Know Thyself - E63 - Donald Hoffman, Proof That Reality Is An ILLUSION: The Mystery Beyond Space-Time

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

In this thought-provoking episode, cognitive psychologist and author Donald Hoffman takes us on a journey through the mysteries of consciousness and reality. From questioning the nature of what we perceive to pondering the existence of inanimate consciousness, Hoffman challenges conventional beliefs and explores the profound implications of proving local realism false.  He delves into topics such as the illusion of free will, the role of love in metaphysics, and the possibility of reincarnation. Prepare to have your mind expanded as we contemplate the nature of reality itself and how this paradigm-shifting understanding will change everything.  Download André's FREE Book Recommendation List: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: (0:00) Introduction (2:30) The Question of Consciousness & Evolution (9:56) Is What We See Real?  (12:47) Implications of Proving Local Realism is False  (16:55) Are Inanimate Objects Conscious? (24:53) What Makes Something Conscious? (29:06) We’re looking at the problem wrong  (40:34) How evolution hid the truth from us  (47:22) Conscious Agents: what’s outside of space time? (54:00) Are We in a Simulation? (1:00:40) Seeing the Oneness in All (1:02:38) Concepts of Karma and Reincarnation (1:07:00) Implications on how we act in the world  (1:12:02) Self Compassion (1:13:35) Death & Facing the idea of impermanence  (1:17:14) Does reincarnation exist?  (1:22:41) Meditation & Spiritual Practices (1:30:30) The role that love plays in metaphysics  (1:31:54) Free will & The illusion of choice  (1:41:40) How Relationships Serve Purpose on the evolution of consciousness  (1:45:23) AI & technology assisting the collective awakening  (1:53:52) What it takes to prove this theory (1:58:30) This will change everything  ___________ 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/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

Each one of us is the deepest reality and the deepest truth and the deepest love that is possible. Most of us are spending our lives completely ignorant of who we really are. Most of my colleagues, they assume that space time is fundamental, which is false. They assume that brain activity somehow gives rise to conscious experiences, which is false. And what they're missing is this. Space and time and objects in space and time do not exist when they're not perceived. We've mistaken a limit of our headset for an insight into. to the nature of reality.

There's that old saying if a tree falls in the woods and no one sees it, does it still make a sound? But you're saying, like, does the tree even actually exist? That's exactly right. The question then is what's outside of our space-time headset? Science will continue to progress because we are not little three-pound brains. We are the infinite intelligence.

Each of us is infinitely precious and infinitely intelligent. Anything that you can say is perhaps ultimately trivial compared to the reality that you are. But on the other hand, you can know it, not intellectually, but by being. Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know They Self podcast, where every single week we get the honor and privilege and opportunity

to sit down with a brilliant mind, a deep soul, to see what we can learn more about the true nature of self and the world around us at deeper and deeper levels. My guest today has a PhD in cognitive psychology. He is a professor of cognitive sciences at UCI, whose groundbreaking research shakes the very foundations of our understanding of reality. He is an author of visual intelligence and the case against reality.

His extensive research in cognitive psychology and evolutionary game theory has made him a leading figure in the field of consciousness studies. His theory suggests that our perception of the world is not a direct representation of objective reality, but rather our brains construct reality as a user interface, almost like a desktop screen that is to a computer in order to help us navigate the world. And it's with that, therefore, that reality is much more illusory than we potentially think it is, and that we may be even living in a simulation of sorts. Today, we're going to be exploring these ideas at depths and exploring the implications that they have about our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Dr. Donald Hoffman, thank you for being here. My pleasure. Thanks a lot for having me, Audrey. Yeah, it's my honor. I've been really loving, just digesting more of your content and your books. And it's so mind-bending and opening. and I would love for you just to start out with like what the technical question that you and your team set out to kind of answer as you started on the journey that you're on. Well, so there's a couple strands to our research. One is evolution and what does it entail about sensory systems?

And does evolution shape sensory systems to see reality as it is or not? That's one strand of our research. And another strand is the question of consciousness. and can we as scientists get a mathematically precise model of consciousness and of its relationship to physical objects like brains and neurons and so forth? And does consciousness arise from the brain or what is that relationship? And so those are the two strands, evolution and what it shapes sensory systems to see and consciousness in its relationship to the physical world.

and our work on evolution has focused on a technical question. Does evolution of a natural selection shape sensory systems to see truths about objective reality, true structures of objective reality? And most of us would say, well, of course, I mean, it's all about fitness, and surely seeing the truth is going to make you more fit. and that seems like just a no-brainer. Sure. And many of my colleagues think that. But when you look at Darwin's theory with mathematical precision, as we can with the tools of evolutionary game theory,

which was John Maynard Smith brought the tools of game theory, which is a mathematical theory, together with Darwin's ideas to give us evolutionary game theory. So we can actually now not just talk informally about what evolution does, we can actually write down mathematical equations and run simulations and so forth. And so I decided with my graduate students, including Justin Mark, Brian Marion, and others, to address this question. It's a nice, clean, technical question. So what is the probability that natural selection would shape our sensory systems, any sensory systems, to see any truths about the structure of reality?

And by structure, I mean, you, for example, maybe there's a reality has some distance metric. Things are far apart. So what is the probability that it tells us true is about distances or orders like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is a total order? If the real reality has some total order, what's the probability that evolution would shape our sensory systems to see that total order? And topologies and other things you can imagine. So we went at it and I thought, you know, maybe evolution will do things on the cheap. and so maybe every once in a while it won't show us the truth

because you don't want to waste calories but when we got into it I was surprised it turned out that the math was very very clear there are selection pressures against seeing the truth period in fact our theorems basically tell us that the probability

that any sensory system of any organism has ever been shaped to see any aspect of objective reality, any structure of objective reality, is precisely zero in the limit. Precisely zero. Zero. Zero. And intuitively, I mean, that sounds crazy. But intuitively, the reason is, well, I'll give a couple reasons. First, evolution shapes sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior. Any evolutionary biologist would agree with that. and basically what I'm saying is, yes, it shapes sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior, period.

It doesn't shape them in addition to see truths. And that seems so counterintuitive, but that's really what evolutionary theory is telling us. And Stephen Pinker talked about this in a paper of his, also in a book called How the Mind Works, but in a paper called So How Does the Mind Work? and he outlines, for evolutionary reasons, in that beautiful paper, about, you know, why there would be selection pressures against true beliefs and true perceptions. So Steve's work is brilliant, but he left open the door that we might have some true perceptions about everyday objects. So that was, my focus was about those everyday objects, like tables and chairs and the moon and the sun and so forth. And there we, basically, Pinker's logic continues even for those objects.

And we don't see the truth even there for everyday middle-sized objects. So I'll give a brief technical reason why. And then I'll give an informal. Technically, evolution, as formulated by evolutionary game theory, think of it as a game. And to win a game, you have to get more points, right, than your competition. for example, or enough points to get to the next level or something. So in evolutionary theory, the points are what they call payoff functions. So if I'm a lion and I'm hungry, a cow or a steak would have great payoff for it for me as a lion.

If I'm the same lion and I'm full and I want to mate, well, a cow has no payoff for me at all. Right. So there are these payoff functions that tell you roughly the evolutionary points you're going to get, which correspond to your chances of reproduction in the evolutionary theory. And so these are mathematical functions. There are functions from the world, whatever the world is. The world, its state, the organism, like the lion, its particular sensory systems and its particular physiological state like Hungary or sated. and the action, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating, you know, the famous 4Fs. So it's a complicated function from the world into payoff values, say zero was a bad payoff to 100, which is a great payoff. It doesn't matter what the numbers are, but say 0 to 100 or 0 to 1,000. And so what we do is we actually analyze.

Do those fitness payoff functions actually contain information about the structures of reality? Mathematically, we'd say, are they homomorphisms of the structure? of reality. That is, do they preserve these structures? And so that's what I'm working with Chaitan Prakash more recently. So I did simulations, but then when we got a hint that this was what was going on, I went with a wonderful friend of mine, long-term collaborator, Chaiton Prakash, who's a mathematician. And so Chayton has proven these terms. I'm not blaming him, but, you know, and what we found is that the probability is precisely zero. You can, there are some payoff functions that will preserve objective reality structures.

There's not that there aren't any. But when you take the ratio of the number that preserve the structure's reality versus all of them, the total number of payout functions, that ratio goes to zero as the number of states in the world and the number of payoff functions gets larger. So would you say that what we see is connected to the structure of reality, but that the structure of reality is made up of something completely different than what we're experiencing? Yes, it's connected, but very, very different. And so here the informal, now talk about the informal metaphor that you mentioned earlier on, which is like a user interface on your computer. If you're writing an email and the icon on your desktop is blue and rectangular for email you're writing, that doesn't mean the email itself is blue and rectangular.

And if the icon's in the middle of the screen, it doesn't mean your email is in the middle of your computer. Anybody who thought that just misunderstands the desktop interface is not there to like resemble. the truth, it's there to hide the truth, which is diodes and resistors and magnetic fields and voltages. You're actually toggling millions of voltages in a precise sequence to write that email. If you had to do that, good luck. If you had to do it directly. If you had to see the reality and do that directly, you never send your email out. So the user interface allows you to interact with reality and control the reality with the kind of precision you need,

even though you're utterly ignorant. Most of us have no idea about the voltages that we're toggling. We're completely ignorant about the reality that we're actually interacting with. And so that's what evolution did. Evolution gave us our senses, you know, seeing, hearing, smelling, and so forth, as a virtual headset, so to speak. We got a headset to play the game of life, and that headset hides reality,

but allows us to control objective reality in the ways that we need. So it's like if you're playing, I like the Grand Theft Auto, like VR kind of analogy. If you're playing a multiplayer game, I might be playing with someone in China or India or whatever around the world. And I can look over with my headset on looking over to see a red Ferrari. And my friend in China might all say, oh yeah, I see a red Ferrari. But, of course, the red Ferrari is only there when I render it. When I look, the pixels appear in my headset. I then see a red Ferrari.

But there's no red Ferrari on the supercomputer. And if I look away, my friend in China might say, well, I still see a red Ferrari. Well, she's seeing her red Ferrari, the one that she's creating in her conscious experience from her headset. So we have the feeling,

we could have the feeling that the red Ferrari is always there. But in fact, there is no red Ferrari anywhere except in the moment of someone's perception. So this is really fascinating and this conversation

is going to be very trippy. So the Nobel Prize that was kind of recently awarded for proving that local realism is false is speaking to this, right? It's like there's that old kind of saying if a tree falls in the woods and no one sees it, does it still make a sound? But you're saying like, does the tree even actually exist if no one's perceiving it? So what's right? What are the powerful implications of, you know, proving that local realism is false? What does that mean? Right. So that's a good

point to move to because someone might say, well, you know, it's one thing to talk about evolution, but you're talking about objects in space time. That's not evolutionary theories, Baileywick. That's physicists. Surely the physicist will put you in your place and tell you that you're full of it. Well, but as you said, the Nobel Prize last year in physics went to three physicists who had done a lot of empirical work

actually verifying the predictions of quantum theory that local realism is false. So Anton Zylinger and John Klauser and Alan Aspect were the winners. So local realism has two parts, the local and the realism. Realism is the statement that physical objects like an electron or proton have definite values of their properties like position and momentum and spin, even if they're not observed. That's realism. So things exist and have their properties even if they're not observed, which we all intuitively say, of course. And then local is the claim that those properties have influences that propagate through space time no faster than the speed of light.

You know, Einstein's got the speed limit on them. So that's local realism. And it turns out that local realism is false. and Klauser did the first experiments decades ago and didn't get the Nobel Prize because this is the kind of stuff where you really want to nail it down. So then Aspect did some more and then Zilinger did some more.

So after decades and decades, even the conservative body like the Nobel Committee says, okay, games up. Local realism is fault. Now, some people will say that this doesn't rule out super determinism. We can talk about that if you want. but local

I think it's very very clear in the quantum formalism that objects do not have definite values of their properties when they're not observed now

some people will try to wiggle out and say well that's for microscopic stuff you know subatomic particles and so forth but tables and chairs that's a different story well there's no

no one's given a principled account that says that macro first quantum theory holds at all scales. So it's just false to say that quantum theory

is the theory of the small and something else is the theory. It's just false. Quantum theory is the theory, quantum filter is the theory of physics, especially and also gravity, Einstein's gravity. So you can't say local realism is false only for small particles

but not for everyday macroscopic objects. We can talk about the collapse of the way function and so forth if you want, go into the weeds on it a little bit more. But if we don't want to go into the weeds, I'll just say, this is true at all scales. And so what I'm saying then is that evolution by natural selection independently agrees with what the physicist just won the Nobel Prize for. It says that what you see is not the truth. You render the objects that you see

on the fly, including all their properties. And that's why local realism is false. The reason it doesn't have the properties is because it doesn't even exist. The moon exists when you perceive it. And when you don't perceive it, it doesn't exist. So that's where I wanted to go next, because you look at like, you know, these celestial entities, like the moon or planets. The fact that they wouldn't exist when no conscious mind is perceiving them is a very baffling idea. How could something, you spoke to how this works at all scales, right? So it doesn't matter if it's a chair or if it's the moon. But I suppose how do you define consciousness then? Because could you say then that the moon has a consciousness of its own?

What about, you know, is there like a scale of sentience for animal life that would perceive the moon? And can you break down more how it's actually possible that the moon doesn't exist when we don't perceive it? Right. That's pretty mind bending. I think a lot of help comes. if you think about the virtual reality headset metaphor. Almost all of your questions will get resolved if you think in terms of that metaphor. So just imagine that I'm in a virtual world that has a moon and the sun in virtual reality, but it's all in my headset. And I have other, it's a multiplayer game, so other people are, you know, maybe I'm playing tennis, for example.

And I have the tennis ball and I'm hitting it. And my partner hits the tennis ball back. Well, now I could play a game and say, well, you know, but, but. the tennis ball is real because, look, I'm going to take the tennis ball, drop it. My partner, Mary, do you still see the tennis ball? Yeah, it's still there. It's on the ground. That proves that the tennis ball was there.

Well, no, it doesn't. Mary just had her pixels in her headset. There's some supercomputer that's coordinating everything, but there's no green tennis ball inside the supercomputer. And so any question that you have, that anything that's stumping you, just think about a multiplayer virtual reality game, take your question into that. and you will then see how to answer your own question. I usually like to give that metaphor now because people send me emails all the time.

And I find myself always saying, okay, here's the virtual reality headset metaphor. When you think about it in that case, you'll get the right answer every time. So, but now your question was also about what is consciousness? And, you know, for example, we might say that a rock isn't conscious, but maybe, you know, an amoeba, I don't know. Maybe an ant, I don't know, but maybe at the time I get to a mouse, possibly a concessly, conscious, a cat, yeah, and that tends to be our intuition. But again, that isn't listening to what our best science is telling us. Space and time and objects in space and time do not exist when they're not perceived. It's just a headset. So the distinction that we make between

living and non-living is not principled. It's an artifact. of the limitations of our headset. The distinction we make between conscious and unconscious is not principled. It's also an artifact. I'll give you an example to bring that home. Suppose you're on a Zoom discussion with some friends, and you see the face of your friend. There's some pixels associated with,

and then also a wall or a chair behind them. Well, you might say, well, some of the pixels are conscious. The pixels related to, those are conscious pixels. and the pixels for the desk and the chair are not conscious. Well, that's silly. Pixels are just pixels. Sometimes they give you insights about consciousness in the person's face and their expression,

and sometimes they don't when you're, you know, the chair and the desk and so forth. But pixels are neither conscious nor unconscious. And now this is all a headset. So all you're seeing are the pixels. When you're looking around, you're just seeing the pixels, and the distinction you make between living and non-living, conscious and unconscious, is not principled.

It's an artifact of the limitations of your headset. So in my view, then, see, the physicists have said, quantum theory tells us that physical particles don't have properties when they're not observed. And then high-energy theoretical particle physicists, like David Gross, Niemar, Connie Ahmed, and others, they're at the very forefront of physics looking, okay, well, what's next?

What they're saying, and this is a quote, space time is doomed. Space time itself is not fundamental. It's been a space and time under Newton was the foundation of reality. And then since Einstein in 1905,

space time has been in science, the fundamental reality. But now, in 2023, it's over. It's had a good ride. Space in time have had a good ride. They were a very, very useful assumption, but now science has moved on. Space time is not fundamental. And physicists are finding new structures beyond space time, something like decorated permutations or mathematical structures beyond space time. But they don't know what this means. They're finding mathematical structures, but what is it beyond space time? So what I'm pursuing with,

this other strand of our research is the idea that consciousness is fundamental. And consciousness is the reality beyond space-time. In fact, space-time just is a pretty trivial headset that certain consciousness is probably not most, probably very few consciousness is used. So I'm proposing a complete inversion of how we think about space and time and consciousness. most of us think of space and time as fundamental and you are a little body 100 to 200 pound body in space time and three pounds of brain create consciousness so so that's the standard view

but that doesn't match our best science now our best science is saying space time is not fundamental local realism involves space time is just a headset whose headset i'm proposing let's turn it around. Consciousness is fundamental. Space time is a trivial data structure, a trivial headset. And it's only got four dimensions, three of space, one of time, in string theory, maybe 10 or 11. Why not 20 billion? I mean, my actual, and actually space time falls apart at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. It falls, that's what physicists will say. It doesn't even have any meaning, operational meaning, past 10 to the minus 33. No, so not 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters, just 10 to the minus 33, the thing falls apart. So we thought that space and

time are the fundamental reality. They're a cheap headset, a really, really cheap headset. A very enchanting cheap headset, right? It feels very real. It's all we know. Yeah. So, I mean, we just opened up so much here. And I'm so excited to spend the rest of this podcast breaking down, digesting a lot of this, especially in the later part of this conversation, exploring some of the moral, ethical implications of all this. But first, I want to kind of go back to this distinction between consciousness and what's alive and what's not. We, I think, like to kind of separate our thinking from a human as conscious. Maybe a rock isn't conscious, certainly less conscious. Is an electron alive? Would you say that an electron is alive or conscious, or is alive and conscious two separate

things in your view? Well, so when I look at you, I just have a visual experience of a human body. That visual experience is not alive or dead. That's just my visual experience. And it's not you. You are a conscious entity. And my experience of you is just my experience through my headset. And so I would say that the image that I have of you, my perception,

that is neither alive nor not alive. It's just a portal to your consciousness. And it's one of the best portals I have. the human form in my perception is one of the best portals I have into consciousness. The cat form is a portal, but not quite as good. I can tell when my cat is hungry. If I've petted it enough and it's had enough. But with an ant, you know, a little bit about it's alive for sure,

and a little bit about what it likes and dislikes. But when I get to Iraq, you might say, well, it's totally unconscious. No, it just means that my interface gave up. I'm always so the idea is I'm always interacting with consciousness my headset has limitations with humans it gives me some

but not very good actually you could live with someone for many many years and still have lots of stuff you don't know about them about their conscious experience how they see the world you can still be surprised so so we've mistaken a limit of our headset for an insight into the nature

of reality. I see a rock and it looks pretty dumb to me. Well, it's not because I'm interacting with a dumb reality. It's because my headset has to give up. It's simplifying things. It's dumbing things down. So when I'm interacting, so I'll be very, very clear. When I pick up a rock, I am interacting with consciousness. And I'm not saying the rock is conscious, right? I'm not saying the rock is conscious. The rock is just my experience. So, so for example, let's do the VR metaphor again with Grand Theft Auto. When I grab the steering wheel of my car,

I'm doing something inside the computer. But there's no steering wheel inside the computer. So that's the key thing to keep... I'm always, in that metaphor, I'm always interacting with diodes and resistors and voltages. That's what I'm always doing. Sometimes I see those diodes and resistors as a steering wheel.

Sometimes I see them as a Ferrari. Sometimes I see them as my arm, my avatar arm, but I'm always interacting with the diodes and resistors in that metaphor. So now backing it into it, I'm saying consciousness is the fundamental engine. It's the supercomputer behind everything. And everything

that I see is my interaction with that engine, with consciousness. But my headset dumps things down. So with you, I'm getting insight into the consciousness that I'm interacting with my cat, but with a rock not. But it's just wrong to say the rock is unconscious

and your body is conscious. those are just put it this way the body that I'm perceiving is not you it's just the body that I'm perceiving and for all I know if you actually knew what I was perceiving of you you would say no that's not what I think I look like at all right so

yep I mean so much of the world and I'm excited to dive into this little bit later so much division and separation comes from the tightly held beliefs of our perceptions being the absolute truth right and so that's right This view of consciousness being fundamental is a completely 180 shift from how most people even approach the hard problem, right?

