As I’ve pointed out before, YouTube has allowed scientists and philosophers of all stripes to promote pet theories that they know they can’t pursue academically with the same freedom. In fact, I’ve heard comments from people like Gregory Chaitin and Sabine Hossenfelder, who feel that the innate conservatism in academia is hindering progress in research and exploring new ideas.
Donald Hoffman is possibly an exception given his credentials: ‘Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine… [He] is the author of over one hundred scholarly articles on various aspects of human perception and cognition. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.’
All of the above I’ve lifted verbatim from the About The Author section to his book, The Case Against Reality (2019). The copy I have is Penguin paperback (2020). The subtitle is How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. I first came across Hoffman 10 years ago (2016), when someone sent me a link to an academic paper he cowrote with Chetan Prakash called Objects of Consciousness, which I reviewed back then.
All of this gives Hoffman enormous credibility, without even mentioning that he had direct communication with Francis Crick before the latter died. His book is obviously aimed at people like myself, who have an interest in science but are not academic, with the intention of convincing us that his ideas are unassailable. But the truth is that by the time I reached the end of his book, I was more convinced that he was wrong than when I started. Now that’s a huge admission given the extraordinary gap in our credentials not to mention the limitations of my knowledge in neuroscience.
I wrote a post some time ago, where I talked about how important beliefs are in the development of science. What I’ve learned from watching various science experts on YouTube, who have, what one might call, ‘fringe ideas’, is that they form a very strong belief and then look for the evidence to support it. I include myself in this, even though I’m not a scientist. My fringe idea is that there is a universal now, and I think this is consistent with relativity theory, even though everyone will tell you that I’m wrong. The one thing going in my favour is that the Universe appears to have an edge in time and a finite age, which runs contrary to the orthodox view that there is no objective now. From what I’ve seen and read, physicists gloss over this conundrum, including Brian Greene in his excellent book, The Fabric of the Cosmos.
A better example is cosmologist Claudia de Rahm, who is one of the very few scientists (perhaps the only one with the necessary expertise) who thinks that gravitons could have mass. The point is that we don’t even know if gravitons exist, and she readily acknowledges, that if they do exist, they might be impossible to detect.
So I can’t criticise Hoffman simply because his ideas are ‘out there’; it’s not uncommon among scientists, including famous ones like Sir Roger Penrose.
This is a lengthy preamble, but I want to make one other point, before I get into the nitty gritty of his arguments. I wrote a post once on how I believe science works, which, in a nutshell, builds on what we already know, even when we have so-called revolutions in science. Ever since the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and of course, Newton and Leibniz, our theories have extended science rather than outright replaced what went before. Claudia de Rahm (cited above) in answer to an audience question I watched online, made the explicit point that whatever new discoveries we make, they have to explain what we already know, so we don’t just throw everything in the rubbish bin (to use her turn-of-phrase).
Many people don’t know that one of Einstein’s self-imposed constraints on his General Theory of Relativity (GR) was that it had to agree mathematically with Newton’s theory of gravity when relativistic effects were negligible. Likewise, quantum mechanics (QM) hasn’t so much replaced classical physics, as added to it and possibly underpins it. UK based Aussie physicist, Mithuna Yoganathan (from the Looking Glass Universe YouTube channel) has made the point that she’s attracted to the many worlds interpretation (MWI) of QM because she can’t accept that the Universe obeys 2 sets of rules: for quantum mechanics and classical physics. The fact that she even mentions it suggests to me that it’s quite plausible, in which case, QM adds new physics without completely overturning the old.
The reason I’ve spent so much time on this detour is that, according to Hoffman, we need to reinvent virtually all the physics of the past 4-500 years, as well as evolutionary theory.
In fact, Hoffman states that “ITP asserts that one theory of objective reality – that it consists of physical objects in spacetime – is false.” (p.82) Einstein’s GR, mentioned earlier, is one such theory and currently underpins the latest cosmological model, specifically LCDM. ITP is Hoffman’s ‘Interface Theory of Perception’ which he analogises with a desktop interface on a computer, and to extend the analogy, the ‘objects’ we perceive are like ‘icons on the desktop’, so not ‘real’. I’ll return to this point later, given its significance to his argument.
After reading his book, I have many philosophical differences with Hoffman, but there is one point in particular, which is central to his entire thesis, where I’d argue the evidence contradicts him. I’m calling it the ‘principle of object permanence’. I admit I made that up, but it’s something that I argue evolution by natural selection selected for, because it’s a principle we not only take for granted but is cognitively found in babies and other animals. In other words, it’s the fundamental belief that an object still exists when we can’t see it. I will give an example of its ‘evolutionary value’ shortly, but it’s the direct opposite of what Hoffman believes. And I mention its evolutionary value because key to Hoffman’s theory is that evolution by natural selection supports his position and not mine.
