The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 17, 2021 23:38:20 GMT
I received this book for Christmas and found it a very entertaining read. I thought I'd share my thoughts on it here as it touches on a few points that have come up here from time to time.
Hoffman's book is subtitled "How evolution hid the truth from our eyes" and it takes a strong anti-realism stance - at least at first. Hoffman's argument is that natural selection would favour not animals that see the world as it actually is, but in a way that promotes fitness. An animal that sees in a way that promotes fitness will be more likely to survive than the animal that sees truth. He calls this the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem. He therefore proposes that what we see is not reality but a sort of user interface ("Interface Theory of Perception" (ITP)). When we drag an icon across the desktop of a computer, we are not literally dragging anything and Hoffman argues that when we see an apple, smell it, pick it up, bite into it with a crunch and taste the apple juice on our tongue, these are all just icons in our interface rather than anything to do with reality per se.
He gives evidence of how we are evolved primarily for fitness, the way we compute vision designed to protect us from predators and bring our attention to things that will aid our survival and peppers the books with dozens of examples of this.
So far so Kantian, but Hoffman argues we can go further than Kant: that we are not limited to saying the noumenal world is inaccessible to us. In the final chapter, Hoffman goes from an anti-realist to a "conscious realist" He rejects physicalism as a whole - it is based on spacetime yet Hoffman argues that we have no justification for spacetime beyond what our imperfect interface reveals and even that interface finds contradictions with spacetime at the quantum level. He believes therefore that a physicalist answer to the hard problem of consciousness is wrongheaded. Instead he proposes that basic reality is actually consciousness - that which allows us to experience the user interface in the first place. We can see more of the world by interacting with other conscious agents and although we cannot access their interfaces and inner experiences, we can use empathy to speculate on them and thereby expand our world. In this way conscious agents combine into more complex conscious agents, perhaps infinitely so into an infinite conscious agent or "God" for want of a better word.
I must admit, it was in this final chapter that Hoffman started to lose me. I think he had been making a great case for transcendental idealism, but his rejection of the physical and embrace of a more ontological idealism seemed to be leaps too far to me. He goes from saying we don't perceive the world as it is to saying there is no world beyond those perceptions. Now, to be fair, this may be because I couldn't fully grasp the implications of the quantum physics chapter. He does admit though that there are some physicists who are not willing to jettison the concept of spacetime and this would certainly hurt his argument.
Still, I think 90% of his argument is solid and whether the book is convincing or not, it's definitely a lively and entertaining read - especially considering the heavy subject matter.
4/5
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 18, 2021 0:16:22 GMT
Utter bullshit as the only animal he can interrogate about this fitness over reality is another human He gives examples of animals that seem to favour fitness over reality. But his argument is primarily a logical one rather than based on evidence: Seeing in such a way as to help you survive is more beneficial to survival and passing on your genes than seeing reality would be. If the two are in competition to pass on their genes, fitness then tends to beat truth. But yes, he himself would be attuned to fitness rather than truth so is he capable of making a true argument? And are the examples of evidence he produces a reflection of reality if we cannot perceive reality? It seems a bit of a paradox really - if we see things as they are then the evidence would seem to suggest we cannot do so. If we do not, how can we rely on evidence or logic to support the argument? |
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 18, 2021 0:50:42 GMT
An individual needs to know an attacking bear is real and not an ancestor come to visit in order to survive the attack. I think you misunderstand his argument. It's not that we mistake a bear for a shaman, it's that we perceive an icon of a bear and we know bears are dangerous and react accordingly. But we do not perceive what a bear actually IS, just the icon. Someone who is confronted by a threat but applies a harmless shaman icon to it is not attuned to fitness so your example wouldn't apply. |
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Post by permutojoe on Jan 18, 2021 13:46:11 GMT
Is this the guy who says our physical reality is 3D because that makes for the most effective error checking? He has some good ideas. And it's pretty clear our brains are geared to perceive fitness as opposed to any accurate depiction of reality.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jan 18, 2021 15:28:38 GMT
