Donald Hoffman Quotes

as Einstein put it ‘Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.

To construct is the essence of vision. Dispense with construction and you dispense with vision. Everything you experience by sight is your construction.

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.

This critique also misreads the Copernican revolution. Yes, our perceptions misled us about our place in the universe. But its deeper message is this: our perceptions can mislead us about the very nature of the universe itself. We are prone to falsely believe that certain limitations and idiosyncrasies of our perceptions are genuine insights into objective reality.

There are as many cubes as there are observers constructing cubes. And when you look away, your cube ceases to be.

Exaptation, in which a trait evolved for one function can co-opt a new function, is commonplace in nature. We use sex to procreate, but also to bond, play, heal, and enjoy pleasure.

The math is not the territory.

Silence is the language of god, all else is poor translation.” —JALALUDDIN RUMI

Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton said, “I am almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: “We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.”36

Which raises a perplexing question: What about the big bang? Didn’t it happen 13 billion 799 million years ago, before any observers?

A glimpse of an eye is, for purposes of triggering the animate-monitoring system, a glimpse of the beast peering through that eye.

In the last 20,000 years, our brains have shrunk 10 percent—from 1,500 cubic centimeters down to 1,350—a loss of the volume of a tennis ball.

If you play a video game on your computer, such as "Doom" or "Uncharted", you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D.

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.31 To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

Hence our decline of insight as we shift our gaze from human to ant to quark. Our decline of insight should not be mistaken for an insight into decline—a progressive poverty inherent in objective reality. The decline is in our interface, in our perceptions. But we externalize it; we pin it on reality. Then we erect, from this erroneous reification, an ontology of physicalism.

The tinkering of evolution can concoct perceptual interfaces with endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful; the vast majority of these, however, are to us most inconceivable. Evolution is not finished tinkering with the perceptual interfaces of Homo sapiens. The mutations that bless one in twenty-five with some form of synesthesia are surely part of the process, and some of these mutations might catch on; much of the tinkering centers on our perceptions of color. Evolution defies our silly stricture that our perceptions must be veridical. It freely explores endless forms of sensory interfaces, hitting now and then on novel ways to shepherd our endless foraging for fitness.

What we call ‘reality,’ consists of an elaborate papier-mâché construction of imagination and theory filled in between a few iron posts of observation.”22 We

Once we know the rules that human vision uses to decode messages about fitness, we can use those rules to send the messages we want. Consider jeans.

For principled reasons, Einstein’s spacetime cannot be foundational in physics

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.

Conscious realism contends, to the contrary, that no physical object is conscious. If I see a rock, then that rock is part of my conscious experience, but the rock itself is not conscious. When I see my friend Chris, I experience an icon that I create, but that icon itself is not conscious. My Chris-icon opens a small portal into the rich world of conscious agents; a smiling icon, for instance, suggests a happy agent. When I see a rock, I also interact with conscious agents, but my rock-icon offers no insight, no portal, into their experiences.

Or perhaps we were short-changed by evolution, and lack the concepts needed to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness. Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens can demystify consciousness?

No conscious agent can describe itself completely. The very attempt adds more experiences to the agent, which multiplies the complexity of its decisions and actions in light of those new experiences, which requires yet more experiences to capture those more complex decisions and actions, and so on in a vicious loop of incompleteness. A conscious agent must therefore remain, at least in part, unconscious to itself. Recall that what conscious realism claims to be fundamental is not just conscious experiences, but conscious agents. An agent cannot experience itself in its entirety, no matter how large its repertoire of experiences.

we need to write down laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the conscious experiences with which they are identical. If we propose that conscious experience is an illusion arising from some brain processes attending to, monitoring, and describing other brain processes, then we must state laws or principles that precisely specify these processes and the illusions they generate. And if we propose that conscious experiences emerge from brain processes, then we must give the laws or principles that describe precisely when, and how, each specific experience emerges.

The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz grasped the mystery in 1714: “It must be confessed, however, that Perception, and that which depends upon it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Supposing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain Perception.

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth. Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “you’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.” Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been to New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from a Jennifer Aniston cosmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin. Because I’m worth it.

In February of 1962, Joseph Bogen and Philip Vogel sliced in half the brain of Bill Jenkins—intentionally, methodically, and with careful premeditation. Jenkins, then in his late forties, recovered and went on to enjoy a quality of life that had eluded him for years. In the decade that followed, Bogen and Vogel split brain after brain in California, earning them the epithet “the West Coast butchers.

We encounter a startling “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.

Japanese anime and manga cartoons, seeking to accentuate youth, depicted female characters with large irises long before our research.

