Objective Reality: an illusion

[stickdog99]

Sounds right to me.


The mention of Loftus and 'objective reality' reminds of hearing Loftus on the radio struggling to explain why a respected, intelligent lawyer like Hillary Clinton could so badly mis-remember her landing "under sniper fire" (not) in Bosnia—how she got it so wrong. Especially considering that some reasonable facsimile of the objective reality was recorded by CBS news cameras for everyone to see.

It never once occurred to Loftus that maybe Clinton was just plain LYING.

Are you sure you are remembering that radio interview correctly?

[Elvis]

Are you sure you are remembering that radio interview correctly?

[JackRiddler]

Please don't revive the "Mandela Effect" thread. Please. I don't even want to know what it is now called, since I've probably misremembered it.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Gentlemen: http://intotheempty.net/2017/12/12/an-i ... ry-of-uap/

I really liked the riff here, it's not tidy so much as thought-provoking. Worth reading in entirety, but their own summary:

Enter the Interface Theory of Perception, which bravely posits that the very space time we witness and live in is nothing more than an interface we’ve evolved to navigate an extremely complex, as-yet undiscovered objective reality.

Everyday objects like the computer I’m using and the trees I’m looking at outside – all physical objects in fact – are nothing more than symbols/icons in my interface, according to the theory, which is used as a guide throughout existence.

Three interesting aspects of this theory are:

A) That the objects we see in space time are not accurately representative of their stimulus in the said mysterious underlying objective reality, just as icons on a computer screen don’t come anywhere near accurately representing the complex reality of programs running in a computer.

B) The physical objects we see and interact with everyday should be taken seriously, but not literally IE: Just because a tree is not really a tree, as per the theory, it doesn’t mean you should start trying to walk through it – its job is to show you where you can’t go, (unless you are climbing).

C) Causation is not happening within the space time interface. The snowball you just threw during ‘winter’ wasn’t ‘you’ throwing it and it wasn’t a snowball. Instead, the whole scenario is representative of some type of action happening in said mysterious objective reality – whatever this proves to be.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Open page from Vallee's journals, Vol. 4

Tokyo Prince Hotel, Sunday 22 October 1995.

...other witnesses have been disoriented by apparent violations of perspective and geometry produced by these objects.

Researchers who think of UFOs as machines operating in our ordinary spacetime have not listened carefully enough to those who have seen the phenomenon up close.

[JackRiddler]

I love the theory. It's not new. It's an awesome power we have, to outline a universe we can never see and never grasp and that could be the real one that produces our perceptions of reality so that we take it to be the whole reality.

Unless it pierces through somehow. That would be where the UFO speculation comes in. All I'd object to in your little snippet, and again it's only semantics or missing words, would be "our ordinary spacetime." That would be like "our ordinary Ptolemaic model of the universe," am I mistaken?

[stickdog99]

Interface Theory’s creator, Dr. Donald Hoffman

Umm, was I under the mistaken impression that Kant called this basic concept transcendental materialism?

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Ah yes, Hoffman. There's stuff from Hoffman within RI's archives, which I'll endeavor to locate and share when I'm in front of my laptop (rather than this irksome mobile device).
Indeed, Elfis included a vid clip of a Hoffman talk in page 1 of this thread.

His Desktop analogy is the one that gets the rounds on the interwebs:

Hoffman's computer analogy is that physical space is like the desktop and that objects in it are like desktop icons, which are produced by the graphical user interface (GUI). Our senses, he says, form a biological user interface—a gooey GUI—between our brain and the outside world, transducing physical stimuli such as photons of light into neural impulses processed by the visual cortex as things in the environment. GUIs are useful because you don't need to know what is inside computers and brains. You just need to know how to interact with the interface well enough to accomplish your task. Adaptive function, not veridical perception, is what is important.