Absolutely. We think that at some stage of neuronal development, we turn that dial enough and then we get conscious experience by virtue of unconscious complexity, just kind of developing. But if consciousness is fundamental, then you're coming at the problem, if you want to call it that from the completely opposite angle. That's exactly right. So most of my colleagues who are studying consciousness, good friends and colleagues, and they're brilliant, but most of them are physicalists. They assume that space time is fundamental, which is false. They assume that reductionism is true, which is false. They assume that brain activity or, for example, complicated enough artificial intelligence systems, the right activity in computers, somehow gives rise to conscious,

So that's the standard view. And again, these are my friends and colleagues. They're brilliant. But they've failed so far to explain any specific conscious experience. There's no scientific theory today, none, that can explain a specific conscious experience and how it arises from the brain activity or orchestrated collapse of neuronal microtributable quantum states or integrated information or some global workspace architecture. If you ask them, and I've done this, I mean, these are my friends.

I ask them informally, ask them at conferences when I want to put them on the spot. I'll say, you know, so great, you have a theory of consciousness. So what specific conscious experience can you explain? What is the integrated information theory pattern, what they call the Q shape, that must be the taste of chocolate and couldn't be the smell of garlic. What is it? Or whatever one you want. Can you give me one?

No. I've done this with Stuart Hameroff and Penrose model. Stuart, can you give me a specific conscious experience that you can explain? And I had to push two or three minutes. He hemmed and had to nod and I finally, Stuart, can he give me one?

Finally had to say, no, you can't. And it's not because they're dumb. They're brilliant. but you can't boot up consciousness from space-time objects. It's just not possible. And so spiritual traditions have been saying this for thousands of years, right? They've been saying that consciousness is fundamental, and space and time is, you know,

they haven't used the term headset, but it's maybe an illusion or something, and Plato has the allegory of the cave. And so the spiritual traditions have in some sense been there for quite a while, but they haven't had the tools of mathematics. They've had only imprecise language to work. And they also haven't had the tools of experimental psychology, for example, or experimental science more generally. So we're coming to a nice convergence for humanity.

The spiritual traditions have been saying this for thousands of years, but haven't had the tools to make it rigorous. And they've suffered for that because when you only have words, the words they'll say the words are just pointers the Tao the Qing starts off the very first sentences the Tao that can be spoken is

not the true Tao once you understand that then it's fine then you can read the rest of the book and realize don't take this stuff literally just take it as pointers to the truth inside you the consciousness inside you and any good spiritual tradition

will make that distinction clear up front but the followers have famously and terribly misunderstood that, and we end up with religious wars and persecutions and killings and so forth. And so,

and a lot of that comes because we've had imprecise language, and it's easy to become dogmatic and to not understand the limits. So what we have coming with science now is, the scientists are now saying, okay, we need to look outside of space time, and the spiritual traditions are saying, well, great, we've been here for quite a while,

come join us, But now the scientists have these incredible tools. They thought that they were studying reality. They've been studying their headset. We've been studying the spacetime headset since Galileo. But we got good enough that we actually discovered that it's just a headset, right? It's actually the tools of science that have forced us to recognize that spacetime is just a headset. Which is an incredible achievement.

It's unbelievable. And that's what is so beautiful about the science is that the theory. theories are mathematically precise so that they tell you two things. They tell you the scope, the power of your theory with mathematical precision. But even more importantly, they tell you the limits. This is how far your theory goes and then it stops. And that's the point of mathematical theories. They tell you the scope and the limits of the foundational concepts of your theories. And so going forward now, I think that science will get a really mathematically precise theory of consciousness. I'm working with my team.

We can talk about the one I'm working on if you want. But I should make a point here that many philosophers have argued against what I'm saying. They'll say, look, and this has been published in scientific philosophy journals, for example. So a number of philosophers have said, Hoffman is saying, that he's using evolutionary game theory of mathematics to show that organisms and resources,

objects in space and time, are not fundamental, they're an illusion, that we don't see reality as it is. Well, now Darwin, in his theory, was proposing real physical objects, competing for real

physical resources in space and time. So the philosophers will say, well, now look, now either the mathematics of evolutionary game theory faithfully represents Darwin's theory or it doesn't. Now if it doesn't,

you couldn't possibly use it to show that space and time and physical objects aren't fundamental. And if it does faithfully represent Darwin's theory, then it wouldn't contradict Darwin's theory. And Darwin's theory assumes space and time and physical object. So either way, you're in a bad situation, what

they will call an unenviable dialectical position. the phosphory so an undesirable dialectical position that you put yourself in. Either way you can't possibly. So they're saying basically you couldn't use evolutionary game theory in principle to show that space and time and physical objects aren't fundamental. And what they're missing

is this. The mathematics as it's used in science is built on the assumptions of the theory and it shows you the scope of those assumptions but also the limits. And there will be limits. There is no theory of everything. In principle, there is no scientific theory of everything

because you always have to have assumptions. And so you have a theory of everything except for your assumptions, but the assumptions are the miracles of your theory. Now, so what happens then is just to make a real clear example of this, because this really seems to have grasped the imagination of a lot of philosophers, who are philosophically minded, they think I'm in a logically bad situation. I've shot myself on the foot logically. Einstein and his theory of space time.

He had the intuitions about space and time and gravity warping space and time. He wrote them down in mathematics, right? So, for example, he had 1907, he had the idea that if he was in an elevator and it was falling. I was sorry, he was in an elevator and standing on a scale. He weighs, I don't know, 150 pounds. And then you cut the cord of the elevator and it goes in free fall. All of a sudden, Einstein realized I'd weigh nothing. And that was his big insight.

That was the big insight that led to his theory of gravity. It took him several years until, like, 1915, to actually turn it into mathematics. Well, so now that we have, so we have Einstein's intuition and his own mathematics to make it formal. And also his mathematics for quantum theory, and we put them together. we find out that space time ceases to have any operational meaning at what's called the Planck scale, 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds.

So there we see that Einstein himself, with his own mathematics that were formalizing his own intuitions, comes up with mathematics that tells him the limits of his intuition. The limits are 10 to the minus 33 centimeters, 10 to the minus 43 seconds, space time no longer makes sense. That's the way science works. So it's not that the mathematics will always confirm and show you that your theory has infinite extension and everything is right.

It will tell you the limits. And what we have to do then in science, and this is maybe a really key point, our theories will tell us the limits. A good theory. A bad theory won't. If it's not precise enough, it won't tell you the limit. But a really good theory will tell you this is the limit. But it can't tell you what's next. You can't tell you.

So scientists then have to take the leap, a creative leap. And it's usually the younger generation, right? The old guys, they die with their theories. And the younger generation then, you know, makes the new leaps into. And so you have to make a leap. Most of our leaps are wrong. Most of them are not interesting. But every once in a while you get something that's interesting.

How do you know that it's interesting? Well, here's where our old theories come back and help us. For example, in the case of space time, physicists are now, Now, just in the last 10 years, literally just in the last 10 years, finding new structures utterly outside of space-time, completely outside of the headset. But they can project them back into the headset and see what they predict inside the headset. And there, if you make predictions that aren't matching our theories inside space and time and the data that we have inside space and time, then whatever you've proposed outside of

space-time, bye-bye. That's wrong. So our theories, our current theories inside space time can give us a thumbs down on our leaps outside of space time. Say, no, dumb, dumb, dumb, bad. You got this wrong. You got that wrong. And they may give you some hints.

Maybe they might help your intuitions about where to look, but they can't tell you what's going to be out there. So you always have to make this creative leap, project back into space time or into your domain of the theory. and then see, you know, thumbs up or thumbs down. So that's how science works. You take your intuitions,

make the mathematically precise. 99% of the time, you're not even interesting. It's just wrong. But every month of while, you get lucky, you get an Einstein or Newton or something like that, and you get something that it's not right,

but it's interesting. It's actually, it accounts for a lot of data. It's doing something right. And then when you find the limits of that, and then you have to create a leap, get a deeper theory. The older theories then say thumbs down most of the time. But every once in a while they'll say, can't put a thumbs down, so maybe you should pursue that. Maybe that one's worth pursuing. So that's sort of the top level. All right. Last to unpack there as well. Before we move on to some of these topics in further depth, I want to kind of just go back to how

fitness beats truth and how evolution essentially hid the truth of objective reality so that we could continue on this reproduction evolutionary wheel for its own evolutionary purposes. So can you speak to just the process of how what we perceived is created in our VR headset and how we really just see what we need to see in order long enough in order to survive and procreate? Right. So just looking at evolutionary theory by itself, so forgetting my consciousness stuff for a moment. So when we talk about science, we have to sort of talk about what model am I going to be. So I'll now go back into space time. So I'm now thinking inside of space time. I'm using the tools of evolution. Okay. So that's the model I'm using. So evolution then will say things, very, very interesting things. It will say, for example, that our perceptions are driven by our needs for food, mating, and so forth. And also to do things,

on the cheap, right? For every calorie that you spend in perception, for example, you need to go out there and kill something and eat it to get those calories and then you put yourself at risk. So there's going to be selection pressures to do things on the cheap, to do them fairly quickly. And we get what we're called satisfying solutions from an evolutionary theory. You just need a solution that's good enough most of the time, just better than the competition, basically.

You just have to be a little bit better than... So it's not that you're, you're not, it's not really survival of the perfectly fit. It's just the survival of the fitter. Really, it's actually better to say the survival of the fitter than the fittest. You don't need to be as fit as possible. You just need to be, as long as you're better than competition, that's good enough from an evolutionary point of view. So, so from that point of view, the selection pressure is really just driven by the nature of your competition. And we do things on the cheap.

I'll give a fun example. So there's this beetle in the outback of Australia, the jewel beetle. And

the beetles are dimpled, glossy, and brown. The males fly, the females are flatness. The males fly around looking for females. And if the male

finds one that looks eligible, he elites and mates. But in the outback, there's also homo sapiens. And, the males of the species tend to drink these beers in these bottles they call stubbies little brown

bottles and the guys tend to throw them out in the in the desert in the outback and it turns out that these bottles are dimpled glossy and just the right shade of brown to catch the fancy of the of the jewel beetles the male jewel beetles and so these male jewel beetles land on the bottles and try to mate and they the real females are not interesting compared to these bottles so it's the male living the female for the bottle kind of situation but for beetles. And what's interesting is these male beetles have full body contact with the bottle, and they still are agog with this bottle. And so...

Leaving the woman for the bottle. Leaving the woman, the female for the bottle. So that gives you a real clue about what's going on in evolution. You think about it, those beetles have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. The males have found females and sequels. successfully made it. You would think that evolution had taught the male what a female really is. Apparently, what evolution gave the male was a little hack. A female is anything dimpled, glossy, and brown, the bigger, the better. That was what, and that's, so that's all evolution,

something like that is all evolution gave. That's all the insight the males had about the females. And the females might complain about them. They don't have very little insight unto me at all. So, but that's what evolution does. It gives you just what you need to survive long enough to reproduce. And as long as there weren't these glossy bottles in the environment, the little algorithm, look for something gossine brown, the bigger the better, was just fine for the, that's all the insight he had into a female. That's all he needed, and that was enough to get the next generation going. But one bottle or a few bottles in the desert is enough to actually drive the whole thing, the whole species to extinction.

So that gives you a clue about how evolution works. We have these simple tricks and hacks. In humans and other species, there are things called super-normal stimuli. So again, I'm just speaking about just evolution on its own terms, which is a fun. I love evolutionary biology and evolutionary game theory. Even though I think it's not, since space time is not fundamental, and evolution by natural selection is a theory inside space time, ultimately evolution by natural selection is not a deep theory.

It's only a headset theory. But it's a beautiful headset theory, and I use it a lot, and this is a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to a deeper theory outside that will project down to evolutionary theory. We can talk about that. Yeah, I'm excited to spend more time outside the headset in a moment. That's right. But inside the headset, you know, there are things called supernormal stimuli.

Once you understand how, so for example, the big bottle was a supernormal stimulus for the beetle, the male beetles. He liked the beetles like the bottle more than the real thing, more than a real female. So that was what we call a supernormal stimulus. And for like, there are some birds that like bigger eggs and you put a big rock and they will ignore their own eggs and sit on the rock. And they never figured out. So that's a supernormal stimulus for them. And with humans, makeup. When women put on makeup, for example, or men, it works because of supernormal stimulus.

You put red lipstick on. You're seeing lips that never occur in that color in nature. And yet, if it's done right, if you don't go to the clown, the level of a clown, done right, it's a supernormal stimulus that actually makes you look better than anything that's real. And so in humans, we use makeup and clothing and so forth to tap in, unconsciously into the supernormal stimuli. And some of the consulting I've done for companies is to be explicit about it and help them in selling jeans and marketing and so forth.

Once you know the stuff, you can play people. Right. Yeah, very interesting. Can you dive into how the role of conscious agents and how that plays into your theory just to like explain what that is. What does that mean when you say conscious agents? Right. So the question then is what's outside of our space-time headset? And no one knows. The physicists are looking, but they're just looking and they're finding mathematical structures.

And so I'm proposing with my team that consciousness is fundamental and that space and timer is just a user interface that some consciousness is used. And so now as a scientist is, I mean, not enough to say it's consciousness. You have to say, okay, here's my mathematical model. And it's got to be an absolutely precise mathematical model. So we've published several papers where we have this mathematical model. We call it a theory of conscious agents. And those who are interested in it, I've got a paper called Objects of Consciousness. If you just Google my name and Objects of Consciousness, you'll find it online as free.

And also Fusions of Consciousness. So Google My Name and Fusions of Consciousness. And you can see the mathematical model. But the idea, so we have what's called a Markovian dynamics. So it's a dynamical system of conscious agents. And the intuition, so I'm not going to go into the math unless you want to go into the math. But the intuition is think of it as like a vast social network, like Twitter, or now called X, but I'll call it Twitter for now. So millions of Twitter users, billions of tweets, no one could keep up with it, but it's a vast social network.

So, and that's, our mathematical model of consciousness is like that. It's a bunch of conscious agents in a network interacting, tweeting, and following tweets, and retweeting and so forth, all the kinds of interactions that you would have in us. So it's a vast social network of interacting conscious agents, but with a interesting twist, and that is that interacting conscious agents themselves form a new conscious agent. And ultimately, there's just ultimately one conscious agent. So you can think of it as a social network, but you can also equivalently, and with mathematical precision, think about it as a single conscious agent. Very interesting. Yeah, it's really quite fun. And the fun thing for me is, and this is the work we're doing right now, the physicists have found these structures outside of space time, something called decorated permutations.

They're like, permutations are like shuffling cars, you know, you change the order. Decorated permutations is just a little mathematical. thing on that. And if people are interested, we can talk about it. But that's as far as they've gotten in terms of the depth. There's no dynamics. And so we had this Markovian dynamics. We say, okay, we have this social network

of consciousness. And the physicists have already gone outside of space time. They found these decorated permutations. So can we connect our Markovian social network of consciousness to these decorated permutations? And so I just said, well, there must be some mathematics that's already been

done about Markov chains, mapping into decorated permutations. We looked and there wasn't. So we did it. And that's the fusions of consciousness paper that I mentioned. We published it in January. And it's a new contribution to mathematics where we show a canonical way to take a social network of Markovian dynamics of consciousness and projected into decorated permutations, which then allows us because the physicist then can take decorated permutations into space time into, for example, scattering, particle scattering at large Hadron Collider and other gliders.

So we have a map now from a dynamics of conscious agents through decorated permutations to scattering processes. And that's where we're headed right now is we want to test our theory of conscious agents against scattering data from particle colliders. And the place we want to look at first is inside the proton. The tiniest places we've looked are inside the proton. and when you look inside of a proton, at the largest scale, there's two up quarks and a down quark. But as you look smaller and smaller, you see a bunch of quark antichork.

And gluons, which are the particles that sort of bind them together. And then when you get really high resolution space and time, it's all gluons. It's just a vast ocean of gluons. And qualitatively, we think we can get that. So our theory of consciousness can actually, when we project it through decorated permutations, into space time, I think we're going to get that.

So our goal is to not only get it qualitatively, but to get the precise what they call momentum distributions of the quarks and glulence. And the reason we're doing that, partly because science, right? You've got to show that you make empirical predictions. But why the proton, right? Why not the brain?

We have all these neural correlates of consciousness in the brain. Surely we want to make connections between our theory of consciousness and the brain, so why in the world am I going after protons? And the reason is the brain is too complicated. You have to start with where the data is really clean and where you can make an absolutely precise prediction. And so I want to get to the brain.

I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. I mean, I was in the brain and cognitive science department at MIT. That's where I got my doctorate. So I'm very interested in the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. But that's a little bit later on. We need to get inside the proton, then go to the atomic nucleus, show that we can model that, then the whole atom, and then molecules, and then bigger molecules, and then climb our way up to neurons and then the brain.

So, I mean, it's on the agenda, but maybe not in my lifetime. I mean, that's quite a bit of work there. But the idea is to have a theory. We do have a mathematically precise theory of conscious agents. We do now have a precise mapping onto decorated permutations, which map precisely into, for example, particles and the elementary particles of the standard model of physics. So now is the time for the next couple years to actually do experimental tests, computational experiments to show that we can actually get that. If we get it, it doesn't mean that we're right.

It just means that we haven't been shown that we're wrong yet. When you describe this network of conscious agents that are coming together that could also be perceived as one large kind of mind, it's really interesting to me. And it points at how reality is so mysterious and much more vast ways than we. normally would think of it. For simulation theory, people typically think of it from this kind of Newtonian when space time is fundamental and technology advances so much to where there's an alien in his mom's basement somewhere on his computer and we're in this kind of simulation version. I'm curious for you to expand on your version of how simulation theory could be accurate. So what do you think of us being in a simulation with the understanding that consciousness

is fundamental? Right. So the standard view, like Nick Bostrom's view of the simulation theory is is a physicalist one. So we aren't the reality we're just someone's program. Some hacker at a lower level has created this and we're fictions in that.

But that hacker herself is a fiction in someone else's lower level and so you could have this nesting. But at the very bottom, in the standard view, there's a physicalist space time. Base reality. The base reality is a physical space time.

So what I'm saying is not that kind of simulation theory at all. Space and time are not fundamental. Space time is doomed. So any simulation theory that assumes that space time is not doomed is doomed. That theory itself is doomed. And second, that version of simulation theory assumes that somehow a physical system like a computer properly programmed that's unconscious will give rise to consciousness. There is no scientific theory anywhere that shows how. that could be. There's nothing on the table, as I mentioned earlier, that can show a specific

pattern of circuitry or software in some AI that would rise to a specific conscious experience, like taste of chocolate or something. There's nothing on the table. Never been done. And again, the people who are doing this, many of them are my friends and colleagues. They're brilliant. If it could be done, they would have done it. It can't be done. And the reason it can't be done is because space time isn't fundamental. They have the wrong foundation. So when we get that sea change, when most scientists realize what a few scientists now know that space time is doomed, then we'll start to make progress. We'll let go of the reductionist approach. Yeah, I would love for you to speak to, and this is where actually I love a dear friend of mine, Clee Irwin, founder of quantum

gravity research. I don't know. I think you're familiar connected with him. I'm very, you're intrigued by the self-simulation hypothesis, because it definitely is an alignment with more of what we're speaking to here. So how then do you view simulation essentially being on a conscious agent basis? Right. So it would be different than the Bostrum thing. It would now be consciousness is fundamental. And consciousness is infinitely complicated, infinitely complicated. And the one consciousness appears to be projecting itself

and looking at itself from different perspectives. So, space time is a particularly simple perspective with it it seems to be taking on it. We think of it as fantastic. I think of it as probably one of the cheaper headsets that the one is using to take a look

at itself. There probably has other headsets where it's a billion dimensions or a trillion dimensions. We have four. So that's why I think We have one of the lower level perspectives that the consciousness is taking on itself. And it's looking at itself, and so it gets a simulation, so to speak, which is as complicated as this seems, it's trivial compared to the complexity of the one. Absolutely trivial. In a couple ways. So first, in our mathematical model, it's dynamics, it's marcoving dynamics that we have for consciousness, but it need not have an arrow of time.

Great. It's what we call a station. It can be a stationary marcoving dynamics. But it turns out that when you take a projection of a stationary marcoving dynamics by conditional probability, so you get the dynamics projected to a dynamics where you've lost a little information about the original dynamics. So it is a dynamics. that projected dynamics will have an arrow of time. It's a theorem. And the arrow of time is a result of the loss of information in projection. So what this means is in our simulation, the arrow of time is not an insight into a deeper reality at all. It's entirely and completely an artifact of the projection. and by the way, time is the fundamental limited resource in evolution.

If you don't get enough food in time, you die. If you don't find mates in time, you don't reproduce. Time is the fundamental limited resource. But time is an illusion. The arrow of time is an illusion. So that's why I say, I love evolutionary theory. For evolutionary biology, it's beautiful. I use it.

And every aspect of it is not deeply true. All of it, including the earth. arrow of time and limited resources and organisms competing. All of it is entirely an artifact of projection of a deeper reality in which there are no limited resources and there need not be any competition. So that's why, so now that gets, I have all this to really say what I think about simulation. Notice what I'm saying. The simulation is not truly a simulation of the deep properties of

the reality. Everything that we're seeing is an artifact of the projection, competition, limited resources. None of that is deeply true of the one. All of it is only an artifact of our projection. So the simulation, typically we think of a simulation as being a model of the truth of the thing that we're trying to simulate. This is entirely artifactual. But the spiritual traditions have been saying this for, again, thousands of years. what can be said right is just is not the thing absolutely yeah and the the sanskrit term Maya refers this you know this illusion that if we become so enchanted with the sensory realm that we take it to be the real thing if we don't close our eyes and go inwards we don't actually

have the chance to touch truth who we are in our innate essence that's unchanging that can't die that conscious being so what's your view on who we fundamentally are then do you see consciousness as the self? In a word, yes. I think, and again, you know, as a scientist, I'm always going to be cautious. Of course. These are my best ideas so far.

And I'm bringing you to the friend the edges here. And words are just words, and even mathematics, it's just mathematics. But given those hedges, my current view is that you and I are the same.

It's the one in an avatar talking to the one in another avatar and so it's the one looking at itself through different avatars but it's the same as the true of my cat and the other avatars in my headset

I don't see the consciousness when I see a rock I am interacting with the one but my headset's not allowing me that perspective on myself isn't giving me that much insight into myself. So that's sort of the view that I take is it is the one. The one is infinitely complicated. And any thought that I have about myself or any perception that I have about myself

is merely a perspective, merely a projection, and is not the final truth. The closest we get to final truth is when we, let go of all thought completely, all perception and are just in a state of meditation in which utter interior silence. That's the closest that we get. And perhaps even deeper than that in like slow wave sleep. There's just so much overlap with what you're sharing in these Eastern traditions and Western traditions that, you know, when you look at karma and how from And this may be a little bit on the fringes of esoteric for some people, but I think that a lot of people can feel this intuition that maybe we took birth in this life,

in this incarnation with and shows a specific curriculum almost, like a specific set of experiences in this display, a VR headset, to reveal to us, to encounter the people, the relationships, the circumstances to reveal where we're still limited, where we still hold judgments. and then to ultimately come to realize the true nature of who we are and really what we are. And so I'm just curious, how do you see the potential of us and really the one or source kind of differentiating itself like you spoke to in these many different perspectives

to then reflect back to itself and go on that process of evolution? Well, that's what I think roughly we're here for is. is the one, it seems that it may be a theorem that no system can fully model itself, can truly understand itself. If you have, just take a finite system, if it tries to understand itself, then it's going to build a little, like a program where it's representing itself. Well, in the process of representing itself, has gotten more complicated, right, because it's changed in the representation.

So now it needs to represent its representation. and you get in this infinite loop and it turns out no system can ever fully understand itself. You can only understand projections of yourself. So, maybe, and this is, again, I'm in a well above my peg right here, but maybe, I mean, I think all of us are. But, you know, it's interesting. I am the one, but I am the one dealing with a pretty tiny space-time headset and a lot of restrictions on the intelligence is coming through. So from this perspective, all I can say is maybe the one is taking these different perspectives because that's in, it must.

It's sort of mathematically forced that this is how the one knows itself. And it knows itself by losing itself in a perspective and actually, you know, fighting itself. People fighting, we killed each other. We have wars, religious and national wars and so forth. so so so that's total unconsciousness we're really unconscious about our true nature but then a gradual waking up and in some sense going through that unconsciousness and waking up gives you a somehow it's a deepening of the of the understanding of the true nature of self i i am not all this stuff i let myself think i was for a long time and i would let myself experience the suffering

that comes from that. And that suffering helped me to wake up from it. And then I have come to understand myself at a deeper level. And this may never end in the sense that it's, that it is the nature, it's the nature of the beast that ultimate self-perception can never happen. It's always this kind of process. That wheel of samsara.

Yeah, that wheel of samsara. I mean, we're speaking into, I think it's ultimately more important to identify with your ignorance than claim what you think you know. But these are important things to discuss because it feels like with the understanding that we kind of are playing out the necessary drama in our life to garner the experience and information to go on that process of awakening, it's less of like a learning, but more of like a remembering and a realization to just what is. and I think that so many people and us in this conversation in our own lives go through periods where we really identify with the headset, with our experience. It's very enchanting. It's very real. The relationships that we have, the delicious food that we taste, the love that we make, all of it.

It's very enchanting in this very real experience of life. And yet, when we kind of come back into realizing who we are beneath it in our true essence, then it frees up so much. And so I want to speak into a little bit of the more. implications really of this understanding because when you see and you experience that the display of your experience is very much that it is a display and when you close your eyes the display goes away I went maybe six months ago and I did a darkness retreat where it was completely black pitch black dark for six days I didn't see anything and so when you come back and you open your eyes like

whoa the VR headset comes back on you're like this is it feels very much like that it feels it rings really true in my body um So you come to that place where once you realize that your perception of reality is literally detached from objective reality, then that has so many implications of you clinging less to your ideals and beliefs and it can release so much separation and division between humans, which leads to so much war and hate and killing. And so I'm just curious for you to share the implications that this has on how we carry ourselves in the world. That's a great point. Ultimately, each of us is infinitely precious and infinitely intelligent.

Unbelievable. Each one of us is the deepest reality and the deepest truth and the deepest love that is possible. Each one of us, from the presidential king to the beggar, all of us. And equally, there's no distinction. most of us are spending our lives completely ignorant of who we really are and of how you know the unconditional intelligence the foundational intelligence and love that we really are and so we try to most of our lives to make up for that by so my money or position or status my car is better than your car my house is better than you you know I look better than you, whatever it might. Or I'm worse than you. Life is, I'm special because life has treated me so poorly.

And we're looking, we spend most of our lives looking to be special. We don't realize that you don't need to look, you are. That infinite, the infinite already is within you. It's about waking up to that infinity that's already within you. So I'll say just a little bit on a political and economic level first. Communism versus capitalism. Communism sounds really great from each according to their ability to each according to their need. And for enlightened people, that would work.

But we're not. So capitalism is what you need to do when you have unenlightened people. Because now it's me competing with you. And so you, so communism should work, but it doesn't. And we try to, spectacular failure, spectacular failure. Capitalism, I'm not going to say a spectacular success, but it sure be common, sure bes communism. But it works because we are all competing against each other. And we think of, I don't think of you as me.

I think of you as competition. I'm competing with you for status, for food, for whatever I'm competing. Whereas the spiritual traditions tell us, love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. Ultimately, all morals come down to this, understanding that the other is you. when you really understand that the other is you, then you will act morally. Until then, when you don't understand that, you will act selfishly.

And it will be only, you know, it'll be very hard to act morally. So that's the foundation of morals, is really recognizing that the other is me, the one, the infinite, the infinitely precious in a different avatar. Yeah, there's really no need for morals if you experience other as self. You don't need to teach you to hurt somebody else if you experience them as a part of you. It's like we said we're the drop in the ocean. When you start to experience the magnitude of the ocean as you are divinated into a drop, it's like so much of what we think we would have to force to have happen would just dissolve away once we experience that kind of unicity within other people. I'm curious what your thoughts are and what happens to come. consciousness after the physical body dies.

I'll just say one thing more about this and then about what happens when body dies. Part of being moral is also having compassion on yourself because all of us are caught up in the illusion. I mean, I'm talking as though I'm not, but I am. I automatically get into competition mode, driving on the freeway up here. I mean, automatically it gets triggered. So part of what's the waking up process, waking up to who you are, is completely accepting that I'm most of the time asleep. And most of the time I'm feeling this illusion of separation and competition and so forth.

And part of it is for some reason, that's part of what the one needs to go through to understand it. It really needs to go through that illusion, that separateness. It needs to have compassion on itself and learn not to judge myself and also not to judge others. So letting go of judgment of myself and others is absolutely critical. But now what happens after death? And of course, I don't know. but I can just speculate and talk to what my theory would say and a little bit of data that we have from out-of-body experiences. If spacetime is just a headset and my body is just an avatar, one way to think about what we're doing in life right now is just think about yourself when you're in a VR game.

So you put on a headset, you're immersed in Grand Thift Auto, for example. there are two ways that you could be in that world. One is, I know I'm wearing a headset, and I'm just having fun. I'm just playing this game, no big, no great shakes, like crash my car, no big deal. Another one is I get into the Grand Theft Auto game and I forget who I am and I am now my avatar. and I'm threatened now I mean I'm identified with my avatar

I'm identified with my car if the car gets crashed that's I'm screwed and so all of a sudden there's this cling and there's this desperation and there's this fighting it so there's two ways

that you could play the VR game one is I'm enjoying the ride of course I'm not in the game I'm that's just my avatar in the game the other is no I'm this is this

everything matters I've got to win. I've got to... So, when you step out of the game, if you never lost yourself in the game, it's no big deal. Took the headset off and moved on. But if you've been identified with the game, taking the headset off is going to be a bit of a shock, right?

That's going to be a bit... So in some sense, the idea is to die before you die. Face death. Really face the fact that this... What I call my body is not me. It's just the avatar. That's not who I am. I'm not three pounds of brain producing conscience.

That's not what's happening. If I looked inside my skull, I would find a brain, but that's because I rendered a brain. It doesn't exist. I have no neurons right now. If you look inside, you would see neurons, but neurons are, neurons are causing none of my behaviors because I don't even have neurons right now. They don't even exist. They get rendered on the fly when you look.

so brains cause none of my behavior but if you look inside my skull you would see brains that's where rubber hits the road where I'm really saying what this means so when you really understand that this is just an avatar then dying is basically just taking off the headset now I don't want to sound like I'm more spiritually accomplished and detained than I am

if someone put a gun to my head right now I'd be scared to death plain and simple because I there's an intellectual understanding of this stuff and then there's a rewiring of your emotional system that takes time and I'm in the, you know, I meditate and so forth and I see, and that's, I mentioned earlier, having compassion, I have to do that for myself.

