Know Thyself - E106 - Donald Hoffman: The Emerging Science, “We Are ONE Consciousness” - Life, Death & The Simulation

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Donald Hoffman is back on Know Thyself today to explore the constraints of time and space, and how they shape our understanding of the world around us. He discusses the "headset analogy" - the idea that our senses act as a kind of cognitive filter, preventing us from directly perceiving the true nature of reality. Donald delves into the paradoxes found in various mathematical theorems, and his newest research on "conscious agents" and how it relates to the Gaia hypothesis. The significance of mystical experiences and their potential to reveal truths about the nature of reality is also covered. Hoffman also opens up about his thoughts on reincarnation, the relationship between science and spirituality, and the possibility of artificial intelligence becoming truly conscious. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  1:31 Why We Don't See the Truth of Reality 8:36 Limitations of Time & Space 13:28 The Headset Analogy: Illusion of Reality  17:08 Is This a Simulation? 23:07 Panpsychism vs Idealism 30:14 The Role of Evolution on Consciousness 37:43 Amplituhedron & Challenging the Notion of Space/Time 46:52 Truth About Scientific Theories & Making Assumptions 53:34 The Limits of Language 1:00:20 Seeing the World with an Open Mind 1:15:03 What Exists Beyond our Understanding 1:20:44 Paradoxes Found in Theorems 1:24:00 Donald's New Research on Conscious Agents 1:28:06 Gaia Hypothesis vs Conscious Agents 1:38:34 Enlightened Beings & Embodying this Wisdom 1:44:02 Donald's Meditation Practice  1:47:39 Why We Should Ask These Questions 1:50:24 What Mystical Experiences Reveal 1:55:28 Reality of Reincarnation  1:58:50 This Science Will Change the World 2:02:27 What's Next for the Research 2:04:50 God & Understanding Something Greater 2:12:33 Will AI Become Conscious? 2:17:06 Conclusion  ___________ Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science. Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and color, the evolution of perception, and the mind–body problem. He has co-authored two technical books; Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception (1989) offers a theory of consciousness and its relationship to physics; Automotive Lighting and Human Vision (2005) applies vision science to vehicle lighting. His book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (1998) presents the modern science of visual perception to a broad audience. His 2015 TED Talk, "Do we see reality as it is?" argues that our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us. Book: https://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Against-Reality/dp/0141983418/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1694112697&refinements=p_27%3ADonald+Hoffman&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Donald+Hoffman ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

We have assumed in science for hundreds of years that space time is fundamental reality. In the last 10 years, for the first time, scientists have taken off the space time headset. What are we going to find? So I should be very, very clear on this point. Now, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist, and when I say that space time isn't fundamental, and objects in space time aren't fundamental, that means neurons don't exist when they're not perceived. What I'm saying is very, very uncomfortable that we don't see reality as it is. This theory of conscious agents is really the first layer of software outside of our space-time headset.

Once you know the software, you can change the game pretty much any way you want to. So you believe we're living in a simulation of sorts? I think that we just have to bite the bullet and say, no matter how smart, mathematically precise you are, it's going to be trivial compared to the reality beyond. I think as a scientist, it's critical for me to actually spend time in utter silence. That's where the true new creativity comes from. What we know is one perspective out of an infinite number of perspectives.

But that's who you are. What you are transcends. any description. And that's how the infinite comes to know itself. Don, so good to have you back. Thank you, Andre. Thanks for having me back. I thought we could start with giving maybe a 10-minute overview,

kind of a high-level view of both your work, our conversation last time, which I absolutely loved, and our audience loved. And then we can dive into some new terrain here on this conversation today, which I'm very much looking forward to. So starting with how fitness beats truth. Okay. And how

the chance that evolution has shaped sensory systems to see objective reality is precisely zero in the work that you share. Could you elaborate on that a little bit in terms of how evolution shapes our sensory systems to be able to navigate it effectively for survival purposes, but not to see reality as it is objectively? Right. So Darwin's theory is very clear that evolution shaped sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior. And that's true. According to Darwin's theory, is in fact true. Most of us think intuitively that to do that, evolution must shape us to see the truth because clearly if you see the truth, that will be much more adaptive than if you don't see

the truth. So to guide adaptive behavior, evolution must also shape us to see the truth. And it turns out that extra assumption, which isn't in Darwin's theory, shouldn't be in Darwin's theory. Now, the mathematics of it is very, very simple. The payoff functions that guide evolution. like if you play a game, you have payoffs. If you make certain moves on the board game or in a video game,

you get certain number of points. And if you get enough points, you can get to the next level of the game. If you don't get enough points in time, you die, so forth. Same thing like an evolution. There's evolutionary game theory. You have payoffs that guide adaptive evolution. And what happens with those payoffs, they're basically not telling you whether you,

you go to the next level of the game, but whether your genes, your offspring, go to the next level of the game. So when you analyze those fitness payoffs and ask, do those fitness payoffs contain information about the true structure of objective reality? If they're going to shape you,

if the payoff functions that guide evolution are going to shape your sensory systems for you to see the truth, then they have to know a little bit about the truth themselves, or they can't shape you. And what we've proven, and this is, again, work with not just me,

but Cheyton Prakash and Manish Singh, Robert Prentner, and Brian Marion and Justin Marks, a number of other people, not just me. What we've shown is in number of ways that the payoff functions basically don't have the information, almost surely don't have the information about the structure of the world. So you can actually prove the probability is precisely zero that any payoff function has that information, and therefore it's precisely zero probability

that we've been shaped to see reality as it is. I should mention just two quick objections that people have about this. One is, I've shot myself on the foot logically. I've used evolutionary game theory, which is supposed to capture Darwin's theory of evolution. It's the mathematics of Darwin's theory. And I've used it to actually show that certain basic concept in Darwin's theory, like real physical animals competing for real physical resources

in a real space and time. I'm saying that all of that is, you know, space and time aren't fundamental. We're not seeing reality as it is. Objects in space time are just an illusion or a headset. So the argument from philosophers, some philosophers have been, well, Hoffman, unfortunately, has shot himself in the foot logically. He's used evolutionary game theory mathematics to show that the very concepts that were gave rise to evolutionary game theory aren't true. So either the math faithfully represents Darwin's ideas and captures it and is a good representation of those ideas or it's not.

If it's not, Hoffman couldn't use it for what he's using it for. And if it does, if it is a good faithful representation of Darwin's central ideas, then it couldn't possibly contradict them. So in either way, Hoffman is messed up, right, and his team. And the answer is this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of scientific theories. Every theory makes assumptions. They're the miracles of the theory. And then it says, if you grant me those assumptions, I'll then prove all this or explain all this other wonderful stuff.

But it never explains its assumptions. And you can get a new theory, a deeper theory that explains those assumptions, but it'll have its own new assumptions at infinitum. So every theory has, if it's good enough, has a scope. But every theory, no matter how good it is, has its limits. If none else, its assumptions are showing you what its limits are. So, the only question is when you have a mathematical representation of the theory, is the mathematics, if it's a good theory, the mathematics will help you explore the scope.

And it's new. But if it's a great theory, the mathematics will actually show you precisely what the limits are. And in case of Einstein's theory of spacetime, for example, his mathematics is, of course, fantastic, and GPS and everything else is based on Einstein's math. So, wonderful scope. But his theory also, the same mathematics that captures his theory and shows its scope also tells us its limits. And the limits are, in Einstein's case, 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Space time ceases to have any operational meaning.

10 to minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds. And so here we have the case where the mathematics that Einstein came up with is the very mathematics that comes back and says, your fundamental concept of space and time fail at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. So that's how science, good science, really works. The mathematics that's intended to capture the fundamental concepts of your theory, if it's great mathematics and a great theory, will come back and show you exactly what the limits are of those fundamental concepts. So that's not self-refutation. In fact, that's why science is so powerful when we're we just use informal discussion and, you know, talking about ideas over, you know, beer and so forth.

That's one thing. But you can never find out the limit of your ideas and the limits of your theories when you have just an informal theory. And as a result, it's easy to become dogmatic and to think that you're getting close to the theory of everything that I know the truth and you don't and so forth. What science does is it puts a big dose of humility on there, even a big theory like I, science theory of space time it tells you, that theory is great and it stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. Game over. So you need a new concept. So that's, so it's an anti-dogmatic kind of thing. So that's sort of just a little, the kind of pushback I've gotten on this. And you can see why it would be some strong pushback, because what I'm saying is very, very uncomfortable that we don't see reality as it is. Yeah, and we'll circle back to the value of discovering the limits of different theories.

because I'm excited to dive into that. To continue to put a bow on the high-level overview of this work, that understanding that you just shared in conjunction with local realism being proved false leads us to explore the headset analogy. Yes. And so, you know, the Nobel Prize for Local Realism being proved false explains how objects in space time cease to exist when they're not perceived. Like they get rendered on the fly when they're perceived.

Why does that become an important reflection when we start to dismantle this notion that reality is as it seems? Well, again, I should say that local realism is false. The Nobel Prize was granted for it for that experimental verification. There are some who still want to maintain some kind of realism through multiverse kinds of explanations and so forth. I think that we just have to bite the bullet and say space and time aren't fundamental. Yeah. And the properties of objects in space and time are. aren't fundamental. So, so, so that's the direction I'm going, but I just want to point out that

there are very, very bright physicists who would disagree. Now, the theory of evolution with natural selection and my work on that is in some sense, it suggests that space time is an interface, right? So it does, it strongly suggests that what evolution gave us was not a window on the truth, but a headset that lets us play the game of life. And, and, and, and, And so that's why I think it does fit in with the modern results in physics. I think it's a very reasonable interpretation of modern quantum theory and it's actually part of, for example, a big interpretation, the so-called cubism interpretation of quantum theory that Chris Fuchs and others are espousing.

That the quantum state is just the observer's statement of the degrees of belief of what they will experience if they make certain kinds of observations. And it's not, you know, quantum states are not descriptions of objective reality. They're descriptions of your degrees of subjective belief. So I think that that fits very, very well with the work I'm saying. So here's a case where physics, this interpretation of physics, the cubist interpretation of physics, the non-local realist interpretation of quantum physics, works very, very well. with what evolution is suggesting,

that we evolved not to see the truth, but to have a headset. So, yeah, I think the two actually dovetail quite well. Truth to be hidden, but allowing us to control it in a way that we need. That's exactly right. And I should mention that since the last time we talked, there has been a big push by the European Research Council, the ERC.

They have a 10 million euro new initiative for finding there are these new structures, outside of space time. Like amplitude, like the amplitude, hebron, right, yeah, that's right. So they're called positive geometries. And so they, it's just started.

Is it a cosmological polytope? Is that correct? That's right. That's right, an associate hydra and so forth. So there are these positive geometries and they could have billions of dimensions.

Space Time has four. Maybe 11 in string theory or something like that. But they could have billions of dimensions. In other words, our headset is pretty cheap. Yeah. It's a really, really low dimension.

we got the cheap model. The high-energy theoretical physicists are now looking at structures like the amplitude hedon in which one of the parameters is the dimension of your space time. So in our case, M equals four. M is the parameter of the, and ours is four, but they could have a billion. M could be any number, any, M is one of the, you know, four is one of the smaller numbers you could have. So that's already a parameter in the positive geometries that, you know, yeah, your head's

like, you know, your space time could be as many mentions as you want. And we have about as cheap as one as you could get away with. So instead of us having a theory of everything, we have a theory just of a trivial headset. So just refining, again, the understanding that objects cease to exist in the form we think they do when they're not perceived. This goes for the chair that you're sitting on, the moon, any object that the quantum theory works at all scales. then this would apply to that at all scales. Can you just share a little bit more about the headset analogy and how that helps us kind of wrap our head around?

