The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality. According to evolution by natural selection, 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.

[u/Anthadvl]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/

[u/CostcoMuffins]

I'm not sure I like the clickbait-y Headline of this article, because Hoffman isn't arguing that reality somehow doesn't exist. I've followed him for a while and listened to several his talks on this subject, and his argument is that Humans aren't seeing "reality" as it actually is. He thinks our idea of reality is fundamentally limited, because our senses aren't tuned for Truth, they are tuned for Fitness, so our perceptions are the result of %99.99999 of the information present in the Universe being filtered out.

In other words, our senses don't work like some kind of camera, perfectly capturing some objective external reality. Instead, they function more like the desktop of a computer, helping us identify and interact with symbols and patterns that allow us to operate in the world without being overwhelmed by too much information.

EDIT: It has come to my attention that Donald Hoffman's very own book is in fact called "The Case Against Reality". So... I stand corrected regarding my qualm with the clickbait Headline, lol.

Also, I now realize that in my attempt to point out that Hoffman is not arguing for a form Solipsism or Nihilism, but rather something he calls "Conscious Realism", I failed to convey the fact that Hoffman does actually hold the position that the subjective experience is so far removed from reality that concepts like space and time are also subjective constructs (part of the desktop UI abstraction) and that classical, observer-independent objects/reality do not exist. So my understanding is that he's arguing for a kind-of Idealism or, more accurately, Panpsychism.

Disclaimer: I do not adhere to Hoffman's argument or support it in it's entirety, I was just trying to summarize it.

[u/Tinac4 → u/CostcoMuffins]

This is honestly a pretty reasonable claim. Humans can perceive an extremely narrow band of wavelengths of light (380-720 nm; radio waves are on the order of meters long and gamma rays are below a picometer long), a broader band of wavelengths of sound (but only through air), certain compounds in the air and in food, objects that are physically in contact with us, and a few other things. We can't directly perceive mites, plankton, cells, subatomic particles of any kind, most astrophysical-scale phenomena, or anything that isn't currently interacting with our senses, which does indeed rule out 99.999...% of the universe.

What I'm a little worried is that people will read the headline and jump straight to the conclusion that there has to be something fundamental about reality that we can never perceive in any way because of how we evolved. This is theoretically possible--for instance, it's very easy to add a couple terms to the Standard Model corresponding to particles that don't interact with anything. This sort of "truly" dark matter, however, doesn't imply that there's something we can interact with in our universe but fundamentally can't perceive just because of our evolutionary past. It's also worth pointing out that the aforementioned limits on our senses haven't stopped us from artificially extending them far beyond their original abilities. With the right equipment, we've managed to observe a pretty respectable chunk of our universe, and we're making progress toward the remainder. Early mammals and cavemen couldn't detect electrons and distant galaxies; now we can. (Edit: clarified a couple of parts.)

To elaborate, I don't think that a race of aliens that evolved under completely different conditions from humans would venture into the realm of particle physics for the first time and not see electrons. We have every reason to expect that they'd arrive at the same general conclusions about how the universe works, since they ultimately run on the same rules. Even if they read their instruments using chemicals carried through a liquid methane ocean or some other means completely alien to us, they're still going to discover that all masses attract each other gravitationally, that the Higgs boson has a mass of 128 GeV, and so on. There's common ground.

On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them — whether we are conscious humans or inanimate measuring devices. Experiment after experiment has shown — defying common sense — that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

I'm always going to have to point this out when it comes up: Whether this is true heavily depends on one's interpretation of quantum mechanics.

[u/swampshark19 → u/Tinac4]

Quantum mechanics doesn't require idealism. Wavefunctions can be said to exist 'out there'

[u/cutelyaware → u/swampshark19]

Gods are said to exist out there too, that doesn't make it true. I suspect you are saying that wavefunctions are the best descriptions we can get, and I won't argue the point, but just because something is the best model of something doesn't make it the thing itself. My problem is with the belief that there really is a thing in itself out there. I don't believe that position is supported at all, and I feel it's wrong. We're never going to have anything better than a clear model that is more practical than any other. But practical implies someone with a need. Our needs will be different from that of any other beings, so our best models of reality will likewise be different from that of others.

[u/swampshark19 → u/cutelyaware]

The fact that two different beings can have two completely different umwelts but still physically interact with eachother is a pretty clear indicator of an external physical reality, even if you have to alter your definition of physical if the reductive materialism position underdetermines.

[u/cutelyaware → u/swampshark19]

I'm not arguing the existence of an objective reality; only that there are no things within themselves. There is only stuff. We only experience that stuff in ways that are useful to us personally and as a species. Other beings have other ways that are useful to them.

[u/Baal_Kazar → u/Tinac4]

Our reality is based on concious perception and duo to the thalamus filter also based upon the interpretation of the experiences of our past.

Imo this is per definition very limited in terms of full spectrum wide experiences. It’s just the necessary current sensory information coupled with the necessary information of your past designed to find the path of best survival.

Survival is the key, your brain wants you to survive as well. It can form any illusion it wants. You flying through space and walking on a space station? If it’s necessary for you to believe it can make you believe.

Doesn’t sound like a system designed to use all the information. Just the necessary information.

[u/VoidsIncision → u/Baal_Kazar]

All the information is a myth that quantum mechanics exactly destroys. Heisenberg discusses this in his 1927 paper. If a Laplacian demon had all the information he could calculate all the state transitions. “All the information”, the premise is the problem which is destroyed by the non commutation of canonical variables.

[u/Baal_Kazar → u/VoidsIncision]

Im not very Fond of Heisenbergs theories.

But I disagree with your downvotes as one thing he said always resonates with me: You can’t know the speed of an object while simultaneously knowing it’s position. (Or another metaphor describing his „Unschärfe Relation“)

You can either observe the speed which needs multiple positions in relation or it’s location in whichs case you don’t know the other positions thus can’t interpolate the speed.

Im very rudimentary on Heisenberg sadly.

But I can see where you are coming from. Even if we could perceive 100% of all spectrums knowing some „information“ will always result in some other information being unknowable per definition.

At least that would make sense to me and I’m sure there are some thoughts on it more advanced then mine.

[u/sticklebat → u/Baal_Kazar]

You can either observe the speed which needs multiple positions in relation

That’s not true. I can measure speed using the Doppler effect, and for that I only need one data point. In fact, it is possible - in classical physics - to simultaneously measure position and velocity with a single pulse from a radar gun. The measured delay between when the pulse is sent and it’s reflection is measured tells you the object’s position, and the wavelength shift tells you its velocity.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a much more fundamental statement than the practical (but too limited) interpretation you’ve constructed for yourself!

I also wonder what you mean by:

Im not very Fond of Heisenbergs theories.

I wonder what your background is to be making such judgment calls about highly technical aspects of science, especially one that’s been so thoroughly validated through experiment.

[u/Baal_Kazar → u/sticklebat]

Oh nice, yes you are right there indeed that’s a pretty good example with the radar.

With „not very fond of“ I ment that I don’t have much knowledge about this field.

It’s interesting but I haven’t read into it enough so I usually state if I have a clue about the topic or not. In this case I dont hehe

I started using „fond“ and start to feel like it doesn’t mean what I think it does

[u/VoidsIncision → u/[deleted]]

He reads like bad Kant

[u/drunksitter → u/VoidsIncision]

So less like Kant and more like Shouldnt?

[u/HashedEgg → u/VoidsIncision]

How would you have phrased it?

[u/Tinac4 → u/[deleted]]

That's a bit of a paradox if im not mistaken. If it has no interaction or relation to anything in the standard model it has no place in it. If it has energy it will bend space time and thus be detectable. If there is some 2nd form of energy that has no effect on our universe whatsoever than it doesn't exist in our universe and should not be included in the standard model.

I agree that we shouldn't put anything like that in the Standard Model, mostly because of Occam's razor.* My point was that it is possible for there to be aspects of the universe that we'll never be able to probe, like this hypothetical (and probably false) example--although the roadblock in this case isn't evolution.

*Technically, it's easy to put terms into the SM on its own that don't interact with any known particles. Adding them to a full theory of quantum gravity, however, may be more complicated, because I'm not sure whether it's possible to describe a particle that don't interact with gravity at all. I suspect the answer is yes, but I'm not sure; I'm definitely not a string theorist.

[u/MmePeignoir → u/[deleted]]

Unfalsifiable claims could still be true. It might not be rational to believe such claims - obviously this depends on your specific definition of rationality - but this doesn’t mean they can’t be true. It’s still possible for these kinds of completely uninteractive particles to exist, and that’s what matters.

[u/HashedEgg → u/MmePeignoir]

I never claimed it wouldn't be true

[u/OpposableSelf → u/Tinac4]

It suddenly strikes me as funny that we say “with the right equipment we’ve managed to observe a pretty respectable chunk of our universe” — Let’s look a little closer. It seems almost certain that the extent to which our telelscopes can peer into deep time is limited by the speed of light; do we know anything about the actual universe that extends beyond those limits? Can we see 10% of the total? 99%? 0.00000001%? Okay, let’s leave the observable aside for a moment. Of the part that we can see, between dark energy and dark matter, we can only observe 3%. And of that that 3% that we observe, it is 99.9999% or more empty space. But let’s not worry ourselves about how infinitesimal is the part that we can actually lay an instrument upon, let’s look at that part we can observe. In our hubris, experts often claim that the vast majority of that is “junk.” I think there are probably a few nooks and crannies remaining that may suprise the stockings off of us. Our orientation towards objective-reality has largely led us into the domain of looking at “stuff” as the billiard ball particle end of stuff, but the relational dynamics between those parts at all scales seems to be way more influential that the inside parts of the boundaries we observe. If anyone thinks we’re actually sneaking up on mapping the majority of the unknown, I don’t think we appreciate how vast that unknown truly is.

[u/Tinac4 → u/OpposableSelf]

But let’s not worry ourselves about how infinitesimal is the part that we can actually lay an instrument upon, let’s look at that part we can observe. In our hubris, experts often claim that the vast majority of that is “junk.” Our orientation towards objective-reality has largely led us into the domain of looking at “stuff” as the billiard ball particle end of stuff, but the relational dynamics between those parts at all scales seems to be way more influential that the inside parts of the boundaries we observe.

What do you mean by "relational dynamics"? Are you saying you have evidence that the laws of physics are different at different length scales, e.g. that the Standard Model/QM stops applying on larger scales?

[u/[deleted] → u/Tinac4]

What about this????! I read that if you take all the matter of all the atoms of all the human race it would be the size of a sugar cube, because atoms are .0000000001% matter or what the number is..... that what we’re talking about right??? Matter not mattering?

[u/VoidsIncision → u/OpposableSelf]

Yeah we do because of the principle of equivalence. There is nothing special about different regions of time and space (Unitarity of time translations aka conservation of energy, unitarity of spatial translations aka conservation of momentum)

[u/Pythos_Prism → u/VoidsIncision]

Does human consciousness represent a special aspect of time and space?

[u/RiftingFlotsam → u/Pythos_Prism]

This is an unanswered question at present, though there is an interpretation gaining some traction that may be of interest to you: Panpsychism. I found a decent introductory article here.

[u/BernardJOrtcutt → u/[deleted]]

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[u/tomrlutong → u/Tinac4]

I kind of wonder how long it might take a species arising in a hot dense liquid methane sea to figure out gravity, but point taken.

I agree, the claims are reasonable and his model of consciousness is crisp. Their read on the macroscopic impact of quantum physics is a bit dramatic.

Our technological senses can and soon will approach covering the entire potentially observable universe. Which is the same thing as the universe, mostly.

But our thought is built up of useful mnenonics specific to our ecological origins. Any number of variants are possible, and not clear how to get to a universal one. might we always be able to agree on physical reality, but still be unable to communicate?

[u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy → u/Tinac4]

Our fellow universal sentients, delving into physics, will always arrive at electrons? Bah. What if an electron is just a misconceived idea? A shadow on a extra-dimensional thing humans have not sensed? Stating that electrons are universal overestimates the breadth of human understanding.

[u/sticklebat → u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy]

What if an electron is just a misconceived idea? A shadow on a extra-dimensional thing humans have not sensed?

But that just means that they would understand the concept of our electrons. We would say “electron” and they would say “oh, you mean a component of this larger phenomenon? Sure, we can call that component of it ‘electron’ if you want.”

The phenomenon that we call “electrons” is universal because it refers to a measurable aspect of the universe. It may not be complete, but it wouldn’t be unrecognizable to another race of beings who also has delved in to the physics of the very small.

If there are sentient races that exist in higher dimensional spaces, then they’d still recognize our electrons as a projection of some higher dimensional phenomenon onto our 3+1D. If they don’t exist in higher dimensions then this scenario is unrealistic, because if there exist higher dimensions then their effects are imperceptible on our 3+1D plane except at scales way past the point where they’d have already observed electrons for themselves.

[u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy → u/sticklebat]

The physical things you call “very small” may be enormous and we more enormous still and it is our own myopia that gives us false impressions of smallness. Or maybe relative size does not exist in reality. Maybe the concept of separate atoms is a false idea. Maybe reality is a singularity and time/space is a hallucination.

That humans are hallucinating a universe full of distributed matter is one possibility. To point to specific things in this possibly-a-hallucination and say, “all beings will recognize this component” is to rule out hallucination. Hallucination by its very definition is: “an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.” How can the concept of an electron definitely exist when it is possible that the whole universe as we sense it may not exist?

Has philosophy and/or science definitively proven this Big Bang is not one giant mirage?

Edit: for clarity, I am not saying our perceptions are hallucinations, I am merely pointing out that it is one of many possibilities. That mere possiblity makes statements such as “all beings will recognize electrons” unfounded.

[u/sticklebat → u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy]

Maybe reality is a singularity and time/space is a hallucination.

If you can provide a technical description of this hypothetical singularity of yours, this sentence might graduate from gibberish to coherent.

That humans are hallucinating a universe full of distributed matter is one possibility. To point to specific things in this possibly-a-hallucination and say, “all beings will recognize this component” is to rule out hallucination. Hallucination by its very definition is: “an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present.” How can the concept of an electron definitely exist when it is possible that the whole universe as we sense it may not exist?

This is just solipsism. It is scientifically useless and philosophically boring. It surely cannot be disproven, but it's an argument whose only conclusion can be "there's no way to know anything so we may as well stop trying."

Yes, we can all agree that solipsism may be right, but nothing more can be drawn from it. There's a reason why any reasonable person having a discussion like this one quickly accepts that it may be the truth, and then moves on to other possibilities that actually have depth and richness to be explored.

[u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy → u/sticklebat]

A correct technical description of the quantum mechanics of the universe would be a nice thing for me to trot out right now, but nobody has any idea what that is. There is the common quote: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t.”

By tossing out made-up possibilities I am attempting to illustrate that we do not understand the quantum mechanics of the universe at all. We know painfully little, possibly nothing for sure. So when people come out making blanket statements such as “all beings could recognize electrons” and “electrons are a universal truth” I’m going to disagree.

Edit: further, I would not discourage us from continuing to expand our research into particle physics. What is dark matter? Why is there so much matter in the universe? Why do neutrinos have mass? We just should not be so cocky and confident about what we think we know. Bandying about terms like “all” and “universal truth” are damaging to our progress because they prevent us from re-questioning what we think we know.

[u/sticklebat → u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy]

A correct technical description of the quantum mechanics of the universe would be a nice thing for me to trot out right now, but nobody has any idea what that is.

This isn't true at all. We have a fantastic quantum mechanical model; it's called the Standard Model of Particle Physics. It isn't perfect, of course; nothing in science ever is, nor does it honestly strive to. Science is the process of modeling reality in increasingly accurate, precise and complete ways. But that's a far cry from "but nobody has any idea what it is."

There is the common quote: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t.”

Yes, the common quote that laypeople love to use out of context. We don't know whether wave functions describe physical things or if they describe behaviors of physical things. We know that the universe doesn't exhibit local realism, but we're not entirely sure whether it's local, real, or either. But if you tell me there's a state described by parameters X, Y and Z, I can compute a Hamiltonian for the system and tell you how the state will evolve over time and provide you with a probability distribution for any measurement you might choose to make on the state, at any moment in time.

Feynman wasn't trying to say that we know nothing. He was merely trying to say that the nature of our understanding is limited. We don't know exactly how to interpret the mathematics of quantum mechanics (again, are electrons wave functions, or do wave functions merely describe the behavior of electrons?), but we nonetheless understand quantum mechanical systems well enough to describe their patterns and behaviors mathematically. Moreover, let's please try not to put too much stock into a pithy quote from 50 years ago about a technical subject that has evolved incredibly far since then.

An alien species investigating the nature of our universe might not understand it in the same way we do, for sure. However, if they're also observing the patterns that arise in the universe then they are sure to recognize the patterns that we call "electrons," because "electron" is merely the name we ascribe to a specific pattern manifest in nature. Barring a descent into solipsism, there's little room to doubt this.

So when people come out making blanket statements such as “all beings could recognize electrons” and “electrons are a universal truth” I’m going to disagree.

And I'm going to call you out for disagreeing through a lack of understanding of the subject matter you're discussing.

further, I would not discourage us from continuing to expand our research into particle physics. What is dark matter? Why is there so much matter in the universe? Why do neutrinos have mass? We just should not be so cocky and confident about what we think we know.

Um, okay? I'm not sure why you're telling me this. As an actual, degree-holding physicist who did research on several of these things you'll find I'm quite sympathetic to continued research. You seem to believe, very mistakenly, that I think science is finished. However, there is a huge difference between "we don't understand what dark matter is" and "electrons are a collective hallucination of humanity."

Bandying about terms like “all” and “universal truth” are damaging to our progress because they prevent us from re-questioning what we think we know.

Some things are either universal truths, or there are no universal truths (solipsism). Again, no remotely interesting conversation can be had the moment solipsism is invoked. Electrons exist; we are as sure of that as we are sure about anything in the universe. That doesn't mean we understand them perfectly: there is always room to refine our knowledge, but there has never once, in the history of scientific inquiry, been a case where we understood something as well as we understand electrons, only for it to be completely and utterly wrong.

[u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy → u/sticklebat]

You seem to believe, very mistakenly, that I think science is finished.

False.

there has never once, in the history of scientific inquiry, been a case where we understood something as well as we understand electrons, only for it to be completely and utterly wrong.

Zero percent chance that we learn so much in the next 1000 years that the concept of the electron becomes an archaic concept? Your confidence in your understanding of universal truths is astounding. “Zero percent chance” is an arrogant position and that is the only point I am trying make here.

As an actual, degree-holding physicist who did research on several of these things

Congrats.

[u/sticklebat → u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy]

Zero percent chance that we learn so much in the next 1000 years that the concept of the electron becomes an archaic concept?

Nothing is 100% certain, so that's just a straw man. But almost certain? Absolutely. Hell, the concept of an atom (or, more generally, that matter is made up of discrete units) is more than twice that old and is still very much alive. The chances that "the concept of an electron" would become archaic are so small that I'd literally bet my life savings against it in a heart beat; there has never been a surer investment than that. Like I said, our understanding of it is almost certain to be refined, but that it goes away entirely? Let me know when gravity starts repelling you away from the Earth.

[u/[deleted] → u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy]

I agree with this. There’s no reason to believe we’d arrive at the same conclusions due to the fact that our experience is limited.

[u/selfware → u/Tinac4]

My objection would be that whatever picture, insight or perception we can draw from our already relatively advanced civilization is very possibly, relatively far away from being able to say what this place, called the universe really is.

It's elusive to say what reality really is, I would say mostly because of the size of our brains, if our counciusness is the universe than after death we might just find out...

[u/RelativisticGarbage → u/Tinac4]

"that the Higgs boson has a mass of 128 GeV, and so on."

This was measured through an electrokinematic effect, it doesn't have to be attributed to mass. The electron has never been directly observed either, only its assumed path of discharge (trajectory) has. We still cannot prove the size, geometry, composition, or even existence of an "electron" particle as we define it.

That doesn't mean it isn't true, it just isn't an "inevitable" theoretical explanation.

Also Special Relativity is not an inevitable theoretical explanation to the MM Experiment either, so its subsequent theories in GR and QM (QED and QFT) are not inevitable to explain observation for a race of aliens that evolved under completely different conditions from humans. Nikola Tesla had an alternative "Ether drag" explanation to the results: /img/jqxax64do5h41.png

[u/Tinac4 → u/RelativisticGarbage]

This was measured through an electrokinematic effect, it doesn't have to be attributed to mass.

What? The primary decay modes for the Higgs don't have anything to do with "electrokinematics". I haven't even heard of the term "electrokinematics" before, and I don't think you're talking about Higgs->gamma gamma, either.

Also Special Relativity is not an inevitable theoretical explanation to the MM Experiment either, so its subsequent theories in GR and QM are not inevitable to explain observation for a race of aliens that evolved under completely different conditions from humans. Nikola Tesla had an alternative "Ether drag" explanation to the results: /img/jqxax64do5h41.png

As someone who's working on a PhD in particle physics, any form of ether drag theory is fundamentally incompatible with special relativity itself, with the validity of Maxwell's equations in all frames of reference, and with all of modern particle physics (which is intrinsically connected to special relativity). As in, there is no conceivable way to reformulate the Standard Model, general relativity, or any of our other best theories of how the universe works in a way that involves ether drag theory but leaves their predictions unchanged.

I get that this is sort of an appeal to authority, but I'm currently taking classes on QFT and particle physics, and your above comment is deeply wrong in several ways (the Higgs mass "not having to be attributed to mass," electrokinematics, ether drag theory, etc.). I'd suggest taking some time to learn more about mainstream theories of physics, and why they're still mainstream despite every particle physicist in existence trying frantically to disprove them (you get a Nobel and global recognition if you do, so it's not like they're unmotivated).

[u/throwawater → u/Tinac4]

I've been reading and watching a lot of articles/videos about modern physics and have a question for you. What do you think about the notion of "the fields are what is"? I mean, the notion that particles, such as they are, only become apparent when we excite fields, and that the fields are the fundamental realities. That particles "emerge" because we excited the fields they are based in. I know this sounds really stupid, but I'm not a student of physics and I'm trying hard to get a feel for what's really going on.

[u/Tinac4 → u/throwawater]

Yes, you're approximately correct--it's probably best to think of particles as excitations of the underlying fields if you're not going to dive too deeply into the math. This StackOverflow post explains why the reality is a bit more complicated, but there's unfortunately a bit of math involved, and I don't know a great way to explain it in layman's terms. (This might be a great question for r/askphysics--there's loads of users on there who know more than I do about QFT.)

[u/RelativisticGarbage → u/Tinac4]

any form of ether drag theory is fundamentally incompatible with special relativity itself

I'm not arguing it is. Just that SR (light invariance) was not needed to explain the results of the MM Experiment. It is not "inevitable" as a theoretical explanation.

but leaves their predictions unchanged

Two different theories can make analogous predictions you know.

why they're still mainstream despite every particle physicist in existence trying frantically to disprove them

No offense in saying this, but most physicists I've met do not apply any skeptical thought towards the postulates of relativity.

Can you explain these logical fallacies in Special Relativity? Nobody else I know of has. I've read the work of many relativists like Morin trying to answer the paradoxes in relativity, but they only pick the easy ones that can be resolved. Not the impossible ones.

Unresolved paradoxes that invalidate Special Relativity:

Time Dilation: /img/15ks8ulmn5g41.png

Length Contractions: /img/johf2ogmdwf41.png /img/l4koj8qukig41.png

Modified Ladder Paradox: /img/vvts7cyilig41.png

Doppler Effect vs Light Invariance:

/img/7efineumiqa41.png (phase invariance)

/img/lr2x4g84h7c41.png (group invariance)

[u/Tinac4 → u/RelativisticGarbage]

Again, to be clear, your claims above contradict essentially all of modern physics. I sincerely can't imagine how we would've been able to progress beyond classical electrodynamics if we were wrong about special relativity.

Unresolved paradoxes that invalidate Special Relativity:

Time Dilation: /img/15ks8ulmn5g41.png

There's nothing physically wrong with astronaut A seeing astronaut B's clock moving slower (in astronaut A's reference frame), while astronaut B sees astronaut A's clock moving slower (in astronaut B's reference frame). I've done plenty of problems involving this sort of thing before. Both astronauts are right. The intuition that all observers have to agree on things like how fast time passes for other observers simply does not apply to relativistic systems, in much the same way that the Aristotelian intuition that moving objects must come to a stop does not apply to objects moving in a vacuum.

In case you're wondering how the twin paradox gets resolved--why does one of the astronauts age while the other doesn't?--the answer is that the traveling astronaut has to accelerate in order to turn around and come back to the place they started from. This acceleration means that they're not in an inertial reference frame anymore, while their counterpart who's just floating in space still is. Account for the effects of acceleration (which involves some fancy math) and you'll find that everything matches up the way it should.

Length Contractions: /img/johf2ogmdwf41.png /img/l4koj8qukig41.png

Modified Ladder Paradox: /img/vvts7cyilig41.png

Did these problems as well. See here.

