I’m a citizen disappointed by the shallowness of our media and lack of honest examination of today’s deeper challenges. Such as coming to grips with what society has done to our Earth’s biosphere (life support system). I realize no one likes bad news, but faith-based denial isn’t going to do our children any good either.
~ ~ ~ Thus I’ve taken to writing what I'd like to see more of and to sharing selected writings of others.
~ ~ ~ feel free to copy and pass along any of the following.
Hoffman starts chapter nine by repeating his drill:
DH: “Our sense forage for fitness, not truth. They dispatch news about fitness payoffs: how to find them, get them, and keep them.
Keep in mind, this according to a theorem that plays out in an idealized mathematical universe of Hoffman’s design. Not in our real universe ! ! !
DH: “Despite their focus on fitness our senses confront a tsunami of information. …” (¶1-2)
All that Hoffman reduces to simplistic four-square games with ill defined terms such as “fitness” - “truth” - “hawk” - “dove” - terms that are fundamentally meaningless when it comes to actual evolution on Earth with it’s constant tsunami of information coming at us.
A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality,
chapter 9, Scrutiny, You Get What You Need, in Both LIfe and Business
As I’ve worked on this project searching out respectable information and following leads. I’ve been amazed by how much presence Hoffman’s Case Against Reality has attainted on the internet. He truly is a marketing genius.
Seems that many people think this Case Against Reality is fascinating. Time is doomed. Man, how cool is that?!
Me, I’m left wondering, what drives such a desire for this sort of vacuous escapism?
DH: “For those readers interested in marketing and business, this idea applies to visual advertising. The goal of successful advertising is not merely, and sometimes not even, to present important facts. It is to craft visual message that rivets the foraging eye of the typical shopper. …” (¶12)
This morning I received a wonderful link to a cool short article.
I myself have other things to work on today and will try to stay away from news until tonight, at least. But I do want to take a moment to pass along the message.
Whoa - today is Election Day and our cortisol is running high. I know today has the very real potential to have most of us glued to the news, maybe drinking more than a typical Tuesday night, and nesting into a space of total fear.
I’ve read a few reports that large numbers of Americans are expecting violence in the wake of the election, regardless of the outcome. I know that I have friends and family who have stocked up on gasoline and groceries prior to the election because they are concerned that America will face another scarcity attack and grocery store shelves will be empty, similar to early pandemic times.
It’s also important to acknowledge that all of this fear is intensified by our fatigue of spending the past eight months living through a global pandemic and economic recession. I do believe it’s really easy and dare I say, justified to get caught up in the chaos surrounding this election.
Nevertheless, it’s also vital to shift gears and practice some deep self care so that in the coming weeks we can be our best selves. These are my steps we can take today to truly nourish ourselves and our communities.
DH: “Color can speak volumes. … Color is a window into fitness - also a jailhouse. … Try to imagine a color you’ve never seen. Can’t do it. … Color… like perception, is both window and prison.” (¶1)
Polychromy = “the art of painting in several colors, especially as applied to ancient pottery, …”
We could also say that our bodies are the prison of our mind. If you really wanted to look at it that way. But, what’s it get you? Beyond a reflection into your own psyche?
A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality,
Chapter 8, Polychromy - Mutations of an Interface
DH: “As a window on fitness color is not flawless, just adequate to guide our actions that keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Color, like each of our perception, compresses the complexities of fitness payoffs to bare essentials.” (¶2)
What gives Hoffman the right to expect some subjective idealized flawlessness from nature? Seems a bit hubristic to me.
Sure color perception is an important element, among many important sense “elements,” none of them perfect in the best of times, all vulnerable to a galaxy of pathologies and quirks. Such is life. That’s why luck often matters as much as fitness.
The fundamental problem with Hoffman’s narrative is that he keeps blaming the perceived object for the quirks and short comings of the perceiving instrument. It’s silly.
DH: “(The human eye has 7 million cones and 120 million rods, each carrying compressed information. The circuitry of the eye then squashes this down to 1 million signal and forwards it to the brain, which must correct errors and decode actionable messages about fitness.” (¶8)
Thus optical illusions happens. I’m going to skip paragraphs worth of Hoffman’s tour through optics trivia. I’ll share trustworthy authoritative sources and let them explain the details without Hoffman’s tactical omissions.
In chapter 7 of Case Against Reality, Hoffman’s “spacetime is doomed” mantra starts sounding like a hypnotist's spell, as reality fades from view. Here we read more fascinating stories that reveal slivers of actual physics, but then contain too many important omissions to be of any constructive help.
