I really buy his argument about our interior experience being a multimodal user interface (MUI) over stimulus from some information system. We describe the universe in terms of a 4D space-time with forces and particles, but this is really the MUI we've constructed (or evolution has constructed) that maximizes our predictive power when "actuating" our MUI (e.g interacting with that external system).
I haven't thought about this before, and kinda rejected it on first reading of Hoffman's work, but think I grok it now. Because our internal experience is a MUI, and that MUI (4D space time, particles) can't be considered a "true reality", it's just an interface, then other conscious entities are more "real" than our MUI. That is, the fundamental true reality that really matters is other conscious agents (e.g. Conscious Realism).
A slightly more wacky theory I like to think about is how this intersects with the simulation argument. If our reality isn't ring 0 (e.g. there's an outer reality that is actually time-stepping our universe), then the conscious interior experience we have in our reality may be due to the properties of reality in the outer universe "leaking through" into our simulation.
This actually aligns well with the Hoffman's MUI argument. We live in some information processing system. Through evolution we've constructed a MUI that we see as 4D space time. But this doesn't at all reflect the true reality of our universe being a process simulated in the ring 0 reality. Conscious Realism then arises because ring 0 reality has properties that imbue pattern of information processing with interior experience.
brotchie|1 year ago
I really buy his argument about our interior experience being a multimodal user interface (MUI) over stimulus from some information system. We describe the universe in terms of a 4D space-time with forces and particles, but this is really the MUI we've constructed (or evolution has constructed) that maximizes our predictive power when "actuating" our MUI (e.g interacting with that external system).
I haven't thought about this before, and kinda rejected it on first reading of Hoffman's work, but think I grok it now. Because our internal experience is a MUI, and that MUI (4D space time, particles) can't be considered a "true reality", it's just an interface, then other conscious entities are more "real" than our MUI. That is, the fundamental true reality that really matters is other conscious agents (e.g. Conscious Realism).
A slightly more wacky theory I like to think about is how this intersects with the simulation argument. If our reality isn't ring 0 (e.g. there's an outer reality that is actually time-stepping our universe), then the conscious interior experience we have in our reality may be due to the properties of reality in the outer universe "leaking through" into our simulation.
This actually aligns well with the Hoffman's MUI argument. We live in some information processing system. Through evolution we've constructed a MUI that we see as 4D space time. But this doesn't at all reflect the true reality of our universe being a process simulated in the ring 0 reality. Conscious Realism then arises because ring 0 reality has properties that imbue pattern of information processing with interior experience.