"What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
The quote below is from an NYT piece where 14 scientists were asked the same question: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"
Donald Hoffman
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence"I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.
The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.
Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits.
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience.
Profound. [This idea] seems to treat the universe we perceive as an interaction of a subset of the universe with our consciousness. [I] would have [never] thought that disparate disciplines I've been involved with - HCI and cosmology - could be so linked[, even if only tenuously at this abstract of a level.]
This kind of a theory [see discussion in comments about what constitutes a "theory"] might begin to account for why 90% of the matter of the universe is dark matter - matter that we cannot see or touch but that interacts with us via gravity - and dark energy - [negative] energy that acts as a sort of anti-gravity.
[So, What do I believe is true even though I cannot prove it? I believe that there is a glorious, productive and much more copacetic future for mankind... and that we are all contributing to this happening whether we consciously try or not. BTW, I'm consciously trying.]
UPDATE [2005-01-04 17:07]: I should point out that I'm not seriously considering Hoffman's ideas as a valid scientific explanation of any sort. I just think it's a neat perspective... it gives me goosebumps, and that doesn't happen often. Usually, when I've happened across something profound. I've added some bracketed stuff to clarify.
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That was the point of the question, in a sense... although hoffman (and others polled) went overboard and included things they believe that might not ever be provable. There is a lot of theory in cosmology (I withstood a qualifying exam in the subject for my astrophysics masters) that doesn't lend itself to provability... unfortunately, unless we make other breakthroughs that question the fundamental structure of the universe, we won't be able to test any of them. And I absolutely agree with your last sentence.
I find theories that aren't falsifiable or provable to spook me out... once when I was young and had done my first or second hallucinogen, I was convinced that mine was the only real consciousness. It spooked me out. I couldn't, via any method imaginable, prove that all other humans were conscious... struggling with each decision, feeling each feeling, etc.