Things exist in objective reality in a way that is analogous like we explored to last time, like a computer where there's gates of electricity moving, but the display of the screen is set to hide the truth of reality so we can control it in a way that is useful because otherwise if we didn't have the display of a computer screen, like how would we actually effectively navigate it? So could you elaborate on that a little bit more

so we can wrap our head around that? That's right. So an obvious question is if we don't see the truth, then what has evolution done? How does it allow us to survive when we're ignorant of what reality is? But if you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense. If you have someone, say, Grand Theft Auto, it is a virtual reality version of Grand Theft Doder and multiplayer,

and there's some supercomputer somewhere that's, running it. But you don't know, you don't see that supercomputer. You don't need to know about the software and so forth. All I know is I've got a steering wheel in front of me. I've got a dashboard. I got, you know, gas pedal and so forth. And I can see over to my ride, I can see a green Ferrari or something like that that I'm racing against. Well, of course, if you looked inside the supercomputer, there's no green Ferrari anywhere inside the supercomputer. And there's no steering wheel and none of that. The reality that I'm interacting with, and what I'm really doing in this metaphor, in that reality, is toggling millions of voltages in a precise order. It has to be, you get one toggle wrong and the thing can crash.

So you have to get this precise toggling of millions of voltages. That's what you're really doing in the reality. But if you had to do that to play the game, if you actually had to go in there and know what sequence of voltages to put in at what time, good luck. I'm going to win the game if I'm just turning my steering wheel and slamming on the brakes and the gas and I'm going to win the game. So here's the case where it's very, very clear that knowing the reality and having to interface directly with the reality to play the game is going to make you lose as opposed to just having a dumb, dumb down user interface that hides the truth, but gives you just the controls you need. So that's sort of the point of view of evolution. From the evolutionary point of view, Darwin's idea then is basically that evolution shaped us with sensory systems that hide all the truth that we don't need and all the gory details, just give us the levers that we need to control reality without actually knowing what those levers do.

because if you had all the stuff that you know you're going to have to pay for more energy for all the neurons you're going to need to store that information to understand that stuff is just too expensive so that's sort of an intuition where it starts to make it seem not so much crazy but of course

of course you don't want to see the truth it's just too complicated yeah so this starts to I think be a little destabilizing for some people when you say we're living in a matrix simulation reality isn't real And so this understanding that this headset, our sensory system allows us to navigate the game of life, like the game in GTA 6 or whatever that comes out. If we have like a VR headset, like the Apple headset, will allow us to navigate and play in there, for example.

And that spacetime is a very limited scope of reality. And within that limited scope of reality, we are perceiving less than 0.1% of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see with. visible light. The sensory experience of life is extremely limited to the vastness of what existence actually is. That's right. And even the very notion of the electromagnetic spectrum itself is an artifact of the headset. It's not a deep insight into the reality. So when we talk about that, we're using headset language is not the truth. Yeah. But even in the headset, we have hints inside the headset, even the part that we see inside the headset is trivial compared to what's out there. So you believe we're living in a simulation of sorts.

Is that right? Yeah, I would say that this is, that space time is not fundamental objective reality, and therefore something else is. And so I should be careful, though, and say when most people talk about simulation theory like Nick Bostrom and people in that camp, their point of view is very, very different from mine, and I should be very, very clear about the difference and also the similarities. So the similarities are that what you see around you is not the truth. it's in some sense a simulation or a headset.

But what Nick and Boscham and others think is that spacetime and physicalist ideas are still fundamental. And they think that computer programs properly programmed can actually create consciousness. So the idea is that there's some computer programmer in a different world that has created this simulation and the simulation is sufficient. that the algorithms are actually creating creatures like us with consciousness. But it's consciousness that's emerging from the computational prowess of the programmer and the power of the computer. Of course, then the possibilities that that programmer and their computer is, in fact, just a simulation from a deeper programmer and so forth.

Many, many levels of that. But at the bottom, the bottom level is presumably, again, a physicalist space-time programmer in a world. physical and space time. And so the idea is, so they're making two assumptions that space time, physics is fundamental. And second, that properly programmed computers can create consciousness. And I'm disagreeing with both points. So the two critical points of their simulation hypothesis, I think, are false. I think there's no evidence in any theory of how computer programs could create consciousness. I'll put it this way. There's not a single theory out there right now, and there have been lots of attempts, that says that consciousness is created

by some kind of algorithm, some kind of computational process, some kind of neural network. None of those theories can explain even one specific conscious experience. When you look at all the theories that are out there and they've been out this for decades, and many of these people are my friends, they're brilliant people. But what I always ask them when I speak at conferences is to say, okay, we can experience roughly a trillion specific conscious experiences. Taste of garlic, smell of chocolate, the sound of a trumpet.

There's about a trillion things that we experience. Should be shooting fish in a barrel to pick one and give us a theory and say how this computational process must be the taste of mint. So how many of you guys got? How many have you done? Zero. And that's the way it's been,

and that's the way it's going to be. So there's a lot of talk about these computational approaches or neurobiological approaches, for coming with conscious experiences, and there's not a single specific conscious experience that they can explain. Zero.

And I predict that that's going to continue because it's not possible in principle to do that. So I disagree with the simulation theorists that are saying that your consciousness is due to some programmer writing up a program that created your conscience. Show me the beef. There's nothing there.

There's all sorts of ideas and handwaves, but I have not seen anybody plop down to say, Here is, for example, an integrated information theory. Here is the causal matrix. An N-by-N matrix. N must be 5,000. And these are the 5,000 by 5,000-in. These are the exact numbers that must be in the matrix

for this to be the taste of mint. Nothing. And if you think about it, how in the world could a 5,000 by 5,000 matrix of number be the taste of met? You've got some explaining to do. So that's where I disagree on two things, right? the idea that space time is fundamental and that computational processes or neural processes

could create conscious experiences. And I'll just mention, when I give up local realism, and when I say that space time isn't fundamental, and objects in space time aren't fundamental, that means neurons don't exist when they're not perceived. That means none of my behavior is caused by neural activity. Now, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist, and I think we need more money for neuroscience, not less. So let me be very, very clear. I am not denigrating neuroscience research. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. I love that research, but it's going to be much harder than we thought. The 86 billion

neurons of the brain in roughly the same number of glial cells are complicated, but they're trivial. They're just a headset projection of the real thing that's behind them outside of space and time. And so neuroscience is going to have to reverse engineer the 86 billion neurons. And and look at the much more complicated reality behind that. So that's why I say we need more money for neuroscience, not less, and we're going to have to up our game because we haven't actually started the hard work yet in neuroscience. So let's just lay the foundation too for people that start to explore

the hard problem of consciousness of why any collection of matter from the materials view would have an experience of itself is very baffling. And so when you look at consciousness, in the many different theories of how it could come to be. There is a materialist view, which is like you just explained, which is along analogous, the understanding that spacetime is real.

And after a certain amount of unconscious complexity in your neuronal structure, consciousness starts to appear as you turn that dial forward. Now we're exploring a little bit more of an originally thought of as panpsychist view, which is the understanding that consciousness is actually fundamental. Could you explain the difference between, consciousness being fundamental or panpsychism versus idealism. Sure. That's right. So I'm good friends with Philip Goff, who's one of the principal

proponents of the modern panpsychist kind of theory. And so there, I'll talk about one specific version of it. I think that Philip may have thought about it that way, but I think he's not necessarily committed to this. So what I'm saying right now, I'm not pinning Philip with this. Okay. But one kind of panpsychism takes space time as fundamental. And it says that in addition to these elementary particles, the leptons, bosons, and quarks of the standard model of physics. So we have these fundamental particles and their physical properties. In addition, let's posit that these bosons, leptons, and quarks also have, in addition, a fundamental unit of consciousness. So that they, and in some sense the consciousness is what is the reality behind the

mathematics. And that certainly is interesting, but there's a couple problems with it. First is, why should we assume that the laws of consciousness are tied to the laws of our particular headset? This is just the M equals four version of a projection, of something that's much more complicated. It fails to understand how trivial spacetime is. Space time is just a trivial headset. And so if we're going to pin our theory of consciousness, such that the equations of that little headset

are in some sense dictating how these consciousnesses interact, that's just way too limiting. We have to think outside of that box. And second, it actually does no work. As a scientist, I would like, I mean, philosophy is important, and so I'm not denigrating philosophy, but as a scientist, I would like my theory of consciousness to actually do some work for me, not just to say,

the laws of physics, you can leave them alone, nothing to see here, but we can tag on consciousness. I'm very, very unhappy with that. I would like a theory of consciousness that shows me where the laws of physics come out as a special case of the more general laws of consciousness. So I would like to show that the headset is a trivial headset, and consciousness is the more, the more fundamental. So you can see it's a very, very different spirit. Now, having said that,

there are many different versions of panpsychism. So I could easily imagine, and I may have already influenced Philip in this direction. We'll see. A panpsychism that's not tied to space time. In that case, as a scientist, I still want, then, fundamental mathematical principles. I want this,

partly because as a scientist, scientists, here's the attitude that I think hard-nosed physicalists should have toward this. They can say, look, in our assumption that space and time are fundamental and doing the mathematics of physics is fundamental, we can explain all this stuff. Your GPS is due to us. The science and technology that's allowing us to do this podcast is all due to this physicalist science. What kind of scientific equipment has come out of your theory of consciousness? Oh, none? Oh, well. I think that that sort of tells us how important your ideas are vis-a-vis, our physical,

and what can I say? They've got me. And they've got anybody who says consciousness is fundamental, and then they say, well, what kind of technology can you give us? None. Well, then either that whole approach is not strong enough, or you haven't done your work. And I think it is we haven't done our work. I think the approach is strong enough.

but we now, those of us who take consciousness is fundamental, need to have fundamentally new mathematical theories of consciousness, qua consciousness, with rigorous mathematics that shows how precisely space time comes out as a projection of this, where we actually get the standard model of particle physics and the generalization of it, so that we can actually predict new technologies. So that's where I'm headed. So the panpsychist approach has not, had all been taken into direction by philosophers that could ever lead to brand new mathematics

that would lead to new technology. So that's one problem I've got with it. The approach that I'm taking is, I call it conscious realism, but you mentioned idealism. Strictly speaking, what I'm doing is philosophically idealism. It's probably the closest would be Bernardo Castro's analytical idealism. So yes, it is what I'm doing is idealism. Which just so I can understand, like, panpsychist view would be that consciousness is fundamental. So essentially consciousness, yeah, it's a fundamental constituent. And idealism would be perceiving consciousness as all there is, but projecting down essentially as like reality is a shadow of it in a sense. Yeah, the idea that's what we call physical space time is just ideas in the mind.

It's just a headset. Ideas in the mind of God. Ideas in the mind of, that's right. of consciousness. Absolutely. So, and the idea would be then that this is what quantum mechanics is telling us. The fact that local realism is false means that the moon or whatever you observe has a value of position, momentum, and spin and so forth when you observe, and when you don't observe, you can't assert those things because, in fact, they're not true. And this is quite nice.

This is non-contextual realism. There's some wonderful work on this, the co-conspecker theorems and so forth. There are cases where you can actually set up these quantum measurements, where you can show a sequence of measurements, where you can predict with probability one what the outcome of an experiment will be, one of the measurements will be.

Probability one. And you can prove that the mathematics of quantum mechanics entails that there could not possibly have been a value until you made the measurement. So these are like knockdown, drag out kinds of arguments that non-contextual realism is false. So all measurements are contextual. And to put that in normal language, it means that in some sense the consciousness of the observer, although I shouldn't put that on Chris Fuchs. Right.

So I think that he's going to be agnostic about. consciousness and all this stuff. He's just saying whatever quantum mechanics is, it's just describing the degrees of belief of the agent that's making the measurements. So when I talk about consciousness, I'm not putting that on, Chris, that's me. So now as we start to explore a little bit more beyond the headset, what role do you feel like evolution could be playing as a projection down from consciousness? That's a great question. And it does raise the issue that I'm going to be talking about consciousness beyond space. Yeah.

And strictly speaking, that's an independent hypothesis from the whole business about evolution leading us to have evolved a headset. So we have to be very careful about how the science goes here. In the first step, I'm just taking Darwin's theory in the mathematics of it and saying, let me just take that is my game, Darwin's theory and the mathematics of it. What does it tell us about our perceptions? Oh, it's just a headset. That is not the truth.

That's what Darwin's theory entails. Now it's a separate step. Okay, now that Darwin has told us that we need to look outside of space time. But Darwin doesn't tell us what's outside of space time. So when I do the next step and say, okay, I'm going to propose that there's this social network of conscious agents. I'm leaping way, way beyond Darwin, and there's nothing in Darwin that says that's the leap you have to take. So I should be very, very clear. Nothing in my work in evolutionary theory is saying you must go to conscious agents.