One way Hoffman misrepresents facts and twists conclusions is by anthropomorphizing the results and implications of quantum experiments and theory, all the while ignoring the profound difference between quantum scale experiments, and our macroscopic physical reality.
Or, for that matter, you’ll not hear Hoffman acknowledge the profound difference between his mathematical models of idealized universes and our actual ever evolving universal physical reality.
Of course bias comes into it.
some have the luxury of sitting back and dreaming,
Others best take reality as a given and stay focused,
and get on with it.
As a simple hands on working man, trying to follow through on Hoffman’s trains of thoughts leaves me overwhelmed time after time. I don’t kid myself, with my middling layperson understanding of physics, I’m in no position to offer lectures or corrections to Hoffman’s details, nor is that my intent.
Heck, I’ve had to do a lot of searching and additional reading these past weeks and again wrestling with this chapter, trying to grasp the various philosophical strands running through it and trying to wrap my head around the heady pipe dreams of these creative theorists.
My intention is to get through Hoffman’s book then to offer a saner down to Earth alternative. An evolutionary perspective of our Earth and our human relationship with this physical reality we are embedded within. Sans the religious baggage Hoffman’s theorem carries, stay tuned for more on that.
I compensate for my mediocre mind by doing homework and knowing how to check out claims and weigh evidence. For this chapter I’ve blown my deadline and spend a good deal of time learning more about what knowledgeable authorities have to explain. I’ll be sharing highlights throughout this review.
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A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality,
chapter 7, Virtuality - Inflating a Holoworld
DH: “… But here, where I don’t expect it, science injects a profound mystery: we still don’t understand “now” and “there”. That is, we don’t understand time and space - length, width, and depth - which we take for granted, which are woven into the very fabric of our daily perceptions, and which we assume are a true and reliable guide to physical reality.” (¶2)
Our spacetime is not doomed, no matter what impression breathless writers fill books and magazines with, no matter how smart the scientist’s mind, or how grandiose and self-certain their pronouncements are.
DH: “If our senses were shaped by natural selection,
then the Fitness Beats Truth Theorem tells us we don’t see reality as it is.
Interface Theory of Perception (ITP) tells us that our perceptions constitute an interface, specific to our species. It hides reality and helps us raise kids.
Spacetime is the desktop on this interface and physical objects are among its icons.” (¶1)
In this chapter 6, Hoffman samples cutting edge theoretical physics to underpin his theorem. This tour through the quantum realm, at the very boundary between atoms and universal background energy, is fascinating. As for Hoffman’s conclusion and implications, they are fascinating science fiction for reasons I will make clear as we go through his text.
“Perceptions constitute an interface, specific to our species” is easy to explain without reaching for twinkle dust. Every creature has a unique life style, with a unique bodyplan, sensing abilities, mental abilities, environmental demands and so on.
Eyes are optical instruments, they cannot help but receive the reflected light coming at them. How well they can process, resolve and act upon those signals is altogether a different question - one that is independent of the physical reality of the object reflecting said light.
A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality,
Before we look at Hoffman's pronouncements, I want to share a talk by Sean Carroll who offers us a more scientifically trustworthy baseline of current physics understanding.
You won’t notice any of the red flags of deception that pepper Hoffman’s presentations. Not that Carroll doesn’t present some amazing theoretical conjectures that do seem to echo Hoffman’s - thing is, Professor Carroll presents them within a more balanced framework.
. . . these are the particles thatmake up you and this table and me andthis laptop and really everything thatyou have ever seen with your eyestouched with your fingers smelled withyour nose in your life.
Furthermorewe know how they interact with eachother and even better than that, the most impressive fact is that there will notbe a discovery tomorrow or next centuryor a million years from now which saysyou know what there was another particleor another force that we didn't knowabout but now we realize plays a crucialrole in our everyday life.
As far as oureveryday life is concerned by which Ireally mean what you can see with youreyes touch with your hands etc we’redone finding the underlying ingredients. That is an enormous achievement in humanhistory one that does not get enoughcredit, because of course as soon as wedo it we go on to the next thing.
Physics is not done. I'm not saying thatphysics is done, but physics hasunderstood certain things and thosethings include everything you encounterin your everyday life - unless you're aprofessional experimental physicist orunless you're looking of course outsideour everyday life at the universe andother places where we don't know what’sgoing on. …
DH begins: “ITP makes bold and testable predictions.
Testable by what? A theorem of Hoffman’s own design. Anything else?
