Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Don Hoffman: Reality Does NOT Exist! (#127)

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us. In his research to uncover the underlying secrets of human perception, Donald Hoffman has discovered important clues pointing to the subjective nature of reality. Rather than as a set of absolute physical principles, reality is best understood as a set of phenomena our brain constructs to guide our behavior. To put it simply: we actively create everything we see, and there is no aspect of reality that does not depend on consciousness. Hoffman is a faculty member at UC Irvine and a recipient of the Troland Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. @donalddhoffman http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ His Book: The Case Against Reality [ https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-Evolution-Truth/dp/0393254690 ] His TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:57 Science through the senses and impact of Galileo. 00:18:34 The philosophy of George Berkely. Is it all in the mind? 00:21:18 The "grand" questions and theories of consciousness. 00:30:10 What is panpsychism? 00:31:18 Math, physics and consciousness. Do we have a model of reality? 00:39:33 The Interface Theory of Perception 00:44:57 What is the evolutionary purpose of the perception of music? 00:48:21 How do we get along in the real world if our perceptions are flawed? 00:51:21 Galileo's AR HMD circa 1600. 00:52:28 Is consciousness a unique filter into reality? 00:57:29 Can computers be conscious? 01:03:20 What is the role of attention in consciousness? Are certain experiences, like war and drugs, a one-way street? 01:08:43 What advice would you give your younger self? Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishly from magic. This is a great pleasure. I'm talking today with Professor Don Hoffman, who's an American cognitive psychologist and a popular science author. He is a professor up the road at the University of California, Irvine. He has joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic, and Philosophy of Science in the School of Computer Science. He's written many books. Today we're going to be talking about a very prerocative book called The King. case against reality. And you can find some more information about him on his TED Talk.

It's really where I got introduced to him called Do We See Reality as it is? You can find that wherever TED Talks are sold. Don, it's such a great pleasure to meet you videographically and elsewise. How are you doing today? Well, thank you so much, Brian. It's a great pleasure. I'm doing very, very well. And it's a great pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for this kind invitation. Ah, the pleasure is truly all mine. And I followed you. We have many friends in common. We have many interest in common. And the first thing I love to do because it's a nice way to kind of open up the conversation is by doing what we're always advised never to do, which is to judge a book by its cover. And I want to ask you how you came up with this very delightful, delicious,

delirium-inducing cover image for the case again. against reality. So if you're at home, folks, go to Amazon.com, buy a copy of the book. I can't recommend it highly enough. I just gave it a five-star review. It's got 534 five-star reviews and up. Anyway, Don, how did you come up with the cover image and the title and subtitle? Because it's very provocative. Are you talking about the version of the United States from Norton? Yes. Or the penguin? Right. So that is actually the brainchild of a guy named Haywood Petri and Bradley Dumai. So this is a well-known subjective Necurecube

that's been around since the 1976-1977. And so it was just adapted a little bit for the cover. So Petri and Bradley deserve all the credit for that. It's their brainchild. And the title, yeah, it's a bit provocative. I do believe that there might be some kind of reality, but the point is that what we take to be reality isn't the reality, and that's what the book is after. Whether there's a real

reality beyond what we believe is an interesting and open question, but at least the space-time reality, space-time and physical objects, that's where I think evolution might say that we need to rethink things. And the subtitle is equally provocative, in my opinion. The subtitle for those who who aren't, haven't yet received the delivery in their Amazon real-time delivery system, which I'm sure will be coming any day now, is the set title is, why evolution hid the truth from our eyes? Now, Don, I'm not that great a scientist, but I was always told that science, that science can't answer why questions.

Why? Why did you use the word why? I always said science answers how questions. First of all, where am I wrong? because I'm sure I am. Right. So this has to do with the logic of evolution and evolutionary gain theory. So in evolutionary game theory, we can actually ask the question technically,

would natural selection shape sensory systems of organisms like humans, but of any creatures? Would their sensory systems be shaped to tell them truths about objective reality, whatever objective reality might be? And that's a question that we can ask very precisely using evolutionary game theory. And the reason I can say why is because I can say why the logic of evolution itself entails the probability is zero that our sensory systems are shaped to see any structure of objective reality. So whatever objective reality might be, whatever structures it might have, one can prove, and this is work that, that's been done in collaboration with some of my graduate students and then a mathematician. So the graduate students are Justin Mark and Brian Marion and the mathematician, Chaiton Prakash,

and others that have worked with us on this. And what these simulations illustrated and what the mathematics proves is that the probability is precisely zero, that any structure of objective reality would be preserved in the sensory systems of any organism. organisms by natural selection. So we're going to be selected to see something or to perceive something. The question is the structure of our perceptions will they somehow capture true structures in objective reality? And the answer is no, almost surely. And so that's why evolution shapes us not to see reality, because the probability is zero that it could. And we can go into why, but the real The interesting reason to me is that you can think about evolution as like a game, a video game, right?

And when you're playing the game, what you have to do is grab points as quickly as you can. If you get enough points in a short amount of time, then you can go on to the next level. Well, in everyday life with natural selection, it's like a game, the fitness payoffs are the thing that sort of counts like the points of the game. And if you get enough fitness payoffs, you don't go to the next level. of the game, but your offspring, your genes go to the next level of the game. And so it turns out that the payoffs, when you look at the structure of these payoff functions and evolution, the payoff functions that are, again, like the rewards that you get in a video game, how many points you get for killing that alien or driving that car that fast and so forth,

all the points that you get, those payoff functions in evolutionary theory do depend on the state of the world and the structure of the world, But they also depend on the organism, like a human versus a cow versus a lion. It's state, hungry versus sated, and the action, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. The big activities of life. And so it depends on all these things, including the structure and state of the world. However, what we did was a combinatorial study. We can ask how many, we can look at all the possible payoff functions. We can count them.

