The optical illusion jpg at the beginning of the article is worth looking at <a href="https://www.socsci.uci.edu/files/news_events/2019/opticalillusion_880.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.socsci.uci.edu/files/news_events/2019/opticalill...</a>
Interview with author (2016):<p><a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...</a><p>"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..."<p>* But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world? *<p>"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."<p>* The world is just other conscious agents? *<p>"I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view."
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.<p>An unknowable unknown is a huge variable to ignore<p>Considering there are species that cannot comprehend reality as we humans perceive it,is this too far fetched of a hypothesis?
A more "mathematical" definition of Hoffman's theory is described in this paper.<p><a href="http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanTime.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanTime.pdf</a>
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>not</i> move. The illusion of movement seems to be caused by saccades, and I’ve practiced preventing my eyes from doing that.
> Perception may not be reality<p>From a compression perspective, of course it is not ...how else would you model your environment?<p>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.<p>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.<p>if “everything you experience is just action potentials in the brain” sets one near to existential terror, should one avoid reading this article?
Url changed from <a href="https://neurosciencenews.com/visual-reality-14590/" rel="nofollow">https://neurosciencenews.com/visual-reality-14590/</a>, which points to this (but doesn't link to it).<p>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 <i>activity</i>".<p>There's no mention of any "neural AC" in the article anywhere...