Prof Hoffman #4 - Sensory - Playing Basketball In Zero-Gravity

Fitness Beats Truth, you’ll hear it like a drum beat throughout Hoffman’s Case Against Reality. 

(last edit 11:15 am Oct 15, 2020)

In order to help it go down Hoffman dispenses with some inconvenient truths, such as: light must first bounce off an object before our eye’s, then mind* can perceive it.  Seems like solid proof that stuff exists before we perceive it!   (* after appropriate processing)

Then Hoffman conflates ‘perceiving’ with ‘the perceived’ and starts down a troubling path.  

It’s no secret that our visual system edits and composes the moving images our mind’s eye perceives.  Nothing reality shattering about it.  Or is there?

Hoffman tells us something more important is going on.  That there’s a hidden reality inside of the reality we experience every day.  Something humanity really needs to tap into before we can feel whole.

Something like what?  Like inside atoms?  Is that justified?  If so?  So what? 

Or, might it simply be escapism that’s driving this Case Against Reality?

I will do my best to honestly and fairly represent Hoffman’s words and ideas.  I have exchanged some emails with Professor Hoffman, and I’ll share a couple quotes when appropriate.  My point is that Professor Hoffman is aware of my project and that I’m ready to listen to anything he has to share with me.

Review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality, 

ch 4, Sensory - Fitness Beats Truth      

DH:  “Does natural selection favor true perceptions?”   (¶2)

For all of Hoffman’s use of “true” he never examines it critically, so his readers are left to their own devices.  For most of us “truth” is some sort of binary concept, it is true or isn’t it true.  That’s not how life in our natural world operates.

Hmmm, binary … well okay, the devil is in the details.  We do need to get beyond a few exceptions: is it alive or is it dead?

DH:  “Is it possible that we did not evolve to see truly - that our perceptions of space, time and objects do not reveal reality as it is? … Can the theory of evolution transform this stale philosophical chestnut into a crisp scientific claim?   (¶2)

DH:  “… This rejoinder misses a point of logic and a matter of fact.  

First logic: if we can’t test the claim that a peach does not exist when no one looks, then we can’t test the opposite and widely held claim that it does exist.  

Both claims posit what happens when no one observes.   (¶4)  

Why?  How does Hoffman figure that?  

Because we’re composing the image in our minds, he claims the object must not exist?  

What’s logical about that?  

Hoffman never does explain, we’re expected to take his word for it.

Prof Hoffman #3 - (objective) Reality - Playing Basketball In Zero-Gravity - Capers of the Unseen Sun.

 I appreciate that many people including scientists use the term “objective” to mean something actually existing independent of the mind - still, if you think about it, bet you’ll admit that “objective,” or lack thereof, actually exists within our minds - as opposed to Physical Reality which simply IS.

DH:  “If we construct everything we see, and if we see neurons, then we construct neurons.  But what we construct doesn’t exist until we construct it.  So neurons don’t exist until we construct them.”   (¶7)

Cc:  In order to see an object light needs to first bounce off that object, then travel to one’s eyes, then be processed more or less the way Hoffman described, only then can it be perceived by one’s mind.

The light beams bouncing off that object wouldn’t be entering our eye’s to begin with, if that object didn’t already exist.                             Or ?   

Furthermore, we don't construct everything we see!  We construct an impression of what we see.                                                      

A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality, chapter 3, 

(Objective) Reality, Capers of the Unseen Sun.

I define “Objective Reality” as a product of our minds.

For me "Physical Reality” indicates the actual atoms, molecules and laws they’ve followed in order to create this Universe and Earth we are embedded within.  

The reality that simply is!  

To begin this chapter Hoffman shares this consensus view:

Palmer:  “Evolutionarily speaking , usual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate.  By and large what you see is what you get.  When this is true, we have what is called veridical perception… perception that is consistent with the actual state of affairs in the environment.  This is almost always the case with vision.”

Stephen Palmer, vision science

Then Hoffman recalls his questioning correspondence with Francis Crick, leading member of the Helmholtz Club, co-discoverer of DNA, and author of The Astounding Hypothesis.  

Prof Hoffman #2 - Beauty - Playing Basketball In Zero-Gravity - Sirens of the Gene

 For his warmup Hoffman discusses visual cues and their manipulation, one of his specialities.  The problem is that he applies his lessons of vision and perception to everything, like reality and evolution.  Thing is, survival and evolution is about a great deal more than vision.

A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality, 

chapter 2, Beauty - Sirens of the Gene

If you have Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality, great, because I’m definitely cherry picking key paragraphs and sentences, which leaves out some nuances and fascinating trivia.  If you don’t, I encourage you to get a copy to follow along and do your own examination of his rhetorical fancy dancing, because there’s plenty I’ve left on the cutting room floor.  

There’s no denying Hoffman tells a wonderful story and shares many curious, interesting and accurate facts, it’s his conclusions that get dodgy.  This study is about focusing on the tricks of the trade.  

