9 ms·

I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems like a misdirection. Given the information in the article, it's impossible to eval

I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems like a misdirection. Given the information in the article, it's impossible to evaluate his claims--we don't have access to the computer models he uses, or the expertise to evaluate his proofs. But there are a lot of gigantic red flags all throughout. Like when he says he's mathematically proved that "an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness." But what it means to "see reality as it is" is exactly what's in question! How could he possibly create a mathematical proof of a concept that lacks a definition? This gets even more blatant when he suggests, toward the end, that he's "postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives." But that would mean that "seeing reality as it is" isn't even a coherent concept! If experience itself makes up reality, how could one's experiences not correspond to reality? The guy is a crank. What he's arguing is a shoddy version of vitalism, dressed up in jargon.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>"an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness Hmm, I'm curious about this. No animal can see high energy gamma radiation and other dangerous radiation sources, but the human can detect them with tools. That means the better detector of reality will always have a higher fitness level (we can avoid Chernobyl's radiation 10,000 years from now after its long forgotten) but animals won't. A lot of good having 10 babies is if they all succumb to radiation poisoning before they can reproduce, or have mutations that make them less fit in other ways. We can extend this to other ways like detecting disease early, seeing microrganinisms, etc. Clearly fitness is tied with some level of reality detection, at least for advanced tool using species like ours. That said, there's nothing wrong with the idea that we might be a simulation in a larger reality or many simulations down. Penrose may not be getting his point accross well, but that idea is philosophically sound. I don't think he's any sort of crank. He may be playing up the whole "I can model the universe to show you its really a virtual machine" but that's its own sort of mathematical solipsism imo. He does make many good points about perception, relatively, etc. Its not the usual "hey guise, quantum physics means magic is true" crap you see on the internet. The problem is we don't know if its even possible to detect if we're being virtualized. The funny thing is that for most/all of humanity's existence this was an assumption; the world was fake or at least a temporary placeholder and the true reality was some type of spiritualism/heavenly realms. Interesting that we're going back to that in a round-about way. I'm glad someone is taking this hypothesis seriously. Detecting if we are virtualized is just as important, as say, SETI. People used to laugh at SETI. Why are we laughing at this?
nikdaheratik 10y ago
I think what he's trying to express may have some value, but I agree that he's misreading quantum physics in a number of ways to try and use it to prop up his philosophical ideas. The observer affecting the outcome of the experiment is an interesting property of quantum physics, but it only affects very small objects that have reached the point where they are almost at the edge of perceptible reality. And it really has nothing to do with consciousness or anything else he was putting across in the interview. And of course, since the person doing the interview hasn't even read basic pop-science stuff on this kind of physics, the guy doesn't get called out on this.
- colordrops 10y ago
  I hear your argument against these sorts of quantum physics inspired models of consciousness, but I could never understand them. Since you imply a greater understanding of quantum physics than the author, perhaps you could help me answer these questions: If properties like non-locality, position uncertainty, etc are real at the small scale, how are they not real at the large scale? Isn't the macroscopic world just a large number of these oddly behaving particles averaging out into emergent forms and behaviors? And arent these macroscopic forms and behaviors no more real than tiger depicted on a computer screen, which is really just a conglomeration of pixels? Or is there some special aspect of the universe that exists at the macroscopic level and not the small scale?
bsmith89 10y ago
An evolutionary argument like the one he uses is _always_ a big, stinky, red flag.
- noahlt 10y ago
  The way you say this makes it sounds like you have examples of times when evolutionary arguments have been used in the past. I'd love to hear some examples.
  - trgn 10y ago
    Women go to the bathroom together because in our hunter gatherer days roaming the Savannah, if you squatted to pee you couldn't see a predator coming in the long grass. So you needed somebody to stand up on the lookout. And if evolutionary psychology is not your style, here's a take on the selfish gene. The purpose of the human organism is for shit to make more shit. (btw, these were just jokes, I don't think anybody makes these in earnest)
    - jfoutz 10y ago
      I like the corn model myself. corn found the most powerful military in the world, and integrated itself tightly into that nations political system. So not only is corn cared for, grown and harvested at a level far beyond a lawn, but it's also powerfully defended politically and militarily.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    trgn is talking about "just-so stories" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
  - gohrt 10y ago