And then we can ask how many of those payoff functions would actually preserve a particular structure in the world, say, a topology. We didn't do topology, but we did measurable structures, certain kinds of groups, and also total orders. And what we find in each case is that the probability is precisely zero. A zero percent fraction of the total payoff functions would preserve the structure of the world. So the bottom line is the reason why evolution by natural selection does not shape us to see truth is because the payoff functions that guide evolution don't contain the truth almost surely. That's why. And when we think about truth, of course, you know, the common parlance truth is subjective, their alternative facts, there's fake news. So there is sort of a theme running through the book of reality kind of being created, as you say,

almost virtual reality without the virtual. In other words, we sort of have this headset that we're encased in, and it's the overlay of perception. I want to start by going back to the beginning of all this, at least in terms of both not only the scientific method, but deep influence on me and on you, I know for sure. And that's this finger puppet for those of you on Clubhouse cannot see. This is a finger puppet of Galileo Galilei that I whip out on occasion. He's called the father of modern science, certainly the father of modern astronomy. And folks like Edward Tufti and others have said that he was the first data scientist in that through his evocative sketches and drawings of the moon, he not only conveyed data, he conveyed

emotion and senses. And really this connection between the retina and the objects that he was depicting. To me, until I read your book, I'd heard this book by Sky Goff that we'll get into in a little bit, but how Galileo influenced some of the modern thinking about reality. First, can you say something about Galileo? And how did he contribute to our sensation of reality and as perceived by sensorial senses, for lack of better word? Right. So Galileo actually made a very interesting distinction between what later became called primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities would be things that we think are part of objective reality,

like maybe the shape of physical objects, the positions of physical objects in space and time. And then, so those would be primary and in some sense those would be real. And then there were things that were called secondary qualities that Galileo, he didn't use that term, but he was pointing in this direction. Locke used that term and used of Locke and his writings on this. So things and color. In some sense, you know, a physicist might say, look, an object really does have a shape and a position, but it doesn't have a real color. In fact, light doesn't have color.

It only has, say, wavelengths. And so in that sense, when you see color, color is something that you make up. It's not really part of the reality. The reality in that case would just be the wavelength of the light. And so Galileo made that interesting distinction that he said some of the things that we perceive are not the reality, you know, the real reality. They're just our contribution. But I think that Galileo thought that other things like the positions and movements of objects, their masses and so forth,

would be part of the objective reality, what was later called primary qualities. And the other thing that I think many scientists would credit Galileo with was, He understood about the importance of making very careful experimental measurements, even about boring things. I mean, he was rolling balls down inclined planes and measuring how fast they moved. You might go, I mean, if you're trying to understand the big questions of the universe, why are you rolling balls down inclined planes and measuring how fast they move? How far removed from the interesting stuff is that? But what Galileo showed was by doing these very careful experiments with great precision and then trying to model mathematically what you've. what you've seen, you start to make serious progress on the little things that eventually are the

road to the bigger questions that you're interested in. Maybe we don't care about balls on inclined planes, but then we start learning about the deep, deep laws of nature, and then they start to open us up to new ways of thinking about what's going on, and that's the big payoff. Right. And of course, you know, I've talked about this in my book, losing the Nobel Prize, that Galileo is deeply influenced by the senses. And in fact, in one of the passages that, that Tufti, I think I'm pronouncing, I never know how to pronounce his name. Is that right?

Tom, Dufti. There's a famous physicist, Et Hooft, who won the Nobel Prize. I'm trying to get him on the end of the Impossible podcast. We'll see if that'll work out. But certainly to get tufti on would be, Tuft would be great as well. But he calls it, you know,

in this passage where he calls him the first data scientist, he uses this passage about the Pleiades, which are also known as the Seven Sisters or Subaru, if you happen to speak Japanese. And this is a small asteroid. and that we can see tonight from anywhere in North America that is in the shoulder of Torres the Bull. And these are really these beautiful set of stars

that are young and hot, and they're surrounded as hot young Hollywood stars often are by an entourage. And this entourage is in the form of a nebulosity, a glow. And Galileo said by observing the nebulosity, he thought that those were merely unresolved stars, that his telescope is incapable of resolving. Right, right.

If he could resolve it, it proved that by what he calls visible certainty, we have destroyed the arguments that have for so long vexed philosophers of previous generations. So first of all, I love that he's a physicist. Of course, he has to like poke fun at philosophers. But secondly, that something can be proven visually is a very perilous proposition, in my opinion. To what extent can we use perception as a most? motivation for achieving scientific proof or consensus whatsoever. Is it not a fool's errand?

That's a great question, because the evolutionary argument that I just gave says that the very language of our visual perception in all of our senses is the wrong language to describe objective reality. That's, of course, taking evolution by natural selection as our starting point. That's just a theorem of that theory. We can, of course, argue about evolution by natural selection and whether we should think that there's a deeper theory. But granting evolution by natural selection as our starting point, then what that theory entails is it's not simply that we maybe get the shape a little bit off or the distances a little bit wrong. It's rather something much deeper, and that is that evolution by natural selection entails that the very language of space and time and position and momentum and frequency and so forth is simply the wrong language to describe objective reality. You couldn't possibly frame a true description of objective reality in those terms. Now, but to your question, that is the only language in which we can actually make experimental observations.

That's what we're equipped with. And so what we have to do is go ahead and do experiments and get data in the only language that we can understand. but then we simply, instead of assuming that that data and the way that we normally would think about that data is just the truth, we have to be a little bit more clever. We have to be like a person who's wearing a VR headset who's been playing a video game and they can sort of, you know, see, like say it's Grand Thift Auto with a VR souped up version of it, right? And you can start to ask questions like, is the geometry of this game a Euclidean geometry? And you can start to work with some other friends who are playing the game with you and do some experiments and discover, oh, well, this is roughly a Euclidean geometry and do things like that. And that would be perfectly fine because that's the only data that you can get is within the language of the game.

But if you think that that's going to take you to an understanding of the deepest reality, which in this metaphor would be the circuits and software and voltages and voltages of some hidden supercomputer that's running the game, Well, you're going to be sadly mistaken and wrong by thinking that, you know, the Euclidean geometry that you measured in the game is going to tell you something directly about the supercomputer that's running the game. You have to think outside of the headset. And so that's what evolution by natural selection is sort of telling us is that, yeah, we can only get data in the headset. But how we interpret the data is going to require us to think outside of the confines of our headset. outside of, in fact, space and time itself. Yeah, and of course, you know, no one really made the same impact, kind of relatively

speaking as Galileo did on its predecessors. Before we move off of him and onto other, you know, slightly more modern than the 16th and the 17th century conceptions of sensorial perception. I want to just remind people listening on Clubhouse that we're enjoying a conversation with renowned professor and thinker philosopher scholar. Professor Don Hoffman, who I'm pleased to call a colleague in this great, wonderful university that we call the University of California. Though we may be on separate campuses, we are colleagues in the world's greatest university.

