!
Anyway, panpsychism is an ancient idea with a long history of refinement in philosophy. One reason to pay attention to the philosophical literature is that philosophers often make and develop moves -- positions, views, arguments, responses -- that are not obvious when you are just starting out thinking about a problem. So, when I see someone make such bold claims as Hoffman is making without engaging at all with the philosophical literature, I am skeptical that they are seeing all of the terrain clearly enough. And it's not like he has to read everything. He could engage with contemporary panpsychists (like Galen Strawson) or their opponents. But I don't see Strawson or anyone else working on panpsychism cited in the interview or in the paper. (Not surprising about the paper, which doesn't really engage the same issues.)
Similarly, insofar as the paper is taken to support a big bold philosophical claim, the argument is one of a class of arguments that philosophers have been devoting a lot of thought to for the last ten years or so: evolutionary debunking arguments (pdf). These are probably best known as criticisms of moral realism. But the basic argument has been used by philosophers to attack not only moral realism but Platonism about mathematics, presentism about time, realist views of color perception, conservative accounts of ordinary objects, and on and on. I know because Dan Korman, a colleague of mine, is doing some interesting new work on debunking arguments (for an introduction, take a look at Chapter 7 of his book, and today I just wrapped up two weeks of discussion of debunking arguments in the context of ordinary objects (like tables and trees) with students in my metaphysics class. (The paper here is relevant enough to what I've been covering with my class that I'll probably pass it around to them.) Many, many philosophers have been developing defenses against the kind of debunking argument on offer here. But I don't see any of them cited. And this isn't reaching back into the 17th century. Moreover, as people have already observed in this thread: wielding a debunking argument without landing yourself in global skepticism is actually really difficult.
On preview: Apologies, JauntyFedora, if I'm being too harsh. The paper itself is really interesting -- though it doesn't get into any of the issues about consciousness or panpsychism (Hoffman's "conscious realism" if I'm understanding correctly) that the Quanta piece does.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 4:51 PM on April 25, 2016 [7 favorites]
Sorry Jaunty Fedora. Hugs.
posted by Annika Cicada at 4:56 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Annika Cicada at 4:56 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
maybe all the philosophy stuff went over the reporters head, who took it out.
posted by rebent at 5:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by rebent at 5:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
We are kind of a bunch of assholes here. We're nicer in person.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:27 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by leotrotsky at 5:27 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
This seems like something Peter Watts could write a really upsetting novel about.
Karl Schroeder wrote a book - Lady of Mazes I think it was called - in which people have software in their brains which in effect walls them off from 'reality' and instead has them interacting with a (shared) reality substitute. Multiple overlapping realities existed, and which one you were present in depended on your affinity. The upshot was that an unmodified observer would see you walking down a street, overtaking and sidestepping other pedestrians, and the software would have you convinced you were hiking on a trail in the mountains with a couple of friends. The sensations of your body moving to avoid colliding with other people would be edited out or substituted with those consistent with what you were perceiving.
posted by um at 5:37 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Karl Schroeder wrote a book - Lady of Mazes I think it was called - in which people have software in their brains which in effect walls them off from 'reality' and instead has them interacting with a (shared) reality substitute. Multiple overlapping realities existed, and which one you were present in depended on your affinity. The upshot was that an unmodified observer would see you walking down a street, overtaking and sidestepping other pedestrians, and the software would have you convinced you were hiking on a trail in the mountains with a couple of friends. The sensations of your body moving to avoid colliding with other people would be edited out or substituted with those consistent with what you were perceiving.
posted by um at 5:37 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
The actual paper is interesting, but it doesn't support the extremely bold claims of the article. For one, to get his results he has to construct a highly contrived game that disadvantages the "truth" strategy twice: by making it pick last, and also by just directly penalizing its score by an "information cost". Second, the claim that the alternate strategies are non-realist seems to be assuming that internal strategy parameters should have a simple 1-to-1 relationship with the truth.
