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 It's recently seemed to me a good idea to post at least a paragraph to this or some other blog at least once a day, mainly for mental exercise, but also for the other benefits that writing and sharing one's writing bring (which I will not attempt to enumerate). As I am in between tasks at the moment, and it would make me nervous to spend time deliberating on a topic, today I'm just going to share a quote I came across and felt compelled to write down yesterday and some very brief thoughts on the same.

This is the quote:

"Fitness payoffs erase information about the structure of the world."

-Donald Hoffman

This quote came from the quotee's appearance on Episode #3 of Paras Chopra's Bold Conjectures podcast.

I've been listening to a lot of interviews of Dr. Hoffman in the past few years and find that this quote contains as distilled an essence of his main big idea as could be hoped for. This idea, however, is more radical than you might think from the out-of-context presentation. He's not just saying that, say, increasing the acuity of one sense must come at an expense to the others or that this merely distorts one's map of reality; he's saying that space-time itself is a construct of consciousness whose relationship to actual reality is roughly equivalent to the relationship between a computer's user interface and its inner workings.

I will try to write more on this later.