The Tim Ferriss Show - #585: Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More

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Starting point is 00:03:30 I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job sometimes to interview world-class performers from all different disciplines to tease out habits, routines, etc. And other times, it is my job to grab world-class performers who intersect with the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, or just the strange frontiers of, say, science.

Starting point is 00:04:05 And this is a case of those two lines converging. My guest today is Donald Hoffman, H-O-F-F-M-A-N. Donald received a PhD in computational psychology from MIT and is a professor emeritus of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is an author of more than 120 scientific papers and three books, including The Case Against Reality, subtitled Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and many other awards. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge. And his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica,

Starting point is 00:04:50 National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His TED Talk, titled Do We See Reality As It Is, has almost 4 million views. That might be higher, might be past 4 or 5, who knows, by now, by the time you listen to this. And you can find him on Twitter at Donald D. Hoffman. And this conversation ended up covering a lot of ground. We got into some very, very fascinating territory that gets very strange and provokes a lot of questions. So we talk about science, we talk about death, what the implications of his research and some of his theories have for consciousness, how we wrap our minds around consciousness, whether space-time as a construct, as an interface, is doomed. And certain physicists would certainly say that is the case

Starting point is 00:05:48 based on recent data and much, much more. So let me just say this from the outset. If you get lost, as I did at a few different points, just give it a few minutes and hopefully I will have, or Donald will have pulled it back into a thread that can be followed. But I had a blast with this conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed being a part of it. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation

Starting point is 00:06:14 with Donald Hoffman. Don, it is a pleasure to see you and thanks for making the time to come on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you for your very kind invitation. It's a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this conversation for some time, and I'd like to start with perhaps a name that my listeners will not recognize, and that is the Helmholtz Club.

Starting point is 00:06:37 Could you please give us some background and explain what is or what was, I don't know the tense on this, the Helmholtz Club. The Helmholtz Club was a group of neuroscientists primarily, and some cognitive scientists like me, that met roughly once a month at the University of California at Irvine. But it was neuroscientists from the whole Southern California area, from UC San Diego, all the way up to UCLA and USC and Caltech, and of course, UC Irvine, and sometimes from UC Riverside. And the point was for us to get together. It was sort of led by Francis Crick and Terry Sanowski and V.S. Ramachandran,

Starting point is 00:07:20 but it was to get neuroscientists together to discuss consciousness. What was the state of neuroscience as it related to consciousness? And we were trying to problem solve this open issue in cognitive neuroscience, which is what is the relationship between brain activity and our conscious experiences? And when I was a graduate student at MIT in the early 80s, it wasn't really appropriate for graduate students to talk about consciousness. It was sort of a fringe kind of thing. But in the early 90s, Francis Crick basically made the case that this problem needed to be addressed. Consciousness needed to be addressed. And he felt that he could address it in pretty much the same fashion that he had addressed the issue of life. Life had been an open mystery. You could imagine

Starting point is 00:08:15 that there was maybe some Elon Vittal that was some special spirit inside living things that wasn't inside inanimate things. But when Crick and Watson elucidated the structure of DNA, it became obvious that maybe you didn't need an Alain Vittal anymore. You could sort of give a reductionist, physicalist account of many of the basic functions of life. And so I think what Crick and the Helmholtz Club was really about was doing the same thing for consciousness that Crick and Watson had done for life, which was to take this thing, which right now seems mysterious, and get a neuro-reductionist story for it in the same fashion that we got a biological, a molecular biological reductionist story for life. And so we met, and it was a lot of fun. I must say it was private. So we met in secret,

Starting point is 00:09:09 basically at the university club at UC Irvine, not because it was clandestine in any bad sense, but because of Francis Crick. If people knew that Francis was there, we would be mobbed and we wouldn't get anything done. I mean, he was for good reason, a very, very popular man, and people would want to talk with him. So we met in secret, and it was invitation only. So each of the members of the club could invite one or two people to join at any given time. But the intention was to keep it really small. There were maybe 15 to 20 of us at most in a meeting. And we would start, it was usually on Tuesdays, we would have lunch together and then we would go at it all afternoon. We would invite two speakers

Starting point is 00:09:52 whose neuroscience work seemed pretty interesting. Even if they weren't directly working on consciousness, we thought it might be, we would bring them out and grill them. It was pretty fun. It was intense, but it was not ad hominem or anything like that. It was really just a very intense time. And we would then adjourn and have dinner together at some restaurant, usually near South Coast Plaza, a place near Irvine. We'd close the place out, 10, 11 o'clock, we'd be there talking and then we'd finally leave. So it was a very intense afternoon and it was a real privilege for me. I started as a young assistant professor in the group, and I got, I mean, I continued all the way through being a full professor, but it was fun for me to see how Francis thought. He was absolutely

Starting point is 00:10:38 brilliant. Even into his late 70s and 80s, he was like a complete genius. And his understanding of the field, his command of the facts, his logic was beyond anything that I ever could imagine for myself at my prime in my 20s. And that was in his late 70s. He truly was stunning. So it was a great pleasure. And of course, the other members, Terry Sanowski, David Van Essen, John Allman, and V.S. Robert Condren, the list, it was truly a fun and engaging time. So I always left inspired and thinking about consciousness. Wow. I wish, I wish, I wish there were a current club, maybe there is, where I could be a fly

Starting point is 00:11:21 on the wall at the very least with such greats. And what I'd like to do before we get too far into this conversation is define some terms. So consciousness is a word that people have heard in many contexts. It is a term or a concept that in one form or another has been of great interest for thousands of years at a minimum. And, you know, there are quotes we might unpack later, but quotes I'm fond of that use this word, like Max Planck, the German physicist, right? I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness. Could you please give us a working definition of consciousness?

Starting point is 00:12:08 Intuitively, your experience is if you hit your thumb with a hammer, the experience of the pain. If you see a blue sky, it's the experience of the blue. In some sense, with words, we can only point to it. I have to hope that you have your own experiences that I can point to in this way indirectly. That's not so different from what we have to do with other things. When I tell you, you know, what is space? What is empty space? Well, if you've never seen and you're not cooperative, you know, I can use all the metaphors I want, you're not going to get it.

Starting point is 00:12:40 Right. And if you're blind and I try to say, you know, something about the color red, you're not going to get it. And so in some sense, we're not in any special problem here with consciousness that we're not with other things. So to be really clear, when we take a child and we are trying to teach them the name of something like the word rabbit, what does the mother do, right? She or her father, they sit there and they point and they point to some furry object that's sitting there and they say rabbit and the child has to be old enough a three-month-old is not going to get it but an 18-month-old will get it and so they have to have had their own experience they've had their visual system has to

Starting point is 00:13:15 be developed well enough and when the mother points she doesn't go biped or quadruped or mammal. She doesn't use those kinds of terms. She uses like rabbit. So, she knows don't use quadruped because you're going to mess up your kid. The first thing you need to say is rabbit. And so, we learn by ostensive definition. That's called ostensive definition. And in some sense, we have to also point with ostensive definition to what we mean by consciousness. And we have to say, if you hit your thumb with a hammer, that feeling of pain, that's part of a conscious experience. When you fall in love, that's a conscious experience. When you're in a deep sleep, dreamless sleep, that's in some sense when you don't have this conscious experience.

Starting point is 00:14:00 So we have to use a sense of definition, but I don't feel too uncomfortable about that because we use it all the time and we don't even know that we're doing it that way. All right. So we're going to certainly come in and out of the territory. Well, I suppose we're always in the territory of consciousness on some level, but we'll be explicitly exploring that from a number of different angles. Like a lot of people, I was exposed to your TED Talk, Do We See Reality As It Is?, and was struck by the relationship to reality? Most of us just assume that we know the answer. Our perceptions show us reality. Not all of it, but when I see the moon, there really is a moon. And of course, I don't see everything about the moon, but I see what I need to see. When I see a carrot, I'm seeing the truth. I'm seeing the correct shape, the correct color, the correct weight if I pick it up. And of course, I'm seeing the truth. I'm seeing the correct shape, the correct color, the correct

Starting point is 00:15:05 weight if I pick it up. And of course, I'm not seeing its molecular structure, so there are things I don't see, but I'm seeing truly, if incompletely. And the interface theory of perception takes a different tack on what perception is. It says, if we take evolution by natural selection seriously, we can ask a technical question. Would evolution by natural selection shape sensory systems to tell truths about the physical world around us or whatever the world might be around us? That's the technical question. What is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to report true properties of objective reality? And you can show through theorems and simulations. Some of my graduate students working with me on this, Brian Marion, Justin Mark, and others.

Starting point is 00:15:58 Some of my colleagues, Chetan Prakash, Manish Singh, and I have worked on this. Robert Prentner, a number of us have worked on this. And the simulations and the mathematics all agree. The probability is zero that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to reveal any true properties of objective reality. It's precisely zero. And one intuition about that is that fitness payoff functions, we can go into this later on if you want, fitness payoff functions almost surely have no information about objective reality. They are not so-called homomorphisms of structures in objective reality. And so if we're tuned to fitness and the fitness payoffs literally are not homomorphisms of

Starting point is 00:16:44 structures in reality, then there's no way thatoffs literally are not homomorphisms of structures in reality, then there's no way that our perceptions can be homomorphic to reality, to the structures of reality. So what then, if we take evolution of a natural selection seriously, and I think we should, not because I'm claiming it's the final story, but it's the best story we have. Science always, to its credit, gets new theories. And what we thought was the final theory 120 years ago, we now look back on it, and Newton was great, but we have much better theories today. And so I have the same view about all of our scientific theories that we have today. The reason I take them seriously is not because I think they're the final word. It's just that we have, as human beings, no better theories.

Starting point is 00:17:26 So we have to take our current theories seriously. And so if we take evolution by natural selection seriously, of course, as scientists, we're going to eventually try to show its limitations, right? But what it says in its current form is that the probability is zero, that our senses have shaped us to see the truth about the world around us. So what have they shaped us to do? Well, the answer within evolutionary theory is it's all about fitness. Our sensory systems have shaped us to guide adaptive behavior so that we can live long enough to reproduce, basically. So one way to put that in a metaphor that's easier to understand is to say that

Starting point is 00:18:11 natural selection didn't shape us to see the truth, but it shaped us with sensory systems that are like a user interface to the truth. So right now, we're both sitting in front of laptops and we're able to, I mean, I've got gigabytes of memory and all this circuitry inside my laptop. I have no idea about the truth of that. I mean, I know the words. I'm not an engineer of that type. So I don't really, if I had to toggle voltages inside my computer to do this video with you, it wouldn't happen. So if I actually knew the truth and I had to actually toggle all the bits and bytes

Starting point is 00:18:52 and so forth and voltages in the computer to make this video happen and you had to do it, it wouldn't happen. We have a very simple dumbed down user interface that lets us control the complexity of the computer without having any expertise in what's really going on inside. And that's what evolution did for us. It gave us simple user interface that lets us stay alive long enough to reproduce, to interact with reality in the ways that we need to interact with it to stay alive and reproduce without having any idea what that reality is. You don't have a need to know,

Starting point is 00:19:25 so you don't know. And that's just the way it is. Very few of us know exactly how the desktop interface on our computer works. And when you drag an icon to the trash can to delete a file, there's a lot of stuff going on inside there that's involved in dragging, in deleting the file. We're blissfully ignorant. And that's what evolution has you in deleting the file we're blissfully ignorant and that's what evolution has done it makes us blissfully ignorant about the nature of reality and gives us icons that allow us to control reality so to be very very clear space and time which we typically think of as fundamental reality is just the format of our 3D desktop. Instead of a flat desktop, we have a 3D space-time desktop. And objects in 3D are merely the icons in our desktop.

Starting point is 00:20:14 They're not pointers to objective reality in any sense. There's the colors, the shapes, the positions that we see have nothing to do with true colors and shapes and objective reality. They're just a nice format that evolution gave us. And that format's going to vary from species to species. So as you said, the theories that we have are the sort of the best stories or plausible explanations of how things work, but those will change. They're constantly in flux. And the theories we had, the best theories 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, 2 years ago, get replaced. And there's this constant process of replacement as we update. And I'm just going to try to encapsulate some of what you said, and please correct me, feel free to stop me if I get any of it wrong. But that we are optimized through natural selection for sexual reproduction. There's no sort of intrinsic

Starting point is 00:21:05 value in accurate representation unless it contributes to more effective reproduction, hence the discussion of layers of abstraction and simplification. Just like you would have the desktop and then many layers below that, you would have assembly language, many layers below that, machine code, and then you get into the circuitry and so on what are some of the implications of this research because i think for a lot of people listening consciousness has been the domain of philosophers and pontificators who are operating outside of the scientific method or a world where things are falsifiable or testable. So I would just love to know what excites you about this and what some of the implications are, scientific or otherwise. I like your summary. I would make just one little change to the summary that you gave,

Starting point is 00:21:59 and that is that evolutionary theorists probably wouldn't in general want to say that evolution optimized us for anything. Got it. That we typically, there's the term that they use called satisficing. You just have to be a little bit better than the competition. Right, right. That's a good point. So that also then, you know, is an interesting thing about it. We're not the best at anything. We're just better than the competition, and that's all we need to be. So the idea then that evolution by natural selection has not shaped us to see the truth.

Starting point is 00:22:30 It's just given us a user interface and that space and time themselves are not fundamental. They're merely a data structure that evolution gave us. Whether what I've just said is true or not depends on whether evolution by natural selection is a fairly accurate theory. So I'm just saying that that's what natural selection entails. We may get better theories further on down the line, and then we'll have to revise it. But that's what we got. Now, why is that interesting with respect to consciousness? The reason it's interesting there is that I would say my colleagues in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence who are interested, and in philosophy of mind, who are interested in consciousness, I would say at least 95% of them efforts in science in understanding consciousness assume that certain objects in space and time are real, that they exist whether or not they're perceived, that they have genuine

Starting point is 00:23:32 causal powers. In particular, for example, neurons and brains. So neurons exist and brains exist whether or not they're perceived. They have genuine causal powers. Most neuroscientists would just say, of course, space and time are fundamental. Physical particles exist when they're not perceived. The brain exists when it's not perceived. We have to explain how consciousness could arise from physical processes that in themselves are not conscious. At least most physicalists would say they're not conscious. We can talk about panpsychism and so forth later on. So the standard work of most of my good colleagues, good friends who are studying this is we will boot up a theory of consciousness from a theory of neuroscience or from a theory of integrated information, a little bit more abstract theory, or a theory of attention schemas in neuroscience, and so forth. But the idea is that we're going to start with objects in space and

Starting point is 00:24:30 time that we take to be fundamental reality, and then boot up a theory of consciousness. So the first thing to say then is, well, if you take evolution of natural selection seriously, you should not start there. You should not start with space and time and objects in space and time. Those are not fundamental reality. Now, I should also at this point say, you know, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. What in the world do cognitive neuroscientists know about physics? I'm not talking physics, right? Space and time is not fundamental. Surely, the physicists will be happy to put a cognitive neuroscientist in his place and let him know that he's out of his league. And indeed, I'm not a physicist. But the physicists themselves,

Starting point is 00:25:20 independent of this work on evolution of a natural selection, are saying, and I quote, space-time is doomed. This is Nima Arkani-Hamed, David Gross, and many other current physicists. I can go into why they're saying that. I mean, I can actually explain it to a broad audience why physicists are saying this. But basically, physics, at least since Newton, has been about what happens in space and time. And now, physicists like Neymar and Kani Hamed are saying space-time is not fundamental. In fact, fairly obvious from recent advances in the study of gravity and quantum theory that it cannot be fundamental. And they're spending their careers looking for the deeper structures

Starting point is 00:26:06 that are beyond space and time, that will give rise to space and time as some kind of simple projection of a much deeper story. So the state of play is really quite interesting. Cognitive neuroscientists studying consciousness believe in space-time and objects in space-time is fundamental. When the physicists are saying, we're spending our careers looking for what's beyond space-time, space-time is doomed. It's really time for the cognitive neuroscientists who are studying consciousness to catch up with what the physicists have already said.

Starting point is 00:26:44 Space-time had a good run. It was a really wonderful framework and it's over. readying consciousness to catch up with what the physicists have already said. Space-time had a good run. It was a really wonderful framework, and it's over. And by the way, the reductionist methodology, so methodological reductionism, which reductionism and space-time have been spectacularly successful assumptions of science for centuries. Absolutely spectacular. Hats off. Those were wonderful assumptions. Science really needed those assumptions.

Starting point is 00:27:12 But it's the glory of science not to get stuck in its current theories. It's the glory of science to have theories that tell you where they stop. That's how you avoid dogmatism. And when evolution of natural selection says probability is zero, that space-time is fundamental. And then the physicists independently say, our theory of gravity tells us that space-time cannot be fundamental. We have our two pillars of modern science saying the same thing. Space-time has had a good run, but it's over. So the methodology of methodological reductionism, which is the idea that as we go to smaller and smaller scales in space, we find more and more fundamental laws. How do we explain temperature

Starting point is 00:28:01 of the air? Well, if we go to the molecular level, we can understand that molecules bouncing around have certain kind of kinetic energy. And the mean molecular kinetic energy at the microscopic level can explain what we call the temperature of the air at a more macroscopic level. So that kind of going to a reductionist, smaller scale, deeper laws has worked in many ways spectacularly in science. But we now know there is a hard limit to how small you can go with that approach. It's 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. And in some sense, that's not very small. If someone said, you know, it's 10 to the minus 20 trillion centimeters, I would go, you know, it's 10 to the minus 20 trillion centimeters,

Starting point is 00:28:46 I would go, oh, who cares? 10 to the minus 20 trillion, that's tons of zeros, but this is only 33, 10 to the minus 33. The space-time story stops. It's not like there's pixels of space-time at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters. It's that space-time doesn't make sense. We need a different framework. And in fact, as you try, and we can go into it if you want, but as you try to probe space-time at higher, higher energies and smaller, smaller scales, you just start actually engaging bigger and bigger volumes of space, not smaller. So gravity destroys reductionism. Reductionism is, it worked for a little bit, but deeply, deeply false, is deeply false. So that's why this kind of stuff is really interesting for the theory of

Starting point is 00:29:32 consciousness. I think 100 years from now, when scientists and historians of science look back at this period, they'll look at it with some interest. We have right now clear evidence that space-time is doomed. Reductionism is false. We still have this very interesting sociological phenomenon that 95, I would say probably 98, 99% of my colleagues who are seriously studying consciousness are disregarding that and are trying to give reductionist accounts in which space-time and particles are fundamental. Even panpsychism does that. We can talk about it. And I think it's going to be a century from now when the new physics is probably well-established and we actually understand these new structures deeper than space-time. And we already have great hints there. We can talk about some of the hints. I mean,

Starting point is 00:30:18 I can talk about them for a broad audience. Some of the hints that they already have from Niemar, Cunningham, and others, cosmological polytopes, amplituhedrons, there are these structures that have names and are being deeply studied that are much deeper than space-time, for which space-time arises as, in some sense, a trivial projection. And in fact, when you go to these deeper structures, you find deep symmetries that are true of the data that you cannot even express in space-time. Space-time actually becomes a handcuff. It keeps you from actually doing what you need to do. It's going to be interesting sociologically that the cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind who were studying consciousness in 2020 were disregarding what evolution told them and what physics was telling them, that that's the wrong foundation.

Starting point is 00:31:06 Now, what is the right foundation? To say that space-time isn't fundamental is not to say what is fundamental, right? Right. So, the best ideas we have right now are things like the cosmological polytope and amplituhedron and sociahedron and so forth that Nima and Juan Malvisan and others are working on. So here's where I then am looking at consciousness in a different way. I can't, in good conscience, attack it from a physicalist framework anymore. I mean, our best theories tell us that's not the right way to do it. See, the theories tell us where they stop, but they don't tell us what the next theory should be. What we have to do as scientists, and this is part of the fun of science,

Starting point is 00:31:48 is we have to be creative. We have to take a leap into the unknown where we say, what if it was such and such, like the cosmological polytope? We write down this mathematical structure. Now, then we say, okay, we have to be able to test our idea. So you have to show a mapping from whatever it is you start with, like the cosmological polytope. How does spacetime arise from that polytope? We can only measure things in spacetime, right? That's where we can do our experiments,

Starting point is 00:32:20 large hadron collider or neural EEG or fMRI. We do all our data collection in space-time. Not because space-time is fundamental, but because evolution has forced us to use an interface, and that's what we're forced to do. So we're stuck with this interface. We have to project everything into our interface. So whatever deeper structure we get beyond space-time, we will have to show how it maps onto the interface that evolution gave us so we can actually do experiments and test it. So of course, any proposal that I make is almost surely wrong. It would be a miracle if I was right, right? In fact, I'll go even further than that. I'll say that science can never have a theory of everything. Why is that?

Starting point is 00:33:08 For two different reasons. First, what is the theory? Scientific theory is an explanation. It says, if you grant me these assumptions, I can explain these other things. If you grant me molecules and the idea that they bounce around and have kinetic energy, I can explain temperature and thermodynamics. But I'm assuming those molecules. So whatever you assume is the thing that you're not explaining, they're what I would call the miracles of the theory. Now, of course, you can then try to say, well, I can get rid of those miracles.