So, Don, it's such a pleasure to be affiliated with you. I want to turn just to last statement about Galileo. Of course, he was involved in this conception and many of his books. Actually, this is a news break for my friends listening on Clubhouse. My subscribers on YouTube know this already. but for many years, Galileo's books were not available, even though they were translated by our colleague or our co-university inhabitant Stillman Drake, who was up to UC Berkeley for many years. And these translations done by him are the definitive ones of all time, including the dialogue

on two chief world systems, which I always keep nearby me. And I started to investigate this book and realized what an amazing writer Galileo is and how beautiful and lyrical he does right. And I said, well, this is great, but you know, this book is 539 pages long. I wish I could do what I did with Don Hoffman's book and listen to an audiobook version of it. Wouldn't that be cool? Turns out the audiobook version has never been made. And I thought to myself, well, somebody's got to do this for the maestro and why not let it be me? And so I hooked around and I found out who has permission to do this. And it was the University of California Press owns the rights to this translation. So then I thought, well, what

could I do with it and to make it kind of theatrical? And I said, why don't I get my friend Carlo Robelli, a previous guest on the Into the episode podcast. And he's going to narrate it along with me and my colleague, Lucio Piccirillo, and maybe someone like Alina Apreel or Andrea Ghez, we got to get some women in there as well because of these Italian women, especially Alita April if you've ever met her, Fabiola Giannati, is a hero of mine. I would just love to have an Italian woman narrate one of the three characters. Anyway, So I'll keep you posted on that. That's great.

Labor of love, maybe not remunatory in the way that I would prefer it. But anyway, it's not all about money. But I do want to say what Galileo said is he talks about a wine's good taste does not belong to the objective determination of the wine and hence of an object, even the object as an appearance. But the special character is the sense in the subject who is enjoying its taste. This is an argument that owes to the namesake of the universe. I don't think it's the namesake of UC Berkeley, but that's George Berkeley. Tell me a little bit about George Berkeley. Did he not come up with these ideas that the moon does not exist except when you're looking at it,

except if you have sort of this God's eye perspective? Talk about Berkeley. Is he irrelevant or is he more relevant than ever? Yes. Berkeley had this very interesting view that everything that we perceive is, is in some sense just a creation of our senses. And that only, he had a theological view, he ended up being a bishop in the church.

But he had this view that even if I'm not looking at a tree, the tree exists only because it's in God's view. So God keeps things existing by being, by perceiving them. But he said, to be is to be perceived, or to be a perceiver. So that's a very, very different point of view than a physicalist view that says to be is to be, for example, something in space and time with energy and matter. So that, you know, space, time, energy, and matter are the fundamental natures of objective reality. And Barclay was saying, no, the fundamental nature of existence is being perceived or being a perceiver, which is a very,

different point of view. And it was, you know, I think Markley was partly reacting against what he thought were the advances of a physicalist, you know, science that was mostly materialist and didn't leave room perhaps for other more spiritual ideas. So when I look at these kind of initial thoughts, initial forays in that time, of course, what Galileo was railing against back in the dialogue, was the notion that the earth was stationary. And he said, you know, your senses tell you that it's stationary. And it seemed like he's sort of arguing against himself because in some sense, they'll say the senses can teach you everything and you can have visible certainty.

In other words, you could prove something, Quades Demonstratum, based on visual cues and visual evidence. On the other hand, he could say, like, don't trust your sensory motion perception. And I think it's so interesting that you connect, and you mentioned this early on in the book, you talk about the grand questions. And I think of them as sort of chicken or egg problems. In other words, how do the universe come from non-universe? How did matter come from energy? How did life come from matter?

And all of which, you know, Darwin sort of presuppose was a crazy thing to ever think about. Now we know it as Big Bang nucleosynthesis. And then lastly, how does consciousness emerge from, you know, bacteria? How do you go from bacteria, to Bach or, you know, anything like that. And you talk about this survey in Science Magazine, arguably the number one or two journal in the world. 2006 asked, what are the big questions for the next century?

The number one, of course, I pat myself on the back, hurting my shoulder, was what is the universe made? And then number two was, how does biology produce consciousness? In my, yeah, in my expertise, at least in thinking about this, I don't know if we'll ever have an answer, you know, of what the universe is made. or what predated our universe. These are active subject of debate and scientific inquiry. Is it true in biology that this is still considered a plausible, possible outcome

that biology could predict how consciousness emerges? I would say among my peers in cognitive neuroscience, those who of my colleagues, they're brilliant colleagues of mine who are working on this, I would say that 95, 99% of them take, it for granted that in human beings and other animals, conscious experiences are a product of brain activity. And we just have to figure out what kind of brain activity causes which kinds of brain experiences and what kinds of conscious experiences and how that happens. I mean, there are theories, for example, that say Roger Penrose, for example, and Stuart Hammeroff,

together have a theory that says that certain structures called microtubules and neurons have certain electrons with special quantum states. And if you can get an orchestrated collapse of these quantum states using some of Penrose's ideas about gravitational collapses of quantum states, you get the right orchestrated collapse of these quantum states, then that will cause conscious experiences. That's what consciousness is. Others say that, no, it's more like the architecture of how information is passed through the nervous system through the brain. Certain information that's broadcast widely is going to be

conscious. Information that's sort of stuck in certain parts of the architecture and isn't widely available throughout the entire system will not be conscious, but if it's broadcast widely, it will be. So this is the so-called global neuronal workspace theory. Bernard Barr's and other are involved in this. And then there's one that says, well, it's more like sort of causal computational architectural architectures that nervous systems or other physical systems might have. This is integrated information theory. It says if you have the right causal computational architecture, then it has something

called high integration of information. They call it fee, high integrated information, but called fee. then that will lead to or be conscious experience. So the idea is a reductionist idea. You start with space, time, and matter and physical objects, and then you have to show from those foundations how consciousness emerges. And that's part of a bigger picture of which you're far better aware than me, which is the Big Bang cosmology.

And the idea is that at the Big Bang, there was only space, time, and energy and matter. There was no life and there was and so that took hundreds of millions, maybe billions of years before life came around and then who knows how much longer after that before consciousness came around. So surely it must be that consciousness emerges from space time and matter. So that's why most of my colleagues are reductionist in this way. Perhaps the adjacency of the problem often comes up in what I do, which is sometimes works to our detriment. And I'll say, you know, we do get this sort of fear or concern for, lack of a better word that you have, you know, being too close to the woo-woo side of things and science is never a good thing. And in fact, you know, I was going to play a game with you, but I

don't have time to do it, which would be, you know, what I call high and low, where we take the highest verified review on Amazon of this book and the lowest verified review on Amazon. And we compare them. And, but I'll spare you it. But the problem is the lowest, I mean, it's got 500 five-star reviews. The only, you know, one-star review that I can find that really, you I was kind of criticizing it, says, well, really, you have Deepak Chopra? I guess on the printed book. I listened to the audio book, but the printed book has Deepak Chopra's endorsement. And I know you guys have worked together.

He's been a guest on my show two or three times already. And he's also contributed to the endorsement in Comia on a book by Frank Wilczek, who you may know won the Nobel Prize in 2014. And he's commented on his book. So the criticism is, oh, how could you have Deepak Chopra? I don't know if the guy even read it. But the bottom line is, is it sometimes the case that these books too close to maybe science fiction or this notion of the mind of God?

I understand the mind of God. I've seen this a lot with, even in this book, you know, to give the devil his due, whoever wrote that one-star review, a plethora of references to the Matrix. I see that in many books, including Galileo's error, this book by Goff, that we might get a chance to talk about. So what do you think about this? And the notion that comes usually concomitantly with it of panpsychism, which is maybe you could describe.

What is panpsychism? Is it Wu? Is it Wu adjacent? What do you think? Right. Well, this is a very important question. And the one thing I would say is that, you know, as scientists, we get our ideas in many, many different places.

Casual conversations, a glass of beer, reading a paper. It's all over the place. But what we do as scientists is we then take them and we have to be very precise in writing them down as mathematical precise theories and then we go test them. So my attitude is, I mean, I talk with people from all sorts of areas and all sorts of religious and scientific fields. And I get ideas wherever I can. And of course, I'm critical of the ideas. I'm critical of my own ideas. That's just the way science works.

So get your ideas wherever you want to. What makes science different is that no matter where you get the ideas, now you've got to make them mathematically precise. You've got to make testable predictions, and then you've got to go out and test them. So that's where you get away from the woo. It doesn't matter where you get the ideas. The question is, what do you do with them and how rigorously do you frame them and test them once you've gotten them? And so that's the key point for me. Now, in panpsychism, the reason why panpsychism and several other ideas have been,

starting to catch favor among cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers studying consciousness is that the physicalist approach, even though it seems to be well motivated by the standard reductionist framework in which space time is fundamental, it started at the Big Bang and so forth, it seems to have all the right pedigree in the right framework. We've not been able to solve a single specific conscious experience. All the theories I gave you, orchestrated collapse of microtubules, integrated information theory, global workspace. If you ask these brilliant researchers, some of them are good friends of mine, just ask them as I do sometimes on stage at good conferences. Great, great theory. So what specific experience can you tell me what's the integrated

information for the taste of vanilla or the smell of chocolate or whatever you want? And they can't give one. So the weird thing about it is that no physicalist theory of consciousness to date can explain even one specific conscious experience. I say, this is the particular causal computational architecture, the right integrated information that must be the taste of vanilla. It could not be the taste of chocolate. And these are the exact reasons why. And if you made this particular change to the causal architecture, you would necessarily change it into the smell of a rose. There's just nothing like that on the table. And the hard thing is that it's not like we go, oh, well, but we can see how we could do it.

We actually don't see how we could make that connection. How are you going to go from a causal computational architectural architecture or a global broadcasting to that must be the smell of a rose? How do you do that without a big leap? And so that's been a big, big problem. So this is then that was one thing that led me to begin to question the whole word. and to ask evolution. I mean, is that a, you know, maybe space time and matter and objects aren't the fundamental nature of reality.

And evolution comes back and says, they aren't. That's the wrong language. But in panpsychism now, what we have is a move to try to come at things at a different tack. The idea is if you can't boot up consciousness from space time and matter, maybe you can somehow get consciousness coming in as a primary concept.

Now, there's two ways that this is done. One is a monist way in which you say, okay, let's just start with consciousness as the only thing that there is. So we have a mathematical model of consciousness on its own terms, and we have to then show how space time and matter emerge. Or you can have a more of a dualist kind of version where you say, let's say that there's physical stuff and a structure and also consciousness and have them somehow interact.

The way panpsychists work is they, there are many versions of us. So I'll pick the one that I think is the most common version. It says, look, um, physics gives us these equations for how matter operates and how the world works. But it doesn't tell us what's inside the equations. It's just, it's just how things operate, but it doesn't tell us what the intrinsic nature of those things is. So maybe when we talk about the wave equation of an electrical, electron, maybe that, you know, that equation is just how something behaves, but it's not telling us what it is that behaves. What is an electron really?

Or what's inside the electron? And so panpsychist says, well, maybe there's some consciousness there. Maybe what's really going on inside electron is that there's some consciousness. And so the idea is that certain particles or certain combinations of particles like maybe a neutron, which has, you know, three quarks in it, that that might be conscious as well. So quarks are conscious or have consciousness. Three quarks together can make a proton or a neutron, and those are conscious. But some combinations, like the things that go into making a rock, maybe that's the wrong kind of combination, and so a rock isn't conscious. And so the idea there is to, it can be run in a dualist version. Sometimes I call it a neutral monist version. It's a little slippery.

I tend to think of it somewhat as dualist, but I think others who are panpsychists might disagree. But the key point is that there's you take the laws of physics and where you find an entity like an electron or a proton or something like that, you can put consciousness as the intrinsic thing that's actually being governed by those equations. Now, I myself am not a panpsychist. I don't think that that approach, at least the one I just described, is, is radical enough. I think that there are good reasons on physics grounds to think that. You know, that space time itself is doomed, that space time is not fundamental, that physics, even if they are not interested in consciousness per se, that physics itself has to look for something deeper than space time. And this is worked by Neymar, Connie Ahmed, and other physicists who will give arguments from, you know, gravity and this interaction with quantum theory that, that say that, you know, there are no local observables in space time.

there's just no it cannot be fundamental and they're looking for deeper structures they're finding things like an amplitudehedron, a sociahedron, cosmological polytopes that are deeper structures that have no Hilbert spaces so there's no quantum theory they have no locality and variance themselves so they don't care about locality in space time but they nevertheless they have deep structures that can give rise to for example scattering amplitudes. They can predict scattering amplitudes, and they can be projected into space time and show you how you get locality and unitarity. So the panpsychist views, I think, are too limited. They typically take the current space-time laws of physics as foundational and are trying

to stick consciousness into the interstitius there. And I think the physicists themselves are telling us, when they're going for things like the amplitudehedron, look, there's a whole new level of logic and structure that we need to look for outside of space time. Yeah, I should say, of course, to listeners. So we're talking with Professor Donald Hoffman, renowned philosopher, cognitive scientist, and deep thinker, author of the current book we're talking about today is the case against reality, which makes astonishing claims not unrelated to the astonishing hypothesis of Francis Crick, to which we will soon turn.

I do want to see if there are any questions first in Clubhouse. house I see there's at least one hand that is raised and maybe two. So let's get them up on stage. Cammy, if you could get them up there. So, Don, we're going to put the phone up to the microphone. And we'll take a question first from Heron. Heron, do you have a question for Dr. Hoffman? Well, it wasn't actually a question.

It was just a quick observation, if that's acceptable. Sure, if it's quick. Yeah, as I see it, I only have available to me my immediate sensory experience and stories about my immediate sensory experience. The very idea of reality is a linguistic construction, is a story, an attempt to make sense of my sensory experience, which is completely mysterious. All the theories that talk about perception and that are being something outside responsible for constructing my perception, those are stories.

And they may be interesting stories and even useful. stories, but they're no more than stories. Reality is a story. I'll leave it at that. Any reaction, Don? Yes. None of us knows for sure what objective reality might be. And there are some philosophers like Emmanuel Kant who said, look, there's the

numina and the phenomena, the phenomena of what we can experience, what we can measure, what we can do empirical science with. And the numina, he, Kant, at least in some interpretations of Kant, said, That's the objective reality, but there's nothing that really we can say about it. It's beyond the realm of what we can do science about. Of course, for scientists, I want to try to give a theory of objective reality. That's what we do is we tend to be realist about our theories in the sense that we're proposing things that we think might be true descriptions of objective reality. Kant might be right.

The numina, the reality may be beyond anything that humans can ever. approach and there's a book by Jan Westerhoff, which, where he makes an argument there, there is no objective reality. So, so, but I myself, in the framework of evolution by natural selection, that theory does posit an objective reality as part of the framework of the theory and payoff functions are mapping from that objective reality into payoff values. And so in that framework, What I can say is if there is some kind of objective reality and it has some structure, then evolution by natural selection, that theory entails the probability of zero that we see any of that structure.

Now, that doesn't entail, though, that we don't have the conceptual systems to try to think outside of our sensory headset, right? The virtual reality that evolution gave us. we may have the conceptual capacity to think outside of the box of our senses and try to get, you know, understandings of the structure of objective reality. Just like, for example, I can't imagine a specific color I've never seen before, right? If I ask you, think of a specific color, imagine a concrete color that you've never seen before. Well, you know, I mean, nothing happens. I, smoke comes out of my ears, nothing happens.

And yet, I do have the conceptual capacity to imagine that there could be, colors that I could never see. And to imagine, for example, if I'm a male dichromat, that maybe these people that are trichromats, maybe they really are seeing colors that I could never even concretely imagine. And so it's certainly seems legitimate to say that even though my sensory system can't reveal this thing to me directly, my cognitive systems can help me go where my senses might fail.

And so I think a lot of scientists take that attitude about this thing. But my answer, and bottom. line is who knows what reality is, right? Even if our theories work and pass every test, it doesn't mean they're right. So we can never know for sure if we've got it. That's right. And I want to turn to that next, especially this notion of ITP, which stands for interface theory of perception, which something that you coined, and I want to understand how we can think of it. When you say interface, you literally mean a type of interface. And the question is, in what way is it a description of reality?

Is what way is it an analogy, which I'm not even denying the validity or necessity of an analogy in this case, but to what extent is it real? I mean, we'll get to Nima and stuff later, who hopefully will be coming on the podcast shortly, but the question of, you know, is it an analogy which has utility

to help us visualize things, or is it itself this infinite turtles all the way down and you're just like substituting one description of something undescribable for another? Well, I would say first, if I just think in terms of the framework of evolution of a natural selection, just the logical framework of that theory, what that theory entails is that it assumes that there is an objective reality. It assumes that there are organisms that are being shaped with sensory systems. And the theory then says that it's a theorem of that theory, that the sensory systems will not ever reveal true structural. of that objective reality. Instead, they will give you sensory systems that serve only as guides to adaptive behavior. So you're not, the whole point is not to see the truth. The whole point is to stay alive long enough to reproduce. So that's the structure of evolutionary theory. So once you understand that sensory systems are not windows on the truth,

they're merely guides to adaptive behavior. then I say well you know people then ask well how could that possibly be you know help me understand and I think that's when the metaphor of a virtual reality headset or a user interface on your laptop those are the kinds of metaphors I think help us to understand what the mathematics of evolution is telling us like when you use your laptop you're writing a paper or a book or something like that and the icon for the book on your desktop is blue and rectangular in the middle of your screen, it doesn't mean that the book in the computer is blue and rectangular in the middle of your computer somehow.

I mean, there's no mapping like that between your senses and the objective reality. Instead, what you see on your laptop hides the truth. And that's why it's valuable. You don't want to see the voltages and magnetic fields and the circuits and software. You mean, if you had to toggle voltages to write your book, good luck. You'd never finish your book. And so that's what evolution did. It gives us a user interface.

Now that part is, now I'm just using a metaphor for what evolution has given us, but it's given us a user interface that hides the truth, but lets us control the truth, whatever that truth might be, in a simple way, using simple user interface icons. And, you know, when I think about that, that fruitful metaphor that you're using, I can't help but escape the fact that we are talking on Clubhouse simultaneously. friends are tweeting out. It will be recorded on YouTube. It will

have a lifelong presence, perhaps, forever. But, you know, there's a distinction. I hope to get you on on Clubhouse by the end of this conversation or teach you how to get on as I have. There's so many people before because so many people did it for me. But what's

nice about Clubhouse is it's purely audio. So you just drop in, listen. I'm going to take more questions. We're speaking with Professor Donald Hoffman. You see Irvine. friend and colleague and really a titan of this field with novel, innovative, and testable ideas. And that's what I think is so draws me to what you do. And we might disagree about certain aspects of it, but of course, you are far more eminent in this domain.

But what's interesting to Clubhouse is that it's a very low bandwidth thing. I mean, only I can talk or only you can talk or only one of the people that are up on stage or soon will be can talk. So it's a single channel, so to speak. Whereas Twitter, we can read really fast. We can perceive information really fast, read hundreds of words per minute. I always say, like, some of the people, probably some people that are listening to us right now wish there was a 2x speed for Clubhouse the way there is for listening to podcast. But you and I speak pretty quickly, so I think we're doing okay.

But the bottom line is Clubhouse acts as a filter in a certain sense. And it is almost as important what information we choose to discard as the information. that we choose to get past the filter. And so you're arguing that evolution is designed, adaptive filters. We call them PID, proportional integral derivative, feedback circuits, et cetera. But there's always a lossiness to any filtration system. And I wonder, in the evolutionary framework, you know, there are some things that it's clear that we derive pleasure from them, but it's not clear that it's a fitness boosting as a metric.

For example, music. When I'm listening to music, I'm perceiving. there's tons of things that are going on or and I smell a smell, that might be more easy to see what the purpose is, because maybe it reminds me that's dangerous to ingest that. But where there's music, where it doesn't seem like there's a fitness payoff in the human. I agree in birds and whales probably.

I don't know. I'm not a biologist. But the point is, what is the purpose, evolutionarily speaking, of this most august, you know, kind of trait of the human species to make music for no purpose whatsoever? It seemed biologically wasteful, at least from a novice perspective like mine. Right.