That is, he names the internal states "red", "yellow", and "green" with the intent to correspond to bad, medium, and good, and demonstrates that the agents evolve "red" to be both extremes of the resource bell curve (under some particular utility function and correlation between resource types). But the semantic meaning of these internal states is not intrinsic to the problem, it's just something he has imposed on it-- we have no reason, other than his suggestive names, to think that the states ought to correspond to particular beliefs or perceptions.
Let me give a example: suppose we evolve agents that are supposed to apply the brakes to a car to stop at a red light. They have one internal parameter, which is the distance from the light when they start braking. Let's call this parameter "stop_light_position". After the evolution this parameter will be at some distance >0, because the car takes time to stop, and we'll interpret this to mean that the cars have evolved to lie to themselves about the stop light position. Suppose the cars compete against another strategy which we call "truth", which is to start braking at exactly the red light position. Obviously that strategy will get in a lot of wrecks, and "truth" will be "driven to extinction".
posted by Pyry at 5:53 PM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
That is, he names the internal states "red", "yellow", and "green" with the intent to correspond to bad, medium, and good, and demonstrates that the agents evolve "red" to be both extremes of the resource bell curve (under some particular utility function and correlation between resource types). But the semantic meaning of these internal states is not intrinsic to the problem, it's just something he has imposed on it-- we have no reason, other than his suggestive names, to think that the states ought to correspond to particular beliefs or perceptions.
Let me give a example: suppose we evolve agents that are supposed to apply the brakes to a car to stop at a red light. They have one internal parameter, which is the distance from the light when they start braking. Let's call this parameter "stop_light_position". After the evolution this parameter will be at some distance >0, because the car takes time to stop, and we'll interpret this to mean that the cars have evolved to lie to themselves about the stop light position. Suppose the cars compete against another strategy which we call "truth", which is to start braking at exactly the red light position. Obviously that strategy will get in a lot of wrecks, and "truth" will be "driven to extinction".
posted by Pyry at 5:53 PM on April 25, 2016 [5 favorites]
I don't want to make it sound like I oppose any criticism. I'm certainly not versed enough in machine learning, cogsci, or philosophy to hold any ground there, just maybe a reminder to keep it chill and that the personal attacks are beside the point. I'm curious how he'd respond to your germane criticisms but I don't think I'd link this thread to him in light of some of its contents. /derail
posted by JauntyFedora at 6:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by JauntyFedora at 6:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [4 favorites]
What happens when one quantum computer is programmed to solve a problem and another quantum computer is used to examine the conclusion.
posted by clavdivs at 6:21 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by clavdivs at 6:21 PM on April 25, 2016
The models created by physicists are products of the human imagination designed to help explain what we see, but do not necessarily present a more correct or accurate view of reality.
posted by humanfont at 6:26 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by humanfont at 6:26 PM on April 25, 2016
One interesting thing this has me thinking about is, if they grey goop of the brain is truly interacting at a quantum level in a sufficient enough manner that it shapes consciousness itself, then is it possible that We could eventually entangle our consciousness into a quantum internetwork that allows us to peer up and share information directly to each other? I guess the question I don't know is, is it possible to untangle particles and undo the quantum peering agreement?
that's all probably best served as the basis for a delightful Neal Stephenson meets Terry Gilliam novel.
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:34 PM on April 25, 2016
that's all probably best served as the basis for a delightful Neal Stephenson meets Terry Gilliam novel.
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:34 PM on April 25, 2016
Interesting! The way it was phrased towards the end, particularly the paragraph "The idea that what we are doing is measuring publicly accessible objects ..." reminded me of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
posted by carter at 7:03 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by carter at 7:03 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
"This pattern was the code of the memory, and it was nearly identical from time to time to time—and the system worked from rat to rat to rat...In rats, the hippocampus is only covered by a thin layer of cortex, that gray wrinkled layer of tissue that we frequently associate with the brain. In humans and other primates, however, the hippocampus is covered by a much thicker layer of cortex."
posted by clavdivs at 7:11 PM on April 25, 2016
posted by clavdivs at 7:11 PM on April 25, 2016
I'm curious how he'd respond to your germane criticisms but I don't think I'd link this thread to him in light of some of its contents.
Just tell him that his perceptions of this thread are merely illusions, and so he has no reason to be bothered.
Seriously, what's the point of proving reality's an illusion, if it doesn't directly lead to a "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" attitude?
posted by happyroach at 8:17 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Just tell him that his perceptions of this thread are merely illusions, and so he has no reason to be bothered.
Seriously, what's the point of proving reality's an illusion, if it doesn't directly lead to a "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" attitude?
posted by happyroach at 8:17 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
"Barron and Klein believe the origins of consciousness date to the Cambrian or even to the Precambrian Periods (more than 600 years ago)." (550 years before The Beatles.) This is from the article about insect consciousness.
posted by Oyéah at 8:29 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 8:29 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
"...more than 600 years ago..."
Technically correct.
posted by biogeo at 9:03 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
Technically correct.
posted by biogeo at 9:03 PM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]
More than a light year ago, 180,000 ancient arbitrary measures, per arbitrarily truncated relatively small time packets, out across a duration roughly equal to one solar rotation, of a wobbly small orb, covered with even smaller, and smaller orbs down to the orbs we haven't thought of yet, the orbs that only we can see of we do not look, that others may only guess about, but guessing is likely as disruptive as looking, as far as immeasurably eensy beensy wigglings of what? Aw dang it, I almost saw it. For all the space vs matter, my foot still doesn't slip through the stair tread.
posted by Oyéah at 9:18 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Oyéah at 9:18 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm finding this incredibly frustrating to read. The philosophy-based objections above seem on-point to me (though I am not expert enough to judge them), but that only scratches the surface.
Hoffman mentions his time in the 80s at MIT's AI lab in the article. He would have been preceded there by David Marr, a great computational neuroscientist whose work came from the same intellectual well. But although Marr emphasized the importance of abstract mathematical descriptions and algorithmic solutions to problems (in vision, specifically), he also acknowledged the importance of the implementation level of description -- that is, how does the brain (or a computer vision system) actually implement the algorithms to solve the computational problem? Hoffman seems to be waving away the implementation level description here, which means his mathematical formulation is unmoored and drifting.
Hoffman: That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.
But that's so vague. A system of six interacting elements can describe a huge number of phenomena if you don't have precise constraints on their behavior. Could his system describe the structure of consciousness? Sure, I guess. But does that mean that his system has captured any essential feature of consciousness? I'm not seeing anything I can hang my hat on here -- and the fact that his formulation leads to "consciousness all the way down" should suggest that maybe he hasn't quite got the right level of precision for describing consciousness. Hoffman invokes "conscious realism"; others in this thread have identified this with various established philosophical positions. Me, I'm a pragmatist. As far as I can tell, Hoffman's very general set of interacting elements is more or less what I might scribble down as a starting point for the sketch of a computational model for a neural system, so maybe it has some utility as an intellectual exercise in getting started. But does it help me make predictions? No, without very specific constraints that limit its generality, it could describe almost anything, so it predicts nothing.
Hoffman: The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.
No it certainly does not tell us that. Quantum mechanics is an objective and deterministic physical theory, it's just that the deterministic laws pertain to wave functions rather than to observables. If you and I measure the same distribution over multiple observations, we will get the same result. This idea that "quantum mechanics, therefore reality is totally subjective" needs to die yesterday.
Q: It doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling block for those trying to understand consciousness? Hoffman: I think it has been.
This will come as a surprise to the many, many people I know with physics degrees (including at least one former string theorist) who are professional neuroscientists.
Hoffman: Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness.
That's because it's not. Again, quantum physics isn't just, "woo, mysterious!" It makes predictions. When you actually run the numbers (or so I understand by reading the work of physicists who have done so), one of those predictions is that, surprise, it's really hard to maintain a coherent quantum state over a system as complex as even a decent sized molecule, let alone a whole cell or neural network. Quantum theory predicts brains should behave more or less classically. And as far as anyone has been able to tell, they do. Thermal stochasticity plays a much stronger role in explaining neural variability.
Hoffman: And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress.
