Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour

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Fair enough: Latour is trying out new cognitive maps.
(But he does so much wordplay! Of course he's aware that all cognitive maps are alwats already 'in language', and that therefore language is a limiting factor, therefore wordplay is a tool to think laterally... )

That said though - I do think if an animist shoe were to drop then Lovelock and Lature's lives would be much easier in terms of gaining attention on this front - ie. the 'sex sells' portion of the formula would be there.

So... Thinking about Hofmann a bit more, while being insomniac.
According to Hofmann:
Consciousness evolved for fitness, i.e. perceiving something called colour.
But that's just what our brain makes of the machine code, so to speak.

Except, it isn't. It's what our consciousness perceives, when photons of a certain wave length hit it. There's no red, only electromagnetic waves. But those aren't there either, that's just the "user interface", hiding reality.

Here's the step I don't follow, in my insomnia: why are there electromagnetic waves?
I mean: why the intermediate step, which took millennia of human life to discover, but that's not reality either?

Hofmann's example is that of a desktop, with a file on it, but if I zoomed in, I only ever get pixels, and not the transistors etc.

In his analogy, there's code, interpreted and played out on a screen, and then the human, perceiving the patterns on the screen and recognising it and calling it 'a file'.

Where does the screen come from?
Why am I not directly perceiving the 0s and 1s, and seeing patterns in there, giving them names?

The difference being that if you look at the 0s and 1s, you can understand their nature, but he claims we can't, because we're lokking at the pixel-signal of the 0s and 1s.
There's a step of interpretation between us and reality, here, no?
I mean, if you zoomed in on a pixel on a screen, at some point you'd see wiring and the lcd panel etc. - but he claims that's not possible.

In animals and humans at least.


TBH that's one of the things I was wondering about and perhaps the disconcerting bit there for his theory - explorations of the backdrop that spacetime emerges from (this is increasingly getting verified these days - indifferent of Hoffman) are in their infancy and a lot could be projected onto what Nima Arkani Hamed is doing, which can make some of this seem a bit snake oil, and in particular with what you just mentioned we have some sense that amplituhedrons map particle collision patterns at the LHC well but I don't know that this has come down to some new theory of how photons propagate or transmit through space or whether that's necessarily a hang point if we're saying that everything we perceive as space and time are getting unpacked from a substrate that is neither-nor. For better or worse he was saying these things as far as I know before some scientists like Arkani-Hamed were saying that spacetime wasn't fundamental. It's within his theory to say it's all UI but the explanation of how spacetime unpacks in terms of billions of years of history would seem to suggest that it's sticking primarily to conscious observation which isn't our own, otherwise it's a claim that the reality of this originating content which we spin up space and time from has all of the characteristics described and we're unpacking lightyears worth of history from around the cosmose and light traveling toward us from hundreds of millions if not billions of years away based on these same principles.


That sort of goes back to the problem that we can't look past plank distance without forming a black hole. Calling it a computer screen or computer program is probably overdefined if we're taking it as more than an analogy but it does seem like we're dealing with secondary effects that are coming from primary effects which we can't directly perceive but where the math is making it somewhat obvious that they are what spacetime arises from.

If anybody is interested in how this idea of a universal consciousness is implemented in the Final Fantasy series, this video I think explains it pretty well:



The next video in the series also addresses it at some points.

techstepgenr8tion, apparently, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the series creator, was a big fan of the Gaia theory and sought to explore the themes in his works. Apparently, he was also influenced by the Kabbalah, basically, Jewish mysticism.

Moving on to the hypothesis of universal consciousness, you will have to show that it explains aspects of the physical world that other hypotheses do not, in addition to it being falsifiable. That it explains the physical world in a way that other hypotheses cannot more simply. Because otherwise, it runs into the problem of being superfluous as an explanation (thus running afoul of Occam's razor). Basically, if it's superfluous, universal consciousness could be conceptualized as a metaphor that helps humans to understand the physical universe, but not referring to any distinct phenomenon in its own right. You need to show that the hypothesis is necessary.

Personally, I think it's quite interesting, and seems to make sense on an intuitive level, and I'd like to see it further developed, so I'm interested in following this.

I actually spent maybe five years studying Qabalah, although it was more in the Golden Dawn and later tradition which means it was the Hermetic format (technically Judao-Christo-Egyptian in its format but allowing for just about any of the pantheons as it covered most of the ancient world's diety archetypes, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah did a good job on those relationships). My biggest gripe at this point with Kabbalah/Cabalah/Qabalah - there's no evidence for the emanationist Neoplatonism that it's founded on outside of the idea that enough NDE'ers seem to suggest a God that all conscious agents are a part of but even there it's never edified the Sefir Yetzirah or anything specific to Kabbalah. I get that it's a tidy system for organizing ideas and people like using the sephira as containers for various correlations but I have yet to hear a near death experiencer come back describing paths on the tree of life or anything consistent with death being a flight up the 32nd path of tau.


I wouldn't bother with that, partly because I think it's either a) there is no evidence that all of this behaves as if it's knowingly being projected from one mind or b) said emanation is happening in such a way where it's done everything it can to remove its fingerprints, give its best approximations to random chance, and see if new things that it couldn't think of on its own were created or new problems created, understood, and solved.

The best places to start, IMHO, are far less ambitious. It's seeing if either consciousness can be proven, to an agreed upon certainty, to be able to live beyond neurons or seeing if a theory of consciousness, sort of like what Donald Hoffman is proposing, offers more explanatory power than both those of mainstream physics at the moment and any theories of consciousness trying to find qualia in chemical arrangements of brain tissue.

