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Sciborg_S_Patel
Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception, Donald Hoffman
Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience. This is troubling, since we have a large body of correlations between brain activity and consciousness, correlations normally assumed to entail that brain activity creates conscious experience. Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, I develop two theses. The interface theory of perception states that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world. Conscious realism states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and empirically explored in the normal scientific manner.
In support of the interface theory of perception, I present Monte Carlo simulations of evolutionary games in which perceptual strategies that see the truth compete with perceptual strategies that do not see the truth but are instead tuned to fitness. The result is that natural selection drives true perceptions to swift extinction. Our perceptions have evolved to guide adaptive behaviors, not to report the truth.
In support of conscious realism, I present a dynamical theory of consciousness in which the observer and the observed have precisely the same mathematical structure, i.e., in which there is a mathematically precise nondualism. I then derive the quantum wave function of the free particle from the asymptotic behavior of the conscious dynamics. This is a step toward solving the mind-body problem from the assumption that consciousness, not physics, is fundamental.