Arguing Conscious Realism to Absurdity

Back in Fine Tuning Towards Ignorance, I presented a scenario in which a fat dormouse (Chubby Loir) was saved by a crack in a barn wall, because he could squeeze through, while Tiddles the cat could not.  I want to revisit that scenario in light of the notion of "conscious realism".  If conscious realism were true, then there would be no objective, observer-independent reality and my representation of reality could be different to your representation of reality.  Now I naturally think this is bollocks, but let's pretend that it wasn't bollocks.  Let's also anthropomorphise Chubby Loir and Tiddles to the extent that they become conscious agents (unnecessarily for most of us, I hope, since these beings have previously been given to very human-like thought processes, and consciousness is not necessarily limited to humans).

Imagine then that they are both particularly pessimistic in their outlook.  Chubby Loir has been sighted by Tiddles and thinks to himself: "Just my luck, I'm going to be eaten now, but I might as well attempt to survive, even though I know it won't be successful."  Tiddles thinks to herself:  "That's a tasty looking dormouse, I almost certainly won't catch it, but I've got nothing else on the agenda, so I'll have a go anyway."  And the chase begins, with both running half-heartedly towards the barn.

Now I don't know whether, in the "conscious realism" paradigm, our attitudes affect our subjective realities, but something apparently will so the pessimism of Chubby and Tiddles can stand in place of whatever the actual mechanism is that permits their realities to differ.

As they approach the barn, they both see a crack, but their subjective realities with respect to the crack differ.  Chubby sees that it is too small for him to wriggle through but Tiddles sees that it is wide enough for Chubby to run through easily, but far too small for her to follow.  So, we reach the absurdity.  Chubby stops, convinced that certain death will follow, because he can't get through the crack while Tiddles stops, and watches as Chubby runs through the crack and escapes.  So we'd have two contradictory "realities", one in which Chubby escapes and one in which Tiddles (who does not belong to Schrödinger, by the way) eats him.

Donald Hoffman, the author of this madness, might argue that in his conception of "conscious realism" beings evolve so as to achieve fitness which is not necessarily consistent with reality, and the scenario I describe is inconsistent with fitness because Chubby gives up on trying the crack and Tiddles fails to eat him.  But even if their perceptions of reality are consistent with a more optimistic fitness, we could still have Chubby seeing that he could get through the crack and escape and Tiddles seeing that the crack is sufficiently large for her to get through and slay Chubby.  Two contradictory realities again.

Of course, it is possible for either of them to make a mistake.  Chubby could misjudge the crack and end up stuck in there, with his enormous bottom poking out, ready for Tiddles to drag him out and devour him.  Or Tiddles could either misjudge the crack as too small when it wasn't or end up getting stuck there herself, so that she ends up getting munched on by a fox.  But in both of these cases, this was because their perceptions of reality were inconsistent with an actual objective reality.  And youtube is replete with "fail videos" in which people misjudge objective reality - in which their own personal subjective realities were wrong, and we can only say they were wrong because there were objective realities against which we can compare them.  The objective realities into which they ran face first, or against which they crushed their (usually) adolescent manhood, or onto which they painfully fell.

(I could only bear about two minutes of the last compilation linked, so I didn't watch the others - watch at your own peril.  While I'm clearly more empathetic than I normally let on, I note that a number of the victims were idiots who managed to hurt themselves with what appears to be some forethought and are, therefore, possibly prime candidates for judicial culling from the gene pool.  I'm hoping that there were no actual culling events recorded.)

Anyways, you could call this the YouTube Argument Against the Madness that is Conscious Realism.

You're welcome.

The Ludicracy of Conscious Realism

It's sad to see that Quanta Magazine should take Donald Hoffman seriously when he waxes lyrical on the nature of reality, based on his "conscious realism".  This is a broadly respected repository of science journalism, but in this case, the editors appear to have let the article through because it mentions quantum stuff.