There's a part of me that knows I'm just an avatar, this is just an avatar, but there's an emotional part of me that is desperately attached to the avatar. And so when I see that in myself, it's really helpful for me to then be compassionate with other people that are completely identified and striving and competing and having the resulting amoral behaviors and so forth that come from that. So long answer, but I would say, is taking off the headset, what is it like? The closest I can come to is it's like when you go in deep meditation and there's just awareness. without any content.

But it may be even closer to like slow wave sleep, I don't know. Is your intuition, by the way, I just loved everything you to share. That was incredible. Is your intuition that any of the content carries over with you? As you, in some Eastern traditions, death is kind of analogous to like taking off a tight shoe. And you kind of release like the personality. Do you feel like that consciousness could then just go into back into the wand? It could take out another headset and with completely different content experience, or is your intuition say that maybe some of you actually does? And when I say you, your experience, your memory, do you feel like any of that could carry over? And is there any evidence that that could be possible?

My guess is that nothing is lost. And that the one, which is what I am, is right now experiencing all 7 billion, 8 billion people on the planet. and all millions of cats and all the amoebas and everything. It's all there. Right now, I'm not the eye that's, so now, in some sense, the avatar eye that's speaking, I'm not experiencing all that. I as the one I'm experiencing, but that's been filtered out from the experience I'm having right now. I would be overwhelming to, but I think that, so I am all that. I am your experience.

I'm everybody's experience. but it's filtered out right now. But I am the infinite and you are the infinite. And so my experience is actually your experience. And none of it's ever lost. And it's really hard because as an avatar, it's hard for me to, I've put on these restrictions. I've put on these, I can only, to be very concrete.

I can imagine a three-dimensional object like a cute. I cannot even imagine a four-dimensional object. Try to imagine a four-dimensional cube. Like a Tessarac. Yeah. Or a five-dimensional cube. Nothing happens. I try to think, but nothing happens.

Or try to imagine the color you've never seen before. Nothing happens. These are like trivial attempts to go beyond my little projection. Can't do it. But I know, for example, that pigeons have four color receptors. Presumably, pigeons are seeing a dimensional color that I can't even imagine. There are some women that have four-color receptors, tetrafilms. So there are these women that have color experiences that I can't imagine at all.

So my imagination in this little avatar is greatly, greatly projected down. but the infinity that I am will be unleashed when I step out of this projection It's just that beautiful realization we're seeing less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and we think that

it appears that we have a great sense on how reality is operating but when you start to dive into a lot of this stuff you realize it's so limited so limited absolutely even when you just look at the electromagnetic spectrum which is inside space and time. So space and time itself is just a trivial headset.

And within that trivial headset, we're only seeing this tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum that would be available inside that. And the one that we are, I can't over-emphasize how infinite you are. And I'll just say a little bit about that. Infinity is not one thing. So mathematics tells us that there's infinitely many sizes of infinities.

So the smallest infinity is the counting infinity. One, two, three, four, up to infinity. That's what would they call a-liff zero. That's infinity. It's the tiniest infinity. Now look at all the possible subsets, like 1-2, 150, 2, 10, and 20. Look at all the possible subsets. when you look at all the possible subsets

the number of them is a bigger infinity it's called a-lf-1 it's infinitely bigger than a-lf-0 now take all the subsets of alf1 and you get alf2 every step you're getting infinitely bigger this is called canter's hierarchy and it never ends

so one reason why I can never mathematically model the one the one consciousness in mathematics is because I can never climb up the canter's hierarchy of infinities. But that's who you are. You are the infinite that transcends even Cantra's hierarchy. So in some sense there's this very, very deep humility of the one.

Right now, we are such trivial projections. There's an aspect of humility of the one being this that transcends Cantor's hierarchy and lets itself not even be able to imagine things in four dimensions. There's an incredible humility in that as well. So that's interesting. I'm just curious, do you have spiritual practices? You said you meditate, but I'm curious in your own personal life, how your relationship to different spiritual practices

and embodying some of these exercises to match the work that you're doing because it feels very spiritual and also you speak very logically as well simultaneously. So I'm just curious how they kind of blend in your life. Well, I've been meditating now for 22 years. So I do meditate. But I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family. My dad was a minister for a while. And there they were explicit that meditation was actually bad.

It would open your mind to the devil. and you shouldn't do it. So it was really interesting that I was actually, it took me longer to start to meditate because of that. I mean, if it's something of the devil, you don't want to get into it right away. So it took me a long time. What you're raised in from your youth,

it's hard to wake up and let go of the limitations. But there are, of course, Christian spiritual traditions that are open to meditation like the Benedictine monks and Father Thomas Keating and so forth, fairly, really deep spiritual people. So I just got a little brand of Christianity. Christianity itself is not stuck with this, but there are wonderful brands of Christianity, as well as mystical Islam and Buddhism, Hindu, a lot of wonderful traditions. So my practice is, I started meditating 22 years ago because I needed trouble, I had trouble sleeping and I didn't want to

take pills. So it was very pragmatic. But that was the door and I began to realize that it had something more to give me than just helping me to sleep and it slowly transforms you meditation process in my case very very slowly I mean I think an academic you're stuck in your mind a lot right so academics we're it's all about the mind it's all about competition of ideas yeah and so letting go learning to balance that with letting go of all thoughts altogether. At first it seemed like complete nonsense, right? It's all about thought and better thoughts. What does you mean to let go of thoughts altogether? So it takes a while, for me as an academic, it took a while to really begin to grasp the importance of

letting go of thoughts. Now, for my academic colleagues, what I would say is in terms of Bayesian theory, so this is now a little geeky kind of thing. We have all these. Bayesian priors. And what we perceive then is based on our priors and we have our posteriors based on what we, you know, the data that we get in our priors. Meditation is a process of letting go of the priors. You literally, and then you can actually be open to new directions that you wouldn't otherwise be open to. So ultimately meditation is a way of, if you want to be creative. It's a way of breaking down the barriers to

creativity. But on a spiritual level, what I found is it's forced me to face and slowly let go of my fears and my anxieties and my selfishness and my self-image of myself. And

I'm not saying that I'm anywhere near done by any means, but at least I'm on the path of waking up. and I see that for me then an interesting challenge is this balance between completely letting go of thought on the one hand

in times of meditation and also just in everyday life driving and so forth to not be lost in pointless thought self-destructive thought to literally be there as a presence without any thought on the one hand and yet on the other hand to then use thought

wisely and productively, for example, in building scientific theories and so forth, while at the same time not being too attached to my own theories, because I know that they're just the next baby step, but not by any means the final word.

So it's learning again to have that playful attitude of the, you know, I mentioned in the VR game. I am my avatar and I'm glued to the wheel, I'm all up to tie. Or I'm just know it's an avatar, it's a game, and I can enjoy the game. It's literally, it's learning, most of my life I've been glued. I am my avatar and everything is important and

matters and learning to back off from that and enjoy the ride. Even as I build precise theories. So be precise, be careful, but in some sense also relax and enjoy while you're doing it. It seems that from at least the limited study that I have of some brilliant minds like Einstein, Newton, Tesla, have had practices that allow them to essentially get into different brainwave states that allow them to, like we were speaking to earlier, rest into that place of the one. And it's almost like the intelligence of the one kind of comes down into you, the more that you start to imbibe in that place. Like its nature starts to become your nature. And some of the breakthrough ideas come as a byproduct of that. Have you found that to be something interesting? Absolutely. All of the

ideas that I've had have come in moments of silence. But it's an interesting interplay. Of course you have to do your homework. Right, of course. You can't have insights about physics if you haven't studied your physics. So there's no excuse if you want to do something. You have to do your study. But on the other hand, then you have to let go of everything you know too.

So that's the interesting back and forth. Yeah, study. I'm a professor. I'm going to tell my students to study. Do your homework. I'll give you a test. Right. So you have to study.

On the other hand, for moments of creativity, once you've done all that homework, then sleep on it, let go of it, and then go into silence. And that's where the creative ideas come. And that's why I think that science will continue to progress because we're not just little three-pound brains. We are this infinite intelligence. Every new step in science is just a new baby step. and there's an infinite number of steps to take, but we're up to the task. We are not little three-pound brains.

We are the infinite intelligence. So we will always have these fun, creative leaps. And so this is going to be, this really is a fun creative ride. But what the one is learning, I guess, is to take each perspective, really dive in, really take that perspective. So this is taking the Don Hoffman, four-dimensional space-time perspective. and it's taking it quite seriously and then learning to relax,

learn from what I need from that perspective, don't get all wrapped up and identified with it, have some creative fun. And then at some point, you know, by the time you're 70, 80, 90, you're gone. From this perspective, you've let go of that perspective. So you need to learn to let go of that as well. Enjoy the ride and then get ready to take off the headset.

Yeah, it's beautiful. I love that, just kind of path of integration, that yin and yang of both, you know, doing the work. being in the, partly identifying being in this reality and then also realizing you're not that you're something much, much bigger and both allow you to find something that can really bring like these ideas that almost come to you. And they're like jewels for you to share with humanity and the rest of the network of conscious minds. Yeah, so it's just consciousness waking itself up. Yeah. Talking to itself. What role, in your model, what role does love play in metaphysics?

Do you see there having be some sort of like metaphysical gravity of love? love in particular as a way that binds something that's transcendent? Well, I think that real love is recognizing the other as yourself. I think that's what really love is. And our mathematics says that as well. There is one, only one consciousness. All the little conscious agents that we model, which we have to do because we can't model the ones. So what I'm forced to do is to say, okay, even if I do like a huge simulation, like a billion conscious agents,

It would be incredible. It would be a billion by billion Markovian colonel. Unbelievable. No supercomputer could do that. And that would be trivial. Trivial compared to the one. So I'm dealing with all these little conscious agents

because that's all I can do. But really, they're all one. They're all just projections of the one. And so that's love as seen in the mathematics. But love seen practically is when I really understand that that person, even if they have a different race or color or creed than me, is me.

