Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - One From The Vault - A Case Against Reality with Donald Hoffman - Episode 16

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

In this episode of RISE UP WITH DRAGON, we have a very special interview in my opinion one of the most intelligent and intreaguing speakers and educators of our time. Professor Donald Hoffman, Author of A Case Against Reality and cognitive psychologist at UC Irvine. In this episode, Dragon and Donald dive deep into the case against reality, what our purpose iss as humans, if any. As well as some thought provoking conversations regarding how evolution and natural selection in no way has positioned us to be capable of perceiving reality in its true form.   WATCH EPISODE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZqIo6cG6Bts?feature=shared   **** Connect With Donald Hoffman, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine @donalddhoffman [e-mail]   OUR SPONSOR: The Makes Sense Academy: https://www.skool.com/makes-sense-academy/about  Tune in to Makes Sense with Dr. JC Doornick Podcast  Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/makessensepodcast  Instagram: @drjcdoornick   06:19 - Has Natural Selection enabled humans to objectively see reality as it truly is? 07:11 - The Red Pill - Space, Time and Matter are not the way to describe reality 09:52 - Why would it be advantageous for Natural Selection to hide the truth from us? 12:30 - What are Fitness points and how do they correlate with natural selection  15:33 - How do you explain obesity? 19:30 - Is our species trying to kill itself? 25:30 - Is what we see what is or just what we see? 29:58 - Object Permanence 36:47 - Are science and mathematics valid methods to validate reality? 41:53 - Where does consciousness live? 44:19 - What happens when we die? 48:04 - What is our purpose on this planet?   #DONALDOFFMAN #ACASEAGAINSTREALITY #CONSCIOUSNESS  #PODCAST #BETTERBRAIN #TRAINYOURBRAIN Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hmm. Makes Sense. Welcome to One from the Vault Thursdays, where the Make Sense podcast pulls some of the most classic episodes of the past from the Rise Up with Dragon show. Enjoy. This is your friend Dragon coming to you with another Rise Up with Dragon. But I guess today, because it's in the afternoon, we'll call it a wind down with Dragon. Usually I have a whole bunch of stuff to say, and you know that sometimes I do my show by myself, but today I have a very, very special guest. and I want to bring him in as soon as possible.

Just to set the stage a little bit, I just want everybody to know that for me, this is a very, very special thing for me. A lot of people always ask me, who would be your ideal guest? Would it be a rock star? Would it be a movie star? Would it be just an icon from social media or movies or anything like that?

I'm kind of a closet nerd in neuroscience and just kind of trying to figure out about things like consciousness and the meaning of life. And I have been following this individual for a long time. When I was talking to him just for a minute, I said, I don't know if you ever wonder about all of the people out there, the millions of people that follow your work, his papers, his literature, his book, but I'm one of them. So this is a really, really special treat. And I'm going to bring him out here. And we'll go side by side for a second. And then we'll get into this conversation. So let's bring him up here.

This is somebody that I look up to. This is Don Hoffman, and he is quite an amazing individual. In our household, my father, my mother, all of my siblings, when I said, hey, by the way, I have Don Hoffman coming on to my show. And they said, what? So we are very, very excited to have you, Don. How are you today? Where are you coming from? Are you in California?

Well, thank you very much. It's very kind of you to have me on. I appreciate it. I'm coming from Irvine, California. Irvine's about halfway between L.A. and San Diego. Awesome. So there's a whole mix-match of people that are going to be watching this, and this is going to be cut up and delivered all over the place.

So what I would love to do is first give them a little bit of a background. A lot of people have heard about you, and a lot of people are meeting you for the first time. So could we just start off with just a little bit of who you are and what you do and where you come from? Well, I've been a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California at Irvine since 1983. I've recently retired, so I'm now Professor Emeritus, and I've been studying visual perception, the evolution of perception. Does natural selection shape sensory systems to see the truth or not? Some work in artificial intelligence, and then also some work on consciousness and this relationship to human neural activity. Just so everybody understands, I come from this upbringing and my father is very, very much

involved in technology and he does a lot of consulting and he's friends with astronauts and he's always asking questions about the bigger picture. So, and he's, he's just always convinced us ever since I was little that there's something more and I bought into it full force. So ever since I was a child, I always asked questions about everything. Your information that we're going to get into right now for me is extremely comfortable because I guess I would say that I was brought up very curious. But we also recognize that we live in a world full of people that are very, very definitive in being right about things. What we're about to do is we're about to make a case for reality, you know.

This is his book. And reading this book for me is like eating a pizza with no calories. But what's interesting about your book is I actually ended up writing a book. book about your book because I took so many notes. So I have note pads all over the place. So I've, I've mold them down into some questions that I think are important. But what I want to attempt to do in this hour that we have together today is make sense of some of your theories. I guess my first question that I thought would be fun to jump in is, and I wrote it down, because I want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to grasp this. What does it take for a human to even open up to the

idea that all that they know or that they've been led to believe and programmed to know might not be so. What is that step that somebody needs to take to be even open to that? Right. That's a great question. For me, I decided that as a scientist to address that question, do we see reality as it is? I see the moon. I assume that that's because there really is a moon. I see an apple and I assume that the shape and color and so forth that I see is at least roughly true. And you agree that you see a red apple. And so we agree that we're both seeing the same kind of reality. So to ask the question, is it possible that we don't see reality as it is, that maybe even space and time themselves are not the nature of reality. I realize that the way as a scientist to address that question is

to ask, do our best scientific theories entail that we see reality as it? is or not. So I asked the question, does evolution by natural selection entail that organisms would be shaped, that the sensory systems of organisms would be shaped to see reality as it is? And most of us might think, yes. I mean, of course, seeing the truth makes you more fit. So those of our ancestors who saw reality more accurately would be more successful at the basic activities of life, like feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. And so they'd be more likely to pass on the genes that code for the accurate sensory systems.