Bits of this are reminding me of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I find similar flaws with both of them. I received this book for Christmas and found it a very entertaining read. I thought I'd share my thoughts on it here as it touches on a few points that have come up here from time to time. Hoffman's book is subtitled "How evolution hid the truth from our eyes" and it takes a strong anti-realism stance - at least at first. Hoffman's argument is that natural selection would favour not animals that see the world as it actually is, but in a way that promotes fitness. An animal that sees in a way that promotes fitness will be more likely to survive than the animal that sees truth. He calls this the Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) Theorem. He therefore proposes that what we see is not reality but a sort of user interface ("Interface Theory of Perception" (ITP)). When we drag an icon across the desktop of a computer, we are not literally dragging anything and Hoffman argues that when we see an apple, smell it, pick it up, bite into it with a crunch and taste the apple juice on our tongue, these are all just icons in our interface rather than anything to do with reality per se. He gives evidence of how we are evolved primarily for fitness, the way we compute vision designed to protect us from predators and bring our attention to things that will aid our survival and peppers the books with dozens of examples of this. I think it's true enough that evolution tunes us for survival as opposed to truth, but there are several caveats to this. One is that it implies that truth has no use to survival. Rationally, this would seem to be false. If there is, indeed, a predator that can kill me that's chasing me, it would seem really useful for me to have a cognitive model that can at least recognize that truth. This doesn't mean that the model has to be 100% accurate, merely that some parts of it must be accurate. The challenge then becomes how do we separate the aspects of the model that are and aren't accurate. Second caveat is that it also assumes there's a "capital-T Truth" out there as opposed to something more akin to relative truths. What I mean by that is that it's very difficult to conceptualize truth separate from perspective. EG, we do not directly see the atomic/particle level despite having evidence that it exists; and if we existed on a level where we could, we would not see the macro level of how those particles/atoms aggregate. Is either level "truer" than the other, or are both merely true relative to certain perspectives? I seem to align with Sean Carroll on this in saying that macro-conceptions and perceptions of reality are no less-real or non-existent; it still makes sense to say that things like temperature and baseball exist despite not existing on any fundamental level. It also seems like something of a self-defeating argument, since if as you say he notes many examples of how evolution has promoted fitness over truth, this implies that we were actually able to learn the truth in order to recognize that. I think the fundamental way this happens is via empiricism and prediction, which is the same way we test rationality. The way we know about cognitive biases, which we deem to be reasoning that doesn't reliably lead to truth, is precisely by observing that such reasoning leads to inaccurate empirical predictions. It's fine to then say that even our observations aren't necessarily reliable or 100% truthful, which we also know to be true (eg, optical illusions), but we still have no way of knowing that beyond empiricism itself. So no matter what we have to fall back on that empirical standard. So far so Kantian, but Hoffman argues we can go further than Kant: that we are not limited to saying the noumenal world is inaccessible to us. In the final chapter, Hoffman goes from an anti-realist to a "conscious realist" He rejects physicalism as a whole - it is based on spacetime yet Hoffman argues that we have no justification for spacetime beyond what our imperfect interface reveals and even that interface finds contradictions with spacetime at the quantum level. He believes therefore that a physicalist answer to the hard problem of consciousness is wrongheaded. Instead he proposes that basic reality is actually consciousness - that which allows us to experience the user interface in the first place. We can see more of the world by interacting with other conscious agents and although we cannot access their interfaces and inner experiences, we can use empathy to speculate on them and thereby expand our world. In this way conscious agents combine into more complex conscious agents, perhaps infinitely so into an infinite conscious agent or "God" for want of a better word. This is the problem with non-physicists making use of physics in their philosophy (even though I recognize Hoffman is a cognitive scientist, not strictly a philosopher) is that they tend to not realize what parts of QM are scientific and which are philosophical. QM contradicting spacetime on the quantum level depends mostly on what interpretation of QM you're using. The most common/popular one does create this problem, but others do not, at least theoretically. It's true we can't quantize gravity, but that may be because we've been doing it the wrong way: rather than quantizing gravity we should be trying to see how QM can produce gravity (and, thus, spacetime). Either