The case against reality | Hacker News Reader

The case against reality

socsci.uci.edu

49 pointsnoego49 comments

The optical illusion jpg at the beginning of the article is worth looking at https://www.socsci.uci.edu/files/news_events/2019/opticalill...

Interview with author (2016):

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...

"I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness..."

* But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world? *

"Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world."

* The world is just other conscious agents? *

"I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view."

I think the gist of his argument is not that no external objective reality exists, but that it is fundamentally impossible using his model of perception to distinguish an "external reality" from a discrete network of other conscious agents, of arbitrary complexity and number. Both would fit the mathematical definition of "W" in his formulation.

As soon as the article started mixing in the quantum mechanics quotes, my eyes glazed over and I stopped reading. Do people really get something out of these kinds of articles?

Humans seem to have a strong desire to see magic. At the same time, scientifically educated people feel ashamed for this desire. The solution for them is to find magic that isn't obviously magic, so they can pretend it is something else.

The popular solution is to use something scientifically sounding, but out of original context. These days "quantum physics" is popular; hundred years ago it would be "magnetism"; and of course "energy" never goes out of fashion.

Seems like you can can replace quite a lot of things fairly arbitrarily -- you can replace X with some learning computer algorithm, and W with a simulation.

Timothy Leary phrased the same thing better a few decades ago as "Any reality is an opinion".

In these sorts of discussions I always wonder why I rarely see people comment that attributes and concepts that are simply beyond our capacity to understand likely exist.

An unknowable unknown is a huge variable to ignore

Considering there are species that cannot comprehend reality as we humans perceive it,is this too far fetched of a hypothesis?

Well, imagine trying to convince someone of the existence of radio waves a few hundred years ago.

Radio waves are knowable,there are unknown unknowns and that's not what I meant. I meant unknowable unknowns.

Think a variable X that will never have value assigned to it. The concept seems ridiculous but on your point,for a long time the concept of the number 0 ( defining non-existance of quantity as a value) was not considered or thought of as useless thing.

You can't build a scientific career on unknowable unknowns and people like arguments that support their limited ability/view or need to agree and work on arguments of their superiors to survive.

Philosophically, I think that people are rarely interested in talking too much about unknown unknowns because acknowledging them doesn't offer specific, useful predictions about the world - sure, you need to be aware that knowledge is approximate models, your thinking is imperfect, and be open to new data that clashes with your assumptions, but that general point is equally applicable to everything and therefore specific to nothing.

Practically, I think that people are rarely interested in talking too much about unknown unknowns because it's typically a segue into talking about gods, or souls, or why quantum physics proves free will or something. Stuff that has been done to death a million times, is as empty as it ever was, and there is other cooler stuff to talk about.

Well you talk about these things to find out truth not because they sound cool right?

I meant specifically some specific aspect of what you're talking about could be unknowable and you can postulate effects of the unknowable property with respect to knowable variables is what I meant.

By definition, we don't know what is or isn't in our capacity to understand. Certainly we must always keep in mind the possibility that some things may be beyond our comprehension, but we cannot assume that possibility is true.

I am not saying to abandon pursuit of knowledge,but like i stated in an earlier comment the number 0 for example exists to define 'nothing' and was not considered useful up until a few hundred years ago I believe. In the same way,if you can define "unknowable" as a value and assign it to certain variables,perhaps more knowledge and truth can be understood?

It is possible to account for concepts that we cannot perceive but we still have all the other capacities to evaluate the consequences of our incapacity. E.g. we cannot grasp echolocation but we don't consider it something mysterious / dangerous.

A more "mathematical" definition of Hoffman's theory is described in this paper.

http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanTime.pdf

Although these ideas of panpsychism are popular and exciting to the mind, i would remind that mainstream cognitive science / neuroscience considers consciousness a deterministic outcome of the laws of nature we know acting on the neural tissue of live humans.

The problem with this is that consciousness pre-existed cognitive science / neuroscience and is the substrate upon which they are built, and not the other way around, so it is an illusion that they are on the outside looking

Consciousness did not pre-exist natural laws. Consciousness was invented by mammal brains. The problem with panpsychism is that statements like the one you made are not only unfalsifiable, they cannot be probed empirically or even philosophically.

It seems to me that this theory is identical to physicalism. By defining consciousness indistinguishably from a "world", or any interactive system within a world which can be modelled as an algorithm and state (experiences), it seems just as valid to say that the world creates consciousness.