And that seems reasonable, but what I decided to do was to ask, using something called evolutionary game theory, which is the mathematical formulation of evolution of a natural selection that we've had since the 1970s, John Maynard Smith came up with this mathematics. We can actually ask this as a technical question, as a theorem.

Is it true or not that natural selection will shape sensory systems to see true structures of objective reality. And it turns out the theorem is very, very clear. The answer is no. The probability is zero that any sensory system of any organism sees any true structures at all of objective reality, according to natural selection. So for me, as a scientist, I mean, I'm hard-nosed in the sense that I want to go with

what our best science says. And so if our best science says, no, we see reality as it is, then I would have to, you know, take that quite seriously. But our best science in this area, which is evolution by natural selection, is very clear. The probability is zero that we see reality as it is. So that's for me, as a scientist, how I begin to take seriously the red pill, the idea that space and time and physical objects are not the right way to describe reality at all. So it's not that I'm getting the shapes a little bit off or the colors a little bit wrong or whatever. It's that the very language of space and time and objects inside space and time is the wrong language to describe objective reality. You could not give a true description of objective reality at all in that language.

And that's a theorem of evolution by natural selection. So that's when I began to take the red pill seriously is when I actually see it being entailed by our best scientific theories. So this is where I want to make sure that we grab this because one of the things that I agree with you on, but I hear you speak a lot about is this theory of natural selection. And one of the things I love about you is you'll hear that every now and then he'll say, I might be wrong or I'm probably wrong. But what he is saying right now, everybody, is based on the best that we have, you know. So when somebody gives a definitive that can't be proven, we have to use a theory to look at that. So I want to go into natural selection a little bit more because I think that sometimes just flashes by someone. So the concept of natural selection, only the strong survive, that if you look at our evolution, we're always trying to evolve and survive.

I mean, what an amazing time to even just evaluate. and I want to get into a little bit of the pandemic, the idea of seeing the whole truth versus seeing just a version of the truth, how does that facilitate our evolution? Like that's one of the things that I find so interesting is, is if this is true and we're looking at this concept of natural selection and our goal is to survive and evolve, why would the truth, as you say,

why evolution hid truth from our eyes? why would the truth be hidden from our eyes and how would that be advantageous for natural selection? Right. And so I agree with your point that when I start with evolution of natural selection, I'm not saying that's because we know that that theory is true and correct. We don't. It's just that it's the best theory we have so far. So as a scientist, I have to take our current scientific theories. I don't believe my own theories. I don't believe any scientific theories. Of course we're going to be looking for deeper theories that surpass what we've already got and comprehend them as a special case. But right now, evolution but natural selection is the best theory we have in this area.

And so that's why I use it. And so to your question about why would natural selection shape us not to see the truth, how would that be advantageous? There's a couple reasons why we'd be advantageous. first, seeing the truth is pretty complicated and really not necessary. So a good example is if you're playing a virtual reality game, say, of Grand Theft Auto, and you see a steering wheel in front of you and you see a dashboard and some cars that you're competing against. And you're trying to win the game of Grand Theft Auto.

Well, what you're really doing when you turn your steering wheel left or right and hit the gas, you're really in the some supercomputer, you're toggling some voltages. So in this metaphor, there's a supercomputer that's the reality, and Grand Thift Auto is the virtual reality. And so what you're doing in that case is toggling millions of voltages per second in some supercomputer. But if you had to actually try to play the game by directly toggling all those voltages very, very quickly and in the right sequence,

you would lose when you were competing with someone who just had to turn a steering wheel left or right. And so that's sort of what evolution did. It gave us this dumbed down virtual reality of space and time and objects that allows us to control this complicated reality without really knowing what we're doing. So I play Grand Theft Auto. I might be a wizard at Grand Theft Auto, but I don't need to know what I'm really doing in the supercomputer. And that's what Evolution does for us. It gives us just simple eye candy that lets us that guides adaptive actions and we're doing something in reality, but we're really ignorant about what we're doing, and that's perfectly fine.

The symbols are there not to show us the truth. They're there to keep us alive. And that's really the whole point. Yeah, I think that that makes total sense because if you look at the goal in mind, our goal wasn't to figure out the whole truth, although so many people feel like that's their mission to seek the truth. But then again, they're going about their days and just trying to move forward and win or at least survive.

But then you look at the bigger picture of mankind, looking to evolve, get through these pandemics and everything like that, it makes sense that we're going to refine what it is that we see so that it facilitates that. Because if you go down a rabbit hole, I mean, it could be exhausting. You might not like what you find. And it might have nothing to do with moving forward. So that being said, one of my favorite things that you speak about is,

and you said the word fit before, in relation to what you're speaking about right now, this concept of fitness points. Now, I will tell you, we joke about this all the time. You know, so you're going to speak about fitness points, but in our, you'll get a crack out of this. So my wife and I, if I walk in the door and, you know, and I'm wearing like a nice outfit, I go, do you know why I'm wearing this? And she goes, because you love me? And I go, no, I'm just trying to rack up. So we have a ball with a lot of your theories. But let's talk a little bit about this because that really helps people make sense about a lot of the things that they do and why they do them. Talk a little bit

about this concept of our goal is to rack up fitness points. Right. So this is just sort of standard way of thinking about evolutionary game theory. So this is the mathematical model of evolution. And the notion of fitness payoffs is maybe best understood with some concrete examples. So being 5,000 feet underwater would be really bad for my fitness. But being 5,000 feet underwater is perfectly fine for a benthic fish. That's the right environment for a benthic fish. So the same, quote-unquote, reality can have very, very different fitness payoffs. And so, you know, again, for a koala bear, eating the leaves of eucalyptus trees is very, very fit. That's what, that really helps the koala bear.

For me, it would be poisonous. It would kill me. If I tried to eat eucalyptus leaves, it would be a fatal mistake. And so the idea is that there's no absolute notion of this thing has high fitness payoffs for everybody. And this one has low fitness payoffs for everybody. It's rather fitness depends on objective reality, whatever it might be, but also on the organism, its state, and its action.

So a benthic fish has different fitness payoffs than for me. and being underwater is great for it, but not for me. And so the idea then is you can think about evolution of a natural selection as like playing a game. We're playing, quote unquote, the game of life. And just like in a video game, what you have to do to win the video game is you have to as quickly as you can grab as many points as you can. So you have to really be focused on grabbing the points in the game. And if you get enough points in a short enough time, then you move to the next level. forth. In evolution, what's happening is like that, but you're grabbing fitness payoffs. You're

getting the right kinds of food, mating the right way, and so forth. But what happens is if you get enough fitness payoffs, you don't go to the next level yourself, but your offspring, your kids pass to the next level. And so that's sort of the analogy. And that's a way to thinking about these fitness payoffs. They're like points in the video game. So I come from a realm of, I was a doctor for 17 years, so I saw all that happen. And now I'm in the realm of going upstream and evaluating that most of, in my perception, most people's problems have to do with their lifestyle. And that ties into everything.

But in the realm of fitness points, I was thinking about this the other day. How do you explain something like obesity? Because if we're saying that food nourishment could be looked at as fitness points, do they just have too much fitness? You know, how would you evaluate how sometimes we take something that has such great value to move us forward, and we have this tendency of overdoing it? Right. So that's a great question. And there's a couple ideas about the specific thing about weight.

And one idea has been that during our hunter-gatherer days, it was not that easy to get lots of food. We lived on the edge. And so it was a good strategy if you ran across a rich food source to consume as much as you could because you never knew when you might come to, again, a good food source. And so there is a strategy of saying if you run across a beehive with lots of honey, you should eat as much as you possibly can because who knows when you're going to get that kind of rich resource. And so that strategy then in a situation like today where food is plentiful, in most countries, at least in the Western world, for example, food is not so much of an issue,

at least not nearly as much as it was during the plasticing, we can get food fairly easily. And so if we have this algorithm built into us that whenever there are high calorie, high fat foods, eat as much as you can, and that's sort of just. programmed into your neurobiology, then that would be a real problem. Same thing with alcohol, right? In a situation, you know, during the hunter-gatherer past, we might have been able to consume all the alcohol that we could possibly run across, but that was because we didn't run across very much of it.

Now when it's, you know, you can get as many bottles as you want, that becomes a problem. Now, there's been some pushback on that theory because it looks like different. People have different set points genetically. And so what may be also going on here is that during our hunter-gatherer past, many of us maybe never could eat as much as our set point wanted, but now we can. And so we tend to have more obesity now than we had back then, simply because, again, it's a wonderful problem that we have all these things plentifully available to us. So the big idea here is that strategies that were built into us during the Pleistocene, during our hunter-gatherer past, were essentially shaped to keep us alive in that situation. And they may not now be appropriate for the new situation that we're in now where food is

plentiful and alcohol is plentiful and so forth. So that's sort of one evolutionary way of thinking about why some of our behaviors seem so counterproductive and against our fitness. They were behaviors that may have been fit in our evolutionary past and are no longer fit in our new situation. Yeah, and just one more question on that, thinking natural selection and thinking how, I mean, we go back to the caveman days and you kind of touched on it a little bit. Those were days where we would be seeking the same things, but maybe take a week sometimes

and not have them. So naturally, our survival mechanism, now this is recognizing that we're also not even sure that what we're looking at is reality, right? but we're just in natural selection and survival mode. So back then we had a shortage and we actually would die from a lack of it. And then here we are now where we have an overabundance of it. We still are the same people. So it's almost like we forgive everyone for you know not what you do.

It's not your fault. It's natural selection. But if you look at our world right now in many, many ways, it's in shambles right now because of the overindulgence and emotional mismanagement and things like that. So in your perception, I just wanted to get this out. What's your observation of what's happening to our species right now? And then we'll go into the reality thing in a second. But what's happening to our species right now?

Because it looks like we're trying to kill ourselves. Right. So from the point of view of evolutionary psychology, which, again, I'm using that framework, not because I think it's the final ultimate true framework, but it's the best scientific framework we have so far for understanding human motivation and human behaviors and trying to understand things that seem counterproductive. So evolutionary psychology is a beautiful and deep and lovely theory. And there we find that the kinds of algorithms that were shaped with are in some sense short-term algorithms.

They work well enough in the niche that we happen to be in. There's no, from an evolutionary point of view, there's no looking forward to future changes that are profound that we'd have to deal with. I'll give you a concrete examples, a couple. One is, if you look at the things that were dangerous to us in the past, there were things like snakes and spiders and bats and so forth. And those are the kinds of things that we have an innate fear for. I mean, little children that have never seen a snake before can have a fear response to that. It's just sort of wired into our amygdala and into our nervous system. But in Western societies, you know, things like guns and SUVs kill more people than snakes and spiders.

And yet we don't have an innate fear to guns and SUVs. but we still have the innate fear to snakes and spiders, which aren't killing as many people. And so the idea is it took a long, it takes a long time for these things to get wired into our nervous system. And so the kinds of, the strategies that are wired into us are strategies that were great for our hunter-gatherer days. They may not be great for today. And this is so true of not just of humans, but of all species. One consequence of this is that 99% of all species that have been on the planet are extinct. That's what happens. That's the sense in which I was saying evolution has no long foresight. It's not like planning ahead for big, big changes. The dinosaurs are doing

great for hundreds of millions of years. Some big, a meteor hits the earth, and that whole thing is over. There was no foresight for a meteor changing the earth in that way. And so then other creatures like some mammals managed to survive that and then take over. Now, what we can do with evolutionary psychology is try to understand the strategies that are built into us and understand why they worked, as they did during the Pleistocene, why they're not working now when we, for example, can amplify our warring tendencies with nuclear bombs and so forth. And we can ask ourselves, given an evolutionary psychology understanding of human nature, is there some way that we can actually change our social structure or the payoffs in our social

structure such that our behaviors will not be detrimental to ourselves and to the planet and to our species? So in other words, this gives us the tools about how we might look at the payoffs that are driving current counterproductive behaviors in humans, can we change those payoffs? Can we choose to change the payoffs in society, such that we will get the kind of behavior that will keep us alive and keep us from going extinct

and taking the other species with us? Isn't that amazing? I mean, most people would say, of course we can choose, especially in this country, they'd say we can choose anything we want, but when you're just the person that's evaluating saying, okay, I'll watch, you know, what transpires. We don't see people making those choices all the time.

In fact, one of the things that I find so fascinating about this conversation, and I'm sure you get it all the time, the idea of recognizing, and I want to get a little bit into the desktop theory, the idea of recognizing that what you see, what you've blamed that you see, like you always talk about the idea of looking at a red tomato, and you see it's a red tomato, but when you look to the side, is it still there? Right? Most people will not only say yes, regardless if they can prove it or not, but out of fear, they will insist that it is. So I just want everybody to understand that this is a man that comes from, he doesn't have an opinion. He's a scientist. He's into proving something. In fact, he always invites people say, okay, show me, prove it to me. But we live in a world where people protect their scenario. And I think it's, out of fear because that idea of Morpheus saying red pill or blue pill, that's a scary moment.

It's a scary moment to all of a sudden wonder if there's a difference between your dream and reality, you know? So to break it down, and I love the way you use the word interface. So, you know, if you were to recognize one day that everything that you see is an interface to help you make sense of the world. If we have time to get into space and time and matter and all that. stuff, that that's another interesting rabbit hole. But give us a little bit of the desktop analogy so people can understand what it is that you're talking about, because they're very

often misunderstand this, when you say that what it is that you see is not actually there. That's right. So it's a natural question. If I claim that it's a theorem of evolution by natural selection, that it's a probability zero that we see any of the truth, then what is it that we do see or perceive. I mean, I'm using C in the general sense of all sensory systems. So what is it that we're perceiving? If we're not shaped to perceive the truth, what in the world are we perceiving? And the idea is that think about, again, like a desktop interface or a virtual reality game. The point of the desktop interface, say you're writing an email and the icon for the email on your desktop is blue and rectangular and in the middle of your screen, does that mean?

that the email itself in your computer is blue and rectangular and in the middle of the computer? Of course not. Anybody who thought that misunderstands the whole point of the desktop interface, it's not there to show you the truth, which in this metaphor would be the voltages and magnetic fields in a computer. It's the interface is there to hide that truth. You don't want to have to toggle voltages to write an email. If you had to do that, you wouldn't get it done. People wouldn't hear from you. So the whole point of an interface is to let you control this complicated reality, toggle the voltages in some supercomputer without knowing what you're doing and not even caring what it is you're doing in reality. And that's what evolution did for us. It gave us a very simple, dumbed down user interface.

Whatever reality is, who knows, it's some complicated thing. We don't have to know what it is. In fact, there's no payoff in knowing the truth. There's only payoff in being able to manipulate that reality in ways that will keep you alive. And a user interface that does that for you on a computer is a good analogy. So space and time, as you perceive them right now, the three-dimensional space around you, is just your desktop or a virtual reality headset that you're using to play the virtual game of life. So you can think about it in terms of virtual reality, playing virtual grand-reality.

playing virtual grand theft auto, virtual reality grand theft auto, all you see is a steering wheel and then dashboard. But what you're really doing is toggling, again, voltages in some supercomputer. And so you don't have to know that reality to play the game. And so that's what evolution did. It gave us space time is just a data structure. And physical objects are just part of that data structure. And they're there to guide adaptive behavior to let us play the game in, a way that we can survive and pass on our genes. And that doesn't require us to know the truth. And so it is a shock to the system because evolution has also programmed us to believe the game.

Developmental psychologists tell us that around four months of age, we get what they call object permanence, which is the deeply wired in belief that when I see a physical object like an apple, that's because there really is an apple and the apple really continues to exist whether or not I perceive it. That's called object permanence. And so we are wired to believe our sensory systems, to take them literally as true or very, very close to the truth. And so it's a real shock to the system to realize that we've believed since we were four months of age, something that we weren't reasoned into. It was before the age of reason. There was no informer. There was no informer. consent here. We were just wired to believe this. And so it's really a shock as adults to realize

something that deep that's been part of our conceptual system and our belief system since before we can remember is deeply false, but programmed for us to believe anyway. I hear you very often give examples of a cat. Do you have a cat? We have two cats. Okay, great. So we do too. I notice, I was thinking about the object permanence thing, which I think is so fascinating. I think anything that I've been through without knowing it is fascinating. Like the idea that there was a time where my parents could hide something and I would think it disappeared. What I love about that is that that gives rise to the fact that object permanence for me is something that I learned to believe in, right?

I can't prove it, but I learned to believe it. But I noticed that cats don't have it. My cats, for instance, we have a very strange cat that plays fetch. I don't know if that's normal for catch, but our cat brings the ball and plays fetch. And if I throw the ball and he gets it, everything's fine. But every now and then, I throw it in a place that it disappears, and I just notice, he sees where it went, but he just assumes that it disappeared. He gives up on it.

I don't know if you've ever noticed that about cats, but I don't think they have object permanence. I don't know about cats, and that's a very interesting point. But this points to a very general feature that we see throughout the animal world, and that is that animals don't see the truth. They have little tricks and hacks that they use to get through the day. One of them that I really like is the jewel beetle. The beetles are dimpled, glossy, and brown. The females are flightless.

the males fly looking for eligible females, and if a male finds one, he alights and mates. But it turned out that this happens in Australia. These beetles are in Australia. And some of the Australians had these beer bottles that they call stubbies. And the stubbies were dimpled, glossy, and brown, and guys would toss them out into the outback when they were done drinking them. And it turned out the bottles were just exactly the right shade of brown.

to capture the fancy of these jewel beetles. And so the males were flocking all over these bottles trying to mate. And the species was close to extinction because the real females were not of interest. The males were more interested in these bottles. And so what's interesting is here the male jewel beetle had for hundreds of thousands of years, presumably, successfully found and mated with females. And you might think, well, that means that evolution had shaped the jewel beetle, males to know what a real female is and the answer is apparently not what

evolution gave them was just a little simple trick or hack a female is anything that's dimpled glossy and brown and apparently the bigger the better and so so that that's the standard thing that we find in evolution is that animals don't see the truth they're shaped with simple tricks and hacks like the gray lag goose that sits on its egg. It turns out you can take a rock, the right shape of rock and put big speckles on it. It's a rock so big that the goose could never possibly lay it. You put that down in front of the goose. It will abandon its own eggs to sit on this rock. So what's going on is, again,

the goose doesn't know what an egg really is. It just has this simple trick that bigger is better. And, you know, it's roughly the right shape and some speckles and is much bigger than that's better. And so it can't figure out that this thing is just a rock. And we just see this throughout the animal kingdom and each animal itself can't see its own limitations and presumably that's true of us humans as well. We can't see our own limitations. We are like the jewel beetle and the gray lag goose and we don't know it. That's exactly where I was going with it, which I think is so funny because here we are, you and I and I want to get a little bit into consciousness and mathematics, but we're having a conversation as if we know anything about the fact that animals have tricks and

hacks, but there's potentially there's a higher being watching us make love to a yellow bottle in our own way, saying, yes, these humans, they're very fascinating. They don't really see the truth. They have all these tricks and hacks to get by, get through the day. I found that fascinating. Am I right? It's absolutely right. In fact, we know a lot of the tricks and hacks.

And I have done consulting for various companies telling them tricks and hacks, and they use for marketing and advertising. So we actually, many companies now know how to grab your attention, hold your attention, make you want things because we know a lot of the evolutionary psychology. It's very subtle, but it's very, very effective. I'll just, well, I won't go into any details, but anyway, it's being used. We know the tricks, many tricks and hacks, and companies are using them to manipulate you in marketing, advertising, product design.

This is a whole, you know, I've watched. a lot of your interviews that go for three hours sometimes, and now I understand why. And we have one hour, so I want to make sure I ask you my questions. This is really, really interesting because at first, I think a lot of people would be afraid to even open themselves up to acknowledge that this phone that I'm looking at is not actually a phone and that I look away and it's not there anymore. That scares people. However, there's a benefit to it as well.

Because there's a lot of things about life that human beings struggle with potentially unnecessary if they knew that it wasn't real. One of the things that I love about concepts of simulation theory and evolutionary game theory and all that, it's given me the ability. Now, I've been doing this thanks to my dad. And by the way, my dad has a question for you. He says, lay this one on him. So that's coming soon. I was brought up to kind of question everything because we don't, you know, you check the facts type thing.

So what an interesting concept to recognize that this science that we're talking about, if you don't believe it, well, then you're unaware that it's being used against you. Whether they believe it or not, they're using it to make you believe something. And that's happening everywhere and they're really, really good at it. But at the same time, I love the. idea of when somebody comes to me with a big problem, the sky is falling or anything like that, my answer used to be, oh my God, but now my answer is, hmm, you know, like, is that right? So I love the idea of just remaining open to this stuff because what it means is that a lot

of the things that you're struggling with might not be worth the struggle. I know you're not a mathematician, but you've got a lot of friends that hook you up with that stuff. So I'm hoping, my wife says, what's the outcome that you want from this? And I said, well, I remember that Don Hoffman talked about Professor Marr at MIT that he was enamored by. And I'm saying, I'm hoping that he will let me follow him around one day. That's my goal of this thing, right? I know that mathematics is an important part of this formula because you're using mathematics to prove some stuff. So here's my question about mathematics.

Is mathematics a valid way of proving these theories, or is mathematics a man-made version of how we're trying to make sense of something? Could we be all wrong with mathematics, is what I'm saying? Great question. One might say that, look, I've used evolutionary theory to prove that all of our cognitive and perceptual capacities are flawed and not telling us the truth. And so that includes mathematics. And so I've actually shot myself in the foot logically. I've used math of evolutionary game theory to prove that math is not reliable. And it turns out I haven't done that.

The theorem that I mentioned about evolution of natural selection applies only to sensory systems. It does not, our theorem has nothing to do with logic or reason or the evolution of logic, reasoning, and mathematical abilities. And there, what's interesting is there seem to be some modest, at least some modest selection pressures for some facility in elementary mathematical abilities. Because we need to be able to reason about fitness payoffs, not about objective reality, but about the payoffs themselves. So, for example, knowing that two bites of an apple offer roughly twice the fitness payoff of one bite of an apple is, advantageous you know an organism that that was wired up to believe that two bites of an apple are worse fitness payoff than one bite of an apple is not going to compete as well as one is wired up the other way so that's not an

argument that we've been wired up to be geniuses in mathematics it just to have some modest capability and then every once in a while you know the genes come together and you get a von Neumann or David Hilbert or some you know mathematical genius that we can all just can't imagine how they could be so smart but but but The point here is that the evolutionary argument, the theorem that Cheytau Prakash proved, that our sensory systems definitely, with probability one, don't show us the truth. That theorem does not apply against math and reasons.

So we have to now think about math and reasoning ability separately. And that's a very deep. I'm not saying it's a trivial issue, but at least the theorems that we have are not the ones that are saying that we have no good abilities there. So basically when we look at math, kind of like natural selection, we can't prove that it's valid, but it's the best thing we got going to explain what's going on right now. If somebody comes along, as you very often say, with something better, we're open to it.

But right now it's the best thing we got. Absolutely. Because here we are talking about reality and making a case against reality. And we're also basically saying, I don't know if we actually knew the deep truth. I don't know if it would be good for us. There's a case that it would actually be disadvantageous for us to do this. So I'm like you in the sense that I go down every rabbit hole I see.

You can call me a drug addict because I take the red pill every minute. My father and I always said, family is most important to us and all that stuff. But if an alien ship shows up, we're leaving. Right. So I'm open to that. But in being open to that, that very idea of being. open to it means that I'm also open to finding out that everything we thought, you know, there's a next step to that. So anyway, I want to talk a little bit about, we're coming to the

end of the hour, I want to get some of the good stuff. I want to talk a little bit about consciousness. So I am just, I spend every waking hour reading and you've, you've given me a lot of great stuff because consciousness is this, this unique thing that human beings have. I think it's the biggest biggest struggle that human beings have in this world is to be mindful and become conscious of things like this or anything. But I know that you and a lot of your colleagues have been really, really playing this game, going down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out where does consciousness come from. And we know that there's these amazing procedures where you can split both hemispheres, cut the corpus colossum, and then have two separate consciousness. So we know

that consciousness, is it safe to say consciousness not created in the brain? Well, most of my colleagues in neuroscience would not say that. So when I say that I have to give good justification, most of my colleagues would say that consciousness is created by brain activity. I'm asking, I'm disagreeing. Well, I would say that consciousness is not created by the brain. In fact, that the brain and neurons are merely icons in our user interface. They don't even, neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived. So neurons create none of my conscious experiences because neurons are in fact the product of my consciousness. They don't cause my consciousness. So this was the question that I had ready for you. Don, with your hands, show me where consciousness lives. It's impossible because there's nothing

in space and time. Consciousness is not inside space and time. So most of us might think that, I mean, I should point to my head and say consciousness is in there because it's created by the brain. But I'm saying that that whole framework in which space time is fundamental and physical objects inside space time are the fundamental reality and then somehow consciousness emerges later, right? The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. There was no consciousness and no life. And life and consciousness came hundreds of millions or billions of years later. And we have to figure out what physical objects are complicated enough to give rise to consciousness. I'm saying that whole framework is misguided.

consciousness does not arise in space time as a latecomer on the pre-existing stage of space-time is just the opposite consciousness of space and time so space and time itself are just data structures within certain consciousnesses they're data structures that serve as our user interfaces so instead of us being in you know our consciousness being a latecomer inside space time space time itself is a data structure in our consciousness. So I just turn the whole thing around. Man, I would love to speak to you about three hours about that. On that topic, I heard you give the beach volleyball game analogy where somebody was asking you like what happens when we die. I'm going to try to get this right. But he gave an analogy, and you can correct me if I miss it, of putting virtual reality glasses

on, right? And a couple of other people and you go into this realm where you're playing beach beach volleyball. And then one of you decides that you have to go get a drink of water, takes the virtual reality glasses off. So you're going to get a glass of water. But everybody in the VR, the headset, remember, that's their reality at the time. They see your avatar collapse and it's lifeless. So, and this is not one of your proven theories. You just think this is a cool idea because consciousness is so fascinating. And I think we're going to spend, you know, if you look at Gerdels theory, you realize that even if we do figure it out, it'll just, give rise to something else we have to figure out.

But you came up with this concept that blew my mind that when we die, our consciousness moves on, but we don't know if it carries the narrative and story of our lives with it. That's right. Did I get it right? You've got that. That's right. So if space time is fundamental and physical objects are fundamental

and consciousness is a product of our brain activity, then when the brain dies, your consciousness must cease. It's just very, very clear. But in this other framework in which space time is not fundamental, it's just a data structure, it's just a VR headset that certain consciousness is used, then death inside space time where the body ceases to move could be just like an avatar ceasing to move. So if I take off my headset and body suits in a VR game, my avatar in the game looks lifeless, but I just stepped out of the game.

So the consciousness could, in this framework, could continue to persist, even though everybody that's using the interface can't connect with that consciousness anymore. And that's a clear implication of this idea that consciousness is fundamental. But at least in the current formulation of the mathematical model of consciousness, I'm not clear that the notion of a self will survive. And so I'm not saying it won't either. I'm just saying that we have a lot of mathematical work to do to try to answer that kind of question. But the nice thing is that these are now technical questions.

You know, we can actually ask technical question, you know, what aspect, what is a self? Get a mathematical model of how networks of neurons, networks of conscious agents interacting, create what we call a self. And then ask, will that kind of self persist after you leave a particular? headset. So that's going to be a nice technical question. I'm eager to find out. Of course, we all have skin in this game, so we're all sort of interested. I would assume that a large majority of people are frightened to death of people like even us, but you, just the idea that they're wrong. You know, the idea that religion, anything like that, you know, I love your approach because you, you don't, you don't, you always say, I'm probably wrong, meaning there's

probably a better explanation. But I think there's a lot of fear of associated with the truth. However, I think that where we're at right now is we kind of come closer to the end, if we just even just scratch the surface of being open to this, what it's saying is that maybe we don't know everything. Maybe you might not actually have the headset on, but let's just assume for the fun of it, that everything you see is no different. You know, Elon Musk actually said the other day,

we're getting closer and closer to the point where you won't know the difference between having them on and off, which I find very exciting. That guy, that's what we should be scared of. But anyway, amazing. I mean, he's coming up with microchips to make us smarter. Here's a potentially scary but interesting question. If that's true, it makes us start to wonder what our purpose is. You know, in the meaning of life, what I like about this theory is,

if I can let go of everything that I thought I needed to really be concerned with and just go to this idea that I'm wearing a headset and it's a game and I can create a good day or a bad day or whatever if I learn how to manipulate it. What it says to me is that the meaning of life, and I've heard you speak about that, is just simply to explore and enjoy as much of it as you can before your vacate, your consciousness vacates with or without your narrative, right? But the question I wanted ask you is, why do I need to be here? Why do I need to be here on this planet? Or is this planet just here for me? Do I have a purpose for the planet? Or I shouldn't say planet. That's small thinking. Right. And the answer is, of course, I don't know. But I'm certainly, you know,

we can certainly ask what our best theories might entail. The, you know, the theory that says that space time is fundamental and that our consciousness is just a product of our brain activity does entail that our consciousness will cease when our life ceases. And eventually this entire solar system, Earth will be burnt up when the sun turns into a red giant. And eventually the entropy death of the universe or a big crunch death of the universe will extinguish all life. So from that point of view, you would say that there is no meaning, no fundamental purpose. From this other point of view in which consciousness is fundamental,

and space time is merely a data structure that some consciousness is probably a small fraction of consciousness is used as an interface, then your question is a really interesting one. And I don't know the answer, the only idea that I've run across that's deep enough to be interesting enough to take seriously is comes from girdle's incompleteness theorem which basically says that there's literally no end to the exploration of mathematical structure so no matter how much we explore we've only literally just begun even a deity could only always be only at the beginning of the exploration of the possibilities of mathematical structure and and in a situation where we we assume that consciousness and what i call conscious agents are all that there is to reality then

mathematical structure is only about all the possibilities of consciousness. And so that leads to this interesting idea that maybe what consciousness is about is what I call Gerdels Candy Store. It's just this endless exploration of all the possible varieties of consciousness and all the possibilities. And it never stops because we're always only just beginning. That's what Girdle's theorem entails. You're always only just beginning. And so maybe, um, It's not necessarily, there's no principal reason why this particular planet, it's not a final thing why we're here on this planet and so forth from this greater point. This is just a way station. This is just one of the candies in the candy store.

We're supposed to explore this for a while and then move on. Consciousness moves on to explore other aspects of the possibilities of consciousness. And even here, even while we're here on this planet together, I mean, we're exploring in very, very different ways. It's something of Ray Charles is exploring in a way that I'm not exploring. He was blind, but he explored music. I'm terrible at music that I can see. So I'm almost in a completely different world than Ray Charles was in. And someone who is a gymnast is exploring the world differently,

someone who's a poet, an artist, a literary scholar. There's all sorts of ways for consciousness to be exploring the possibilities of consciousness, not just science by no means. And so even all of us here on this planet are really exploring different worlds of consciousness. And we're in our own interesting worlds. There's presumably some overlap, although we can never prove that. I don't know the answer to your question, but it's an interesting idea that consciousness is always about exploring and then going beyond what we already know and transcending what we

know and going to the next level. I got to make sure that I get my dad's question out. But one of the things that I wrote down, if it makes any sense, is I wrote down, here is for us to experience, but we are not here for here to experience. And what I mean by that is this whole thing that we're talking about is our experience, as far as we know, because we're experiencing it. We don't know if it is experiencing us. And that is what I think scares the hell out of people,

is because if we say that we're kids in candy store, I mean, it's kind of nice to just think about like, hey, I'm going to get off this podcast, and I'm going to go out and enjoy the candy store. But I think that it's natural that humans will say, but am I doing a good job? Am I doing a good job at exploring the candy? Because I think that humans,

what they really, really seek is whether or not they matter. Right. And, yeah, so again, I don't know the answer, but in this framework, an interesting idea would be, be that what would it be to successfully be, you know, exploring if that's what consciousness is about? Well, it would be facing our fears of the unknown. It would be letting go of dogmatism. It would be embracing a tough kind of humility where I admit that what I thought I was sure of, I could be wrong about and being more like a child that's open to new observations, to new ideas,

to being wrong. And then realizing in this Gertles Candy Store kind of my point of view, that there is no such thing as a theory of everything. You never could arrive. In principle, Gertl's theorem is saying, we will always, in principle, only be at the beginning of the exploration. And so to understand that we never arrive, it's in some sense enjoying process of discovery and being willing to fully explore where we are and then being willing to let go and go into the utterly unknown.

