Donald Hoffman's Unconventional Theory of Reality

Although he claims he is a physicalist by training, I have to applaud him for noting that it has absolutely failed to explain all fundamental components of consciousness. I personally don't see why it is so hard for many to accept that consciousness is fundamental: most of the early founders of quantum mechanics thought likewise.
 
That is the most explicit video I have seen by Donald Hoffman. He is definitely a very interesting man to follow. He started off (some years ago) by arguing that if our physical senses evolved by natural selection, they can't show us reality. Of course, we understand the whole of physics via our senses (ultimately), so this is a big statement that I think a lot of people fail to understand. He has videos in which he starts to show how a universe consisting of a number of observers and nothing else, can end up producing notions of space and time, and he claims to have derived Special Relativity from them. Unfortunately, he got a student/collaborator to produce a mathematically rigorous version of his theory that is utterly impenetrable to me. See the later portions of this book:

http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ompref.pdf

If you can simplify this a bit, I'd be very grateful!

I guess he is rather dropping the dependence on evolution by natural selection, and remarkably he seems to be coming round to the same POV that many of us have!

Maybe he is ready to be interviewed on Skeptiko.

He has a new book coming out in August, that maybe very interesting.

David
 
Back
Top