The sclera—the white of the eye—affects attraction. No other primates have white scleras. Their scleras are dark, hiding their direction of gaze from predators, and from members of their own species—for whom a stare can be a threat.40 The white sclera of the human eye advertises gaze direction, making it a tool for social communication. It also advertises emotion and health.

What do we want in a scientific theory of consciousness? Consider the case of tasting basil versus hearing a siren. For a theory that proposes that brain activity causes conscious experiences, we want mathematical laws or principles that state precisely which brain activities cause the conscious experience of tasting basil, precisely why this activity does not cause the experience of, say, hearing a siren, and precisely how this activity must change to transform the experience from tasting basil to, say, tasting rosemary. These laws or principles must apply across species, or else explain precisely why different species require different laws. No such laws, indeed no plausible ideas, have ever been proposed.

Activity in a region of the brain called the postcentral gyrus correlates with conscious experiences of touch. The neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield reported in 1937 that stimulating this gyrus with an electrode in the left hemisphere prompted his patients to report conscious experiences of touch on the right side of the body; stimulating the right hemisphere led to feelings of touch on the left side of the body.13 The correlation is systematic: nearby points on the gyrus correspond to nearby points on the body, and regions of the body that are more sensitive, such as the lips and fingertips, occupy more real estate on the gyrus. Stimulate the gyrus near the middle of the brain, and you feel it in your toes. Slide the electrode along the gyrus, stimulating at ever more lateral points, and the feeling, with a few exceptions, slides systematically up the body. The exceptions are interesting. The face, for instance, resides next to the hand on the gyrus. The toes are next to the genitals—a fact perhaps relevant to foot fetishes, as V. S. Ramachandran has suggested.14

Male jewel beetles, Julodimorpha bakewelli, have a thing for beautiful females.1 The males fly about, searching for females, which are shiny, dimpled, and brown. Recently, some male primates of the Homo sapiens species have been driving through the beetle’s haunts in Western Australia and littering the outback with emptied beer bottles, known as “stubbies.” As it happened, some of the stubbies were shiny, dimpled, and just the right shade of brown to catch the fancy of male beetles. Forsaking real females, the male beetles swooned over stubbies with their genitalia everted, and doggedly tried to mate despite glassy rebuffs. (A classic case of the male leaving the female for the bottle.) Adding injury to insult, ants of the species Iridomyrmex discors learned to loiter near stubbies, wait for the befuddled and priapistic beetles, and then devour them, genitalia first, as they failed to have their way.

This broader notion of fitness is called “inclusive fitness” to distinguish it from the notion of “personal fitness,” which we have discussed until now.50 The two notions are not at odds. Inclusive fitness simply recognizes a broader spectrum of strategies by which genes muscle into the next generation.

red lust, power, hunger, or excitement; yellow jealousy or happiness; orange comfort, warmth, or fun; green envy, harmony, or good taste; blue competence, quality, or masculinity; pink sincerity, sophistication, or femininity; purple power or authority; brown ruggedness; black grief, fear, sophistication, or expensiveness; white purity, sincerity, or happiness.

Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry.

a scientific experiment to test whether new rules of physics could spark fascinating life forms whose creativity and pleasure was worth the pain they suffered.

because I want to discover where, precisely, it may be wrong and, if possible, to repair the defect.

Perception may seem effortless, but in fact it requires considerable energy. Each precious calorie you burn on perception is a calorie you must find and take from its owner—perhaps a potato or an irate wildebeest. Calories can be difficult and dangerous to procure, so evolution has shaped our senses to be misers.

Steven Pinker sums up the argument well: “We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.

Others who found their way to the air via Atwater-Kent were Frances Alda, Josef Hoffman, Louise Homer, and Albert Spalding. Fees to the Met alone ran $25,000 a year. By 1930 Frances Alda was the regular soloist. That year, the first that reliable ratings were compiled, Atwater-Kent had a 31.0, finishing third behind Amos ’n’ Andy and The Rudy Vallee Hour. An offshoot of sorts was Atwater-Kent Auditions, the first talent scout show, heard in 1927 and culminating in December that year. Local competitions were initiated around the country: the five winners from each division (male and female) competed for $5,000 prizes in the finale. Donald Novis and Thomas L. Thomas came out of Atwater-Kent Auditions, but Kenny Baker—who also went on to a notable radio career—never got past the local level. Graham McNamee announced the show.

If you ever feel like ending your life, come see me first. Life is worth living.

Reproductive success depends on collecting fitness points. Beauty tells us what and where they