The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables

My guess is that who you are as a consciousness utterly transcends any description that we can give, including “Hoffman’s Theory of Conscious Agents” … and will transcend everything we have, even if we work on this for billions of years. Whatever we are, whatever YOU are, is so amazing, and so immense, and so deep, that trillions of years of the best science, with everybody being an Einstein working on it, will get us zero percent of the way to understanding how complex you are.

Again, this is just a quote from Hoffman that I felt would be nice to open the post with. I like the humility. It resonates well with things I wrote here (in 2. No more need to understand everything) before I ever listened to the interview. Call it an echo chamber, if you like…

4. Taking Off the Headset

The interview concluded with a Q&A session, where Hoffman was presented with questions the audience sent earlier, as he was speaking. in that section, Hoffman was asked if he ever had a conscious out-of-body experience, that might be a “taking off the headset moment”. To that Hoffman replied a very clear “no”, though he added that his model “does predict that there could be all sorts of experiences that are mind-blowing, that we haven’t had yet.“

But I wonder… could that be what’s happening every time we dream? In some loose way, we usually experience space and time in our dreams; but the strict laws of physics don’t necessarily apply in our dreams… So, maybe we still communicate with the One (our conscious “environment”) through the “RIST converter“, but with the converter in a different “mode”?… Maybe it can be seen as a partial taking off of the headset; or a taking off of a part of the headset… I think you understand what I mean. If I am onto something here, I’m sure Hoffman had experienced it more than once…

5. What is the Goal?

… or, as Hoffman echoed another question: Why? Why bother?

Hoffman seems to address the cardinal “why” question from the One‘s perspective. Rather than describing us as individuals (for example, individual CCA) who each wear/use a headset, he speaks in this answer about that ultimate “infinite consciousness” that wears many different sets of “human headsets” (as he termed it).

Maybe he has some profound insight in this context, far ahead of anything I speculated here. My guess though, is that being the dedicated and seasoned scientist that he is, he focuses more on formal mathematics and more precise descriptions of the CA space, and less on free-form philosophical ideas (like I’ve been doing here); and as a result, he sounds a little less watertight on this subject. An alternative interpretation to his reply is that each one of us (who wears a “human headset”) is an infinite consciousness; though I find it difficult to reconcile that interpretation with the concept of the One. In my guess, the One is all there is; it’s the only infinite entity; and each of us is a (finite) “region” or a subset in it (perhaps with our “headsets” integrated within our individual regions, as I discussed in part 2).

In a way, you could say that in my model the One is indeed “having many human experiences” (because we are all parts of it); however, I prefer thinking about the One as just BEING – not doing anything, not experiencing anything, not intending anything. Just encompassing. Maybe this is a disagreement between my thinking and Hoffman’s, but it’s also possible I simply misunderstood him, or he just didn’t have the time to go into the necessary detail of his thinking, which might have clarified the issue.

Either way, the reply Hoffman offered for the “why” question, in line with the above approach, was that the One (“the infinite”, “the transcendent”, in Hoffman’s words) gets to know itself, and even to enjoy itself – by taking different perspectives (including non-human perspectives, for example animals’). An infinite number of perspectives.

(I liked his phrasing of that approach as “That friend of yours, is just you with a different headset on… you are looking at yourself.“)

The above is quite an appealing approach. Actually, when I first asked myself the “why” question (years ago, right after I finished reading The Case Against Reality), I came up with a similar answer. Not long ago, after putting more thought into the graphical representations I later presented here, and concluding that it’s all about complexity, I phrased my answer: “Complexity is its own reward”. What I meant by that is that that universe would evolve in the direction of more complexity because every step it takes in that direction (increased complexity) presents it with “more options” and “more interest”; while decreased complexity would deprive options / interest (and maybe enjoyment).

However, I wasn’t 100% happy with that idea, and a little later I came up with a different thinking, inspired by (but not identical to) Darwinian Evolution – I mentioned that idea earlier. I still intend to write a full post about it, but not today.

That concludes my current comments on the interview. There are additional worthwhile points in it, but I don’t feel a compulsion to cover all of it… I’m sure that some of the topics I covered (or didn’t cover) in this set will come up in future posts; either way, I recommend watching the full interview for yourself, if you have a way of doing so, and I encourage you to challenge anything I wrote here, or point out other interesting perspectives. Please feel welcome to comment below.

Peace to all.