way, I think it's a pretty huge leap from "spacetime doesn't work on a quantum level" even if true to "basically reality is actually consciousness." Though I also don't have a huge problem with the hypothesis that there is a kind of proto-consciousness within fundamental matter/energy itself-- at least helps explain why it's "like" to "be" something like huge aggregates of matter rather than just P-Zombies--but it's still just a hypothesis requiring evidence, and I also don't see how it's fundamentally incompatible with physicalist/materialist explanation of consciousness either. I don't think anyone would doubt that the actual physical and material arrangement of brains is going to have a huge impact on our conscious experience, which is why people with brain damage report altered conscious experiences. Maybe Hoffman explains this in more detail in the book, but I suspect not as I've yet to hear anyone explain it satisfactorily, at least for me. Anyway, my $0.02 on the matter. |
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 18, 2021 17:38:28 GMT
Is this the guy who says our physical reality is 3D because that makes for the most effective error checking? Yep |
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 18, 2021 17:39:24 GMT
I think it's true enough that evolution tunes us for survival as opposed to truth, but there are several caveats to this. One is that it implies that truth has no use to survival. Rationally, this would seem to be false. If there is, indeed, a predator that can kill me that's chasing me, it would seem really useful for me to have a cognitive model that can at least recognize that truth. Yes, I don't think Hoffman would deny that, only that we perceive the predator as it really is other than that it is a threat. So I think that would mean he would have to concede there is a limited truth to fitness. Yes, his example he gives is advising a new player how to do well in Grand Theft Auto. You better understand how to interact with the icons of the game but neither of you sees the game as it really is- a bunch of machine code. You grasp the icons better than your newbie friend but that is not because you better see the truth. By analogy we can point out instances where insects seem to act in a way where they rely on icons of their own but they seem ineffectual to us. Not too sure how convincing this is though. However, the realist doesn't really win the argument here since he can only cast doubt on the results of the experiments by taking an anti-realist stance in the first place so either way anti-realism wins. Hoffman admits this - though seems to forget he has done so in his final chapter! You mean like panpsychism? Interestingly Hoffman rejects that on the basis that he thinks it implies dualism. I think though your stance here is assuming brains are physical rather than merely an icon that represents consciousness in others. For Hoffman, observations of a brain are all just part of the user interface of the observer and he believes there's no underlying reality to that. |
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Post by permutojoe on Jan 18, 2021 18:25:12 GMT
Bits of this are reminding me of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I find similar flaws with both of them. I think it's true enough that evolution tunes us for survival as opposed to truth, but there are several caveats to this. One is that it implies that truth has no use to survival. Rationally, this would seem to be false. If there is, indeed, a predator that can kill me that's chasing me, it would seem really useful for me to have a cognitive model that can at least recognize that truth. This doesn't mean that the model has to be 100% accurate, merely that some parts of it must be accurate. The challenge then becomes how do we separate the aspects of the model that are and aren't accurate. It would only imply that if he was presenting truth and fitness as mutually exclusive. Not only is he not doing that but I don't think it would make much sense if he did. The idea is that our brains are tuned to pick up on the "fitness" part of reality, which is a tiny tiny sliver of what's going on "out there". If otoh our brains were truly designed to understand a fuller (or god forbid a genuinely complete) picture of reality, it would require much more energy to make those calculations work, which would be prohibitive to our survival. For this reason it seems his argument is true in a prima facie way.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jan 18, 2021 18:35:23 GMT