Who’s trade? Hoffman's marketing insights and the science contrarian’s trick of confusing rather than clarifying.

I appreciate Hoffman may take umbrage at that since he spends a lot of time talking about the need for science to take over for the failed philosophical approach, if we're to tackle the perception-reality ‘problem.’  

He presents his formulas as real science, and they may be, mathematically speaking, but that is not natural science.  Nor is it bound by the constraints of physical reality.  (But than, Hoffman does reject physical reality as we know it.)

It’s an exercise of the mind and is vulnerable to the same pitfalls of human self-serving vanity as all other human endeavors, because it’s not constrained by physical reality the way the natural sciences are.  In fact, I believe calling it a “problem” to begin with is a bit contrived and has more to do with marketing and career creation than any actual “problem” we must resolve.

I’m going to be skipping a bunch of this chapter because it focuses on how visual cues can mislead the receiver of those signals.  The topic has been studied a long time now and there’s nothing reality shattering about what’s happening and why it occurs.  Interesting, but still, a distraction from Hoffman’s main supposition.

DH:  “Perhaps the universe itself is a massive social network of conscious agents that experience, decide and act.  If so, consciousness does not arise from matter and spacetime: …  

Instead, matter and spacetime arise from consciousness - as a perceptual interface” (¶26 of Preface)

Prof Hoffman #1 - Mystery - Playing Basketball In Zero-Gravity - The scalpel that split consciousness

 Visualizing the physical source of consciousness.

 

Human Connectome Project - Harvard

A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality, 

Chapter 1, Mystery - The scalpel that split consciousness

Hoffman begins by telling us about Joseph Bogen and Philip Vogel who in 1962 pioneered “corpus callosotomy” a procedure that sliced through the brain’s corpus callosum, which runs between the two hemispheres of the brain.  It’s done to short circuit the neural feedback loop that triggers extreme epileptic fits.

Then onto the Helmholtz Club, a small group of neurosurgeons, cognitive scientists, and philosophers that met to,

DH:  “explore how advances in neuroscience might spawn a scientific theory of consciousness.”   (¶7)

DH:  “The mystery of consciousness, which was the focus of the Helmholtz Club … is quite simply the mystery of who we are.  Your body, like other objects, has physical attributes such as position, mass, and velocity… (just like a rock)”   (¶7)

DH:  “Like a rock, we have bona fide physical properties.  But, unlike a rock, we have conscious experiences and propositional attitudes.  Are these also physical.  If so, it’s not obvious”   (¶10) 

DH:  “So, what kind of creature are you?  How is your body related to your conscious experiences and propositional attitudes?  How is your experience of a chai latte related to activities in the brain?  Are you just a biochemical machine?   (¶11)

“Just a biological machine”?  What does that mean?  What’s Hoffman trying to imply?  What’s Hoffman expecting?  

What’s wrong with inhabiting the most amazing biological creature that the pageant of Evolution has ever produced?

Prof Donald Hoffman Playing Basketball In Zero-Gravity - the prelude.

An unauthorized critical review.

If Donald Hoffman had categorized his book “The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid The Truth From Our Eyes” as new age literature, metaphysical intellectual entertainment, I’d have no complaints.  It’s his insistence on passing it off as a serious scientific effort that begs a frank detailed response, (even if I’m only a thoughtful spectator and no academic myself.) 

Science is a set of rules and an attitude for observing and striving to understand our physical world, it’s about atoms and molecules, all they create, including biology and our planet’s biosphere, along with the rules all of it follows.  Science strives for objectivity, it demands facts and rejects ego driven conclusions.

All of us view the world through our own unique perspective, which of course is the product of genes, upbringing, environment, cumulative learning and experiences that produce inevitable biases in how we perceive the same bits of information.  Admittedly, there’s an ocean of difference between the professor and myself.

Donald David Hoffman (12/29/55) is a cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a Professor in the Dept of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Dept of Philosophy, the Dept of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.

Hoffman 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 color, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. (wiki)

Me, I’m on the outside looking in on academia.  Born the same year as Hoffman, mine was a skilled working-man’s life with a passion for learning about Earth’s story through science, personal observation, thinking, reading quality popular publications and books, visiting libraries, museums, then the internet and always pondering the fundamental questions, fitting together pieces of the puzzle, and being astounded at all science was learning and sharing.  

In particular, I’ve been impressed that even with all the unexpected surprises over these decades, there remains an underlying harmony and consistency that’s amazing.  Our understanding has been like an image coming into better focus as more pixels of information are gathered.  Seems like proof that we’ve developed a reasonably accurate understanding, even if some mysteries and surprises remain.  We shouldn’t glibly turn our backs on all we've learned.  