If you have his book, check the paragraphs I skip, let me know if you can spot any actual testable predictions being outlined - as opposed to what-if stories. I can’t.
DH: “It predicts that spoons and stars - all objects in space and time - do not exist when unperceived or unobserved.
Something exist when I see a spoon, and that something, whatever it is, triggers my perceptual system to create a spoon and endow it with a position, a shape, a motion, and other physical properties.
But, when I look away, I no longer create that spoon and it ceases to exist, along with its physical properties. …” (¶2)
“As long as our theories are stuck within spacetime, we cannot master what lurks behind.” Professor Donald Hoffman
DH: “ A venerable tradition conscripts the latest technology to be a metaphor of the human mind. …” (¶3)
... and history also shows us what a folly this venerable tradition is.
Gary Marcus: “Science has a poor track record when it comes to comparing our brains to the technology of the day. Descartes thought that the brain was a kind of hydraulic pump, propelling the spirits of the nervous system through the body. Freud compared the brain to a steam engine. The neuroscientist Karl Pribram likened it to a holographic storage device.”
Instead of taking the hint, Hoffman takes his cue from a Hollywood blockbuster and reduces our sensory interface with reality, down to our interface with a computer screen.
Chapter five’s opening quote comes from Morpheus in The Matrix: “This is your last chance . . . I (will) show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
Is Hoffman being provocative for the sake of intellectual titillation?
Is it for the sake of constructive science? Or what? Is it tailored to sell to a frivolous audience?
Can we tell the different between a constructive scientist and a devious salesman? Lets find out as I continue my inspection of Hoffman's words and their implications.
DH: “… I invite you to explore a metaphor of perception: each perceptual system is an interface, like the desktop computer of a laptop. A laptop shaped by natural selection, …” (¶3)
Shaped by who’s “Natural Selection”? It gets labeled, but never defined.
Besides, who’s kidding whom, the interface we experience with our laptops doesn’t in anyway correspond to the interface between our minds and our bodies; and then by extension through the senses, our “interface” with physical reality; which we are embedded within; as time relentlessly speeds us forward.
A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality,
chapter 5, Illusory - The Bluff of a Desktop
DH: “The blue icon does not deliberately misrepresent the true reality of the file. Representing nature is not its aim. Its job, instead, is to hide that nature for the complexity inside the computer. …(then into details )… The language of the interface - pixels and icons - cannot describe the hardware and software it hides. … ( and so and so forth )” (¶5)
Fitness Beats Truth, you’ll hear it like a drum beat throughout Hoffman’s Case Against Reality.
(last edit 11:15 am Oct 15, 2020)
In order to help it go down Hoffman dispenses with some inconvenient truths, such as: light must first bounce off an object before our eye’s, then mind* can perceive it. Seems like solid proof that stuff exists before we perceive it! (* after appropriate processing)
Then Hoffman conflates ‘perceiving’ with ‘the perceived’ and starts down a troubling path.
It’s no secret that our visual system edits and composes the moving images our mind’s eye perceives. Nothing reality shattering about it. Or is there?
Hoffman tells us something more important is going on. That there’s a hidden reality inside of the reality we experience every day. Something humanity really needs to tap into before we can feel whole.
Something like what? Like inside atoms? Is that justified? If so? So what?
Or, might it simply be escapism that’s driving this Case Against Reality?
I will do my best to honestly and fairly represent Hoffman’s words and ideas. I have exchanged some emails with Professor Hoffman, and I’ll share a couple quotes when appropriate. My point is that Professor Hoffman is aware of my project and that I’m ready to listen to anything he has to share with me.
For all of Hoffman’s use of “true” he never examines it critically, so his readers are left to their own devices. For most of us “truth” is some sort of binary concept, it is true or isn’t it true. That’s not how life in our natural world operates.
Hmmm, binary … well okay, the devil is in the details. We do need to get beyond a few exceptions: is it alive or is it dead?
DH: “Is it possible that we did not evolve to see truly - that our perceptions of space, time and objects do not reveal reality as it is? … Can the theory of evolution transform this stale philosophical chestnut into a crisp scientific claim? (¶2)
DH: “… This rejoinder misses a point of logic and a matter of fact.
First logic: if we can’t test the claim that a peach does not exist when no one looks, then we can’t test the opposite and widely held claim that it does exist.
Both claims posit what happens when no one observes. (¶4)
Why? How does Hoffman figure that?
Because we’re composing the image in our minds, he claims the object must not exist?
What’s logical about that?
Hoffman never does explain, we’re expected to take his word for it.