I think it's true enough that evolution tunes us for survival as opposed to truth, but there are several caveats to this. One is that it implies that truth has no use to survival. Rationally, this would seem to be false. If there is, indeed, a predator that can kill me that's chasing me, it would seem really useful for me to have a cognitive model that can at least recognize that truth. Yes, I don't think Hoffman would deny that, only that we perceive the predator as it really is other than that it is a threat. So I think that would mean he would have to concede there is a limited truth to fitness. Yes, his example he gives is advising a new player how to do well in Grand Theft Auto. You better understand how to interact with the icons of the game but neither of you sees the game as it really is- a bunch of machine code. You grasp the icons better than your newbie friend but that is not because you better see the truth. By analogy we can point out instances where insects seem to act in a way where they rely on icons of their own but they seem ineffectual to us. Not too sure how convincing this is though. However, the realist doesn't really win the argument here since he can only cast doubt on the results of the experiments by taking an anti-realist stance in the first place so either way anti-realism wins. We're still at the issue though that to argue that we don't see the tiger/game as it is that there is a way both really are, and how do we come to know that? Like, it's fine to say that the game is just sequences of code on a fundamental level, but there's two points to be made about that: one is that we do, in fact, know it's just a sequence of code, and we know that for the same reason we that we see its iconic appearance: through empiricism. I'm just saying that we are capable of "knowing" it on both levels simultaneously, which goes back to my idea of relative truth. Second is the notion that the icon/appearance doesn't have a reality to it either, which I was talking about in my last post by mentioning concepts like temperature and baseball that also don't exist on a fundamental level. I think it's fine to understand that our macro concepts are not 1:1 accurate maps of reality as-it-is, but that doesn't mean they aren't representing things that exist in a meaningful way. You mean like panpsychism? Interestingly Hoffman rejects that on the basis that he thinks it implies dualism. I think we briefly talked about panpsychism a while back and TBH I've kinda forgotten what it was all about so I'm hesitant to say yes or no. Though I'd be interested in hearing how it differs from what you say Hoffman is describing. I guess what I'd say is that I'm open to the idea that there maybe something that it's like to be an atom or a particle, but I do not hold that whatever this being/likeness is is anything like our experience of consciousness, or if we're going to call it consciousness we have to be very careful in defining it. Perhaps it may be that consciousness is more category than object, less apple and more fruit. So if there is a consciousness to individual atoms/particles/whatever it's almost certainly completely different from ours, even though it's still able to aggregate into ours. A brain may just be a very particular iteration of consciousness that we call mind. I think though your stance here is assuming brains are physical rather than merely an icon that represents consciousness in others. For Hoffman, observations of a brain are all just part of the user interface of the observer and he believes there's no underlying reality to that. Now I'm more confused... so let's say I slice someone's head open and am staring at the gray mass that we call a brain. Does my perception of that brain have any correspondence to any object in reality? Further, if that person is capable of describing their states of consciousness, and I stick my finger in their brain and start messing with it, and they start reporting changes in conscious experience, how does he explain this correlation between brain-states and conscious/mind-states? I'm not sure I understand the "icon that represents consciousness in others" since no matter how much I stare at a brain I don't see how it's a representation of anyone's consciousness since I have no direct access to the latter.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jan 18, 2021 18:39:05 GMT
Bits of this are reminding me of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I find similar flaws with both of them. I think it's true enough that evolution tunes us for survival as opposed to truth, but there are several caveats to this. One is that it implies that truth has no use to survival. Rationally, this would seem to be false. If there is, indeed, a predator that can kill me that's chasing me, it would seem really useful for me to have a cognitive model that can at least recognize that truth. This doesn't mean that the model has to be 100% accurate, merely that some parts of it must be accurate. The challenge then becomes how do we separate the aspects of the model that are and aren't accurate. It would only imply that if he was presenting truth and fitness as mutually exclusive. Not only is he not doing that but I don't think it would make much sense if he did. The idea is that our brains are tuned to pick up on the "fitness" part of reality, which is a tiny tiny sliver of what's going on "out there". If otoh our brains were truly designed to understand a fuller (or god forbid a genuinely complete) picture of reality, it would require much more energy to make those calculations work, which would be prohibitive to our survival. For this reason it seems his argument is true in a prima facie way. I don't disagree with this, but what I said was part of a larger point that if we do recognize there is some survival utility to truth then the challenge becomes about figuring out how to distinguish the truth from the useful illusions, and to even propose that we have some access to truth, including the truth that some perceptions are useful illusions, also implies that we have a means of doing that, even if imperfectly.
