Round 3 with Hoffman's Consciousness Primacy Theory

Previously I have written about my miss-givings over Donald Hoffman's "crazy but not too crazy" ideas, which I've characterized as neo-Idealist. In this post I want to be a little more sympathetic and try to tease out some value from his speculative proto-theory.

Having read a fair few papers on his work with collaborators, I still find their work overly indexing off vision cognition research, and lacking a richer appreciation of consciousness. And I am still slightly confused about just how far Hoffman himself takes his ideas. Is he really saying that external objective reality does not exist apart from conscious agents? Or is he only saying that we simply do not perceive the external world in any way close to what actually exists?

If the latter, then I am sympathetic, but it is more a triviality. When our sensory perceptions are limited by our biology, obviously we rely on the mental/spiritual abstract thought to fill in plenty of gaps. Quite obviously there is almost no chance our perceptions match external reality. I just do not find any justification at all for inferring from this that there is no external objective reality. I previously gave a few reasons why one should not be nihilistic about realism. One is from information theory: it is far more absurd to think, and unlikely in probabilistic terms, to have consciousness conjuring up reality, than it is to presume there are external non-conscious locii, real external sources, of our sensory data. It's a parsimony principle argument. It is not a logical argument, it is a probabilistic argument.

Our abstract thought (our philosophy and science and art) is not limited by our sensory faculties. Imagination goes beyond the physical, in my humble view. We know this with fairly good certainty (perhaps not 100%) because mathematicians routinely theorize about spaces that most would regard as physically impossible to realise. And even if mathematical structures do later turn out to be physical, it is clear that today a lot of mathematical thought is well beyond what physical science understands. Mathematics has gotten (perhaps only temporarily) beyond all known physics. To my mind, to my philosophical taste, this means human mathematical thought cannot be explained as a purely physical process. This is heuristic or spiritual proof, not logic in the way Penrose tries to force it. I appeal to intuitions, not to pure logic here.

You can see why I have a soft spot for Hoffman's ideas.

Nevertheless, when I read some of Hoffman's more extreme statements, I baulk. Plus, I think I have a better framework for thinking about consciousness.

In Favour of Ontological Pluralism

Rather than consciousness supremacy, I think it is much richer, and a more beautiful framework, to think about degrees of spirit. If you believe in a God concept, then consider that to be the highest form of consciousness or "mind". It is not worth pursuing that sort of theology here though, because frankly I find it utterly impenetrable. If there really is a God, it is something unknowable, and I err on the side of silence. I do not appeal here to the Wittgensteinian notion of silence, instead I am saying that if we can see our way to defining some sort of Universal Uncaused Cause of All Things then that entity is an absolute existence, and far beyond all flawed human conception. So the unwillingness to assert things about such a God is not born from excess humility, it is born from absolute humility, and there's a difference! Anything we can hope to understand is something we should not be silent about!

Human consciousness may prove to be forever beyond our grasp, but I do not think it is obviously so, I think we can hope to understand aspects of human consciousness.

After the God concept we can conceive of various degrees of spirit, and at the base we have "inanimate matter". Of course, to the modern physicist matter is "totally not" inanimate. So what we really mean by the minimal form of spirit is whatever the most simple and elementary interactions there are in nature. We are never guaranteed to discover what these are, but at any stage in science we can say what we know as "most elementary". At the present that would be the fundamental particles in the Standard Model of physics and their interactions, mediated by bosons. Beyond this stage we might get some day to a tested theory of Strings or branes, but that is at about our current limits.

Like a metaphysical garden of variety, there are different kinds within each grade of spirit. One can, for example, regard elementary mathematical ideas that go into definitions and axioms as also a kind of elementary spiritual form, they are like the most primitive possible platonic ideals. They are the mental abstract analogues of the elementary physical particles. A primitive notion in logic or number theory is to the abstract platonic realm as electrons and photons are to physics.

A Reconciliation with the Consciousness Supremacists

Here then, is one way in which I can meet Don Hoffman and his collaborators half-way. Sentient beings with subjective conscious awareness (qualae-filled beings) are a higher form of spirit than the elementary particles of physics and the primitive logical notions of mathematics. And in this sense (but only in this sense) we can regard consciousness as primary.

This is an inversion of reductionism. Reductionism goes the wrong way! (Hoffman's view.) Well, I think I can go part way to agreeing with this, but with perhaps more subtlety.

The thing is, I do regard it as reasonable to think of physical stuff as also primary, and fundamental. Consciousness too has a certain attribute of fundamentality. The point being the two notions of fundamentality are not necessarily incompatible. Seeing how they could be compatible is a potentially rich avenue of philosophy, in my view. You could crudely call this a kind of rapprochement between physical reductionism and metaphysical idealism (neither of which I agree with as entireties in philosophy). In my view this is what David Chalmers has been struggling to achieve for over 30 years.

