A very interesting topic. I've seen interviews with Donald Hoffman (and his TED talk) pop up quite a few times in my YouTube suggestions. Some disjointed thoughts and observations on the general topic of consciousness:
I think what Donald Hoffmann says makes sense up to a point, but then loses coherence. One issue I have with his ideas is that he seems to be attacking
direct realism, which in neuroscience, or the philosophy of perception, is a position that few people actually hold - even wikipedia redirects you to the pejoratively named "naive realism."
His comment that "there are hints from deep within science itself that perception and reality don’t match" is odd - surely the work of science for a long time has been to fill in the enormous gap between what we can perceive, and the underlying structures of reality?
The idea of 'reality not being real' in some sense is not a new one, even among scientists. It's not unusual for neuroscientists to make statements along the lines of "perception is a controlled hallucination" - for example Anil Seth has a TED talk on YouTube titled "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality." It's not a wild theory, just a description of how perception works.
I always found the issues surrounding consciousness and perception fascinating when I was studying philosophy, and wrote a dissertation on qualia. After finishing that, I remember trying to process what I'd been studying, what the implications actually meant in everyday life. There was a moment when I was gazing out of the window and thought to myself that what I was looking at was not actually out of the window, it was inside my head.
The car you see in the street is a car in the street, but the actual perception of the car, the street, everything else, ultimately exists as a hallucination inside your brain, even if it's based on the light reflected off real objects. It is so forcefully presented as an immediate reality that this idea seems crazy, but I think this is the reality of perception. If you think of dreams as an uncontrolled, incoherent hallucination of things that aren't real, compared to a controlled daytime hallucination of things that are real, it perhaps seems less odd.
A good, readable book on this topic is
Making Up the Mind by
Chris Frith. This short section sums up the general theme of the book:
I think that I have direct contact with the physical world, but this is an illusion created by my brain. My brain creates models of the physical world by combining signals from my senses and prior expectations, and it is these models that I am aware of.
There's a perceptive comment on that wikipedia page on direct / naive realism:
Simon Blackburn has argued that whatever positions they may take in books, articles or lectures, naive realism is the view of "philosophers when they are off-duty."
I think this is part of the reason why people are so baffled by "the hard problem of consciousness." It's hard to comprehend how the world we see "out there" also exists in our consciousness at the same time, when in fact the whole thing is an artifact of consciousness. To confuse perception with reality is like confusing the map with the territory.
If you could somehow see "reality as it really is," you could imagine sweeping your gaze across the street and viewing some impossibly complicated structure of atoms, energy and electromagnetic radiation. Your actual perception takes in only a fraction of that information, from reflected light, and doesn't just present it as a simplistic view of what's in front of you that whirls around when you move your head. It's creating and updating a model of what it expects to see, it assumes houses have four walls, not just the ones you can see, it doesn't distract your attention with the intricacies of every leaf on every tree. It makes various assumptions to fill in the gap between what your eyes can detect from your current position, and what should logically be there. It filters what you notice into simple categories that you barely pay attention to - car, car, tree, house. In fact this description of perception reminds me of a Philip K Dick novel ("Time Out of Joint" I think it is) where some objects are replaced by bits of paper with things like "Hot Dog Stand" written on them... it's a simulation, but a simulation created by the brain.
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Given this interpenetration of the physical world with consciousness, the debate about whether the fundamental reality is based on consciousness or matter, is perhaps looking at different sides of the same coin. Both positions reject dualism (the idea that there are mental and physical events which are completely separate). If you say that "what we think of as consciousness is just matter" or "what we think of as matter is just consciousness" then you have a type of "identity theory" where mental and physical events are ultimately the same type of thing. I sometimes wonder if the nature of matter will turn out to be very "thinky" (i.e. consciousness turns out to be a fundamental property of matter in some way), or even if matter will turn out to be a property of consciousness rather than the other way around. In both cases reality could still be obeying the "laws of physics" and would technically be materialist in that sense - the idea of a simple clockwork universe, where atoms are the smallest bits of lego in the box, went out of the window some time ago; the scientific interpretations of reality open to us at the moment are all rather strange.