Excuse me? If that were true, I'd have a much easier time writing the grant I'm working on -- I'd just pitch the same things they were working on in the 80s.
Hoffman: I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain!
Deepak Chopra, eat your heart out.
The thing is, at core there's an important and relevant point here. Our sensory perceptions don't provide veridical representations of reality. Philosophers have known this for a long time. So have psychologists. So has anyone who's seen that blue and black dress (or the gold and white one). You can measure the ways in which our senses fail, and they do so in predictable ways, often explainable by the biological mechanisms that were shaped by evolution to be "good enough" for survival (exactly as Hoffman is arguing) or by limitations in the algorithms those mechanisms implement. But the leap from "we do not have direct veridical access to an external reality" to "there is no external reality" is a philosophical argument, not a scientific or mathematical argument. All of the nonsense about quantum mechanics and simple mathematical models of consciousness is a distraction from the core truth, which while important, probably isn't all that surprising to most people.
Philosophers in the thread: please note that when I say Hoffman's argument is philosophical rather than scientific or mathematical, that is not meant to be a disparagement of philosophy. Some scientists are disparaging of philosophy's utility, but I am not one of them. My sense is that Hoffman's argument is philosophically weak as well as scientifically, but I am less equipped to evaluate that.
JauntyFedora: I don't mean to insult your uncle with any of this. His arguments in this article just hit a lot of pet peeves of mine.
Everyone else in the thread: sorry. I'm cranky after spending 12 hours today on the same single page of a grant application.
posted by biogeo at 10:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [14 favorites]
Hoffman mentions his time in the 80s at MIT's AI lab in the article. He would have been preceded there by David Marr, a great computational neuroscientist whose work came from the same intellectual well. But although Marr emphasized the importance of abstract mathematical descriptions and algorithmic solutions to problems (in vision, specifically), he also acknowledged the importance of the implementation level of description -- that is, how does the brain (or a computer vision system) actually implement the algorithms to solve the computational problem? Hoffman seems to be waving away the implementation level description here, which means his mathematical formulation is unmoored and drifting.
Hoffman: That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.
But that's so vague. A system of six interacting elements can describe a huge number of phenomena if you don't have precise constraints on their behavior. Could his system describe the structure of consciousness? Sure, I guess. But does that mean that his system has captured any essential feature of consciousness? I'm not seeing anything I can hang my hat on here -- and the fact that his formulation leads to "consciousness all the way down" should suggest that maybe he hasn't quite got the right level of precision for describing consciousness. Hoffman invokes "conscious realism"; others in this thread have identified this with various established philosophical positions. Me, I'm a pragmatist. As far as I can tell, Hoffman's very general set of interacting elements is more or less what I might scribble down as a starting point for the sketch of a computational model for a neural system, so maybe it has some utility as an intellectual exercise in getting started. But does it help me make predictions? No, without very specific constraints that limit its generality, it could describe almost anything, so it predicts nothing.
Hoffman: The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.
No it certainly does not tell us that. Quantum mechanics is an objective and deterministic physical theory, it's just that the deterministic laws pertain to wave functions rather than to observables. If you and I measure the same distribution over multiple observations, we will get the same result. This idea that "quantum mechanics, therefore reality is totally subjective" needs to die yesterday.
Q: It doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling block for those trying to understand consciousness? Hoffman: I think it has been.
This will come as a surprise to the many, many people I know with physics degrees (including at least one former string theorist) who are professional neuroscientists.
Hoffman: Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness.
That's because it's not. Again, quantum physics isn't just, "woo, mysterious!" It makes predictions. When you actually run the numbers (or so I understand by reading the work of physicists who have done so), one of those predictions is that, surprise, it's really hard to maintain a coherent quantum state over a system as complex as even a decent sized molecule, let alone a whole cell or neural network. Quantum theory predicts brains should behave more or less classically. And as far as anyone has been able to tell, they do. Thermal stochasticity plays a much stronger role in explaining neural variability.
Hoffman: And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress.
Excuse me? If that were true, I'd have a much easier time writing the grant I'm working on -- I'd just pitch the same things they were working on in the 80s.
