How Professor Donald Hoffman Uses Mathematics: From Idealism to the Amplituhedron

Professor Donald Hoffman is a philosophical idealist. Professionally, he’s also a cognitive psychologist. At some point after 2013, Hoffman discovered that a small number of theoretical physicists were claiming that “spacetime is doomed”. He particularly noted the work of Nima Arkani-Hamed and his amplituhedron. More relevantly, Hoffman realised that he could use the work of certain contemporary theoretical physicists to advance his own brand of idealism (i.e., “conscious realism”), in which “conscious agents” and their “interactions” are the ground of all reality. He published his conclusions in the 2023 paper ‘Fusions of Consciousness’.

Donald Hoffman: lost in maths? (The mathematical extracts in the image above are all from a single paper — ‘Fusions of Consciousness’. They are a very small selection of the maths contained in that paper.)

(i) Introduction
(ii) Donald Hoffman’s Idealism in Some Context
(iii) The Amplituhedron
(iv) Donald Hoffman on The Physicists
(v) Psychological, Physical and Ontological Space and Time
(vii) Donald Hoffman on Reductionism
(viii) Conclusion

It’s clear that Donald Hoffman isn’t mentioning — and extensively relying upon — the work…