Weirdness Under the Hood

Writing this one has taken several starts before I figured out how to approach it. Probably over a year ago I had run across cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman on a podcast, and his ideas about reality struck me pretty hard, and that coincided with where I was in my thinking at the time. I had just written about eternalism, and honestly I don’t even remember what I was reading at the time that put me onto that, but my idea was that reality was an analog recording, and people are only active on a small slice of it, kind of like a vinyl record. Hoffman talks about how all of the physics we see in our slice are merely manifestations of some deeper reality, a reality that is not directly accessible. What we experience, our “reality”, comes through a small window of perception that Darwinian evolution crafted for us, and evolution crafted us to survive long enough to reproduce. Our perceptions are tuned to survival, what Hoffman calls fitness payoffs. Perception is not tuned to truth, just survival, so what we end up with is a kind of graphical user interface, a GUI. Hoffman means this quite literally. Nothing about a human’s perception deals with direct reality.

So, let that idea rattle around in your mind for a while, and the first place I went was, well, what about this couch over here, this brown one. Is Hoffman saying that it isn’t actually there, or that I’m only seeing a representation of it, and there’s some deeper more fundamental couch that I just cannot see, and so I try to imagine the fundamental couch, and I can’t do it at all. I walked around for weeks thinking about that. I’d look at a stainless steel pot and think about it’s lattice of iron and cobalt atoms, wondering what I’m supposed to make of atoms now. Throw in dark matter, that something like 80% of the universe is inaccessible to us, and a picture starts to emerge. There’s a physics that seems to define the conditions in which biological entities can exist, and that physics seems to be nested, or maybe emergent, from a deeper physics, a physics outside of our evolved perceptions, something that we can only stab at while wearing a blindfold.

So what? An explanation that dethrones spacetime as foundational to reality doesn’t change anything for us here on the ground. It doesn’t matter if reality is deeper outside of our perceptions. Spacetime is our reality. Hold on, though, because this is where Hoffman’s actual area of expertise comes into play. This is where Hoffman talks about the hard problem of consciousness. For Hoffman, human consciousness is a foundational component of reality itself. That makes us curious creatures, indeed. We’re the creatures that exist as evolved talking apes in spacetime, but because we cannot account for consciousness (the hard problem), we got this feature that is part of the infinite.

The hard problem of consciousness is to me a bit tricky to grasp. How do we define consciousness? Right away I know it’s at least going to be slippery and hard to pin down. What makes me conscious? But I want to say that I always get struck right away that consciousness might not be as important as we think it is. If it just means self awareness, then I think other species also have that to varying degrees, which leads me to think that consciousness is degrees of awareness, and that there’s limits on how aware one can be. The hard problem has plenty of assumptions built into it. What is my experience of consciousness? I am aware of myself, but again, only to degrees. There’s entire regions of myself that are inaccessible to me. I will never really know myself, and I don’t really even know what that means. The hard problem is finding the link between the wet-ware that is our brains, our neurons and synapses, and our experience of the world. When I see a keyboard, I don’t have a literal keyboard in my brain, but a representation of that keyboard, and to me it seems totally real and okay, but how does that happen? We have no idea. None. That’s the hard problem.

I have a hard time trying to grant Hoffman his consciousness-is-fundamental, and I think that’s because I’m convinced by evolutionary theory that humans have emerged from these biological systems, that there’s nothing special about us, but I haven’t even mentioned quantum effects, the double-slit experiment, how observation itself seems to play a role in the structures of reality. The double-slit shows that particles behave based on observation. This is where we get into particle/wave duality, locality/non-locality, wave functions, and a lot of stuff like that. Hoffman tied his horse to the locality, that quantum theory shows locality isn’t a real thing, and that means what you think it means, that things are not tied to points in space, which is our experience of things. When I put my documents in a safe, I expect them to be there when I look for them next week, or next year, but quantum theory tells me that those documents are not there until I look for them, that they are not “there”, that unobserved those documents become waves which only fix themselves into points when someone looks.

But again, so what? Ever notice that the double-slit has been around for a long time and it isn’t relevant to daily life? No one ever talks about it. No one is seriously worried that his coat won’t re-materialize when he goes to put it on. But I would say that if consciousness could ever been mapped or expressed in mathematics, it seems to me that that has to emerge in some way from quantum theory, that consciousness is quantum. But, Hoffman would say that quantum theory is also emergent from spacetime. This is what people call reductionism, that deeper realities are found in the small places. Hoffman seems to think reductionism is ultimately going to be a dead end, because it is still probing only our particular slice of a much larger record.

Weird things are going on under the hood, but when I boil it down to something manageable I get that people are aware of the observer effect. We are conscious that observations have an effect on reality, and that points to something going on that we do not understand, perhaps something more fundamental and closer to the universal.

Just randomly: if locality is bullshit, is there a way to utilize that so we can start beaming places? I can’t even imagine how that would work, which is kind of a point I’m making here, that I keep running into, that there’s probably hard boundaries on our slice that we simply cannot cross. We’ll never beam anywhere, for example, because beaming actually assumes locality, which isn’t real. It assumes two physical points, in other words. Probably the only way to traverse spacetime is by using the physics of spacetime, but then again, maybe there’s backdoors. I’m pretty much just slipping into a stream-of-consciousness right now, so I might as well end it here.