Hacker News Reader

Comment by AIorNot | Hacker News Reader

What’s wild to me is that Donald Hoffman is also proposing a similar foundation for his metaphysical theory of consciousness, ie that it is a fundamental property and that it exists outside of spacetime and leads via a markov chain of conscious agents (in a Network as described above)

Ie everything that exists may be the result of some kind of Uber Network existing outside of space and time

It’s a wild theory but the fact that these networks keep popping up and recurring at level upon level when agency and intelligence is needed is crazy

https://youtu.be/yqOVu263OSk?si=SH_LvAZSMwhWqp5Q

View on HN

>it exists outside of spacetime

So I guess this theory won't be subject to empirical testing any time soon?

Perhaps "outside" means "resident on the boundary of", a la holograms and Maldecena's AdS/CFT work, and so still within reach of experiment?

How is AdS/CFT (as it pertains to describing spacetime & the Standard Model) within reach of experiment? We're not even in an AdS universe.

I was going to write something up but honestly the top two answers in this physics stack exchange do it more competently and comprehensively than I'm able

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/122540/why-are-a...

My takeaway/summary is 'AdS/CFT let's you temporarily change your space/model to make the math easier and then map it back into the original model. Although we don't currently have such a model specified for our particular observed universe, it still allows us to study functionality equivalent behavior and make some determinations over what is/isn't/could be possible'

From the link you posted:

> Ok, so if I understand correctly, AdS spaces aren't meant to directly model the universe, but rather are used as a tool to make certain calculations in CFT easier?

GP's comment was modelling the universe as AdS/CFT, though, which is why my question addressed precisely that part:

> How is AdS/CFT (as it pertains to describing spacetime & the Standard Model)

Sorry, my point was to (almost facetiously) interject the topological concept of "boundary/bulk" correspondence (as also exists with holograms & AdS/CFT) rather than suggesting the correctness of AdS/CFT.

The idea that "outside" becomes available via a change in perspective from boundary to bulk.

For those who, like me, are not familiar with AdS/CFT, it's "anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence" which is "a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories", allowing quantum field theories to be made more mathematically tractable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence

A universe where everything can be empirically tested would be conveniently and suspiciously human-centered

And neccessary.

Well, likely necessary to determine a unique and comprehensive, consistent model (or equivalence class thereof)

There's no guarantee such a model can be determined via an observer in the universe the observer is observing.

Functionality though, yeah that's the goal to either find such a model or show that one can't exist, or can't be proven one way or the other.

I don't see how that follows. Almost nothing about what we've discovered is human-centric, we've had to build machines to sense beyond our human perceptual limits. In what ways are gravitational waves detected by LIGO human-centric?

In that humans built LIGO to bring forth phenomena for them. There is no science without an observer. The universe might exist without us, but without an observer there is no-one to describe it.

I don't see how this has any bearing on the original point. Why would universe where everything can be empirically tested be conveniently and suspiciously human-centered?

That was my reply to you, not the original point. If it helps:

I think the GP implied with the statement that we should subscribe to some non-empirical theories ("outside spacetime"), because the endeavour is not supposed to be human-centered.

1. You said that the observations are not human-centered since we need to make machines, so the GP does not need to be suspicious and should stick to empiricism.

2. Both you and the GP seem to assume that the endeavour is not supposed to be human-centered

3. I say it is human-centered because we make the machines for us as observers at the center, so your argument doesn't quite work

4. I think our science is entangled with us as observers on many levels, and it should be. So the GP's statement should actually be pushed through suspicion towards neccessity.

> You said that the observations are not human-centered since we need to make machines

I didn't say LIGO was not human centered, but that the gravitational waves which LIGO detected are not human-centered.

I just don't think your take is equivalent to the OP's claim. Yes, our instruments are human-centered because humans are the observers, and so phenomena outside of our perceptual range has to be projected into our perceptual range. That doesn't imply that the underlying phenomena are human-centered, or that the theories formed from those observations are semantically human-centered (syntactically they are because humans have to be able to read them).

I frankly don't even understand the OP's claim: how does the proposition "this is a universe where everything can be empirically tested" logically entail "this universe is human centered". I can agree with being suspicious of the claim that we can empirically test everything, I just don't get how that entails human centeredness.

Well, my take is not equivalent to OP, in that I actually don't agree :) I am a human-centered empiricist.

I think OP's logic flows the other way: skeptical of human-centeredness position (like you) and from that skeptical of going purely empirical (not like you/me).

I'd say LIGO described phenomena as gravitational waves through the interaction of the experiment. They didn't detect anything because that would go beyond empiricism into assuming the existence of a thing beyond the interaction

I don't think one even needs "supernatural" explanations.

1. Consider the base hardware of each agent:

http://neuropathologyblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/shannon-curra...

2. Consider that (according to science anyways) there is no central broadcaster of reality (it is at least plausible)

3. Consider each agent (often/usually) "knows" all of reality, or at least any point you query them about (for sure: all agents claim to know the unknowable, regularly; I have yet to encounter one who can stop a "powerful" invocation of #3 (or even try: the option seems literally unavailable), though minor ones can be overridden fairly trivially (I can think of two contrasting paths of interesting consideration based on this detail, one of them being extremely optimistic, and trivially plausible))

Simplified: what is known to be, is (locally).

