Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

Look behind the curtain to see the Wizard’s hidden Ideal mechanisms creating the illusion of Reality

   Post 105.  December 15, 2019 continued . . .

  Interface : Window to Reality

   A world on a desktop

 The Fitness Beats Truth theorem is a modern version of the ancient notion of Maya7, the veil of illusion. But the deception is not for evil purposes. Instead, it’s a necessity for dealing with limited understanding. Just as you “talk down” to young children, Nature avoids overwhelming the adult human mind with irrelevant details. In effect, for the practical purposes of survival, your physical senses provide Pragmatic “Facts”, not Ideal “Truths”. Even so, the mundane human mind does have the ability to look behind the veil, to get a glimpse of the mind-boggling machinery of creation. By the use of Reason and Imagination, we can postulate the abstract Ideal realm beyond sensory Reality. Yet, Hoffman is aware that his theorem is counter-intuitive. “How can my perceptions be useful if they aren’t true?” So, he has developed the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP) to serve as an explanatory metaphor. By analogy with your computer or phone screen, you don’t interact with the internal mechanisms & processes, but with symbols & icons on a “desktop” as-if they were physical objects. In ITP, “spacetime is our desktop.” What we think of as “space and time are simply the format of our interface.“

In the terminology of Enformationism, ultimate Ideality (e.g. Plato’s realm of Forms) is made of immaterial Information8 (mind stuff), but the meaning of that incoming abstract data is interpreted by your senses as your subjective Reality. However, “ITP doesn’t deny that there is an objective reality.” It’s just that what you see, ain’t what actually obtains in the Ideal realm. Yet, if evolution is progressive, as is obvious in modern technology, “our perceptions of reality are growing ever closer to the truth, even if it is with a small ‘t’.” For example, our sense-extending tools have revealed that the universe is bigger than early humans ever imagined, and that there is a whole unforeseen underlying universe smaller than our eyes can see unaided. Ironically, we have to take the existence of those invisible realms on faith in our authoritative priests of Astronomy & Physics.

Most of us take Space-Time for granted, as-if it is the fundamental reality providing a particular place and sequential order for the objects that we interact with. But Hoffman’s analogy says that “my spacetime is the desktop of my interface”, hence Ultimate Reality (UR) transcends my sense of space & time. By that I mean, UR exists in the state we call Infinity (spacelessness) and Eternity (timelessness). By reference to the familiar computer screen metaphor, we can make sense of the nagging Quantum Measurement Problem9 : is the moon still there when I am not looking at it? A group of physicists concluded that, “a measurement does not . . . reveal a pre-existing state of affairs. It is an action on the world by an agent that results in the creation of an outcome — a new experience for that agent. ‘Interventional” might be a better term.” Apart from the interface analogy, that statement doesn’t make much sense to the intuitive mind. As Einstein put it, “Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.” One interpretation of Quantum Theory, Quantum Bayesianism10 (QB) says that “quantum states describe not the objective world but the beliefs of agents about the consequences of their actions.”

                   Post 105 continued . . . click Next

10. Quantum Bayesianism
    “an interpretation of quantum mechanics that takes an agent's actions and experiences as the central concerns of the theory.”

7. Maya :
  “Māyā connotes a "magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem". . . . and the "power or the principle that conceals the true character of spiritual reality"

8. Information :
  Multifunction mental & physical substance. We experience it in the world as ideas and as energy. It’s equivalent to Spinoza’s Universal Substance and Substance Monism.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_theory
   http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

9. Quantum Measurement
   When scientists attempt to measure the properties of quantum scale particles, their measuring tools change the very quality they want to know about.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem

The Case Against Reality

Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes

Donald Hoffman

Cognitive Psychologist

“Interface theory of perception”