How do we get to such a framework?

Surprise, surprise... I have no idea! If I did, I would not be wasting time writing these notes.

A Beginning

One way to re-orient your thinking towards a compatibalist framework is to abandon the childish notion that, "either realist reductionism must be true or else idealism "must be true." It is a false dichotomy. Then, I think, you have to go a bit further beyond such categorical thinking. There are other ways to partition and categorize reality.

One way is to stop thinking in terms of scale, size and complexity, and use a different (but compatible) hierarchy of levels. But what? My suggestion is to use categories of spirit. What could that possibly mean? We need some working definitions!

I am not suggesting categories of spirit replace reductionist hierarchies. I imagine reductionism will always be useful. It's practical impossible to do physics without it! It's just that reductionism is not metaphysical entirety, it does no account for all things. Fooling yourself into thinking physical reductionism and emergence is literally all there is to the world is a bit like the proverbial dumb ass handyman who only has a hammer and so to whom every problem is a nail. Even if he is correct at a fundamental level, we can easily conceive of a world made up of pure "elementary nails" to have complex structure made up of billions of nails which cannot be manipulated with hammers, but can more usefully be manipulated using macroscopic objects themselves built out of nails. (You realise of course I am thinking here that our handyman is a string theorist, and the nails are superstrings and branes.)

In previous essays I have described how such macroscopic emergent" objects can gain causal efficacy, thus defeating the no-go supervenience theorems of Jaegwon Kim and others. All we need is the existence of closed time-like curves, then physicalism loses all potency and genuine macroscopic causal emergence becomes possible (indeed, unavoidable in a tame sort of physical universe with stable fundamental laws). General Relativity already permits closed time-like curves, these are the wormhole solutions (of which several exist.) A task of modern science is to get some solid experimental evidence. We do already have some experimental evidence, but it is not conclusive, because parsimony arguments cannot yet rule out alternative explanations for the experimental data. For instance, entanglement is direct "proof' that minimal wormholes exist, but we do not yet know if these can be traversable, and generically they are probably not, since most theories presume the wormholes have minimal area. However, Susskind and colleagues have shown how information can be sent in and extracted from wormholes. So while the minimal wormholes bridges might not be traversable by particles, we know that information can traverse the ER bridges. That is all we need for a minimalist theory of genuine emergence of macroscopic causality! That is because if we can send information back in time, then we can send causal influences back in time from a macroscopic system.

The limitation that large particles and molecules cannot traverse the ER bridges is probably a good thing, it preserves some forms of causality! In particular, we cannot time-travel ourselves by exploiting these particular types of CTC's.

Other experiments involving tunnelling are also indirect evidence of wormholes, and it is plausible that we've shown electrons can traverse the ER bridges! (If not then at east some sort of cloning of the electron gets across a wormhole). The Austrians (Günter Nimtz and colleagues) demonstrated sending Mozart's Symphony ahead in time --- they measured output before they sent in the input, through and electron tunnelling apparatus. Without invoking some quantum mysticism, the only way to explain such experimental result is by postulating the existence of traversable Lorentzian (spacetime) wormholes.

Can We Agree to Some Isomorphism Between Realism and Idealism?

While admitting I still find Hoffman confusing, because he mixes metaphors, and in one sentence talks about evolution and objects, then in another suggests they are not real, there is a superficial rapproachement available, and because philosophers get siloed into separate camps they miss it. This is the possibility that our words for different things can belie deeper commonalities.

From the realist side, you have to take empiricism at face value, and all empirical evidence seems to be pointing towards a breakdown of cherished notions of causality and permanence of objects. Quantum field theory is nothing if not ambiguous on whether solid objects and particles really exist at all.

From the idealist side, once you admit your mind is creating reality, what on earth point is there to claiming things are not real? If your mind makes them real, they are real! The distinction between "internal" and "external" then becomes merely definitional. Things I mentally construct as outside my mind, well, they are "outside". And in any case, most people (including myself) do not trust solipsism, and we are on firm epistemological grounds when inferring that at least other minds do exist external to our minds. We might be intimately connected to other minds in some sort of Mindspace network, but we are not them, not in entirety. We have elements of separateness even if we also share connectedness.

When you begin to appreciate how realism can lead to idealism, and all idealism can be reframed as realism, then you might also begin to see that perhaps neither extreme is an entirety. Like the old Elephant and Blind Men parable, we probably fool ourselves when we go to those extremes, we are narrowly looking at metaphysics from just one angle when doing so.

OK, but I don't think there are isomorphisms as this section heading suggests. And there need not be for some fruitful philosophy to come of all this . More to come later.