`Human Consciousness: Requires quantum physics (Humans)

by dhw, Sunday, April 24, 2016, 13:29 (3134 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Is much of what we experience of reality an illusion? That is the subject of this interview. How does quantum mechanics relate? Is our brain a machine? - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ - QUOTES: "As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain's best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one.
"Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.” - I'm surprised that anyone is surprised by this “dramatic” conclusion. The world as an illusion is as old as philosophy. We ourselves covered the whole subject yonks ago in the thread on epistemology, when we agreed that human experience is subjective, and the nearest we can get to objectivity is intersubjectivity - in the form of a general consensus that something is “real”. I don't know how it is possible to say that the world we perceive is “nothing like reality” when none of us is in a position say what IS reality. Coincidentally, this ties in with BBella's challenge to find a theory that could explain the (hypothetical) “reality” of psychic experiences. This, she and I have agreed, boils down to the statement: “Reality is whatever the individual thinks it is.”