What's out there right now in the way of evidence for consciousness going out beyond the brain at times or potentially quite often breaks into a couple of categories. The first is statistical analysis - like the Gansfeld experiments, the PEAR random number generator experiments, to some extent the Global Consciousness Project although TBH I don't understand how the controls on that one work, and a lot of the statistical analysis that Dean Radin and people like him have done (I believe there was a high-ranking statistician, forgot her name, who did meta study on these things and found them far enough beyond chance to be quite credible). The other part is claims of veridical perception when people have near death experiences and in these cases there are eye-witnesses of doctors who can verify that the person's out of body observations while they were flatlined were valid, to mean anything it's much more specific than 'you were wearing blue or white scrubs' (no kidding), and sometimes these people do tell people who did what with something the doctors can't find (like a guy whose dentures got lost) and he was able to tell them where they were put at a time when he was out. People have claimed experiences as well of going into an NDE, seeing dead relatives who they thought were alive, came back and found out hours or days later that the person had died around that time. There's also along that experience line that of people who experiment with psychedelics, people who experiment with occult mysticism and magic (same basic aim but protected by the 1st amendment and DEA approved), and other situations that can just happen spontaneously for people.

Anything in the paragraph immediately above only counts as proof for people who either already believe these things or who are sizing them up for the possibility that they're real, for anyone else these are just anecdotes open to human folly that don't prove anything - thus perhaps enough for some to feel that hypotheses along these lines are worth unpacking or pursuing but no clear evidence in and of itself. IMHO it's not that the events themselves are too unreliable (maybe in some cases, not in others) but it has more to do with where we're at culturally - ie. a scientific establishment whose had it foisted on them to be the new arbiters of reality, needing to keep public weight and credit in science (not just for social power but funding to do anything), and there's the concern that most people are already superstitious and would go right back to fundamentalist religions and killing each other over their beliefs if any nod to anything other than reductive materialism were given (it's that same sad mistake as well in the west of either it's reductive materialism or the bible's the literal word of God or the Quran, which has zero necessary correlation to the facts but again people tend to think along very simple tracks like even assuming miracles are real, if one happens at your church it's best to figure out of said miracles happen in other denominations or even other religions before getting too zealous).

So yeah, if we were to see something like panpsychism (in it's literal or genre sense), functionalism, dual-action monism, or something other than naive physicalism being taken seriously it would require a very robust theory that makes doing otherwise impossible. The rug 'anecdote' can be swept under is apparently quite big and can still accommodate more than what it is.


Back to what I said about Hoffman's theory earlier - ie. his intent is to see if more simple mathematical theorems can be written per his conscious agent theory of the underlying space Nima is researching. If it can circumscribe and explain quantum mechanics, general relativity, classical mechanics, and everything the sciences currently have then its on as a potential model and even more a potential contender if it makes predictions not made yet to date that flesh out with experiment.

techstepgenr8tion,

Curious, those NDE's you speak of, did anybody report anything like a void, or nothingness, as either part (spatially or temporally speaking) of or all their experience?

Taking my cue from the video above, one way you could possibly demonstrate the existence of such a consciousness would be by finding some way to tamper with it and seeing what happens. (Keep in mind though, it could be very dangerous, and you may possibly break reality. ) But if you could find some way to do something experimentally to produce a result in a way that only a universal consciousness could explain and that is reproducible, you might have something there. Of course, the nature of universal consciousness itself could be such that nothing you do with it is reproducible, putting it outside the bounds of science as we've conceived it.

They're diverse. Some people actually have found themselves in nothingness, often as an unpleasant state, and either rocked their way out of it by thinking of other things or spent that time breaking something they had with them and creating as many different things as they thought they could. I'm not 100% sure how many of these experiences come up with something equivalent to the Good of Plotinus, most you tend to hear about seem to be contact the God of Neoplatonism but there are some more traditionally Christian experiences, some that fit other religious profiles (for various canonical reasons you won't hear about Islamic NDE's, even if they do happen they'd be haram by definition). My takeaway from that - their content will, generally speaking, be highly personal albeit in the west there's some tendency toward the Good of Plotinus.


It's a dead-end as any sort of public hypothesis unless we somehow cross bridges that lead us there from other places, and I think it's because you can ask the question - is there something that you can do within the laws of physics that would extract an answer to that question? Really in a way it's worse - it's trying to find a question with a particular pre-defined answer and we'd have no clue where to look for that question.

The thing I hate about the double-slit and the measurement problem is that there's no workaround for it under any conditions. Most experiments I've thought of which might test for occult biology, a bird feeder experiment comes to mind, couldn't be gotten off the ground because they rely on somehow getting an observation, like energy dissipation, both with and without observation to see if said dissipation happens when the bird feeder isn't being observed and if it does only happen when the bird feeder is not being observed and in irregular quantities (assuming the right people were able to tell the experimenters what types of energy occult fauna or wild life like to feed on) then one would at least have some evidence that the bird feeder was showing signs of getting positive hits. Even there through it would take more follow up from there and ways to determine variance in these results and I'm still not sure if said results would be any more convincing than PEAR's rng/reg studies.

I think what Donald Hoffman's looking at though is a much more elegant proposition - ie. to deal with the fundamental boiler plate that all of our assumptions rest on and see if a different boiler plate fits better. Again he's not after a universal consciousness per say but then again, TBH, I sort of don't care so much about that as I do seeing us get unstuck both in our technological and cultural pursuits of useful information.