    http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Common_criticisms_of_evolutionary_psychology http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Common_... http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431 http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/d...
jcfrei 10y ago
I think you are being a bit pedantic here. His example merely demonstrated that if consciousness is a function of reality (and for the sake of his example he more or less explicitly makes the assumption that there is an observer independent reality) it can be either optimized on how closely it matches said reality OR how much that function helps survival. So if you assume that there is an observer independent reality the projection of that (consciousness) function will most likely divert from reality (at least that's the argument Hoffman makes). Needless to say that if you assume that there is no observer independent reality then a whole lot of questions about perception become moot (ie. everybody sees what he wants/can).
- maldusiecle 10y ago
  > His example merely demonstrated that if consciousness is a function of reality (and for the sake of his example he more or less explicitly makes the assumption that there is an observer independent reality) it can be either optimized on how closely it matches said reality OR how much that function helps survival. Right, I got that. My point is that in order to define what it is to "match reality," you have to already have a theory of mind and consciousness. Think of what he says just after that: > For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality. This already has so much baggage to unpack that it's ludicrous. An organism which "sees" red or green already has consciousness--it's converting nerve stimuli into symbols which it interprets. An unconscious being wouldn't see a color, it would simply react. But let's say you do already have "consciousness." In that case, why is it necessarily going to be more complex to map the stimuli to "red" or "green" within consciousness, instead of prior to consciousness? For all we know, it'd be simpler to do the mapping within consciousness (put another way: to map the stimuli "consciously," or to be "conscious" of the mapping). To know which is more complex, we'd have to have a clear idea of what consciousness is, and how it works at a biological level. (I don't think the metaphors I'm using here are accurate descriptions of how the mind works, incidentally. They're not much more than "just-so" stories. My point is that you have to have some kind of idea of what consciousness is before you can say things about a "function" which can "match said reality.")
onli 10y ago
> I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems like a misdirection. Because it is. It is the usual physics-inspired pseudophilosophical blabla without any real grounding in philosophy, physics or intelligent thought. It caters to the "intellectual" esoteric wishing for a meta-universe, for some kind of god, for something apart from reality. It is rubbish, and on the same level as the ted-talk of the lunatic claiming to have found the perpetuum mobile and faster than light travel thanks to some circle-based mathematics given to him by his enlightened professor. At the same time funny, sad and highly annoying if it comes up on places like here.
- acqq 10y ago
  Somebody can also check who this "scientist" really is. Those making such claims often represent themselves as much more qualified than they really are. The claims in the article are annoyingly unscientific.
  - JackFr 10y ago
    You can too if you have access to a "web-browser". His PhD is from MIT, and he's been a full professor at UC Irvine for 25+ years, publishing pretty continuously. Lots of papers online.
    - acqq 10y ago
      I haven't had the time before. And I stand to my claims. Searching for his CV didn't help: now I forced me through both his CV and this article. He didn't study physics but "Computational Psychology."(1) And sadly it shows: Everything "quantum" he mentions in the article is simply invalid, easy to see for anybody with enough knowledge of physics. Quantum randomness occurs on different scales than where he tries to involve it. Where he doesn't involve "quantum" the claims sound better. The sad part is that he certainly had the chance to consult with the physicists. Why he haven't had, of if he had, why he ignored it, I don't know. 1) http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/media/pdf/donald-hoffman-vita.pdf http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/media/pdf/donald-hoffman-vita....
xlm1717 10y ago
It's an article edited for lay audiences. It is for people who don't have the expertise to evaluate his proofs. You can look up his research, though, if you want. If you have an expert friend you can have that friend explain it to you. You can find a list of his publications here: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/ http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/ This is one of his papers that quantifies the ideas he talks about in the article: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf In the paper, he does define what he means by "see reality as it is".
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  I get suspicious when some proof is so complex it must be mediated by an expert. I think the burden is on the prover to make their case, rather than on the audience to understand the case.
  - jcfrei 10y ago
    From your argument I take that you are very suspicious of quantum mechanics as well?
    - jackcosgrove 10y ago
