Tag: analytic idealism

The Death of SpaceTime & Birth of Conscious Agents, Donald Hoffman

Spacetime is doomed. It, and its particles, cannot be fundamental in physical theory, but must emerge from a more fundamental theory. I review the converging evidence for this claim from physics and evolution, and then propose a new way to think of spacetime: as a data-compressing and error-correcting channel for information about fitness. I propose that a theory of conscious agents is a good candidate for the more fundamental theory to replace spacetime. Spacetime then appears as one kind of interface for communication between conscious agents.

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and author of more than 90 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (W.W. Norton, 2000). He received his BA from UCLA in Quantitative Psychology and his Ph.D. from MIT in Computational Psychology. He joined the faculty of UC Irvine in 1983, where he is now a full professor in the departments of cognitive science, computer science and philosophy. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. He was chosen by students at UC Irvine to receive a campus-wide teaching award, and to be included in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers. Hoffman studies visual perception, visual attention and consciousness using mathematical models, computer simulations, and psychological experiments. His empirical research has led to new insights into how we perceive objects, colors and motion. His theoretical research has led to a “user interface” theory of perception—which proposes that natural selection shapes our perceptions not to report truth but simply to guide adaptive behavior. It has also led to a “conscious realism” theory of consciousness—which proposes a formal model of consciousness and the mind-body problem that takes consciousness as fundamental.

Buddha At The Gas Pump- Interview with Tony Parsons

 

Tony Parsons:

All there is is nothing apparently happening.

On the face of it this is a simple but paradoxical proposal. It is also radical in that it recognises that the concept of self is illusory, together with any belief in free will and choice. As there is nothing happening, there would be nothing to seek or to become.

https://www.theopensecret.com/

Analytic Idealism Course

 

In this Part I of Essentia Foundation’s Analytic Idealism Course, we investigate whether our ordinary intuitions about the nature of reality and the world at large can be true at all.

Link to PART II: https://youtu.be/BbnfnveWUh0

Nobel Prize 2022 – Universe is not real | Where quantum physics meets Vedanta

The Nobel prize for physics this year has been awarded to physicists who proved that the universe in not real. ‘The Universe is not real’ – a concept that Vedanta has been proclaiming for millenia. The latest proof to this comes from this year’s Nobel Prize winning physicists Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger. We have finally arrived at a day where we are discussing the paradoxical aspects of quantum physics that can be easily resolved by applying the principles of Advaita Vedanta. Physicists are now toying with the idea that the very purpose of the universe was to create conscious observers. Until observers appeared, the universe was in a state of quantum flux. It did not have any shape or form before observers came into being. All these sound less like physics and more in the territory of metaphysics. Is it possible to make sense of these bizarre findings? It indeed makes perfect sense when you look through the lens of Vedanta.

Quantum Bayesianism and the embodied agent

The Nobel Prize in physics in 2022 went the scientists who, for over 40 years, have carried out a series of experiments indicating that, contrary to materialist expectations, physical entities do not have standalone existence but are, in fact, products of observation. This result is extraordinarily relevant to our understanding of the nature of reality, and so Essentia Foundation, in collaboration with the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Vienna, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (home to Prof. Anton Zeilinger, one of this year’s Nobel Laureates in physics), organized a conference discussing the implications of this result. The conference was hosted by IQOQI-Vienna’s Dr. Markus Müller and featured seven other speakers. In this presentation, Dr. Jacques Pienaar discusses the notion of an embodied agent in the context of Quantum Bayesianism (‘QBism,’ for short). QBism is an interpretation of quantum mechanics according to which the wave function represents simply what we know about reality—a kind of betting strategy about what we will see next—as opposed to reality itself.