The Conscious Realism of Donald Hoffman

I know what you are thinking, Hoffman is a total flake, a fraud. But I've recently given his work a third glance or so, and it's not really as bad as his TED Talk sort of crap makes it out to be. He does still use some pretty extreme unjustified ontology, but the underlying idea, shorn of unnecessary monist propaganda, is quite compelling.

These short notes are just a first record, I will post follow-ups later as my impressions evolve. You can review Hoffman's body of work yourself, most of it is freely accessible, e.g., start here:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&qsp=2&q=donald+hoffman+consciousness&qst=ib

Donald Hoffman. Some think he's a genius,
others think he's a nutcase.

Note 1. Automatic "solution" of the Hard Problem

By taking consciousness as fundamental, Hoffman is not really solving the hard problem (what gives us qualae? WTH are qualia?) But he does usefully shift the problem to where (I think) it belongs. History will show (I believe) that the materialists were wrong, always wrong, and delusional, their basic strategy (if one can charitably call it that) is to sweep the Hard Problem away by denying the reality of qualia. Hoffman does something of an inverse, he is saying consciousness is what drives everything and what we think is "physical reality" is the true illusion. Unfortunately this does not explain what consciousness is, nor what qualia are. All we've done is a semantic game shift, instead of trying to build up consciousness from physics, we are now trying to construct physics from consciousness. A useful exercise? Maybe. It is certainly a new way to have some intellectual fun.

It is not clear to me that this shift gains us anything. Denialism of one form or another conveniently evades harder questions. I am pretty much against that sort of solution. The harder problem worth tackling is to put Interactionism on a more solid foundation. This is the idea that both consciousness and physical reality are "real" and the interaction between them is something interesting and profound.

From my perspective, monism is kind of stupid, or at least unhelpful. Everything interesting is interaction. Non-interaction is death (both in concrete and abstract terms!) If you want a monist ontology, you still need interaction to get anything useful. So it is largely semantic nonsense to think monism has any merit. Any time you have different things interacting you've given up monism. If you hand me a monist theory which has any kind of interaction, I can immediately dualize it. Take String Theory as an example: supposedly all elementary particles are strings and branes. But if they interact then any particular brane has different forms. Whether you regard two different forms as "the same stuff" or as "different things" by virtue of their different form, is pure semantics. To me, two different forms can be thought of as different realities, and so whether I choose to call this monism or some variety of dualism or pluralism is moot. Monism is either just plain wrong or a tautology. In other words, it is a meaningless view of ontology. Difference is the spice of life so-to-speak. By all means go ahead and think of "everything is branes" as your ontology for physics, it will do you no good until you admit distinctions, at a bare minimum open & closed strings for starters. There you've already lost pure monism.

I know this sounds like I'm being naïve. I know there is a virtue in the elegance of monism, but the point is just to note that it gets you nowhere. Sure, "all is strings" could be the case, but there is absolutely no good reason to suppose this at the outset, especially if you are doing philosophical ontology rather than hard physics. In physics it makes total sense to me to adopt monism as a working thesis. But why? It is not for any puritanical materialist reasons nor for phislophical purity, rather it is for pragmatic purposes of elegance and minimalism, or parsimony. The fewer objects your theory needs to deal with, usually the more useful it is, computationally and mathematically, at least up to a reasonable level. If you try to ridiculously par down your theory to less than what is minimally required, you will find your theory is simply inadequate, which is on the lunatic non-parsimonious side of minimalism. (Folks who want to build spacetime out of causal nets are in this category I suspect. But I respect their efforts, I do not wish to discourage them at all.)

Note 2. Mental Supremacy is as Close-minded as Physicalist Supremacy

Generally I have little patience for bigots, elitists and "supremacists" of any colour. I can appreciate Hoffman's desire to place consciousness at the centre of reality, but what is so frustrating about his supremacy attitude is that there is just no good reason for it. To place consciousness in the centre as a fundamental reality does not necessitate relegating physics to illusion.

What I think is valid enough, from a kind of philosophically agnostic and open-minded POV, is to recognize relative illusion. For example, transitory phenomena can be as real as a spark that gives you an electric shock, but once forgotten such things in some sense cease to exist. Transitory physical phenomena could be said to be "unreal", but by that we do not mean a supremacist sort of view that such things never existed or were hallucinations of the mind. What we might mean is that such things are merely relatively unimportant.

When you boil all things down, nothing we ever conceive is unreal. Thoughts are not unreal. But as far as they are transitory and contingent, then sure, you can think of them as of utterly minor importance and enjoying relative obscurity. Such things can be said to be "illusory" but one should perhaps not take an absolutist position and think of "illusion" as absolute non-existence. Indeed, to regard illusion and imagination as fiction is itself nonsensical. If I imagine a "thing" then it exists, at least fleetingly in my "minds eye". I do not require a theory of what "the mind's eye" is to know such things are real, however transitory and unimportant they may be in the grand scheme of things.

(I would love to have a theory of "the mind's eye" but it is more of a conceit than a spiritual virtue to think I will ever gain such a theory.)

In everyday parlance the words "fiction", "hallucination", "illusion" and the like, have a different meaning to what philosophers like Hoffman are really claiming. Hoffman is overtly trying to claim the physical world does not exist. When he claims physical reality is an illusion or hallucination of the mind, he is guilty of extremism. He means these realities do not exist, they really are unreal. And I do not buy this.

I can buy-in to the idea that much of what we perceive as "real" is hallucination of a kind. Our brain and mind make up our subjective reality from sensory data. That is pretty clear, and has been understood for decades, if not centuries. But the objective data are real, in my view, or at least it does little help to dismiss the clear common-sense notion that sensory data are real.