Starting point is 00:33:41 I can say that particles are themselves what the physicists would call irreducible unitary representations of the Poincaré group, which is the symmetries of spacetime. So I can have my theory of spacetime and say particles are merely these representations of properties of spacetime. But now I'm assuming spacetime. So every scientific theory is going to have this thing where it says, these are my assumptions, and those are the miracles. And that's what a scientific theory is. So by definition, a scientific theory can never be a theory of everything. It's a theory of everything except its assumptions. The assumptions are the thing it's not explaining. It's the

Starting point is 00:34:18 miracle. It's turtles all the way down. That's right. It's explanations all the way down. That's right. This explanation is all the way down. And there's another deep reason why that has to be true. And it comes from Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Gödel showed that any finite axiomatization of mathematics that you make that's at least rich enough to account for arithmetic will have a weird property that there are truths that cannot be proven from that system. And he actually showed that there are statements that are true, but cannot be proven from within that system. And if you add those true statements to your axioms, to your assumptions, so those axioms are like the assumptions of a scientific theory, then Gernot's theorem still comes back and says, well, there'll be new statements that are true that cannot be proven from within that new axiomatization. And what this means is that any conceptual scheme that

Starting point is 00:35:16 we come up with will always and only barely scratch the surface of reality. This is a truly humbling point of view. It is to say, every scheme we come up with, you can show that you can actually write down truths that are true, but can't be proven. And so our theories will always never get all of the truths. And so this is great job security for mathematicians and scientists. We'll always be doing this. So that's why I don't believe my own theory. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals

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Starting point is 00:36:49 adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. So let me hop in just for a minute here and just to sort of tell a story that leads to a question. And it may or may not be related to cosmological polytope site or a singular or plural. I don't, I'm not actually familiar with that term, but just to perhaps also try to highlight a few things that you said. Again, please fact check anything that I get wrong, but I'm not a physicist,

Starting point is 00:37:36 nor am I a cognitive neuroscientist, but I am an avid watcher of documentaries. I was watching a PBS documentary, which was produced and then made available online pretty recently called Einstein's Quantum Riddle. And there were a lot of credible scientists in this, a lot of scientists and communicators like Sean Carroll, who has a fantastic podcast, if people haven't seen it. And towards the end of this discussion, because it tracked the chronology of Newtonian physics, which had incredible explanatory power and utility for a very long time, still does. But then it traced the debates between Einstein and Niels Bohr related to the implications of

Starting point is 00:38:18 quantum mechanics, right? And there was a lot of disagreement, these two behemoths meeting multiple times a day for a period of time, this gathering of the greats. And then ultimately getting to the point towards the end of this where they were gathering experimental data to test the hypothesis of quantum entanglement in the Canary Islands. Fascinating documentary. I highly recommend it. And where it kind of wraps up at the end is at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where I did not spend any time as a researcher, but I was an undergrad nearby for a period of time. And the halls of that place, I mean, have just had the footsteps of so many luminaries. It's incredible to look at the list. And the director at the time,

Starting point is 00:39:07 Robert with two Bs, he's Dutch, I cannot pronounce his last name, towards the end of this, traced out on a blackboard the possibility of a holographic universe, or the universe as we experience it being a projection of some type. And I think I found on your Twitter, you have a great Twitter feed, by the way. I found a link to Nature and a paper, I believe it was a paper, called Simulations Backup Theory that Universe is a Hologram. And this is actually, this point's somewhat, I don't want to say dated, but it's older, 2013. Could you elaborate on this holographic model of the universe, this concept? This is the physicist now. This is not cognitive neuroscience. But I understand enough to explain it to a broad audience. And that is that they've discovered that you can think of the universe as being a hologram. It's called the ADS-CFT, anti-de Sitter space conformal field

Starting point is 00:40:07 theory duality. So you can have a field theory without gravity on a boundary, and it turns out to be dual or equivalent to a theory with gravity in the space of one higher dimension. Now it turns out this was a major advance. Juan Maldacena was a key figure in doing this, essential figure in doing this. But everybody understands that this is not our space. So, we don't live in an anti-de Sitter space. The holographic principle works for a space that's not ours. And one problem with the ADS-CFT holographic principle is that the time on the boundary is the same as the time in what they call the bulk, the bigger space. So you don't get emergent time, you only get emergent space in this. So the holographic principle as it currently stands is very, very

Starting point is 00:40:58 intriguing and suggestive, and it's leading Juan Maldacena and and Neymar, Connie Hamed and others to try to do the same thing for our space-time which is a a desider space so we we have a different thing than anti-desider space but I'll give you just an idea about this holographic principle in a compact sense and where in some sense the idea first came from when they studied black holes and they were trying to figure out, you know, when you stick stuff into black holes, they get bigger. And in some sense, as they're getting more, as you put more things, more information into the black hole, they get bigger. And so they wanted to know how much information could you stick inside a black hole? And you might think, well, how much memory I could store into hard drives depend on the volume

Starting point is 00:41:45 of the hard drives, right? So what was the maximum that I could compress hard drives into a certain volume to store information? Well, when they worked out, and this was Stephen Hawking who did the math, there was another physicist who first proposed this, but Hawking was the one who actually proved it. The amount of information that you can stick into a black hole does not depend on this volume. It depends on the surface area of the black hole. That's the universe we live in. You should really let that sink in. Yeah, that's squirrely for me to wrap my head around. It's truly stunning. But if you let that sink in, you begin to understand why space-time

Starting point is 00:42:26 is doomed. Space-time is a great data structure, but it's not the object that we thought it was. It's a data structure. It has certain interesting properties. And so the amount of information you can stick in a black hole depends only on the surface area of the black hole. And then it's easy. Physicists have shown that that's true of any region of space. So it's not just black holes. They first discovered it in black holes with Hawking's work. But any volume of space, the amount of information you can store in it has nothing to do with the volume. It has only to do with the surface area. It's so bizarre to think about. So that's the holographic principle. And so we're really trying to understand what that means, but it does mean that space-time is doomed and we're looking for a

Starting point is 00:43:08 deeper story. So let me hop in. What I'd love to ask is no doubt something that a lot of listeners are wondering, and I'm wondering also, let's say space-time is doomed and that we are, as humans, operating on this very high level of abstraction that serves to satisfy our drive and our evolutionary imperative to procreate. As we realize that space-time is doomed and that these paradigms need to be revised, these theories need to be revised, are there practical ramifications of this in the same way that perhaps at some point quantum mechanics were viewed as sort of an academic exercise, but then before you know it, and it might be contending with the shut up and compute

Starting point is 00:43:55 school of thought where let's not worry about how it works if we can use it to make something work. You're seeing quantum computing, I think the implications of which are quite profound. What might things look like in the next 5, 10, 20 years as we begin to fundamentally revise how we think of reality, matter, the interplay of consciousness, or the role of consciousness as fundamental? What happens? What might manifest? What might change? Any thoughts on that? Quite a bit. Every new advance in science leads to unexpected, miraculous technologies. When Maxwell wrote down Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism in the mid-19th century.

Starting point is 00:44:47 He wrote down these equations which sort of captured all of Faraday's experiments with electricity and magnetism and so forth. So Faraday had done all these experiments, wonderful stuff. Maxwell realized that all of the experiments could be captured in a few equations. True tour de force. Our modern technology is largely due to maxwell i'm talking to you today cross-country because of maxwell and the technologies that have maxwell's equations stimulated einstein to come up with special relativity in part so i think that the scientific theories that are being developed right now, like the cosmological polytope and so forth. And my understanding is that these guys understand

Starting point is 00:45:31 that there's really hard work ahead. It may be decades before they can, this is really, really tough. But once we have a really strong theory that can be mapped back into space-time to make predictions. Here's the kinds of technologies that you could conceive might come out of that. When we realize that space-time is not fundamental reality, and we get technologies based on structures beyond space-time. If I want to go to Alpha Centauri, I may not need to spend light years in a ship. I may be able to go outside of space-time and just get there.

Starting point is 00:46:14 And not even through wormholes, just understanding the true nature of reality beyond space-time, realizing that it's a data structure, we can play with the data structure. We can reverse engineer it. I can just put myself there. So I think the kinds of things that we take as fundamental limits on us right now will not be fundamental limits. So in other words, to answer your question,

Starting point is 00:46:35 you really have to think out of the box in ways that what would happen if space-time was no longer a limit? You can just go around space-time. Right now, for example, the physicists will tell us that because of the expansion of the universe, most of the galaxies that we can see, we could never get to. They're going way too fast. You can go at the speed of light and you'll never get there. So as fast as we can go through space time, it's I think 90% or more of the galaxies are inaccessible to us. Too bad, all that real estate is just gone. Well, what if we don't have to go through space-time? Suppose we can use some new structures that the physicists find that projects into space-time, but is far more comprehensive. And then we get technologies

Starting point is 00:47:14 built out of that. We just go around. We go outside of space-time and pop up where we want. So it's going to be very, very different. But that theory is going to perhaps lead us to a new realm of far more interesting than space-time. So, the work that I'm doing is a theory of conscious agents. I'm proposing a model in which consciousness is fundamental and there are innumerable agents beyond space-time. If that model is, you know, and again, I would bet against myself. I mean, that's just a good scientific attitude to assume that you're wrong and try to get a theory that as quickly as possible will make predictions that you can test and show you're wrong. That's just the good scientific attitude. So with that in mind, I'll just go with this theory of conscious agents. So there are countless conscious agents interacting.

Starting point is 00:47:58 So I get a model of how they interact. I get a model of how certain conscious agents we call human beings use a space-time interface, a data structure of space-time to interact with them. And we use that data structure. We have portals, but right now I have a portal into your consciousness. It's called your body. And we're using laptops and technology to take pixels, which are an image of your body, your voice, and it gets projected to me. And I then understand something about your consciousness. And then you understand something about my consciousness.

Starting point is 00:48:34 And I think that I'm genuinely changing your consciousness. And you're genuinely changing things in my consciousness through the portals that we call our body. So we know that there are portals in our space-time interface into consciousness. So the question that comes from the point of view of what I'm working on, once we understand the theory of conscious agents and how space-time arises as an interface that some agents use, can we open up new portals in that interface? Maybe hallucinogenic drugs do that. I don't know. Maybe they don't. But could we develop new technologies that open up new portals into the realm of conscious agent? And if

Starting point is 00:49:10 so, are they friendly or hostile? And could they teach us stuff? So you can see, once you start thinking out of the space-time box, as a scientist, you want to let your imagination go. You don't want to be constrained. You really have to think outside of the box, but then you always have to take your theory and say, okay, I need to make predictions in space and time that my colleagues can go and show me wrong. That's why this is not dogmatism and it's not just pie in the sky. You have to think pie in the sky. You've got to think big to write down your theory. You've got to think big, but then you also have to say, here's how you can pop my bubble. Do this experiment. That's how you pop my bubble.

Starting point is 00:49:49 So a question about the conscious agents. I'd love to hear more about how you workshop this or simulate or use computer models. In other words, how do you poke and prod at this with the understanding that, as you said, this is a hypothesis worth disproving, and you want there to be some predictive power or make an attempt at constructing a model that has predictive power. You want it to be falsifiable, right? You want to tell people how they can burst your bubble. Exactly. How do you explore this?

Starting point is 00:50:19 How do you explore this, struggling for the right word, but this theory of conscious agents? So there's a couple steps. We've published a paper that people can look up. It's called Objects of Consciousness. So if you just Google Objects of Consciousness and my name, Donald Hoffman, it's free online. And you can just see a paper where we propose a simple model of consciousness using simple mathematics probability theory and things called Markovian kernels. And my attitude about it is I'm trying to start off with a very, very simple model, what our 1.0 model, the simplest math that I could do that sort of models the idea that conscious agents have experiences, they make decisions, and they act to change the experiences of other conscious agents. That's the basic idea.

Starting point is 00:51:11 Mathematically now, you get a dynamical system that's called a Markovian dynamical system. So now we can start to study these Markovian dynamical systems of conscious agents and look at how their behavior would predict properties of consciousness and how they might predict the emergence of space-time. So one thing that I've been working on, I was working on this very, very heavily a little over a year ago, and then COVID took me down for about a year. So I've been, I was out of commission for a year with COVID, long-haul COVID. It took out my heart. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, it made my heart almost fail. So it's taken me a year to get back on my feet. So I plan to get back to what I was doing

Starting point is 00:51:52 before COVID took me out. But the idea I was pursuing is that the long-term behavior of these conscious agents, the so-called asymptotic behavior, has structures that are very interestingly related to structures that Nima or Connie Hamed is finding beyond space-time. So I would like to show that the asymptotic behavior of this conscious agent dynamics has a fit with some of the structures like the amplituhedron cosmological polytope that they're finding behind space-time. But if that were right,

Starting point is 00:52:33 then the structures that they're finding behind space-time would still be simplifications of the conscious agent dynamics because they would only capture the asymptotic, the long-term behavior, not the full dynamics of the consciousness. So behavior, not the full dynamics of the consciousness. So we'd have the full dynamics of consciousness. A certain projection of that would lead to the cosmological polytope and the amplituhedron, and a projection of those leads to spacetime. So the idea would be to start with a theory of conscious agents, through the asymptotics project to the cosmological polytope, project to spacetime,

Starting point is 00:53:08 and that way we would get consciousness leading to predictions in space-time that we could test. So that's a big project, and I'm glad to put it out there so that someone who's much smarter than me can go ahead and run ahead of me and beat me to it. So I would just be delighted to read about it from someone who could beat me to it. We're going to come back to cosmological polytope, because I feel like after the 17th time it comes up, we should probably return to it and cover it. However, I want to ask you something first, and I'm going to wade into this maybe in a roundabout way, and we'll see where it goes. It might be a dead end, it might not be. But if we're talking about, if I'm understanding correctly, the possible fundamental error of taking a bottom-up approach to understanding consciousness. That is sort of starting with the neurological structures and using our space-time tools to kind of build from the smallest upward to sort of explain the phenomenology and subjective experience

Starting point is 00:54:00 that people have that they label consciousness. How would you answer the question, is consciousness localized? And I ask that understanding there's a lot of controversy around this and people will look at different types of injuries and either use it as proof for or against the idea that consciousness is locally generated, so to speak, by what we, you know, the three pounds of goo that we hold between our ears. But there are people who take the opposite stance. And even though I think it's very difficult to test, might look at the brain as almost a receiver of sorts. How do you think about this? And I apologize if it's a sloppy question. It's a great question.

Starting point is 00:54:42 If you wouldn't mind unpacking that however it seems best, I'd love to hear your thoughts. So a lot of people might think that I'm proposing a receiver theory, that the brain is a receiver for consciousness, and I'm absolutely not. Because that theory is assuming that the brain exists and is a real object with real causal powers, and that somehow there's the brain and there's consciousness and somehow consciousness interacts with the brain as a receiver. That's absolutely not what I'm saying. Nothing inside space and time has any causal powers. Nothing. Everything inside space and time are merely perceptions within consciousness from this framework. So the brain is an icon in my desktop that appears when I look inside skulls. And as

Starting point is 00:55:29 soon as I look away, I delete that icon and there is no brain. So to be very, very clear, right now, I have no brain. There is no brain. If you looked inside my skull, of course, you would see a brain, but that's an icon that you create on the fly. The icon exists when you create it, and you delete it when you don't need it. So neurons do not exist when they're not perceived, nor does space-time. That's my point of view. Again, I could be wrong, but I just want to make very, very clear, it's not the brain receiver, because that's giving the brain too much existence. The brains only exist when they're perceived. Just to stand in for the audience,

Starting point is 00:56:08 so people might be squirming a little bit in their seat here. Of course. So if you say that nothing in space-time, if I'm getting this right, act as a causal agent, that's not to say that if someone holds a gun to your head and pulls the trigger that it's not going to splatter your brains all over the wall behind you, but rather that that is an abstraction on the user interface that we are

Starting point is 00:56:30 using i mean there can still be consequences experientially so is the question then just a it's based on false assumptions because it predicates that the brain is actually something that exists and persists whether or not we're looking inside your skull. That is the big assumption, that physical objects exist and have causal powers even when they're not perceived. And by the way, the physicists have tested this. There's two very technical terms for this. One is local realism and the other is non-contextual realism. So local realism is the claim that physical objects like electrons have properties like position, momentum, and so forth. Real values are those properties that exist whether or not they're perceived and that have influences that

Starting point is 00:57:19 propagate no faster than the speed of light. So the realism is the claim that they have the properties even if they're not perceived. And the locality, the local, is that they influence no faster than the speed of light. So together, it's called local realism. And most of us might think that, of course, local realism is true. It turns out local realism is false. It's been tested, and local realism is dead. It's simply untrue, and that's the end of the story. Local realism is false. Non-contextual realism is the claim that, again, realism, the property particles, for example, have their properties like position and momentum and spin when they're not observed, and that the values of those

Starting point is 00:57:55 properties do not depend on how we measure them. That's the non-contextuality. And non-contextual realism is false. So local realism is false. Non-contextual realism is false. I conclude that particles themselves don't exist when they're not perceived. They have no property. They have no position. They're not there. If you have no position, you're not there. So they're not there. And space-time itself is not there. Space-time itself is merely a data structure. And particles, by the way, when we say that physicists say that they're irreducible representations of the Poincare group, they're basically saying that the representations of the structure of space-time is what particles are.

Starting point is 00:58:36 They fall from the structure of our interface. I think a better framework is to think about this as a data-compressing, error-correcting code that we're using. If you think about space-time and particles as part of a data structure for data compression and error-correcting code as part of our sensory interface, I think it'll be a much more useful framework. So I may take us into deep water here with my next question, but I will ask you because I know that your next commitment today relates to the subject of death. So in a few hours, you have a commitment, not a funeral, but rather an event that is discussing various topics and questions surrounding death. How do you think of death,

Starting point is 00:59:21 given all that we're talking about and first order second order third order implications of all of that how do you think about death physicalism has a very clear implication for death if space-time is fundamental and elementary particles like electrons and quarks and protons and so forth are the fundamental nature of reality and what you are what your body is is just an assemblage a complex assemblage of particles and your consciousness is somehow an emergent property of certain activities of those particles so you say brain activity then it's very very clear that in death when the brain dissolves your consciousness dissolves and that's the end of the story that's it that's very, very clear that in death, when the brain dissolves, your consciousness dissolves, and that's the end of the story. That's it. That's a very, very clear implication of physicalism.

Starting point is 01:00:10 We can talk about panpsychism, but physicalism, strict physicalism, that's the end of the story. If consciousness is fundamental and space-time is just an interface, and our bodies are merely icons that we use to represent certain interactions of conscious agents and we can go into how i think about that then on that approach there is the possibility that some aspect of my consciousness survives death there i have to look at the mathematics of the model and go into it, but it may be, for example, that the bare awareness that's associated with me, just awareness without content, that survives. But all the details of Donald Hoffman and his life story within this interface, maybe that all dissolves. Maybe that's a story about what is consciousness up to? We can talk about if consciousness is

Starting point is 01:01:12 fundamental, what is it doing and why? What is the dynamics of consciousness about? To answer the question about death, we might have to answer that question too. It's a big one. Please continue. So I'll try a stab at that question because I think it relates to the death question. So what is consciousness doing and why? The right answer is I don't know. And I've only seen one idea that seems deep enough to at least be worth thinking about. And I'm not saying it's the right idea, but only one idea that seems deep enough to at least be a candidate. And it again comes from Gödel's the right idea, but only one idea that seems deep enough to at least

Starting point is 01:01:45 be a candidate. And it again comes from Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Gödel says that essentially no matter how much you explore within a particular conceptual system, you can't get all the truth. There's always going to be more to explore mathematically. So if consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness is all there is, then mathematical structure is only about the possibilities of consciousness. That's all that there is to be about. And so what if what consciousness is doing since the exploration of mathematical structure is in principle unending, then perhaps the exploration of the possibilities of consciousness itself is in principle unending. And therefore,

Starting point is 01:02:37 consciousness, what it's up to is exploring all of its potentialities. And the reason it's continuing to do that, from our perspective reason it's continuing to do that, from our perspective, it's continuing to do that, is because there's no end to it in principle. So consciousness itself is, in some sense, always learning about itself. And so perhaps then what we are, what people are, and what cats are, and what dogs are, and what amoebas are and so forth is consciousness trying on different headsets different realities and exploring and losing itself i mean so this very interesting idea that the consciousness chooses to really explore so deeply that it

Starting point is 01:03:22 loses itself in the exploration doesn't even know what it is. It becomes a physicalist. It actually thinks that consciousness isn't fundamental. It goes through the whole bit and then slowly has to wake up. And in so doing, it really explores what it's not and what it is. In some sense, to know what you are, you have to know what you're not. And so on that point of view, the Hoffman icon is simply consciousness taking a perspective on itself, looking at itself through a particular space-time headset, taking a little projection. And from that headset, there was a birth, there was growing strong until your 20s and 30s. And then after your 40s, you start declining and

Starting point is 01:04:12 in your 80s and 90s, you die. And that whole process is just consciousness exploring itself from a particular perspective, in which case, maybe the Hoffman icon and maybe a lot of stuff can be left behind. But in some sense, consciousness itself has learned something through that experience and the 8 billion other people and the quadrillions of amoebas and the who knows how many viruses and so forth. Consciousness is just trying on innumerable headsets. And when it's done with that headset, it takes it off. Awareness is perfectly fine. The raw awareness is fine. But the detailed icons that happen to appear, space-time icons, objects in space and time, brains, neurons, all those things, those are just icons. And you studied them and then you realized,

Starting point is 01:05:03 pretty cool, really neat. Mount Everest, what a beautiful icon, Death Valley, what a beautiful icon. But I'm not that. I'm something even more transcendent than space and time. I'm more transcendent than Death Valley. And so consciousness is just waking up. I mean, again, I'm trying to tell a story. I'm not saying that it's correct, but it's just, it's the only story I've seen so far that at least is deep enough that it's worth taking seriously. Who is the origin of this story? And can you ever know that it's accurate, do you think, through testing or experimentation?

Starting point is 01:05:37 The story that I'm saying right now has an interesting way that you might be able to test it. So the dynamics of conscious agents that I mentioned is the Markovian dynamics. You can make it so-called stationary. Stationary dynamics in which the entropy of the dynamics doesn't change. But you can show that even if you have this Markovian dynamics of consciousness

Starting point is 01:05:56 in which the entropy never changes, any projection by conditional probability, any projection looking at that dynamics will see it as increasing in entropy. In other words, the arrow of entropy, the arrow of time is an artifact of the projection. So consciousness itself has no arrow of time, but you can prove from this mathematics that

Starting point is 01:06:26 you get an arrow of time by projection. The proof is trivial, it's like two or three lines. Here's a project that I think would be really fun. Can we show, when you look at all the different ways that you could project consciousness in this mathematics, the conditions under which all these different arrows of time, the entropy that you get, satisfy the Lorentz transformations? In other words, can we get special relativity out of this? We would have to model also the space aspects of

Starting point is 01:06:49 it, what's happening to space as a projection of the dynamics of these conscious agents. But we see the time aspect. So could we actually show how special relativity arises as just different perspectives that consciousness can take on a fundamental dynamics of consciousness that has no arrow of time. That's the kind of thing where we could start to make brand new predictions that could be testable. And I just want to, as a sidebar, say to folks that I know we're probably serving quite a bit up on the plate to chew on in this conversation. And I would highly recommend folks who are like, good Lord, I mean, how do I even wrap my head around one-tenth of this,

Starting point is 01:07:30 to consider exploring some of the documentation of, for instance, quantum entanglement, which does get, I think, misappropriated and used by a lot of kind of hand-wavy, new-agey folks. But if you just look at the experimental data and double-slit experiment, and then the kind of later generations of experimental data, like what was done in the Canary Islands, I think they were using two quasars, which is just like, who funds that? I want to know. It's incredible that somebody actually put the money up for that. Pretty awesome. If you start to even dip your toes into that, or watch a few presentations by Carlo Rovelli, who is, as I understand it, a skilled practitioner

Starting point is 01:08:17 and physicist. I think he focuses on quantum gravity. He's brilliant. Yeah, brilliant guy. So he's not just a stage presenter with a decorative title. This guy actually does serious work. You'll begin to see just how weird some of this gets when you start to push around the edges. Let's chat for a second because it's a term that has come up. Panpsychism. Could you please explain what this is? So there are various versions of panpsychism, but the basic idea is that if you take elementary particles like electrons and protons and so forth, in addition to their physical properties, position, momentum, and spin and so forth, panpsychists, they also have an elementary

Starting point is 01:09:03 unit of consciousness. And when you take an electron and a proton and put them together to form a hydrogen atom, then somehow the consciousness of the electron and the consciousness of the proton together somehow combine to create the new consciousness of the hydrogen atom. Two hydrogens get together and an oxygen get together and combine to form water molecule, then the consciousnesses of the hydrogens and oxygens somehow combine to create the consciousness associated with the water molecule. And then by the time you get up to humans, you have so many of these particles coming together that human consciousness emerges somehow. It takes physicalism too seriously,

Starting point is 01:09:43 from my point of view. It's saying that these electrons exist. They really do exist in space and time. So these things are fundamental, fundamental reality. And in addition, they have this other fundamental unit of consciousness. One analogy that's sometimes given is that particles had position and momentum in Newtonian theory, but with quantum, you discovered that that wasn't enough. You needed something called spin. So they just added spin. So particles now have spin, right? And so the same thing, we could do the same thing with conscious. We had a position, momentum, spin. We now have to just add this other unit of consciousness. They have a

Starting point is 01:10:18 unit of consciousness. We'll do the same thing we did with spin, sort of the idea. And so my approach, I call conscious realism, where I say consciousness is fundamental reality and space-time is merely one user interface out of countless that consciousness can use. There's countless interfaces. Space-time is just one. Panpsychism, at least the version that I'm talking about here and I think is the standard, sort of the standard one,

Starting point is 01:10:43 is, I think, smuggling in the idea that space-time and particles are still somehow fundamental reality. Philip Goff, I think we could have a good discussion about him. I think that that's what he says. I would love to have him disagree with me. Who is Philip Goff? Philip Goff, he's a very famous panpsychist. Panpsychist. Now, just because I think it'd be satisfying for me to know this just based on my curiosity, are there what you would consider credible scientists who ascribe to panpsychism, or is it relegated to kind of other arenas?

Starting point is 01:11:17 Well, I think that the integrated information theory that Christophe Kog and Giulio Tononi are studying, it's often taken as a panpsychist theory. It says that certain physical systems also have the unit of consciousness. If they have the certain property called integrated information, the right kind of integrated information, then they also have a certain amount of consciousness that's quantified, the amount is quantified by the degree of phi, the integrated information. So that's a sort of a panpsychist thing because they're taking, again, space, time, and particles as a reality, as an objective reality.

Starting point is 01:11:53 But that reality, if it has certain kinds of properties, also has consciousness. So it's in that sense a panpsychist kind of approach. And Tononi and Christof Kohl are, of course, brilliant, I mean, the fact that I disagree is irrelevant. These are geniuses. these assumptions and these models is actually very similar to, in some respects, not all, but animist religions like Shintoism, right? The rock, the moss, the dirt, everything has sort of a consciousness of one type or another, just a quick sidebar. Not to say they are related, nor that all panpsychists are Shintoists. I agree, but that raises a question that i would like to um please mention briefly in that and that is i'm saying that the question of which objects are conscious and which are not

Starting point is 01:12:53 or the question of which things are alive and which things are not the answers that we give right now are an artifact of our interface. If reality is not space and time and physical objects, our interface is then giving us more or less information about some realm beyond space and time, beyond our interface. When I see a cat, I think it's alive. I see a mouse, I think it's alive. When I see an amoeba, yeah. A virus, I don't know. I see electron, I think it's alive. I see a mouse, I think it's alive. When I see an amoeba, yeah. A virus, I don't know. I see electron, I say no, definitely not alive. Well, is that a genuine insight into the nature of reality? Or am I mistaking a limitation of my interface for an

Starting point is 01:13:40 insight into reality? So this is the kind of question that arises when you no longer take space and time as fundamental. It opens up the possibility that we've actually got the question of life and the question of consciousness so fundamentally wrong that we're asking it the wrong way. The question, could an electron be alive or not, is the wrong question. In fact, my body is not alive. My body is merely an icon. It's not alive. In fact, if you close your eyes, my body disappears. If I close my eyes, my body disappears. This is merely an icon. So the only question is, which icons on our desktop give us effective portals into life or consciousness? And ones that do not doesn't mean that we're not interacting with life or consciousness. It just means that our interface is giving up.

Starting point is 01:14:29 Of course it had to give up. Reality is too complicated. So once again, this actually shows how important it is. If space-time is just an interface, we better get on with the program and not fool around with space-time being fundamental. We get life wrong. The question of what's living and not living is in fact the wrong question. This is how important it is. If space-time is not fundamental, we need to change our science,

Starting point is 01:14:54 how we're doing our science. It's going to be quite a Copernican upset. It's going to make people very, very unhappy for a long time, I expect. Let's segue to cosmological polytope, which, if I ever go back to Burning Man, I feel like that should be my nickname on the playa, cosmological polytope. What is the cosmological polytope? Or the amplitohedron, I'm getting that correct. The amplitohedron and so forth, and the sociohedron.

Starting point is 01:15:22 What I'll talk about is, at a high level, what these guys are up to and what they're finding. Yes, please. They're looking for structures beyond space-time that can give rise to space-time. And they want to do it in a way that they can test empirically. The tests that they have are of two fundamental kinds. One is the scattering studies that they do at the Large Hadron Collider, where you take subatomic particles of high energies, smash them into each other, and see what sprays out. What they do is they look at the so-called scattering amplitudes. If you have two gluons hitting each other and four gluons go spraying out, what is the amplitude

Starting point is 01:16:03 or the probability for the various kinds of ways that that can happen? And it turns out the scattering probabilities for these various events is the fundamental data that needs to be explained. Those are the big, big data. And several decades ago, when they were starting to try to build the superconducting supercollider in the United States,

Starting point is 01:16:24 which didn't happen, but they realized they were going to be doing so many of these collisions per second, then most of them would be things that weren't interesting. So you needed to have some way of analyzing the data very, very quickly and getting rid of the stuff that was not interesting so you could find the needle in the haystack that was interesting. So they needed to compute these scattering processes, the so-called scattering amplitudes. And it turned out, if you got, you know, like two gluons in and three going out, it was a lot of algebra. And four going out is like hundreds of pages of algebra for one computation, for one amplitude. It was nasty. They were doing it using quantum field theory and Feynman's approach to things.

Starting point is 01:17:07 The experimentalists said to the theorists, look, we can't do hundreds of pages of algebra billions of times a second. Supercomputers can't do this. You've got to simplify the math for us. And so some mathematical physicists said, okay, we've got to help out our experimentalist friends. So they found that they, a miracle, they could collapse all this stuff down to a couple pages. And then another miracle, they collapsed it down to two or three terms. They couldn't believe it. They thought this must be a one-off. But over the decades, they discovered one after another, all these scattering amplitudes that were going into hundreds of pages of algebra could be collapsed to three or four terms that you could write down by hand. And so that's what the amplituhedron and the cosmological

Starting point is 01:17:49 polytube, they're actually showing that there's this deeper reality. There are deeper symmetries. What they discovered, there are deeper symmetries that are true of the scattering data that cannot be seen in space-time. So when you let go of space-time, you are now dealing with deeper symmetries than space-time that are true of the data, and all of a sudden the math becomes trivial. If you do it in space-time because you've got the wrong framework, you're doing it in this projection space that's not right, it's not the deepest reality. When you go to the deeper reality, you see the deeper symmetries and the math becomes trivial. So that's the kind of thing that makes them think they're onto something here. We're seeing new symmetries, the computations become much, much easier,

Starting point is 01:18:34 and now we're seeing these structures. Now they don't know what the structures are about. This is really an interesting point in the history of physics. So these geniuses were trying to go beyond space-time. What the heck is beyond space-time? How do we go there? What kind of flashlights can you use? Now you're speaking my language. So hats off to these guys like Neymar, Connie Hamed, and Juan Maldacena, and these guys. They're brilliant and they're brave. So what they're doing is they're saying, we have to, of course, really know all the physics in space-time, and they know it backwards and forwards. They know all the scattering stuff.

Starting point is 01:19:12 They know all the symmetries. They're going, now we're discovering that there are these symmetries in the data that can't be explained in space-time. We need to go to these deeper structures. So you have to take a leap. You have to propose these structures like the cosmological. You have to propose them and then propose how they map back into space-time and show that you can make predictions that are testable. Now, the other thing they're looking at is not

Starting point is 01:19:38 just the scattering data from the Large Hadron Collider and other colliders. But also they're looking at the correlations you see between stars and various objects in space, the two- and three-point correlations and so forth. The idea is that they might think of the whole universe as one big scattering event from the Big Bang, and they might be able to get data that you couldn't get the energies high enough in the colliders that we could build on Earth. But there was much bigger energies at the Big Bang.

Starting point is 01:20:11 And so we might be able to probe nature more deeply by looking at the sky. At the macro. And looking at these correlations in the sky. Wow. Just so I can take a note for myself, who are the researchers or the institute that if people wanted to do a deeper dive on this, they should look up in this case? Well, you'll like this. Nima Arkani-Hamed is at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Oh, look at that. It makes sense. It makes sense.

Starting point is 01:20:37 As is, I think, Juan Maldacena as well. Yeah, Juan is. So a lot of work is being done there. But Nima's influence is huge. He's trained a large group of young people who are working on this. If people are interested in it, I highly recommend Nima Arkani-Hamed gave a semester-long class at Harvard in the fall of 2019. So if you just Google Nima Arkani-Hamed Harvard lectures 2019, you can get everything that I've been talking about in all the detail. He's got 20 more lectures on this. That's incredible.

Starting point is 01:21:11 Okay, so we will put this for everybody listening. We'll put those in the show notes since if you, like me, are not quite clear how to spell this person's name, we will get it. We'll find the links. We'll put it in the show notes at tim.blog.com. I'd love to return to something you mentioned in passing, which is hallucinogenic drugs. So you may or may not know, I've been very involved with funding scientific studies over the last, I don't know what the exact range is, six to eight years within the realm of psychotropic drugs with a focus on psychedelic compounds across a whole spectrum of, say, classes. So tryptamines, phenethylamines, but also including some

Starting point is 01:21:53 stranger ones like salvinorin A, which is derived from salvinorin. This is an area of deep interest to me. And I would love to know what you find interesting about hallucinogenic drugs or what questions they raise. Anything at all that leads you to find them just an area of interest? I should first say that I'm interested, but I haven't actually explored myself. Not that I won't, but I haven't actually explored myself. Not that I won't, but I haven't yet. But I have many friends who have, and some who've really done it systematically with 5-MeO-DMT, some who have been very, very systematic about it, and others who've taken psilocybin and so forth. And the reports that they have are very interesting. In many cases, they do find themselves interacting with other agents,

Starting point is 01:22:51 other conscious agents. And some of those agents are teaching them. And some of them are rough. They're rough teachers and so forth. And from a physicalist framework, you have to conclude that this is just brain malfunction, right? This is not to bring us into reality. This is the brain being kicked in ways that it wasn't intended to be kicked with neurotransmitters at levels or concentrations that are not supposed to be there. And that's the whole story. And the same thing happens at death with near-death experiences. Those are merely brain malfunctions, effectively. But in a theory in which consciousness is fundamental, it still may be the case that these are merely hallucinations and no insights, right?

Starting point is 01:23:25 This is absolutely possible. But also, I cannot, with my theory of conscious agents, I cannot dismiss the possibility that perhaps the drugs are somehow opening up new portals into this realm of conscious agents, new access that we didn't have before. To a different interface. That's right, or through a different aspect of our interface that hadn't't have before. To a different interface. That's right. Or through a different aspect of our interface that, you know, that hadn't opened up before. So from my point of view, then what I really need to have is a theory of portals. I have a portal, right?

Starting point is 01:23:58 The portal is your body and I'm interacting with your consciousness. And we have one technology. We have one technology by which we know how to open up new portals. One really important technology. It's very low tech, but it's having kids. When you have a kid, you open up a new portal into consciousness. So we do know that there is a way to open up new portals into consciousness. Could you elaborate on that just a little bit? What do you mean by that? You and your significant other decide to have a kid, and you have no idea what that person's going to be like, right? But you have a kid, you start off as a sperm and an egg, and nine months later, through a magical process of morphogenesis, which we don't understand. By the way, Mike Levin

Starting point is 01:24:42 at Tufts is doing some beautiful work on morphogenesis and showing that it's not just the molecular biology that's involved, there's bioelectric fields, electric fields that are actually guiding the body growth, the body morphology and the morphogenesis is truly stunning. So there may be a lot there, but by the time the child is born, you now have this little portal. You have very little insight into the conscience. You know if it's happy or sad, right? It cries or not.

Starting point is 01:25:13 But over a period of years, you see the portal getting more and more sophisticated. You're getting deeper and deeper insight into the conscious agent that you're interacting with. And so studying that and studying the morphogenesis process, we may be able to come up with new technologies that allow us to open new portals into the realm of conscious agents. And who knows, that technology may look like silicon and circuits. Who knows? If so, it might look like artificial intelligences that are conscious, but it would be very, very different from the standard approach to this, right? Standard approach of people thinking about this is that if I get my artificial robot complex enough,

Starting point is 01:25:58 with the right kind of complexity, maybe the first flickerings of consciousness will emerge from the pattern of activity in the hardware somehow. And if I get it really sophisticated, they'll be more conscious. So somehow the physics of the AI is fundamental. But if the physics of the AI has the right dynamics, then consciousness might emerge. I'm saying something entirely different. Physics is not fundamental. Space-time is not fundamental. Space-time is not fundamental. Consciousness is.

Starting point is 01:26:29 What we call physical objects are merely the ways that we play with our interface to open new portals into the realm of conscious agents. And so once we understand, you know, maybe it's the amplituhedron, the associahedron, the cosmological, what's behind space-time and maybe conscious agents behind that, if we're lucky, then we understand how the interface is related to it, we then be able to build technologies that open new holes, new portals in our space-time interface. And then once we've done that, once we've figured that out, then we might be able to answer your question, which is, are these drugs really opening up new portals now we have a theory of portals you the

Starting point is 01:27:09 drugs really open up new portals or are they just screwing up the interface right it's just pathological firing right or is there more to it so we have a little work to do yeah we do have a lot of work to do and I just want to share a few things that may be of interest. So the first is that with many of these compounds, I mean, there are people who I consider, I'm not going to name them by name because a lot of them are under the radar at the moment, but intelligent, thoughtful, rational, to the extent that any human is rational, rational actors who are very interested in trying to get a deeper understanding of, at least experiment with these entity encounters, which in the example that's in my mind, surface very consistently with

Starting point is 01:27:55 DMT or NNDMT, which is very different subjectively in its experience than 5-MeO-DMT, 5-Methoxy-DMT. So they've looked at means of extending the interactions by changing, say, the mode of administration to intravenous and so on. At the very least, the questions are very interesting. And I recognize for a lot of people listening, this is going to sound like we're going, well, I'm not going to use we, that's the royal we, it's unfair to you, Don, that I'm just going to crazy town. But just allow me to be kind of self-indulgent for a second. If you also look at the sort of ethnobotanical and ethnographical studies and just self-reporting in the histories of tribes, say, in South America,

Starting point is 01:28:38 who use ayahuasca as just one example, it is largely accepted among the cultures down there, and it hinges on certain cosmological views and so on, but that shared visions are common. So that people in close proximity taking these drugs at the same time often have shared visions. They see the same thing slash experience the same thing. So it's easy, I think, to, on one hand, just dismiss all of this as kind of the ravings and made-up stories of people who have taken drugs that have kicked their brain, as you put it, in ways that the brain is not intended to be kicked. But these things have also been used, and I don't think the people in these tribes are stupid by any stretch of the imagination. And furthermore, I'd say, in hospitals, was studied in many different

Starting point is 01:29:46 capacities. And there were certain ingredients that were included in these mixtures, such as black pepper or various species of pepper that were thought to be inert. And the conclusion of the Western chemists who were doing the analysis was, you know, these tribesmen have no idea what they're talking about. Yeah, they got one or two things right, but this has no bearing. And that may be true in very many instances, but it turned out that, you know, bioperine, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, in these pepper species increased bioavailability. So it increased the speed of onset of these paralytics. And I'm going to stop in a second, but this is an area of deep interest. If you look at how, let's just say, ayahuasca has been used historically, it's also been

Starting point is 01:30:24 used for hunting and warfare. And I'm not saying any of this holds water, but at the very least, consistent use by humans over millennia would seem to imply some utility. And if one is to believe the claimed utility, it raises questions that we are currently not able to answer from a physicalist paradigm. Anyway, end of speech. I agree, and I think that this is very much worth exploring. I think that I cannot dismiss and should not dismiss the possibility that these drugs are opening up portals into this other realm. I mean, it's also possible that they're not. We need to have a mathematically precise theory of what we think this realm beyond space-time is and what portals are. But I don't dismiss this at all. There's a brilliant researcher named Monica Gagliano who has spent time with these native societies and that are using these plants plants she's got a book called thus spoke the plant i love the title by monica gagliano and she was inspired by these tribes and their

Starting point is 01:31:38 their work to do new experiments on plants that showed that plants have capabilities that we never thought they can do classical condition she's done classical conditioning on plants that showed that plants have capabilities that we never thought. They can do classical conditioning. She's done classical conditioning on plants. Plants can learn to associate a sound with food, and they will grow their roots to just the sound that's been paired with the food when there's no food there. So you can do classical conditioning with plants, and she's got other remarkable discoveries about plants and so she says there's a a wonderful movie that just came out called aware where she and christoph koch and and several other people are are interviewed i highly recommend the movie's called aware i forgot the subtitle something like explorations of consciousness or something like that for the subtitle. It was something like Explorations of Consciousness or something like that for the subtitle. But the movie's called Aware.

