The Case Against Donald Hoffman

[This is an excerpt from my recently published book, Nonduality and Mind-Only through the Prism of Reality, which is available in Kindle and paperback at Amazon and from other book sellers.]

As delusional as Bernardo Kastrup is about reality, Donald Hoffman, UC Irvine professor of cognitive psychology, is perhaps even more so. Together, these two leading academic “lights” on quantum-crapola idealism have become uber-popular icons for those who worship at the altar of anti-reality.

To those in the know, the first evidence that Hoffman is philosophically challenged is his adoration of fogged-out pop guru Eckhart Tolle, his primary spiritual influence. If Hoffman didn’t live in a spiritual-intellectual bubble, he’d know about and have read my book Beyond the Power of Now: A Guide to, and Beyond, Eckhart Tolle’s Teachings, which not only deconstructs the rampant poppycock permeating Tolle’s magnum opus The Power of Now, but presents spiritual Dharma on a level a quantum leap beyond Tolle’s text.

In addition to his infatuation with Tolle, Hoffman also vibes with A Course in Miracles, a second-rate quasi-Christian mysticism course that should be titled “A Course in Spiritual Trash,” which anybody steeped in real Christian mysticism would toss into a garbage bin or donate to a local Goodwill store. If Hoffman were a deep, serious spiritual seeker interested in true, esoteric Christian mysticism, he would have come across my seminal text Electrical Christianity: A Revolutionary Guide to Jesus’ Teachings and Spiritual Enlightenment and found it immensely more enlightening than A Course in Miracles.

What can you say about Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality?

After watching numerous YouTube interviews with Hoffman and hearing his same full-of-bull anti-reality shtick over and over, I had zero interest in reading his book; so I didn’t.

The truth is, Hoffman had no business writing a book titled The Case Against Reality, because he doesn’t even know what reality is. Unbeknownst to him, reality is simply that which exists. Regardless of the ontological status of an existent, simply by virtue of existing, it is real. In other words, there is no case against reality, there is only the question of the ontological status of the various existents that constitute it.

Hoffman holds that consciousness is foundational and can’t be booted up from space-time and matter. While I concur with that idealist assessment, I disagree with virtually every postulation he makes based on it. First and foremost, the fact that consciousness (or Consciousness) is Ultimate Reality does not render phenomenal reality (space-time and objects in it) unreal or an illusion, as Hoffman contends. Nothing unreal can come from the Real, so the fact that phenomenal reality (space-time existence) derives from Ultimate Reality (the spaceless, timeless Existent, or Consciousness) does not negate its reality.

Hoffman not only negates the reality of reality, but the ability of humans to perceive veridical reality. He employs three principal arguments in his attempt to undermine the efficacy of man’s perceptual faculty.

The first, through the work of his mathematician-partner, is his implementation of evolutionary game theory, which, he claims, proves that evolution hid the truth from mankind, that there is zero percent chance that humans evolved to perceive reality and 100 percent chance they evolved for fitness concerns, merely to maximize the perpetuation of their genes. To this, I say evolutionary game theory is hardly infallible or necessarily robust. Without resorting to “lost-in-math” game-theory analysis (which also serves to perpetuate climate-change myths), no clear-thinking individual would buy the idea that Darwinian evolution has in no way fostered man’s desire and ability to perceive reality; rather, such an individual would conclude that man’s ability to perceive reality is inextricably linked to his reproductive fitness.

Hoffman’s second principal argument attempts to prove that human sense-perception is defective, but what it proves instead is that Hoffman, despite his PhD in cognitive psychology, is an epistemological ignoramus. In some of his YouTube videos, he provides examples of optical illusions that putatively discredit the validity of our senses. This is specious for the following reasons: First, although our five senses are limited in scope and precision, they (along with sensory extensions, such as microscopes and telescopes) do what they are intended to do: inform us that something exists. It is then up to the “sixth sense,” the mind, to properly identify the contents of our either direct or instrument-enhanced sense-perceptions. For example, we might initially see a piece of rope and mistake it for a snake; but upon further analysis, we properly identify it as a piece of rope. Second, if our senses are invalid, producers of only illusion, then our minds, which are built upon our sense-perceptions, are also invalid, thereby rendering any ideas anyone has of a sensible world as folly.

