Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? (2015) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? (2015) [video]

ted.com

45 pointsakkartik60 comments

The problem with this talk is that it's almost content free. He has demonstrated that sometimes we (and other animals) misperceive things, or construct in our heads what we expect to see. He has demonstrated via simple virtual world models that simple artificial organisms evolve to perceive things that keep us alive and ignore other things. But what he has failed to do is tell us anything at all about how our perceptions generally differ from reality. Yes, the map is not the territory - we know that. Yes, we can't directly see atoms, we know that too, though we can with our machines. But other than being a low definition representation, he has not shown any important way in which the map differs from a low definition representation of reality, except that sometimes we make mistakes. He could be right, spacetime could just be the API, but he has presented no evidence for that.

Well we do see atoms, and we see them directly -- in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions.

However what "seeing atoms" means at a "given resolution" differs.

There's a long history of this paranoid game: we think the stick is bent! We were wrong! We didnt see the stick at all ! (false).

Ah, but damn: how is it now we know we were wrong? How is it now that, when we took the stick out of the water, we know it isnt bent?

Every sceptical example ever posed has this feature: it presumes that it is possible to be right. That is quite daming to the whole project of scepticism; it is, essentially, incoherent.

Without the possibility of knowing the stick is bent, our mistake was never even a mistake. The very worry of being mistaken is a worry which presumes that truth & knowledege are the ordinary background of our experience.

> in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions.

I do not believe this is correct in any manner, and reduces the role of cognition.

Jastrow’s work focuses on this departure between one context and higher order cognition.

the concepts we develop through sensory-motor interaction with our environment structure our perception so-as-to-present a certain "level of abstraction" over the environment

But just as `sum([2, 4, 6])` presents `12`, it does so via directly summating `2`, `4`, `6`.

That our perception is aggregating and abstracting does not mean that it isnt caused directly by those things which it aggregates and abstracts.

Here, "seeing" is the `sum`, `[2, 4, 6]` are the atoms, and `12` is the perception.

A case in point: a frog can detect a single photo. Is there any sense here in which a frog's qualitative sensation of a "flicker" is not directly caused by a photon?

And likewise, that redness of the apple is just an abstract presentation of photons of light scattering of the atoms of its surface. The causal chain here is direct.

Light does not "go via" purgatory first, we see, directly, the objects of the world.

The TED talk is old and maybe not the right format to discuss details. There are long-form discussions with Donald Hoffman on Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal I can link:

https://youtu.be/CmieNQH7Q4w

He goes into more details (it's over 3 hours…), but I am not sure his arguments are satisfying. It is really hard to prove this concept. The idea itself is very old. Plato's Cave is only one example.

Also in discussion with others: https://youtu.be/EwTpdCVsttI with John Vervaeke https://youtu.be/bhSlYfVtgww with Joscha Bach

There is certainly truth to the claim that the brain abstracts over the raw sensory input. Reading, for example, would be a much more intractable problem if you had to do it in terms of photons hitting your retina instead of first abstracting the patterns on your retina into shapes, letters and words.

But the leap from there is some abstraction going on to reality is nothing like the abstraction seems not [well] justified to me. And we can check it, we can build all kind of sensors and machines that interact with the world out there, cut out consciousness in the process, and see if the sensors report a world very different from how we perceive it. And they don't.

There is of course a complication to this, constructing those sensors and machines and looking at what they are doing always has to pass through our perception, so maybe we accidentally build sensors that yield the same distorted version of reality as our brain does or the sensors are actually reporting a very different world but when we look at the sensor readings they get distorted to match the perception through our senses.

But given all the ways and angles from which we can measure things and then transform and represent the results before perceiving them, I have a hard time imagining how it could always be coherently distorted to match our normal perception without showing any inconsistencies.

And our perception and intuition is of course not perfect. Time and space, for example, are different from what our perception and experience tells us, but we managed to measure it and uncover the differences. But even in this case our perception and intuition are not really wrong, they are a very good approximation for everyday situations and only shows noticeable discrepancies in extreme circumstances.

For me it's a simple problem of information size. A complete model of reality, aka the universe, takes this many bits. Our brains or computers have that many bits, obviously many, many orders of magnitude less. So any model we can actually make is an extremely lossy compression that will have horrible artifacts and distortions. But I also find this a truism, and quite a useless one. Of what help is pointing this out?

The universe and the brain are just assumptions, you're already in the realm of imagination when you talk about them as they can't be empirically known. You only know what you experience right now, that could be the entirety of it. When you move from a place to another, you simply just imagine that new place. You join those thoughts coherently because you like to think logically, but otherwise nothing necessarily exists outside of perception.