Hoffman's holotype is the Australian jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli. Females are large, shiny, brown and dimpled. So, too, are discarded beer bottles dubbed “stubbies,” and males will mount them until they die by heat, starvation or ants. The species was on the brink of extinction because its senses and brain were designed by natural selection not to perceive reality (it's a beer bottle, you idiot!) but to mate with anything big, brown, shiny and dimply.

The author of the excerpt is somewhat of a detractor, however:

ITP is well worth serious consideration and testing, but I have my doubts. First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive? Hoffman's answer is that evolution gave us an interface to hide the underlying reality because, for example, you don't need to know how neurons create images of snakes; you just need to jump out of the way of the snake icon. But how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place? Natural selection. And why did some nonpoisonous snakes evolve to mimic poisonous species? Because predators avoid real poisonous snakes. Mimicry works only if there is an objective reality to mimic.

Hoffman has claimed that “a rock is an interface icon, not a constituent of objective reality.” But a real rock chipped into an arrow point and thrown at a four-legged meal works even if you don't know physics and calculus. Is that not veridical perception with adaptive significance?

As for jewel beetles, stubbies are what ethologists call supernormal stimuli, which mimic objects that organisms evolved to respond to and elicit a stronger response in doing so, such as (for some people) silicone breast implants in women and testosterone-enhanced bodybuilding in men. Supernormal stimuli operate only because evolution designed us to respond to normal stimuli, which must be accurately portrayed by our senses to our brain to work.

Hoffman says that perception is species-specific and that we should take predators seriously but not literally. Yes, a dolphin's icon for “shark” no doubt looks different than a human's, but there really are sharks, and they really do have powerful tails on one end and a mouthful of teeth on the other end, and that is true no matter how your sensory system works.

Also, computer simulations are useful for modeling how evolution might have happened, but a real-world test of ITP would be to determine if most biological sensory interfaces create icons that resemble reality or distort it. I'm betting on reality. Data will tell.

Finally, why present this problem as an either-or choice between fitness and truth? Adaptations depend in large part on a relatively accurate model of reality. The fact that science progresses toward, say, eradicating diseases and landing spacecraft on Mars must mean that our perceptions of reality are growing ever closer to the truth, even if it is with a small “t.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... eally-are/


Of course, none of this rules out the Holographic theory of our Universe..

[JackRiddler]

.

NOTHING will ever rule out the holographic theory of the universe. I hereby bet a solid-gold orb with the diameter of Saturn's orbit that it will never be ruled out. (I will generously accept ownership of the Earth as the counterbet._

If the holographic theory of the universe is PROVEN as dramatically as in a Matrix-style awakening, NOTHING will ever rule out the holographic theory of THAT universe. (Hello, Zion was a Matrix. Duh.)

It's like an all-powerful all-knowing God who intentionally and impenetrably hides his omnipresence, eternally. Can you disprove him? NO. So. BELIEVE!

In fact, it IS that. It is the religion for atheist math talents. The guy's favored parable is a COMPUTER.

We have gone through this now in about 14 threads. I'm not complaining. God wants you to KICK them.

.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

[this article can fit in numerous other threads here]

I get that Scientific American is an intel-backed operation and all, but I'll have to add this link as well into the mix. Every source has its share of valuable information, if parsed with a measure of care and awareness.


https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ob ... y-to-mind/

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind

So-called “information realism” has some surprising implications

In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that “protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars” are all redundant “baggage.” Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them,” which “can be described in a baggage-independent way”—i.e., without matter. He attributes existence solely to descriptions, while incongruously denying the very thing that is described in the first place. Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real.

This abstract notion, called information realism is philosophical in character, but it has been associated with physics from its very inception. Most famously, information realism is a popular philosophical underpinning for digital physics. The motivation for this association is not hard to fathom.

Indeed, according to the Greek atomists, if we kept on dividing things into ever-smaller bits, at the end there would remain solid, indivisible particles called atoms, imagined to be so concrete as to have even particular shapes. Yet, as our understanding of physics progressed, we’ve realized that atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as “energy” and “fields”—abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.

