YT: Donald Hoffman on Consciousness and Conscious Agents

thumbnail
Aleksandras, modified 3 Years ago at 9/9/20 10:16 AM
Created 3 Years ago at 9/9/20 10:09 AM

YT: Donald Hoffman on Consciousness and Conscious Agents

Posts: 6 Join Date: 12/2/17 Recent Posts
Hi everyone,
i hope this is relevant to this subsection. Basically, what Donald Hoffman's theory proposes
is that there is a "realm of conscious agents" which exists sort-of outside our physical world, 
but those agents preceive themselves and communicate using our "physical reality" - this reality he theorises
is not at all fundamental, but sort of a "game" to which these conscious agents are connected
and through which they communicate with each other. If eventually we may create AI sophisticated enough
(on silicone or otherwise) then it would become a "portal" for more of these agents to come and connect
to our "game". Strangly, he does not mention or refer to any to contemplative pratices, traditions or experiences.
And i think  is quite odd, because too me it looks as if it's exactly what's been observed by advanced spiritual
practitioners  since the time of Buddha and earlier - there's something/consciousness that's can interact with
the illusory phyiscal world but also exists outside of it.

The YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIxz9pyHukA

Somehow i also think he'd be a helpful accomplice to the academic research that Daniel Ingram is doing these days
thumbnail
Chris M, modified 3 Years ago at 9/9/20 12:26 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 9/9/20 12:25 PM

RE: YT: Donald Hoffman on Consciousness and Conscious Agents

Posts: 5117 Join Date: 1/26/13 Recent Posts
I've read a lot of what Donal Hoffman theorizes and my take is that he's saying:

1. Humans do not experience the universe as it "really is" but rather a sensory/mind version that is survival positive

2. Human senses and the mind combine in this efforts to create a universe that he compares to a video game. In other words, a game-like interface that the mind uses to navigate this mental construction

Hoffman's ideas are indeed very much like what Buddhist cosmology teaches, and even more like what we find when we develop and maintain a deep mediation practice:

 . . I want to propose that realism is false, and what we're seeing is more like a user interface or a virtual reality headset. Think about a virtual reality game of tennis. You're playing VR tennis with a friend, you both have your headset and body suits on, you see your friend's avatar on a tennis court and you start playing. Your friend hits the tennis ball to you, and you hit the same tennis ball back to your friend, but is your friend seeing exactly the same tennis ball that you're seeing? Well, of course not. There's no public tennis ball. You have some photons being sprayed to your eye by your headset, and those photons are causing your visual system to create your own perception of what you would call a green tennis ball. Your friend has a headset on, which is spraying photons to his eye, and his visual system is creating his own green tennis ball perception.

It turns out that both of those perceptions are coordinated by something else, namely a supercomputer that's sending the photons to both headsets, causing both headsets to work in coordination. . . .

All the things that we would do to say that objects really exist even when they're not perceived hold here in virtual reality. . . . That doesn't mean that the tennis ball exists and has any physical properties when it's not perceived; it just means that there is some objective reality.


Here's a nice interview with Hoffman:  https://www.edge.org/conversation/donald_d_hoffman-realism-is-false
thumbnail
Aleksandras, modified 3 Years ago at 9/10/20 2:01 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 9/10/20 12:13 PM

RE: YT: Donald Hoffman on Consciousness and Conscious Agents

Posts: 6 Join Date: 12/2/17 Recent Posts
Hoffman's model is very close to Platonic-Cave where we just see shadows dancing on cave walls, 
but with a twist of having conscious agents interacting by watching those shadows - it's a pretty important one IMO,
and it sort of bridges ideas of Plato with things that Buddha has discovered and tought about 2 hundred years before him



[ funny you quited that, in a span of last 4 yeras i've literally spent over 1000 hours playing table tennis 
in virtual reality with players all around the World, it's amazing fun and workout. Now im gradually trying to 
subsitute more of that time with daily meditation, i feel the latter is also challanging skill-development but it has
more meaningful ways to progress than smashing virtaul ball with a virtual racket year after year... But
according to Hoffman this is what we unknowingly do in our life anyways]
thumbnail
Niels Lyngsø, modified 3 Years ago at 9/30/20 12:02 PM
Created 3 Years ago at 9/30/20 12:02 PM

RE: YT: Donald Hoffman on Consciousness and Conscious Agents

Posts: 413 Join Date: 11/15/19 Recent Posts
I have also been very interested in the theories of Donald Hoffman, and now I just found out that he is a diligent meditator himself. In the first 15 minutes of this interview, he tells a little about his self taught practice. Apparently, he has been meditating for some 17 years, around three hours a day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs1xv0ZEN-U&ab_channel=BuddhaAtTheGasPump 

Breadcrumb