This needs to be the top comment in this thread; it precisely gets to the heart of what&#x27;s being said here.<p>I mean, the other criticism is good too--I was trained as a physicist; I too balk when I see quantum mechanics used this way. (I&#x27;m a big fan of Searle&#x27;s third law[1].)<p>But I mean, the only point that we&#x27;re actually seeing used here is that QM is creating a huge amount of tension for people who used to comfortably believe in an objective observer-independent reality. That&#x27;s not actually a hugely divisive issue here. One issue that isn&#x27;t particularly quantum but is brought up here is that there seems to be a strange embeddability problem in the most basic theories of consciousness, also highlighted by Searle as part of his &quot;Chinese room&quot; thought-experiment: somehow the two halves of your brain merge into one consciousness, but somehow we don&#x27;t think that two people dancing really do; we don&#x27;t think that the two halves of your brain keep separate accounts of reality quite the same way that we do think that two dancers do: what is the boundary? Is it just, say, a matter of the volume and frequency of communication as related to the reaction speeds of the surrounding media? Or what?<p>Similarly the issue that Donald Hoffman&#x27;s raising up-front is precisely the one that you&#x27;re analogizing: hey, there&#x27;s no reason to think that this language that our brain uses maps directly onto the fundamentals of the reality; rather where there is a translation between these two it&#x27;s complicated at best, and you&#x27;re only seeing the world after layers and layers of programming have acted on it. Maybe at the most fundamental things are crazily different -- and we can&#x27;t understand them easily, if at all -- and what we&#x27;ve got are really effective models. When this happens, and what the universe is doing &quot;down in the plumbing&quot; starts to get really difficult to understand, it&#x27;s going to be <i>more useful</i> for us to regard our impressions of reality as a sort of farce -- except that pragmatically, we can&#x27;t do that, so we have to regard the underlying we-can&#x27;t-actually-experience-it-but-here&#x27;s-what-we-think-it-is reality itself as a sort of farce.<p>That feels like an uncomfortable &quot;turtles all the way down&quot; place to head, but I read Donald Hoffman as saying precisely, &quot;Hey, it&#x27;s not as scary as it sounds, just try it for a few: I&#x27;m not promising any dramatic answers, in fact I&#x27;m just promising less bluster about &#x27;here&#x27;s all the stuff we know for sure&#x27; and more honesty about how little we really know.&quot;<p>[1] Searle&#x27;s third law is a fun one, and this whole talk is fun: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vCyKNtocdZE</a> . About at 25:30 in this discussion of philosophical problems of free will, there&#x27;s a great aside: &quot;Well, think about it, is there any part of the universe that we have solid evidence to believe is not fully determined? And the answer is, of course, we know from quantum mechanics, that at the most basic level, it&#x27;s not deterministic. Now -- I <i>dread</i> saying this, &#x27;cause Searle&#x27;s third law is: whenever philosophers talk about quantum mechanics, <i>what comes out is hot air, at best</i>. And I won&#x27;t use an even more obscene expression. Oh, by the way, that applies to a lot of things physicists say about quantum mechanics, too: Feynman said, look, don&#x27;t try to think what quantum mechanics means, just do the equations, for God&#x27;s sake, don&#x27;t think you understand it -- well, unfortunately, I get paid to try and understand things! So. There is a part of the world that&#x27;s not deterministic.&quot; And then continues back on the thread that he was on.