Philosopher George Berkeley posited the famous idealist question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It’s been changed over the years from what he actually said, which was, “The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden... no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.” Einstein responded to this notion, which had made its way into quantum theory, asking, “Do you really believe that the moon only exists if you look at it?” Einstein, of course, knew that the second the moon was removed from earth’s orbit, catastrophic tidal and other climactic conditions would appear on earth. There is a reality to the atoms which make up things.
The answer to the tree riddle tells us more about our arrogance as humans than about anything existing in reality. The tree falls, sound vibrations go through the forest, which are heard or felt in any number of different ways by the myriad creatures and plants living there. Berkeley was an Anglican Bishop and saw in his theory the existence of God, or the divine behind the veil of material illusion, an ancient Hindu and Buddhist idea. Everything we experience, Berkeley said, is God showing us the products of his creator mind. Turn your head in the other direction, the bird sitting in the tree in your yard disappears along with the tree, until you turn your head back, then God puts it there again for your edification. It’s a bizarre notion, one picked up recently by cognitive psychologist and author Donald Hoffman, who’s rejiggered the idea with consciousness in place of God, Einstein’s spacetime replacing the veil of illusion, which becomes the matrix we’re in, which we see through the virtual reality headset of our senses. Meanwhile, in another dimensional background, actual reality exists. Got that?
Hoffman’s main metaphor is the virtual reality headset, which is life as we experience it. We’re in a virtual reality game, he says, but just as there’s no actual cars in Grand Theft Auto, a game he often refers to, only digital representations of cars, what we see as reality is only a representation created by consciousness, which he sometimes calls The One. We live in this virtual reality, which has complex rules, but we ourselves are only conscious agents, avatars who are allowed to see only this version of reality, within spacetime.
The existence of a world built on Berkeley’s impossible idealism is examined by Jorges Luis Borges in the classic short story, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius.”
Hoffman has come up with some mathematical equations which are said to represent how conscious agents work and share conscious experience. Though I read his paper, I’m not conversant with mathematics enough to be able to tell you how good they are, or if they make actual sense. Reputable people seem to accept them in theory. Another large component of his study is that evolution has never functioned to show us aspects of true reality, rather its function has always been to guide us in survival. In some sense, this can be certainly seen as true, though it’s fairly obvious and is hardly groundbreaking as an idea. Someone who drops acid is no longer functioning in a mode requisite for survival. Afterward, though, his consciousness may be changed. Since recorded history, there have been countless human experiences of glimpses into the true aspect of reality, metaphysical, spiritual and psychedelic, and surely these are part of our evolution. Hoffman’s conclusion in this regard is, to me, patently absurd, no matter what his mathematical models have shown. Is Greek philosophy not part of evolution? Is the long history of shamanism not part of evolution? Even if evolution has trained us for opposite, and mothers don’t want their daughters marrying philosophers, the persistent inquiry into the meaning of true reality has always been part of the human journey.
To be fair to Hoffman, there is something to the idea of our reality being part of a perceptual mode where we see in a very limited array. Hoffman acknowledges this as us being incapable of seeing everything as it is, because we’d be overcome with unusable information. One can imagine seeing every spectrum of light at once including infrared and x-ray, hearing all sounds, radio waves, feeling electromagnetic waves, seeing physical objects at an atomic or even quantum level as everything merges with everything else. In such a scenario, we’d have no ability to separate the useful from the extraneous. Life would be a continual acid trip. This is the gist of his argument about evolution training organisms to ignore everything but what’s most essential to survival, thus the idea of the virtual headset, filtering out all but the necessary. In this respect, he’s correct about evolution generally training us this way, but I would posit another idea, which Darwinism doesn’t include - that of the nature of all creatures and plants to consciously seek self-improvements. Darwin throws the evolutionary weight of the improvement process to mutations and adaptation, but the continual process of unique eureka discoveries, constant within human evolution, cannot be confined just to the human, as the entire chain of evolution is unbroken between all species, with dependent origination central to it all. In other words, human beings didn’t evolve in conditions that were separate from everything else.
If Hoffman means that the atoms comprising the moon itself remain unchanging, it’s always up there physically in the sky, with form, substance and gravity, and he’s only talking about our perception of the moon, our ability to see it without all the extra information, that would be unproblematic. But, as far as I can discern, he isn’t. He’s saying, I believe, that the spacetime matrix where we experience our lives manifests perceptually as we look at things, we render it, is the phrase he uses, then it all disappears when we turn away, because it no longer needs to be there. This is where an unproven and unprovable theory goes into the realm of the impossible, and, it seems to me, pure fiction. Hoffman has created no experiments or theories that explain why or how this whole incredible device came to be. What’s the working mechanism of the matrix? What are the experiments that are glimpses into it? Hoffman is silent on this.
The intriguing idea behind these ideas, however, behind Hoffman and Berkeley’s rabbit hole reality, is the recognition of the energy within all things. It seems, as Hoffman indicates, there could be something mindboggling going on behind the scenes, as evidenced by people who’ve had intense DMT experiences, similarly the experiences of mystics and saints, and those having had near death experiences.
I would agree with Hoffman as far as his main dictum - that consciousness is fundamental. There is consciousness within all things. How does that work? I would suggest this - each living thing has its own requisite degree of consciousness necessary for its particular life, function and survival. The dragonfly has dragonfly consciousness. The military have for years been studying the dragonfly, trying unsuccessfully to recreate its flying ability. It has a tiny brain, but its focused consciousness allows it to do this one thing very very well. A very small computer chip can power a digital clock. This is how it must be for everything, and accounts for, in a general fashion, many of the baffling mysteries of the natural world. How do slime molds work, what going on with starling mumerations, what created the ant hive-mind, how can seashells shape themselves to the Fibonacci sequence? Science often says that photons, since they’re moving at the speed of light, have no concept of time. This implies photon consciousness.
There is a select, focused portioning of consciousness that enters into all things, wherever it is able to do so, however much the organism can accept and utilize. This parceled consciousness facilitates the endless uniqueness of life and specialization in nature. This would work in tandem with the advancements of organisms through evolution. So much of the workings of nature can’t be explained by chemical or biological processes of scientific physicalists. It rather can only be explained by the panuniversal existence of consciousness, spread throughout and within all things, present and active in proportion to how much consciousness each of those living things in nature is able to open up to and use.
Academic science gets upset at such statements, because universal consciousness begins to sound a lot like God. Fine. It is what it is. Consciousness is everywhere. We see it appear anew every day, in every baby born.
We should try to get used to this idea, because the next large steps science takes will start from there.