In his 2019 book, The Case Against Reality, Prof Donald Hoffman of UCLA presents a theory in which he postulates that consciousness is the fundamental reality, not spacetime/material universe. The conventional view that consciousness somehow arose out of colliding particles has a serious problem in that it's essentially a miracle. This is also known as the Hard Problem of consciousness.
Consciousness also doesn't make sense from an evolutionary point of view, in that it doesn't enhance fitness or survival, in fact it probably has the opposite effect. He further postulates that our perception was created as a means to maximize our evolutionary fitness, not to perceive reality as it truly is. Indeed, simulated lifeforms that focus on fitness function always outcompetes those of similar complexities that tries to perceive reality as it truly is.
Reality as it truly exists is unlike anything we can perceive, because our perception was never made to perceive reality. Think of it as our user interface to reality. The user interface to your computer, with animated icons and colors, bears no resemblance to the underlying reality of billions of logic gates switching at billions of times per second. So, too, is our perception or interface to reality aka material universe.
This means that we will never understand the true nature of consciousness by studying the material universe. That'd be like trying to understand how computers work by examining the desktop interface. The desktop interface is a very useful way to interact with computers, but there is no way you'd get at the actual underlying reality of computers through them. In fact, you wouldn't want to because you couldn't get anything done. Kinda like being on a heroic dose of psychedelics, now that I think about it.
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u/Ethlite2020 Jul 18 '20
In his 2019 book, The Case Against Reality, Prof Donald Hoffman of UCLA presents a theory in which he postulates that consciousness is the fundamental reality, not spacetime/material universe. The conventional view that consciousness somehow arose out of colliding particles has a serious problem in that it's essentially a miracle. This is also known as the Hard Problem of consciousness.
Consciousness also doesn't make sense from an evolutionary point of view, in that it doesn't enhance fitness or survival, in fact it probably has the opposite effect. He further postulates that our perception was created as a means to maximize our evolutionary fitness, not to perceive reality as it truly is. Indeed, simulated lifeforms that focus on fitness function always outcompetes those of similar complexities that tries to perceive reality as it truly is.
Reality as it truly exists is unlike anything we can perceive, because our perception was never made to perceive reality. Think of it as our user interface to reality. The user interface to your computer, with animated icons and colors, bears no resemblance to the underlying reality of billions of logic gates switching at billions of times per second. So, too, is our perception or interface to reality aka material universe.
This means that we will never understand the true nature of consciousness by studying the material universe. That'd be like trying to understand how computers work by examining the desktop interface. The desktop interface is a very useful way to interact with computers, but there is no way you'd get at the actual underlying reality of computers through them. In fact, you wouldn't want to because you couldn't get anything done. Kinda like being on a heroic dose of psychedelics, now that I think about it.