He has developed a theory of consciousness that asserts that evolution has led us to be blind to a true reality. As he says, “Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.” Essentially, while there is an evolutionary advantage toward tuning our perceptions to anything that supports “fitness” or survival, the actual real world structures don’t necessarily match the associated fitness function.

This theory has support from evolutionary simulations as well as mathematical proofs of some of the concepts. Hoffman developed a mathematical consciousness model, which consists of “spaces” of artifacts, experiences, and mappings: “I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world.”

Most interestingly, the math and supporting evidence for this model leads to the conclusion that multiple conscious agents can combine to form a unified consciousness and that W, the true reality, appears to act exactly as a unified consciousness. This sounds uncannily similar to the idea of ATTI, or the Global Consciousness System, which, in this model, would exactly be W.