4. Consider the possibility (or assume as a premise of a thought experiment) that reality and the universe are not exactly the very same thing ("it exists outside of spacetime"), though it may appear that they are (see #3)

Is it not fairly straightforward what is going on?

A big part of the problem is that #3 is ~inevitably[1] invoked if such things are analyzed, screwing up the analysis, thus rendering the theory necessarily "false" (it "is" false...though, it will typically not be asserted as such explicitly, and direct questions will be ignored/dodged).

[1] which is...weird (the inevitable part...like, it is as if consciousness is ~hardwired to disallow certain inspection (highly predictable evasive actions are invoked in response), something which can easily be tested/demonstrated).

Why is #3 obvious? How can agents know all of reality? May be a subset?

knowledge = knowledge (true belief)

"knowledge" = belief (possibly true but not necessarily, but sincerely perceived as "true")

(I'm considering this from an abstract / autistic / "That's pedantic! [so stop doing it]" perspective, so I include quotation marks to note the technical distinction...in phenomenological analysis, perhaps they'd be left out, to better illustrate the local experience of reality, the true "is-ness" as it is. In normative discussions ("anything that good hackers would find interesting"), these things are generally rather taboo.)

There's lots of nuance I'm leaving out, but that's the general idea.

A popular though terminating description for the phenomenon is "that's just people expressing their opinion, everyone does it, that's what everything boils down to" (which can make it not only not obvious, but damn near invisible)...but consider the semantic differences of that with and without the inclusion of the word "just". (Also: watch out for #3, it's recursively self-referential, and has substantial cloaking / shape-shifting abilities. It is almost always and everywhere.)

An alternate perspective: consider what an uneducated person "sees" in "reality" (aka: what "is", and "is not") as they go about their day, compared to highly educated (as opposed to knowledgeable) people from very distinct disciplines.

Can you explain #3 and 4# more clearly?

in #2 you are claiming there is no objective reality or no 'broadcaster' of reality

We must assume some things as being objective such as a rational universe in order to make any claims at all.

-if you are saying in #3 that humans as conscious agents make subjective claims about reality but that those claims are in fact 'the reality' for that agent or person, that is a subjective claim. (I'm not saying that that subjective reality isn't true for that person)

Also, Hoffman doesn't make a 'supernatural' claim per se, his claim is simply that reality as 'we all see it' is NOT the whole story, and that it is in fact only the projection of a vast, infinitely complex network of conscious agents that creates what we perceive as the material universe and time. He starts with the idea that consciousness as a property is fundamental, existing outside of space and time and that if you apply reasoning and mathematics that networks of agents acting as UANs in a sense project that material universe into being, with that assumption, ie that it extrapolates to our entire universe.

I'm not sure I'm (or anyone for that matter) is really qualified to answer that claim..it's so big that it does verge on mysticism. that's why I said its such a wild idea, but I found the article above another interesting piece of evidence for Hoffman, because it talks about a general theory underlying such networks:

whose "repeated and recursive evolution of Universal Activation Networks (UANs). These networks consist of nodes (Universal Activators) that integrate weighted inputs from other units or environmental interactions and activate at a threshold, resulting in an action or an intentional broadcast"

ie this is very similar to Hoffmans system of Conscious Agents -which is an extreme theory of such networks that I described above

https://evolutionnews.org/2023/10/eccentric-theories-of-cons...

These are good questions, I am on mobile at the moment so won't be able to make a response that does them justice for 2 days or so.

I'd think my other post provides some relevant content though?

In the meantime it may help...an important axiom in my model/theory is that the universe exists independent of us, but reality is downstream of us. I think Donald's theory is based on Idealism maybe, where he disagrees and thinks reality is downstream of us, and the universe is downstream of reality? But that raises some very tricky paradoxes, more so than the one main paradox/problem that all models have (I think? Maybe not, maybe I just lack adequate imagination! And it doesn't make him necessarily wrong, but it puts it into the same category as God(s) imho: anything is possible, including the "impossible". Which is fine, but please acknowledge it explicitly, Donald.)

I'm not terribly hung up on which model one subscribes to (or has been subscribed to) in general, but I am extremely hung up on logical inconsistencies and paradoxes within them, that are not explicitly acknowledged in a non-dismissive manner...this is fundamentally important to my model, as mine has an opinionated ~ethical component (Utopianism), and an extremely strong dislike for "imposters" in this regard.

We've already invalidated hidden variable theories in Physics so I find it hard to believe consciousness has some separate class of hidden effects still undiscovered and allowable in our universe.

> We've already invalidated hidden variable theories in Physics

No we haven't.

The only theories not ruled out by Bell are non local. You have to accept such a mountain of nonsense for any non local theory to be valid that I don't think anyone takes them seriously.

Aside from non-local theories which have been known since the 1950s and are regularly used in quantum chemistry, superdeterministic theories have seen virtually no development. Claims that they either of these approaches entail a mountain of nonsense are based on no evidence.