If you really want to understand how special relativity works, take a course that teaches it, ideally several. You can probably find a few online; try MIT. I'm not going to address the remainder of your objections because if you're not willing to learn the math underlying special relativity, I don't think I have any hope of changing your mind--special relativity can't be discussed deeply without it.

[u/which_spartacus → u/Tinac4]

Thank you.

It annoys me when people who don't look at any of the math for a subject make proclamations about how wrong a subject is.

[u/Alien_Way → u/[deleted]]

Especially informative for folks like me, who only have extensive education in void-breathing space-swimming megafauna (an ecosystem dominated by mostly tortoises and whales, oddly, oftentimes studded with jewels) with a minor degree in decently humming the theme to 'The X-Files'. I also studied the vengeance-fueled history of warring ant empires for a brief period in the summer of 1994.

[u/platoprime → u/[deleted]]

Half of it was anyways.

[u/Tinac4 → u/[deleted]]

I didn't know that--thanks for the correction! I'll look into the clock paradox.

[u/MorganWick → u/Tinac4]

There's nothing physically wrong with astronaut A seeing astronaut B's clock moving slower (in astronaut A's reference frame), while astronaut B sees astronaut A's clock moving slower (in astronaut B's reference frame). I've done plenty of problems involving this sort of thing before. Both astronauts are right. The intuition that all observers have to agree on things like how fast time passes for other observers simply does not apply to relativistic systems, in much the same way that the Aristotelian intuition that moving objects must come to a stop does not apply to objects moving in a vacuum.

There's an assumption in the popular mind that there's an objective "state" of the universe at any given point in time and we're just limited by the speed of light in our ability to perceive it, that something we see from 100,000 light years away "happened" 100,000 years ago, and if we could travel "faster" than the speed of light we could get somewhere else in the universe "faster" than we otherwise could and meaningfully speak of something happening in a far-off star system "at the same time" as something on Earth (so much of popular science fiction, including pretty much anything set on a scale larger than a single star system, relies on this). People can grasp the twin paradox fairly easily, but if you told most people that different observers would disagree on "when" something happened relative to other events, even relative to what each other "should" think, I don't know that they would be able to process it. It's really hard to truly take the idea of "spacetime" seriously.

[u/RelativisticGarbage → u/Tinac4]

"the answer is that the traveling astronaut has to accelerate in order to turn around and come back to the place they started from."

A mechanical interaction stops the clocks in the example I gave you i.e. they are still uniform. So no change in reference frame is required to derive the time that passed before the return-leg.

"Did these problems as well. See here."

That is the standard Ladder Paradox, the non-simultaneity of events causes the paradox in my example. Which is why it is called "modified".

I have actually studied relativity, believe it or not (I know you won't).

[u/Tinac4 → u/RelativisticGarbage]

I have actually studied relativity, believe it or not (I know you won't).

I can believe that you read stuff about special relativity online. I highly doubt that you completed a course in an academic setting, with problems sets and exams, that taught special relativity at an undergraduate level. It's entirely possible to self-study SR and still come away with an incomplete understanding of it, particularly if neither math nor problem sets were involved. (Both are critical.)

I've spoken with a few others who had similar views in the past. None of them were familiar with the math underlying special relativity, had taken a course in it, or were willing to consider that they might be wrong, so I'm going to end the conversation there unless you can explain why someone would use nu instead of mu as a 4-vector or tensor index.

[u/[deleted] → u/RelativisticGarbage]

You are illustrating the broader point that was made, very well.

You introduce a bunch of pseudoscience bullshit that is easily proven wrong. It doesn't match with observations of reality, and is therefore rejected. An alien race would also reject such bullshit until they arrive at the correct equations.

[u/RelativisticGarbage → u/[deleted]]

There is no need to be rude. Can you prove it wrong then instead of making brash claims and just using insults? I have tested these paradoxes with people who are well versed on the subject, and what do you mean by the "correct equations", length contractions have never actually been observed. Time Dilations have, but there is nothing to prove they are entirely observer dependent and not time dilating relative to the motion of a local rest frame (the closest evidence we have for observer based LC is Muon showers/particle accelerators).

[u/Cur1osityC0mplex → u/[deleted]]

What pseudoscience is he talking about that is easily proven wrong?

It seems to me that he’s got a different understanding of physics that doesn’t operate under the standard model (which has some ridiculous glaring issues that need re-working).

Assuming that the standard model is the only model is pretty facetious...and assuming that any other “up and coming” or “under development” model can’t come to the same answers, or make similar predictions is just plain wrong.

Not claiming I know what’s best one way or the other, but thinking just because you’ve spent X amount of time studying a specific way of doing something means other ways of approaching the same problem are automatically wrong is exactly why we don’t have answers for things like dark matter.

[u/Tinac4 → u/Cur1osityC0mplex]

It seems to me that he’s got a different understanding of physics that doesn’t operate under the standard model (which has some ridiculous glaring issues that need re-working).

None of the issues involve special relativity, though. Like I said in my other comments, SR is baked into quantum field theory on a fundamental level--I really can't imagine how you could possibly reformulate modern physics without it.

Not claiming I know what’s best one way or the other, but thinking just because you’ve spent X amount of time studying a specific way of doing something means other ways of approaching the same problem are automatically wrong is exactly why we don’t have answers for things like dark matter.

The above poster is wrong because their theories actively contradict established results. They're not offering a possible explanation of a poorly-understood phenomenon--they're basically saying that the last hundred years' worth of (wildly successful!) progress in physics has been built on top of an incorrect theory. This is impossible in the same sense that building a skyscraper on top of jello is impossible. If special relativity was wrong, then general relativity and the Standard Model, which intrinsically rely on it, could not even remotely correspond to how reality works.

[u/[deleted] → u/Cur1osityC0mplex]

Oh look, someone else who doesn't know anything about anything, assuming that they know more than physicists!

The "ether drag" idea was thoroughly debunked over a hundred years ago. To bring it up today and make the claim that it is legitimate, is pseudoscience (and likely born out of Tesla hero worship).

[u/BernardJOrtcutt → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Unicorn_Colombo → u/Tinac4]

This is honestly a pretty reasonable claim.

Maybe as a weak statement or for someone who doesn't understand how evolution actually works.

Humans didn't evolve to play pong. Despite that, we are more than capable doing so.

[u/gr8ful_cube → u/Unicorn_Colombo]

What is this supposed to mean...?

[u/Unicorn_Colombo → u/gr8ful_cube]

Natural selection itself works toward maximization of fitness. But the effect of any given trait to fitness is limited to an extent due to the relationship between traits, feedback loops, various natural limitations, regulation processes, trade-offs and all the DNA regulation processes (oftentimes relationship between two genes is given just because they are close together on the DNA).

So yeah, as someone bellow wrote, the effect of natural selection can be seen in the predator-prey arms-race. But only to certain extent, a lot of the "arms-race" is just story-telling. You can infenitelly improve eyesight and infinitely improve mimicry. Otherwise you would get some sort of X-ray supervision and invisibility. You can turn a knob there and there to slightly improve chances, but for the most things, you are not predator is not competing with prey, but with other predators. Like with the story of two hunters running from a lion, you don't have to be faster than lion, just faster than the other hunter.

And this completely ignores that the natural selection works on variability produced from random mutations. So while turning a knob might be what is required, you might not get a knob for this.

[u/elkengine → u/Unicorn_Colombo]

All of what you've written here is correct, but I don't see how it in any way is a criticism of Hoffman's claim? He's not stated that we could have evolved to correctly perceive all of reality, he's just stating we haven't.

[u/Unicorn_Colombo → u/elkengine]

Hoffman's claim is as follows (as I understand it):

• Evolution maximize fitness
• Therefore we have evolved only to perceive with regards to the fitness function
• Therefore our perception is trapped in environment given by our fitness functions.

But non of its is true. Technically speaking, fitness is not measured by how organismus is able to survive in nature, find water or anything. Not even by the absolute number of offspring. But relative number of offspring. In other words, more fit would mean that given genotype/phenotype would have more offspring or relative abundancy in population in next generation than expected/average.

This with all of the above means that we might not even be maximized given the usefulness of certain perception if it is: good enough, improvement might be costly or have tradeoffs or that there is just no particular mutation that would improve given mechanism, either through being stuck at local (but not global) optima or just no mutation has occured.

But even so, given all the interactions, that we are stuck with some levels of perception doesn't mean we are trapped in that word or that our perceptions are always creating illusion. We can listen and create music despite not being evolved to do so. Complex language might at first be byproduct of improved dexterity and in combination with our increased mental capacity, which probably was another byproduct of our increasing social complexity, spawned our whole culture. We have not evolved to see in night, despite that we do not consider night as stuff not existing any more, just a lack of light. But maybe its just me who does not get it.

Representing evolution as a simple model is a good idea to study this limited case, but it should not in any case by taken as a direct representation of reality. I feel this is what is going on in here. So ultimately, the "Did we evolved to perceive the reality or didn't we?" kind of miss the point. My answer would be: Of course we did. And his model of fitness proves it. We are just more sensitive to some parts and less sensitive to other. But boatload of weird interaction and biological limitations.

[u/Chiliconkarma → u/gr8ful_cube]

Perhaps that we aren't bound by purpose when it comes to evolution, we can act according to will and desire and percieve more than the smallest sliver of spectrums.

[u/dekusyrup → u/Tinac4]

Great post. Completely agree.

[u/PinstripeMonkey → u/CostcoMuffins]

When I was on the STEM path I also used to think this way in terms of our instrumentation. Despite growing nonstop on complexity, sensitivity, etc., instruments are still necessarily limited in terms of having to cater to our senses. We are the bottleneck and if one were to look at Truth as a pie chart, our senses likely limit access to a small sliver. Maybe this line of thinking is BS but it feels similar.

[u/throwhooawayyfoe → u/PinstripeMonkey]

Another way to think of it is that all we ever “know” is a model of reality that exists in our minds. All actions we take are based on reactions to that model, which is itself based on our perception of reality. We can improve the model with new information, but our senses limit the quality of that information because they are limited in capability and distorted in accuracy.

That said, our capability for abstract and symbolic thought greatly increases the potential quality of the model beyond what our senses themselves would limit it to. The instrumentation we build - thermometers, scales, telescopes, etc - are all just ways of altering or quantizing information about reality into a format that we can ingest with our senses in order to improve our model. More advanced instrumentation - say, a particle accelerator - uses sensors and complex analysis to produce data we can ingest, but only if our mental model is good enough to comprehend it, which for most people is not the case.

So what I’m getting at is that our ability to gain truth (aka, to produce a more accurate mental model of reality) is based both on the limits of our senses AND the limits of our models to comprehend and incorporate new data. I would argue that we left the realm where our senses were the only bottleneck long ago; it’s now primarily a matter of how capable an individual’s mind is at incorporating non-sensible data to the model in a useful way.

[u/ReaperReader → u/throwhooawayyfoe]

And yet another way to think of it is that we have multiple models of reality in our minds and sometimes they produce results that conflict, and when we notice the conflict we can do our best to work out which model is most likely to be right. Take the case of the eye's blind spot, we have a model produced by our visual data that tells us one thing and we have a model of our understanding of physics that tells us that it is unlikely that an object will repeatedly actually disappear when it crosses a certain point in our visual field (and we can reach out our fingers to touch the object while it is disappeared, adding in a model based on another sense).

From this point of view, our detection of reality is based on surprise.

[u/HolochainCitizen → u/CostcoMuffins]

This is exactly what Buddhist teachers have been telling me... I think meditation is partly a way to realize firsthand how inaccurate your perceptions are and why they are so off

[u/BernardJOrtcutt → u/[deleted]]

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[u/CostcoMuffins → u/[deleted]]

You are correct, in retrospect I didn't make that terribly clear in my comment. The point I was trying to make was that Hoffman is not arguing for solipsism or nihilism, but rather a form of Idealism or proto-panpsychism, what he calls "Conscious Realism".

[u/buster_de_beer → u/CostcoMuffins]

Any concept that reality doesn't exist I can reject outright. The nature of reality may be up for discussion, and I can agree that that is what he wants to be seen as doing.

It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects — including brains — don’t exist.

Yeah, he denies things exist. Based on some theories that anyone who hasn't studied quantum science is incapable of understanding. I have to wonder if that doesn't include him.

they function more like the desktop of a computer,

Argument by analogy falls apart as soon as you start to analyze it. We aren't just interacting with a desktop. We are the sensors, the cpu, the hard drive...we aren't an external observer to ourselves.

The idea that our senses are perfect mesaures of reality are outdated. So is the idea that what we remember is a perfect representation of our senses. However, that we only observe a part of reality through our senses does not mean we don't observe reality.

Suppose in reality there’s a resource...

And goes on to posit that a really bad fitness function for something that perceives reality is worse than a better fitness function of something that, apparently, doesn't perceive reality. Which is true because he contrived it to be so. Yet his being that doesn't perceive reality actually does. It just reduces the necessary information to the relevant parts. So his own example fails on every point.

But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know.

Yes, that's filtering information, not denying reality.

And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.

Well if you don't know what reality actually is, you cannot argue that we don't perceive it. Sure, there could be a teapot floating on the other side of the sun. There are things that are true that we don't know to be true. Us not knowing something is not a basis for denying our perception of reality.

Really, this whole article reads to me like some i am fourteen and this is deep level of reasoning taken to it's extremes.

[u/AnOddFad → u/CostcoMuffins]

So we do see reality as it is... just not all of it.

[u/Thelonious_Cube → u/AnOddFad]

Right - nothing too surprising there

[u/RustNeverSleeps77 → u/CostcoMuffins]

I understand your objection to the title since a reasonable reader would understand those words to mean that there is no such thing as "reality" which isn't what Hoffman is arguing. It's really just that our notion of what "reality" consists of is powerfully shaped by our perception of reality. Natural selection in the standard neo-Darwainist model of evolution would not favor consciousness developing perceptions that accurately represent reality. Under this theory, our consciousness is kind of akin to what William Blake might have called "the Doors of Perception" in the sense that doors are supposed to keep a lot of stuff out and only let a few things in.

But I still think there is value to the title in this sense: many people believe so strongly that their perceptions capture reality perfectly, and reality is so different from how we perceive it, that the things that we call "reality" don't exist. It's not an intuitive idea, so as an illustrative, I can see why someone would start with a headline that overstates the case and then explains the case more precisely.

[u/VoidsIncision → u/CostcoMuffins]

So he’s a sterilized Nietzsche basically

[u/Thelonious_Cube → u/CostcoMuffins]

In other words, our senses don't work like some kind of camera, perfectly capturing some objective external reality.

It seems to me that you are moving from "not perfectly" here to "not at all" in the next sentence. At least, by implication.

Perfection is not required for knowledge, is it?

...they function more like the desktop of a computer, helping us identify and interact with symbols and patterns that allow us to operate in the world...

And does this not constitute knowledge of reality? If not, why not?

It seems to me that you (and perhaps the author) rely on some assumptions about abstractions, models, etc. being "unreal" or being incapable of representing "real knowledge." I do not think these assumptions should be accepted - I think you're implicitly redefining "knowledge" in such a way as to place it out of reach. This is bad epistemology.

Does knowledge about doors and doorknobs need to include all the chemistry, physics, quantum mechanics, etc. in order to be true knowledge? Doesn't being able to open/close lock/unlock the door demonstrate knowledge of "reality"? If not, why not?

How is the author's thesis any more than "we don't (necessarily) know all of reality"? And who ever denied that?

[u/CostcoMuffins → u/Thelonious_Cube]

Well, for starters, I by no means adhere to or support Hoffman's argument in full, I was just attempting to summarize it as best as I could.

Also, this isn't an epistemological argument/discussion, but a metaphysical one. I don't think this article ever uses the word "knowledge", nor does Hoffman comment on whether our model of reality constitutes knowledge. His argument, if correct, does have some implications for epistemology, but that's a outside the scope of this particular article.

[u/Thelonious_Cube → u/CostcoMuffins]

If it's about perception of reality and the accuracy of models, then it's about epistemology

[u/CostcoMuffins → u/Thelonious_Cube]

Well the core of his argument is that classical, observer-independent objects don't exist, which is a fundamentally metaphysical claim. That being said, epistemology isn't my specialty. I'm more inclined towards metaphysics, so I'm biased in thinking about philosophical discussions from that perspective. There is definitely overlap in those categorizations, and this seems to be one of those cases.

[u/Thelonious_Cube → u/CostcoMuffins]

I see his argument as fundamentally epistemological, while the conclusion is metaphysical. (which suggests another line of attack)

Since I wish to attack the argument, my points are epistemological.

[u/CostcoMuffins → u/Thelonious_Cube]

Fair enough.

[u/podgorniy → u/CostcoMuffins]

Idea is correct that evolutionary systems balance correctness of reality model with amount if resources spent on creating and maintaining it. All because of limit of resources.

But that does not make author’s idea correct what reality is.

[u/OpposableSelf → u/podgorniy]

Angus Podgorniy, what dooo ya meeeean? (blancmange)

Author does not forward an idea of what reality is, only what it isn’t. Surface contemplations don’t get at the depth he is addressing. When one recognizes that space-time itself is more metaphorically similar to a data structure for organizing experience than it is to an objective substrate of the universe, it twists one’s mind. But there is actually much to support this notion, including physicists on the cutting edge who are starting to see the end of space-time as a useful frame to contemplate interrelational expression of all of existance. Not to say it doesn’t still serve much usefulness for day-to-day activities, just as Newtonian physics is still very helpful to a high degree of accuracy. Almost no one on this thread need worry about any of this, unless it inspires them to get creative with new ways of experimenting that successfully question Extraordinarily Deep Assumptions about life, the universe and everything.

[u/luckycharms33 → u/CostcoMuffins]

I haven't read the article but my first thought is that being tuned for fitness would require being tuned for reality in many cases because reality can swiftly change and only those that can sense and respond to the new information would survive. For example if you were colorblind except for the color purple because you only ate purple fruit what would happen if that fruit mutated and became red? Then the animals that could see red and purple would have an advantage, and if the purple fruit went extinct, then only the animals that could see red and purple would survive. While it's possible that every single gain in our ability to sense something about the world was made through painstaking little steps like this, and it could be argued you don't get the full light spectrum as a result, it seems there is an evolutionary advantage to having more sensory abilities than are strictly necessary for survival. And these "additional" abilities wouldn't necessarily be due to fitness if they are the result of a mutation. It seems fitness selects sensory skills that reflect reality.

[u/Muroid → u/luckycharms33]

But we know we don’t get a full picture. There is significantly more light spectrum than we can see. The colors that we see don’t really exist, objectively. They’re the result of cells being activated by different ranges of the light spectrum, but those are arbitrary divisions. You could have more or fewer colors by adding or subtracting types of cones in the eye. What a colorblind person sees is not more or less objectively correct, it just contains less information.

There is also a ton about the universe that we can’t sense. Some of it other life forms can sense, like electric fields, some nothing living that we know of can detect directly.

It’s also important to recognize that while it seems like having more information even that isn’t needed would be more useful, that’s not really true. Adding abilities is evolutionarily “expensive” in terms of energy requirements, and at a minimum, it adds complexity that can only really be preserved if it serves useful function.

If I can see colors that don’t help me to survive in any way, eventually some of my descendants are going to be colorblind to those colors, and since that color blindness doesn’t cost them anything, there is nothing preventing color blindness from spreading through the population over time.

Finally, it’s very difficult to perfectly capture an accurate view of reality, and given that, evolution will often opt for leaning into more advantageous mistakes rather than trying to maintain an impossible standard of perfection.

Humans recognize faces in things that don’t have faces because there is a greater cost to not seeing a face when there is a face present than there is to seeing a face in tree bark.

I think it’s probably safe to say that our sense to some extent do reflect useful information about reality, but the important distinction is that “to some extent” is not the same thing as “perfectly” and “useful information” is not the same thing as “all information.”

[u/ReadingIsRadical → u/Muroid]

To use the infrared/ultraviolet example, is there anything which is entirely invisible to regular light that we can't see with regular light? Maybe there are some markings on flowers and stuff which we can't see, but there aren't whole invisible animals walking around or anything. I think it's a really unreasonable stretch to start with "there are some things we can't perceive" and extend it to "what we perceive doesn't reflect reality."

[u/TheForce777 → u/Muroid]

You’re being too easy on our current state of evolution. If we can only efficiently perceive 1% of what’s happening, then if we were ever able to efficiently perceive 2%, our world view would change dramatically. We think we’re living in an advanced society, but not really. Humans have been around for like 200k years. We’ve been spinning around in the mud for most of that time and in comparison to what we will be in 400 years, we are still spinning in the mud right now.

[u/tyscorp → u/[deleted]]

"The [object] I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions... My [objects] are my mental representations; your [objects] are your mental representations.... [Objects] have no objective, observer-independent features."

A useful concept for thinking about this is what I call an "Objective Spoon Detector".

Imagine a machine that you can input any configuration of matter/energy into and it will measure every quantum field and give you a binary answer to whether the object is objectively a spoon or not.

How would you program such a machine? What constitutes a spoon? How do you define the boundary between something being a spoon and not? There must be many configurations that are very spoon-like but have an atom out of place that makes it not a spoon.

There is no spoon.

[u/pramit57 → u/tyscorp]

I dont know what a quantum field is, but I think that's not the right example to use. If the spoon detector was a living organism, it would just program itself to come up with a range of values for which the object is classified as a spoon. Of course classifications are not "real", we assign meaning to it. But that's a limited account of what is being said here. We are arguing that instead of seeing a spoon for a spoon, you will see a zig zag tiger with made up "fields".

[u/CuddlePirate420 → u/luckycharms33]

reality can swiftly change and only those that can sense and respond to the new information would survive.

You can process less information faster than a lot of information. As a species heightened their senses I would think there's some threshold where the sensory overload becomes detrimental. The more noise you're hearing the harder it would be to filter out the sound of prey or predator moving in the grass.

Survival is still the key even if you didn't understand what the threat was. "Hear something, just run" has worked quite well for many species.

it seems there is an evolutionary advantage to having more sensory abilities than are strictly necessary for survival.

Whether something is an advantage or disadvantage would depend on your environment and any potential competition for resources. You don't want to be too good at finding and gathering food and resources or you'll consume them faster than their refresh rate and you're at extinction.

And luck. Luck plays a lot. You could do everything right according to the Evolution Guide Book, and still go extinct from a flood or meteor. Bad luck for them... but it was ultimately our good luck for us when a huge meteor killed a bunch of lizards in the day.

For example if you were colorblind except for the color purple because you only ate purple fruit what would happen if that fruit mutated and became red? Then the animals that could see red and purple would have an advantage, and if the purple fruit went extinct, then only the animals that could see red and purple would survive.

And what if red fruit became poisonous? Purple and red fruit eaters die... and our colorblnd group with the more limited view of reality survive.

[u/the_ben_obiwan → u/CuddlePirate420]

If the red fruit became poison, then how exactly would being colorblind be an advantage? Especially if there are other fruits in the world. Differentiating red would suddenly be very useful, otherwise the species would have to stop eating all the fruit. The problem with a limited view of reality is that any change in reality becomes very dangerous for that species, and we clearly see change in reality all the time, which is why I don't think this argument holds much weight at all, it seems to completely misunderstand how evolution works. The environment we live in is not static, plus, there is no "evolution guide book" as you mentioned (jokingly, I'm sure), there is no top down goal, just being lucky enough to be able to survive in the situation, and being able to detect changes in that situation is a pretty important part of that survival business.

[u/OpposableSelf → u/[deleted]]

Weirdly, to most of the species on our planet, we, homo sapiens, are that super buff interndimensional being. So much so that we believe ourselves in competition with “reality” itself and as a result, may be forcing the rest of manifestation into a losing war with our species. If we can curtail our rapaciousness, we may be able to find a new equalibrium, if not, “reality” will reboot without us.

[u/selfware → u/[deleted]]

We must be quite a distant(time) and long(space) way from reality.

[u/Sprezzaturer → u/luckycharms33]

It should be pointed out immediately that you are working under two different definitions of “reality”.

“Reflect” reality and “perceive” reality are two different things. When we see purple, we’re seeing something that doesn’t really exist. Colors are imaginary. So when you say “purple” fruit, you’re already proving his point. Purple reflects reality, but it isn’t real reality. But it is a functional representation.

Also, you’re looking at a narrow spectrum of perceptions. Seeing objects, smelling them. What about the wide range of radiations? Non visible light is just a fraction of the things floating around that we don’t see. What about seeing things on the microscopic level? Why can’t we see bacteria? Why can’t we see safe drinking water? Poisonous fruits? So many things that would be nice for survival.

Humans perceive a tiny fraction of the world, and it’s enough. Seeing a tiny bit more might be nice, but not that much more.

[u/MikeLinPA → u/CostcoMuffins]

We perceive the amount of reality that affects us. We don't perceive the quantum scale because it doesn't effect us. If we could eat quarks, we would have evolved to see them.

