Ideas

The Conscious Agent

the six-tuple self
Hoffman's math where minds come first and matter is output
Documented

The formal model

Hoffman and Prakash's 'Objects of Consciousness' (2014) defines a conscious agent as a six-tuple of spaces and Markovian kernels for perception, decision and action. Fields, Hoffman, Prakash and Singh's 'Conscious Agent Networks' (Cognitive Systems Research, 2018) extends the model, and Hoffman's ongoing program uses recursive structures on these kernels, trace-logic style constructions, to model agency and observer windows.

Assessment: The formalism is published and precise; whether it touches consciousness itself is the open wound.
Stories

Souls with equations

The folk version hears: science proves we are spirits in a cosmic mind. The math gets quoted as vindication for everything from idealism to the afterlife, usually by people who have not opened the papers.

Assessment: The story borrows the equations' authority and spends it elsewhere.
Interesting claims

The inversion as method

The structural reading: for four centuries the hard problem was getting mind out of matter. Conscious realism simply declines the assignment and starts from mind, making spacetime the derived object. Whether it is true or not, it is the cleanest demonstration that the arrow of explanation was a choice, not a finding.

Assessment: Interesting as a working alternative, unproven as a worldview.
Sources and further reading
  1. D.D. Hoffman & C. Prakash, 'Objects of consciousness,' Frontiers in Psychology 5:577, 2014
  2. C. Fields, D.D. Hoffman, C. Prakash & M. Singh, 'Conscious agent networks: Formal analysis and application to cognition,' Cognitive Systems Research 47, 2018
  3. Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, 2019, the recursive-structures program
Worth asking

If physics is the user interface of a network of minds, who, or what, is the network?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+