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As someone who's been engaged in this topic (the nature of reality and consciousness) over the past 3 years, it's very surprising to see this comment on HN. As
by mekoka 2y ago
As someone who's been engaged in this topic (the nature of reality and consciousness) over the past 3 years, it's very surprising to see this comment on HN. As I've suggested in a past comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465928), this can potentially be one of the most transformative rabbit hole anyone can ever hope to enter.
It's been fascinating to observe the dichotomy between researchers who work on explaining consciousness, starting from a physicalist/materialist perspective, slowly being convinced away from that intuition with iron clad arguments, while laypeople lean further into it, deluded by what they perceive to be signs of it from recent AI progress.
Among former materialist academics that I expect to see publications from a more affirmed idealist position in the next 5 years, I count David Chalmers and Christof Koch. Perhaps Anil Seth too.
- Lerc 2y agoI hadn't encountered conscious agent theory before. I took a quick look and it seemed to be solipsism wearing a disguise. Can you elaborate how it distinguishes itself from solipsism in its arguments that it might be real? I found the evolutionary argument rather odd. The disconnect between perception and reality is pretty much the standard belief these days. Unless I'm reading it wrong it was making the claim that 'reality' is a non causal artifact of conscious entities but one that was caused by evolution, which seems contradictory.
- mekoka 2y agoSolipsism is skepticism of the existence of anything outside the self. I've seen Hoffman address accusations of solipsism a few times and I have to admit that it's always been unclear to me which part of his theory people tend to perceive as such. Perhaps I've just consumed enough of it to zoom past this perception. I'll try to keep things short, as this can get pretty long winded fast. From what I understand of his proposition, it's a take on idealism that is very close to eastern thought as inspired by nondual traditions like Advaita and Buddhism, but with a heavier emphasis on science. Everything in reality is a projection in consciousness of consciousness. It's made up of interacting conscious agents (you, me, a rock, an atom, a particle, etc) which are themselves "projections" ultimately stemming from a fundamental, unknowable, infinitely distant and unattainable root conscious agent. The implication is that space-time, our perceived reality, is not fundamental. Hoffman thinks that we might possibly have access to at least one, higher, more general dimension of reality of which ours is a specialized version (as hint of this, he speaks of current work in physics where structures outside space-time are being discovered, like the amplituhedron). Space and time not being fundamental creates problems with some materialist assumptions in evolutionary biology, where consciousness is seen as part of an evolutionary process. Hoffman suggests to rethink evolution from scratch instead. He uses evolutionary game theory to demonstrate that we can have consciousness as fundamental, keep some of the core evolution principles and still end up with consistent conclusions. I'll stop here, as I've said, it can get deep rather fast.
- ziofill 2y agoI don't think the amplituhedron should be given so much substance as a real structure beyond spacetime. It is a calculation tool.
- anon84873628 2y agoAre you really surprised? Threads like this make the front page every 3-4 months in various forms...