Interface model of consciousness: Cook excerpt #10

Nick Cook writes: Professor of Cognitive Sciences Donald Hoffman likens our experience of reality to the relationship we forge with the ‘graphical user interface’ of a computer, its screen²⁸.

In the classical physics model, everything we perceive involves illusion. What we see is not a direct representation of the objects in our vision; it is a translation formed by our brain’s interpretation of the light reflected off the objects. This is high school physics and well understood. The reality represented by those objects – and the meaning we attach to that reality – will be different depending on who is doing the observing.

In Hoffman’s ‘conscious realism’ model, we don’t need knowledge of the ‘guts of the machine (a laptop, for example) – its hardware and its software – in order to interact with it. Instead, we forge a relationship with the icons (and apps) it displays on- screen. We ourselves create the icons, but the icons themselves, being an on- screen representation, aren’t conscious. At heart, conscious realism states that consciousness is primary and the physical world – our world of matter – emerges from it.

This, Hoffman says, gives rise to the idea of ‘conscious agents’. “The way one agent in a network perceives, depends on the way some other agents act,” he tells us²⁹. In this world, our brains function as ‘reducing valves’ to give us ‘just the reality we need’ for ‘survival’. To take this a step further, we agree on reality, because we’ve all evolved the same reality interface.

It is this interface that, over eons, has allowed us to play the same game. It is also the process that provides us with our perception of consensus, objective reality.

What Hoffman wants to do is develop maths, an algorithm, to allow him to unpick the ‘source code of the game’ – leading, potentially, to technologies by which we can access the ‘greater reality’ in the parts of the machine we don’t normally experience.

Meantime, ‘crude methods’ – methods we might refer to loosely as ‘technologies’, as well, including meditation and psychedelic drugs (even though it might be hard to think of a psychedelic as a technology) – give us a limited capacity to do the same thing.

So, where – and what - is this ‘interface’?

The light that enters our eyes projects upside-down on to the retina, the sensory membrane at the back of the eyeball. There, millions of cells, each adapted to pick out one of three primary colours, send signals to the occipital lobe in the back of the head, where a trillion synapses help forge them into our world of vision. A similar sensor-fusion process takes place inside the brain with inputs from our other senses.

Matter, as we have already seen, is 99.9 per cent empty space. Dr Robert Lanza, whom we met earlier, wants us to be ‘really clear’ on how and where we forge our construed, consensus picture of ‘objective reality’: with and within our minds; and that the world we perceive to be a world of separation – an ‘out there reality’ of trees, houses, tables, rocks, animals, things; and an ‘in here reality’ of us – doesn’t exist. The icons on our user-interface, then – of which, per Hoffman, there are an infinite number and variety – might be said to arise out of the vibrating energy grids we also encountered earlier, informed, as they are, by the quantum magic that permits an infinite range of sub-atomic probabilities to collapse into the particles that make up the things – the material objects we all agree upon – in a format that contributes to our sense of hard, cold reality. Here, Hoffman says, our brains filter out anything not to do with survival.

Here, too, ‘survival’ isn’t just about the physical things – food, water, shelter, warmth etc. – we agree on for the furtherance of our species, but a more tenuous consensus of colour, taste, aesthetics, our sense or right and wrong ... love, even. But you’ll find little discussion of what makes this, or any other definition of our reality in a textbook, because it relies on something science can’t agree on to begin with: consciousness.

The question at the heart of this essay – whether human consciousness can survive permanent bodily death – hinges on the ability of ‘the mind’ to exist outside of the body.

Consciousness, because we are immersed in it and it in us, is, essentially, non- provable. But anomalous aspects of it that manifest as paranormal phenomena are – which is what makes them so important. They are the clues we must examine from the outside in that alert us to a fundamental feature of existence – the idea that there are depths to our everyday reality that we don’t customarily see; and that existence is based on a set of commonly agreed protocols that give us, for the moment, all the reality we can handle – no more, no less – via a panoply of agreed ‘everyday icons’.

But the evidence, too, says there’s some malware in the machine that’s throwing icons we don’t all agree upon on to the user interface – what we might, perhaps, refer to as ‘rogue icons’.

These manifest as ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, angels and demons, miracle cures and any number of ‘anomalies’ that mainstream science wants to tell us aren’t ‘real’.

Except, since they exist as shared experiences for so many, at some level, they have to be.

28 See The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes, Donald D. Hoffman, Allen Lane, 2019.
29 Op.cit. p.184.

 
Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.