Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Why Our Senses Lie to Us | Dr. Donald Hoffman

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Donald Hoffman a Professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.I got introduced to Donald through the legendary Deepak Chopra so I was very excited to speak with Donald…Donald received a PhD from MIT and is an author of over 120 scientific papers and three books, including The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences.His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge, and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.He has a TED Talk titled “Do we see reality as it is?” and that sets the tone for this conversation…In Donald's words: “I’m deeply convinced that everything that I've been taught is probably largely wrong. Everything that I believed is probably largely wrong. One of the big, big things that I have to work on as a person is to be good with that, to be good with not knowing and to face the fundamental and profound ignorance that's part of the human condition.”_________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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We want to think that we have the answers and we know all the way down. And what science teaches us is that even our best scientific theories are almost surely deeply flawed, and they're the best we've got so far. okay welcome back or welcome to the finding mastery podcast i'm michael gervais and by trade in training i am a sport and performance psychologist now the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are flat out switched on, who have dedicated their life efforts towards mastery. They're trying to get to the truth of stuff and they're using their craft to figure that out.

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really excited to speak with him. And Donald received his PhD from MIT and is the author of over 120 scientific papers and three books, including The Case Against Reality, Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for Early Career Research and the Rustem Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Hoffman also has a TED Talk titled, Do We See Reality As It Is? And that sets the tone for this conversation. His dream right now is to explore what might be beyond space-time. So grokking with fundamental and hard problems in science requires deep knowledge and highly

creative thinking. And wait until you hear how he's approaching consciousness. I mean, it is so good. It's awesome. And so I'm really excited to introduce him and this conversation to you. And with that, let's jump right into this conversation with Dr. Donald Hoffman. Donald, great to spend some time with you. And you've been spending your time for the last couple of decades trying to sort out the hard problems in life and the hard problem of

consciousness, certainly. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. I have no idea exactly where it's going to go, but my sense is from you and your work is that we're going to go to some deep places. So I'm ready to strap up my boots and get in there with you. So thank you for spending some time. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure. Awesome. Okay. So let's start with just some context. You grew up in San Antonio, but what was it like growing up?

Well, I was born in San Antonio, but my folks left when I was only six months old. My dad was there. He was stationed in San Antonio for the army. And so I was born in an army hospital, but then six months later, they moved to Southern California. So I basically have no memory of, of course, from six months. I have no memory at all of Texas or San Antonio. My memory of growing up is San Diego and San Fernando Valley and Torrance and so forth, the towns I grew up in. Okay. And then, so what was it like inside the house?

What was it like? What was the general themes of the house? What were the principles that guided you guys? Oh, well, let's see. My dad had a master's degree in chemistry and worked as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft for a while. And then he became an assistant pastor in a fundamentalist church. So I was, from a very early age, sort of exposed to some science and a lot of religion, Christian fundamentalism. My mom had a degree in microbiology and was quite a sharp programmer,

but also very much into the fundamentalist Christian thing. So I got this interesting mix of some good science and technology on the one hand and then some, some out there fundamentalist Christianity as well. Okay. Okay. There you go. So dad went from kind of hardcore science chemistry and then flipped over to as a full practice, like a full lifestyle adjustment over to, um, uh, a spiritual practice. That that's right. To being an assistant pastor and then eventually having his own very, very small church that he ran. Yeah, so he also got a degree in counseling, a master's

degree in counseling, as did my mom. So they ended up being licensed counselors as well. Okay, got it. All right. So then how do you find your way to one of the top universities in the world? How do you find your way to MIT? Well, I completed my bachelor's degree at UCLA. And my last year at UCLA, my senior year, I was fortunate enough to take a graduate class on artificial intelligence. And it was a great pleasure to read the state-of-the-art papers at the time. And one of the papers was by a guy named David Marr, who was doing work on human vision, but with like a computer vision twist to it. But the idea was if we're going to understand human vision,

what we need to do is to build mathematically precise models that in principle could be built into computer programs. And we could attach cameras to the computer, and it should be able to see quote-unquote see with the program that we wrote now see in 3d recognize objects see motions and so forth so it was the idea that to understand human vision we should try to build robotic vision systems that that work and i really you know reading that paper as a senior, I realized, wow, this is really nice. I mean, it allows you to study human visual perception, but to do it in a really rigorous way and potential applications in artificial intelligence and computer vision.

So I said, where is this guy? I want to work with him. And it turned out he was in the artificial intelligence laboratory and what's now the brain and cognitive science department at MIT. So I applied and was lucky enough to get in there and had a chance to work at MIT for my PhD for four years. Unfortunately, David Marr died after I'd only been there for, I don't know, 14 months or something like that. So he died very, very young. But even those 14 months with him were remarkable. And then Whitman Richards was my advisor, a co-advisor when Marr was alive, and then my full advisor afterwards. So it was a wonderful experience.

The people I met there were a lot of fun. So you use the word lucky. And I want to just note that because sometimes people use it as like it's part of their framework, their philosophical framework, how they understand how the world works. And some of it use it for a bit of humility. So are you using it? Which part are you using the word lucky from? Do you have a fundamental belief that luck is part of the way the world works and or using it for humility reasons?

Well, yeah, interesting. I would use it lucky in the sense of fortunate. I feel very fortunate that I had the chance to go there. The deeper philosophical question about luck is a very interesting one. I don't know if I have a... To really answer that one deeply is a very, very deep question. Is there such a thing as luck or not? My own guess is that there isn't such a thing as luck. And that there's, if we understand things from a deeper place, we'll see that luck isn't really critical, but that free choices are critical. But I must say, I feel like already we're treading in territory where it's very, very deep waters and I'm likely to be wrong. Yeah. I know that this is like on the cursory of the things that you study,

you know, maybe way cursory, but I think about luck a lot, you know, and I wonder how does the ball bounce this way and not that way, you know, and when it bounces, when it zigs and it sometimes zags, like maybe it's just mechanics. Sometimes it just doesn't feel that way. And maybe luck is just this way for us to be able to explain events. And it's just a word that we use to explain the unexplainable or something that feels good to explain a math problem. But let's pause that for a moment. I want to come right down center lane for you about sensory perception. And that's the part that I get, well, I get not confused about, but I get, I forget it. So I know the information, right? And I, this bit of information, which I can't wait for you to open this up even deeper, but I know I can't see all the colors that exist.