Maybe the crux of the matter is whether you believe in an "objective reality" at all. The problem I have with positing that reality is just a shared field of consciousness with limitless possibilities (which seems very plausible during a psychedelic trip) is that we are clearly heavily constrained in our existence. As far as we can tell, reality is consistent to the point of being pernicously so, and does not magically bend to our will. You end up with the same problem as religion, having to posit some "dog ate my homework" reasoning as to why everything isn't permanent sunshine and rainbows, and basic facts about life become very difficult to explain in a coherent manner. On the other hand, if a reality in which consciousness is the fundamental property, is ultimately constrained in the same way as a physical reality, with the same scientific laws as a physical reality would be, then there doesn't seem much to differentiate the two. Simulation theory is somewhere in-between; there is a physical reality but this isn't it.
Have you ever encountered -- perceived, become aware of, known -- something, anything, that was independent of your consciousness?
This is something of a tautology - have you ever been conscious of something you were not conscious of? Plenty of things are "known" by science which have never been consciously perceived. On the other hand, I think it's a good point that the only direct connection you have with "physical reality" is through consciousness itself. This is another point relating to the "hard problem of consciousness" - if the only direct contact you have with matter is via your thoughts, it is perhaps less difficult to conceive of consciousness as something physical, or that physics is part of consciousness in some way. It may be that the "folk" conception of matter is at fault here, that people are ignoring what science is telling them and instinctively making judgements from a position of "naive realism" in a Newtonian model of reality.
It's interesting that the idea of consciousness has in some ways gradually taken on some of the characteristics formerly attributed to the "soul," in a process of mystification which works in the opposite direction to scientific enquiry. An interesting Youtube channel is
Closer To Truth, but sometimes I get the impression that so much is being loaded onto the idea of "consciousness" that no explanation could provide the answers sought. Frequently in philosophy, the real answer is that you are asking the wrong question. People try to grasp consciousness in the same way that a medieval peasant would try to understand an iphone - I can see its made of metal and glass, but there must be some witchcraft involved.
I think the basic idea of science is to give a coherent and reliable account of reality, and I'm not convinced that ideas such as idealism or pan-psychism, which put consciousness at the centre of everything, provide this - they take consciousness as a given, as fundamental, which doesn't really "explain" it, and at the cost of "un-explaining" a lot of other things.
An alternative model makes sense of the evidence perfectly well: Everything is one consciousness, one infinite being whose being is consciousness, and whose consciousness is being. You and I, as centers of subjectivity, are finite mediums by which that consciousness has entered a kind of virtual reality, which is the world we (essentially falsely) perceive as external, objective, and separate from consciousness, but which is actually nothing but consciousness as well, appearing to "us" as it does because of the particular structure of these human minds and this five-dimensional human perceptual apparatus. What happens to my, your, or anybody else's individual/finite mind therefore doesn't fundamentally transform, let alone snuff out, the whole hyperreality of "the objective world," since it's the same consciousness entering and perceiving this world through each seemingly separate self.
I have some sympathy with this viewpoint, but I just have a niggling feeling that it contains an element of anthropomorphism, where reality conveniently revolves around us. Certainly in one sense there is no real fundamental division between you and the people and objects around you, either from a "non-dual" viewpoint or from the perspective of particle physics.
My default perspective on consciousness is that it is something which can be fundamentally and brutally altered by physical causes (in a universe of pure consciousness, what is a stroke, a deleriant, the feeling of cold, COVID, or chronic pain? Wouldn't the simulation of a non-existent physical reality with these things in it by a Godlike conscious entity be somewhat perverse?). I suppose I tend to think of the universe as a place where consciousness is an inherent potential property of matter, but one that maybe only arises in rare situations - not a goal or a purpose or a basis of existence. It's the creation of a virtual reality in the brain by evolution, that all too often works like a carrot-and-stick torture device compelling you to go on long enough to reproduce. If the world was a deliberate simulation of a conscious entity, it puts me in mind of the Cenobites in the film Hellraiser, addicted to pain and suffering, an experiment which would be a monstrous, colossal atrocity which incorporated every other atrocity ever committed.
Watch the watcher. Become aware "from the inside" of the self-evident truth that all phenomena and objects of experience, including not just "outer," "material" phenomena and objects but one's very thoughts, moods, memories, and so on -- the entirety of one's perceptual sensorium plus one's "inner" mental-emotional life -- automatically imply, point toward, and reveal one's real self as a core of apparently bottomless or boundless empty space, as it were.
Despite my seemingly dour and joyless scepticism, through psychedelics I've been pleasantly surprised to find some validity in Buddhist ideas; certainly as an introspective psychology of consciousness. For a non-dual account of consciousness from a neuroscientist, it's worth checking out
Dr. James Cooke on YouTube. The more recent videos are interviews (Donald Hoffmann makes an inevitable appearance) but if you go right back to the first uploads on the channel, there are a series of short videos explaining his ideas from a simple and sensible starting point. I wish there was a simple way to get YouTube to play the videos on a channel in sequence starting with the oldest...
In Ligotti's "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" there's a brief section on the idea of "ego death," which is always a hot topic on psychedelic forums.
...the cognitive mechanisms which produce a fictive ego shut down. In these instances, the individual who loses himself is the beneficiary of a rapturous payoff. This is truly a "good death" in which someone disappears as a purported self and is reborn as... no one. He is content just to exist, and equally content not to exist.
I've never really got into meditation, but certainly through high doses of psilocybin you can encounter the dissolution of your "self" (the loss of all sense of being you, of thinking thoughts) and its replacement by this boundless realm of oceanic bliss and rapture, a vast sea of consciousness, as though you had plugged into the matrix and the entire universe had opened up to you and revealed itself to be a single consciousness entity. To "come back" into this is a very profound experience, like glimpsing an ultimate reality behind this one, where consciousness is fundamental, where you cannot die because you are part of this larger consciousness. With psychedelics this is a transitory state, but as a demonstration of the raw power of conscious awareness it is incredible.
Backing up a bit, I suspect that what is happening here is that this "boundless" realm is in fact a glimpse into the inner workings of the brain, the ground from which it "hallucinates your reality;" it is "the matrix" that simulates reality within your brain. Encountering this during psychedelics can be very solipsistic, as you start to believe that you are creating reality with your mind, that you are God; simulation of reality gives way to hallucination and delusion. In the Buddhist sense, I think you can be "attached" to visions of an ultimate reality, and a desire for certainty of it, just as much as you can be "attached" to a desire for sex or money. Whilst many things about consciousness are speculative, currently unknown or perhaps unknowable, I'm always wary of taking the option of "believing what I want to believe," although with a conundrum like consciousness it's useful to view it from as many perspectives as possible, as a thought experiment.
An interesting case of something resembling ego death (caused by a stroke) is presented in
Jill Bolte Taylor's book "My Stroke of Insight" - she does a good TED talk on YouTube about her experience, with the same title. This an intriguing case as it is another example of a profound change in consciousness with a very obvious physical cause.
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Another intriguing aspect of Buddhist thought and meditation is the idea of observing your thoughts and recognising that they are, in a sense, independent of you, which in turn links into ideas of the unconscious. After a trip where I had the distinct feeling that I was writing down whole sentences which were popping into my head from some unconscious source, I had the unsettling idea that our conscious experience is, in a way, to be the pilot of a
qualia zombie. You do not think your thoughts, you become aware of those thoughts. Supposing your conscious awareness is merely as a sort of avatar, an unreal "self" inhabiting a model of the world created by a largely unconscious and to some extent unknowable being, experiencing its thoughts as your thoughts, your "inner speech"? Would this not make you, as it were, a puppet? To take psychedelics would be like opening a door into this creature, making the unconscious conscious, taking a lantern and exploring it like some alien city of the dead...
