[FRIAM] The Atlantic article on "the illusion of reality"

[Russ Abbott]

An easy way to agree with Hoffman and not get bent out of shape is to
acknowledge that anything we think involves something being constructed in
our heads. That construction is an idea -- or an emotion, or whatever other
modes of awareness we have. That seems to me to be tautological: we can
think or feel, etc. nothing but our thoughts, feelings, etc. As I said
that's a tautology. After all, when we see something and say, that's a dog,
we are converting whatever raw signals we encounter into an image and a
concept. We aren't talking about the raw signals. It's impossible for us to
be aware of the impact of, say, every photon on our retinas. (I'm assuming
it is impossible. Perhaps some people can do something like it.) Also, I'm
assuming there is a world that includes photons that we encounter.

So this position doesn't deny a world "out there." At the same time it
acknowledges that as living beings we have evolved means to make something
more useful to us than awareness of raw signals. After all, why have eyes
if all they do is give us the equivalent of a plane of pixels. That doesn't
tell us anything about friend/foe, nourishment/poison, etc. If our senses
weren't hooked up to internal processes that made something of them besides
the raw signals, evolution wouldn't have kept and perfected them.

So the simple answer is that Hoffman is right that we don't see "the world
as it is" but that doesn't mean there isn't a world as it is.

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:17 AM gⅼеɳ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 09/18/2017 06:56 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> >
> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?utm_source=atlfb
>
> We've discussed Hoffman's ideas before.  Lots of us played in that
> thread.  The FriAM archives are down, I think.  But here's the 1st post of
> the thread:
>
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> Subject: [FRIAM] Why depth/thickness matters
> Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2017 12:05:05 -0800
> From: glen ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> To: friam at redfish.com
>
>
>   Natural selection and veridical perceptions
>   Justin T. Mark, Brian B. Marion, Donald D. Hoffman
>   http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/PerceptualEvolution.pdf
>
> > For the weak type, X ⊄ W in general, and g is a homomorphism. Perception
> need not faithfully mirror any subset of reality, but relationships among
> perceptions reflect relationships among aspects of reality. Thus, weak
> critical realists can bias their perceptions based on utility, so long as
> this homomorphism is maintained.
>
> To me, this evoked RRosen's "modeling relation", wherein he assumes the
> structure of inferential entailment must be similar to that of causal
> entailment (otherwise "there can be no science" -- Life Itself, pg. 58).
>
> > For the interface (or desktop) strategy, in general X ⊄ W and g need not
> be a homomorphism.
>
> This more closely resembles what I (contingently) believe to be true.
> Hoffman goes on to define and play some games, the results of which (he
> thinks) show that the interface strategy, under evolution, can demonstrate
> how fake news might dominate.  But my interest lies more in the idea that
> one's internal structure does matter with respect to whether or not one's
> likely to _believe_ false statements.  And I'm arguing that flattening that
> internal structure in a kind of holographic principle simply doesn't work
> with this sort of machine.
>
> An interesting potential contradiction in my own thought lies in:
>
> 1) I reject Rosen's assumption of the modeling relation (i.e. inference ≉
> cause), and
> 2) I still think intra-individual circularity is necessary for biomimicry.
>
> --
> ☣ gⅼеɳ
>
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-- 
Russ Abbott
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles
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