To hear someone of Hoffman’s stature simply dismiss it all and replace our day to day reality with imagined icons replacing material stuff; reduce Evolution to a computer interface & game theory analogies; topped off with “conscious agents” zinging around like so many photons.  It’s mystifying, disconcerting, crazy-making, and a hell of challenge for me to get to work on enunciating a more down to Earth perspective on the Evolution of perceiving the reality we are embedded within.

Hoffman begins his book with a quote from a founding father of science,

I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on . . . 

reside in consciousness.  Hence if the living

creature were removed, all these qualities

would be wiped away and annihilated. 

In fairness, that was penned a life time before people started understanding the light spectrum, hundreds of years before we started understanding biochemistry and learning about the molecular structures that make up odors and tastes.  

Evolution is not a process. Evolution is a result.

 Looking at it from a slightly different perspective:

Evolution is Time driving Matter forward.

From the cosmic perspective of some 14 billions years,

Evolution has no intent, it has matter, time, motion, outcomes.

An under appreciated analogy for “Evolution,” is to recognize that “Evolution” is a result of time’s relentless forward momentum.

Time is motion.

The sum total of human knowledge shows us with overwhelming consilience that our “Reality” started at what’s been coined the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, when massive pure energy was released to create our Universe.

It’s time/motion that pushed this primal energy to coalesce into bundles such as quarks, and it’s time that drove the universe to expand and cool.  It’s time/motion that saw atoms and molecules form.

Time/motion/gravity is what brought vast clouds of atomic, molecular dust together into swirling nurseries for stars to be formed, only to run through their life cycles.  Some dying stars exploded and producing all the elements heavier than iron.  Time/motion/gravity is what sweeps together those remnants into new stars and planets.

Here in our corner of the Universe, conditions were promising for something special to happen and it did.  It’s time/motion/gravity with sunshine and radioactivity that created Earth’s geological turmoil which is the source of life

Time married Earth’s geology with biology and it has driven all the changes since.  One second, minute, day, season at a time.  Resulting in folds within folds of cumulative harmonic complexity flowing down the cascade of time.

Scientism: On getting lost within the Mindscape.

It’s an odd sensation, periodically rediscovering how some things that I find self-evident, seem absolutely foreign (if not invisible) to most others.  When I embraced the term “Mindscape” a couple years back, I thought I did a good job of capturing a metaphor for those universes of thoughts that we possess just beyond our physical brain with its neurons, synapses and electro-chemical cascades.  The seat of ego, emotions, thought, reflection, god seeking, knowledge seeking, love seeking, success thirsting, the sense of self, our life’s spirit, our soul, whatever labels you want to tag onto it.  

The world flowing through our physical senses and then getting sorted through our genetic and environmental filters before being reflected against the metaphorical retina of our brain and infusing through our body.  The thing that thinks it’s telling our body what to do, when most the time it’s the other way around.  The thing that believes it’s in control of us, or out of control, as the case may be.  The thing that is us, but has yet to be found by scientist or philosopher.  

I’ve discovered that suggesting we should categorize it differently than the stuff of atoms and the laws of physics invites the wildest mental gymnastics intent on drawing the discussion away from the essence of acknowledging the ephemeral nature of our human mind, that thing that animates our bodies during our short dance across physical reality’s stage, or more specifically, Earth - and then disappears when we die.

"Mindscape" it's a psychological thing.

I need to correct some unfortunate misunderstanding regarding my use of the term "Mindscape" and why it matters.  This is a continuation of the discussion at Center for Inquiry's forum and I appreciate the opportunity to reconsider and restate something that's important to me.

Lausten:  August 4, 2020 at 4:19 pm - at CFI

Not too clear to me either Tim. I see “opposed to” and take it as something separate from, something “not”. 

I agree there is a lot we don’t know, and you could say that is conceptual or theoretical, or I would say that, but anyway, but I don’t really draw a line at “human desires”. 

Human desires arise from the physical, so there is no separation. 

It’s almost like CC thinks you are making a case that human thoughts cause things to occur in the physical world. I think you would say that but only in the most circular way, that is, thoughts are created by physical particles interacting, and physical particles act on each other.

Or am I getting too far out there?

=======================================

Okay please give me the benefit of the doubt, lets backtrack on all this and start at home base again.

Forget about the organism of our brain and our little gray cells and all the marvelous things they do that (together with the environment it’s dealing with) produces the mind, thought, consciousness, sentience, memory, mindscape. 

First step,

It’s about me and the way I look at the world.  There’s my body and then there’s that “sense of self” that is constantly thinking and talking, ‘me’ – where does it reside?  All my learning happens through it, heck seems like all I am radiates out from there.  And all the world must enter through my senses and get translated into something my “sense of self” can do something with.

My “sense of self” (mindscape) reinhabits my body when I wake in the morning.  I then through my body proceed to deal with all the environmental requirements of my day to days.  Where do I get my sense of self from?  First I think of my sight that takes in the world and my other senses smell, taste, sound, touch filtering the world that arrives in my consciousness.