Starting point is 01:32:26 It just came out very recently. So Monica is in that. Christoph is in that. And they go through and talk about her experiences with the tribes. You see her sitting with the tribes. Then you see the experiments that she's done. So I think that there's, again, I don't know what the answer will be here. Because until we have the science, you know, a mathematically precise science, we just don't know.

Starting point is 01:32:49 It could just be screwing up the brain in some sense, or it could be a genuine insight. So there's a lot of hard work ahead to do this. But if you're a physicalist, we know the answer. You're just screwing up your brain. Yeah, you're just completely cuckoo bananas and should be put in a padded room so you can't damage yourself, which, in fairness, some of these things you do have to be careful with. This book looks fascinating. Thus spoke the plant. Monica Gagliano, 253 ratings, like 4. this, or if people wanted a place to start that is a little shorter, there's a piece called The Intelligent Plant that Michael Pollan wrote for The New Yorker at one point, which also speaks to this in so much as plants can sense gravity, the presence of water, feel an obstruction in the way of their roots before coming in contact with

Starting point is 01:33:39 them. There's time-lapse videography or photography of plants finding poles to climb up in using means that are very unclear. Really, really fascinating piece. That's a bit older, 2013. So I would imagine that Monica's book has more up-to-date science. That's right. This will give food for thought to vegetarians. Yeah, that's true. The ethical considerations.

Starting point is 01:34:05 Plants are this intelligent. I mean, are they sentient? From my point of view, of course, that's the wrong question, right? The question of which things are conscious and which are living and which is the wrong question. We're always interacting with consciousness. When you see something that's called a plant, you're interacting with consciousness. It's just that your symbol is what you call a plant, but you're really interacting with consciousness. That's a thorny dilemma for people to sort out. I'm going to save that for the bioethicists and people who have a better understanding. I'd love to ask you about a book which was gifted to me. I did not agree with everything in it, but I did find some of the explanations and thought

Starting point is 01:34:42 exercises to be worthy of exploration very simple but are you familiar with the book called biocentrism have you ever heard of this yes what is your what is your opinion of this book so i agree with him that physicalism is is an inadequate framework so absolutely i so i agree with him on that the disagreements may or may not come in what we propose is beyond space-time so I particular model of conscious agents that is mathematical and he may or may not like that I mean you know he may disagree in his case he doesn't have any specific mathematical model so it's more just using the current evidence to

Starting point is 01:35:21 suggest that physicalism is false, that something more lifelike, more conscious-like may be fundamental, but it doesn't go to the next scientific step, which is, okay, give me a mathematical model that's falsifiable or testable. Thank you for answering that. You mentioned a number of names, Nima something something Hamed, which I will get right in the show notes. Which scientists, they don't have to be scientists, but I do like playing within the realm of falsifiable hypotheses, if proven true, that have predictive powers. Anyone you would suggest taking a look at or who you find interesting in terms of what they are attempting to figure out or testing? One person I find brilliant and interesting is Chris Fuchs, F-U-C-H-S.

Starting point is 01:36:13 He's a physicist and one of the founders of Qubism, Q-B-I-S-M, formerly called quantum Bayesianism, but I think he dropped that and just now calls it Qubism. Qubism is catchier. Qubism is catchier, and he had some technical reasons for maybe dropping the quantum Bayesianism, but I think he dropped that and just now calls it cubism. Cubism is catchier. Cubism is catchier, and he had some technical reasons for maybe dropping the quantum Bayesian name. But he and also David Merman is another, Rudiger Schock, they're all cubists. And it's an interpretation of quantum theory that is very, very close to what I'm saying. That they make the point that each act of observation in physics is an act of fact creation. When you measure the position of the electron, you're not measuring a pre-existing fact.

Starting point is 01:37:02 You're creating the fact in the act of measurement. So that's the cubist approach. And of course, I find that very, very cordial to what I'm saying, that space-time is just an interface and these properties are things that we create when we look. They're data structures. You create when you look and then you garbage collect. You destroy it when you don't need it. And so particles are things that we create when we need them. And he's got a paper called Cubism, the Outer Fringes of Quantum Bayesianism. It's a 2010 paper. I can give you the exact title of it. But in that paper, Chris Fuchs actually describes an experiment, a mathematical experiment that some other mathematical physicists did in which they

Starting point is 01:37:45 prove, they show using quantum theory, a series of measurements that you can make where you can predict with probability one what the outcome will be, but you can prove that quantum mechanics is incompatible with the value being there before you measure it. I think I'll need you to say that one more time. Yeah, that's right. So this is in Chris Fuchs' paper, but it's some other work. A series of measurements that you make where you can prove that with probability one what the outcome is going to be, but you can also prove that the outcome did not exist, the value did not exist before you made the measurement. You can prove it.

Starting point is 01:38:30 So that's, again, against the local realism. But it's also against what Einstein said. can, without interfering in any way with the system, predict with probability one what the outcome of measurement will be, then there's an element of reality corresponding to the thing that you could get with probability one. If without disturbing the system, you can predict with probability one what the measurement will be, then there's an element of reality corresponding to that measured value. That's what Einstein said. Really nice idea. And what Chris Fuchs in his paper shows is Einstein was wrong. Here's something, probability one, we know what the outcome is going to be,

Starting point is 01:39:15 and we can prove it didn't exist. So this is once again, the nail in the coffin of space-time and particles being fundamental reality. They don't even exist when they're not perceived, when they're not measured. So, cubism says every physical measurement is an act of fact creation. You create it in the act of observation. That agrees with what I'm finding from evolution by natural selection. You create the symbols you need on the fly to survive long enough to reproduce. So cubism for folks, we'll put this in the show notes as well, and we'll get the title of that paper is QBISM. Yeah, that's very involved with D-Wave and other quantum computing companies,

Starting point is 01:40:08 which will also really stretch the boundaries of the mind just to consider what is involved. And these are things that are happening right now. I mean, Google and many of these companies have vast resources dedicated to quantum computing. It is of great practical value, but it gets into some very, very strange territory. I'd love to know what experiments, if you could wave a magic wand, or if you just had a pet billionaire who would fund whatever you thought was worth funding, what type of experiments would you like to see? Or do any experiments come to mind that you would like to see,

Starting point is 01:40:47 you would love to see done in the next five, ten years? The magic wand, I would say that the stuff I'm working on, we need to just be funded for the next ten years to really get the mathematics worked out of this theory of conscious agent. But in terms of experiments that could be done right now, my take would be I would go to Nima Arkani-Hamed at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and say, here's all the money you want.

Starting point is 01:41:13 What experiments do you want to do? Because you're the one who's actually telling us how to go beyond space-time. What do we need to do to go beyond space-time and really understand the structures behind there? So he's got some ideas. In fact, he was, perhaps still is, beyond space-time and really understand the structures behind there. So he's got some ideas. In fact, he was, perhaps still is, sort of the lead on a new collider that was going to be built in China. I don't know what's happening on that. So I would say some of the most beneficial experiments we could do right now are the ones that really help us push beyond our current space-time

Starting point is 01:41:40 understanding and really go into the structures that are beyond space-time. That's going to be our best bet. I mean, the kinds of stuff that I would do, I think, as a neuroscientist and so forth, they're incremental, but his stuff would be transformational. On my part, I think we have to just go after the mathematical modeling and then try to tie it into the structures that they're finding. I think that's the best way for science to move forward in the quickest way on this. I'm going to ask a totally unrelated question.

Starting point is 01:42:11 Thank you for that. And I did finally found, I'll just read it for folks. So Nima Rukani Hamed, N-I-M-A, next word, A-R-K-A-N-I hyphen H-A-M-E-D, American Canadian physicist. I will be looking into this gentleman. Also, the older I get, the more I'll view other people as young. But he's done a lot. He's 49. I mean, he's really, he's gotten a lot done. Wow. Very impressive. He's stunningly brilliant and hardworking. What are you reading these days? or what do you have on deck?

Starting point is 01:42:47 Could be something that you've finished reading, something you're working on currently, something that you're looking forward to digging into. I'm just curious what your information diet looks like these days. Several different fronts. One is on the very technical fronts. I'm studying some information theory in the entropy, conditional entropy, and so forth. And then the Poincaré group and irreducible representation of the Poincaré group to see if I can't show how space-time emerges from these

Starting point is 01:43:19 conditional probability projections of a dynamics of consciousness. So the idea is that consciousness has this dynamics that has no arrow of time. There's no change in entropy. Anytime you look at that dynamics from a perspective, but using conditional probability, you get an arrow of entropy, but different ways of looking at it will give you different entropic rates. So the rates will change depending on how you condition. I would like to show that I could get a group of transformations of these entropies that then give me back the Poincaré group, for example. That would be, again, it wouldn't prove I'm right, but it would at least prove that we have a theory that's compatible with what we know that can actually map into space-time. It would actually be tremendous. So I'm looking at technical stuff on Markov chains, information

Starting point is 01:44:09 theory, and of course, the related physics on this. I'm also in a completely different direction because I feel like when we're studying consciousness on its own terms, there's very few of us as scientists who are trying to study consciousness on its own term. So I'm not trying to think of consciousness as some, you know, how does neural activity give rise to consciousness and so forth. I'm asking what is consciousness qua consciousness? I want a scientific theory of consciousness that doesn't assume a physical world as the foundation at all. Sounds very difficult. It absolutely is. a physical world as the foundation at all. Sounds very difficult.

Starting point is 01:44:45 It absolutely is. You have to just reboot everything without all the props that we've had of space and time. So what do you want in a mathematical model of consciousness? Now, as I mentioned, I published that paper, Objects of Consciousness, a few years ago, and people can read what we have there. But I realized that I should listen to various spiritual traditions. But now, spiritual traditions are a mixed bag, right? I have no doubt that many practitioners

Starting point is 01:45:17 have had deep insights, and that I have no doubt that many of the things that they say are dogmatic nonsense. And the question is how to separate the two, right? Part of it is that they may have had insights, but without the scientific technique of writing down mathematically precise theories and then testing them, you just can't make progress. Even if your insights are deep and correct, you can't take them and evolve them very far. If you're just using words, you have to use mathematics and then make testable predictions. And so I'm reading, not the, well, I mean, I've read the Bible and it's a mixed bag. So I'd get some insights from that. I had a chance to talk with the Dalai Lama and give a talk to him and get some interaction with him.