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 18, 2021 20:00:26 GMT
Second is the notion that the icon/appearance doesn't have a reality to it either Actually, he ultimately argues that the user interface is essentially reality so he seems to agree with you here. I suppose for Kant, reality had both a phenomenal and a noumenal aspect but the noumenal was a deeper reality, but it was also essentially unknowable beyond speculation and assumption. Hoffman goes along with this, but then essentially ditches the noumenal - there is no deeper reality but there is still a reality of sorts in the phenomenal. A panpsychist believe atoms have a consciousness of sorts. Hoffman believes atoms don't exist beyond the user interface of consciousness. For Hoffman, no. At least there is no brain that exists beyond your perception of it. I think (and maybe I have it wrong here so don't judge Hoffman too much on what I say here) that your perception of interfering with their mind and their perception of you interfering with their mind combine to generate a change in their perceptions. But it's all mental, there is no link between matter and mind, matter is a representation created by mind of interactions between different consciousnesses. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jan 18, 2021 20:16:04 GMT
Try to respond in more depth tomorrow, but from your latest post it seems like Hoffman is proposing some kind of solipsism, which is odd if his initial argument was about the difference between truth and its appearance. Seems a pretty radical plot-twist to go from "the appearance of truth is a useful fiction" to "the appearance of truth IS truth!"
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 18, 2021 20:26:27 GMT
Try to respond in more depth tomorrow, but from your latest post it seems like Hoffman is proposing some kind of solipsism No, he believes there are multiple minds that interact to shape reality. |
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Post by goz on Jan 19, 2021 0:27:20 GMT
I am skeptical of the anthropomorphism that appears inherent in this.
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 19, 2021 1:13:16 GMT
I am skeptical of the anthropomorphism that appears inherent in this. Could you elaborate on this? |
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Post by goz on Jan 19, 2021 2:27:28 GMT
I am skeptical of the anthropomorphism that appears inherent in this. Could you elaborate on this? Sure. Reading this post, it referred to evolution in terms of cognition. Evolution in essence came from the very lowest on the scale of cognition, to the very highest, human. Therefore to implicate cognition of those lower on the human scale to me is problematic. I haven't given this matter much thought, just what occurred to me when I read you OP. It also raised the problem of 'directional evolution'.
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Post by moviemouth on Jan 19, 2021 6:44:21 GMT
I am not even going to pretend I know what this guy is talking about.
Is this something like "what is" vs. our perception of "what is"?
When stuff gets this deep it more or less starts to lose me.
It seems to me that evolution would favor whatever keeps a species surviving and that truth in the way he is describing it doesn't play a huge part in that.
Maybe someone can dumb it down for me.
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Post by moviemouth on Jan 19, 2021 7:08:40 GMT
I think you misunderstand his argument. It's not that we mistake a bear for a shaman, it's that we perceive an icon of a bear and we know bears are dangerous and react accordingly. But we do not perceive what a bear actually IS, just the icon.
Someone who is confronted by a threat but applies a harmless shaman icon to it is not attuned to fitness so your example wouldn't apply. His idea about “icons” sounds like Peirce’s theory of signs. And I think even Platonism, and probably works as a theory of communication. But his supposition that this facilitates “survival of fittest” is the problem. What does that even mean? What is he saying a bear actually is?
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 19, 2021 9:08:59 GMT
I am not even going to pretend I know what this guy is talking about. Is this something like "what is" vs. our perception of "what is"? When stuff gets this deep it more or less starts to lose me. It seems to me that evolution would favor whatever keeps a species surviving and that truth in the way he is describing it doesn't play a huge part in that. Maybe someone can dumb it down for me. Seems like you've grasped it pretty well. |
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The Lost One
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Post by The Lost One on Jan 19, 2021 9:23:29 GMT
What does that even mean? What is he saying a bear actually is? For most of the book, he suggests we don't know. Our senses tell us that a bear is some combination of bone, blood, sinew and fur, but since he argues our senses do not accurately depict reality, we can't know that's what a bear really is. In the final chapter, he goes quite a bit further and suggests reality is generated by multiple consciousnesses interacting with one another. A bear is a consciousness of its own, albeit likely of a different and perhaps more limited sort than human consciousness. So a bear as it appears is a combination of what we as a species have evolved to perceive it as and what the bear exhibits itself as. To give an example of what I think Hoffman is getting at, bears are somehow able to harm us and this interaction has led to our consciousness perceiving them as having big claws and teeth, and strong muscles. But Hoffman argues they do not have these attributes beyond our perceiving of them. |
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