I can't hear all the sounds that exist. My sensory inputs have limitations, right? Both from a processing standpoint, like heuristics, and then also from a mechanical standpoint, like from a retinal standpoint. So I know that knowledge, but when I go throughout my day to day, I forget it. It's like, it's not, it's not really part of the way I process. So, so can you talk about like the hardcore understanding that you've come to find, but also the questions that you're really diving deeper into? Like, I'm curious about both of those. Right. So a fundamental question about our senses is, do they tell us truths about reality? And by reality, what I mean is the idea that many of us have that there is something that exists, and possibly most scientists would say has existed for many billions of years, before there was any life, before there were any creatures

with senses to perceive it. You know, there's the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and then matter and energy and space expanded, and planets and stars were formed and so forth, and eventually life came around and then consciousness. And so when we say, do our senses show us reality, the typical way that it's understood by scientists is the question, there is something that exists, whether or not any creature perceives it, planets and stars, space and time, and do our senses tell us truths about that reality? Of course, no one thinks we see all of reality. I mean, as you say, there are colors we can't see

and so forth. But the parts that we do see, are they telling us true things about objective reality? And that's, I mean, that's an interesting question. And a lot of people would say, well, obviously, yes, right? I mean, of course, I mean, I see a rock, there is a rock, I see a cliff, I would be stupid to jump off the cliff, because the cliff is real, in the sense that I just described, it It exists whether or not anybody perceives it. And the cliff, you know, like at the Grand Canyon, well, presumably the Grand Canyon, they say, has been around for millions of years. Well, even our species hasn't been around for millions of years. So that canyon has been around.

And so we're just seeing truly, but not exhaustively, what the Grand Canyon is. And so my question then was, well, that's what most of my scientific colleagues believe, and that's what most of us just informally believe, that we see not the whole truth, of course, but that we do see some truths. And so what I like to do as a scientist is to take our best scientific theories that are mathematically precise and ask the question of those theories. What does this theory say about this question? And so I looked at the theory of evolution by natural selection. And that's one of, I would say, three big pillars of modern science.

There's evolution by natural selection, there's quantum field theory and general relativity. There are other great scientific theories, but those are like three big pillars of modern science. And so what I wanted to do is just ask that question of evolution. Would the theory of evolution predict on its own structure, its own mathematical structure, would it predict that sensory systems would evolve, would be shaped by natural selection, to report some truths about objective reality? So for a scientist, that's a very clean technical question, right? This is not about our intuitions anymore. We have our beliefs and this is just a clean question to one of our

foundational theories. And it turns out evolution by natural selection has been turned into a mathematically precise theory. It's called evolutionary game theory. And so I use the tools of evolutionary game theory with some of my students, Justin Mark and Brian Marion, and a colleague, Chetan Prakash, and others on the mathematical side. And the answer is quite clear. The answer is no. Evolution by natural selection will not tune sensory systems to show any aspect of the truth, whatever that truth might be. And you might say, well, how in the world could you prove that? You'd have to assume what reality is, and it turns out you don't have to prove by assuming that you know what reality is. The mathematics allows you to answer the question even if you don't know what reality is. The mathematics allows you to answer the question, even if you don't know what reality

is. And so the stunning thing is that evolution doesn't shape us with perceptions that show us the truth. It just shapes us with perceptions that help us to act in ways that we survive and reproduce. And that's what it does. It helps us survive and reproduce. And you don't need to see the truth to do that according to evolution by natural selection. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team,

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Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. So is that a teleological approach, meaning that we are pruning or pairing what our brain processing and sensory information does to be able to have a goal, and that goal is survival? Is that too much of a reductionist approach to this very complicated evolutionary… Right.

So evolution by natural selection, as it's understood by most scientists, as it was understood by Darwin, is usually thought of without any teleology at all. The idea is that those creatures whose sense organs don't provide them with the right information to survive don't survive, and so they don't pass on the genes that coded for those sensory organisms. And so from this point of view, in some sense, there is no guiding force, there's no teleology. Again, I'm not saying this is what I believe. I'm just trying to be hard-nosed about what evolution of a natural selection itself is assuming. That's what you do is you take the theories on their own terms and study them.

So no teleology in evolution. It's just if your senses allow you to act in a way that's more fit than your competition, then you have a better chance of passing them on. Okay, great. And then in that vein, it would be a disadvantage to have full sense of reality. Could you make that argument? That's exactly right. That seeing reality as it is in's very counterintuitive. Even very, very bright scientist friends of mine that I talked with about this find it very, very counterintuitive. We have to talk for a long time before they realize, yes, that's the structure of the theory. That's what it entails. Well, it shows up in a couple of ways, right? Like heuristics as one, like there is a value in shortcuts, right? Mental shortcuts or

neurological shortcuts. There's also kind of that dual processing network that we have, the low road and the high road, if you will. When stimulus comes in, some of it's going right to that limbic fight, flight, freeze, submit mechanism. And some of it's going to the cortex, but it takes a little bit longer for the information to get up to the cortex. And so there is a reason why chunking information would actually help survival. Now, all that being said, the reason I was asking about theological was not so much in the religious doctrine framework, but the idea that there's a goal in mind. And that goal, and maybe I'm not using the frame correctly, so help me out. But the goal is survival. And so if the goal is survival, if you agree with that, then pruning would make sense.

Is that close? Right. So again, I think most of my colleagues would not want to talk about goals in any sense in evolution. What they would just say is, if your genes coded for sensory systems that guided your actions in less fit ways, less likely to survive and reproduce, then those genes just won't get passed on. So it's just sort of de facto. That's what's going to happen. If you have genes that code for sensory systems that aren't working well, then those genes are less likely to get passed on. And so they wouldn't say there's a goal. So it's a very polite way of saying, no, get off it, dude. You're wrong. Which is fun. It's totally good too.

Well, there may be goals. By the way, who knows? There may be goals in the universe. I'm just saying that evolutionary theory itself makes no such assumption. Maybe evolutionary theory is wrong. There you go. Okay. That's interesting. Okay. And if we're using goal as like, if we replace it with the dictum is to survive, is that the, for evolutionary approaches, is that the prime driver for survival or for life is survival? Right. So I would say that most evolutionary biologists would say that in some sense, as we've already said, there's no goal for evolution itself, but what evolution may do is create organisms that have certain emotions like fear of cliffs, fear of snakes, fear of dangerous situations. And that would lead to what we would call goal-directed behavior. I'm going to avoid the cliff because I'm afraid of it and I don't want to fall off the cliff. So you could have goal-directed behavior that evolved, even though they claim evolution by itself has no goals.

Right. So that's sort of, and again, I'm just trying to play the game the way it's played in the scientific theories. Always with the proviso that, of course, any scientific theory is probably wrong, but we just need to understand what the theory is claiming. Yeah, good. No, I'm right there with you. And then if we double click on this idea of how the brain works, I'd love for you to take a moment and kind of pause on the evolutionary piece, because I've got lots of questions, but I want to understand your framing between the brain and the mind, right? And so consciousness and the hardware, the brain. Can you frame your position there? Because you and a handful of others were a bit disruptive to the status quo theory about the brain and the mind. And so can you frame that for us?

Right. So this is a big open problem in science now, which is the problem of consciousness, what they sometimes call the hard problem of consciousness, which is how are your conscious experiences of, say, colors and headaches and the smells of food and so forth, how are those related to neural processes going on in your brain? We absolutely know that there are correlations, right? So we know that there's correlations between your sense of smell, your smell experiences, and certain brain activity in the olfactory cortex of the brain. Color and certain areas like the area V4 of the brain. And if you have a stroke in like area V4, you lose color in part of the visual world. And if you stimulate that area, you can have psychedelic color experiences. So there are these tight correlations.

And as scientists, we like to understand why. Why are there these correlations? And one theory is that the brain activity somehow is responsible for the conscious experiences. The brain activity causes the conscious experiences or gives rise to the conscious experiences, or perhaps in some sense to be spelled out clearly, is the conscious experiences. And so scientists have been trying to cash it out, to figure out how the brain could cause or give rise or be these conscious experiences. And the weird thing is that we have no theory to date that can explain even one specific conscious experience, say, you know, the taste of chocolate.

What brain activity, what kind of brain activity must be the taste of chocolate or must cause the taste of chocolate? And why couldn't it cause the taste of vanilla or the smell of garlic? Why does it have to be that connection? And there's no theory that can answer that question for even one specific conscious experience. And they're brilliant. I mean, I know many of the players, they're brilliant, they're hardworking, and we've utterly failed to explain even one experience. And so that's why we call it the hard problem, because we've tried really hard for many decades now, but we've

known the problem since even Leibniz knew it back in 1700. He knew that there was going to be a problem here. And we haven't been able to figure out how brain activity could be the starting point and consciousness somehow emergent. And so what I've been playing with then is a scientific approach that says, well, maybe the brain doesn't cause it. Maybe we should go the other way. Maybe we should start with a theory of consciousness, a mathematical scientific theory of consciousness, and explain how it is that we come to have experiences that we call space and time and objects and colors and brains and neurons. But those experiences are just experiences. They're not fundamental reality. And that would dovetail with the prediction of

evolution by natural selection that I mentioned, which says that none of our perceptions are telling us any truths about reality. I mean, the implications of that are profound. What that means is I look inside of a skull and I see neurons. Evolution by natural selection tells me quite clearly that doesn't mean that objective reality has neurons. Evolution of natural selection tells me quite clearly, that doesn't mean that objective reality has neurons. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't even mean that space and time are part of objective reality. In fact, the probability, and we can prove this, the probability is zero, that anything in our perceptions is telling us the truth about objective reality. So the probability is zero that space-time itself as we perceive it is giving us any insight

into the structure of reality and that means that everything inside space-time including neurons yeah it's where it starts to get really bendy you know that's right yeah this is where it gets and i because it becomes this loop for me which which is like, okay, I, for what it's worth, um, and I'm not sure exactly how to qualify this, but I'll, I'll, uh, this thin amount of reading that I've done in the research around, um, consciousness. And I mean, it's when I say thin, it's thin to you, but probably heavy lifting to most is that in this field of cognition, I can't, I cannot understand how the neurology, the, the, the brain creates consciousness. I cannot understand it. And so when, what you're offering and some of your colleagues are offering is no, no, no, let's start with consciousness. Let's start there that there's this, and this goes back to like Carl Jung and some of your colleagues are offering is, no, no, no, let's start with consciousness. Let's start there. That there's this, and this goes back to like Carl Jung or some of those folks, like, hey,

there's this collective consciousness. I'm not sure I'm buying that. I'm not sure yet. I really don't know. But the concept is really intriguing, is that there's something else. And to your point, like, hey, that actually matches up with evolutionary approaches, which is like, yeah, you can't see, we can't, there's more to reality than what we can perceive. So if that's the case,

this more could be fill in the blank consciousness. Is that close to being right? That's right. That's sort of where I'm headed. Evolution is telling us that space-time itself is not fundamental. It's just our way of seeing. It's not the truth. It's just the way one set of creatures tends to see things. And it's no deeper than that. So if we played this game where you had to put a stake in the ground for whatever reasons, and I said, okay, well, what is reality?

How do you answer that right now? Right. Well, the model I'm playing with right now is that it's a vast social network. Reality, objective reality is a vast social network of interacting conscious agents. Think like the Twitterverse. But it's a mathematical model that I'm working on, right? So I define what a conscious agent is. It's a nice mathematical structure using Markovian kernels and so forth. So it's all precise and we get this network dynamics, but just intuitively think about the Twitterverse. And in the Twitterverse, there are

literally tens of millions of users, billions of tweets, and lots of stuff trending. It would be impossible for any Twitter user to read all the tweets. There's billions of them. And you couldn't interact with all the tens of millions of Twitter users. You wouldn't live long enough. So if you want to understand the Twitterverse, you're going to need to have some kind of data compression, right? You're going to need to have some kind of visualization tool. If you want to see, you know, some tool that

has little eye candy that you can understand, little objects that are doing stuff. And so, so when you use your, your visualization tool, you look at what's trending in London or what's happening in New York or all of the United States and so forth. Your tool can zoom into a little city or zoom out to a whole country. You can see what's active, what's trending, who's a hub, who's getting lots of followers, who's in the wilderness, no one's following them and so forth. So whenever you have overwhelming social data, you always use a visualization tool to see what's going on. And that's what I'm suggesting. Reality is this vast social network of conscious agents.

And what we call space and time and physical objects is just a little headset, a visualization tool that we have that allows us to interact with a network of conscious agents that otherwise would be overwhelming. We couldn't, it would be, you know, there's countless agents out there, we couldn't understand it. And so we made a simple mistake. We mistaken our headset, space and time headset, for the truth. It's not, it's just our little headset. Okay. So easy layup.

How do you, how are you defining conscious agent? So, well, intuitively, I mean, we can go into the math if you want, but I doubt that you want that. But intuitively, a conscious agent has a set of experiences, conscious experiences that it can have. And based on those, it decides on a set of actions that it might take that will affect the experiences of other conscious agents that's the intuition so experiences leading to decisions that drive actions that affect others experiences and so you get this dynamics of social dynamics okay so if we go in um the step between decisions and

experience right right uh there's a framework or a filter in there somewhere right i'm assuming that you're not a behaviorist in approach and so there's some sort of filter framework that is framing out, projecting what meaning might be, but also filtering in to try to understand what the experience is. There's some sort of mechanism in there, call it the mind, if you will. But I use the word framework. So inside of that, and I'm going to double tap Bandora right now on the word that you're using about agency. And so as we understand how we make decisions, because that's what really agency is about, is having some sort of volitional, foundational belief and control that you can determine, or not determine, but be an active participant in life, I think is a fair way of saying it.