      Your use of the word "very" is a giveaway that you're being snarky. I am definitely suspicious of scientists who act as the truth authority, and cast aspersions on lay people who don't understand their proofs. That attitude is antithetical to the spirit of science, which encourages skepticism and the democratization of thought.
      - selectron 10y ago
        Science is about reaching an expert consensus of the most probably explanation of the available evidence. It is not a democratization of thought - it is evidence that matters not majority opinion or vote of scientists. More generally, it takes a lifetime of study to truly understand even a small aspect of physics. How can you expect someone to explain a lifetime of study in an article for lay people without glossing over the details? I trust the opinions of one physics professor about quantum mechanics much more than 1 million lay people.
JackFr 10y ago
I think 'crank' may be overstating it. His PhD is from MIT, and he's been a full professor at UC Irvine for 25+ years, publishing pretty continuously. While that certainly doesn't mean he's right -- plenty of people accept that Penrose is a genius who is wrong about certain ideas. I think dismissing this guy as a crank is not the best way to disagree.
- maldusiecle 10y ago
  Apologies, I should have used a better phrase. Although I still think he fits the dictionary definition of the word ("an eccentric person, especially one who is obsessed by a particular subject or theory."), I can see how it might be interpreted as more demeaning than that. I stand by my opinion that the ideas expressed in this interview are bizarre and incoherent. Then again, many very well-educated and well-credentialed people have held weird ideas about the mind.
noir-york 10y ago
Agreed. When I see such arguments I immediately become skeptical because I start seeing a political argument being made, or at least, an argument driven by political leanings. When I say political, I do not mean party political, but generally being on the left side of the spectrum. I've known enough philosophers who do their level best to bring science down a peg, seeing it as power struggle between the different ways of "knowing" Think postmodernism and the quest to relativise everything.
- aklemm 10y ago
  What exactly does "relativise everything" mean? It seems possibly like a straw man.
colordrops 10y ago
> crank Using labels and insults should almost always be avoided. Attack a person's arguments, not their personality. I'm sure you've heard it before, but this is called "ad hominem". Personal attacks and labels are a cheap and easy way to associate your target with a social stigma, immediately biasing others' opinions, whether deserved or not. "crank" isn't much better than "conspiracy theorist" or "libtard" or "moron".
- Houshalter 10y ago
  That is not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is "this person is a crank, therefore their argument is wrong". What OP is saying is "their argument is wrong, therefore they are a crank", which is a valid argument.
  - colordrops 10y ago
    Being wrong does not directly lead to being a "crank", whatever that means, and the poster did not demonstrate anything beyond that he thought the author was mistaken. Let's be honest - the poster called him a crank because the topic is one the the poster finds distasteful. There was no clear proof of him being a crank. Ironically, the poster is guilty of the same thing the author is being accused of, which is poor reasoning about a thesis.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      There's no solid definition on what makes one a crank, but this does feel very cranky. It's more than just being "wrong", it's being "not even wrong". Saying things that are nonsense and incoherent.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Being wrong in particular ways is the definition of being a crank. I see no evidence of poor reasoning by the poster.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>"an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness Hmm, I'm curious about this. No animal can see high energy gamma radiation and other dangerous radiation sources, but the human can detect them with tools. That means the better detector of reality will always have a higher fitness level (we can avoid Chernobyl's radiation 10,000 years from now after its long forgotten) but animals won't. A lot of good having 10 babies is if they all succumb to radiation poisoning before they can reproduce, or have mutations that make them less fit in other ways. We can extend this to other ways like detecting disease early, seeing microrganinisms, etc. Clearly fitness is tied with some level of reality detection, at least for advanced tool using species like ours. That said, there's nothing wrong with the idea that we might be a simulation in a larger reality or many simulations down. Penrose may not be getting his point accross well, but that idea is philosophically sound. I don't think he's any sort of crank. He may be playing up the whole "I can model the universe to show you its really a virtual machine" but that's its own sort of mathematical solipsism imo. He does make many good points about perception, relatively, etc. Its not the usual "hey guise, quantum physics means magic is true" crap you see on the internet. The problem is we don't know if its even possible to detect if we're being virtualized. The funny thing is that for most/all of humanity's existence this was an assumption; the world was fake or at least a temporary placeholder and the true reality was some type of spiritualism/heavenly realms. Interesting that we're going back to that in a round-about way. I'm glad someone is taking this hypothesis seriously. Detecting if we are virtualized is just as important, as say, SETI. People used to laugh at SETI. Why are we laughing at this?