So evolutionary psychologists have thought a lot about this. Stephen Pinker has got some good ideas. He calls music auditory cheesecake. It's something that cheesecake sort of hits our senses in a very, very strong way, all the positive things. In some sense, in the case of taste, we, you know, fatty foods are really good for us. They have high calories. Sugary foods are really good for us. We need the energy and so forth.

And during the Pleistocene, it was hard for us to get these things. And so if we find a food like cheesecake that has all of them, you'd never find perhaps cheesecake during the Pleistocene. But now that we can make it, it hits all the things that were shaped by evolution during the Pleistocene. And so we go for it. In the case of auditory stuff, we do use auditory information. to tell us, for example, who's attractive?

Some people's voices are more attractive than others, and that will have some correlation with the reproductive fitness of that person. You know, the voice of a 99-year-old has certain qualities to it that are different from the voice of a 21-year-old, and we pick up on those qualities, and we can infer something about the age of the person, and that, in terms of reproductive potential, then leads to certain attraction or not.

And so those kinds of arguments can be given for why we find certain patterns of auditory stimulation more attractive than others because they in the past and in the present are correlated with reproductive potential and fitness enhancement. So in music now, what happens is just like with cheesecake, you start to, someone figures out how put all these wonderful ingredients together and you get something that you would never perhaps ever heard in nature.

But now it's like cheesecake, which would never exist in nature until we put all these ingredients together. So that may be one aspect of it, but there may be more also to music in the sense of a social, joint, cooperative and bonding experience that comes from music. So again, tribes in our evolutionary past, often when they went out, to hunt or fight would have some kind of chanting or music together so it could be a bonding thing so so i would say that from an evolutionary point of view from evolutionary psychology the kind of question that you you asked brian is is a non-trivial one but we we have ideas about how to try to come to rigorous answers yeah um so now i want to take another question uh from the audience i have

a friend of mine mark love it who is a uh a very deep thinker he is up in the and the stage Clubhouse? Mark, do you have a comment or question for Dr. Hoffman? How are humans supposed to interact with, you know, the real quote-unquote world? If our memory is so flawed and our ability to comprehend reality, it just doesn't work so well. That would be my question. Great, great question. And I would say my own attitude is, is, I certainly agree that we don't see, reality as it is that our beliefs are not necessarily the truth. And I take that as a welcome wake-up.

I don't find it discouraging at all. It's a wonderful realization. It's like someone that's had a VR headset on all their life, and they thought that the virtual world that they were in was the fundamental reality, and you finally tell them, you know what, everything that you've seen is just a virtual reality headset, and I'm about to take the headset off. Well, that's good news.

So science has the tools to try to go beyond just what our senses tell us. And so I think that we can never know if we've succeeded, but we don't have to give up. So I think this is a fabulous time actually in the sciences. Science, I would say from this point of view, from an evolutionary point of view, since Galileo, we've been sharpening our tools by understanding our headset. So we've really learned how to use experimental and mathematical tools. We've studied our headset. We really have done it so well that our theories are now so good.

Evolution of a natural selection, quantum field theory, and gravity are so good that they tell us space time is not fundamental. They're telling us you've been studying the headset. That's an incredible vindication of science. It's telling us that even though you assume that you were looking at the truth, you're not. You're just looking at a headset, but now use those same tools to try to come up with theories beyond space and time. And the way that you test those ideas is to make them mathematically precise. So like what Nima is doing with his structures outside of space time, like the amplitude hydrant or something like that, Make them mathematically rigorous, show exactly how they project into space time, and see the predictions that they make there.

And if you can, then you can test them. You only see things in your headset. So that's where the experiments have to be done in your headset. But you can still test models outside the headset as long as you have a mathematical model about how they project into the headset. So that's what science is now going to be up to. We're taking our first forays out of our headset, out of space and time, and science is up to the task. So this is, for me, an exciting opportunity and not a time to be discouraged. Very good. A question from my friend and collaborator in all.

I should point out, by the way, Don, do you know that Galileo actually invented an actual VR or AR headset, which was a type of chronograph that was based on a telescope, a telescope looking at the moons of Jupiter. So you'd wear this helmet and you'd look at the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter and I would have a telescope built into it and you'd augment your reality or vision in this case and you'd be able to see the moons and this is a huge problem back in the 1600s to tell time and in fact he was impelled by the desire that impels many of us professors to make money and to capitalize on it. No, I'm just kidding. We're not all. Don, I shouldn't accuse him of my own venal motivations, but Galileo had this VR headset that he put on a telescope and he didn't win the longitude prize,

But eventually it was and is used to do many other, some say more important things like test and measure the speed of light and its constancy throughout our solar system. I didn't know that. That's wonderful. Yeah. Question from Max, a bitball, who is a colleague of mine, Dr. Max, would you like to ask Dr. Hoffman a question? Well, so the answer is I don't know, but I can just tell you how I'm thinking about this. in cognitive neuroscience, we have this problem of consciousness. We call it a hard problem of consciousness, which is how are our experiences, you know, taste of chocolate, smell of garlic, a sound of a trumpet.

How are these conscious experiences related to neural activity in the brain or perhaps to circuits and software in an AI system? And we've come up empty, trying to start with the physical system of consciousness. We've just come up empty. We can't. I mean, I'm not saying we can't do it, but we've had very, very bright. people, including Nobel Prize winners, many of them, working on this, and we've come up empty so far. And it seems to me to be principled that we can't start with space time and matter and boot up consciousness. And so there's two responses.

One is to say, well, there's no such thing as consciousness. It's just an illusion. So Dan Dennett and Keith Frankish will say this. And of course, then they have to explain how the illusion of consciousness arises. So how do I, what is the brain activity that causes the illusion of the taste of vanilla? So there is no such thing as the conscious experience of the taste of vanilla. But nevertheless, somehow our brain has duped us into having the illusion of the taste of vanilla. So they still owe us a mathematically precise theory about what are the neural processes precisely that lead to the illusion of the taste of vanilla

and why those processes could not be the illusion of the sound of a trumpet. And there's nothing there yet. But the other approach I'm taking now to get to your question, I don't view consciousness as a filter, but I'm saying if I don't start with space time and matter, maybe I can start with consciousness, not as an emergent property of space time, but as an entity that I want to mathematically model on its own terms. So I want a simple mathematical structure that I claim captures everything there is to capture fundamentally about consciousness. I want to look then at the mathematical implications of that formalism and then show that,

that somehow there's this dynamics of consciousness, and that can give rise to space time. So space time is not fundamental in any sense. And scale structure in space time is in no way fundamental to consciousness. The consciousness itself is fundamental. My attitude is very much like touring, when he was trying to come up with a theory of computation, right? Computation is a wild and woolly enterprise. There's traveling salesman problem, computing pie, there's NP complete problem. There's tons of stuff in computation.