And so how does that framework get built? And I'd like to say how I think it does. And this is just observational. It's not built on mathematical models. And then I'd like to hear how you think about it as well, because I spend most of my time trying to help people understand and upgrade that framework. And so early days, that framework is built on influential systems. There's sensory data input that's coming in, but then that gets shaped by other people's ideas, thoughts, what we culturally see as being reinforced and supported and rewarded. And then at some point, we get to be about 12 and then our friends start to add to that framework. And at some point we get to like

22 and we start thinking we understand how the world works and then reality kind of, or actual experiences kind of shift us back into different experiences or different perceptions. And then over time, we believe that we have a good understanding of how and why we make decisions, but most people have not spent significant time investing in awareness, investing in the principles, clarity of the principles of why they do what they do and understanding how they're filtering information from a psychological perspective. So that's the upgrade process, right? Principles and frameworks and awareness. And so anyways, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about the space between decisions and experience.

Well, there's a couple levels that we could talk about it. One is just in terms of standard approaches right now in cognitive science, for example, how cognitive scientists think about that, and then how I might think about it as well in my theory of conscious agents. But I would say right now the best scientific tools that we have for this realm come from the realm of the theory of evolutionary psychology. So evolutionary psychology is, as far as I know, the only scientific theory that actually can predict the logic of human emotions and gives answers to two kinds of questions about our decisions and our feelings. The two kinds of questions are what we call ultimate and proximate. So the ultimate would be from an evolutionary point of view, why did we evolve the kinds of feelings and decision strategies that we have? That's the ultimate question. So we're asking questions about the

environment in which we evolved and why those strategies were good for that. And then there's the proximate question, which is, what are the current brain mechanisms that are associated with it? Now I'll play as though brain activity causes our experiences and our decisions, which is what is typically assumed. So as you can see, what I'm doing as a scientist is I'm saying, I don't know the truth. Let me tell you what our best theory says, and I'll talk in terms of the language of that theory. So right now I'm putting on my evolution hat. I'm saying, I'm speaking now as an evolutionary theorist, not because it is true, but because there is no better science at the point, at this point,

right? There is nothing more precise. There's nothing that can make the predictive depths that evolutionary theories make. And so it turns out we can predict a lot about our filters, our emotions, and the way we choose things. And a lot of it goes on under the radar. So I'll give you a funny example. You may have heard about this simple thing where they had a textbook that had a beautiful woman's face on it. And they put two different versions of the textbook cover out there. Some versions had, they just went in and they took the pupils of the woman and dilated them a little bit with Photoshop in one. And they just put the two kinds of books out there, a bunch of them out there, and had a bunch of guys going out there and choosing which ones they wanted to buy. And the guys all picked up and decided

to buy the ones with the bigger pupils. And if you ask them why, they couldn't tell you why. They just sort of liked that one better. It was a free choice. They knew that that's what they wanted and they couldn't tell you why. Well, we can tell you why. The wider pupils indicate more interest and they were more interested in the woman who seemed more interested in them. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature.

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And for me, that includes how I take care of my body. I've been using Caldera Lab for years now. And what keeps me coming back, it's really simple. Their products are simple. And they reflect the kind of intentional living that I want to build into every part of my day. And they make my morning routine really easy. They've got some great new products I think you'll be interested in.

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very complicated, but I like to think that the brain wins if we don't develop our consciousness. And maybe that is too simple. But my experience has been like, if left unchecked, the brain has like, it's so powerful. Like these instinctual drive, perceptional influencing experiences of people's, that influence people's decisions and actions is really powerful left unchecked.

So how do you answer that? Right. So I'll put on the hat of my scientific colleagues, the cognitive science evolutionary psychology hat. I would say that within that field of science, the answer would be quite clear. The brain causes all of our behavior and consciousness really is a latecomer and actually does nothing. So that's the standard view of my colleagues. That's right.

Consciousness comes, in fact, our conscious awareness of our decisions, they'll point out, comes much, much later than the biological activity that we know determines what you're going to do. I can predict what you're going to choose sometimes several seconds before you can tell me what you're going to choose. Because if I can measure your EEG and motor cortex and so forth in certain tasks, I can tell with high accuracy what you're going to choose before you can tell me. So they will use that kind of thing to say that the consciousness is just a tag-along and it's making up stories that it's in charge, but it's not in charge.

That's the standard cognitive science, physicalist, evolution point of view. Now, as I've said, I think the brain doesn't even exist when it's not perceived. That's my view. The brain doesn't even, space-time doesn't exist when it's not perceived. Space-time is our construction. So from my point of view, consciousness is fundamental, but that's not just my consciousness. There's this whole network of conscious agents that I'm working with, right? And so my decision will be influenced by the decisions of all the other conscious agents, right?

Living, for example, in the United States, in our political system, we're being influenced by all the other actions of all the other conscious agents here. It's very, very different than if we're in Ethiopia or in Russia, right? Where they've set up a different system of it. And that's going to affect how you act. So your decisions as a conscious agent are free, but not totally free. They're influenced by the decisions of others. And so as you would expect, when we talk about free choice, it's not complete freedom. I'm free to jump, but I'm a white guy, so I can only jump

two feet. I can't jump five feet. So I'm free to jump, but I'm not free to so i can only jump two feet you know i can't jump five feet i mean so i'm free to jump but i'm not free to jump as far as i want um and so there's and so in every case when we talk about free choice it's never absolutely free it's you know it's freedom within a certain bounds which and that bounds is set partly by the free choices of others and so a theory of and so that's what when we look at that through the filter of our interface, what we say is, oh, it's my brain making me do it. Well, the brain is just my little user interface symbol for the interactions of other conscious agents that are influencing my own choices. So the brain doesn't do it. The brain is just my headset symbol dumbing down all the choices of all these other agents into a format that I can see.

It looks complicated anyway. We have, what, 86 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex. I mean, it still looks complicated, but it was way, way simpler than the actual network. So you can see the answer is not trivial. I think we do have free will, that we do make free choices. It's not absolutely free. It's highly constrained by the free choices of others. You know, I'm free to smoke, but not in your face. You know, that kind of thing. We're free to choose, but my freedom ends where yours begins kind of thing. Um, and sometimes the very framework of my free choices depend on, on others, right. Others choices. So that's my

view, but, but my colleagues would say, and I disagree that the brain does it all. I think that the brain doesn't even exist when it's not perceived so when it's not being perceived um i think i can go a couple ways with that is the the actual kind of immediate immediacy of perception but that's not i don't think that's what you're talking about you're talking about the the it doesn't exist if it's not perceived um as uh inside of the consciousness of the agents right of it inside of the network that we are connected through is that that's that's right I can give you a concrete example I think most people can really relate to suppose that you're playing a virtual reality game of auto racing and so you have on a VR headset

