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Consciousness explained?

Ted talk; didn't watch.

Do you think you can summarize his more salient points for us?
 
Here's the transcript: https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is/transcript?language=en

It's really too short on details to give a good estimate of the worth, but there was one red flag for me...

He tells the story of a beetle which gets confused by bottles it tries to mate with because evolution hasn't prepared it for humans discarding beer bottles. The beetle "nearly went extinct." This is then followed later on by saying evolution didn't prepare us to see reality, only fitness. And he claims tests prove that seeing "reality" leads to extinction in his laboratory model (which uses the "mathematically precise" evolution - whatever that might be).

The trouble with it is that the beetle story is about not seeing reality (it's a beer bottle, not a female beetle) leading to extinction (nearly) - the opposite thing he wants to prove (that "fitness" is paramount, not reality).

It really needs some fleshing out to see if the idea is good.
 
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What a horrible mess. He's munged together an incorrect understanding of consciousness, solipsism and evolution, to arrive at a worldview that is comprehensively wrong. It is wronger than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps reality is some vast, interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each other's conscious experiences. Actually, this isn't as crazy an idea as it seems, and I'm currently exploring it.
Click to expand...
No, you were right the first time, it's exactly as crazy an idea as it seems.
 
Maybe "exploring" means a couple of attractive grad students and a case of beer?
 
So he gives seeing a tomato as an example, saying the tomato we see is a construct ("an icon on your desktop") that is not what is really there. He says that Space/Time and objects are just convenient constructs not literally reality.

But then he wants to treat this "consciousness" he perceives as a literal, really there. Thus he fools himself into a quest for something else of no literal substance.

"He thought he saw an Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
'A fact so dread,' he faintly said,
'Extinguishes all hope!''

(The Mad gardener's Song, Lewis Carrol)
 
I have no problem with the notion that evolution has equipped us with perceptions that model the world accurately enough so that we stayed alive and prospered.
That seems pretty obvious. However, the model of the world that we perceive appears to be very accurate in most cases.
There's a lot we can't perceive; the atomic crystalline structure of matter, elements of the electromagnetic spectrum outside of visible light... That sort of thing.
But we've used our other tools to be able to do those things.
 
!Kaggen said:
Donald Hoffmann seems to have found a useful way of dealing with problem consciousness.
Like anything to do with evolutionary fitness it's not to be found in the representational world we like to call reality...Do we see reality as it is?
https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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I believe in the metaphysics of Ligeia. Whata’ gall! Who cares if she was ever real or not? Reality is sooooo overrated!


http://poestories.com/read/ligeia
And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.
Joseph Glanville
aka: Lady Ligeia
aka^2: narrator
aka^3:Edgar Allan Poe



The are no hallucinations for the truly strong of will! That is my theory of consciousness!


<Snort>
 
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