He calls his theorem FBT, ‘Fitness-Beats-Truth’, which effectively means that evolution selects for fitness, not truth, while being somewhat hand-wavy about what those terms mean and how they can be quantified. The one example he provides in his book is a graphic representation. In fact, all his ‘evidence’ is based on computer modelling according to the examples he gives. He combines FBT with ITP (already mentioned), asserting they prove that he’s right: object permanence does not exist (as I defined it above).
I’m not going to try and prove his FBT or ITP wrong; I’m going to show why I believe the principle of object permanence is a necessary belief for evolutionary fitness. Now Hoffman would agree that the perception of object permanence affects evolutionary fitness but that doesn’t mean it’s real. However, I contend that it can make the difference between life and death, which does make it real.
I will give an example I read about once, involving crows not humans, which I assume really happened. Actually, it involved crows and humans, but it’s the cognitive ability of the crow that’s tested. A human with a gun set a trap for a crow using bait, then went into hiding until the crow took the bait. The crow, however saw the man go into hiding, and believing in object permanence waited patiently till the man left. Then the man got a companion, and this time the crow waited until both of them left. So they repeated the exercise using 3 gunmen and this time after 2 left, the crow thought it was safe, only it wasn’t. The exercise proved that the crow couldn’t count past 2. But you can see how a belief in object permanence can be critical to survival.
Now Hoffman has an answer to this, because it’s comparable to being hit by a car or being killed by any so-called object in his ‘interface’ (hence the name, ITP). He would say you need to take the car ‘seriously but not literally’. I admit I have a problem with that statement: I take the car ‘seriously’ because it can kill me but I don’t take it ‘literally’ because it’s not ‘real’. Hoffman keeps comparing this to someone playing Grand Theft Auto on a computer, because we live in an ‘interface’ not spacetime and there are no objects, only ‘icons’, including your own body. He later argues we don’t live in a computer simulation, which I’ll return to.
For examples of truth that evolution didn’t select for, he mentions oxygen and ultraviolet light causing sunburn. His point is that in both cases we don’t need to know about oxygen in order to know that the ability to breathe air confers fitness or know about ultraviolet light to know that keeping our skin covered against prolonged exposure to sunlight also confers fitness. By these examples, truth means explanations, to which I’d agree: evolution doesn’t select for explanations and I wrote about that elsewhere, while also discussing Hoffman. Note how sunlight and air exist externally to us.
Returning to my principle of object permanence, Hoffman cites Einstein’s famous retort to Bohr, ‘Do you think the moon ceases to exist when you’re not watching?’ It turns out that Hoffman does: “There is no objective moon or spacetime that exists even when unperceived…” (p.198)
I would like to know how that affects the tides occurring all around the world, although, according to Hoffman, there is no ‘around the world’, because there is no 3-dimensional space, and there is no cause and effect. He also claims that DNA and chromosomes don’t exist unperceived which turns evolutionary theory on its head. I discussed that in my original post on Hoffman. It reinforces my earlier point that Hoffman’s theory requires all of science to be replaced, including evolutionary theory as well as cosmology. He doesn’t explain how DNA and chromosomes can only exist when observed, yet underpin evolutionary theory as we currently know and understand it. He also claims the same for neurons in the brain, meaning consciousness creates them rather than the converse, which is the consensus of virtually all neuroscientists. Hoffman acknowledges this fundamental disagreement.
He spends a lot of time discussing optical illusions in considerable detail as supporting evidence that what we perceive is not real. I agree with him that our sensory experiences, like colour, sound and smell are all totally subjective and that other animals’ sensory experiences can be completely different to ours. We know that some animals can see colours we can’t and vice versa, and some can hear sounds that we can’t. But here’s the thing: colours are created by reflected light from an external source, and sounds are caused by vibrations transmitted through a medium, like air, and we’re evolutionarily adapted to pick them up and transform them into sensory experiences. To use his terms, the ‘fitness’ is our sensory experience and the ‘truth’ is our explanation of their external origins. So, yes, we evolved for fitness, not a scientific understanding called truth, but that doesn’t rule out object permanence (as described above) nor their location in space and time.
For the sake of brevity, I can’t address all his points but there is one other I find particularly contentious, and that is the idea that 3 dimensions of space are redundant, and we only need 2. Hoffman cites the cosmological holographic principle, which is basically the idea that all the (quantum) information inside a black hole is available holographically on the surface of its event horizon, which, it needs to be pointed out, is a sphere. Some argue that our entire universe could be modelled on the same principle, that everything in it could be a hologram projected from a 2-dimensional horizon. Hoffman argues that since all the information can be contained in 2 dimensions the third dimension of space that we ‘perceive’ is redundant and is used for ‘error-correction’. Aside from this being highly speculative physics, Hoffman overlooks the fact that the 2-dimensional surface of an event horizon on a sphere can only exist in 3-dimensional space; a hollow sphere in 2 dimensions becomes a circle.
But there is more: the inverse square law for gravity, which is in both Newton’s and Einstein’s theories, is a direct consequence of space being 3-dimensional. John Barrow gives the best account I’ve come across in his excellent book, The Constants of Nature. Given Hoffman’s access to academia, I’d recommend he talk to Barrow, or at least, read his book. Hoffman quotes Arkani-Hamed in a 2014 lecture at the Perimeter Institute: “Almost all of us believe that spacetime doesn’t exist; that spacetime is doomed, and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks.” (p.114) Now, I’m obviously not familiar with Arkani-Hamed’s work, but Graham Farmelo (The Universe Speaks in Numbers) also quotes Arkani-Hamed in a different context, which is the success of mathematical objects called amplituhedrons in predicting the amplitude of gluons in particle physics. Note this has an experimental physics basis, and is not just theoretical.
This is a concrete example of a way in which the physics we normally associate with space-time and quantum mechanics arises from something more basic. (my emphasis)
Now, I know that some physicists are speculating that spacetime might be an emergent property from something deeper (as inferred in the above quote from Arkani-Hamed), but that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t exist. If, on the other hand, Arkani-Hamed really believes that ‘spacetime doesn’t exist’, then he needs to replace the highly successful GR with something else. He also needs to explain the cosmological history based on the observable CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation) that is the remnant of the Big Bang (13.8 billion years ago). I don’t know how you can have a cosmological history without spacetime. Hoffman challenges this by arguing for a ‘top-down cosmology’, that starts with an observer, but that’s another topic for another time.
In fact, Hoffman argues that conscious agents generate spacetime and all the physics we currently know, including quantum mechanics.
Conscious realism must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface, and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology. (pp.198-9)
We must show how conscious agents generate spacetime, objects, physical dynamics and evolutionary dynamics. We must get back quantum theory and general relativity, and generalisations of these theories that are mathematically precise. (p.184-5)
Hoffman does this by creating a mathematical model of consciousness that apparently generates all of what we call objective reality. He reveals this in an appendix, titled, Precisely; The Right to Be Wrong. He doesn’t make it clear who has ‘the right to be wrong’: himself or the rest of us. It’s very obtuse mathematics, in the form of logic rather than equations, but basically, he creates a mathematical formula for ‘conscious agents’, and then, using ‘Markovian dynamics’, effectively derives spacetime. I don’t pretend I can follow it. He concludes by saying: “…perhaps a dynamic evolution of conscious agents toward small-world networks may appear in spacetime as the dynamics of gravity.” (p.205) I think the words, ‘perhaps’ and ‘may’, carry a lot of weight. To provide context, Hoffman argues that it’s networks of ‘conscious agents’, not individuals, that generate the world we call reality.
Earlier this year, I attended a 2hr stage presentation by Prof Brian Cox, which was very esoteric, discussing wormholes, black holes and other cosmological exotica, but he never mentioned that ‘spacetime is doomed’; so that’s the orthodox view.
In summary, I have 2 fundamental contentions with Hoffman, without even considering his ideas on evolution. Anyone who has lost an object (like car keys) knows they still exist unobserved, including Hoffman, I suspect. He will rationalise that he takes them ’seriously but not literally’. However, that explains nothing, unless you’re in a video game (refer below). My argument is that evolution confers fitness on perceiving ‘object permanence’ because it’s a matter of life-and-death, as per my crow story.
My second contention is that we live in 3D not 2D. To demonstrate, draw an animal, any animal, on paper, so it’s flat and you can cut it out. Then draw an alimentary canal from its mouth to its anus. If you then cut it out, it falls apart into 2 pieces. This is as good a reason as any why we don’t live in a 2D universe. Hoffman mentions, in passing, while discussing something else, that he can’t visualise 4D, and there’s a good reason for that: we don’t need to; even though we can represent any finite dimensional world mathematically. The reason we can only visualise 3D and less, is because we live in a 3D world.
Hoffman finishes his main text (before the Appendix) with this:
Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your inventions. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink. You have worn this headset all your life. What happens when you take it off? (p.202)
Despite claiming that he doesn’t believe we live in a computer simulation, his description of ‘reality’ is indistinguishable from one. This is demonstrated by calling objects and even his own body, ‘icons’, and that he believes the world is 2D like a screen, which we erroneously perceive as 3D (according to him), because it increases our evolutionary fitness.
He reinforces that view here: “The interface theory of perception contends that there is a screen – an interface – between us and objective reality.” (p.191, my emphasis)
Later he talks about spirituality, which I won’t elaborate on, except to say that the idea that consciousness can escape its physical constraints, as opposed to creating them, is not ruled out or ruled in.
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