The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables

Hello.

(In case you missed my welcome post, it’s here.)

Today I want to write a little about Prof. Donald Hoffman and his book The Case Against Reality.

Hoffman is an accomplished researcher who worked in various esteemed (one could say mainstream) academic institutions. I’m mentioning that because some of his ideas are quite esoteric, so it’s important to acknowledge he “grew up” in the heart of academia’s mainstream. Not your garden variety weirdo (when I write “weirdo”, I mean it with the utmost respect and fondness – I’m a weirdo).

Decades ago, Hoffman started out in the research of human visual perception. Later it expanded into perception in general, and eventually he came up with an entire theory about the nature of reality and how we experience it. His book, The Case Against Reality, is an overview of that journey, and it lays out the theory in general terms; I highly recommend it. Some of the ideas presented are not completely new (for example, some of it resonates with Kant), and there are other – similar to an extent – theories around. But for me it was a first, very refreshing encounter with that world of thought.

I know that some talks with Hoffman are available in YouTube etc. It might be tempting to watch them instead of reading the book (as much as a 3-hour talk can be tempting); however, I don’t recommend doing that. The talks I watched are good for watching AFTER reading the book, which does a very good job laying down the concepts, nice, slow and orderly. Hoffman’s ideas are big and might need taking in slowly.

So, what is it all about? In a nutshell, Hoffman is challenging the notion that reality exists in time and space (or Einstein’s Spacetime), that it consists of invisible matter particles and energy. He challenges the notion that consciousness arises from structures of essentially unconscious matter, or from data structures residing in / running on such structures.

Alternatively, Hoffman suggests that consciousness is primal; that the indivisible (a-tom) building blocks of reality are what he refers to as Conscious Agents (which I’ll short here as CA). CA are a-material and exist in no space or time (because space and time don’t really exist). Everything we experience (thoughts and sensations) is the activity of those CA, not a result of objective, external structures that we interact with. What we perceive as objective, external structures, are actually internally-fabricated, shorthand representations of a very large (infinite?) number of interactions between the CA that we are, and that everything else is. Hoffman refers to those representations as “an interface” to reality. I know it might sound confusing at first, but I intend to come back to all of it, and maybe clarify it (or at least my take on it) a little, through examples and more specific elaborations. Again, reading Hoffman’s book is a good way to get started.

At this point I’d like to just briefly mention that Hoffman and his team have developed a mathematical formalization of the CA concept (it is presented, to an extent, in the book). I do not know too much about it, nor pretend to have a full grasp of the mathematics within, because I’m not a mathematician. However, it is very appealing to me, because I perceive mathematics as an extreme level of abstraction for everything around us. Some of my follow up thoughts around Hoffman’s theory are phrased in mathematical / probabilistic / computer science terms. But I’ll get to that in later posts.

Before I wrap up today’s post I’d like to quote something I read today, from another author I appreciate a lot (and I intend to write about in this blog) – Dr. James Hollis, which touches on something similar. It was very interesting for me to come across it, because as far as I know Hollis, who is a practicing psychoanalyst, has nothing to do with the kind of abstract reality Hoffman is suggesting.

“…Kant …made modern psychology necessary by discerning that we never know reality directly; we only know our internal experience of it. He was not saying that external reality does not exist; rather, that we can only know it subjectively. Our psyche takes the raw chaos of stimuli and organizes it into coherence according to categories of time, number, spatiality, and other elements of our minds. The chair upon you sit is a swirling assemblage of energy and open spaces that presents as a state we call matter, even as it is also constantly in motion and transformation. It is difficult for the ego to imagine that it is not sitting on something permanent, fixed, but rather a passing energy congruence, as quantum physics has known for a century…”
[Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, 2005]

This is a nice illustration; however, quantum physics (and perhaps Hollis, and maybe Kant too), does not go all the way as to dismiss a physical origin for our experience. Hoffman, though, does make that leap.

More about it in upcoming posts. I hope you found this topic worthy of your attention.

Peace to all.