Hoffman: I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain!
Deepak Chopra, eat your heart out.
The thing is, at core there's an important and relevant point here. Our sensory perceptions don't provide veridical representations of reality. Philosophers have known this for a long time. So have psychologists. So has anyone who's seen that blue and black dress (or the gold and white one). You can measure the ways in which our senses fail, and they do so in predictable ways, often explainable by the biological mechanisms that were shaped by evolution to be "good enough" for survival (exactly as Hoffman is arguing) or by limitations in the algorithms those mechanisms implement. But the leap from "we do not have direct veridical access to an external reality" to "there is no external reality" is a philosophical argument, not a scientific or mathematical argument. All of the nonsense about quantum mechanics and simple mathematical models of consciousness is a distraction from the core truth, which while important, probably isn't all that surprising to most people.
Philosophers in the thread: please note that when I say Hoffman's argument is philosophical rather than scientific or mathematical, that is not meant to be a disparagement of philosophy. Some scientists are disparaging of philosophy's utility, but I am not one of them. My sense is that Hoffman's argument is philosophically weak as well as scientifically, but I am less equipped to evaluate that.
JauntyFedora: I don't mean to insult your uncle with any of this. His arguments in this article just hit a lot of pet peeves of mine.
Everyone else in the thread: sorry. I'm cranky after spending 12 hours today on the same single page of a grant application.
posted by biogeo at 10:08 PM on April 25, 2016 [14 favorites]
I haven't read it yet, but am curious, but when I read "Evolutionary Game Theory" as the explanation for ANYTHING... My face certainly gives an expression of extreme doubt.
posted by symbioid at 10:12 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by symbioid at 10:12 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]
No it certainly does not tell us that. Quantum mechanics is an objective and deterministic physical theory, it's just that the deterministic laws pertain to wave functions rather than to observables. If you and I measure the same distribution over multiple observations, we will get the same result. This idea that "quantum mechanics, therefore reality is totally subjective" needs to die yesterday.
Except he equivalently agrees with your point, because in the same paragraph he also says this about macroscopic phenomena and subjectivity:
I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches.
So, that's consistent with guaranteeing shared results, with the critical assumption that you can have the "same" distribution. Rather, by "no shared physical objects", I was guessing that he meant it from a quantum information-theoretic sense, which seems to be more salient. And I think he's focusing on limits or bounds when he says "that's the best we can do": he's saying there's no absolute objectivity (being the prompt of the interviewer's question) nor relativism, and that what's going on is intersubjectivity i.e. emphasizing that our sense and experience of objectivity is socially constructed and/or interactive. I think he's alluding to these different disciplines, based on the diction and wording in that paragraph.
posted by polymodus at 11:47 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
Except he equivalently agrees with your point, because in the same paragraph he also says this about macroscopic phenomena and subjectivity:
I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches.
So, that's consistent with guaranteeing shared results, with the critical assumption that you can have the "same" distribution. Rather, by "no shared physical objects", I was guessing that he meant it from a quantum information-theoretic sense, which seems to be more salient. And I think he's focusing on limits or bounds when he says "that's the best we can do": he's saying there's no absolute objectivity (being the prompt of the interviewer's question) nor relativism, and that what's going on is intersubjectivity i.e. emphasizing that our sense and experience of objectivity is socially constructed and/or interactive. I think he's alluding to these different disciplines, based on the diction and wording in that paragraph.
posted by polymodus at 11:47 PM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
But that's so vague
Yes. I'd be interested to know how he thinks an experience space and an action space can be defined. What are the axes of experience space? What makes you think the domain of experience - if it even makes sense to talk about such a thing - can be exhausted by a regular linear ordering?
If we've evolved so that our senses give us a radically false view of the world, physics is radically unfounded. Yet we're told the problem is that we're not paying enough attention to physics.
Experience suggests people are not well served by short pieces like this and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt - he probably makes more sense given space than appears in this frustrating account.
posted by Segundus at 12:12 AM on April 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
Yes. I'd be interested to know how he thinks an experience space and an action space can be defined. What are the axes of experience space? What makes you think the domain of experience - if it even makes sense to talk about such a thing - can be exhausted by a regular linear ordering?