and your friend you have it's a distributed game around. And so you have on a VR headset and your friend, you have, it's a distributed game around the world. So you have other people around the world playing with you, racing cars, and they all have their VR headsets on. And you look over, so you look over to your right and you see a green Mustang. And then you look over to your left and you see a red Ferrari. Well, when you looked over to the right, of course, there's no real green Ferrari anywhere. You look over there, some pixels get sprayed in your headset. You, in your conscious experience, create the green Mustang. And if you say there's a green Mustang to my right, someone in China who's playing the game can say, oh, yeah, I see there's a green Mustang to your right. Now,

your friend in China, of course, is seeing their own experience of a green Mustang. They're not seeing the same Mustang that you're saying they couldn't. They're not inside your headset. But you can agree. Now I look over here to the left. As soon as I look over here to the left to look at the red Ferrari, I've destroyed the green Mustang. It doesn't exist anymore. There is no green Mustang anywhere in my perceptions, and it didn't exist anywhere else except in my perceptions. Okay. So that's what I'm saying about the moon. The moon exists only when you perceive it, and when you look away, you know, the study of knowledge or the theory of knowledge does when the tree falls and no one's listening or no one's there, does it make a sound like a kind of a classic dilemma, right? And you're saying, no, it doesn't. So you're not, yeah, you're not using practical

sense to back into an explanation. You're saying because you don't have conscious connection to the actual experience, it does not exist. Right. Because space-time itself is just our creation. We think of space-time as fundamental, right? It was there for 13.8 billion years. We came along later on. But I'm saying, no, you create space-time by looking, right? It was there for 13.8 billion years. We came along later on. But I'm saying, no, you create space-time by looking and you destroy it when you don't. And space-time isn't, we're not little bit players on the big pre-existing stage of space-time.

We're the authors of space-time. I'm turning the whole thing completely around. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I really like that. We're the authors of space time. In other words, it's the best set of optics that we can put on how the universe works. That's right. Yeah.

It's our headset, right? It's how we play our game. It's not the only headset that's possible, but it's the one we happen to use. Okay. So what is your understanding of the nature between the brain and when i say brain i'm also including brain stem you know in those systems but let's just say the brain for right now you're the relationship between the brain and the mind like how do you capture that relationship right so um i'll just say first of, what's standard in my field, right? So cognitive neuroscientists would say that the mind is what the brain does. That's right.

So what's really going on, they would say, is neural activity. And we just call some of that neural activity thinking or experience or feeling. Francis Crick, for example, who discovered the structure of DNA with Jim Watson, was working on consciousness. He wrote a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis. He said, look, you're nothing but a pack of neurons. That's what you are. You're a pack of neurons. That's what you are. You're a pack of neurons. And conscious experience is nothing but certain kinds of activity in that

pack of neurons. We just have to figure out what that activity is. Just like he would say, we discovered that life was not some weird Elan Vital. It's just a double helix with four nucleotide bases. And that's what it is. We'll do the same thing for consciousness. We'll discover it's just some kind of pattern of neural activity. So that's the standard view. And for a lot of practical problems, that's a good working hypothesis. For a lot of things, it's perfectly fine.

But when we actually get at the deep problem of consciousness and how it's related to the brain activity, and we now run up against a wall, we can't explain it. Now we have to go deeper. So let me just explain just briefly why I think that's the case. If you're a wizard at Grand Theft Auto, right? Everybody's just impressed at what you can do. You can be a wizard without knowing anything at all about the supercomputer that's underlying the game. You might not even know that there is such a thing. You know all the tricks inside the game. And so it's perfectly fine. You could be a wizard and believe that the game is the reality, that Grand Theft Auto is the final reality. That's what it is. But if you're a software developer and you're trying to make a change, upgrade the game, that of it is perfectly fine to accept the fiction that neural activity causes our behavior, our psychology.

It's perfectly fine. And it's a very, very useful framework. It's only when we really want to understand precisely how consciousness is related to brain activity that we realize, okay, now we've got to up our game. We have to realize it's just a fiction to say that brain activity causes this stuff. For most purposes, it's perfectly harmless and actually useful to say, you know, area V4 of the brain causes my color experiences. The olfactory bulb causes my smell experience.

So that's perfectly fine, and I have no problem with that. But when you actually want to build a change to the game itself, then you've got to step outside. And so from my point of view, then conscious experiences and our choices are not dictated by the brain. Instead, we create the brain when we look at it. Then we have to change. I've got a lot of hard work that I've got to do. I have to show how dynamics of conscious agents, not the brain, but dynamics of conscious agents gets mapped to something that we call brain activity.

That's what it looks like to us in our dumbed-down user interface. What's really going on is this dynamics of conscious agents. I've got a team of researchers working with me. We're working to build this network and study its dynamics. But when we project that into space-time, then we get what looks like a brain as the headset representation. So we can go back and forth between the two and what so what we really want to do is understand how our decisions evolve as sort of a an interaction with others right um okay so so let's give a like an example right That involves both brain and mind. A person's walking to the edge of a cliff and they've assigned meaning to the, you know, what it means to be

at the edge of the cliff and they have a parachute on. Okay. And their skill is intermediate on using a parachute. Okay. And so the intent is to jump. The brain is interpreting that as being a threat, amygdala, limbic system, you know, the cascade of predictable experiences take place. And then my understanding is that we're assigning meaning along the way. And I can though, I can override that. I can choose to walk away or I can choose to lower my heart rate. I have some tools in place. I can do long exhales. I can do this, that, and the other, and I can choose whether to walk away or actually jump. So in that volitional, you're calling it the dynamic um what's the word you used for the agents conscious agents right the dynamic yeah right the interaction the dynamic interaction

is that um so if we just strip it down from the dynamic interaction and we're doing the individual the intra and in yeah the intra experience is that that right? Or inter? Yeah, intra. Intra experience. How is it that some people, they cannot get themselves together? They cannot use their inner narrative, their self-talk, that thing of mind that we're talking about, thoughts, and to work with their feelings and and emotions and their feelings and emotions win right the brain center really is winning at that point and so how do you explain that so i'll have to use the the current standard framework right the neurobiological framework now because my framework isn't evolved enough yet to okay okay all right cool so i'll talk now

with the standard neuroscience kind of hat on. And it turns out that there are mutations that vary across individuals that affect this kind of fear and also the need to seek out excitement in life. Some people don't get afraid by many things. They're just not afraid. And some have mutations where they really need to do some remarkably weird things to just feel like a normal amount of stimulation where others would... So that's what we would call a normal variation, right? Evolution is a process where you try different things. I'm speaking informally, but you have mutations. You try some people who are risk

takers, some people who have deep empathy for others, others who have no empathy at all, right? There are genes for sociopathy. And there are selection pressures to keep those genes, to be heartless and to be cruel. So there's a wide range of variations among us that you can turn partly, they're partly due to genetics. They're partly due to traumatic experiences that we've had. And it turns out you can actually i mean so for example some people have phobias to like spiders right right so someone who's got a phobia to it he might be a big strong tough guy you know but in most cases he's quite strong but you show him a spider and he and he turns into a you know a a whimpering child with that one stimulus, maybe because when he was two, something happened with

him and a spider got into his amygdala. So it's really complicated, right? What, what, what goes on. So for a lot of us, the challenges I face and the challenges that you face are utterly different in many cases because of the genes, the experience that we have, what may be trivial for you might be heroic effort on my part, given my experiences in genetics. And so we have to cut each other some slack on that. If someone has a phobia, right, a grown man who is tough in every situation, but with that trigger just melts. And it's not because he's not a tough man, but there's this circuit in his amygdala that really wipes him out. Now, it turns out you can fix him overnight. You can turn that man, you can get rid of like arachnophobia, spider phobia, literally overnight. There's work by Meryl Kint, a psychologist there.