Given that evolution shapes human perception, as acknowledged by the author, it seems more sensible to say evolution has created human consciousness. This seems especially so, when the definition of the conscious agent is so general, as to allow any state machine.

Is there anything obviously new in his claims? I couldn't see it in the article, and there seemed a bit too much unquestioned "me and my team" style implications of revolutionary theory building.

Perhaps I'm being too negative in my reading, or it's just marketing gone awry and the actual book offers a more realistic grounding; but areas where there is potential for murky crossover between philosophy and fundamental science does seem to encourage this rather optimistic iconoclastic self-image.

For what it’s worth, I can make their example picture not move. The illusion of movement seems to be caused by saccades, and I’ve practiced preventing my eyes from doing that.

Interesting. I expected that this effect took two eyes to see, and I lost the use of one eye a few years back. When I saw your comment before reading the article (shame on me), I assumed that I wouldn't be able to detect any motion a 'normal' person could.

Surprise! I could! Also - it doesn't take much to make it 'stop' (I assume I'm arresting saccades to do so), but I don't really know what I am doing. What did you do to learn how to prevent your eyes from doing that? I can make it go and I can make it stop - but I am not able to tell you what I am doing to do so...

How does one prevent saccades? I didn't think there was any conscious control of them.

I can jitter my eyeballs, and maintain a more-or-less stable (percieved) scene. I don't know that there is any real-world use for this...

I guess this has something to do with armor piercing looks you can give.

Ha! Not really. I've sustained enough blunt force trauma to the head that I have to work really hard to maintain enough focus to cross the street without falling over...

In my case, a few minutes practice was enough. Subjectively it’s somewhat like holding your breath. I don’t know if that’s a common or uncommon ability.

All you have to do is focus either on nothing at all, or focus intensely at one specific point. Saccades will stop.

thats really cool, i never knew i could do that. just told myself it wasnt moving and it stopped. stopped thinking about it and it started again.

I was able to do it first try but never practiced controlling it, never even heard of anyone trying or thought of trying. Is there any benefit to it?

If you can do it drunk, it will help with the flashlight test at a DUI stop! (just kidding - it probably might - but I was being cynical in the response)

The only benefit has been figuring out my own visual system. https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/06/18/vision/

explain the practice method, please.

I guess it’s like learning to hold your breath. The first time I tried it was at university, next to monument overlooking Aberystwyth. I focused on the grass ~5-20m away, and on my eye movements, and learned to resist their (I guess autonomous) movement.

When I managed to stop the saccading, the grass disappeared from my awareness except where the wind was rippling through it. I tried again more recently, with a closer target and no wind, and found a different effect (I have no idea why): https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/06/18/vision/

Cool, thanks for sharing this post!

I'm not sure that's stopping saccades. However, I think I know what you mean as I've done it a few times, if you want a deeply unsettling experience do it close up in a mirror. Parts of your face disappear and are replaced with various patches of skin or whatever is around as you fill in the gaps.

> Perception may not be reality

From a compression perspective, of course it is not ...how else would you model your environment?

Consciousness is just a glorified 'top' command. Our visual cortex has evolved over millions of years to distill our environment down into a much lower dimensional space.

Additionally, I would rather have them phrase it like neural activity creates consciousness (which in my opinion is almost a meaningless tautology).

this seems like one of those articles that’ll give me a small panic attack.

if “everything you experience is just action potentials in the brain” sets one near to existential terror, should one avoid reading this article?

Definitely.

It's even worse than that. Even brains, as physical objects, don't exist. Only minds do, or something.

That's actually not as bad. At least it's cohesive. It's the sort of "substrate jumping" of reality that is incongruous and terrifying.

I'm fine with only minds existing - as long as there are more than just mine. .....which I'm pretty sure is a tough valley to climb out of. these are just a bunch of stubs right now, but you can see these things come up for me a lot: https://blog.vinneycavallo.com/tags/existential-dread :)

Url changed from https://neurosciencenews.com/visual-reality-14590/, which points to this (but doesn't link to it).

Submitted title was ""The case against reality: A new theory argues consciousness creates neural ac..." " which our software rewrote to "The case against reality: A new theory argues consciousness creates neural AC", since AC usually means alternating current.

What's with the odd ending to the title? The title of the linked article is just "The case against reality," and the summary starts "A new theory argues consciousness creates neural activity".

There's no mention of any "neural AC" in the article anywhere...

Explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20559224

Reply on news.ycombinator.com