Just under a different... Don't mistake the avatar for the person. Your theory posits that free will can exist outside of space time. I'm curious what you think about free will. We've had Sam Harris on here. He wrote the book Free Will. Very interesting conversation, how... I think we just don't have free will in the context that most people would think that they're this person making choices, which is if you look a little bit closer, it's really originating from this black, dark place within yourself. You don't really choose to choose whatever your choice may be in this life. If you choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream, there are deeper impulses that kind of drove you to that. So I'm curious what your thought and framework is on free will and how it could exist outside space time as well. So most discussions of free will will be informed by the

the neuroscience, and Sam Harris is, of course, he's a neuroscientist. And what they'll point out, rightly, is that they can predict, if they measure your brain activity, in many cases, they can predict dozens of milliseconds before you, what you're going to do in certain. Up to seven seconds even sometimes. Seven seconds, that's right. Exactly right. So they, so.

That's crazy to think about, too. It's like, you could measure what decision you're going to make up to seven seconds before Before the person can consciously report that they're going to do it. So if you're a neurobiological reductionist, what you would say is this shows that brain activity is responsible for your decisions and brain activity is responsible for your conscious experiences. And the brain activity is doing both. But space time is doomed. And neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived. So what's really going on here?

So we're probing an interface object of brain and getting hints about something in this network of conscious agents outside of space time. And the projection of this conscious agent dynamics into space time into this particular avatar, Hoffman, or whoever it is, the subject in the neuroscience experiment. So first I would disagree with the neuroscientists. And I mean, on this particular issue, I guess with Sam, if he thinks, that the brain activity is actually causing our behavior. I should ask him if he actually thinks that. I mean, it would be interesting. I'm good friends, so I should just ask him.

But to the extent that someone thinks that neurons even exist when they're not perceived, I disagree, neurons do not exist when they're not perceived. Do neurons have any causal powers? No. Zero causal powers because they don't even exist. So neurons cause none of our brain activity. So what's going on? So neurons cause none of our behavior.

It could cause none of our choices. So what's going on there? On some level they do, or just completely no? Neurons don't exist. The only time you have a neuron is when someone actually sees a neuron, like through a microscope. Otherwise, there are no neurons. So when you measure neural activity, that measurement occurs and that exists. So that's the headset thing.

This is the VR headset. Which will take some time, especially for viewers that are new to this, is going to take some time to digest that. That's right. So if someone says, I don't believe in free will because I think the brain is creating all of our actions, then I say the brain doesn't even exist when it's not perceived. It creates none of your actions.

So that can't be the reason why we say that there's no free will. Now, I might still say that Don, this avatar, doesn't have free will. But then it would be from a deeper theory in which the one is the only entity that has free will that's making choices. And among those choices are this avatar

that's called Don Hoffman and what that avatar thinks it's choosing in the moment. One could say there's no free will for the Hoffman avatar because the only free will is in the one.

But when I look at our mathematics it looks like there's a notion of free will in the mathematics of choice that goes recursively down the entire network of conscious agents. In some sense, as we group together conscious agents, we get bigger and bigger conscious agents. And at each agent, you can profitably talk about the free will choices of that agent. So we get mathematically what we call a scale-free decomposition of free will choices.

So in some sense, you could say, yes, only the one has free will. And yet it's very useful to unpack that. And the mathematics allows us to unpack that into all these little micro-free will choices. And from my point of view, maybe they're just as real as the one. And maybe the distinction between trying to distinguish between them is a mistake. So just to summarize, most people who deny free will say that our behaviors are forced by our brain activity and I assert that brains don't even exist when they're not observed so brains cause none of our behavior and by the way

I'm all for more research for neuroscience I think that neuroscience is much harder than we thought and we need more funding for neuroscience because neurons and brains and so forth we thought that that was the reality that's driving everything. It's a thin veneer. What we can see in our microscopes of, you know, literally, what, 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses in the human brain. As complicated as that is, that's a tiny thin veneer in our VR headset of a much deeper and more complex, I think, Markovian dynamics.

We have to reverse engineer the neural networks to get the much deeper and more complicated Markovian networks of conscious agents that are behind them. more funding for neuroscience, not less, but I then also say, neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived and they cause none of our behaviors. So you can see when you go down this rabbit hole, everything changes.

You have to rethink everything. That's why it's taken me, it's been a real shock to the system. I mean, yeah. Real shock in the last, but hey, that's part of the fun of the ride. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's part of being the pursuit of truth.

That's, it's just so interesting to think i guess there's just no way in our limited intellect that we're going to be able to perceive how the one could have free will because the way that we perceive choice is like okay we have these options and i'm going to choose this way but the higher intelligence of like the collective consciousness i'm just curious how you perceive choice being made at that level or could you even come up with a thought around that well a couple things first one in our mathematical models where we have probability measures, that's where we come up against the limits of our theory.

And when we see, so I might come to a choice point in a piece of software, and I can either go here or there, and there's some probability of going there. Or in like quantum theory, when you look at the way function of a particle, there's certain probability for it being here. or there. When you see probabilities, you are face to face with the limits of your knowledge. And there are two kinds of interpretation we give. One is to say it's objective chance,

just raw objective chance. That's typically a physicalist. And the other is, no, there's some kind of free choice that was made. I, in the case of consciousness, so in my model, there are probabilities. And so that's where my bottle stops in some sense that's that wherever you see a probability. That's where you know your your model is saying I give up. I just have to do a random number generator here. I don't know what's going on. And that's where your theory in some sense stops. Free will maybe dive this intuition that there's this there is a choice. But but the other part of the question was, you know, how can I really understand that? And I think you can't understand it intellectually in knowledge, but as spiritual tradition would say, you can understand it

by being it. You are the one. So when you let go of your knowledge temporarily, you are that. But then when you come back, you can't really put it back into words. Or at least the words become maybe the distinction between free will and no free will then becomes silly. When you go deeper in some sense, anything that you can say is perhaps ultimately trivial compared to the reality that you are. But on the other hand, you can know it, not intellectually, but by being it in silence.

It's that nosis, the body intelligence. A mutual friend of ours, Robert Grant. He said, perhaps destiny is the free will of the higher self. Yes, right, right. Which is an interesting thought experiment. Yes. I'm curious how you perceive relationships in this VR headset.

We come into contact. We meet somebody, we see their face like you spoke to. They are a portal into another consciousness. I'm just curious, what role do you see the relationships that we encounter in our life, the purpose that they serve on the evolution, on the path of evolution. evolution of consciousness. Well, I personally, you know, everything I've learned is from other people, right, from their books or from personal encounters and not only in teaching situations, but also

people who rub me the wrong way, right? And we all had brothers and sisters that we fought with as we were growing up, and we learned from that as well. So, I think that we learn by all these other perspectives, but it really is, again, the one just learning about itself by taking a perspective and interacting. See, ultimately right now, my avatar is one perspective. Your avatar is another perspective from the one. We're having this conversation.

And we're learning from, so the one is learning from itself in this process, both ways. Both avatars are learning something in this process. Through reflections and mirrors. That's right. So it's really quite interesting that. And yet we know that what we're learning is, in some sense, important, but also a trivial projection. It's only – and yet it's important to know ourselves from this projection, and it's important to know the limits of what we're knowing from this projection. And ultimately, it's important to know that we completely transcend everything that we know from this projection.

All of that seems to be important, and we get little bits of that from every interaction that we have from. ourselves and from ourselves in the form of other animals and plants because that's also the one interacting with me so i i got a spider bite on my on my leg the other day i'm learning something from myself in the form of a spider that came and bit me and and and so i know all these interactions it just feels like you know as we reflect and mirror back to each other our collective experience and perspective is greater than the individual parts. The sum of our perspectives is closer to the truth of objective reality than our own limited one, you know, ideas and perspective. So it's really cool, I think, and it's just an awesome framework to think of

people as these portals of consciousness that reflect back to us. And together, we are on this process of evolution. And with that, we can bring that humility to meeting other people. And not as much competition but more curiosity. I completely agree with you. And even the most unlikely person, when you think about it, they are that infinite intelligence, infinite, beyond Cantra's hierarchy. Even someone that you think couldn't teach you anything, they are the infinite intelligence.

And true love is seeing yourself in that and seeing the infinite in that person. Often the people that are most difficult to love, I feel like have the most to teach us. That's right. The things that we are difficult with are the things we need to learn the most, absolutely. To really reconcile. I'm curious, as we start ahead towards wrapping up, I'm just curious what your thoughts are on, with the exponential rise of technology and artificial intelligence, how do you see technology weaving and potentially supporting and being allies on this process of realizing the true nature of consciousness?

I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of widespread fear of the potential dystopic reality that could come by virtue of, you know, AI and how fast it's growing right now. I'm curious to hear some of the promise and what you think of it being an ally and supportive on the process. Well, I've been interested in artificial intelligence for quite a while. As a teenager, I was interested in it. Wow. I went to, I was interested in the question, actually, as a teenager, are we just machines?

are people just machines. So I went to MIT as a graduate student. I was in the artificial intelligence laboratory starting in 1979. And the was now the brain and cognitive science department because I wanted to study AI, see what machines could do, cognitive neuroscience, so I could see what human brains could do, and then to see if there's something special about it. So I've been very interested in this for a long time. And I'm not, you know, people, a lot of people are thinking catastrophic things going to happen with it. I'm not too worried about it.

It's a powerful technology and it can be used, of course, for harm. But so is nuclear, so as genetic engineering. We have all sorts of technologies. But what we learn is that we just have to be aware of the risks but also welcome the benefits and have whatever rules and laws are needed. But, you know, there's always a risk. Someone could release some NASA. genetically engineered virus that could kill humanity. Someone could release some kind of software that could really hurt us.

In terms of consciousness, I think that people are worried that AI will become conscious. And if you're thinking about it from a physicalist framework in which space and time are fundamental, and the idea is that somehow physical circuits and software, which are not conscious, but if you're they have the right kind of computational complexity, right, functional properties. Could appear so. They could, well, some people think they could actually lead to consciousness. I think that that's not possible.

On the other hand, for two reasons. Space time is doomed. Physical objects don't exist when they're not perceived. So the circuits don't even exist to create the consciousness, nor does the software. Your supercomputer exists when you look, and it doesn't exist otherwise. What exists is something outside of space time. What we see is a supercomputer or an AI

when we project that back into space time. So something created within space time could never exist outside of space time. Yeah, space time is just the pixels. Piscals aren't going to do it. They're just not going to do it for you. But the pixels within space time can be a portal.