However, I have to go the other way. If I'm going to propose conscious agents, the social network, a Twitterverse of conscious agents as the fundamental reality, then it's my responsibility to show that I can first project it back into something that I would call space time. I would create a space time and that when I do that projection, in that space time, I would see what looks like nature, red, and tooth and claw, as Darwin predicts. So it's not that Darwin predicts conscious agents, it's rather that Darwin says there's something beyond space time. And then I go, okay, well, what is it? Darwin can't tell me. I need to make my own leap.

So I am going to propose conscious agents because at least that way I might be able to understand consciousness. Then, okay, then as a scientist, no BS. Give me back space time, give me back the standard model of particle physics, every bit of it with new predictions, and giving me back evolution of natural selection. Otherwise, my theory of conscious agents, you shouldn't pay attention to it at all. So unless I can do that, by-bye. So that's the hard-nosed attitude that we have to have

for an idealist theory of consciousness beyond space-time. Again, I'm not putting down philosophy. Philosophy is wonderful, and I learn a lot from philosophers. But I'm talking about science here. Scientists who are idealists have to do this hard work and give us back a theory of space-time. that gives us new technologies and new insights. So that's what I'm up to right now is working with my colleagues.

It's a mathematically precise theory of consciousness. Think of it as, again, like a social network, like the Twitterverse. There's an infinite number of these conscious agents, and we have a mathematics. It's a Markovian, so it's called a Markovian dynamical system. It's trivial to show that it's computationally universal. So our network of conscious agents can do anything that a neural network could do. Chat GPT, Gemini, Bard, all these, all these AI programs that are based on neural nets.

Conscious agent networks can do all of that. So our conscious agent nets only assume that there are agents that have a range of experiences, like the taste of chocolate, the smell of garlic. So that's one of our miracles. Every scientific theory has a miracle. my miracles. There are conscious experiences. And second miracle is that there are probabilistic relationships among conscious experiences. That first one though doesn't necessarily require an assumption, right? So how could you say it's a miracle? Well, most... Because our conscious

experience is probably the one thing that is self-evident, right? Well, I would agree that space and time, what we call physics, is an extrapolation from our experiences. My experiences are all I know directly. So I would agree with you on that. But when I say it's a miracle for my theory, what I'm saying is my theory will not try to explain the origin of conscious experiences. So it's that sense, it's a miracle.

Got it. So it's going, and some people might say, well, that's why I like physicalism, because I'm just going to start off with the standard model of particle physics, and I don't need to assume the taste of mint and all these experiences. just the particles in their properties.

And I'm going to show you where those conscious experiences come from. And then I win. And I would say if they could do that, but as I said, that would be very, very impressive if they could do that. Right now they're batting zero. And I predict that they're going to bat zero. But they would have their own miracle, which is the laws of the standard model of particle physics

and the quarks and gluons and bosons and leopons. and leptons that they're... So it's not like they don't have any miracles. They have their own miracles. It's just not my miracles. So everything is going to have its miracles. Now, one thing about taking consciousness is fundamental is that there's a wide variety of conscious experiences, right?

I said there's a trillion specific ones that we have. So that's, in some sense, it's assuming a lot, right? But it's one category of assumption. It's a category of conscious experiences. And the reason why right now I think it's a good, stepped as a scientist to move in that direction is when you look at my good friends and colleagues who are doing the physicalist theories, they're having to assume all of space-time physics, the standard model, and so forth. And then when they get to the step of explaining conscious experiences,

they can't. And so what they're effectively having to do is also they have to stipulate the conscious experiences. They stipulate the physics, and they stipulate the conscious experiences. And that's actually the word that Stephen Pinker used, as he describes, you know, like the global workspace, global neuronal workspace theory. He's saying, yeah, it stipulates all the physics, but then it also has to stipulate the conscious experiences. And so my attitude is, well, if the

physicalist theories are stipulating the conscious experiences as well as the physics, and I'm only stipulating the conscious experiences, and I'm going to show where the physics comes out, I'm going to explain the physics, I'm not going to stipulate the physics, I'm going to explain it, and hopefully get a deeper model with new technologies

that you couldn't get with space time. Then you win. That approach will win. because I've stipulated less than the physicalist theories. So that's why I think I want to go ahead with us, even though it's a big give to take all these conscious experiences are fundamental. But what I'm not taking is other things like learning, memory, problem solving, intelligence, the self.

There's all these other things that we would expect to have from a theory of consciousness. And I'm not assuming those. That I'm going to explain. The only thing I'm assuming are the raw conscious experiences, themselves and probabilistic relationships among them. That's all. That's all I'm giving myself.

So it's very, very spare starting point, as spare as I could make it. It was literally the minimal thing that I thought I could get away with. And then there's no notion of self, learning, memory, intelligence, all that other stuff. We have to build that. But the fact that it's computationally universal means, it doesn't mean it's easy, but it means, yeah, we can do it.

So we mentioned a little bit earlier, the amplitudehedron, which is this jewel-shaped geometric structure that challenges our notion of space and time. How would you explain what that is to somebody that is not a physicist or mathematician? Like in simplistic terms, what does that represent for the possibility in challenging notions of space and time? Yeah, it's an interesting short story. I'll tell this short story. when you try to understand how particles interact in space time,

you might smash two gluons into each other and four gluons go spraying out. And you want to look at the probabilities of various kinds of interactions that particles can have. They call them scattering amplitudes, but probabilities of interactions. When you do the mathematics in space time using quantum field theory, the math is very difficult. That little two in, four gluons out, hundreds of pages of algebra. Hundreds of pages of algebra for one interaction, millions of terms. And that makes it really hard when you have to look at millions or even billions of these interactions per second

to try to figure out what's the new stuff. So there was some serious pressure to try to make the mathematics easier. The experimentalists were saying, come on, guys, you've got to give us something a little bit easier to work with here on the mathematics. And so some mathematicians in the 80s discovered they could get it down to 13 pages instead of several hundred pages they were like, oh thank you

it was holy smoke down to like 13 or something and then they guessed a single formula like just a few terms you could write it down by hand and it was right for that one particular indirect and it was like there's something going on here there's like some magic going on here

maybe it's a one-off But then they found other examples, and then in 2005, 2006, Ed Witten and his postdocs discovered something called, it's now called the BCFW recursion relation, that allowed them for many, many kinds of interactions. Technically, it's called N-Equels, Super Yang Mills. But anyway, a particular class, they could compute them with this very, very simple recursive formula that collapsed all this stuff. And some guy named Hodges, then brilliant physicist in England, said in one case, a few cases, it looks like this formula is putting together pieces of a volume of some object. Maybe there's some general thing here. And then Nima and his team said, well, that's an interesting idea.

So they went after that. And in 2014, 2013, they published the archive, but 2014, the actual publication came out. So just 10 years ago, the official publication came out of the amplitude hedron, which confirmed what Hodges had proposed. But there was some geometric object that BCFW recursion relations were gluing pieces together to make this object. And that object was encoding in its volumes, the scattering probabilities. And the structure, it turned out, of this object. The structure was encoding the probabilities? The volumes are encoding the probabilities.

but the structure, like the edges, all the edges and so forth, we're encoding properties of locality and unitarity, effectively space-time properties, quantum unitarity and space-time locality, you know, relativistic locality. And so, but this was not an object inside space-time, and it was actually entirely beyond space-time and also beyond quantum theory. So some people have said, well, yeah, space-time isn't fundamental,

but we'll use entanglement, for example, of quantum theory to boot up space time. And they're saying, no, no, no, no. Space time and quantum theory are emerging together from something far deeper, such as the amplitude, hedon. And then more generally, these positive geometries. So the amplitude hydrant is sort of like the first, but positive geometries more generally. So the idea is there's...

We have assumed in science for hundreds of years that space time is fundamental reality, in the last 10 years, for the first time, scientists have taken off the space time headset. And we've said, we can look outside space time. What are we going to find? We're looking outside of space time. The first paper in some sense that was going outside of space time is, say, in the last 10 years. Give or take. So we've been looking outside of space time for 10 years, and what do we find?

Mind? What you take off the head? Obolusks. Geometric structures, not a dynamics, just sitting there. Here I am. Big geometric. Could be millions of dimensions. It could be hundreds of dimensions, trillions of dimensions. They're just sitting there.

And so here it was very much like 2001 Space Odyssey where the obelisk is there. Yeah. And all the apes are pounding and hooting and they know it's important. Yeah. It's clearly, and they have no clue, right? And that's where we are. We've taken off the headset. There's these obelists sitting there, smiling at us.

It's quiet. They're not moving. They're telling us something really, really important. But it's so tantalizing that, as I mentioned, the European Research Council, just put out $10 million initiative. It's called the Universe Plus initiative. February, they brought together like 100 mathematicians and high-energy theoretical physicists to launch this whole thing, and we're off to the races.

We've taken off the headset. We've found these obelisk. We want to find out who put those obelists there and why. What is this telling us? So the race is on, and what I'm proposing is we need a dynamics. Physics always wants something dynamical. We need a dynamics that will give rise to these obelisks, the positive geometries.

And so that's what I'm working on with this theory. of conscious agents. What the paper I'm working on right now and the paper published last year is we're taking the theory of conscious agents in this dynamical system and we're showing how to get the new objects that the physicists have found outside of space time from them. So I didn't mention in addition to the positive geometries, there are combinatorial objects, in particular something called decorated permutations that classify these structures, classify the objects. And we've done that. We've actually mapped our consciousness dynamics onto the decorative permutations. That's then giving us, that helped us grok how to then mesh our theory of conscious agent

dynamics, the markup dynamics, with these positive geometries. And the paper we're working right now, we're planning to actually take, in a simple case, N-equals, to go all the way from consciousness, all the way into space-time and predict a scattering amplitude. So the idea, And that was just a first baby step. But the idea is, we start with the theory of consciousness, mathematically precise outside of space time, and show precisely where these decorated permutations and the positive geometries come from

and then show how spacetime and its properties emerge as a trivial projection of this social dynamics of conscious agents. So that's sort of the big picture of where we're headed. Okay, there's like four tangents that just spurred off that I want. to explore. There is this Sufi master actually that I believe has a quote roughly saying, this whole universe was made so that God may know himself, the seed wished to know what it was and what is in it,

and so it became a tree. And it seems like structures, like these geometric structures that exist out of space time that we're discovering, point to projecting down into this reality to create, almost analogous to like we discover certain, crystals or rocks that earth for whatever reason the dynamics create these mathematically precise structures that are extremely beautiful that we're looking down projecting down into there are these higher dimensional structures that are

projecting down and so I'm just curious like what implications do you feel like is comes about as we start discovering these hired like obelisks that for some reason are there we don't know why but that yeah that again like We mentioned challenges and notions of space time, but then also begs the question of what are they doing? How are they there? Right, right. And first, I should clarify one thing. I probably sound very excited about these ideas about conscious agents outside of space time.

And I'm playing it up. Because that's the current research I'm doing. It's a lot of fun. But frankly, it's just a baby step, right? It's not the truth. There is no such thing as a theory of everything, and that includes Hoffman's theory. so I'm not claiming I've got the final word. I'm just saying that here's a very interesting,

for those of us who think something like consciousness is fundamental, here is a first scientific theory outside of space time. But it's not the final theory of everything, and I'll be very, very happy when someone comes and overthrows my theory and get something deeper. But my guess is that the deeper thing will be a much deeper understanding of consciousness than one that my theory is proposing. So Humble Pies is required right over.

Right? I'm not the theory of everything. It's okay to be excited and be fine, but don't mistake that from me thinking it's the truth. It's not the truth. It's just an interesting baby step. In terms of, for example, what you were saying about what the Sufi master said, I think something like that is really right. Again, it's a good pointer.

Again, when I say right, not the truth, but again, a pointer in an interesting direction. I think that, so I should be very, very clear on this point. This is really critical. I talked earlier about scientific theories, always making assumptions, and therefore there can never be a scientific theory of everything. That means there's an infinite number of scientific theories that we could create,

because there's an infinite number of deeper and deeper assumptions we could make. And reality, whatever it is, transcends even that infinite sequence of scientific theories. And that's really an important point, and it's coming from a very simple fact about scientific theories. Every scientific theory must make assumptions, and it doesn't explain its assumptions. Those are miracles for the scientific theory. There's no way around it. You cannot give me a scientific theory that doesn't have miracles at the starting point.

