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Lex Fridman Podcast 293 - Reality is an Illusion

Whatever reality is, is not what you see. What you see is just an adaptive fiction.

– Donald Hoffman

Case Against Reality

The world we see with our eyes is not real, it’s not even an abstraction of objective reality, it is completely detached from objective reality.

– The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

Natural selection has not shaped us to see the world objectively. It has shaped us to see enough to survive long enough to reproduce.

Fridman paraphrases it as: Fitness beats truth. We didn’t evolve to see truth, we evolved to survive.

Perceptions guide adaptive behavior but hide the truth of reality because it’s too complicated to deal with. An example is given of writing an email. Composing an email is really toggling voltages, but we don’t have to deal with that because it would be too complicated.

Isn’t that the point of abstraction? Maybe this is not an example of an abstraction that is detached from reality.

Space time

Space time complicates the math needed to describe the fundamental nature of reality.

Park/Taylor - reducing billions of terms to one - how is this not simply reducing an expression to independent variables? Doesn’t the reduction to this term show we can perceive truth, otherwise they would not have been able to find that one term. (Off by orders of magnitude, not just one term)

They’re looking for new structures beyond the space time abstraction.

~~~

Amplituderon

A quick look aside on this topic, Wikipedia:

Amplituhedron theory challenges the notion that spacetime locality and unitarity are necessary components of a model of particle interactions. Instead, they are treated as properties that emerge from an underlying phenomenon.

Properties that emerge from an underlying phenomenon.

~~~

I feel that Donald Hoffman may be failing with precision of language.

Coincidentally he is off by several orders of magnitude when he describes how much it reduces the complexity of the problem of computing amplitude scattering with Feynman diagrams. And it’s not reducing it to a single term, as he states several times, but to a single diagram. What would have taken a number of diagrams greater than the number of atoms in the universe now takes one diagram. (I added a parenthetical to the previous note rather than changing it.)

It sounds like he is saying we can only observe indirect effects of reality as opposed to being able to perceive reality.

They are making guesses. Brilliant guesses. Once they get one or two that pay off…

1986 - Park & Taylor - Super computers couldn’t perform the math necessary to eliminate background noise? And so the formula they came up with helped in devising the Amplituhedron.

He argues that these new theories are not observed directly, but are instead the result of educated guesses and that they represent a more accurate reflection of reality that we cannot directly observe. As these new formulas are discovered, they have to prove that they can show the same relationships we show with existing space time theories.

He asserts that any such theory will have to project into space time to look like the theory of natural selection. Maybe he means it cannot violate the theory of natural selection, because theories that have nothing to do with natural selection wouldn’t need to projects onto natural selection.

Lex asks: How do we know we’re getting closer to objective reality?

Hoffman starts to describe that experiments are still a valid way to test theories. He also states there will never be a theorem of everything.

Hoffman states:

Reality will always transcend any conceptual theory we can come up with.

He doesn’t answer the question of how we know we’re getting closer, just that we can never solve the problem completely.

Lex starts to talk about money. Isn’t it better to connect transactions to some physical element instead of something that is entirely an illusion? Can you continue to safely drift away from something physical?

Hoffman’s starts to discuss distributed vs centralized control structures.

Hoffman decides to interpret Lex’s question as whether our evolutionary interface is too detached from reality to provide for meaningful or safe important tests for scientific theories. Which he answers with those are the tools we have, and they will color our perception.

I need to re watch this part, he’s making a comment on how if we found some underlying system that could model consciousness it would… something.

Will resume and update with notes on the next sections… the video is around 3 hours long.

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