Hey, thanks for posting this John, I watched the first video and plan on finishing the course. This is my first time encountering Kastrup. Although the thermo dynamic model argument against naive realism escaped me, I am very familiar with the evolutionary one, I discovered Hoffman 5 or so years ago. I find his theory very intriguing, but have a nagging feeling about it, specifically something about its premise. I haven’t fully fleshed out where this feeling comes from, but maybe discussing it with people, who are more familiar with Kastrup or Hoffman, might clarify it for me.
I’ve often wondered how does Hoffman’s model really differ from the materialists model of perception? The way I see the materialists model in its most basic description is that the brain in some unexplainable way produces what we call our perception. While we might go about our day believing that these perceptions are a view of the ‘external’ world, materialism taken seriously, does not believe this. Materialism must see perception, the emergence of ‘qualia’ as a type of hallucination. The feeling that this hallucination is veridical, comes from that feedback of our interaction with the world, (and the convergence of senses) in short our perception is pointed towards action in the world, we confirm the reality of our perception of the world, by how it allows us to interact. For example I believe the cup is actually there, because my action agrees with it, I can go pick it up. Now if I see the cup and my acting on it disagrees with my expectations, I might believe my perception to be false.
Now isn’t this just what Donald Hoffman is saying? I don’t see how his interface theory is different from the materialist’s idea that red does not really exist in the world but only in our consciousness. The materialist, might be able to measure this frequency, but must admit that that doesn’t tell us anything about what the frequency is actually like. My point is that Materialism taken seriously also puts us in the dark confines of the control panel cock-pit describe in the video, and must admit that it does not know what matter is actually like but only that it is measurable. And is measurability just another way of describing our control over matter? This to me, is a place, quit indistinguishable from Hoffmans.
What is the difference? I think the answer lies in action . I still need to think about this a bit, because of how causation and agency are so interrelated, and what would it mean to be an agent in Hoffman’s model, or in other words what it means to be an agent outside of time. But thats where I see these two approaches differing, not in the status of matter, but in the status of agency. I plan on writing more on this in relation to Bergson’s theory of perception as external , as Hoffman and Bergson seem incompatible at first glance, but that maybe this is just an incompatibility in the language they use. Both are fundamentally pointed towards action.
here is a video I made on Bergson’s theory of external perception, where in short, our perceptions are so real, that they are not even of the world, but rather a part of it, constituting our experience. I think it might connect with Hoffman in interesting ways, despite its seeming contradiction.
