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Hoffman has studied perception, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary game theory for decades now and he now makes the *incredible* claim: reality is an illusion.
"Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos."
(Can't really argue with that. I figure the boundless infinity of existence is experienced by my dog a lot differently than me.)
Hoffman's on about what's called the 'hard problem' of consciousness. In quantum, systems don’t seem to materiialise as localised objects until someone or something arrives to observe them (if a tree falls in a forest...). Quantum says there's no such thing as independent reality.
Consider vision. We tend to think of it as a camera. We take snapshots of 'objective' reality that are processed by our brain. This is the model followed in my last post on vision. Trillions of synapses are used, according to neuroscience, to reconstruct reality accurately. This view argues that evolution favours us seeing an accurate version of reality - accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions.
However, in Hoffman's lab they ran hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with random worlds and organisms competing for resources and concluded that, actually, eh, we don't see reality as it is...check it out:
“The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists,
all that was not present did not exist.” Jean Paul Sartre
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Lecture notes: University of Notre Dame Idealism
The main purposes or goals of AI research is learning,knowledge,reasoning,planning,communication, artificial intellegence
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