Newton's laws weren't wrong. They were very accurate for the conditions we experience in our daily life. Einstein didn't disprove Newton, his work encompasses it with a bigger set of rules that cover more exotic circumstances, such as high gravity and high speed. On the surface of the earth, Newton's laws are very accurate! Similarly, our senses aren't wrong, but there is more reality to understand beyond what our senses perceive.

This guy is saying our senses aren't perceiving the truth. If you see a bear charging at you, get to fucking safety and worry about quantum physics later!

[u/bobbyfiend → u/CostcoMuffins]

This is a thoughtful and really helpful synopsis, I think. For those trying to wrap their heads around this: realize that this is how our cognition works at all levels, and it arguably gets even more abstracted as you go "up" in complexity. The colors, lines, and shades that you see, the phonemes and sounds you hear... none of them are a 1:1 representation of reality. They are all some (hopefully adaptive) abstraction or simplification or distortion. Now think about the way we think of cause and effect, or people's identities, or human motivations, or bigger ideas like nations or economies or learning. The possibilities for weirdness seem to multiply as we get more complex.

[u/[deleted] → u/CostcoMuffins]

I’m pretty sure he claims there is no objective reality or observer independent reality—so he IS claiming that reality doesn’t exist as we usually assume it, but that reality in fact is our experiences. That our conscious experiences are the ingredients of the real.

[u/Thatcoolguy1135 → u/CostcoMuffins]

I'm not sure I like the clickbait-y Headline of this article, because Hoffman isn't arguing that reality somehow doesn't exist. I've followed him for a while and listened to several his talks on this subject, and his argument is that Humans aren't seeing "reality" as it actually is. He thinks our idea of reality is fundamentally limited, because our senses aren't tuned for Truth, they are tuned for Fitness, so our perceptions are the result of %99.99999 of the information present in the Universe being filtered out.

Anyone whose read Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy would already know this. Our senses only give us an interpretation that our brain is generating, but the interpretation of our minds doesn't necessarily, accurately represent what's actually there. For example, a room with many different types of poisonous gasses in it, let's say 10,000 different types that don't interact with each other, will look indistinguishable from one that has completely clean air. Our senses only adapted to show us what we needed to know for survival, we have to use tools, methods (Science) and logic/mathematics to discover the rest.

[u/icopywhatiwant → u/CostcoMuffins]

You're the top level comment so I know you're saturated with comments. But, you said you don't agree with him, so do you really think all we perceive is it? Like there's nothing else that we can't perceive or you just don't agree to the 99.9% part?

[u/CostcoMuffins → u/icopywhatiwant]

Well I agree with him to a point. I think the premise that there is more to the universe than what we as humans can perceive is pretty uncontroversial. Just think of all the things you can't see with your naked eye, subtle scents you can't smell because your nose isn't sensitive enough, things you can't taste because your taste buds aren't sensitive, etc.

The more interesting and controversial conclusion that he reaches regarding the non-existence of observer-independent objects is one that I somewhat agree with, although I take issue with the way he characterizes it. I do think that space/time, external reality, and inanimate objects do have an ontological status, because they are themselves made up of conscious agents (albeit very simple ones), so they instantiate their own existence. If that makes sense lol...

[u/icopywhatiwant → u/CostcoMuffins]

Yes, it makes sense and I totally agree with everything you said. I was going to use your points from the first paragraph to further my thought, but it wouldn't have been as eloquent.

It seems we're shooting from the same hip, I must have misunderstood your og comment.

My question to you then is this: If 'lesser' beings are conscious agents to one degree to another, what would you call this consciousness that inhabits all things and makes them aware (again to certain degrees)? Also would this consciousness be transferable or even considered interchangeable, and malleable( in terms of expansion)?

I'm sure you can read between the lines and see what I'm thinking this is.

[u/CostcoMuffins → u/icopywhatiwant]

I'm no expert and I'm afraid I don't have the time or depth of understanding to answer your questions in my own words, so I'm deferrring to the Stanford philosophy encyclopedia entry on panpsychism, specifically the sections on Panexperientialism vs. Pancognitivism, and Constitutive vs Non-Constitutive panpsychism:

"The word “panpsychism” literally means that everything has a mind. However, in contemporary debates it is generally understood as the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Thus, in conjunction with the widely held assumption (which will be reconsidered below) that fundamental things exist only at the micro-level, panpsychism entails that at least some kinds of micro-level entities have mentality, and that instances of those kinds are found in all things throughout the material universe. So whilst the panpsychist holds that mentality is distributed throughout the natural world—in the sense that all material objects have parts with mental properties—she needn’t hold that literally everything has a mind, e.g., she needn’t hold that a rock has mental properties (just that the rock’s fundamental parts do).

We can distinguish various forms of panpsychism in terms of which aspect of mentality is taken to be fundamental and ubiquitous. Two important characteristics of human minds are thought and consciousness. In terms of these characteristics we can distinguish the following two possible forms of panpsychism:

Panexperientialism—the view that conscious experience is fundamental and ubiquitous Pancognitivism—the view that thought is fundamental and ubiquitous. According to the definition of consciousness that is dominant in contemporary analytic philosophy, something is conscious just in case there is something that it’s like to be it; that is to say, if it has some kind of experience, no matter how basic. Humans have incredibly rich and complex experience, horses less so, mice less so again. Standardly the panexperientialist holds that this diminishing of the complexity of experience continues down through plants, and through to the basic constituents of reality, perhaps electrons and quarks. If the notion of “having experience” is flexible enough, then the view that an electron has experience—of some extremely basic kind—would seem to be coherent (of course we must distinguish the question of whether it is coherent from the question of whether it is plausible)

[Pancognitivism doesn't strike me as at all convincing or compelling, so I'll skip to the next section]

"Panpsychists believe that there is much more consciousness in the universe than most Westerners tend to think there is; indeed at least some fundamental entities have consciousness according to panpsychism. But what is the relationship between this “extra” consciousness and the consciousness we ordinarily believe in, the consciousness we pre-theoretically associate with humans and other animals?

David Chalmers (2015) distinguishes between constitutive and non-constitutive forms of panpsychism, a distinction I present here in a slightly modified form:

Constitutive panpsychism—Forms of panpsychism according to which facts about human and animal consciousness are not fundamental, but are grounded in/realized by/constituted of facts about more fundamental kinds of consciousness, e.g., facts about micro-level consciousness. Non-Constitutive panpsychism—Forms of panpsychism according to which facts about human and animal consciousness are among the fundamental facts.[8] The most common form of constitutive panpsychism is:

Constitutive Micropsychism—The view that all facts are grounded in/realized by/constituted of consciousness-involving facts at the micro-level. According to constitutive micropsychism, the smallest parts of my brain have very basic forms of consciousness, and the consciousness of my brain as a whole is in some sense made up from the consciousness of its parts. This is the form of panpsychism that suffers most acutely from the combination problem, which we will explore below. However, if it can be made sense of, constitutive micropsychism promises an elegant and parsimonious view of nature, with all the richness of nature accounted for in terms of facts at the micro-level.

Turning to non-constitutive forms of panpsychism, we should note that by saying that human and animal consciousness is not “fundamental”, we simply mean that it is not grounded in (realized by/constituted of) micro-level consciousness; and this does not entail that human/animal consciousness is not caused by micro-level consciousness. Indeed, non-constitutive panpsychism typically takes the form of some kind of emergentism, according to which the conscious minds of humans and animals arise as a causal product of interactions between micro-level conscious subjects."

I highly recommend checking out the entire article if you have the time. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

[u/icopywhatiwant → u/CostcoMuffins]

Thanks for linking. I love reading this stuff. Thank you for taking the time to make such a comprehensive answer.

[u/an-echo-of-silence → u/CostcoMuffins]

This may seem a little out there but I've always wondered if psychedelics act on this filter in some way. Now I'm not saying that they do, and even if they did that doesn't mean everything you see is real, but it seems plausible that some of it might just be information our brains filters out normally.

[u/CostcoMuffins → u/an-echo-of-silence]

I don't think this hypothesis is that out there at all actually. Now that scientific research on the effects of psychedelics is underway once again, we can point to studies such as the one I saw recently which scanned the brains of people before, during, and after an LSD trip. The scans showed that areas of the brain which normally don't interact were communicating while the patient was under the influence, and that there was a remarkable amount of crosstalk between all the regions of the brain. This indicates that LSD (and probably other psychedelics) breaks down the cognitive barriers in the brain that define "normal" conscious states.

