didn't know Hoffman had discussed his ideas with THE Francis Crick? I'm not surprised he was a critic.
I take it Hoffman is a lot more radical than the rather tame view that reality and our perception of it are not one and the same? — Down The Rabbit Hole
Don Hoffman was a close associate of Francis Crick, and they worked together for years. But Hoffman was a lot younger, and began to diverge from Crick in his basic worldview. Crick was a fairly traditional reductive-materialist-classical scientist, and famously said "
you are nothing but a pack of neurons". Yet, over time, Hoffman's views turned toward more holistic Eastern models of reality, in which "You" are more than your physical structure. He also was influenced by the contra-classical findings of Quantum Theory -- including the role of the observer in constructing models of reality. And I wouldn't be surprised, if Crick lived long enough to read Hoffman's latest books, that he would find his ideas "radical". Nevertheless, Hoffman remains respectful of his mentor's contributions to science.
Hoffman's "
astonishing hypothesis" is just the opposite from Crick's. And he turned the old evolutionary arguments for reality (arbitrary & random reshuffling of matter) upside-down, by implying that even hard-nosed no-nonsense scientists are dealing with illusions of their own making. This does not necessarily mean that there is no ultimate true Reality, but merely that each of us is like the
blind-men and the elephant story, in which each observer sees only a part of the whole. In that case, the role of science is to have a meeting of minds, and to merge our various "illusions" into a single useful approximation of Holistic Reality.
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” ___Francis Crick
https://todayinsci.com/C/Crick_Francis/ ... ations.htm
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality :
The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman believes that evolution and quantum mechanics conspire to make objective reality an illusion.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evol ... -20160421/
BLIND MEN OBSERVING A WHOLE ELEPHANT'S PARTS
blindmen-elephant.gif
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant