{"id":2988,"date":"2022-11-07T03:54:11","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T07:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2988"},"modified":"2022-11-07T03:54:11","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T07:54:11","slug":"thoughts-on-reality-whatever-that-really-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2988","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on reality, whatever that really is"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently finished reading\u00a0<em>The Case Against Reality<\/em> by Donald Hoffman.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/caseagainstreality-199x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"199\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-2990\" srcset=\"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/caseagainstreality-199x300.jpg 199w, https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/caseagainstreality.jpg 331w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a short book, only 200 pages, but still felt too long. Too much filler and repetition. You&#8217;re perhaps better off watching an interview with the author on YouTube.<\/p>\n<p>The main premise is simple: we don&#8217;t see reality as it truly is, but rather as it relates to our evolutionary fitness.<\/p>\n<p>Some obvious examples of our limited perceptions include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We only see certain wavelengths of light; we cannot see infrared or ultraviolet.<\/li>\n<li>We only hear a certain range of frequencies of sound.<\/li>\n<li>Our sense of smell is very limited, and often comes with instinctual judgments of pleasantness or disgust.<\/li>\n<li>We cannot sense oxygen in our lungs; rather, we can only feel the effects of having too little.<\/li>\n<li>We experience being surrounded by solid things, yet atoms consist of mostly empty space.<\/li>\n<li>Lots of optical illusions clearly trick our visual perceptions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This means that everything we perceive in the physical world is actually a high-level abstraction of some unperceived foundational reality. A book, for example, only exists in our minds as a concept, a collection of perceptions and sensory experiences. These perceptions correspond to things in physical reality (that we can&#8217;t perceive directly), but they don&#8217;t actually <em>exist<\/em> in physical reality.<\/p>\n<p>The book&#8217;s author compares the mind-reality relationship to icons on a computer. Using a computer, you manipulate highly abstracted icons, imagining that files have physical spaces and locations. (The word &#8220;file&#8221; itself is an abstraction to aid the metaphor.) Inside the computer, everything is just 1&#8217;s and 0&#8217;s passing through transistors. But it would be completely inefficient to try and derive meaning from those long binary strings, so we work with high-level abstractions, colored pixels on a screen that correspond to those 1&#8217;s and 0&#8217;s. &#8220;Files&#8221; don&#8217;t even really exist in memory; computer memory is just a big collections of ordered 1&#8217;s and 0&#8217;s. Files don&#8217;t exist until some program (like an operating system) makes some determination of how to separate the bits into separate groups, which is ultimately decided by a human mind, which is where all the meanings of those 1&#8217;s and 0&#8217;s are derived from in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>OK, that&#8217;s all well and good, but so what?<\/p>\n<p>Well&#8230; I don&#8217;t know. The book doesn&#8217;t really go into why understanding this might be important. Perhaps it may help you to appreciate the possibilities of other perspectives, I guess? Help you not take your perceptions for granted, or take for granted the meanings you&#8217;re imbuing things with yourself? Or appreciate that there&#8217;s a ton of reality that you can&#8217;t even see? Perhaps it has some applications for AI or something?<\/p>\n<p>Interesting stuff to think about anyway.<\/p>\n<p>The last chapter is the most confusing. The author starts talking about what he calls &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Donald_D._Hoffman#Conscious_Realism\">conscious realism<\/a>&#8220;, which I can&#8217;t claim to understand very well. He writes on page 184:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If we grant that there are conscious experiences, and that there are conscious agents that enjoy and act on experiences, then we can try to construct a scientific theory of consciousness that posits that conscious agents<span>\u2014not objects in spacetime\u2014are fundamental, and that the world consists entirely of conscious agents.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Um&#8230; OK?<\/p>\n<p>Actually, I once had a dream in which I understood that reality and spacetime are created collectively by consciousnesses, so I find the idea compelling. On the other hand, I really don&#8217;t understand the idea any deeper than that. On some level, it feels like just playing semantic games with &#8220;reality&#8221; and &#8220;consciousness&#8221;, which is maybe all one can do.<\/p>\n<p>(If I say &#8220;A book exists only in one&#8217;s consciousness&#8221;, is not such an existence just as valid, perhaps even more valid, than some other sense of existence?)<\/p>\n<p>On page 190, the author goes on to write:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The definition of a conscious agent is just math. The math is not the territory. Just as a mathematical model of weather is not, and cannot create, blizzards and droughts, so also the mathematical model of conscious agents is not, and cannot create, consciousness. So, with this proviso, I offer a bold thesis, the\u00a0<em>Conscious Agent Thesis<\/em>: every aspect of consciousness can be modeled by conscious agents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I still don&#8217;t really get it. Also, don&#8217;t you still have to answer what <em>consciousness<\/em> itself is? (And can you?)<\/p>\n<p>So, overall, some interesting ideas, but I&#8217;m not quite sure what, if anything, I can do with them.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently finished reading\u00a0The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman. It&#8217;s a short book, only 200 pages, but still felt too long. Too much filler and repetition. You&#8217;re perhaps better off watching an interview with the author on YouTube. The main premise is simple: we don&#8217;t see reality as it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[18,53],"tags":[858,857,856],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-Mc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2988"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2993,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988\/revisions\/2993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}