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Interview with author (2016): https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionar
by blacksqr 7y ago
Interview with author (2016):
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...
"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..."
* But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world? *
"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."
* The world is just other conscious agents? *
"I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view."
- blacksqr 7y agoI think the gist of his argument is not that no external objective reality exists, but that it is fundamentally impossible using his model of perception to distinguish an "external reality" from a discrete network of other conscious agents, of arbitrary complexity and number. Both would fit the mathematical definition of "W" in his formulation.
- core-questions 7y agoTimothy Leary phrased the same thing better a few decades ago as "Any reality is an opinion".
- joycian 7y agoAs soon as the article started mixing in the quantum mechanics quotes, my eyes glazed over and I stopped reading. Do people really get something out of these kinds of articles?
- Viliam1234 7y agoHumans seem to have a strong desire to see magic. At the same time, scientifically educated people feel ashamed for this desire. The solution for them is to find magic that isn't obviously magic, so they can pretend it is something else. The popular solution is to use something scientifically sounding, but out of original context. These days "quantum physics" is popular; hundred years ago it would be "magnetism"; and of course "energy" never goes out of fashion.
- empath75 7y agoSeems like you can can replace quite a lot of things fairly arbitrarily -- you can replace X with some learning computer algorithm, and W with a simulation.