On reality as a simulation

In aa recent popular discussion Donald Hoffman has gotten allot of attention for his argument that reality is an interface to a simulation. I am quite bothered by this whole debacle and the attention Hoffman is getting for his claims. The reason is that this is of course trivially correct and noting new in the sense that we do not experience anything but our experience of reality. This is just a modern framing of Kant's Ding an Sich (something we do way too often - think that modern technology has something deeper to tell us about reality. That is of course also false.).

These ideas are quite compatible with panspychism (which I am a fan of) in which everything has an experience. It is just that primitive objects have primitive experiences. Trees experience a property of reality where energy in the form of light has a directionality and thus the trees grow in certain directions towards that energy.

However, coming back to Hoffman, he is introducing the terms user interface and simulation which are a wrong use of the terms. A user interface is something designed and it is the same with simulation. It is something designed to mimic something else. However, there is nothing in Hoffmans argumentation, that I have seen, that imply that reality should be a simulation in this sense. That is, he has no good argument for the existence of God. And as far as I understand, this is also not what he is trying to argue for. But the terms user interface and simulation should not be used to describe Kant's ideas about the experience of reality.

On Donald Hoffmans case against reality

To many, Donals Hoffmans ideas about reality are considered radical. To me they seem obvious and, not to sound arrogant but, rather mundane. However, there is one point where it gets very interesting, and which to me, he seem event to miss him self. And where actually I think I got some new enlightenment.
Sam and Donald talks about the relation between perceived reality (PR) and full reality (R) and Sam proposes that there must be some isomorphism between PR and R. Donald pointed out that the relation is surely complex; but what he did not say explicitly, but which make things interesting, is that there is no reason actually to expect this to be an isomorphism at all. It could rather be a projection. And if that is the case, it might well be that there is no way to recover R from that projection/PR. It seem there can be multiple things that can be the case here; it could possibly be that it is possible to recover R from PR due to that it happens that R only has one way to be, given the structure of PR space.
But it could also be that the projected structure (which is probably a better word than space) is compatible with an infinite number of different complete/full realities.
I guess it could also be something like an ill-conditioned problem, that the projected structure in principle is completely connect to the full reality, but some parts/links in that projection are so weak that it is essentially impossible to probe them.
I hate when people who don't know a squat about things like Quantum Mechanics talk about it and throw out uninformed thoughts. But I will still do it here, and perhaps I am at least not completely uninformed. The thought is that perhaps the wavefunction collapse is a consequence of this ill-condition and that is why it is so hard to probe past it.
Given the non-existing of very weak link between PR and R, perhaps the evolutionary pressure on us is only from PR and there might be other PRs with completely other evolutionary pressure.

Seeing reality as it is is still a possibility. In fact, that is what we do. More or less

Hoffman just published another paper discussing his computer simulations indicating it is better to not experience reality as it is.

The ideas as stated are of course not new. They are present already in Plato's cave myth. But what should be pointed out I think, is that the ideas are actually not very interesting. Or perhaps even scientifically wrong.

First. We describe reality with models that approximate it. Hence, there is nothing new to anyone that we do not experience reality exactly as is. But what is more important is that there is, taking the scientific process to its limit over time, really nothing else to say about reality. Per definition. If there had been, it would be covered by some scientific theory. This is kind of the argument also against a supernatural being which I yet have not met any theist having a reasonable argument against: if an entity can interact with reality, that mechanism of interaction can be probed, and thus modeled. And then it is not supernatural any more. If there is no such interaction mechanism, they the entity has no implication on our reality.
Thus, in a proof by contradiction, there cannot be any supernatural entity.

On another note, of course an organism can be greatly successful and still not perceive reality fully. That's trivial. Take treas or any other plant. Surely their perceptive abilities are very limited and do not cover the whole of reality. They are still very successful as a spices. There is no problem here. However, a tree does also create models of the world. It is about light and temperature and nutrition. And the trees act according to those models. Surely, those models are quite good, they have made trees very successful. They approximate reality and the approximation is in direct relation to what that species needs. Trees cannot move, and hence they do not need models for kinematics.

This actually leads to an interesting thought - is evolution creating model-generating organisms? It looks like it. The genes are really an information processing system and as such, they are operating on some model assumption.

On " the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences"

There is allot of fuzz on this question out there. E.g. on fqxi. To me this is not so strange. If we assume nature has structure, and is not only chaos, then why would not any attempt to capture that structure succed?

The point is that any modeling structure that you can come up with will be sufficient to describe (that is, model) at least a part of reality (in  approximation). And from there it is just refinement. Science is an optimization process, or a search if you want. An optimization to minimize the error between model and measuremen.

Thus we (the humans) could have started from any mathematics and enevideble would have ended up with a physical model that will capture some part of reality.