You've heard about her work? Mm-hmm. I have. With propanolol. So the idea is that it blocks the reformation of memories. So every time you access a memory, it becomes unstable. And you have to actually recreate the memory and store it away. It's very, very counterintuitive.

Most people think, when I have a memory of what happened to me last week, I just look at that memory and I just look at it and I don't touch it. No, you bring it up, you completely make it fragile, and you have to actually, the neurobiology has to literally go back and put it back in there. And of course, that means it's not exactly the same as when you touched it. So our memories keep changing all the time. It's like a micro re-traumatization. Yeah, I think that PTSD is not the right, you know, military wants to call it PTS, you know, uh post-traumatic stress is not actually the right framing the right framing um in my mind is it is a radical re of a radical avoidance of re-traumatization you know

so people don't want to be re-traumatized and so they you know all the signals are don't don't do it again don't do it again but um we if we we can do it psychologically and or physiologically so um yeah i I like that. That's where I think some of the EMDR stuff actually starts to get. Right. It helps to destabilize the repatterning, if you will. I should tell you just this one example, this guy. So you bring them in.

You have them touch a tarantula. He's this big guy. He's trembling. He's sweating. You have him touch a tarantula. He's this big guy. He's trembling. He's sweating. You have him touch the tarantula, and then you give him a glass of water and a pill of propanolol. And you say, see me tomorrow morning. He comes back in, goes to the tarantula, and he goes, whoa,

there's no problem here. He goes and touches it. He can't believe it. He feels like I'm a different guy. I'm a different person. You blocked the reformation of the memory. And so, as you said, there's no post-traumatic stress anymore because you're not re-experiencing that. You're not stirring up the same memory because you didn't store the memory again.

That's right. Yeah. And the behavioral and psychological problem is that you're organizing your life to avoid it. Right. Yeah. That's the actual problem. You wouldn't know this, but I spent some time on a project called Red Bull Stratos. And it's where Felix Baumgartner jumped from outer space at 130,000 feet.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And so right at the edge of space. And the brightest minds in aerospace were not sure if they weren't sure like the probability of making it because no one had jumped. They weren't sure if he traveled the speed of sound if his body in a transonic experience would rip apart you know like yeah going through a double sonic boom potentially what happens to the human body they didn't know and so he uh quote unquote created this is all public but he created um or he had a claustrophobic experience in the suit. The suit was an emblem, right?

It wasn't just, it wasn't the actor. It was an emblem for a lot of things. So they brought me in and the stakes were too high to work from a managing a fear perspective. We had to dissolve it. We had to extinguish the fear, to use a more technical term. What did you do so um it did my framework is more cbt okay so yeah and so um and then medication was not an option for you know

the experience and so good cbt got us through it um and so it's systematic desensitization flooding um and then i think you'll appreciate this, that there was a moment, and this is all in a documentary, but there was a moment where, you know, in a systematic way, we're ramping up the intensity. And it wasn't working. Our skills weren't working. Okay. His skills weren't working. And so he looks over and his eyes are big. And I said, uh, I said, Hey, what color is yellow? You can imagine what that did. Right. And so it completely

destabilized the experience. Did you say that it was helpful then to later on to say, thank you. It helped. Oh yeah. No, he, he, He extinguished his fear, which is pretty amazing. But so I say all that because the destabilization is important from a growth perspective. All that being said is I still want to go back to this thing. I want to go back to the edge of the cliff because there's the extremes. Some folks that are risk adverse incredibly and and some that are, you know, on the frontier taking all the risks and we need them. They might die early, but we need them. We need the men and women on the frontier to show us and remind us of what's possible to carve paths that others won't. Um, and so right and i say that endearingly because uh those are i feel uh akin to but

um that being said is that the the majority of us that struggle with do i go do i not go that's where my understanding of where the value of awareness of your your thought and emotional interaction can actually override uh the the brain's producing of chemicals and electrical interactions to say high alert. So we can override. And that's, how do you explain that? Our ability to say, I see you brain, you're not, you're not, you're not going to win this thing. I've got a different agenda. Well, there's partly disruptive, as you say, you're not you're not going to win this thing i've got a different agenda well there's partly disruptive as you say you can sort of by focusing on different thoughts you can disrupt a pattern of of mental activity or brain activity that's leading you in a destructive way or or you know a panic what is the difference between mental activity and cognitive activity or brain activity for you? Well, okay. So most,

so again, I'll speak as just a standard cognitive neuroscientist on this. Most neuroscientists would say that 99.99% of all brain processes are unconscious. So they're mental processes, but they're unconscious. So I would call those cognitive conscious uh cognitive not not mental well yeah so cognitive yeah the relationship between cognitive versus conscious and unconscious is a little tricky right um so no no i'm going cognitive and mental, not conscious and non-conscious. So I nod my head to like the vast majority of non-conscious processing taking place. Right. Yeah.

What distinction do you make between mental and cognitive? Cognitive being more of the hard exchange between chemicals, neurons, electricity, like the processing piece of the hardware. And then the mental psychological is more of the intangible narrative and meaning making experience. Right. Yeah. Typically, I think in in our field we don't have really precise definitions so it's dividing those two kinds of things up typically when we talk about cognitive science we we use cognitive to mean anything from like unconscious physiological processes like like processing of visual information, but automatically, to very high-level rational choices that we make. We think very, very – so cognition is typically viewed fairly largely

to include perceptual – sometimes we'll divide perception from cognition. Some people like to say there's perception, and then cognition is a little higher level than perception. That's a distinction that's made. Others the interfaces that you would like, you have to do something, um, right. You have to choose. Yeah. Like a cognitive is the, um, is more mechanical at, whereas mental and psychological to me feels more, um, intangible. And I'm not saying intangible in the sense of, uh, you can't measure it, but it's thought process as opposed to, I don't know, shape. This is more right down your lane when I'm talking about shapes, but the way that we're perceiving experiences. Right, right.

