In this episode we explore a User Interface Theory of reality. Since the invention of the computer virtual reality theories have been gaining in popularity, often to explain some difficulties around the hard problem of consciousness; but also to explain other non-local anomalies coming out of physics and psychology, like ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘out of body experiences’. 

As you will hear today the vast majority of cognitive scientists believe consciousness is an emergent phenomena from matter, and that virtual reality theories are science fiction or ‘Woowoo’ and new age. One of this podcasts jobs is to look at some of these Woowoo claims and separate the wheat from the chaff, so the open minded among us can find the threshold beyond which evidence based thinking, no matter how contrary to the consensus can be considered and separated from wishful thinking.

So who better than hugely respected cognitive scientist and User Interface theorist Don Hoffman to clarify all this.

Donald D Hoffman is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and colour, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. So he is perfectly placed to comment on how we interpret reality.

Hoffman is also the author of ‘The Case Against Reality’, the content of which we’ll be focusing on today; ‘Visual Intelligence’, and the co-author with Bruce Bennett and Chetan Prakash of ‘Observer Mechanics’.

What we discuss:

11:20 Seeing the world for survival VS for knowing reality as it truly is

13:30 Competing strategies to maximise ‘fitness’ in the evolutionary sense

21:30 The payoff functions that govern evolution do not contain information about the structure of the world

29:30 Space-time cannot be fundamental

37:45 A User-Interface network of conscious agents

41:30 A virtual reality computer analogy

53:30 User Interface theory VS Simulation theory

01:08:00 The notion of truth is deeper than the notion of proof and theory

01:17:30 Is nature written in the language of Maths?

01:27:00 Consciousness is like the living being, and maths is like the bones

01:44:00 Being and experiencing being may co-arise

01:48:00 Different analogies for different eras

References:

Donald Hoffman - ‘The case against reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes’

Nima Arkani-Hamed - ‘Space-time is dead’

Nima Arkani-Hamed - 'Reductionism is dead'

Local Realism is false

Noncontextual realism is false

Don Hoffman - Objects of Consciousness paper

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem