Multisense Realism

Listening to this podcast:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/178-reality-illusion

My view has developed along similar lines as Donald Hoffman’s. One important difference is that I take his observation about the world we perceive being a sensory desktop or data structure contrived from fitness payoffs a step further. I plug that observation back in to itself, so that the expectation of data structures and fitness payoffs are also part of how we are using a sensory desktop.

In other words, after we understand how survival of a tangible, mortal body shapes our entire perception, we can see that this understanding is also biased and contrived by the particular modes of sense and sense making that have evolved since the Early Modern Period.

This means that the desktop we experience is different from the unimaginable ‘real world’ not because it is fabricated but because tangibility is only one aspect of ‘world realization’, and even the unimaginable ‘real world’ is actually only another level and scale of the same sense desktop. Yes, human perception has been shaped by fitness payoffs from animal mortality, and that has been supercharged in the centuries since Galileo and Descartes, but that doesn’t mean that perception in general is shaped ONLY by those anthropological>zoological>biological fitness payoffs, and that does not mean that sense experience itself (sensation>feeling>perception>awareness>personal consciousness) arises FROM fitness payoffs.

If my view is on the right track, it’s *all* a desktop, and there is nothing that can ever exist which is not a ‘user interface’, even if the ‘user’ is a sub-personal or impersonal frame of perception, i.e. a pre-physical sensory-motive event. So yes, I think that our movie is directed by evolution (as presented in our desktop of tangibility/causality/realism/mortality), however even the director’s world that our movie fictionalizes is itself nothing but the larger, older movies that we currently use as a movie *theater* (physics, information).