> nothing necessarily exists outside of perception

Random thought: if a stray bullet hit you on the back of your head and you die, does perception end? And if so what caused that bullet?

I don't remember perception starting and so far i have no indication that it ends, so it's all assumptions here because "perception end" is something i cannot know, empirically.

While I agree I think my question still stands. Of what help is this? I can only talk to you about what I perceive in words and concepts that make sense to me, as flawed as they might be. Even if I would only imagine the existence of computers, forums and you, what can I do about it? How is this knowledge actionable?

It is actionable because once you come to terms with the fact that most of your knowledge is based on (flawed) assumptions, you are a) less inclined to try to impose your views onto others (because no single view has greater weight than another), and b) any new information that comes your way can be treated as something to explore no matter how contradicting it may seem to you initially, because it can help you reduce or refine those assumptions. There is no fixed world out there we can have access to, it's composed and filtered by the meaning we give to it. This view produces a totally different set of actions than a view that, e.g posits that "there is a world out there, it has meaning independent of my perception" because you might be thinking that whatever you think you know is actually the world and therefore anyone that is not acting according to that, is either malicious or ignorant and must be reformed because they pose a threat.

I disagree, that just leads to extreme subjectivity in which you can argue for anything. I can justify killing all children I come across as they are not real, or if they are real nobody can argue that killing them is a bad thing. Or simply becoming catatonic since nothing outside of the mind matters.

Subjectivity is all you have, there's no extreme version of it. And ethics is also something we define. In any case, you have to make a jump and make a metaphysical claim that you can't prove.

There are two possible claims:

1) The belief that the world is out there and is intelligible and I have the means to know about it. Which means whatever I think I know, must be based on some absolute truth that was there before me knowing about it.

2) The belief that whatever I think about the world, defines the world and whatever I think about the world is something I am making up right now.

If you adhere to 1, then all of your actions are justifiable for you, because the only place to lookup for confirmation is still just your own mind, and you believe that the mind reflects "a world that is out there and is intelligible" then whatever you do or think must be based on some truth, including harming others. Wars are a perfect example of that. In the minds of the people conducting it, it is justifiable because that's their version of reality and they believe that reality as something concrete and unchanging. Nations, ethnic categories etc. are all things that people made up and hold strong beliefs about them.

If you adhere to 2, then you are more humble in how you approach matters. Whatever you might imagine, you know that is just a product of the mind, and is malleable, since the world isn't intelligible and therefore can't be known. The lack of concreteness creates doubt, and in doubt you (usually) don't take actions. You allow the space for others experiencing their own version of reality however they feel like, as you do yours, without an inclination to indoctrinate them into your own version, since the metaphysical claim is that anyone has their own, and that's how things are. You could say this makes you catatonic, but i claim that it better directs your attention to the things you find interesting, rather than others telling you what you need to pay attention to. You are free to create your own ethics, based on your own experiences of what's good or not according to you, for your own space.

When you adhere to 1, the ethical framework is already given to you and imposed on you by other people hallucinating their reality, and if they say "lets go to war" you go to war, because that's what you believe must be true. There is no doubt, since there's no subjectivity, it must objectively be the case that you need to go to war. That's the only possible outcome of a belief that the world is out there and is intelligible.

Interviews from the 70s with David Bohm about his cooncepts/theory of implicate and explicate order is much deeper and more sound than any TED talk about reality vs perception.

He distinguishes between perception and reality, but at no point he defines reality. How could he know that a given perception is different from reality, when perception is already one of the ways of knowing reality (along with: Other senses, cognition, human consensus) ?

Objective reality is a disturbingly difficult thing to prove.

It is impossible to prove, because "objective reality" refers to a hypothetical reality that exists independently of the perceptions of conscious entities. The problem, of course, is that we are conscious entities and all of our experience of reality comes from our perceptions, and there is no conceivable way for us to experience reality if not through our perceptions.

This is a very simple and even tautological conclusion, that a lot of smart people I know seem to have a hard time accepting. I think that this is because people assume that science assumes materialism, which it doesn't, of course. Science requires no metaphysical commitment.

> Science requires no metaphysical commitment.

https://iep.utm.edu/met-scie/ or

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/48844/axioms-...

You can’t really do science without having certain metaphysical beliefs about the uniform nature of causality across time and space, for example.

Not necessarily uniform across all time and space, but certainly in the roughly observable universe. Definitely in our local solar system.

> about the uniform nature of causality across time and space, for example.

Nothing can exist without causality as we know it, i.e. a thing happens which is the cause of another thing that happens.

That does not mean the order of events is as perceived, or that there is even an order of events. The order of events is the way observers perceive the events, and is independent of the cause and effect.

For example, everything that happens in the universe may already have happened, at the instance the universe was born. But we, as members of the universe, perceive it as happening one thing at a time, like watching a movie already created.

Causality is part of the framework that we might impose on our experience in order to make sense of it. It cannot be proved to be any more objective than our experience of sounds or colours.

David Hume spoke a lot about this: https://iep.utm.edu/hume-causation/

> Nothing can exist without causality as we know it, i.e. a thing happens which is the cause of another thing that happens.

Not only is this not true of all conceivable worlds, it's not even true for the most commonly accepted explanation of physics. In the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the value that will be observed in an experiment has no cause - it is random in some range. For example, if we detect an electron passing through the left slit of a double slit apparatus, there is no cause for why it passed through the left slit and not the right one (in the CI of QM).

I guess CI admits a weaker form of causality, in which an effect produced according to a determined probability distribution. But even this is part of the map rather than the territory.

Bit late, but I probably should have given virtual particles as a better example. Those are theorized to appear and disappear at random out of the void. Per the theory, there is no cause to this appearance (apart from it being permitted by the laws of physics).

Of course, this is ultimately a model and can be wrong. But my point is that we can definitely conceive of models of the world in which causality is not a strict requirement - and not just fantasy ones, but very concrete models with workable predictions.

>You can’t really do science without having certain metaphysical beliefs

You can do science without holding any beliefs just like birds can fly without a theory of aviation. Metaphysics just provide interpretations of scientific results beyond what's observable.

In fact outside of physics we don't really posit uniformity in any science, because what you study changes all the time anyway, in fact the scientific method itself changes. Science itself is a dynamic, evolving process. Certainly looking back 500 years science was pretty different, and it probably will be in another 500.

> You can do science without holding any beliefs just like birds can fly without a theory of aviation.

In which case your metaphysical assumptions will simply be implicit rather than explicit. For example, in doing science, you'll be "explaining" things, which assumes a certain position of the nature of explanation and causality. You'll be choosing a theory out of a number of competing ones, a choice which will rely on some assumptions (e.g. simpler is better?). You'll be trying to uncover "laws of nature", which would assume their existence in the first place, etc.

> It is impossible to prove, because "objective reality" refers to a hypothetical reality that exists independently of the perceptions of conscious entities. The problem, of course, is that we are conscious entities and all of our experience of reality comes from our perceptions, and there is no conceivable way for us to experience reality if not through our perceptions.

Are our perceptions and experiences of reality not also a part of reality? If not, then what are they a part of?

> This is a very simple and even tautological conclusion...

This itself is an experience of reality, an objectively incorrect one if you ask me.

> I think that this is because people assume that science assumes materialism, which it doesn't, of course.

Science, having no volition, does not assume anything. Scientists on the other hand, whom I've spoken to hundreds of, very often do assume materialism. I personally believe that humans are unable to not assume most things, and as evidence I would present the content of all internet forums.

Donald seams to believe that “reality” is defined in the terms of something like...

reality: “the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.”

That definition allows him to make the argument that he makes; as the definition separates our ideas from the thing that reality is.

It’s a definition with problems…

Map vs Territory

this video needs no more than the caption:

> John Carpenter's Dark Star - 1974 from phenomenology to cartesian skepticism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck

bonus relevance for AI hubbub

Thank you, this made my day :)

I'd say that there's a reality (whatever it is; some phenomena that can be observed in whatever ways), and there are models of it.

Unless the reality has very particular properties (some kind of regularity / redundancy), every model of it is a simplification, so it has discrepancies. Even if the reality is regular and compressible perfectly into a model, it's rather hard to come up with such a model, and to prove it's the right one.

It's the old "Is a falling tree creates a sound if no one hears it".

The simple answer is NO, because there is no "compatible ear" that interprets those "sound"-waves, as sound.

The reality is, it always creates waves but not sound.

The better answer is to agree on how 'sound' should be defined, which would dissolve the question.

“Do you think that 'sound' should be defined to require both acoustic vibrations (pressure waves in air) and also auditory experiences (someone to listen to the sound), or should 'sound' be defined as meaning only acoustic vibrations, or only auditory experience?”

From: Disputing Definitions — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...

>The better answer is to agree on how 'sound' should be defined, which would dissolve the question.

No it's not because now you just define what sound is for humans. Pressure waves in the right frequency is interpreted as sound for humans. Same with colors, for most humans red is red.

Frequencies are the reality, but sound/color is just a interpretation.

It's the other way around. Frequency is an abstraction. Sound/color is the reality.

