Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? (2015) [video]

https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is

by akkartik • 3 years ago

45 60 3 years ago

yamrzou3• 3 years ago

He distinguishes between perception and reality, but at no point he defines reality. How could he know that a given perception is different from reality, when perception is already one of the ways of knowing reality (along with: Other senses, cognition, human consensus) ?

reilly3000• 3 years ago

Objective reality is a disturbingly difficult thing to prove.

telmo• 3 years ago

It is impossible to prove, because "objective reality" refers to a hypothetical reality that exists independently of the perceptions of conscious entities. The problem, of course, is that we are conscious entities and all of our experience of reality comes from our perceptions, and there is no conceivable way for us to experience reality if not through our perceptions.

This is a very simple and even tautological conclusion, that a lot of smart people I know seem to have a hard time accepting. I think that this is because people assume that science assumes materialism, which it doesn't, of course. Science requires no metaphysical commitment.

callesgg• 3 years ago

Donald seams to believe that “reality” is defined in the terms of something like...

reality: “the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.”

That definition allows him to make the argument that he makes; as the definition separates our ideas from the thing that reality is.

It’s a definition with problems…

passion__desire• 3 years ago

Map vs Territory

LesZedCB• 3 years ago

this video needs no more than the caption:

John Carpenter's Dark Star - 1974 from phenomenology to cartesian skepticism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck

bonus relevance for AI hubbub

waseems• 3 years ago

Thank you, this made my day :)

nine_k• 3 years ago

I'd say that there's a reality (whatever it is; some phenomena that can be observed in whatever ways), and there are models of it.

Unless the reality has very particular properties (some kind of regularity / redundancy), every model of it is a simplification, so it has discrepancies. Even if the reality is regular and compressible perfectly into a model, it's rather hard to come up with such a model, and to prove it's the right one.

nix235• 3 years ago

It's the old "Is a falling tree creates a sound if no one hears it".

The simple answer is NO, because there is no "compatible ear" that interprets those "sound"-waves, as sound.

The reality is, it always creates waves but not sound.

yamrzou3• 3 years ago

The better answer is to agree on how 'sound' should be defined, which would dissolve the question.

“Do you think that 'sound' should be defined to require both acoustic vibrations (pressure waves in air) and also auditory experiences (someone to listen to the sound), or should 'sound' be defined as meaning only acoustic vibrations, or only auditory experience?”

From: Disputing Definitions — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-...

yarg• 3 years ago

Hold your hand up and look at it, now (without moving your hand) look at the wall (or whatever else) beyond it.

You'll perceive your hand in two different places - when it obviously isn't, because what you're perceiving is not reality, but the hack that allowed your ancestors to survive it.

dang• 3 years ago

Discussed at the time (barely):

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9782664 - June 2015 (1 comment)

pffft8888• 3 years ago

Interviews from the 70s with David Bohm about his cooncepts/theory of implicate and explicate order is much deeper and more sound than any TED talk about reality vs perception.

trabant003• 3 years ago

For me it's a simple problem of information size. A complete model of reality, aka the universe, takes this many bits. Our brains or computers have that many bits, obviously many, many orders of magnitude less. So any model we can actually make is an extremely lossy compression that will have horrible artifacts and distortions. But I also find this a truism, and quite a useless one. Of what help is pointing this out?

stagas10• 3 years ago

The universe and the brain are just assumptions, you're already in the realm of imagination when you talk about them as they can't be empirically known. You only know what you experience right now, that could be the entirety of it. When you move from a place to another, you simply just imagine that new place. You join those thoughts coherently because you like to think logically, but otherwise nothing necessarily exists outside of perception.

dalmo3• 3 years ago

nothing necessarily exists outside of perception

Random thought: if a stray bullet hit you on the back of your head and you die, does perception end? And if so what caused that bullet?

trabant003• 3 years ago

While I agree I think my question still stands. Of what help is this? I can only talk to you about what I perceive in words and concepts that make sense to me, as flawed as they might be. Even if I would only imagine the existence of computers, forums and you, what can I do about it? How is this knowledge actionable?

panda-giddiness2• 3 years ago

Consider that of the four fundamental forces, we can only directly probe two: gravity (via the inner ear) and electromagnetism (all other sensory organs).

jamesrom2• 3 years ago

What do you mean by directly? Gravity is only sensed via an interaction between fluids and fine hairs in your inner ear.

