a deeper intelligence under reality

A reader asked me to comment on this from Donald Hoffman:

I’d seen it several weeks ago and enjoyed it. Here are my impressions:

Donald struck me as quite a sympathetic and brilliant character. I liked hearing about his background before he let the 800-pound gorilla out. He came across as intellectually gifted and sincerely humble, a combination I love to see.

For those who didn’t know, this is how science is done in the 21st century. Its language is pure, cutting-edge mathematics, so its hypotheses, arguments, and evidence cannot be put into plain speech but only hinted at in words. We laypersons have to trust that the scientists are communicating in earnest; we have no way of checking their work. For example, Hoffman says Darwin’s theory is confirmed by employing state-of-the-art mathematics to which Darwin had no access. However, he said other contemporary workers disagree, and I have no way of deciding which to believe.

After walking us through why he felt confident that his feelings of being human--a “hundred-sixty-five-pound man living in Irvine”--are just part of a headset, he tells us that his ordinary personality still rebels against the notion that the “human avatar” is puny compared to the immensity of endless mathematical space in which much more avant-garde avatars (the human one is “really, really low on the totem pole,” he said) can be the new headsets. And since those more advanced avatars need not be embodied, death is not the end, but just a letting go of the human headset and putting on a better one.

What? No death? Does that mean that the religions and gurus had it right all along and that just as Darwin, according to Hoffman, is confirmed by network theory, eternalism is confirmed by the utility of geometrical figures envisioned as existing outside of time and space to correctly predict particle interactions in quantum field theory experiments?

Well, not so fast. “Truth” is beyond where the best scientists like to go. Donald points at that by telling us that one must be granted an assumption or two to say anything scientifically. This is a crucial point that less rigorous thinkers often ignore or finesse.

Everything he believes about advanced avatars hinges entirely upon starting with two suppositions and then investigating their implications mathematically. He’s not claiming “truth.” He says his math confirms that if the beginning assumptions are valid, then infinite avatars, no death, etcetera.

Making this syllogism explicit, as he rightly does, changes an idea from pure conjecture to an informed hypothesis, and that is all the difference. Wild claims--“Jesus loves you”--don’t interest me; this does.

Donald says his two axioms are as simple as pie, but I don’t see it that way.

Here they are:

1. There are experiences and experiencers.

2. There are probabilistic relationships among experiences.

I’m OK with number 2, which seems to mean only that some experiences are more likely than others to arise, but number 1, from my perspective, is a doozy. It sounds simple and obvious, but is it?

No, not in my view. The assumption that experience is one thing and the experiencer is another needs examination. What if experience and experiencer are two words for the same happening? What if starting with the unquestioned proposition that experiences are one thing and experiences are quite another begs the question by assuming in advance part of what he says his math will prove? What if splitting occurrences into two pieces creates the illusion of a permanent, unchanging observer when it’s possible that no such entity actually exists?

In my clearest moments, experience is all there is. Experience is the experiencer, and vice versa. That is the phenomenon sometimes called flow or non-duality. If Donald were here now, I’d ask him about that.

Since Donald has also said that quantum field theory is a dead letter, I’d also ask him why verifying predictions in quantum field theory validates his hypotheses. I don’t say this to dispute the case. I have neither the motive nor the mathematics background to do that. I’d just like to hear more about that from him.

I like to follow science but do not expect it to answer the truly fundamental questions. I doubt it can or ever has. I follow science not for ontological answers but for intellectual curiosity and to help illuminate any murky areas in my own somewhat non-scientific worldview.

The moral of the story, as I see it, is this:

Science can show us many things and suggest hypotheses backed up by evidence--almost always, nowadays, statistical and mathematical evidence. Still, the scientific method inevitably demands that one or more premises be assumed a priori—first conditions that must be admitted without proof or demonstration. Kudos to Donald for making that clear.

I wonder how much Donald’s early Christian religious indoctrination has influenced his work. After all, the split between experiencer and experience that was one of his premises seems to me a dualism inextricably built into Christianity. In that tradition, experience is transitory and riddled with sin, but the experiencer (the soul, the essence) is deathless.

Hoffman mentioned Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Douglas Hofstadter was brilliant on what that is and its implications for understanding selfhood. I assume, but do not know, that Hofstadter was an influence of Hoffman’s. If this interests you, I highly recommend “I Am A Strange Loop.”