That is a good article - vastly more penetrable than Hoffman's maths! I'd recommend everyone read it, to get a clearer idea of what Hoffman is on about.
I am dubious about the whole concept of evolution by survival of the fittest, so I don't know that I believe this scenario - what do you think?
David
Briefly scanned it, I thought that was dumbed down Hoffman? The author extracting some parts that are not really controversial "...perception hides the truth..." which seems little more than saying the 'result' comes from a 'process'... I also balk at invoking the word 'truth'... I don't know if there is such a thing... difficult to call a process the truth... but if your going to use the term truth... I'm not sure why the result shouldn't be the 'truth' either.
However I had a brief look at the '
Epilogue' in the Hoffman link you gave earlier... and that was fun reading, I can actually see why he wrote what I thought is an incorrect article on the spoon and the headache being the same thing. To him they are the same thing - as at page 5, he seems to envisage an 'instantiation cone', or, one thing building up complexity. Where as I see two things building up complexity. He seems to see a single 'thing' spread across observers, which I can see might be correct from a particular point of view. But it doesn't seem very useful... because he doesn't appear to deal with space-time.
His 'instantiation cone' seems like a poorer version of my sense-of-space final diagram (
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/posts/29304/ ). But he seems to be saying a similar thing...
O: ...For dynamics near the top of the cone, close to O itself, the representation tends to be more "psychological" whereas as one goes down the cone the representation becomes more "neurobiological" and then more "physical" and then...., well there’s no bottom that we know of.
I: Then you would deny a principled distinction between mind and body?
O: Yes. "Mind" and "body" are convenient terms to distinguish between levels of the instantiation cone for a given observer. Higher levels, or rather an observer’s representation of the dynamics at these higher levels, are
"mental." Somewhat lower levels are its "body"....
... but I think how he gets there is incomplete, it's too simple, because he doesn't attempt to deal with space-time... and thus gravity/acceleration, and thus matter/energy. I can see for instance that degrees of freedom are correlated with the acceleration of matter...
I accept that observers (whatever they are) are working together to produce our waking perception (coherence). But it's not very useful to merely suggest (show?) that. When what we really want to understand is why perception is the way it is... dealing with space-time is vital... it's vital to be able to break out of coherence, in some ordered way.