By that definition, we can also detect the weak interaction by feeling the sun on our face or the warmth of radioactive material.

panda-giddiness2• 3 years ago

On the contrary, I'd be perfectly content classifying our probing of gravity/acceleration indirect, too. For completeness I include gravity because it's the only other fundamental interaction we arguably directly sense (inner ear fluid and fine hairs are part of the same sensory organ, unlike our skin and the sun).

But I still suspect we would be able to sense gravity without inner ear fluid, even if only slightly. When we vigorously shake our head, the fluid flows against the hairs, so naturally the electromagnetic force and/or Pauli exclusion is mostly responsible for sensing. However, even absent any inner ear fluid, the hairs should still bend due to gravity -- I just don't know how appreciable the effect is.

stagas10• 3 years ago

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”.

Reality is perception. It is one set of logical possibities that allow the thinking agent to exist and to produce the thoughts it is producing right now. It is the output of a pure function in which it creates itself and maintains its existence, constantly feeding its output to its input.

Dreams are the exploration step of that function. Once in a while, the function creates a sandbox, feeds it with output gathered and classified as semi-coherent (adding in a few random bits), it simulates outcomes and picks out those fragments that didn't crash it.

Those are then integrated back into its main code, into the world it imagines it inhabits, "reality".

quietcomments2• 3 years ago

You can't have a perception without an external thing existing.

If you're born tabula rasa and everything you know is learnt, then everything your senses know came from an external object which exists independently of your senses.

Are we going to do Kant vs Nietschze until the end of time?

puffoflogic• 3 years ago

As long as Kant's would-be defenders defend counterfactual positions only, then I suppose there's no reason the debate would ever end.

If you're born tabula rasa

There's lots of evidence that just isn't so. If nothing else, we appear to be equipped with minds which are better suited than random chance to build a "meaningful" model of the world around us.

stagas10• 3 years ago

Ok but that's a hypothesis you make. To me it is absurd how an external object can exist independently of perception. What does it even mean that anything "exists" without senses to perceive it?

mhandley• 3 years ago

The problem with this talk is that it's almost content free. He has demonstrated that sometimes we (and other animals) misperceive things, or construct in our heads what we expect to see. He has demonstrated via simple virtual world models that simple artificial organisms evolve to perceive things that keep us alive and ignore other things. But what he has failed to do is tell us anything at all about how our perceptions generally differ from reality. Yes, the map is not the territory - we know that. Yes, we can't directly see atoms, we know that too, though we can with our machines. But other than being a low definition representation, he has not shown any important way in which the map differs from a low definition representation of reality, except that sometimes we make mistakes. He could be right, spacetime could just be the API, but he has presented no evidence for that.

mjburgess2• 3 years ago

Well we do see atoms, and we see them directly -- in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions.

However what "seeing atoms" means at a "given resolution" differs.

There's a long history of this paranoid game: we think the stick is bent! We were wrong! We didnt see the stick at all ! (false).

Ah, but damn: how is it now we know we were wrong? How is it now that, when we took the stick out of the water, we know it isnt bent?

Every sceptical example ever posed has this feature: it presumes that it is possible to be right. That is quite daming to the whole project of scepticism; it is, essentially, incoherent.

Without the possibility of knowing the stick is bent, our mistake was never even a mistake. The very worry of being mistaken is a worry which presumes that truth & knowledege are the ordinary background of our experience.

foolrush• 3 years ago

in the sense that atoms are a direct cause of our perceptions.

I do not believe this is correct in any manner, and reduces the role of cognition.

Jastrow’s work focuses on this departure between one context and higher order cognition.

mbnull• 3 years ago

The TED talk is old and maybe not the right format to discuss details. There are long-form discussions with Donald Hoffman on Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal I can link:

https://youtu.be/CmieNQH7Q4w

He goes into more details (it's over 3 hours…), but I am not sure his arguments are satisfying. It is really hard to prove this concept. The idea itself is very old. Plato's Cave is only one example.