If we've evolved so that our senses give us a radically false view of the world, physics is radically unfounded. Yet we're told the problem is that we're not paying enough attention to physics.
Experience suggests people are not well served by short pieces like this and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt - he probably makes more sense given space than appears in this frustrating account.
posted by Segundus at 12:12 AM on April 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
Ain't much substance in the interview, maybe the reporter did not understand it. Anyone skimmed his actual research? Can you point us towards a short version of the real content?
In particular, there was no discussion of the classical limit, which one expects to play a role anytime you're making classical statements based upon quantum mechanics, but itself gets complicated.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:58 AM on April 26, 2016
In particular, there was no discussion of the classical limit, which one expects to play a role anytime you're making classical statements based upon quantum mechanics, but itself gets complicated.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:58 AM on April 26, 2016
There is a drive on toward accepting panpsychism, and incorporating it into contemporary science. Bernard Kastrup is a critic of this movement. He writes:
posted by No Robots at 8:09 AM on April 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
But here is where panpsychism raises its head as the greatest threat on the horizon: it provides an easy escape route for the materialist. It magically 'solves' the hard problem of consciousness simply by declaring consciousness to be either an irreducible property, or the intrinsic nature, of matter. This way, it maintains our present delusion that matter – either in substance (Interpretation 1) or in structure (Interpretation 2) – is the primary aspect of reality. It threatens to usurp from us the unique opportunity we have today to face and correct our delusional worldview. It threatens to deflate all momentum currently building up towards a more truthful ontology. If the interpretations of panpsychism discussed above end up sticking, we will be in for another century of madness. May this essay help raise the alarm against this danger.It is good that the mind/matter issue is under serious scrutiny. I won't bore folks with my own dogs in the fight (the curious can check out my profile).
posted by No Robots at 8:09 AM on April 26, 2016 [2 favorites]
"Threads like this on Metafilter always perplex me. I don't know if this guy is right or wrong, but it sure doesn't seem like he's just spitballing. His PhD is from MIT, he's got a pretty solid job, his publication and presentation history seems fairly solid. Maybe he is full of shit, but I feel like if he is likely his colleagues are calling him on it in ways more sophisticated than most Mefites can manage. I feel pretty confident, for instance, that other people know who Kant was and what he was on about. "
I don't know karate, but I do know an argument from authority.
The drive on Metafilter to act like we've all already asked and answered the hard questions is a strange one.
There's a bit of a mistaken assumption in the way you've formulated this. We haven't asked all the hard questions yet, but we've asked a great many of them for thousands of years, including whether there's an objective reality. Again, the attempt to ground subjective experience in mathematical form was pretty much Edmund Husserl's main jam, under the rubric of "phenomenology." But the way you've phrased it is that we think we know the right answers to a lot of these hard questions, when really it's that we know the wrong answers to a lot of these questions. We have had millennia of philosophers, both natural and abstract, wrestling with these questions, and many of them were very smart people, but came up with profoundly wrong answers that other smart people demonstrated pretty clearly couldn't actually work or be proven. And, should you doubt this, a brief trip to AskMe should convince you that the community is intimately cognizant of wrong answers to just about anything.
So when we have someone positing a really huge claim that's significantly similar to previous, wrong huge claims, pointing out that we might not know the right answer (almost certainly don't), but we know that the answer he is giving as gospel has a lot of previous critical work that either the reporter or the scientist is eliding, that doesn't require a degree from MIT. It requires a couple of undergrad classes, maybe, or some dedicated autodidacticism, and the person making the huge claims should be able to clear that fairly low bar.
If I said you had no hands because I couldn't see them, you wouldn't take my word for it even if I was Linus Pauling. And while there's been a general backlash on MetaFilter toward the impulse of skeptically interrogating the subjective experiences, this is one of those instances when the benefits of such an orientation are obvious.
posted by klangklangston at 9:20 AM on April 26, 2016 [3 favorites]
I don't know karate, but I do know an argument from authority.