>Sound/color is the reality.

Have you ever had an argument with a bee if that flower is red? Or a blue-wale how Mozart sounds for him? Are waves on a body of water an abstraction?

But your obviously a troll so i stop here.

I'm not trolling. There is no concept of frequency in the color red. Frequency is an abstraction/reduction you make in your mind in order to explain it. The real phenomenon is "red". Frequency is just a concept that works for certain cases in a certain framework that you create using abstract reasoning.

So, yes, waves are an abstraction, how can you not see it? When you look at the sea you don't see waves, you see colors moving around and then when you try to describe what you see, you define the concept of "waves" and come to the conclusion that these are waves you are looking at. But that happens entirely inside your mind. Waves is a concept like frequency.

>There is no concept of frequency in the color red

>>Red light has relatively long waves, around 700 nm long

Those 700 nm or ~428274 gigahertz is the frequency of red (as a human eye normally sees color) light waves.

https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/atmosphere/visible-ligh...

>>Frequency is a measure of how often a given event repeats itself. In physics, it is commonly used to describe waves.

https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en/frequency-...

>>Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency

You can scroll down and you will find "Light" and "Sound"

This is "our" visible spectrum, to the left increased frequency to the right increased wavelength:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency#/media/File:EM_spect...

>the concept of "waves" and come to the conclusion that these are waves you are looking at.

It's not a concept but:

>>a wave is a disturbance or variation which travels through a medium.

https://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/demos/waves-intro/waves-int...

And stop with you wannabe philosophical BS, it sounds just uneducated even borderline clownish.

When you look at red, you see red. You don't see "frequency" or "light" or any other thing we invented to describe red. When you say red I know immediately what you mean because I am also experiencing the color red. It doesn't require any further description. Descriptions are not the thing, we invented frequency as a measure, it's a concept. It doesn't exist in the real world. The real world is the one that you experience through your senses. It has colors and sounds and tastes and feels. It doesn't have frequencies or any kind of units or measures, those are made up concepts or abstractions over the thing we are experiencing.

>"frequency" or "light" or any other thing we invented to describe red.

You really don't know how science works do you? Bye roger, i am out.

Hold your hand up and look at it, now (without moving your hand) look at the wall (or whatever else) beyond it.

You'll perceive your hand in two different places - when it obviously isn't, because what you're perceiving is not reality, but the hack that allowed your ancestors to survive it.

There is our perception of reality but also how we make meaning of our perceptions, how we understand. For example colors that do not exist in the physical reality but are products of our perceptions and our interpretation of those perceptions.

"The structure of the system of color categories is shaped by the neurophysiology of color vision, by our color cones and neural circuitry for color. Colors and color categories are not "out there" in the world but are interactional, a nontrivial product of wave length reflactances of objects and lighting conditions on the one hand, and our color cones and neural circuitry on the other. Color concepts and color-based inferences are thus structured by our bodies and brains."

https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p4.html

Discussed at the time (barely):

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782664 - June 2015 (1 comment)

We see reality as it is captured by our input sensors, and processed by our vision system. That signal chain is where the subjectivity comes into play, as well as the edge cases where our vision systems misidentify something, or see something that isn't actually happening. It also defines what our reality is, based on the capabilities of the sensors. The existence of optical illusions prove that we don't see reality "as it is", or those illusions would not exist, and we'd just see what was there. The existence of both color-blind people, and tetrachromats, also prove that we don't see reality "as it is". Look at any of the other species in the world with differing vision systems to understand that at most we see what reality is for humans.

The really wild part of all of it is the way our brains can perceive things out of order, in a sense. The way our brains fill in microsaccades is wonderfully interesting. It's why the first tick of a second hand sometimes seems like it lingers.

There’s also a paper, well worth a read: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0057...

Scroll down to the section on Conscious Realism. This presents a mathematical basis for what "base reality" is: a graph of conscious agents, and our reality is merely a projection of that graph (we perceive elements of the projection, not the base graph). This to me is a much more powerful idea than the Ted talk which is a bit clickbaity.

Yes. This reverses the popular physicalist understanding of causality from “neurons firing cause your mind” to “measurable changes in the brain are reflections of conscious activity”, and so on.

This idealistic monism makes the most sense at a fundamental level. Since our mind is the only thing we can be sure exists, granting objective absolute existence instead to all those other bits and bobs and atoms and neurons—everything else but the mind—strikes me as logically inelegant overcomplication.

While swapping the directionality of this causal arrow may be orthogonal to most of STEM fields as they are now (philosophical concerns are irrelevant to physics), it could have immense implications for fields like medicine and human well-being.