Also in discussion with others: https://youtu.be/EwTpdCVsttI with John Vervaeke https://youtu.be/bhSlYfVtgww with Joscha Bach

danbruc• 3 years ago

There is certainly truth to the claim that the brain abstracts over the raw sensory input. Reading, for example, would be a much more intractable problem if you had to do it in terms of photons hitting your retina instead of first abstracting the patterns on your retina into shapes, letters and words.

But the leap from there is some abstraction going on to reality is nothing like the abstraction seems not [well] justified to me. And we can check it, we can build all kind of sensors and machines that interact with the world out there, cut out consciousness in the process, and see if the sensors report a world very different from how we perceive it. And they don't.

There is of course a complication to this, constructing those sensors and machines and looking at what they are doing always has to pass through our perception, so maybe we accidentally build sensors that yield the same distorted version of reality as our brain does or the sensors are actually reporting a very different world but when we look at the sensor readings they get distorted to match the perception through our senses.

But given all the ways and angles from which we can measure things and then transform and represent the results before perceiving them, I have a hard time imagining how it could always be coherently distorted to match our normal perception without showing any inconsistencies.

And our perception and intuition is of course not perfect. Time and space, for example, are different from what our perception and experience tells us, but we managed to measure it and uncover the differences. But even in this case our perception and intuition are not really wrong, they are a very good approximation for everyday situations and only shows noticeable discrepancies in extreme circumstances.

arunix• 3 years ago

Related book on the same topic:

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019/12/24/book-review-the-...

strogonoff2• 3 years ago

There’s also a paper, well worth a read: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0057...

csmeyer• 3 years ago

Scroll down to the section on Conscious Realism. This presents a mathematical basis for what "base reality" is: a graph of conscious agents, and our reality is merely a projection of that graph (we perceive elements of the projection, not the base graph). This to me is a much more powerful idea than the Ted talk which is a bit clickbaity.

strogonoff2• 3 years ago

Yes. This reverses the popular physicalist understanding of causality from “neurons firing cause your mind” to “measurable changes in the brain are reflections of conscious activity”, and so on.

This idealistic monism makes the most sense at a fundamental level. Since our mind is the only thing we can be sure exists, granting objective absolute existence instead to all those other bits and bobs and atoms and neurons—everything else but the mind—strikes me as logically inelegant overcomplication.

While swapping the directionality of this causal arrow may be orthogonal to most of STEM fields as they are now (philosophical concerns are irrelevant to physics), it could have immense implications for fields like medicine and human well-being.

kabanossen• 3 years ago

There is our perception of reality but also how we make meaning of our perceptions, how we understand. For example colors that do not exist in the physical reality but are products of our perceptions and our interpretation of those perceptions.

"The structure of the system of color categories is shaped by the neurophysiology of color vision, by our color cones and neural circuitry for color. Colors and color categories are not "out there" in the world but are interactional, a nontrivial product of wave length reflactances of objects and lighting conditions on the one hand, and our color cones and neural circuitry on the other. Color concepts and color-based inferences are thus structured by our bodies and brains."

https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p4.html

LocalH• 3 years ago

We see reality as it is captured by our input sensors, and processed by our vision system. That signal chain is where the subjectivity comes into play, as well as the edge cases where our vision systems misidentify something, or see something that isn't actually happening. It also defines what our reality is, based on the capabilities of the sensors. The existence of optical illusions prove that we don't see reality "as it is", or those illusions would not exist, and we'd just see what was there. The existence of both color-blind people, and tetrachromats, also prove that we don't see reality "as it is". Look at any of the other species in the world with differing vision systems to understand that at most we see what reality is for humans.

The really wild part of all of it is the way our brains can perceive things out of order, in a sense. The way our brains fill in microsaccades is wonderfully interesting. It's why the first tick of a second hand sometimes seems like it lingers.

Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? (2015) [video]

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