We call them assumptions. That's a very sobering fact about science, and one that we should really look at closely. It means infinite job security for science, which is good. But that's also very, very humbling. It means that even if we gave infinite effort, had a billion Einstein's working for a billion years, we wouldn't scratch the surface of whatever objective reality is. So when spiritual traditions, many spiritual traditions,

have made it very, very clear, like the Tao de Ching says, the Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao. They're saying something that's truly, truly important. And that is, all of our concepts fail, ultimately. They're pointers to the reality, but they're not the reality. In the following, very, very simple sense. The word mint versus the experience of mint. Of course, the word mint is nothing like the experience of mint.

And the word mint doesn't explain the experience of mint, and it's not a theory of the experience of mint. If you want to know mint, the experience of mint, you have to taste it yourself. You have to know it firsthand. And then someone else can say, that is what I mean by the word mint. So you have to have the experience yourself.

And then the words can point to it. This is not BS. This is the way, and this is all of our concepts, the color red, the smell of garlic, the sound of a trumpet. You have to have the,

if you don't have the experience yourself, good luck me giving it to you by talking. So my words aren't going to to do it. And so what the spiritual traditions have been saying is extremely important here. It's not just schmistical nonsense. I'm saying that scientists have to really understand that our scientific, we, I'm a scientist. I love scientific theories. They beat handwaves by a long shot. So I'm, I'm sort of impatient with handwaves. Scientific theories are wonderful because they're precise and they tell you their limits. And so they tell you when that theory is done. That's beautiful.

But many scientists still have the hope that they're going to get the theory of everything. No chance. There is no theory of everything. So the spiritual traditions are telling us the right thing when they say any word is a pointer. The same thing is true of scientific theories. They're all at best pointers. But our pointers in science tell us their limits. The spacetime pointer stops at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters.

Thank you. After that, space time is not worthwhile. It doesn't work. and 10 to minus 43 seconds. That's the anti-dogmatic cure that we get from science. That's really, really powerful. So I'm all on board with the spiritual traditions saying in some sense that whatever reality is, you can only make pointers to it.

And even our scientific theories will only be pointers to it. And they're only pointers to a perspective on it. So the idea that the infinite one that you were saying from the Sufi master, that the infinite needs to look at itself from different perspective. I agree. And maybe what science does is it gives us rigorous, the most rigorous descriptions we can give pointers from a perspective. And the fact that we can do technology doesn't mean that we know the truth.

It means that we have a good description of this perspective. And so the match of the scientific description to a perspective, not the ultimate, the ultimate truth transcends. But the perspective description, getting that right, does allow technology. And so that's where we can see most of our theories are not even right about our perspective. Right. We're just so wrong that we don't even get our perspective correct. So that's how humbling this is. Yeah.

And words are frustratingly. inadequate for describing these things and much like what you were saying. It's so puzzling because our words are meant to communicate our inner experience. And yet our inner experience inherently transcends linguistics. That's right. And I'm excited to dive also into Kurt Godil's incompleteness theorem because this points that there are truths that can't be proven. And so we'll dive into that in a moment.

but just any further thoughts on how the limits of language is a very real thing. And, you know, it's a thing on this podcast that we can talk about many different things forever. And yet you won't have the experience of mint until you taste it. Until you taste it. That's right. And in spiritual, the big one in spirituality is that the ultimate unconditioned consciousness transcends any description. You can only know it by letting go of thought. And actually being face-to-face, no thought

with that unconditional, infinite intelligence that you are. Now, for many scientists, that sounds very schmistical. It sounds very, very, this is so unscientific. It's so, we want rigorous terms that we can verify and experiments. And my point earlier was, no, this is not different than what's going on in science at all. All of the basic concepts that we have, how do we know the taste of mint? If you've never tasted, I can't. The word is only a pointer.

Space time, if you've never experienced space time, the mathematics is only a pointer. So this is not something, some deficit of spiritual traditions that they say, well, we're pointing to this mystical thing that's infinite intelligence that you are, but, you know, no words. And most of my colleagues in science would go, that's the kind of nonsense we don't need to deal with here in science. And I'm saying, no, no, that's the kind of nonsense you deal with all the time. Almost every term that you use is only known by what we call ostensive definition. ostensive definition means someone has to point and then give you the word. Like when you have a baby, 18 months, and there's time for them to learn some words. And mom and dad, there's a rabbit on the carpet.

And at the right age, you can just point and say rabbit. And, you know, Chris gets it. You know, baby Chris gets that. Now, when you think about it, that's a miracle there's an infinite number of hypotheses that Chris could entertain it could be the fur

the texture of the fur the collar it could be the ear and the left foot it could be the tail and the chair behind the rabbit there's an infinite number so how is it

that all mom and dad have to do at the right age is to point and say to Chris rabbit and Chris gets it often in one or just one or two trials. That's a ostensive definition, and that means that Chris already has to have that experience. And mom and dad don't teach them the experience. They assume the experience, and they give a pointer,

which is trivial compared to the experience of the rabbit. Rabbit is nothing. The word rabbit is just a trivial pointer. And this is how we know basically everything. Every visual experience that you have, every smell experience you have, every tactile experience you have, The fact you get the name, people just type, the experiences you're having that I'm assuming that you're having, we call that, you know, hot, or we call that cold, we call that rough, we call that smooth, we call that satin, whatever. You have to have the experience, and that's almost any century experience is all by ostensive definition. We don't teach people anything. If they don't have the experience, you can't teach them. So this kind of thing, that's easy for scientists to dismiss the claim that language fails to capture this deep consciousness that's unconditioned, that's infinite, and that ultimately is the core of who you are. That sounds so schmistical to them, and I'm saying, no, no, no, this is ubiquitous.

and all the terms that we know basically are by ostensive definition from things that transcend the words and can't be reduced to the words. And I should just, it's humorous, but when you're pointing to the rabbit and saying rabbit at the right age with critical, what you don't do is point and say quadruped. You'll be messing up your kid. If you said quadruped or a mammal, something like, That's just the wrong thing to do.

So we actually have rules that are wired into us. We know intuitively you don't have to go to class. You just know that when you're going to say rabbit, you're not going to say quadruped or mammal or anything like that. It's reducing it down to its function or parse instead of what its essence is. That's right. And the kid is also pre-programmed to know that mom and dad know this intuitively. So they're going to give me what we call the basic level object category name first.

and then they'll maybe give me some superordinate or subordinate pointers later on. But right now I'm going to just get the basic level. And so we're actually wired up with the right way of pointing out. So the pointing that you get in the spiritual traditions, and these are just pointers, I'm just pointing out that that's how we learn everything. It's pointing out all the time. This is not some just schmistical, weird stuff that these people are. It's all over the place.

and it's essential in science. And I think that the pointing out of things doesn't absolve us of the mystery of what it is because oftentimes you like give a bird a name, right? You discover a new species or whatever and you name it and it's like, okay, now we know what that is. Like, you know, there is a level of grandiosity just labeling something as in that's a rabbit

and okay, yeah, there's just, now I just know that rabbits look like that or a tree is just a tree and you don't get to, I guess, be surprised by the mystery of what the essence of that thing is, which is like the one in the many different ancient wisdom traditions that have talked about this immaterial realm that pre-exist space, time, and the quantum foam from Kabbalistic origins, talking about Aynsof, which is literally without end, or Buddhism talking about emptiness, or at Veta Vedanta talking about this non-dual reality, that the consciousness is like extremely vast

and differentiating itself into all of these different experiences, which I find so fascinating. I've heard you talk to how, you know, as humans we have three channels of color with red, green, and blue. The mantisrip has 10, 11 or more channels of color. What is that experience? Exactly. No, I agree with all the points that you're making here.

It's really critical, as you were talking about, the spiritual traditions do tell us that the word is just the word and the reality transcends the word. The word is just a pointer. And so they often will recommend that you spend time letting go of the words. So that's meditation. So if you want to not be trapped in the trivial world of concepts, which is trivial compared to reality, then spend time in meditation where you literally let your mind not dwell on the concepts. You just have no, you let go of any concept. And when you actually look at the, when you walk around in the world, look at trees, look at the ocean,

where you just literally say, my mind can be quiet for a while. Just no thoughts. I'm just going to be here in thoughtless, pure awareness. Then the world comes alive and you begin to realize, Most of the time, you've killed the world. It's deadened. You see the dead world of your concepts, and you don't see the living world that's around you.

And I can put this, so that's what spiritual tradition. I'll put this in scientific language. Bayes inference. We talk about our prior understandings, our prior probabilities, says, you know, in Bayesian priors. So we have this prior probability of, for example, maybe belief in the standard model of particle physics and the particular laws and those properties. That's my prior. Before that, maybe with Newton, we had, you know, Newton's theory

of physics and so forth. That would be our prior. And once you have a prior, once you have the prior probability, any new data that you get will be interpreted in terms of your prior understanding. And there's this whole Bayesian inference kind of thing. And you get a posterior distribution, which is so given that you have this prior belief and you get this new data coming in, then you compute what your posterior distribution will be. Walking around without concepts, letting go of thought,

is saying, I need to let go of my prior. If I don't let go of my prior, I'm condemned to only see my posterior. in both funny senses that, right? You can only see your posterior, both in the technical sense and in this more metaphorical sense. If you don't let go of your priors,

you will only see your posterior. And so if you don't want to just be seeing your own posterior, you want to be open up to novelty, then you actually have to spend time. I think as a scientist, it's critical for me, to actually spend time in, of course, thought and mathematics and hard-nosed, no substitute. Do your hard work.

and then let go of it completely. Sit there in utter silence. That's where the true new creativity comes from. And then go back and try to translate it if you can into the math and symbols that you have. And that way you're not stuck with your priors. If you want creativity, you actually have to get outside your priors altogether. So I would suggest that, again,

there's not some kind of schmistical, nasty, terrible, silly, stuff that's going on, you know, in spiritual traditions, that's anathema to science. I think there's a way to understand what the spiritual traditions are telling us that makes sense from a Bayesian inference point of view from the scientist. If you don't let go of your priors, you're condemned to only see your posterior. So let go of your priors. What does that mean? Of course, do your homework.

But then, at some point, step back and let go of all your concepts for a while and see what comes out. Yeah, it really seems like the parable of the blind men and the elephant where blind men come and, you know, touch the tail of the elephant, think it's a whips. Another touches the leg thinks it's the tree trunk. Another touches the trunk of the elephant and thinks it's, you know, a snake. Another touches the belly. Thinks it's a wall. And they're all experiencing parts of something and not understanding the whole of what it is.

And I just find it very interesting to explore the overlap and conciliance of. what the cutting-edge science is saying with the ancient wisdom traditions and philosophy and metaphysics and if we can touch all the different parts of that metaphorical elephant to see and talk to each other about what our experiences of that thing that it points us closer to the direction of the experience of what it actually, you know, what it actually is and what reality actually is. Yes. I think that the idea of the elephant being looked at from different various perspectives is apt here. And the science gives us rigorous tools to do that palpating of different parts of the elephant with more precision than we might otherwise palpate it.

And when I say that there's infinite job security in science, I mean, that's really truly humbling. It means that we, with all the palpation we've done, we have zero percent of the elephant underneath this, zero percent. And that's, I honestly believe that. I think that we've palpated zero percent of it. What we know is one perspective out of an infinite number of perspectives. Not like there's five perspectives and we got one of them. No, there's an infinite number of different perspectives. And whatever it is, but that's who you are. What you are transcends any description, an infinite number of descriptions.

And so it's truly, truly a remarkable claim that spiritual traditions are making. and that you and I are just avatars. Andre and Don are avatars being used by an infinite consciousness that transcends an infinite number of different descriptions and would transcend an infinite study by science. It's talking to itself through two different avatars and looking at itself right now through a particular humble perspective, only a four-dimensional space-time headset perspective on itself.

and is doing that and who knows how many there's an infinite number of these other things going all the time but what's interesting about it as well from the social perspective is once I understand that Andre and Don are just really the same consciousness talking to itself

through two different avatars that's the real foundation for social interaction and social justice love your neighbor as yourself is true and right because your neighbor is yourself. It's interesting, the infinite consciousness that we are has chosen to forget itself, to plunge itself into a perspective so thoroughly

that it's lost in the perspective. And it actually views its other avatars as enemies in some cases and slowly wakes up. And so somehow it's really important when you look at yourself from a perspective, that you really look at yourself from that perspective, you take it really, really seriously, and you get lost in it,

and then very, very painfully wake up, and then you realize, oh, as interesting and complicated and wonderful as that perspective was, I infinitely transcend that. And that's how the infinite comes to know itself. It's beautiful. And it's why I love talking to you so much, too,

because you're able to navigate both terrains of the scientific understanding, which is rigorous, and the philosophical and inner experience side of things. You know, if consciousness really is this unifying field, then us as individuals, in parentheses, having this individual experience

are much like waves of an ocean. We're not actually separate, but we have the experience in a certain amount of time, in a certain amount of space that Andre and Don exist, just like a wave exists in an ocean for a certain amount of time and for a certain amount of space

and it has its own experience that is unique and unlike any other wave that has probably ever come before. And after that time and space it inhabited is over then it joins back the ocean, but the kicker is that it was never separate

from the ocean. In the first place. In the first place. That's right. But there is value in the ocean and having the wave in us as individuals that are connected to source or the one

kind of losing ourselves, discovering ourselves, waking up because that somehow provides a unique, nuanced experience and perspective of the one that otherwise wouldn't have been previously available. I completely agree. I think that's right. And the one thing that we're trying to do with mathematics

that we're working on right now is to actually take that idea and make it mathematical. Again, the mathematics, will always just be a baby step. But still, to take those ideas that what you're saying is, I think, been part of the wisdom traditions for millennia, that kind of idea, to turn it into mathematically precise things. So what we're doing right now, for example,

we have with the Smarkovian Dynamics of conscious agents. And the way the wisdom ideas get cashed out is that the model, again, it's just a model, but here's what the model says. we can write down a dynamics of this infinite conscious agent that's so-called stationary dynamics there's the there is no entropic arrow of time so it's a dynamical system but the entropy is not increasing well if it is then also centipy is increased air is is moving in the other

direction what do you say um first i'd have to look for stationary dynamics i'm that's a technical thing i'd have to ask about the okay i'll have to look sidebar That's right. But the entropy is constant in the stationary dynamics, but it's a theorem that if I take this dynamics in which there's no entropic arrow of time, and I look at it from any perspective by conditional probability, for example,

then the dynamics that I'll see will be a projected dynamics, and that projected dynamics will have an arrow of time. The entropy will be increasing. So here we are with an entropic error. of time. The model I'm working on is there's a consciousness has no entropic arrow of time. It's timeless and it's also spaceless. But when I look at it from this perspective, so we're talking about perspectives, but now we can deal with mathematical precision. We can say, when we take this perspective, then by the math, the mathematics tells us we're going to get an arrow of time.

So we will get a big bang. And by the way, there's no, it's all one, the consciousness is all one, But when you get inside of the projection, now all of a sudden there are these artificial boundaries. So you get what we call predictive processing and Markov blankets and active inference and so forth. All of this stuff which is sort of modern state of the art neuroscience kinds of things that we're looking to and other computer science looking at ways of modeling thing. All of that breaking into units with Markov blankets separating things and so forth. Active inference, predictive processing to maintain. or boundaries. All of that is not an insight into the deep nature of reality. All of that is an artifact of loss of information in the projection. As is Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Nature red and tooth and claw. What is the fundamental limited resource in evolution? Time. If I don't eat in time, I die. If I don't mate in time, I don't reproduce. If I don't breathe in time, I die. Time is the fundamental limited resource. So I love Darwin's theory. Inside space time, talking about biology inside of our space time, there's no better theory than Darwin's. Having said that wonderful thing about Darwin, every aspect of his theory is an artifact of the projection from space time.

None of it translates to anything about the reality beyond. None of it. So that's a real warning sign to us to be very, very humble about our theories. Darwin's theory is a beautiful theory inside space time. It has no traction outside whatsoever. It's all of it as an artifact. And so we're not moving towards the theory of everything. We should be very, very humble.

I'm curious, do you think that there are levels of fundamental reality that are simply inconceivable to the human mind and understanding? Like we wouldn't expect a monkey to understand quantum mechanics or entanglement or have even the baseline ingredients to be able to have any semblance of anything regarding quantum mechanics, are there things that you think that are simply beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand and deeper levels of reality? I do. I think that the human mind has great capacities and fundamental limitations.

And when spiritual traditions tell us to set aside the human mind now and then, spend time in meditation and put the human mind apart, you, of course, then when you try to reconceptualize what you experienced, you can only reconceptualize it inside the human mind. That's the tool you've got. But in fact, you infinitely transcend the human mind. So you aren't the human mind. You, when you talk to me through these avatars,

we're having to use the human mind, and therefore all of a sudden the bandwidth goes down to a straw, a little tiny straw of information that goes back and forth. But you and I are, in fact, the infinite intelligence looking at itself through this particular little straw. So yeah, the human mind has this incredibly... Write that down. But you are not the human mind.

You transcend infinitely the human mind. But as long you're in this avatar, you can only have a human mind appreciation of that transcendence. I love that. So, I mean, right now we're exploring, you know, the boundaries or limitations of our possible understanding. And I know that you've talked to the value of discovering the limitations of our mathematical theorems and because they show us what's possible and how we can invent GPS

and so much of things that we use and take for granted in our convenient modern society. And it also shows us where it fails, right? And so what is the value of discovering the limitations do you feel like and how it redirects us in our energy and their search? Well, I think it's valuable for a couple reasons. One reason is simply that it's true that the mathematics, as powerful as mathematics is, and I love mathematics, all the theorems that you can prove are a trivial subset of the terms that are out there.

And all the theorems that are entailed by any set of axioms you write down are trivial subset of all the theorems that are true. So it's really important to know that. Once again, I think it's, one way we think about it is that it's the infinite intelligence giving itself a wake-up call, giving its avatars, its projections, a wake-up call. It's plunging itself in all the way with both feet. It's losing itself in there, but it's giving itself a little hint from the mathematics that says, no matter how smart and mathematically precise you are, it's going to be trivial.

compared to the reality beyond. Wake up call, wake up call. You aren't your projection. You aren't the avatar. Reality transcends, infinitely transcends, anything that you can do in your science and your mathematics, which is not to say, don't do your science. I'm a scientist.

I'm not a mathematician. I wish. I wish I work with mathematicians. But I am a scientist. And so I'm all for the science and the mathematics. And it's wonderful to get a better appreciation of this projection, of these avatars. But ultimately, that's a big hint to ourselves,

from Gurdles Incompleteness theorem, for example, that there's infinite exploration beyond which you could even do with your science and your mathematics. So that's a very important wake-up call. So let's explore that incompleteness theorem. I've been geeking out, diving deeper into Kyrgyz's Incompleteness theorem, also his life and who he was as an individual. Very, very interesting,

regarded as one of the most brilliant logicians to possibly have ever lived. And I recall Einstein referring to him as kind of like the smart one. Like he would love to come back and go on long walks with him. And a very interesting individual. Also had these metaphysical practices

of laying down and intuiting mathematical objects and different things like that, which I want to talk to you about in a little bit. but for people that don't know what the incompleteness theorem is how would you break it down in describing truths that are truths but can't be proven well what girdle showed was that if i write down a certain set of axioms like for arithmetic certain you know every number has successor and things like that if my axioms are enough rigorous and enough complicated so substantial enough to actually be able to formulate all of arithmetic,

to formulate arithmetic. Then Gertl showed that he could write down a sentence that was true and could not be proven from your axioms. And that's pretty stunning, right? So that was the brilliance, was to actually use the language of mathematics to write down a sentence that says, I'm true, but can't be proven.

And so he did that. And which you can say, Oh, okay, well, no problem. I'll just take that and add that to my axioms. So now I'm good. I've got, so this statement wasn't provable, so I won't, I'll just throw it in as an axiom. But then Gertil's thing is recursive.

He can then show you another one. And this goes on at infinitum. What this means is Gertl showed that basically, you can't just write down a finite set of axioms and then a set of rules and grind out all the truths. Truth transcends proof. It's the bottom, you know, in three words.

That's girdling in three words. Truth transcends proof. And that's along the lines of what I was saying earlier, that truth transcends any scientific theory. Because every scientific theory is going to have a mathematical set of assumptions, the axioms, and it will have mathematical derivation rules

that are of course, usually at least is good enough for doing arithmetic. So every scientific theory is subject to girdles and completeness theorem, which means that as many truths as you can crank out with your scientific theory, I'm sorry, as many proofs about reality as you can crank out the truth infinitely transcends it.

So this is another bit of humble pie. And again, my take-home message is not don't do science, absolutely do science because science does crank out a lot of interesting proofs that seem to be useful

but it also, to its credit, tells you that it can't give you the whole truth. That's wonderful. So he ascribe binary I believe different numbers to certain equations and theorems to be able to prove this a random example that's just coming to mind

right now. I don't even know if it's accurate but I'd love to hear is if I say this statement, all men are liars. And I'm like, a man, if I am lying, then that kind of eats itself, because is that statement true or false? If I'm lying that

all men are liars, but that entails that I'm telling the truth about all men are liars, but I am also, so it's like it kind of eats itself in a really confusing way. That's right. The liar's paradox is an important point. I don't even know it was like a thing.

It's a very, very big thing in mathematics, and it's There's also the Barber of Seville, which is a similar. The Barber of Seville shaves all and only those who don't shave themselves. Who shaves the Barber of Seville? Right. You get yourself into. So that's where this turns out to be non-trivial in mathematics,

because you get things that Bertrand Russell discovered this issue in set theory. So a lot of mathematics are set on set theory. You know, the set of all integers, for example, or the set of all prime numbers. We have all the sets are very, very important. But Bertrand Russell pointed out that what about the set of all sets that don't contain themselves? Does that set contain itself or not? And you get this liar's paradox kind of thing coming out. And that's still a big, I mean, so what they have often done is, is reduce,

set theory, what they call a class theory, to try to avoid these kind of paradoxes. But my, my take is that this is really not really resolved. I mean, there is this liar paradox kind of thing that goes on in mathematics. And so, yeah, it's pretty deep. But I would say that the big one, though, is that truth transcends proof. And that you kind of in a way have to be, you have to go outside of a system to, like, fully understand it. and that consciousness is not amorphous but structured,

and that structuredness, I guess, goes to infinity. I would agree up to a point. I would say that when you say consciousness is structured, I would say, as a scientist, I'm limited to describing consciousness as structured and having that structure go into infinity. And that's what I'm doing. So what you're describing is what I'm trying to do.

But I actually think that consciousness transcends, structure. infinitely transcends structure. But it can be structured. It's a nice projection of... Sure, like we're structures of consciousness in a way. That's right. But what you are literally does transcend any words or any mathematics period.

But there's an infinite number of perspectives that we could take on the true consciousness. And in many of those perspectives, then you could have infinite mathematical description. description. I'm working on, the paper I'm working on right now is one. So I'm working on a paper right now where, you want to share a little bit about, just a little, just a touch. I love, I love to hear, yeah. So it's, we have this Markovian dynamics, so Markov chains, describing a big social network of interacting conscious agents, an infinite number of them in principle. So it's just like you were talking about. I mean, an infinite structure description of the one consciousness. And I'm doing that because that's,

The best I can do as a scientist, but as I said earlier, I think that consciousness transcends that completely. So I'm putting the humble pie right up front on this. But now, with the humble pie there, now let's look at the fun, fun part of this perspective. It turns out we discovered, just this year, a new order on Markov chains that no one had ever discovered before. and it's a way of saying when one Markov chain in some sense is less than another or entails another. For those who know Markov there, I'll just say it real briefly, you can take a Markov kernel,

and if you take a trace of it of that Markov chain on a subset of a state, like the first three states or something like that, you'll get a new Markovian kernel called the Trace Chain. So you can take a big Markovian kernel, trace it on a subset of its states, and you get a new Markovian kernel that's called the Trace Chain of it. And I can go into an intuition on that if you want to. I can say a little bit more intuitively about what that means. But what this logic is, is we discover that if you say one Markovian kernel entails another or observes another, if and only if it's a trace of the other.