To some physicists, this indicates that what we call “matter,” with its solidity and concreteness—is an illusion; that only the mathematical apparatus they devise in their theories is truly real, not the perceived world the apparatus was created to describe in the first place. From their point of view, such a counterintuitive conclusion is an implication of theory, not a conspicuously narcissistic and self-defeating proposition.

Indeed, according to information realists, matter arises from information processing, not the other way around. Even mind—psyche, soul—is supposedly a derivative phenomenon of purely abstract information manipulation. But in such a case, what exactly is meant by the word “information,” since there is no physical or mental substrate to ground it?

You see, it is one thing to state in language that information is primary and can, therefore, exist independently of mind and matter. But it is another thing entirely to explicitly and coherently conceive of what—if anything—this may mean. By way of analogy, it is possible to write—as Lewis Carroll did—that the Cheshire Cat’s grin remains after the cat disappears, but it is another thing entirely to conceive explicitly and coherently of what this means.

Our intuitive understanding of the concept of information—as cogently captured by Claude Shannon in 1948—is that it is merely a measure of the number of possible states of an independently existing system. As such, information is a property of an underlying substrate associated with the substrate’s possible configurations—not an entity unto itself.

To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such.

[more at link.]

And this quote -- clearly, this is a man of great intellect. Behold, his prosaic usage of descriptors:

A passage by Luciano Floridi may provide a clue. In a section titled “The nature of information,” he states:

“Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory.... Information remains an elusive concept.”

http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/floridi/wp-co ... titpoi.pdf

Ephemeral, yet tactile to the senses. Quite an illusion.

[Elvis]

^^^^ I like it!

It reminds me of money: you don't need the actual cash, just the idea of it.

[JackRiddler]

.

Elvis: You may have hit on a good analogy. It is true that the idea of money IS money -- at least once the idea has sufficient consensus; nothing can be money unless the idea of it has sufficient consensus. Money literally is money because we think it is.

However, unlike information in information realism, money is not already a complete universe in itself. You still need the things to be exchanged. That is why an idea for how to exchange them is devised. Money is still a map of a universe of external values that are measured in money-units.

Of course, as we have seen, the exchanged things in turn can be abstracted through seemingly unlimited layers of securitization and derivitization, until these too seem not to exist in any material sense, and become equivalent to their exchange-values as measured in money. All that is solid melts into air. Yet as soon as too many people think that has become perfectly the case (that there is no longer an underlying material asset, it's only information), it goes poof! And crash!

So money is still clearly an invented convention to facilitate exchange, and the things being exchanged are only valuable for exchange because we think so (often however proceeding from the not-so-dubious idea that we should eat stuff).

In information realism it seems the laws of how matter-energy behaves, once putatively understood, become its creators. I find that suspicious.

From their point of view, such a counterintuitive conclusion is an implication of theory, not a conspicuously narcissistic and self-defeating proposition.

Why can't it be both? A lot of things that can be read as implied don't turn out to be so. A lot of conspicuously narcissistic and self-defeating propositions aren't obviously so to those who suffer from them. This seems to confuse the money for the thing exchanged. On paper, the money is the thing, operations on the money imply operations on the thing. The thing's existence asserts itself elsewhere, sooner or later.

And is this idea really counterintuitive? I'm not sure what that word even means, here. It's clearly an idea that people love. People love thinking that mind creates matter, or that mind is the only real thing and matter is illusion, or that they are part of the mind that creates the matter, or that they know something of the mind that creates the matter. So what's counterintuitive about this idea we seem primed to believe? It's often a very useful idea: assuming ourselves as the creators of things often helps us understand them. One example is reverse engineering.

I wonder whether something that's easy for people to imagine, and that people like to imagine, is being reconceived as a daring, courageous leap.

.

[Belligerent Savant]

[Bump]

[Grizzly]

If what is going on isn't a script, I don't know what isn't!

[Harvey]

^ It is a script.