Turing managed to find this drop-dead trivial formalism. A finite set of states, a halt state, a start state, a set of transition rules. And that turned out to be enough to have the church-turing thesis. Anything that's computable can be computed by a Turing machine. I want the same thing for consciousness, a minimal formalism that has combinatorial properties that can allow me to build a theory of anything that I want to have about consciousness. The self-learning, memory, problem-solving, intelligence. I want to build all those things from a stripped-down version of conscience.

So that's the attitude in which I'm thinking about it. Consciousness, from this point of view, isn't like just a filter. It's the whole thing. Now, again, I'm probably wrong, but I'm just telling you the strategy that I'm taking. I don't want to start with space-time matter because that doesn't seem to work. So let me start with consciousness and see if I can boot that up. So, yeah, I should say I had a... Right.

Who is that? Ask a question. Not yet. In just a minute. Yeah. Hold on. Thanks, Neil. So, yeah, speaking of Turing, we had on Noam Chomsky on The Impossible

Podcast over the summer. And Noam was saying things, you know, that, you know, Turing considered certain questions such as, you know, can machines think is like utterly ridiculous. And that brings up one of these notions that I want to talk to you about, which is, you know, this notion of increasing computational ability, quantum computing, et cetera. Whereas NEMA's theories, and he has agreed to come on the end to The Impossible Podcast, and we'll talk to him about this. His theories, I would say, are, of course, he's incredibly brilliant, very creative and inventive, but they're by no means mainstream.

They're by no means accepted at the same level of most of the other physics content of this book, the case against reality. So I just want to caution people that because NEMA is conjecturing, it doesn't necessarily mean it's established fact or even accepted by even a majority of physicists, even though it has some promise. And I would say, you know, there are alternatives, loop quantum gravity, even string theory, et cetera, that are trying to parameterize the fundamental, you know, dichotomy between space time is fundamental or emergent, primitive or somehow elementary versus not being so. But the question I have is about conscious computers. So not only let's just skip Turing and say Chomsky's wrong, Turing's. You know, can computers be conscious if I don't see why not according, you know, at least if I put in my naive panpsychism hat, I don't know why not anything, you know, just Silicon and or Joseph's injunctions or whatever.

So can they be conscious? And if they are, and if we are, you know, somehow a virtual perception or perceiving entities, then who's to say that we're not simulated as people have conjectured. And I'm sure that will generate some follow-up questions from the audience. Yeah, so go ahead. Yeah, great question. So there are a couple of frameworks to try to answer that in a physicalist framework. So space time and matter are fundamental.

Then the attitude is that, of course, machines can be conscious. The brain is a machine and it's conscious. So we have a firsthand example. So Searle at UC Berkeley has made that argument. And I think 99% of my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience say, of course, right? Brains are machines. They're carbon-based machines, not silicon-based machines, but they're machines. And they create consciousness, and we just have to work out how it's done.

And they may be right. So in that case, yes. And if that's true, then I would say absolutely, if carbon-based machines can create conscious, then certainly there's nothing against silicon. on-based machines. Now, I've argued, though, that there's principled reasons why you can't start with inanimate matter and boot up consciousness, so that I think it just can't be done, and that the whole Big Bang cosmology has to be rethought in that regard, and maybe start with consciousness being fundamental. Now, in the case of panpsychism, once again, the panpsychism has consciousness,

in some sense, being fundamental. It's not derived from matter, but it's sort of the heart of matter. It's the, to use Hawking's phrase, it's the fire inside the equations, right? That's, that's what consciousness is. So in that sense, surely the right kinds of machines will have the right kinds of pan-psychic consciousness. So that's a second framework in which you can think about it. The wrong kind of machine is a rock, right? It has the wrong kind of architecture. So the combinatorial way in which atoms combined to make a rock is not the right kind of combinatorics to have the rock have its own special consciousness of its own kind that's above and beyond all the consciousnesses of the particles. So that's the sort of the combination issue that comes up in panpsychism.

Certain combinations will have consciousness associated with them. Others will not. And so we have to be precise about that. And panps are struggling to do that. In the framework that I'm working on, consciousness is fundamental. So it's not arising in any way from physics. Instead, physics and space time is just the headset that certain consciousness is used. So the metaphor I like to give is the Twitterverse.

The vast social network of interacting agents in the Twitterverse. There's tens of millions of users, billions of tweets. There's no way that any Twitter user can grapple with the whole thing and read all the tweets. So we have visualization tools for vast social data. That's overwhelming. We have visualization tools. And so in this view in which I'm proposing that, ultimate reality is a vast social network of interacting consciousnesses like the Twitterverse.

So that's the fundamental reality. Then spacetime is just one headset, one kind of data structure, one visualization tool that certain of the agents use to help them grok or interact with other agents. Now, if we think about it that way, I need to write down a mathematical model of the dynamics of these agents, of the headset, the mapping of the dynamics of conscious agents into the headset. Once I've done that, then we can try to reverse engineer that mapping and say, the headset is there to give me contact with certain conscious agents or to give me trends about what these conscious agents are doing, just like you get trends in Twitter. So the question would be, once I know how this space-time headset works,

can I open new portals in that headset to new consciousnesses? And with some of those portals, the technology needed to make those portals look like silicon and circuits. And my answer is probably. I mean, it's probably possible once we understand the headset, we can reverse engineer it. Right now my headset, when I see your face, I've got a portal into your consciousness, fallible but genuine portal into your consciousness. So we know that this headset under this framework gives us portals into consciousness. Could we have a precise enough understanding of this headset and of its relationship to conscious agents that we could reverse engineer it?

I think yes, and I think some of the technology may look like artificial intelligence, but we wouldn't be doing it in a reductionist framework. We're not starting with circuits and software that are unconscious and booting up consciousness. We're starting with consciousness and a headset that's been constructed by conscious agents. We're reverse engineering it to open up new. portals to other conscious agents. So it's a completely different framework. I talk a lot in the book about experience. I've been thinking about a quote I heard from Sam Harris once, which is something to do with, you know, that the most valuable quantity in life isn't time, you know, because time we waste. Everyone says, you know, money's so valuable.

No, you can't make money back. You can't make time back. You know, if I ask you, Don, you know, could you, would you like to trade this last two hours of your generosity? You'd say, yeah, give me that back. I'd love to have that time back to play with my. my friends and do whatever I was. But in reality, it's actually, according to Sam Harris, is attention. So you have a certain amount of attention, and that's the most conserved quantity,

because we all have time to watch, you know, Lord knows I've watched a lot of cat videos, but I've been thinking a lot about it, and I can't help but ask you in the remaining minutes before we wrap up. And I want to ask you something. I actually think the most valuable precious commodity is innocence.