So it's a trace chain of the other. Then you get a complete logic. All consciousnesses are now tied together in this one big logic. you can talk about when they can actually, it tells you how to combine consciousnesses, when they can combine into new higher consciousnesses, and when they can't. It's a non-bullient logic,

and it shows that consciousness can go infinitely far in complexity, in infinitely many directions. There's no one-top consciousness in this model. So even this mathematics is already complex enough to say, whatever consciousness is, there's not just a single little guy at the top. There's an infinite number of directions you can go infinitely far. And so we'll be publishing this year, this paper.

So there's this whole logic of all the little consciousnesses and bigger and bigger consciousness, is how they combine to ultimately point to the one consciousness which transcends our logic. but with this logic this is going to be part of the key for us making the math into space time

and the physics and giving a theory of observation because we now have a theory what does it mean for one consciousness to observe another

if it's a trace of the other and that's going to be we're thinking it's going to be a big big help in physics because

in quantum theory they don't have theory of observation. They don't have a theory of the observer. So when you don't observe something, there's a unitary, linear evolution of the system. But when you observe, whatever process is, whatever system is doing the observation is non-linear, it's non-unitary. And so quantum theory has been out for almost 100 years, 1926 to now, so 98 years.

and no theory of observation because you can't reduce a non-unitary process to a unitary one, you just can't do it. So we're proposing a theory of observation for physics. With what you just described, is it possible that it could be linked to what someone would regard as a kind of contentious

exploration with James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis that the earth is itself a limit, living organism. And I'm curious if this, because it sounds like you're exploring the inter, how consciousness is kind of like linked together, do you feel like conscious agents such as Don, Andre, everybody that lives on Earth and the organisms that live here, like conscious agents could kind of stack to create a bigger one, for example, Gaia. Do you see that as a possibility?

Well, yes, but it's a completely different framework from the Gaia kind of hypothesis. So let me sort of explain the difference in perspective. From the theory of conscious agents, it's saying that consciousness is fundamental, and space time and its objects are just a headset. So to make it really radical, how radical it is, most of us think of ourselves as little 100 to 200 pound tiny objects inside of an infinite space time, with trillions of galaxies and so forth. So on this tiny little 200-pound object

in this massive universe that's been there for almost 14 billion years and so forth. And what I'm saying is, that's completely wrong. Whatever you are, spacetime is a trivial data structure inside you. So you're not this trivial 200-pound object inside this vast space-time.

That vast space-time is a trivial data structure, structure inside you. So that's how radical what I'm saying is much more radical than the Gayle hypothesis. So if you're looking for who's the bigger or not, right? But then the idea is that our, what we view, we look around us, we see what we think is a distinction between animate and inanimate objects. I mean, I'm not worried about hitting this, whereas I'd be worried about hitting you. If I hit the microphone, you know, it might mess up the audio a little bit, but it's not, I'm not worried about causing any pain on anybody.

Whereas if I hit you, I'd be causing pain. So we have this distinction between animate and inanimate objects. And the GAIA hypothesis is starting to sort of play with that, say, well, you know, maybe the difference between living and non-living isn't as, is. tight as we thought. Well, I think that that's right in the following sense. The distinction we make between animate and inanimate objects I claim is completely

unprincipled. There's no principal distinction between animate and inanimate at all. When I in this point of view, the only reality is consciousness. That is the reality. So I'm always interacting with my

headset, space-time headset. I'm always interacting with consciousness. But my consciousness, but my consciousness my headset is dumbing things down, right? That's what headsets do. They're simplifying things. Right now, so I have some insight into your conscious experiences through my headset. But when I look at a mouse, I'll get much less insight, but some.

When I look at an amoeba, much less, when I give you virus, much less. And then when I look at protons, neutrons, none, or rocks, none. But think about it this way. Suppose I'm talking with you on a Zoom screen, and there's a bunch of pixels on my screen. Some of the pixels are pixels of your face, and those pixels provide me with a portal into you, into what you're thinking. I mean, like if you smile, he must be happier. Or frown, he doesn't like what I just said. So I get some insight from those pixels about your conscious experiences, but the pixels of the wall behind you.

No, no insight into consciousness whatsoever. Now, I wouldn't want to say, ah, so there is a distinction between animate and inanimate pixels. Those are the living pixels and those are the... That's dumb. Pixels are pixels. They're part of an interface, a headset or a desktop. And some of them, some pixels provide a portal into the consciousness and others don't. And so this is the way I think about why there's no distinction between animate and inanimate objects.

Space Time is just a head. headset. The headset sometimes gives me insight into consciousness, sometimes it doesn't. That's what headsets do. They dumb things down. That's a limit of the headset, not an insight into reality. So when I look at a rock, I am interacting with consciousness. But my interface is so impoverished that all I get is a rock. Yeah. Now, I hope that the back and forth goes both ways, that Just as the consciousness on the other side can't really affect me too much directly, I can't affect the conscience too much through the rock. If I smash the rock, as I might have to do if I'm building house or something like that,

I would hate to think that I was causing pain on the other side. But I don't know. There's no portal into the conscious experience of a rock. That's right. But, I mean, we could assume that objects with no central nervous system would not be able to feel. pain in that way, but I'm curious. So you think, you believe that all inanimate objects have a degree of sentience, like having a sliver, a type, a scale somewhere of a conscious experience?

I don't, and I don't think the human body has any sentience either, because body is just an interface description. It has nothing. Your body, the body that I see that I call Andre only exists. when I perceive. That body is now gone. It only exists in the instance. So rocks don't have this liver of consciousness because rocks don't even exist when they're not perceived. And the human body, the human brain doesn't exist when it's not perceived. I have no neurons right now. Yeah. So this is when we say local realism is false. Yeah. We have to be completely thorough.

Local realism is absolutely false. And that means the human body only exists when it's perceived. And it doesn't contain consciousness. However, when I see human human, in a body, I know my interface is telling me don't do certain things because my interface has given me a way that could affect consciousness. So I just want to clarify here, are you saying that when you look away from me, I cease to be rendered in your experience? So in a way, I cease to exist. That's right. But the fundamental constituents of my consciousness, although not rendered in real space time still do exist, but completely detached from the way our sensory system would perceive it.

That's right. You're not in space time. Yeah. Space time is in you. Completely. So you're entirely outside of space time. And your body is literally just a pixel description. When I take my camera and point it, the pixels for Andre will light up.

And I now have Andre pixels. As soon as I turn the camera away, those pixels are gone. There is no, and your body is just as ephemeral as that. Even to myself, right? Right now, I have no brain. There's literally no neurons. There's no neuron. Now, if you did a scan, you would find neurons,

but that's because you're intervening and looking. So you get a picture. Now you've got your pixels that you've sort of said, now I've got my pixels making neurons. Okay, fine. But neurons only exist in the act of observation and not. You don't have neurons when they're not perceived, but you do have what neurons are connected to. Would you say that?

Nothing in space time exists when it's not perceived. Nothing. Space time itself doesn't exist when it's not perceived. But the objects... I know, I know. But the objects in space time, they are connected to the structure of reality. Just like the pixels on the desktop are a portal to back and forth that when we're talking about, talking to each other.

Right. So yeah, like a folder on your desktop screen doesn't exist when it's not perceived, but the electrical gates and things that are happening within the computer system, those do exist. In that metaphor they do, but when I let go of, when I then step back and apply that metaphor to all the space-time, then they don't exist anymore. So I use that metaphor just to get people to understand the idea. So for sake of argument, let's assume the computer's real. Yeah.

The circuit's real. People will grant me that. Once they understand, okay, oh, yeah, no, there's no blue rectangular icon inside the computer. You won't find that. So my file on the desktop is not, there's nothing on the computer. It looks like. Once you get that, then you have to kick that ladder away. That includes kicking away the computer itself.

It doesn't exist when it's not perceived. All right. So, yeah, I mean, it's, I feel like no matter how many conversations, I have with you, there's still some more head wrapping. I have to, like, I need to wrap my head around this even further. And I feel like our audience does too. It takes many times of talking about this and exposure to it to like... The rabbit hole goes deeper.

It does. It keeps going. It just seems to keep going. I'm as uncomfortable as you are, by the way. I mean, I have gone through this kicking and screaming myself. Just grasping out to space time as a rug fully gets pulled underneath you. And emotionally, I don't believe it one bit. I can see when I do meditation and so forth.

I realize the amount that this is penetrated into my emotional belief is 1%. Yeah. But the logic, I mean, I just can't argue with the logic. And who knows when my emotions will come along for the ride? There seems to be various enlightened beings, master. of meditation that have emotionally embraced it, what they would say is close to 100%, where they have literally no fear of the body because they clearly have the perception that it is not them, where if somebody comes up to you, God forbid, on the street, and puts a gun to your

head, I'd be scared. Scared to death. Right. It seems like in the metaphysical practices and the contemplative sciences, you can arrive at the place experientially, emotionally, where you truly perceive the source of that which you are and therefore that which you are not does not have the grip over you which is interesting because it requires it requires both the rigorous science and logic to be able to explore these things and explain it with the limited capacity we have for language with language and then the contemplative practices

that allow us to arrive there experientially to become closer and intimate and become one with that which we truthfully are i i completely agree and I think that there are spiritual masters who are there. Eckhart Tolla, for example, I suspect it truly doesn't fear death. And so, and I intellectually think that, well, this is an interesting thing to think about it this way. Think about a video game in which you jump into the video game. And you could be in the game identified with the avatar. That's me.

So if it's a shoot-em-up game and you think you are your avatar, you're going to be scared to death, and you're going to be really alert. And suppose that, I'm Navy SEAL or something. I'm trying to get you ready. So I'm putting you in this game. So I want to somehow drug you so that when you get in the simulation, you think it's real because I want you to be scared to death.

and I want you to learn how to fight in that thing. So I'm going to make you identify it. So here's a drug that makes you identified with your avatar in this VR game. And boy, you really, you. And then we'll slowly let you disidentify from that avatar. And that's what I think is going on here is we're in this. Emotionally, I'm still identified with the avatar. But part of me is recognize, oh, Don, that's just an avatar, is not you.

But the emotional part of me is still plugged into you are an avatar. The meditation process is slowly waking me up to the truth that an avatar is just an avatar. Relax. Yeah. Just relax. It's just your avatar. You are the infinite intelligence of which this whole simulation is a trivial little game that you, it's no effort for you, whatever. It's literally nothing.

and all the wealth and all the possessions you could possibly have, you could be the richest man on earth. It's nothing. It's absolutely nothing. It's just a little game in you, and you could make a billion other much better games than that. So that's, but see, mostly I'm still, it's very, very interesting to know that I am the infinite intelligence.

I've woken up a little bit, but not completely. So I'm still halfway between identifying with the avatar and halfway disidentifying with the avatar. And I agree that there are spiritual masters who have completely disidentified. And I would love to disidentify because it's no fun to be afraid. Yeah.

I find it so interesting how, I think largely around the time of the Vienna Circle and the 19th, 20th century, there was kind of this big divorce between the simultaneous contemplative practices and metaphysical practices alongside the scientific explorations. And like most people don't understand

to the degree in which Newton himself had just as much exploration into alchemy than the sciences. And it makes sense that they're kind of, they're one and the same in the source. And then there's the experiential side and then there's the logical side. There's the particle, there's the wave.

You know, there's two ways to come at something from the top down, from the bottom up, you know, in the way that it's processed. Yes. I'm curious because I know you meditate for like roughly, like two hours a day, at least you sit in silence. And Kurt Godell was somebody who very, very viscerally felt that you could lay down. And he would say he would lay down for hours and get rid of all of his senses. So hearing, tasting, touching, smelling.

He would feel that you could intuit directly mathematical objects that since we're connected to it, There shouldn't be any reason that by abiding in the place in which we are connected to it, that you shouldn't be able to have intuitions around it that then come into your mind or your thought that you could then channel into his work. And he said that he did that very, you know, and he's one of the most brilliant logicians to ever exist. And he was doing that. So I would just be so curious to see what would happen if the most brilliant minds in today's age had those practices to support them on the practices as well. So how do you feel like your practice has personally benefited you on that journey? Well, I think that it's absolutely essential. I didn't start meditating for that reason. I started meditating for the very pedestrian reason that I was having hard time sleeping. And I didn't want to take drugs.