So right now I'm sitting here, I'm looking at you. And so I have certain pixels in my headset. that are given me insight about Andre. But Andre is not inside space time. Andre is the consciousness utterly outside of space time. But I got some pixels inside my spacetime headset that are giving me some insight into Andre's consciousness. Well, so the question is, if we understand the headset,

well enough, could we reverse engineer it and open new portals into consciousness? Now, we know one way, we have one technology for opening new portals into consciousness. having kids. Very low tech. But it is a technology for opening new portals. So we know that there is one technology that we know about for opening new portals into consciousness.

So the question is, if we can reverse engineer that well enough, could we create new means for opening portals? Through our headset into consciousness. And for what it's worth, I think the answer is yes, that we could. And I think that it's possible that if we did that, some of the technology that we developed would look like artificial intelligence. But in that case, the interpretation of what's going on is 180 degrees opposite of what the standard interpretation would be real physical circuits and software of a real physical system that was formerly unconscious, suddenly became conscious. That's the standard of you. I'm saying those circuits and software don't even exist when they're not perceived. they couldn't cause anything.

However, my spacetime headset may have pixels in it that look like circuits and software. They may look like an artificial intelligence that are opening a new portal into consciousness outside of the headset. And we may be able to actually do that as a technology

that is learned from having kids, you know, from that technology. So you can see once again, when you go down this rabbit hole, everything that you think about has to be thought about 180 degrees opposite from the standard way of thinking about it. And it's a little hard now, but I suspect in a few short decades,

it's going to be just obvious to a generation that's been raised where virtual reality is just part of everyday life. Once you have spent time in virtual reality, all of a sudden you just sort of get this. It just becomes, the old view then just looks like flat earth. the idea that space time is fundamental and objects in space time are the reality that feels like flat earth

so I think the next generation will get it I think that's a really interesting perspective because sometimes I feel like in the next coming decade we create intelligence that appears to be conscious right we're getting there closer and closer every single day

and so I wonder if creating something in an AGI that appears to be sentient by all markers of past the Turing test it looks like it is, that would almost diminish our desire or seeking to know the true nature of what consciousness actually is, just because we have something that appears to be conscious that maybe would with or aware or seeking to actually know what the real thing is. I'm not too worried about that. People, even with the chat GPT stuff, I play with a little bit

and it doesn't impress me very much. Sure. Right. I mean, it's a great tool, but it's really easy to make it do mistakes that even, you know, a kindergartner wouldn't make. So it's not, but presumably, you know, in 10 or 15 years, it'll be much better. And it will be, you know, smart enough to full most people and be able to write better novels than anybody and better music and so forth. I think that that won't stop people from still wondering about who they are and what is the nature of my consciousness, especially since your death forces the issue. I mean, it forces you.

We all, we can get lost in the race of life for a while, but even just a little car accident or even a bad bug bite that could take you down, it forces you to realize I need to think outside of this box for a little bit, what am I, what happens when I die? and I will die, there's no getting around it. Even if we can extend life to 200 years, it's a flash in the pan. It's nothing. 200 years is just nothing. So the fundamental fact of life is death, or at least the fundamental fact about birth is death.

Maybe life is something deeper than both birth and death in spiritual traditions. So I'm not too worried that an apparently conscious AI, or maybe an AI kind of thing that really opens up a new portal into consciousness so that it really is funneling consciousness, just like the Andre Avatar is really a portal into genuine consciousness. Maybe an AI that is a genuine portal into consciousness. I don't think that that's going to make people less interested in consciousness or, if anything, it might open our minds even further. What is this thing that we could open a new portal into it? I'm curious if, you were to, like let's just say as a thought experiment, let's say you, for some reason, knock on one,

you went to a coma, 10 years you woke up, and they're like, welcome back, Don, you made it back, good news for you, just something about work real quick, we figured out, we proved the conscious agent theory, we were able to prove that consciousness is fundamental. And how would you now, like waking up, how would you predict that there would be an avenue of proving it in that way? Would there be a certain field of study or what you're maybe you're researching now that you feel like would would really lend to to that being possible? My plan with my team is to show that we can actually predict the momentum distributions of the quarks and gluons inside protons at all spatial and temporal resolutions that have been mapped in colliders and get it exact. In other words,

that doesn't mean that we're right, but I think we'll get it. So with mathematics, radical precision being able to predict their location. What they call the momentum distribution. So at lower resolutions and time and space inside the proton, you just see these three quarks, roughly. Two up, up quarks and a down quark. As you get to finer, you get a bunch of quark antichork pairs and a lot of gluons. And then even finer scale, smaller scale, you get just a whole sea of gluons.

And so you can say how much of the momentum is at each scale is for quarks and gluons and so forth. You can actually, they've got these momentum distributions. So what I want to do first is to show that our theory of conscious agents can predict those precise momentum distributions. They've been gathered for decades, four or five decades at the various colliders. It's one of the biggest databases that we've got. It's absolutely precise. There's no wiggling around. You either nail it or you don't.

And so that's, there's no BS here. If the model can't do that, then our model shouldn't be taken seriously. If it can do it, then it would be the first model outside of space time. A first scientific model of a dynamics outside of space time that can actually predict that kind of precision inside space time. It doesn't mean we're right, but it means it's potentially a baby step outside of space time. and I emphasize baby, a baby step outside of space time. Again, I think there are infinitely many steps to take.

But taking the first baby step is always a wonderful thing. Their first baby step is really quite good. So this would be maybe our first baby step of a dynamical system outside of space time. Physicists have taken the first baby step of finding static structures outside of space time, like the decorated permutations and amplitude-heatern. So I would say I would like 10 years from now, to be able to say that the theory conscious agents has shown that it can predict the inner structure of protons. Hopefully we get then to the neutrons and maybe even to modeling the nuclear force inside the nucleus

and then start to move towards atoms and molecules start to move into chemistry and show that we can model there. and once my colleagues in the cognitive neuroscience cognitive neuroscience see this and they really understand that space time is just a headset and they really understand

that reductionism dies because space time dies and they give up trying to build neural reductionist theories of consciousness and they start going this other way my colleague they're really smart

they're really brilliant the only reason they're not making progress is because they have the wrong foundation. And no one, no matter how smart they are, can ever solve the problem on this reductionist foundation. But as soon as they get the idea, they will then run circles around us.

When I was at MIT, I saw people who are so much smarter than me. I had no idea how smart they were. In academia, you just see people that are so smart. You just know they're walking on a different planet than I am. So once that kind of intelligence is unleashed with this new framework I won't be able to keep up I won't even be able to read the papers

and that's what I'm looking for I would love to see in 20 years that this thing is just taken off and I'm not even smart enough to read their papers now so interesting I feel would you then say if you were able to come to that conclusion

or really prove that that would probably be one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in science because of the implications that would have for redirecting a lot of those individuals intelligence and energy to work on this problem

are these things with you. Well, it would certainly be a paradigm change, right? Just like flat earth to round earth, it was a huge paradigm change. And then geocentric universe to, no, we're not the center. That's another. So this is a paradigm change. Yeah. A monumental one.

It's a monumental one. Letting go of space time is, actually makes flat earth pretty, seem pretty. Yeah, I don't know what else would you would put on that level, you know? Nothing else so far. This is realizing that everything we've done is just a headset. Right. It's a pretty big paradigm change. But now the physicists are there first, right?

They've discovered these new structures outside of spacetime, like Nimar, Connie Ahmed, and others that working with him. So, but my guess is that as big as letting go of the headset is, we have even bigger surprises ahead after that. And I'm not even smart enough to think what they are. But the one is, and I am the one, but with the current avatar restrictions on the one, I can't tell you. So fascinating.

There is so much to digest in this whole conversation. I'm just looking forward to watching back myself. I'm just curious, is there anything within your theory or framework that you feel like we haven't touched on that you would like to share that would help create more of a cohesive understanding of how this all kind of comes together? Well, I'll raise a question that I get in emails all the time. Sure. people say how can you possibly say that

space time are fundamental and that rocks only exist when you look at them and their neurons don't exist so for example someone could take a rock a piece of iron

stick it in the ground I got an email someone not too long ago and come back 10 years later and it's rusted and so forth well unless there was real piece of iron and there really is such a thing as rust going on and so forth. So that really

shows that the whole thing you're saying is nonsense. These things really do exist. The iron really exists in space and time and it really does rust even when you're not looking at it. And so I get these kind of things all the time. And my reply is, again, always think about it in the VR headset framework. Imagine, and this is something I wrote back in an email to somebody. I said, imagine that you're playing a multiplayer Minecraft game. And you take a little, red brick and you and you bury it somewhere in Minecraft. But it's a multiplayer game

and it's a VR version of it. And so, you know, a friend of your, someone you don't know, say in Switzerland, you know, a couple days later, going around and sees your brick, pulls it out, paints it green, puts it back in there. And you come back a week later and you're looking, oh, my brick was red and I put it in there, and now it's green.

Ah, well, does that prove that the brick really exists when you don't perceive? No, it's just a Minecraft game. There is no green brick. There is no red brick. There's just some supercomputer. And if you look inside,

you would not find any green bricks inside that supercomputer. You render the brick when you look and it's not there when you don't look. It only exists. So any question, so I end on this point, any question that someone has at the end of our conversation, you probably will be able to answer it yourself.

just try on a virtual reality metaphor and try to solve the problem yourself before you email me because you'll probably figure it out for yourself. Yeah, when you're not so identified with the appearance of phenomena. That's right. Just think VR and you'll get it. Donald, thank you so much for coming on

and I appreciate you so much for coming out in person and just find it so much better when we can do these things in person. And thank you so much for the work that you're doing. It's just so pivotal and fundamental towards the progression and evolution of understanding reality in its objective way. So thank you so much. My pleasure.

Thanks for inviting me, Andre. Yeah. All righty, everybody, thank you so much for coming on this journey of the Know Thyself podcast. This conversation was mind-bending. I am going to percolate on a lot of things that we talked about in this conversation for weeks, months, years to come. And my intention with these conversations, part of it at least, is to deconstruct

these tightly held notions of what we think reality is in the pursuit of a larger truth. realizing that the universe and life is much more mystical than we perceive it to be. And hopefully this conversation bridged some gaps in your understanding of the world. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. And until next time, be well.