I think you are misunderstanding. These are typically mathematical tricks used for computation and don't lead to actual non-local interpretations of QM. I don't think any major work is done without standard QFT.

I doubt you can find any serious Theoretical Physicist who believes retrocausality or FTL information transmission is compatible with the Universe we observe.

Anyway we've diverged off the actual crux which is that Quantum Conscious Woowoo theories require types of hidden variable theories which are not coherent with this Universe.

> These are typically mathematical tricks used for computation and don't lead to actual non-local interpretations of QM.

Bohmian mechanics is an explicitly non-local theory of QM, not merely a computational trick. It actually makes predictions that differ from QM in non-equilibrium regimes, but is consistent with QM in all regimes currently accessible to us.

> I don't think any major work is done without standard QFT.

I don't know what "major work" means. Work in quantum foundations is done without QFT all of the time. Yes, QFT is a useful effective theory, but that's a far cry from the original claim about the nature of reality, ie. that there are necessarily no hidden variables. Literally no experiment has ruled out hidden variables wholesale, only certain types of hidden variables.

> Anyway we've diverged off the actual crux which is that Quantum Conscious Woowoo theories require types of hidden variable theories which are not coherent with this Universe.

Maybe consciousness would require hidden variables, but your conclusion is still based on a fundamental error, which is that we have observations that are inconsistent with hidden variables. Since this claim is in error, then the conclusion does not follow.

> We've already invalidated hidden variable theories in Physics

Not quite, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory

I think Hoffmans path and the idea of consciousness being fundamental comes from a few conceptual Leaps - let me go through the high level of each one:

1. Current physics shows via quantum mechanics that spacetime has a definite limit in measurement (Planck scale)

2. Relatively also applies a similar limit on our ability to measure time and space (infinite energy/black holes)

3. Latest work in high energy physics has led to some interesting new findings (in the last 10 years or so) regarding an approach to calculate particle scattering amplitudes in supercolliders <= that is: when you apply nonlocal assumptions and certain mathematical simplification and that new approach simplifies the scattering amplitude calculations and ALSO just happens to map to a new conceptual framework where you think “outside of space and time” and then you can come to a geometric “structure” of immense complexity (let’s call one conception of that geometry the ‘amplitudehedron’) which is static, and immense encoding the universe itself, this polytope encodes the scattering amplitudes

For more on this See: https://youtu.be/6TYKM4a9ZAU?si=alGV5ThrCdBKcyfJ (hour long lecture by physicist Nima Arkani Hamid)

Short version: https://www.ias.edu/ideas/nima-arkani-hamed-amplituhedron

4. Given the hard problem of consciousness, ie “only awareness is aware” (ie we cannot break down the qualia of awareness) (Now this is where Hoffman goes wild: Hoffman says: “ Ok well, given that space time as we know it doomed (not fundamental - again see point 3 above)” then, let’s propose that consciousness IS defined to be FUNDAMENTAL and that it exists as a ‘network of conscious agents’:

Ie he preposes a “formal model of consciousness based on a mathematical structure called conscious agents”. then he proposes how time and space emerge from the interactions of conscious agents via the structure mentioned in point 3 above..

Hoffman then claims his math for these models implies that we are in a universe that emerged out fundamental consciousness and that he is working on a mathematical model he hopes can be tied the new physics that emerge out of the amplitudehedron through networks of these agents

5. Finally it was my observation that the general theory of Neural Networks in the article had some interesting similarities with all of this (ie maybe Nature uses such networks at all scales to represent intelligence )

Feel free to be skeptical- I am but I get all sorts of weird feeling he’s onto something here…

I don’t know if this exists outside of spacetime, but I have a suspicion that UACs didn’t begin with gene regulatory networks, but are more fundamental part of a computational universe hypothesis.

Category theory is the mathematical formulation/foundation of this "Uber Network".

Graphs are the most basic unit of meaning.

No, graphs are too inclusive.

Can you expand on that?

More generally there’s graph neural networks, for instance, but not you’re including many dynamic networks that are not open-ended or evolvable. The idea is to identify common dynamics and add constraints on the types of networks that are included to find general principles within that class. Kisen the constraints, you make the class too broad and can’t identify common principles.

I am a hobby student of category theory. Is there any breadcrumbs to your comment?

So the gnostics were right? Demiurge spatial-temporal firewall of reality nodes

weren't the sophia/gnosis, emnations and eons were from greek philosophy? also any philosophy/hottakes that stress on duality (what's seen here and what's out there that is causing what's seen here - such as manichean, advaita etc).

This is a pretty cool theory that resonates well with me. What are some good places I can read more about this (and related theories)?

This sits in a larger field of complexity theory and complex adaptive systems. There was also some interesting work on “Artificial Life” although that research program seems to have fallen out of favor. My introduction in 1995 was the book Chaos and then Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe. Wolframs New Kind of Science was also interesting.

This is just Berkeley's idealism with a bunch of pseudoscientific hand waiving.

Consciousness isn't outside of space and time, it creates it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com