The problem with Hoffman's seemingly heretical opinions is that they lack any use. It does me no good to deny the reality of the external objective sensory data. Even if they are non-existent, the fact it works to me survival benefit pretty well to assume other people experience something similar to me, is worth taking seriously as evidence in an external reality.

For sure, that external reality can be transitory and almost unreal in essential nature, and there might be some underlying deeper consciously based reality, but nevertheless, supposing the external data are real is so useful we tread dangerous philosophical waters by blanketly denying such things are real.

Note 3. What is "Real"?

Just define what you mean! Give me a sensible definition and I can work with you. I'll give you mine, and we can go from there. If we fundamentally disagree then the solution is to invent a different lexicon, so that we are not using mere words to tread upon each other's ideas and opinions.

You don't have to be a Wittgensteinian incurious bastard. You do not have to be a Pinkerian or Dennettian denialist defeatist. That which we do not know or understand we should speak about! At great length! But from the POV of humility and desire to know, not from imagined vainglorious intellectual superiority.

Note 4. What Hoffman Might Be Getting Right

Edging more into gross personal opinion, I think Hoffman does a good service in shedding some light on philosophical problems of materialism. In some ways Hoffman is not doing too much more than rejuvenating Idealism. It is however a useful sort of re-formulation of Idealism. He is using psychology and vision science to point out some very important flaws in physical materialism. This is very useful. If nothing else, it is forcing materialists to defend their philosophical positions, and when they do so it can be quite comical and laughable. Hoffman often comes across as the saner person!

You can construct a rock out of your pure conscious mind, imagine stubbing your toe on it, and experience pain! I've done so. But it takes an awful lot of paradoxically mental anti-effort, in fact, it is so hard to do that you cannot do it (stub your toe painfully on an imagined rock) by direct focus. It takes some dreaming and altered conscious states (it really is extremely difficult, and I cannot repeat the process all that easily, and I frankly do not wish to, there is an element of tediousness and a sense of wasted time in doing so). However, if you have good dream recall, you probably have had similar such experiences. When I dream lucidly these types of painful or emotional experiences can be quite acute, and it is "less effort" to have these imagined experiences through dreaming, the only problem being there seems less conscious control involved.

The weird thing, if you take Hoffman too seriously, is that a "normal rock" that you, I, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker all perceive, must, according to Hoffman, be a shared mental construct. How the hell does that work?

Well, if we all share existence in some Mindspace then it is not hard to see abstractly how shared mental experiences can lead to the full-blown impression that physical science can appear too be dealing with absolute external objective reality, while nothing of the sort is true, it is all just shared mental construct.

The problem is, we are then back to playing silly semantic games. If we all share the exact same mental construct, then by golly that thing we all hallucinate as real is practically real, and external, and objective, by definition.

Shared subjective states are by definition "external objective and real".

All we are now doing is redefining physical reality as a subset of a shared Mindspace. That does not advance us very far in either science or philosophy, because although redefinitions can matter, good ones that is, this is not such a great re-definition. To be of importance it should have some new consequences other than just a, "Wow, that blows my mind!"

I appreciate that sounds a bit snobbish and "utilitarian" prejudiced. Maybe it is? Yet I have plenty of soft spots for Idealism, and yes, I find utilitarianism one of those elitist snobby ideas. Not without all merit, but snobbish nonetheless. I do like the idea that we should look for use in all things, but I also like the idea that people need to be free to not have to seek utility all the time. Just as in a healthy economy not all things should be made for-profit, in healthy philosophy and life not all things need to be forced to have utility value.

What's my current take on Hoffman's ideas?

• It is worth exploring a non-physical basis for consciousness.
• Biological determinism is an elitist charade. Some things have a physical-biological basis, but not all things need have.
• One way (that so far very, very few philosophers have considered, in fact I do not know that any have) that non-physical reality can have causal physical influence is through closed time-like curves (CTC's).
• CTC's could exist on the Planck scale, and have in fact been conjectured as a possible mechanism for quantum entanglement (The ER=EPR Conjecture).
• If CTC's can exist in spacetime, then signals from macroscopic processes can propagate backwards (or forwards, both) in time.
• Thus, at a fundamental level, large objects can have causal influence over the physical micro-scale.
• Thus, we do not need to deploy Hoffman's consciousness extremism to suppose that our conscious minds can exercise causal influence over matter.
• This completely shatters the classical Mind-Body problems identified by physicalism, of the kind discussed at length by the likes of David Chalmers and Jaegwon Kim.
• We do not require Hoffman's radicalism to believe in coexistence of mental and physical realms. They are totally compatible ontologies. Philosophers who think mind and matter are incompatible just lack sufficient depth of thought (or carry too many prejudices).
• If we also take spacetime as sensible, and not necessarily emergent, then the 4D Block Universe gives us a very nice picture wherein conscious mental reality is not emergent on top of physics, but co-creative with physics. The difference between the mental (thought, free will, etc) and the physical (electrons, photons etc) is not so much to do with ontology, but rather more to do with scale and interaction kind: electrons and photons interact in very elementary ways, while minds interact in far more complex ways. (Emergent spacetime theory is a philoosphical distraction I think, it might pan out in some way, but whatever is emergent is nonetheless real.)
• Do our collective minds hallucinate a reality to electrons and photons? Maybe. But if so, there is no practical distinction between this and supposing electrons and photons are objective external realities. And in Hoffman's ideology, supposing something is real makes it real, so we end up going around in circles. My take is: electrons are real, mind is real, and they have different ontological qualities. Our great privilege as a species is to explore what these differences can be.

That's all for today.