It seems like Hoffman equates space-time with Maya.

Yep, and so do I. But he errs in his understanding of Maya, which literally means that which has been measured out from the Immeasurable (meaning Mind, or Consciousness). What is measured out from Mind is physically, phenomenally real, not an illusion, as Hoffman erroneously contends. And once the universe of space-time existents has been measured out from Mind, regardless of what new shapes or forms the raw, emanated existents morph into, they do not need to be measured or perceived or observed to manifest objective physical qualities. Unbeknownst to Hoffman, man’s cognitive faculties, which he disses, are valid instruments for directly perceiving and recognizing this reality.

Hoffman not only denigrates space-time, reducing it to an illusory interface, but he goes even further, insisting that “space-time is doomed.”

Yes, he seconds physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed’s statement that “space-time is doomed.” Beyond heat-death through entropy, Arkani-Hamed speculates that space-time may be doomed from giant particle colliders (such as the Large Hadron Collider) that produce ever-higher energy collisions of protons which could imperil the universe as we know it by creating black holes whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and even stars. Most physicists, however, scoff at this notion.

But beyond his secondary “doom-through-black-holes” hypothesis, the primary reason Arkani-Hamed believes space-time is doomed pertains to its non-fundamentality. He contends that he has identified static geometric structures, called “decorated permutations,” which exist outside (and beyond) space-time, and thus are more fundamental than it is. Hence, metaphorically speaking, four-dimensional space-time (as the foundation of reality) is doomed.

Donald Hoffman not only buys into Arkani-Hamed’s decorated-permutations paradigm, he also claims he’s working on a dynamical aspect to them.

Do you buy into Arkani-Hamed’s paradigm?

No, I say that Donald Hoffman and Nima Arkani-Hamed are full of hooey, and I challenge anyone to argue otherwise. The fact that Hoffman claims to be working on a dynamical aspect to the putatively static Amplituhedron (the most prominent decorated permutation) and other supposed geometrical structures outside space-time is laughable, because no such structures exist. They are, in fact, mere conceptual models used to simplify quantum computations.

Arkani-Hamed’s Amplituhedron encodes amplitudes (building blocks of probabilities in particle physics) in the “area” of a multi-dimensional analog of a polyhedron (hence, Amplitu-hedron). But there is no such thing as “the Amplituhedron,” a monolithic geometric structure outside space-time that is more fundamental than space-time. Therefore, “the Amplituhedron” is just a concept that manifests in various amplituhedra, each corresponding to a calculation that one might make. The Amplituhedron’s advantage is that it makes these calculations much simpler. But this hardly makes the Amplituhedron more fundamental or foundational than quantum mechanics or space-time. Imagine using an abacus as a computational tool and then discovering an electronic calculator that is many times faster. Well, that is an analogy for what Nima has done. And while it’s commendable, it hardly revolutionizes physics, as he and others contend, but merely simplifies quantum computations.

Even though Hoffman believes that decorated permutations are more fundamental than space-time, he still considers consciousness as most fundamental.

He’s wrong about decorated permutations, which are just mental abstractions, but right about the fundamentality of consciousness. Unfortunately, along with his failure to grok space-time, he also lacks a deep understanding of universal consciousness, which, unbeknownst to him, is Di-“vine” in nature, consisting not only of the “vine” of Mind, but also the “vine” of Spirit, or Clear-Light-Energy, which “crystallizes” into stepped-down, manifest forms of energy and matter. Hence, in addition to being an epistemological ignoramus, he is also a spiritual one.

Anything more you want to add to your “case against Donald Hoffman”?

In addition to being an epistemological and spiritual ignoramus, Hoffman is also an ontological one, possessing scant understanding of levels and states of consciousness and reality. On top of the Arkani-Hamed quantum crapola he peddles through the medium of decorated permutations, Hoffman also promotes the same anti-realist quantum crapola as Bernardo Kastrup, meaning he doesn’t believe that space-time objects exist when they’re not perceived. According to him, there is no moon in the sky without someone to see it; according to me, that makes him—pardon the term—a lunatic.