nikdaheratik 10y ago

I think what he's trying to express may have some value, but I agree that he's misreading quantum physics in a number of ways to try and use it to prop up his philosophical ideas. The observer affecting the outcome of the experiment is an interesting property of quantum physics, but it only affects very small objects that have reached the point where they are almost at the edge of perceptible reality. And it really has nothing to do with consciousness or anything else he was putting across in the interview. And of course, since the person doing the interview hasn't even read basic pop-science stuff on this kind of physics, the guy doesn't get called out on this.

colordrops 10y ago
I hear your argument against these sorts of quantum physics inspired models of consciousness, but I could never understand them. Since you imply a greater understanding of quantum physics than the author, perhaps you could help me answer these questions: If properties like non-locality, position uncertainty, etc are real at the small scale, how are they not real at the large scale? Isn't the macroscopic world just a large number of these oddly behaving particles averaging out into emergent forms and behaviors? And arent these macroscopic forms and behaviors no more real than tiger depicted on a computer screen, which is really just a conglomeration of pixels? Or is there some special aspect of the universe that exists at the macroscopic level and not the small scale?

bsmith89 10y ago

An evolutionary argument like the one he uses is _always_ a big, stinky, red flag.

noahlt 10y ago
The way you say this makes it sounds like you have examples of times when evolutionary arguments have been used in the past. I'd love to hear some examples.
- trgn 10y ago
  Women go to the bathroom together because in our hunter gatherer days roaming the Savannah, if you squatted to pee you couldn't see a predator coming in the long grass. So you needed somebody to stand up on the lookout. And if evolutionary psychology is not your style, here's a take on the selfish gene. The purpose of the human organism is for shit to make more shit. (btw, these were just jokes, I don't think anybody makes these in earnest)
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    I like the corn model myself. corn found the most powerful military in the world, and integrated itself tightly into that nations political system. So not only is corn cared for, grown and harvested at a level far beyond a lawn, but it's also powerfully defended politically and militarily.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  trgn is talking about "just-so stories" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story
- gohrt 10y ago
  http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Common_criticisms_of_evolutionary_psychology http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology#Common_... http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431 http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/d...

jcfrei 10y ago

I think you are being a bit pedantic here. His example merely demonstrated that if consciousness is a function of reality (and for the sake of his example he more or less explicitly makes the assumption that there is an observer independent reality) it can be either optimized on how closely it matches said reality OR how much that function helps survival. So if you assume that there is an observer independent reality the projection of that (consciousness) function will most likely divert from reality (at least that's the argument Hoffman makes). Needless to say that if you assume that there is no observer independent reality then a whole lot of questions about perception become moot (ie. everybody sees what he wants/can).

maldusiecle 10y ago
> His example merely demonstrated that if consciousness is a function of reality (and for the sake of his example he more or less explicitly makes the assumption that there is an observer independent reality) it can be either optimized on how closely it matches said reality OR how much that function helps survival. Right, I got that. My point is that in order to define what it is to "match reality," you have to already have a theory of mind and consciousness. Think of what he says just after that: > For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction exists in reality. This already has so much baggage to unpack that it's ludicrous. An organism which "sees" red or green already has consciousness--it's converting nerve stimuli into symbols which it interprets. An unconscious being wouldn't see a color, it would simply react. But let's say you do already have "consciousness." In that case, why is it necessarily going to be more complex to map the stimuli to "red" or "green" within consciousness, instead of prior to consciousness? For all we know, it'd be simpler to do the mapping within consciousness (put another way: to map the stimuli "consciously," or to be "conscious" of the mapping). To know which is more complex, we'd have to have a clear idea of what consciousness is, and how it works at a biological level. (I don't think the metaphors I'm using here are accurate descriptions of how the mind works, incidentally. They're not much more than "just-so" stories. My point is that you have to have some kind of idea of what consciousness is before you can say things about a "function" which can "match said reality.")

onli 10y ago

> I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems like a misdirection. Because it is. It is the usual physics-inspired pseudophilosophical blabla without any real grounding in philosophy, physics or intelligent thought. It caters to the "intellectual" esoteric wishing for a meta-universe, for some kind of god, for something apart from reality. It is rubbish, and on the same level as the ted-talk of the lunatic claiming to have found the perpetuum mobile and faster than light travel thanks to some circle-based mathematics given to him by his enlightened professor. At the same time funny, sad and highly annoying if it comes up on places like here.

acqq 10y ago
Somebody can also check who this "scientist" really is. Those making such claims often represent themselves as much more qualified than they really are. The claims in the article are annoyingly unscientific.
- JackFr 10y ago
  You can too if you have access to a "web-browser". His PhD is from MIT, and he's been a full professor at UC Irvine for 25+ years, publishing pretty continuously. Lots of papers online.
  - acqq 10y ago
    I haven't had the time before. And I stand to my claims. Searching for his CV didn't help: now I forced me through both his CV and this article. He didn't study physics but "Computational Psychology."(1) And sadly it shows: Everything "quantum" he mentions in the article is simply invalid, easy to see for anybody with enough knowledge of physics. Quantum randomness occurs on different scales than where he tries to involve it. Where he doesn't involve "quantum" the claims sound better. The sad part is that he certainly had the chance to consult with the physicists. Why he haven't had, of if he had, why he ignored it, I don't know. 1) http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/media/pdf/donald-hoffman-vita.pdf http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/media/pdf/donald-hoffman-vita....

xlm1717 10y ago

It's an article edited for lay audiences. It is for people who don't have the expertise to evaluate his proofs. You can look up his research, though, if you want. If you have an expert friend you can have that friend explain it to you. You can find a list of his publications here: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/ http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/ This is one of his papers that quantifies the ideas he talks about in the article: http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf In the paper, he does define what he means by "see reality as it is".

jackcosgrove 10y ago
I get suspicious when some proof is so complex it must be mediated by an expert. I think the burden is on the prover to make their case, rather than on the audience to understand the case.
- jcfrei 10y ago
  From your argument I take that you are very suspicious of quantum mechanics as well?
  - jackcosgrove 10y ago
    Your use of the word "very" is a giveaway that you're being snarky. I am definitely suspicious of scientists who act as the truth authority, and cast aspersions on lay people who don't understand their proofs. That attitude is antithetical to the spirit of science, which encourages skepticism and the democratization of thought.
    - selectron 10y ago
      Science is about reaching an expert consensus of the most probably explanation of the available evidence. It is not a democratization of thought - it is evidence that matters not majority opinion or vote of scientists. More generally, it takes a lifetime of study to truly understand even a small aspect of physics. How can you expect someone to explain a lifetime of study in an article for lay people without glossing over the details? I trust the opinions of one physics professor about quantum mechanics much more than 1 million lay people.

JackFr 10y ago

I think 'crank' may be overstating it. His PhD is from MIT, and he's been a full professor at UC Irvine for 25+ years, publishing pretty continuously. While that certainly doesn't mean he's right -- plenty of people accept that Penrose is a genius who is wrong about certain ideas. I think dismissing this guy as a crank is not the best way to disagree.

maldusiecle 10y ago
Apologies, I should have used a better phrase. Although I still think he fits the dictionary definition of the word ("an eccentric person, especially one who is obsessed by a particular subject or theory."), I can see how it might be interpreted as more demeaning than that. I stand by my opinion that the ideas expressed in this interview are bizarre and incoherent. Then again, many very well-educated and well-credentialed people have held weird ideas about the mind.

noir-york 10y ago

Agreed. When I see such arguments I immediately become skeptical because I start seeing a political argument being made, or at least, an argument driven by political leanings. When I say political, I do not mean party political, but generally being on the left side of the spectrum. I've known enough philosophers who do their level best to bring science down a peg, seeing it as power struggle between the different ways of "knowing" Think postmodernism and the quest to relativise everything.

aklemm 10y ago
What exactly does "relativise everything" mean? It seems possibly like a straw man.

colordrops 10y ago

> crank Using labels and insults should almost always be avoided. Attack a person's arguments, not their personality. I'm sure you've heard it before, but this is called "ad hominem". Personal attacks and labels are a cheap and easy way to associate your target with a social stigma, immediately biasing others' opinions, whether deserved or not. "crank" isn't much better than "conspiracy theorist" or "libtard" or "moron".

Houshalter 10y ago
That is not an ad hominem. An ad hominem is "this person is a crank, therefore their argument is wrong". What OP is saying is "their argument is wrong, therefore they are a crank", which is a valid argument.
- colordrops 10y ago
  Being wrong does not directly lead to being a "crank", whatever that means, and the poster did not demonstrate anything beyond that he thought the author was mistaken. Let's be honest - the poster called him a crank because the topic is one the the poster finds distasteful. There was no clear proof of him being a crank. Ironically, the poster is guilty of the same thing the author is being accused of, which is poor reasoning about a thesis.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    There's no solid definition on what makes one a crank, but this does feel very cranky. It's more than just being "wrong", it's being "not even wrong". Saying things that are nonsense and incoherent.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Being wrong in particular ways is the definition of being a crank. I see no evidence of poor reasoning by the poster.