Because in some sense you have to go into the utterly unknown to take the next step. And that's scary. Letting go of the known is very, very scary. And so maybe that's part of what it means to be a successful explorer is letting go up dogmatism, learning the kind of humility, facing the fear of the unknown, and then bravely going into it. It's an interesting way of looking at the desktop theory and the icons. If you're fighting that and you're saying, no, what I see is what is, that's an example of being afraid of letting go of the known. But then again, you read any book about personal growth.

self-discovery or anything, all it ever talks about is that growth takes place in the unknown, in the outside. But we have this tendency to just hold on to it so much. And I understand why. I somehow, and I thank my father, and I'm going to ask you his question in a second, he's watching from France, so he's up late. I thank my father for having some deep, deep discussions and giving me the confidence to not only embrace a lot of the stuff that you're saying, but also embrace the potentiality of there's even more, you know, and not be afraid of it.

So I'll say thank you to my Papa for that. So here's his question. So hope to God we can have a further conversation, but this is what he said. So based on all of this stuff, he says, I knew it was going to be a weird question, but you'll get to know his character. He says, ask him if he sees civilization us, based on all this stuff. He says, do you see civilization potentially as a, bunch of mushrooms accidentally growing on the side of a tree?

Well, the notion of accident is an interesting notion. We typically the notion of an accident means that things happen that are unpredictable. We can only write down probabilities for what might happen. And when we, now we have these probabilities and we have to say, what do we mean by the probabilities of these things happening? And there, often they're interpreted. in terms of objective chance, so that there's this mindless, objective reality, somehow novelty comes into our physical, space, time world, new things happen, maybe at the quantum

level or whatever, and we call that objective chance. But in a theory in which consciousness is fundamental, there is no such thing as objective chance if I don't want to be a dualist. I mean, if I said there's objective chance, then in addition to consciousness, there'd be some unconscious source of novelty in the universe. And so then I would be positing a dualism. There's consciousness is a source of novelty, and there's this thing that's not conscious. It's just, you know, objective chance, unconscious novelty. And so I don't want to do that. And so the notion of an accident then becomes problematic. What seems to be the right way to think about probabilities in the case in which consciousness is fundamental is that in some sense,

It's like a notion of free will. Wherever I see non-determinism, things that I can't predict, it's not objective chance. It's that other conscious agents are making free will choices that are, in some sense, independent of my control. And so that's why I can't predict them, at least exactly. I might be able to predict them probabilistically, but not exactly. And so there's going to be a notion of free will. So again, I don't know the answer, but within this framework in which consciousness is fundamental,

the real dynamics is of free agents exploring, making free choices about how they're going to explore. And what we see as civilization, what we see as humanity on Earth is really our user interface, dumbed down representation of this really big exploration of conscious agents that's going on. And all these free will decisions that agents are making get projected into what we see inside space time that might look like accidents. So it's a great question. And I don't know the answer, but at least I'm trying to give a different framework for how we might think about coming up with an answer to that question.

I think it's a common question to ask the word and use the word accidental, because the opposite of accidental is that I'm here for a reason. And I think that's what everybody longs. So my last quick question as we close up, did this interview actually happen? Because I sure hope it did because I'm telling all my friends that it did and all of our followers. Because we're going to record it and I'll be able to rewatch it, but did it happen? Well, I would say, yes, it really did happen. And the reason why that's not contradicting what I said earlier about evolution with natural selection is that I don't take evolution but natural selection as the final word.

That's just our best current theory. What I'm looking for now is a deeper theory of consciousness in which perhaps it is the case that we can have some knowledge of truths about objective reality. And in this deeper theory of consciousness in which we can perceive some truths, I need to be able to show how that deeper theory projects into space time and also projects to evolution by natural selection in space time and why that theory entails that we don't see the truth.

In other words, I want a deeper theory that shows. shows where evolution of natural selection comes from and explains why natural selection says you can't see the truth. So that's the deeper framework in which I would want to say that, perhaps as scientists, we can find deeper theories in which we could perceive the truth. And in those deeper theories, it really is true that this recording happened at least as an event in our consciousness. But then again, I get to choose whether or not it happened. So I just want to introduce this book once again. The way I look at this book, because what

he does in this book is he guides you through it. He doesn't dump it on you in an hour like we just did. This is kind of like taking the pink pill, right? And then by the end, you've taken the red pill. Fantastic book. I've only read it once, but I'm definitely going to read it again. Thank you so much for this work. Thank you so much for the time that you spent with me today. I'm a true, true fan. And I just want you to know that a lot of the work that you're doing and a lot of the barriers that you're breaking down for all of us with our headsets on are really, really making a difference. You know, my life has completely changed as a result of gaining access to some of the stuff that you've spent a lot of your life working on.

So I thank you for that. Well, thank you very much. That's very, very helpful to hear. I'm glad that the ideas are helping us to break out of certain habits that, you know, and open up new conceptual possibilities. That's wonderful. Thank you very much. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much. I know you have to go. Thanks for your time. You've got a new friend in Dragon here. Thank you, I'm the manifestation of who I never thought I could become, and I've become in a large part of that is due to people like you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful, wonderful evening, and we'll speak to you soon. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.