Hmmmmmmmm?

I am extremely intrigued by Dr. Hoffman and his Conscious Realism. He is yet another example of a high-level scientist who advocates universal consciousness, a concept that appeals to me greatly.

His work however is based on the assumption that reality is composed of conscious agents. As he says, we have to start with some sort of assumption. The common assumption for many people is that the universe is composed of particles of matter. There are phenomena that can not be understood with materialism, but Conscious Realism explains those phenomena handily, especially the mind-body problem.

[cogsci.uci.edu]

The above link gives a detailed and scholarly presentation of Conscious Realism.

I watched a 5 minute video of him talking about it, so now I basically know everything about it. There are things I like and things I find a bit dubious. I like that he aims for precision and built a mathematical structure to support his views. What I don't like is that he makes some heavy assumptions without explaining them (at least his mathematical model doesn't strive to do that afaik). What is consciousness and where does it come from? Those are questions I have not heard his answer yet, but that might just be ignorance on my part.
If I understood him correctly he is an (metaphysical) idealist, meaning that the existence of the "outer world" (matter, forces ect.) depends on conscious minds. I basically have the opposite view. Idealism starts with complex things (consciousness) in order to explain simple things (particles, forces ect.) whereas as a kind of "materialist" I start with the simple things and see complexity arise out of that. I don't think idealism holds any water but of course I could be wrong. It's one of those questions where we might never get an answer, but Hoffman at least says that his theory is falsifiable, so that's a good things. Maybe it also makes some testable predictions, but I doubt that (based on my limited understanding of his theory, of course).

Who? What?