Yeah, there's a lot of our mental processes that we can't control very much except indirectly, right? I might be able to only control it by directing my attention somewhere else. We're thinking about something else. Otherwise, it's just going to go along this path. Other things I have a little bit more flexibility to control. I like that word, flexibility. And are you more influenced by top-down or bottom-up experience? Well, if you look at it physiologically, in the nervous system, you see that the bottom-up pathways, like in the case of vision,

are actually smaller than the top-down pathways. Yeah, that's right. So it's both bottom-up and top-down, so it's cyclic, it appears. Yeah, and it's one of the things, tell me if I'm wrong yeah and it's one of the things tell me if i'm wrong here it's one of the things that makes humans unique is that you know the con this consciousness thing as as far as we understand that we've got a a larger um influence on top down whereas dogs might not have as much of an influence from top down well yeah i would distinguish between top down bottom up on one hand versus consciousness on on the other right yeah you'd split those i would split yeah i mean it's an interesting question what's the relationship between them between this neurobiological circuit of top down and bottom up and its relationship if any to consciousness

that's an interesting technical question. But I could imagine that maybe even an ant, and maybe it doesn't have any top-down stuff, but it might still be conscious, right? I mean... That's a problem to sort out. That's a tough problem to sort out. Yeah. So you can be conscious without top-down processing. I have to leave open that possibility until I have a scientific theory that says otherwise, right? If there was a good scientific theory that was mathematically precise and said otherwise, then I would have to take that idea seriously that top-down was required.

But I don't have that yet. That's cool. I would make the assumption that it is. I like that you're parsing that there for sure. As a scientist, we always just have to be very, very careful. Even our best theories, I would say our best scientific theories, they're not true. I don't believe that they're true,

but we don't have anything better. So that's what we have to talk about. Yeah, I love that. And how do you, with that openness that you have for trying to ask the right questions to get to the right answers, if you will, openness that you have for trying to answer ask the right questions to get to the right answers if you will like you know smart questions right how do you work with your your understanding of life right like do you have a framework that you're coming from and i'm

trying not to beg the question like about about spirituality, or whatever, but we could go like, what is your, what are you saying happens before the Big Bang? Right. So the big point is, first and fundamentally to say I'm deeply convinced that I don't know. I'm deeply convinced that everything that I've been taught is probably largely wrong. Everything that I've believed is probably largely wrong. And one of the big, big things that I have to work on as a person is to be good with that, to be good with not knowing and to face the fundamental and profound ignorance that's part of the human condition. We don't like that. We want to think that we have the answers and we know all the way down. And what science teaches us is that even our best scientific theories are almost surely deeply flawed, and they're the

best we've got so far. We know that quantum mechanics and general relativity don't play well together in certain cases, and that we have to let go of space-time itself. This is now from physicists. They're saying that space-time itself cannot be fundamental. And they don't know what's deeper. But there's this profound sense of, on the one hand, respecting the theories that we have and understanding them. And then tearing them apart. And trying to make them break. And then saying, now we have to face the void.

And try to come up with a new theory that goes deeper into the void but my own feeling is the void no matter how far we progress in science we will always face the void of unknowing and we will never be able to say we we know so for me the key thing is is to is a humility first. It's just recognizing the human condition. We would like to think we know, and we don't. And most of what we've, if we look back at human history, we have a really strong, consistent record of being wrong. We're just consistently wrong, and there's no reason to believe it's any better today. Our theories are more sophisticated. They're not wrong in the same ways that we were

wrong before, but that doesn't mean they're not deeply, deeply wrong, even our best scientific theories. I mean, if we have to let go of space-time, there's something deeply wrong with quantum field theory and general relativity, right? They assume space-time. And if the space-time is not fundamental, then there's something that's far, far deeper than our best scientific theories are even acknowledging. And so that, for me, is sort of at a spiritual level. I think the first thing is to let go of dogmatism, which, by the way, is not the same thing as saying anything goes. Any BS story I want to tell is fine. No, no, no, no.

Absolutely not. I want to tell the best story we can tell so far. There is something good about telling the Einsteinian story about space-time over the Newton's story of space-time. It's more powerful. But on the other hand, Einstein, I think, is deeply wrong at a deeper level. And so that's the kind of thing we have to do. My guess is based on something called Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

And we can go into it if you want, but I'll just say what I think it means. I think what Gödel's incompleteness theorem means is we can go into it if you want, but I'll just say what I think it means. I think what the incompleteness theorem means is that our quest for understanding will always only have just begun. And there will be everything in front of us, no matter how far and how long we progress. We will always be just baby beginners in exploring what there is to be explored. I think that's the ultimate human condition. We are always just at the first step. Even a billion years from now, we're just at the first step. That's what I think is my guess of the genuine human condition. And so a profound humility and excitement for exploration, and a willingness to just say, of course, maybe I know nothing,

maybe everything I believe is deeply false, and be open and good with that, and then explore and go deeper. Yeah, you definitely have open curiosity, exploratory humility, you definitely have that curiosity, exploratory humility. You definitely have that approach. You're not a cynic, a critic, an expert, right? Like limited by that word expertise. So there's a freedom in the way that you're approaching what you don't know. And I also hear you, maybe purposely, I don't know, but not answering the question about the 11 world when you think of those attempts to explain that makes sense whether they are inspired or not how how do you how do they fit for you right so my attitude is that many of these spiritual traditions have for thousands of years already been saying space-time is not fundamental.

There's something beyond space-time. Science is just now catching up on that. It's only been in the last few decades that it's been taken very seriously that space-time is not fundamental, and we're looking for a deeper mathematical story. So I think that the spiritual traditions, and that includes Judaistic, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, fundamentalist, Christian, mystical Christianity, I think they've all had some really important insights. On the other hand, I think that there are probably, almost certainly, mistakes. And so, what we don't want to do is to say, you know, I've had this document, we've had this book, this scripture, it's been around for 3,000 years, therefore every verse is true.

That's not my attitude at all. My attitude is, of course, I would like to study and understand and grasp the really important insights. I'd also like to figure out where there are mistakes. And ultimately, I would like to see science and spirituality interact in the following sense. What scientists do as a sociological thing, as a group, individual scientists are dogmatic, but as a group, science is not dogmatic, right? And what we do as a group is to propose mathematically precise theories so that we can figure out why we're wrong. We make predictions, we figure out where we're wrong, and then we can make the next one.

I would like to do that with the spiritual ideas. I think there are good ideas there, and they need to be listened to. I think there's also bad ideas there that need to be discarded for the benefit of the actual practitioners, things that are actually getting in the way of their own personal growth. How do we tell the two apart? Well, we can try to take the ideas, make them more precise, see what the coherent systems predict, and go test. So it's a humility.

It's a step away from dogmatism to a kind of precision. It's not a preciseness that's there to say, oh, I'm so smart, I can be precise. It's not that at all. It's a preciseness that comes out of a humility that says, if I'm not precise, then I can dodge and weave and protect my idea and you can't prove me wrong. Well, that's not what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in dodging and weaving. Life is short. I want to understand. I don't want to just protect what I think I already know. So forget it. I mean, if you can show me wrong, show me wrong now so I can move on. I don't want to just protect what I think I already know. So forget it. I mean, if you can show me wrong, show me wrong now so I can move on. I don't want, you know, or if this one idea is wrong and this idea is great, great.