And so I said, well, they all meditate. But then I realized later on, well, there's a lot more to this meditation than just helping me with my sleep. This is a pretty profound transformation that's going on here. So I can't take credit or anything like that. I just was doing it for my own little silly reasons, but then I stumbled on to, this is pretty important. And now I use it explicitly as a tool. I need new ideas. Go into silence.

I mean, when you realize that you are that infinite intelligence, that's what you are. But if you don't let go of your Bayesian priors, you'll only see your posterior. So I have to, how do you let go of your Bayesian priors? There's only one way to do it. That's literally to let go. No thoughts. How can you get into the unknown? if you don't leave the known.

That's exactly right. So I think this is absolutely essential for scientists, and I think that the very best creative ones, whether or not they know it, they go into a moment of silence. The real deep intuitions come. Of course, you have to do your homework. You've studied your math.

So there's no substitute for doing the hard work. It's just like a powerful, brilliant musician without understanding and practicing their skills. Then they can throw it out the window, and it's a part of their unconscious competence, and then they sit down, listen, and something beautiful, the next masterpiece comes through. That's right. You had to do your homework,

but then is when you sort of let go of what you know that the new originality comes through. And Einstein did talk about that. He said that his big ideas came to him in vague images and so forth. And for me, too, it's, I'm no Einstein, by a long shot. But my ideas, when they do come, come from moments of silence.

I've done my homework. I have a problem I'm trying to solve. And then all of a sudden, I follow myself just going deep silence, and then all of a sudden I see something coming. So I think for scientists to actually take advantage of it, to realize you are that infinite intelligence. Let go of your, of course, build your priors. That's what science is.

Build these really good prior. But then let go of them. If you need to transcend Newton, you have to let go of Newton for a while. before you can go to quantum and general relativity and so forth. You have to let go of Newtonian ideas. And so going into the silence beyond any concept is really critical. So it's again an interesting back and forth,

and we're getting a little picture perhaps of what the one is doing all the time is that back and forth between, I've got this perspective on myself, I got the Newtonian perspective, that was fun. Let me go deeper. Oh, now now I've got relativity. oh, now I've got quantum mechanics. And that's still trivial compared to what I am. But that was an interesting new perspective.

And so even these perspectives, as fun as they are, are trivial compared to what you are. What do you say to people that would comment on this podcast, like somebody did the last time saying, what difference does it make if reality is an illusion? The pain I feel is real to me. The joy I feel is real to me. We are having an experience.

that is obviously incredibly valuable, and it feels real to us. So I guess how would you respond to somebody that says, why does it matter if reality is an illusion? Which it might seem like a trite kind of after our whole conversation, you know, it seems silly to ask that question because it has very real implications, but how would you respond to that? Well, I would say a couple things. I think all of us are inquisitive.

Who am I? Why am I here? What is this all about? I mean, maybe some people are not. But I think most of us are. And then most of us, when we start hearing the various stories that people tell, find them, that's probably not good enough. That story is probably not good enough.

And so I think it's really important. because we are inquisitive, and that may be what we're here for, in fact, is why does the one plunge itself into avatars is because it's answering the question, who am I? And is taking an infinite number of different perspectives and looking and saying, oh, from this perspective, I could talk about myself this way. And so there's, and so to find out that this is just a perspective is important that this illusion, this is just a perspective. So I'm using those two things together here. It's a perspective, therefore it's not the truth, therefore it's in that sense illusory, is perhaps as best language

can be used to describe it. What we're here for in the first place. We're here to learn that this is an illusion, but it was an interesting illusion, and look how complicated we are from this point of view, and yet we transcend all of that. So that would be, I mean, one answer. On the other hand, I think if someone persisted in saying that, I'd say, well, that will be another perspective that the one takes on itself from your avatar. And maybe that's what the one needed to see from that perspective as well. That I, hey, relax. And in some sense, yeah, relax. There's nothing that needs to be completed about you. You are already the infinite. So maybe this is just really about enjoying all the perspectives, including the perspective. Who gives it?

Yeah, no, I love that. I'm curious what you think as we've been exploring, like, alternative views from the conventional notion of our understanding of reality, what do you think starts to open into otherwise, like, contentious fields of understanding of out-of-body experiences, precognition, remote viewing, near-death experiences, with this understanding that we've been exploring with consciousness, what implications do you feel like it has in those realms?

Well, if you're a physicalist, these things can't happen. If, like me, you're a conscious realist, I can't rule them out. Now, as a hard-nosed scientist, I'm not happy just to say, I can't rule them out. Therefore, I'm going to say that these things are all real. Absolutely not. I'm going to be hard-nosed still about it. What I'm not going to do is rule them out a priori, but I'm not. more than 100% sure that most of these are probably confabulations, right? Probably most things are

confabulations. But there is, for example, the near-death experiences that seem to be there's some systematic experiences of the tunnel, the light, life review, maybe a decision to come back. That seems pretty consistent. So I wouldn't rule that out at all. But here's where I get hard-nosed about it. As a scientist, I want a theory. Right. So, and I'm working on it, so we'll see. But if spacetime is just a headset, then what does, and in some sense, my experience of me is just an avatar in that,

and now we have these experiences of an avatar going through a tunnel and seeing a white line and review. I want my theory of conscious agents to be able to show how we, make a headset and then show me precisely when that headset is coming to an end for a particular avatar, why or how I could get this tunnel with a light experience. In other words, until I have a scientifically precise theory of this and then can make predictions that are testable, all we have are informal accounts, hints, in other words,

a pre-scientific kind of approach. And what we found throughout human history is, of course, you can do great things without science, and you get geniuses who just have good intuitions and do things. But when you actually get the systematic science stuff, you find out that most of what you believed was nonsense. Most of the things that people did were just plain nonsense. It's not all.

Sometimes, you know, indigenous people have some really deep insights that you can't explain how they got that. But most of the time, there's just plenty of nonsense. So my guess is, if I were a physicalist, I'd say all nonsense, nothing to be saved here. This is all just illusions caused by the brain, activity, and so forth. So I'm not saying that whatsoever. So I'm not saying it's all nonsense. I'm saying it's at least in principles, not all nonsense. I'm saying in practice, probably most of it, 99% of the reports are probably just not accurate. But that doesn't mean that there's something deeper that it isn't true. I think that life does not end with the death of the body. It's just taking

off the avatar. So I think that maybe Hoffman, as Hoffman doesn't exist anymore, but the consciousness that was the true thing behind Hoffman will continue to exist because it's the infinite consciousness. So I may lose everything that I'm attached to in terms of the of the Hoffman ego, all of that has to go. And spiritual teachers tell us to die before he die. And that's, I think that's right. In some sense, if I can die to everything about Hoffman and don't care about Hoffman, because Hoffman's just an avatar, then when there's time for the avatar to go goodbye,

it'll be just like in the video, you know, the VR game. Once I've not identified with the avatar, when this game over, I don't care. That was just my avatar that died. It's not me. my average brother died and then shut down that game. So I guess I'll summarize what I'm saying. I cannot dismiss any of these, you know, the near-death experiences or any of these kinds of things. I can't dismiss them out of hand.

But I think that those who take consciousness as fundamental owe it to everybody to give absolutely rigorous scientific accounts of these things and to hold the highest standards in terms of the data that we try to collect and so forth. So this is not, you know, saying consciousness fundamental is not an invitation to just accept any hypothesis and say, oh, yeah, yeah. It means I'm open to them, but I'm going to be hard-nosed about them. And that's what we should do because if there is something real there, then we want to understand really what it is. I'm curious if you had to give your best guess, if when we die, consciousness still exists, in regards to reincarnation, which there's been some interesting studies about kids that come in and have actual memories that you can verify in the real world of people who have lived that they claim as them,

from where they live to people that were in relationship to, to favorite objects that they had, if it is in the case that somehow this consciousness leaves and then does take another form, how could it possibly be done where, I guess, memory is stored in consciousness and could take on another avatar? Right. Well, that's quite interesting because I was approached by a team of brilliant researchers. one of the head of the team is research scientists at Caltech and most of them are Indian so they're I think more Hindu

philosophy and they're very interested in reincarnation and I actually gave a talk in their workshop at the Science of Consciousness Conference in Tucson back in April and they found out about this trace

logic that I've mentioned and trace chains and Markov chain and they realized that that might actually give them the tools they need for understanding reincarnation. So I've been collaborating with them, and they're going to actually be implementing that logic and trying to start to make predictions from it out of reincarnation. Now, I'm just giving them help to understand the basic logic.

I'm not actually part of their research team, but I'll help them. So I have no ax to grind on this. I mean, I know very little about the theory of reincarnation and so forth. But they do. I mean, they're quite immersed in it. So I'll be very interested to see. But this seemed to be this trace logic of conscious agents, seem to be the first mathematical framework that they'd ever seen that had the potential to begin to address these kinds of questions rigorously, mathematical rigor. So they'll be doing some big simulations, big, big matrices with millions of entries and so forth to try to get at this.

And the kind of question you asked is going to be the kind of question we'll try to answer. How could the memories of one life, one avatar sort of be stored in the network and then download it into another headset and so forth? Right. Yeah, it'd be very interesting. Yeah. But so finally, we have a mathematical framework that's rigorous enough and can be implemented in computers to test it. Which is fun. I mean, at least with science, you can actually test things like, oh, most of the time you realize your ideas were just wrong.

that's just wrong. Whereas if you don't have the mathematics, you can believe for many many years that you're on the right track when you're deeply wrong. You mentioned how our understanding of space time and Newtonian physics has bared many fruits and technologies that we use in everyday, in the everyday world.

What do you think could be some possible practical applications of this new understanding of consciousness and how it would change how we live in the practical world tactically? I think that you can't think big enough on what it's going to do. Quantum mechanics opened up incredible technologies that are mind-blowing.

What are some fields perhaps that you think would be like revolutionized? Well, transportation, for example. So right now, there are billions or maybe even trillions, but at least billions of galaxies that would be fun to explore. The nearest one is more than 2 million light years away.

That's the nearest one. Well, even if we're traveling through space near the speed of light. That's a long, long time. If you put some humans on the spaceship, the great, great, great, great, great, great, grandkids won't be alive. So you can see, and that's our nearest galaxy.

So going through space time and seeing any of the real estate is just not possible with our current way of the thing. But what if you realize that space time is just a headset? And you know the code. So in some sense,

so think about someone who's, again, a real wizard at Grandkids. and theft auto. They know how to drive their car faster than anybody else and they know all that, they know the terrain and they can beat everybody. That's great. But if you're the software engineer who wrote the code, well, you can do things that are magic to the wizard. You can give them a flat tire any time you want to. You can take the gas out of his tank. You can change the geometry of the roads. You can take his car and move it from one side of the game to the other instantly, just like that by changing a pointer. Well, when we're, this theory of conscious agents

is really the first layer of software outside of our space-time headset. We're starting to learn how the game is rigged. How do we play? What is a software that's playing the spacetime game? Once we understand that, I don't think we'll have to go through spacetime to the Andromeda Galaxy.

We can go around space-time. We can just be there. And that's just one. I think you just can't think big enough. Once you know the software, You can change the game pretty much any way you want to. It feels like there's not an area of life that it wouldn't revolutionize. Think about healing.

If you understand the deeper dynamics of how the projection of all of ourselves work together, what we maybe would have spent decades trying to heal physiologically or travel to within the limits of the speed of light. all of a sudden, like, miraculously cease to exist because you're working with dynamics outside of the headset. That's right. So I think, you know, in medicine, probably there'll be all sorts of remarkable things.

So as I mentioned earlier, the 86 billion neurons and roughly the same number of glial cells make the brain is really complicated. But we're going to be going to the more complex software outside of it. We'll actually be able to understand to maybe rewire the brain outside of space time. and then rewere. And also understand

systems in the body at a much deeper level and then rewire them. So yeah, I think that the revolution in medicine will be remarkable. What do you think it will take for the brilliant physicists that are currently out there to pivot their intelligence to exploring realities beyond space time,

beyond the headset? Well, the Universe Plus project that the European Research Council has funded already has over 100s high doing that. So they're funding, they look for these new positive, and understanding these positive geometries beyond space time.