The drive on Metafilter to act like we've all already asked and answered the hard questions is a strange one.
There's a bit of a mistaken assumption in the way you've formulated this. We haven't asked all the hard questions yet, but we've asked a great many of them for thousands of years, including whether there's an objective reality. Again, the attempt to ground subjective experience in mathematical form was pretty much Edmund Husserl's main jam, under the rubric of "phenomenology." But the way you've phrased it is that we think we know the right answers to a lot of these hard questions, when really it's that we know the wrong answers to a lot of these questions. We have had millennia of philosophers, both natural and abstract, wrestling with these questions, and many of them were very smart people, but came up with profoundly wrong answers that other smart people demonstrated pretty clearly couldn't actually work or be proven. And, should you doubt this, a brief trip to AskMe should convince you that the community is intimately cognizant of wrong answers to just about anything.
So when we have someone positing a really huge claim that's significantly similar to previous, wrong huge claims, pointing out that we might not know the right answer (almost certainly don't), but we know that the answer he is giving as gospel has a lot of previous critical work that either the reporter or the scientist is eliding, that doesn't require a degree from MIT. It requires a couple of undergrad classes, maybe, or some dedicated autodidacticism, and the person making the huge claims should be able to clear that fairly low bar.
If I said you had no hands because I couldn't see them, you wouldn't take my word for it even if I was Linus Pauling. And while there's been a general backlash on MetaFilter toward the impulse of skeptically interrogating the subjective experiences, this is one of those instances when the benefits of such an orientation are obvious.
posted by klangklangston at 9:20 AM on April 26, 2016 [3 favorites]
METAFILTER: the community is intimately cognizant of wrong answers to just about anything.
posted by philip-random at 10:37 AM on April 26, 2016
posted by philip-random at 10:37 AM on April 26, 2016
What quantum mechanics implies about external reality also depends on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, something which isn't at all settled. The article assumes an interpretation which includes wave function collapse, and we can argue with him over whether collapse implies what he thinks it implies. If we use an interpretation that doesn't include collapse, it's an entirely different argument.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:16 PM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:16 PM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm curious what edge cases like blind sight would do to these arguments. Not everyone does see "red"; perceptual experience at a certain level seems to be epiphenominal. That's one of the big mysteries in consciousness studies: Why do we have conscious experience at all when there are known examples of people functioning without some classes of them? These arguments don't seem to account for those examples.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:12 PM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by saulgoodman at 3:12 PM on April 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
Actually evolutionary game theory works quite well, symbioid. It's Just-so stories that suck. Your theory should actually "do something", not just say "let's not think about this anymore". It's fine otoh to say "lets look for answer this way" too, but maybe nobody will listen unless you actually do part of the work.
It appears Donald Hoffman has focused mainly on vision and illusion related questions, so maybe one should read the interview as "Your vision is easily fooled, largely due to how it evolved. One should expect similar mistakes across all aspects of human cognition."
I think that's a reasonable "researchers should think about this" type statement, but I'm left wondering about specific links between evolution and visual illusions. In particular, there should be cases where either Dawkins' concerns about fitness, ala "illusion blah helps you see snakes, remember berries, etc.", or else Gould's worries about physical limitations might seem more relevant, or even just something else our vision never got right because it didn't matter much.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:53 AM on April 27, 2016
It appears Donald Hoffman has focused mainly on vision and illusion related questions, so maybe one should read the interview as "Your vision is easily fooled, largely due to how it evolved. One should expect similar mistakes across all aspects of human cognition."
I think that's a reasonable "researchers should think about this" type statement, but I'm left wondering about specific links between evolution and visual illusions. In particular, there should be cases where either Dawkins' concerns about fitness, ala "illusion blah helps you see snakes, remember berries, etc.", or else Gould's worries about physical limitations might seem more relevant, or even just something else our vision never got right because it didn't matter much.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:53 AM on April 27, 2016
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posted by philip-random at 11:15 AM on April 25, 2016 [12 favorites]