Let me get rid of the wrong idea or change it. And so that's what mathematics and science does for us. It's literally just taking the normal process of human inquiry and say, be precise so that we can find out precisely why you're wrong. It's that simple. Be precise so we can find out precisely where we're wrong and fix it. Let's do that so that we don't have the same documents for 3,000 years. We would like to have our documents updating on a much more quick basis as our understanding evolves. If Gödel is right, and I think he is, we're always at the beginning. But let's move our beginning forward. Instead of just staying

in one place for 3,000 years, let's have a new beginning every day that builds on the insights of the past and gets rid of the problems of the past. Just a couple more questions. I want to honor our time here. I could go on with you for a long time. The way that you shape the complicated into the simple is evidenced of the nuances that you know you don't understand yet. And I really appreciate it. And so when you think about your life, what is it that you dream about? Well, I can say my dream right now is to explore what might be beyond space-time. That's what really gets me up every day and gets me excited is I have some ideas about

how this network of conscious agents might be interacting. I'm trying to show with a team of collaborators that I can use that theory to actually predict how to get quantum field theory and general relativity and evolution by natural selection to come out as special cases of like the headset version of this deeper model so we have this deeper model we can show how it projects into our headset of space and time and gives us quantum field theory and general relativity and and evolution of natural selection as little projections. So you can see that's pretty exciting. That would be a lot of fun, and it would lead to game-changing technologies, right?

Every time we've made a step in science forward, like we got Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism. Well, that, I mean, I would guess that at least 30% of our GDP is based on Maxwell, right? Those, those, I mean, the technology that came out of that is game changing. We're talking today via Zoom because of Maxwell and those equations that he wrote down and later additions, quantum mechanics and so forth. And, but the steps I'm talking talking about next where we're talking about what's behind space time maybe this network of conscious agents if that's right or a good next step in theory building it would give us technologies that in principle could change the very parameters of space time we could warp space time everything that we're doing right now is inside space-time. This is actually changing the fundamental parameters of the game itself.

That would be a game changer completely. So for me, that's pretty exciting. Yeah. Are many people involving those three theorems, those three approaches? Because the evolutionary psychology approach is usually not one of the three legs of the stool as as far as i understand and but this is not where i spend my time right so i would say evolutionary psychology is not but um evolution sorry so evolutionary selection yeah evolution of a natural selection i would say that most scientists, if you said, you know, name the three most big, important scientific theories of today.

They'd say, well, of course, you know, quantum field theory, general relativity. No, I know that part, but the combination of the three to try to integrate the three. Is that unique? Oh, well, there's a lot of work trying to integrate quantum field theory and general relativity. That's in physics, right? That's in physics, yeah. There may be a few very farsighted people whose efforts on that could ultimately have an evolutionary aspect to it. Like Gerard de Hooft has an approach that possibly, I'm not saying that he's thinking about evolution,

but it's a framework that he's come up with that could possibly. So no, you're right. But I think the answer to your question is no, not too many people are trying to do that. Yeah, it seems fresh. Right, right. It seems fresh, which it seems fresh which again this is what's probably getting you up in the morning yeah that's awesome i feel like a kid every day

i just like i'm i'm just so eager to keep learning new math and and learning more about the physics and in my own field and integrating i just i'm a kid it's just too much fun i love that you say you're learning new math because my son is in fifth grade and he's doing some stuff and he comes and he says, Hey dad, can I show you how I did this? I said, yeah, it's math. And I look at it and I go, well, you got, you got the answer I would have gotten, but it's completely different. It's new math.

So they're, they're actually teaching fundamental math in like a lot of different ways, which I didn't know. You and I probably learned it one way as Western-influenced math. But there's the Korean approach. There's lots of different approaches to fundamental algebraic or numerical stuff. It's refreshing because they give you a different perspective on things. I really, really love it. I just wish I'd been exposed to it more when I was a kid. I'm having to do remedial learning on my own now. So, okay. So I want to honor our time, but so just one more quick question. What are you

doing to keep your brain sharp? Well, a lot, because that's sort of my whole game, right? If I can't think, that's what I do. So I work out six days a week. I do weight training three days a week. I do aerobics three days a week. So that's a huge, I mean, being physically fit is absolutely critical to being mentally sharp. I do everything in my power to make sure I get enough sleep at night. I eat very, all of this is actually part of my, so what I'm doing, it's not just when I read math and do the

stuff, actually all of my weight training, my sleep, the food I eat is all part of the package of trying to be at my peak all the time. Because, you know, to do this kind of theoretical work, if you're tired, you know, not healthy, you just can't think at your peak. So I have to give myself every chance to have another creative idea. So I'm so motivated by the problems I'm trying to solve that I'm motivated just to do simple things like stay healthy and get some sleep and eat well. Yeah, those are the big ones. And then you laugh a lot. So if there's five pillars ones. And then you laugh a lot, you know? So if there's five pillars of recovery,

which you just named three of them and the other two are laughing, you know, social recovery, social wellness. And then the fifth pillar being thinking well, right? Like literally using your mind as a regenerative, restorative process. Like CBT recommends, right. Say it again. Like CBT does, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. Like if you wake up in the morning,

you got great sleep, you ate fish and vegetables, you know, you're hydrated properly, you're oxygenating in a, in a smart way. But the first thing you do is you wake up in the morning and you pull up in the sheets and you say, Oh God, I got so much to do. Oh my goodness. Like I met here and you're anxious and exhausted and frustrated, whatever God, I got so much to do. Oh my goodness. Like, man, here. And you're anxious and exhausted and frustrated, whatever, then of course you're going to fatigue the system. And so, you know, those patterns matter. Absolutely. And I'll just say one other thing I do is I do meditate every day too. Oh, you do?

A little time meditating, letting go of thoughts and relaxing. So that's critical. I agree. Are you using more of a single point focus, just focusing on one thing, or more contemplative, just kind of non-judging, non-critically watching and observing? Yeah, just watching in silence. So when thoughts come up, I don't identify with them. I just let them go and go back to pure silence. I'm just aware. But it's there's no pose. There's no rules. It's just silence. But I don't want to end up having rules and have that be a performance as well.

Awesome. So the world is better because of you, Donald. I'm so happy that we got to spend a little bit of time together. Thank you for your humility, your curiosity, your appreciation for the scientific approach and the theories that you're nested in and standing on and building toward. I really appreciate the approach. So thank you. Thank you so much, Mike. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you and appreciate all that you're doing. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. All the best to you. Take care. You too. Take care. Bye-bye. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with

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