Naturally, I object to "conscious realism" in general, because it is total bollocks, but I also object some of the specific nonsense spouted by Donald Hoffman.  Now I would have provided a Wikipedia link to the page on "conscious realism" here, but there isn't one.  When you google the term, you end up at a document written by Donald Hoffman, which states:

Conscious realism is a proposed answer to the question of what the universe is made of. Conscious realism asserts that the objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents.

Hoffman even gave a TED talk on the topic - Do we see reality as it is?

My major beef is with this specific claim (from the Quanta Magazine article, but also referred to in the TED talk):

Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

I don't think I can state this strongly enough: This is total and complete bollocks.  It's lunacy.  I'd call it quantum nonsense, but this might lead some readers to think that it's nonsense on a minuscule rather than massive scale.

This idea could only work if, in order for trains to work, we were obliged to explain them to each other - to synch our individual subjective realities with respect to the trains in our shared experience.  Think about it for a moment.  Engineer E designs a train at the request of Customer C, who approves the drawings and passes them over to Manufacturer M.  At various stages during the process, Surveyor S visits the construction site and compares the train, in its current form, to the design detailed in the drawings.  Eventually, S signs off on the construction and M presents the train to C who then puts it onto a pre-existing rail network, with pre-existing tracks, pre-existing bridges and pre-existing tunnels and sets it off on its way.

There is certainly some discussion between E, M, S and C, but the process does not involve a word by word, squiggle by squiggle explanation as to what each of the pieces of paper have written and drawn on them.  For the information to flow accurately from person to person, and for a train to result which fits on the tracks and into tunnels (etc, etc), those pieces of paper (the drawings) must have an independent, objective and (at least temporarily) immutable reality.

Once the train exists, we don’t need to discuss with each other the location of doors and seats, and so on.  If my reality of the train could truly be different to your reality of the train, then we could enter via different doors and you could sit on a seat in a location that, in my reality, doesn't even exist on my train (for example, you might have the train as being four metres wide, whilst mine is only three metres wide).  Animals that cannot even converse with us (guide dogs for example) will reliably enter and exit via the doors in a train that must necessarily have an objective reality (and may not be perceptible at all by those being guided).  An objective reality is necessary because we could not synch any differences in subjective reality with them.  (Cross country horse events would be a nightmare if horse and rider could not independently observe an objective reality with respect to jumps and other obstacles - both need to be aware of what they are jumping over, and when, in order for them to move in concert and make the jump.)

I agree that there are certain aspects of reality that are fuzzy to us - colours vary due to lighting and there is evidence that the perception of some colours may be language dependent (Lenneberg and Roberts).  The idea is that given the lack of a specific word for "orange", speakers of Zuni find it more difficult to differentiate between two colours that an English speaker would have no difficulty distinguishing.  Females, who generally have a better handle on language, also have a greater range of colours that they can distinguish, despite not having any huge difference in their physiognomy.  (There are apps written for men to help them discuss curtain, cushion and dress colours with women - "What do you mean, the light green cushion?  It's not light green, it's chartreuse!")  There are a range of illusions that we may fall prey to: the illusion that an image on a page is 3D, if it is sufficiently well drawn, or the illusion that a spoked wheel is spinning in the opposite direction that it is actually spinning and so on.

However, these illusions and inaccuracies on our part as imperfect sensory creatures should never be taken to mean that reality is somehow "imperfect", let alone non-existent.  To pretend otherwise represents a monumental level of hubris.

To my mind, Donald Hoffman's "conscious realism" constitutes an equally monumental level of stupidity, complete with a massive begged question - where do these "conscious agents" of his come from, if there is no objective reality?  It's a form of quantum woo.

But then again, who knows, it might just be a misconception on my part.

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And by the way, I couldn't decide on whether I should use "lunacy" or a reference to the ludicrous nature of the idea of conscious realism in the title, so I split the difference.  It also hints at some sort of governance by the ludicrous, a word for which the need of is becoming more and more critical each day.