That's very different than saying that they're after consciousness, but they're not. I mean, maybe individuals are, but that's not what the ERC is up to. My hope, I'm actually trying to get one of these. Trying to recruit one of them. I've got money for it.

So I've got money for a postdoc. for two postdocs. So if someone's got, what I need is someone with a recent PhD in algebraic geometry, specific branch of mathematics, algebraic geometry, which is really critical to these positive geometries, or a real understanding of high energy theoretical physics, in particular the amplitude, hedon, and so forth. Because in the current paper, we're going to make a projection to a special case of the amplitude heedron for, but we would like to have someone who can actually help us do the real whole deal. So we want to do proof of concept in this paper and show that we can actually, You start with conscious agents and predict scattering of gluons in space time so that we now can go all the way.

So we've got the little bridge across. Now we need someone to help us build the whole thing, right? A big, big road across. So we're looking for relative new PhDs in high-duty theoretical physics or algebraic geometry geometry can help us with this. But ultimately, once we do that, if we could, can actually make a prediction, a new prediction inside space time from a dynamical system of Markov, of conscious agents. We can show that these positive geometries arise from it. We can actually make new predictions that are testable and then come out to be true inside

space time. We won't have any trouble at that point, getting people. Now, we may have trouble having them take it seriously as consciousness. They might say consciousness, who cares about that? But you've got a Markovian dynamics outside of space time. I'm good with that. So let's just, let's go with that. And so it's not going to be a proof of consciousness being fundamental, but it'll be perhaps an indication that a Markovian dynamical

system outside of space time is an important next step in science. And that would be fine with me. If they dismiss the conscience stuff, that's perfectly fine. I completely respect that. But I would be loving to give me, these guys are brilliant,

guys in the generic sense. These people are brilliant. And much more smart in this stuff than I am. And so I'll just be able to then kick back and try to read their papers. That's what I want. Yeah. I'm so curious to see what evolves in that space and then also globally. I mean, as these new innovations and discoveries come on board,

I'm curious to see what happens with religious fundamentalists, with people's understanding of perceptions on God to. Would you say that I don't love, the term or using it because it's so tainted, but the closest thing approximating the term God would be the collective consciousness of all that is? Well, I would say that the word God and the word collective unconsciousness, or collective conscience, are pointers and that the thing itself completely transcend. It is not even a thing, right?

Going back to the mint. Yeah, even to say the thing itself. is already a mistake. Right. Right. So all these things are pointers to something that transcends. And again, I said something. So as soon as I start using language,

everywhere, as soon as I say something, I realize, wrong again, wrong again, wrong again. Maybe for the next podcast you should just sit here in silence for a few hours. Well, that's right. And bore people to death. Enlighten them. So I think the, the deepest rigorous,

thing I've seen so far is this trace logic on the space of conscious, of Markovina. But that's, but having said that, I then will immediately say it's a baby step and compared to the reality, zero, right? So, so I think that we can go infinitely beyond what I've done, what my team has done with this Markov trace chain thing. But, and even if we go infinitely beyond it, and we do that for a trillion years, will be 0% of the way toward understanding what you already are completely. Because it's infinite. It's completely infinite.

No matter how big the number gets, it's still nothing in comparison. And that puts the light of dogmatism, right? It's really, dogmatism is really missing the point. Dogmatism is missing the point that what you can say about it, is never it, never it. There's no right formulation of words. And killing people, because their formulation of words is different from yours,

is really to miss the point that, you know, I don't know what the word is for mint in Spanish, but saying mint in Spanish versus saying in English is nothing to kill over. Hey, we're pointing to the same thing. You're just saying it in Spanish, I'm saying it in English.

Don't, let's not kill each other over it. We're pointing to the same thing. which is what you are and what everybody else is. They are that. And they are that completely already. But it's interesting that the one consciousness chooses to put itself into avatars and let itself get so wrapped up that it forgets itself. And it kills, it has some avatars kill others.

Ultimately, when you realize it's just an avatar, in some sense nothing was really ever lost. When you, with your friends and you shoot up your friend's avatar, and then afterwards you take off your headsets, laugh, have a beer together, and it's just your avatar. It's just like the, I don't know if you've seen the film Ready Player 1, but I love it. And it gives a perfect description of what could be very real

in the next 20 to 30 years, if not less, where you have a setup that you plug into with a headset and biofeedback technology that plugs you into another reality that is extremely real. And if the rise of technology is at all moving forward, given enough time,

we will come to the place where our games, we can plug into another virtual reality that seems extremely real. And you take like GTA or Sims just further down the line as AI and technology advances, it's not far.

off from the future reality that we could create what is like a simulation and people and what seems to be conscious beings having an experience whether or not they are is up for debate but then we get lost in the sauce so to speak we think that we are the character and yeah you've given a lot of important pointers to waking up beyond who we are in this headset yeah and i think that you're right that there's going to be an infinite number of directions we can explore with different kinds of simulations and so forth and exploring different physics, right? We can change the laws of physics in these new worlds and see how we adapt to them. Why don't it have instead of a three dimensions of space, one or four dimensions of space? Actually, a friend of mine, Mike Desmura,

professor of UCI, probably 20 years ago, was already doing that with his graduate students. They were making four dimensional worlds and having people learn to plan these four dimensional worlds and one of the graduate students claimed in their thesis that people were learning to actually experience, you know, they actually see in four dimensions. And I didn't buy, I let him get his Ph.D., but I didn't buy that. But I think if you trained infants, but I don't think you can do this for ethical reasons, but if you trained infants, possibly, possibly they might be able to develop a four-dimensional, a real four-dimensional space-time experience. So yeah, I think that we can certainly push the parameters and our imagination is the only limit. I'm very interested to see what happens

as we can also within the headset explore the boundaries of what our senses are capable of. Forgot the scientists or researcher that was Anna Kaharis who we just head on was referring to, but they're actually training, like, for example, the sense of the magnetic field of the earth and you could develop that sense to know where North is

based off of wearing this device and it's a new sense that you could develop and have the capacity for there is I believe it's the Kogi tribe in South America where within the first seven years the chosen shaman children

largely live in darkness which you could say is unethical we could say many different things but they are developing a completely unique relationship to their internal reality than people in the Western world is like the opposite end of the spectrum and what that unlocks for their capacity to navigate those realms, you know, in their own consciousness. It's very interesting. It really is. And also David Eagleman has been doing this kind of research, where he's been sort of augmenting our senses in various interesting ways.

You could even have people that could sort of have the stock market information being played onto their body and they could sort of feel when it's time to buy and when it's time to sell and so forth. They can build these intuition. So, yeah, there's a lot of untapped potential that we could use. I think it's really fascinating. Right now, we're doing this using just what we know about the neuroscience inside the headset. Once we actually have stepped outside the headset and we know the software behind the neuroscience, then those kind of technologies, I think, are going to be even more powerful.

Yeah. Do you think we will create conscious AIs? So that's a good question. Most people, when they answer that question or even ask it, what they're thinking about is this framework, that building a conscious AI means we're starting with these unconscious circuits and software, physical stuff in space and time. That's the fundamental reality.

But if we get the right kind of complexity in the circuit and the software, then the unconscious circuits and software will give rise somehow to the conscious experience. So that's the way most people take your question and they try to answer it. They'll say, oh, yeah, sure. Of course we know that physical systems can create consciousness. Your brain is a physical system and it creates consciousness. Neurons, neural circuits create consciousness. So yeah.

So most people, that's the kind of answer they're going to give. My answer is very, very different. I say that neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived. Circuits and software don't exist except as ideas in my mind. So I've got to rethink the question entirely. Here's how I rethink the question.

Inside my headset, there are certain portals to consciousness. One is what I call the Andre body. That's a portal into consciousness. And we have one technology for, that we know of, that works for creating new portals into consciousness. And that technology is having kids. So that's, it's low tech, but it works. So we actually, we have a technology that opens up new portals into consciousness.

So, from this point of view in which consciousness is fundamental, if we can actually reverse engineer with the, maybe the consciousness theory is the first baby step, understand that technology. What are we doing when we have kids? from the point of view of conscious agents, how is a new headset being created? Once we've reverse engineered that, then we can ask ourselves,

can we do it ourselves? Can we just take that and do it abstractly? Instead of doing it through human mating, can we actually do it in some sense technologically? And I think ultimately the answer is probably yes, we'll be able to open up new portals. And when we do it, it may be that certain of the technologies we use

will look in our headset like artificial intelligences on computers, circuits. But now notice that the answer is completely different. I'm not saying that the circuits and software are creating the technology, the consciousness.

I'm saying that consciousness is fundamental. What looks like technology is an interface representation that only exists when you happen to see it. So it doesn't even the software and hardware aren't even there when you don't look. The only thing is there are the conscious agents, but through your headset, it looks like a, you know, a conscious

robot that you're interacting with. So you can see why I had to give a long answer. If I just said yes, but the ultimate, the answer is yes, I think we could do it. But you can see that that would have given you entirely the wrong perspective on what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, the first example you gave is like, if you've seen Ex Machina, the movie, where they essentially develop the set, through the wetware and the hardware, this sentient AI humanoid robots, that would be creating it, essentially creating consciousness through

figuring it out throughout like Newtonian world essentially. If you assume that physicalist framework, you're not going to understand really what you're doing. Now, it may be that ultimately we'll find with this theory which consciousness is fundamental, we'll figure out what we have to do inside of our headset

to be, and maybe it look like the ex-Machina kind of thing. But what we'll realize is that what we're really doing is rearranging this network of conscious agents. It looks like neurons or circuits and software inside space time. But what we're really doing is this new programming of conscious agents or whatever transcend conscious agents. So it still may work out that way, but the real scientific theory will be much deeper than space time.

And by the way, that's now, that's not just a cognitive scientist saying that this now the European Research Council putting 10 million euros on the line saying, these positive geometries outside of space time are the real deal. This is the way forward. Let's let's do this. Incredible. Man, I'm just so, I love, thank you so much for your time today. I'm just so, it brings me joy.

Like, I just feel like a giddy kid who discovered a new toy. Every time I get to dive deep into this discussion that just, like, lights me up so much. Because starting to slowly chip away at a model of, understanding the world, which has so many implications of how we navigate within it and diving deeper into the truth as like, you know, that's the goal with here in the Know Thyself podcast to discover the true nature of ourselves and the world around us. And I, just putting it out there in the field, I have the vision of producing these high quality roundtable discussions around specific areas of life, one being music as medicine, another being around consciousness

theories. And so I'm excited to, hopefully in the next 12 months, I'm just going to find the location and find, you know, the way we want to do it because it's a full thing to like have six-state individuals. Fun. To start to create these conversations that can be shared in, in all of its nuance, in all of its many different perspectives, to start to like refine each other's perspective in a way that can be perceived for the masses and for people online to be able to watch. and intrigue interest for people that might want to go down this path and find the way that the one uniquely wants to express itself through them. And so be on the lookout for that.

I'm excited to have something like that in the future as well. I think that's an excellent idea. I think that actually something new could come out of it when you bring people together that are thinking roughly the same, but not exactly the same. And they've done a lot of work. They're thinking about it really, really deeply. then you get some new sparks that they could really light something up.

Yeah, yeah. And I know researchers obviously do that in their own accord behind closed doors and whatnot. Oh, absolutely. But it's interesting when you put it in the media, you know, and for people to view. And it's like the parable of the blind man and the elephant, you know. Let's sit down at a round table, put this elephant on the table and start talking about it. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Sweet. So amazing. Now, is there anything else you want to share with our audience, having under, you know, the context of the conversation? we just have that you would like to wrap up on or share before we close? I would just say one thing is this is the Know Thyself podcast. It's about Know Thyself. And I would just say that what I've learned is that whatever you are transcends any description. Not said.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. Everybody that's been tuning into this episode, if you made it through nearly two and a half hours, you're my kind of people. I just love to share this joy and this conversation and dialogue. So thanks for coming on this journey. As always, let us know in which ways this has uniquely impacted you. And until next time, be well. Thank you, Don.