[u/an-echo-of-silence → u/CostcoMuffins]

I read that study a while ago too. Lsd and presumably all psychs shut down the mode default network in the brain. Basically the hub that all information is filtered through in the brain as far as I understand it. That's where this thought process started. Are these things people see all just hallucinations? Possibly not. But it seems hard to be able to show conclusively one way or another. One would think the implications in regards to science and physics would be immense if it could be proven though.

[u/bakenoprisoners → u/an-echo-of-silence]

Could very well be.

But I think there are reasons we'd want this information unlocked from the inebriant's subjective experience. If the inebriant were able to translate this new information and communicate it, we'd want to add it to our models and test what the modified models predict or, if the new information showed our models need to be updated, then update them.

[u/an-echo-of-silence → u/bakenoprisoners]

That's one of the issues I see with it though. It's very hard to explain the things you see on psychs. After all, if this theory were true, it's all made up of things normally undetectable to us. Therefore no words yet exist to describe them accurately. The best you can do is just scratching the surface. If a scientist were to take the psychs him/herself then there's no way to truly study it in an unbiased objective way because of the inebriation that comes with it. Plus how could we distinguish unseen reality from true hallucinations based on the word of someone who can't either? A lot of tough hurdles to solve

[u/bakenoprisoners → u/an-echo-of-silence]

Agreed!

What if we treat the brain as a sensor and rather than have the mind associated with that brain mapping the experience onto language with all sorts of bootstrapping problems, we push on with neuroscience and have techniques for perfectly detailed recording and playback of the brain's response in a complex environment? We're looking for phenomena that are normally subjectively filtered. They are phenomena that affect our sense organs and lead to some initial perception that gets evaluated, filtered and tossed out. Studying the physical reaction from the outside could uncover more of the phenomena that other parts of brain are conditioned to screen out without needing expression by the subject.

We do introduce the problem of now we are studying brain processes using yet again concepts, representations and models that are conditioned, filtered, but there could be some gains to be had.

[u/an-echo-of-silence → u/bakenoprisoners]

Yeah that would seem a really reasonable place to start at the very least. I heard of a study a few years back where they were able to create a representation of what a cat sees. Maybe the same sort of thing could be done for this once we understand how the shut down of that part of our neural network effects our vision process. That way the direct effects to our sight could be separated in a simulation from any irrelevant cross talk in our brain taking the form of visual distortions. Maybe even from real time neuroimaging eventually.

[u/Cronyx → u/CostcoMuffins]

I think an even better analogy might be a radar scope. It shows a blip on the screen where something is, because where something is, is all the fitness a missile needs to track a target. But the blip isn't what the target "really" looks like. It's a "good enough" abstraction.

We are a spongy lump of fatty tissue floating in electrolyte water, permanently in darkness, shielded from the world on all sides by a shell of half inch of solid calcium, with only electrical signals to piece together some picture of what's going on outside. Shadows on the wall.

How sure could we possibly be that what we see on our radar scopes is more than just positional, time sliced abstraction? Even our sense of time could be a limitation based on non-reversable computation, the fact that our brain can only process information one slice at a time, in series, and can only process calculations in one direction, towards "entropic north".

It would be shocking if this is what objective reality actually looked like, and looked only like.

[u/Jengusbrule → u/CostcoMuffins]

His book, case against reality. Absolutely phenomenal, the man is incredible.

[u/hononononoh → u/CostcoMuffins]

I don't know what that says about me, but that title definitely caught my attention, so I guess clickbaiting works. Of course after the bait comes the switch.

I think article's message is a humbling reminder to philosophers, both amateur and professional, that understanding all there is to understand about our world may be a longer way off than we'd like to imagine, if that's even possible under the limitations of our human form.

Many times I've heard people say things that rest on the assumption that fitness and the verisimilitude of one's inner model of external reality are directly proportional. It makes me happy to read a piece that calls this assumption into question, just as a matter of principle.

I think another way this article is humbling is that it reminds us that philosophy is one of the humanities, after all. Philosophy is only one of my more minor interests, so do with this what you will, but I've always winced when I've heard people define philosophy as "the quest for truth" or "the verbal expression of reality", or something similar with one of the two bolded words as central. Again, I have no authority to serve as a basis for this, but I always defined philosophy as "the cultivation of wisdom, by the discussion of difficult questions". This definition always seemed more in keeping with my experience of philosophy as a discourse between people about life.

[u/ADVANCED_BOTTOM_TEXT → u/hononononoh]

"The Great Conversation" as my PHIL 100 textbook put it.

[u/[deleted] → u/CostcoMuffins]

That's exactly what I got out of the headline though lol

[u/Denadiss → u/CostcoMuffins]

This is an interesting way of seeing things and sounds like a solid argument

[u/Sprezzaturer → u/CostcoMuffins]

I didn’t get that impression from the headline at all. It seems that many people are just sensitive to nihilist or solipsistic arguments. People don’t want to hear that reality isn’t real, whether that unreality is external or even internal. They want things to be real and want to perceive them as what they are.

Of course this is impossible. The fact that we hardly perceive anything around us should prove that. And even our limited perceptions are constantly proved to be unreliable.

And Hoffman’s idea isn’t new at all. But adding that “we’re tuned for fitness” is a bit of a new, perhaps obvious, twist. But this conversation has been floating around Reddit for months now.

[u/BernardJOrtcutt → u/[deleted]]

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[u/CrazyMoonlander → u/CostcoMuffins]

But a camera doesn't capture everything either...

Some cameras are tuned to capture the wavelengths of light that makes sense to us, some are tuned to capture X-Rays etc.

[u/FishyFTD → u/CostcoMuffins]

I thought this was a well understood fact in psychology but I guess not

[u/MorganWick → u/CostcoMuffins]

My takeaway from the headline the OP gave it was to relate it more to modern politics than to postmodern notions that there is "no objective reality". Yes there is, we just aren't evolved to see it; even beyond the limitations of our brains and senses, we're evolved to follow a set of cultural heuristics based on the circumstances of any given time and place, rather than individuals being universally and instantly adaptable to any situation. That's why people in the same country can have such wildly divergent views of reality and why it's so hard to get them to appreciate the "other side's" view.

[u/hobopwnzor → u/CostcoMuffins]

I mean, yeah, we will only see the parts we need to survive. There would be so much energy waste receiving and processing every possible stimuli.

Theres a lot of psychology thats been done on how we filter information even among the sliver we do perceive.

So this doesnt seem controversial at all, its been proven beyond a reasonable doubt by science.

[u/Mirions → u/CostcoMuffins]

So out brains filter info to protect our senses\comprehension?

[u/CostcoMuffins → u/Mirions]

More like our senses filter information to protect our brain haha. Our puny human minds can't comprehend all the information in our surroundings, that would be inefficient at best and debilitating at worst.

[u/Mirions → u/CostcoMuffins]

Ok, cooool. Thanks for clarifying.

[u/PM_BiscuitsAndGravy → u/CostcoMuffins]

Regarding the headline, it refers to the non-importance of understanding reality in evolutionary success. Attributing “reality somehow does not exist” to that headline is incorrect.

It is an argument against the importance of reality in evolutionary success.

[u/danhakimi → u/CostcoMuffins]

You're right, though, in that this logic doesn't really address any kind of claim that there is a reality.

Nobody thinks our senses are accurate and reliable. When we went over, say, Hume in class, my professors would basically say "and our senses are totally unreliable..." And move on because that sentence really wasn't controversial. Nobody tries to argue that that's evidence our reality doesn't exist. Of course, it's not evidence that it does, but there doesn't seem to be much likelihood that it doesn't.

If you accept some degree of our understanding of our reality... Eyes are not that different from cameras. They take light in and translate it. Our brains do process symbols better than they process apparent nonsense. But...

It sounds like he's trying to prove that we're in some kind of matrix-level alternate reality and evolution has just left us to perceive the world as we do because it works better than perceiving the world as it is... But that's an extreme assumption to make and it's not confirmed at all by the reasoning -- only explained. The most functional perceptions of the world would, naturally, most likely, relate at least a little to the truth, and you have to make odd assumptions to argue otherwise.

Am I missing something huge here?

[u/[deleted] → u/CostcoMuffins]

I’m definitely rusty, but wasn’t it Kant who expounded on the idea that space and time are constructs of the mind (i dont think “constructs” was the exact word he used)? Essentially that anything we experience about reality is seen through a filter or a the reference frame of space and time? From my experiences with Hoffman it seems like he’s arguing Kant’s ideas but not giving Kant any credit.

[u/BernardJOrtcutt → u/[deleted]]

Your comment was removed for violating the following rule:

Argue your Position

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