'The Case Against Reality'

Exploring the Philosophical side of the Occult.

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Cybernetic_Jazz
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'The Case Against Reality'

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

Anyone else checked this one out?

I ask because I spent quite a while, probably a lot longer than most sane people would, trying to chase down an accurate map or cosmology and I really think he's nailed the ground level on what it is. Part of why it speaks to me as much as it does is the author (Donald Hoffman) is essentially describing a context for functionalism (really functionalism with multiple realizability), something that's mapped on IMHO quite well to both what consciousness seems to do in nature with respect to group organization or even group organisms and then you have the egregore aspect which it covers. It does make sense then that a world that runs the schema of functionalism with multiple realizability would extend from idealism in terms of the 'stuff', even if the behavior of that stuff is so inert as to suggest reductive materialism to a pedestrial onlooker.

The idea that space-time is a UI makes a lot of sense from the standpoint that we've been trying to corner wave/particle collapse for some time now, trying to corner consciousness with just as much futility, and much like it would seem that consciousness is a more ancient primitive than what else is around us it would equally make sense that collapse is not about an actual event in the 'real' world but rather the boundary (thinking the boundary between the classical and quantum worlds) where something that wasn't in our space-time UI gets added.

One of the puzzles this does present though - space-time not being fundamental is fine at this point, it makes sense if the energy needed to examine anything below the Plank scale would create a black hole. With Conscious Realism, ie. Hoffman and Prakash's theory, the world we live in isn't necessarily 'virtual' so much as a sliver of reality so drastically reduced that one could call it a user interface, but that does perhaps beg the question - in that ultimate 'real' world then what the heck is to generate something like a black hole?

One of the other selling points to this theory - it doesn't just take Darwinian game theory seriously, the theory is predicated on it, so it grapples and reconciles two gorillas in the room - ie. evolution by natural selection and a reality that isn't ultimately reductive materialist.
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borealis
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Re: 'The Case Against Reality'

Post by borealis »

I hadn't heard of it, but I have just read the preface and it looks like a book that I will enjoy and show to friends.

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Re: 'The Case Against Reality'

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

It's the kind of thing I'd love to hear someone like Josephine McCarthy or Jake Stratton-Kent comment on because in a lot of ways it does a lot to mathematically edify what's happening with respect to energy in nature, 'portals' of communication to other forms of consciousness, etc.. A lot of this stuff jumped out in his interview with Zubin Demania:
You don't have to do a thing perfect, just relentlessly.

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