Because I have a bunch of kids, and I'm so amazed by their learning, and their growth every day. And when I see something like time or even attention, it's reversible in the sense that like, okay, so you could rejuvenate if you're really drained or, okay, so you did all this, you wasted all this time, you know, eating and watching the Super Bowl, but now you can go for a run. But in a sense, you really can't, you really can't get back.

And I see that. And I've talked to men who've gone to war and how to take lives of the enemy. And they said they can never undo that. And that was the biggest loss of their innocence. It wasn't the drugs that they did. And so I caution people, and I've had addicts on the show, and I've had people that really opened up in ways I never thought. I was talking about physics. All of a sudden, this guy tells me that, you know, he's had to kill people in his life and service of his country.

And it breaks my heart because I know he's a good soul. And I'm not condemning it at all. And there are listeners right now in this room who have been to war. And then I've heard people that have been drug addicts. And I know that the last comment, you know, is not maybe, you know, to do anything. really hurt yourself. But is there irreversibility? I mean, am I doing some sort of child abuse to my kids? And I actually just tell them, I'm like, you do these drugs, it's irreversible. And I'm talking about my experience, my children, my experience, my life. There are things that, you know, we always

talk about how, you know, well, I wouldn't have been the person I was today if X, Y, and Z didn't happen to me. And actually, I've looked at this and all the guests I've had on 116 guests, now 117 with Don's gracing us on the podcast. But, you know, thinking about, you know, kind of the experiences and, yeah, I wouldn't trade anything. I wouldn't, you know, I am the result of all my experiences in a certain sense. But again, I'm just asking Don, you know, from a neurochemical perspective, are there, is there, you know, a possibility that certain drugs are not, are one-way ratchets and pauls

in the fine manian sense that it can only go in one direction. And people like me, perhaps, shouldn't try it. By the way, I might have a more addictive personality. I know I have addiction to food and I'm addicted to love. But the point I'm trying to make on is, are there drug experiences that you really can't come back from? Yes, I think that there are some, of course, that may open your mind and be harmless and others that could be irreversible. And there's going to be individual differences. So, you know, you are taking a chance, just like if you have dinner and eat mushrooms,

you're taking a chance too, right? I have friends that eating a mushroom was fine for me, but for them it's irreversible. So we are taking these chances. I think, you know, having a hit of marijuana is probably not going to, if I did that, it would have no long-term effects on me and the benefits may outweigh the risks. And I have good friends who have done many, many trips on five and are, you know, are psychonauts. They just really go out there and they come back and they tell me all sorts of. of interesting things. And right now my attitude is, I hear what you're saying, and, you know,

I don't need to go there right now myself to do the work that I'm doing that's trying to put structure and mathematical understanding to the kinds of things that you're talking about. But, you know, others disagree. You know, my good friend, Anika Harris suggests that I would be in better shape of, and better able to move forward on these ideas if I had firsthand experience. I do, I should say, I do meditate quite a bit. I've meditated for 18 years. And so I do let go of all thought. I go into silence.

And I do explore outside of the geeky realm in that way. But there I don't feel like I'm very much in danger of injuring my brain. Very good. So I'm going to need to wrap it up in just a second or two. I want to just reiterate. We're talking to Dr. Donald Hoffman, who is Professor. at UC Irvine just up the road and really an influence. So I want to just finish up with just one of the questions that I normally ask my guests

who honor me by their presence. And that is sort of advice to your former self, the name of this podcast, The Into the Impossible Podcast. And that comes from Arthur C. Clark, who you quote in this book, the very famous line, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that is how I open every one of these podcasts, as you'll find out when you listen to the audio version of it. His second law is that for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And the third law, and we all know that in the faculty club.

I'd love to drop that little humding around people. But the last law that derives the derivation of the name of this podcast is the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. I want to ask you, Don, advice to your former self. If you could go back in time and tell a 20-year-old, 30-year-old Donald Hoffman, one piece of advice that would give him the courage to venture into the impossible as you have done, maybe enabling something new at an earlier phase in your life. What would that piece of wisdom or advice be?

Well, I'd tell myself a couple of things, because I think there's a couple things I needed to know that I didn't know. One is listen to authorities, but be willing, after you've really studied them, to argue against them vociferously. So don't be stupid and not listen, listen, but then have the confidence to argue against them. And second, learn as much mathematics as you possibly can. Right. I mean, that's, that is for a theorist, Translating your abstract ideas into something that you can really use and make predictions from is a precious gift. Right now I have to work with mathematicians who are kind enough to collaborate with me and deal with my relative lack of mathematical expertise. So I have good collaborators.

I would love to – I would have gone back and said, you know, get a master's degree, at least in mathematics, while you're doing all this other stuff. So you can work more on your own on the mathematical side. So be brave. Of course, listen to the experts. But then go and follow your own dreams and your own ideas, but also be humble about it, right? Don't be dogheaded and dogmatic about it. That's how you stop inquiry. So be dogmatic about nothing, be open about everything, and learn mathematics.

Very good. I think that'll be the title of the show. I want to thank everybody, but especially I want to thank Dr. Donald Hopper. Thank you, please, though, and proud to have you as a colleague in the University of California system. Please find his TED Talk on YouTube. It's got 1.57 million views on just YouTube alone. Find his website. If I his book, The Case Against Reality, which is so fascinating.

I really found so much in there that I just could talk to you for hours. What I want to do next is have a conversation with you and Nima, Connie Ahmed, who will hopefully, we won't team up too much against you as physicists. But then we'd have on your side, we'll have maybe Dr. Stewart. hammer out. I don't know. We'll convene a big thing. If people on clubhouse think it's cool, let's do it. I would, thank you, Brian. I would love to talk with him. I haven't contacted him because I didn't want to waste his time. I'm reading his stuff. He taught a class at Harvard in fall of 2019. I have myself personally translated, transcribed 17 of his lectures. I'm learning his stuff. That's how serious I'm about learning his stuff because I, you know, I'm really taken with his work.

But I wanted to really understand his work at a deeper level before I. wasted his time but I would love to talk with him. All right, well, I'll get him on my show first and then we'll get you both together. So please tune in on YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating, subscribe to the Into the Impossible podcast wherever you get it. Don, have a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much for joining us

and going Into the Impossible. Thank you, Brian. My pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinguishing from magic. Hello, I'm Stuart Volko, producer of Into the Impossible. If you enjoyed this episode with Professor Brian Keating, Please let us know by subscribing, commenting, sharing, and most importantly, rating and leaving

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