Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception Donald Hoffman It is generally assumed that truer perceptions are fitter perceptions, and thus that natural selection has shaped our perceptions to be good estimates of objective reality. I argue that this assumption is false. Instead, simulations based on evolutionary game theory indicate that our perceptions constitute a species-specific user interface that guides behavior in a niche. Just as the icons of a PCs interface hide the complexity of the computer, so our perceptions usefully hide the complexity of the world, and guide adaptive behavior. Our perceptions are tuned to utility, not to objective reality. Visual intelligence, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman writes, is the power that people use to construct an experience of objects out of colors, lines, and motions. Hoffman demonstrates the mysterious constructive powers of our eye-brain using simple drawings and diagrams to illustrate basic rules of visual perception. Here Hoffman explores a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world. The interface theory of perception states that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world. Conscious realism states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and empirically explored in the normal scientific manner. In support of the interface theory of perception, Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games in which perceptual strategies that see the truth compete with perceptual strategies that do not see the truth but are instead tuned to fitness. The result is that natural selection drives true perceptions to swift extinction. Our perceptions have evolved to guide adaptive behaviors, not to report the truth. In support of conscious realism, a dynamical theory of consciousness in which the observer and the observed have precisely the same mathematical structure, i.e., in which there is a mathematically precise nondualism. Hoffman derives the quantum wave function of the free particle from the asymptotic behavior of the conscious dynamics. This is a step toward solving the mind-body problem from the assumption that consciousness, not physics, is fundamental. https://youtube/watch?v=dqDP34a-epI
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 03:21:59 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015