Donald Hoffman on the Space Time Quandry
Anyone who is curious about the origin of the univese should listen to Donald Hoffman, but beware. What you understand right now will be slapped upside the head. Proceed with caution.
"So, by material, I think of objects in space and time. Physicists such as David Gross and Nima Arkani Hamed are now telling us that space-time is doomed. By that they mean space-time is not fundamental. And they're not just throwing up their hands and giving up. Physicists have now found structures beyond space-time like the positive Grassmannian and the amplituhedron. This is all new. It has only been in the last ten years that they have, for example, had the amplituhedron but the idea that space and time and objects like bosons, leptons and quarks particles and so forth are fundamental is now no longer the received opinion. There's something deeper like the amplituhedron and beyond that something called a decorated permutation. So, the idea of reductionism is also doomed according to physicists like Nima Arkani Hamed. The idea that as we go to smaller and smaller scales in space and time we find more and more fundamental laws and more and more fundamental entities that are also dead. So I am not a pan-psychist in the sense that I don't want to try to put consciousness in the elementary particles because the physicists themselves tell us that space-time and the so-called elementary particles are doomed. We have to go entirely outside of space-time and attempting to put consciousness inside of particles or behind particles. We must have a much deeper framework. Now evolution by natural selection also agrees. This is work that I've done with some of my colleagues. It also agrees that our perceptions of space and time are not an insight into the nature of reality. They're merely an interface; an artifact of our perceptual sensory systems. There's a technical question: What is the probability that evolution would shape sensory systems to see any aspect of the structure of reality as it is? And it turns out the probability is precisely zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see any aspect of the structure of objective reality. So evolution and the physicists agree space-time is doomed and reductionism is doomed and so we have to look for a theory of consciousness outside of it. And I would agree with (others) that solipsism is not the answer either we needed a theory of consciousness that's not solipsistic."
Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and author of more than 90 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (W.W. Norton, 2000). He received his BA from UCLA in Quantitative Psychology and his Ph.D. from MIT in Computational Psychology. He joined the faculty of UC Irvine in 1983, where he is now a full professor in the departments of cognitive science, computer science and philosophy. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. He was chosen by students at UC Irvine to receive a campus-wide teaching award, and to be included in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers. Hoffman studies visual perception, visual attention and consciousness using mathematical models, computer simulations, and psychological experiments. His empirical research has led to new insights into how we perceive objects, colors and motion. His theoretical research has led to a “user interface” theory of perception—which proposes that natural selection shapes our perceptions not to report truth but simply to guide adaptive behavior. It has also led to a “conscious realism” theory of consciousness—which proposes a formal model of consciousness and the mind-body problem that takes consciousness as fundamental.
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