Starting point is 01:46:06 And I'm reading Eckhart Tolle and Rupert Spira. Who is Rupert Spira? Rupert Spira, S-P-I-R-A, Rupert Spira. Who is that? I just, I don't recognize that one. He's a spiritual teacher from England and I've run across him. I had a chance to have breakfast with him up in San Jose. There's a science and

Starting point is 01:46:25 non-duality conference that I've gone to many times. It's called science and non-duality meets once a year until sort of, you know, it got messed up with COVID, but it'll probably restart. And there, you know, they bring together scientists and people from spiritual traditions to have a dialogue, which I found very, very useful. So again, my attitude is, as a scientist, I don't think any of our current scientific theories are correct, including my own. I think a century from now, we'll all look back and look at our current theories like we look at Newton's theory. It was great for its time, but it was time to move on. And I think all of scientific theories will be the same way. So I have the same attitude about

Starting point is 01:47:03 even the spiritual teachers and the way they think about what they've experienced. On the other hand, I think it's important for me as a scientist to listen very carefully to what these spiritual teachers are doing. They seem to have explored in ways that perhaps I and other scientists have not. And can I get insight? So I'm spending time reading Eckhart Tolle's books and Rupert Spira and just, again, taking everything with a grain of salt. But I don't want to just ignore this. I want to

Starting point is 01:47:32 really think about it deeply as I try to get a mathematical model. Yeah, I wonder, as you're talking about this, I wonder, I'm just thinking about the convergence of spiritual practice, not just the saturation of religion, but let's just say practices and mathematics. I mean, just offhand, and this could be completely misguided, I'm wondering if there have been any pairings of mathematicians and spiritual practitioners in, say, India. I mean, there's such a strong, certainly millennia-long set of traditions related to deep practices of various types, but also mathematics. I mean, you have an incredible, I don't want to say tradition, but you do have a historical record of outstanding mathematicians

Starting point is 01:48:19 out of India as well. I know two of them, and I am very, very lucky to count them among my longtime collaborators. So Chetan Prakash and Manish Singh. These guys are mathematical geniuses, and with also deep spiritual understanding, they have their own spiritual practices. And Chetan has worked with me for over 30 years, and Manish for almost 30. Manish was a student of mine, but he's now my superior. He's absolutely brilliant. So any mathematical savvy in our papers is not due to me, it's due to them. And perhaps any spiritual savvy is also due to them. So I don't know what I do. But anyway, these guys are brilliant. And also, I was very fortunate to work with a gentleman named, you know, he wasn't Indian, he was Jewish, Bruce Bennett.

Starting point is 01:49:07 He was just a flat-out genius mathematician with also a deep spiritual understanding of Eastern spiritual traditions, I think, informed his stuff. So I've been around, I've been fortunate to be and to collaborate with these brilliant mathematicians. So I agree, absolutely. brilliant mathematicians so i agree absolutely so as you i'd love to just know as you're reading from these religious and spiritual texts whether it's scripture like the bible or any other source how do you pull from that like what is your kind of filtering mechanism could you give any examples right because i think that think that there are people who can hold the, let's just call it kind of rationalist mathematical faculties while simultaneously having faith-based religion or spiritual practices. They don't have to be faith-based. I mean, you could be a mystic with

Starting point is 01:50:04 direct experience. It's very different, though, to integrate those things. You can have those two things coexist in you, but some would view them as antithetical to one another, right? So how do you filter? And are there any examples that come to mind of things you've pulled from spiritual practices and look to pour over into the scientific? A couple things. One, from the Upanishads, there's this saying, not that which the eye sees, but that whereby the eye can see. Know that alone to be Brahma the eternal and not what people here adore.

Starting point is 01:50:40 Not that which the ear hears, but that whereby the ear can hear know that alone to be brahma the eternal not what people not that which the mind thinks but that whereby the mind can think know that to be so there's this distinction between pure awareness versus the contents of awareness. And when I realized that they were making that distinction, I looked back at my math and I realized that when I was writing down these mathematical models of consciousness, they're probabilistic models. And you have to write down, when you do that, you have to write down a probability space. So there's just this thing. It's this timeless thing, probability space. And then you have the dynamics occurring on that space. So the mathematics itself also models, there's this

Starting point is 01:51:39 pure awareness beyond time, beyond the dynamics. That's what I call the probability space. And then there is the dynamical system of the contents that appear and disappear within that system. So I realized that there is this really interesting correspondence between the kinds of things that they're saying. There's pure awareness. And in some sense, they'll say, what you are is not any of your contents. You're not your body. You're not the sound of your voice. You're not your possessions.

Starting point is 01:52:13 None of that stuff is you. You are the pure awareness, and the pure awareness is what survives death, but not necessarily any content. That does seem to correspond pretty well with some of the mathematics that I wrote down just because I had to write it down that way. That's just what you do when you write down the mathematics. And so, I find these kinds of correspondences really interesting, and I want to

Starting point is 01:52:34 pursue them further. The other one that I think is really interesting is the insistence. You get this in many of the spiritual traditions, but I see it really clearly like when Eckhart Tolle is explaining these things in his books, like A New Earth and The Power of Now and so forth. He points out that thinking is not a very deep intelligence compared to the realm of our reality beyond thought. So in these spiritual traditions, one of the things you do in meditation is you let go of thought completely, right? Any thoughts that come up, you don't fight them, but you don't

Starting point is 01:53:11 give them any space. You let them go. The point that they make is that as you do that, and it may take you years to really be able to do that, you are getting in touch with an infinite intelligence that is much, much deeper than any thought intelligence. And in fact, is the source of all intelligence that comes through our thoughts. And so if that's right, that also makes sense from this Gertl's incompleteness theorem point of view that I've been taking on this. That is that consciousness, there's no description of it, including any conceptual thought description that we can give, that even scratches the surface of the depths that Gödel's incompleteness theorem says is there. So I see this correspondence again

Starting point is 01:53:55 between, so there's this really interesting thing. We need thought. Without words, we wouldn't have this conversation, right? Hard to podcast. Very difficult. Hard to podcast. So it's not like words are bad and concepts are bad. The question is, what is the relationship between conceptual systems and this intelligence that transcends any conceptual system? That's the really interesting. The spiritual traditions will say, it's a pointer relationship. I'm using the word aware as a pointer.

Starting point is 01:54:23 Of course, the word aware, don't take it too seriously. You can also call it consciousness, whatever, but don't take the pointer too seriously. And then some pointers are really bad, right? So we have this notion of good and bad pointers. So as a scientist, I'm going, now that's really interesting. What do we mean mathematically by a good pointer versus a bad pointer. Can we actually take these ideas and make them more rigorous? So for example, I'll just give a really simple concrete idea of the kind of thing that I'm talking about. The real numbers, the real line, you know, from minus infinity to infinity. So that's a lot of numbers. I'm no mathematician, but it sounds like a lot of numbers. It's a lot

Starting point is 01:55:01 of numbers, right? And now just the integers from minus infinity to infinity. Well, there's between zero and one, there's a whole bunch of real numbers, right? So there's a sense in which the integers are a very good approximation to the real numbers. There's so many real numbers between zero and one. Zero is not really telling me anything about the integers between zero and one. So you could say that the integers are a pointer to the real numbers, but it's a really bad pointer. But now take the rational numbers. A rational number is an integer divided by an integer. So you just take any two integers, you get a ratio. Those are called the rational numbers. And it turns out that the rational numbers are what mathematicians call dense in the real numbers. You can approximate a real number as close as you want with rational numbers, but not with integers. Now, it turns out there's just as many rational numbers as there are integers.

Starting point is 01:55:59 This sounds crazy. So the number of integers equals the number of rational numbers. The integers are a bad pointer to the real numbers, but the rational numbers are a good pointer to the real numbers. They can approximate them. So this is the kind of thing, can we take the spiritual idea that what we are is an infinite intelligence that cannot be captured by any finite conceptual system, language for example, speech, thought.

Starting point is 01:56:26 We have this notion of good, bad, and worse pointers. Can we make this idea, which has been for thousands of years in the spiritual traditions, can we now dust it off and make it serviceable in a more rigorous way? Can we actually take spirituality and turn it into a scientific discipline, which is not to desiccate it and deprive it of its life, but to make it precise and make it actually serviceable, actually make predictions. I would love, my father was a minister in a Protestant fundamentalist church. The sermon, the guy gets up and his sermon is, guess what we just discovered mathematically about

Starting point is 01:57:05 spirituality this week? You won't believe it. Here's this new theorem about spirituality. Sign me up. I would love to go to a church like that where they're telling you the new discoveries, you know, where rigorous discoveries about good pointers to, you know, here's how to think about consciousness. Here's a better way to do your meditation. And we now have this mathematics to explain why you should do it this way and not that way. I would just love that kind of thing. And I think that science and spirituality eventually could collaborate. Now, question for you, would spirituality not at that point cease to be a useful term in so much as if spirituality is, and please feel free to disagree with the wording, but an attempt to

Starting point is 01:57:48 describe with words, these sort of clumsy, imprecise labels, glimpses somehow, if we look at the mystical traditions, into this fabric beyond space-time, like by the time they converge, we will have the tools and the mathematics to obviate the need for this word spirituality. Is that nonsense that I'm spouting? I think that's a very natural question. And my attitude is that science itself is in the same boat.

Starting point is 01:58:26 Science will never have a theory of everything, and science will always, as Newton put it, Newton described near the end of his life, he described himself as a little boy on the seashore amusing himself with a little shell or a pebble when the vast ocean of truth lay unexplored all before him. I think that's exactly right, and that's the right attitude that science should have, is that no matter how far we get with our scientific theories, we have to understand that we will always be playing with pebbles on the seashore, just like Newton was. At least Newton was smart enough to understand that, that he was playing with pebbles. And so the fact that the spiritual people are also just playing with pebbles on the seashore, but they're pointing to the ocean beyond and saying it's beyond conception.

Starting point is 01:59:18 That's why I think the notion of the pointers is really important. Good pointers versus bad pointers. We can never get a theory of that. But if the spiritual traditions are right, and if conscious realism is right, even though you can't get a theory of it, you can know it by being it. You can't know that infinite intelligence through your conceptual analysis. You can get good pointers to it, and science can help us get good pointers, but you can only deeply know it by actually letting go of thought and being it. But then, as a scientist, you can go there and be it, and then come back with the goods in your own conceptual system and make progress in your science. And that's where I see this possibly going.

Starting point is 02:00:09 Scientists would actually learn, once we let go of our physicalism, would learn actually how we as scientists are that infinite intelligence. But our conceptual tools are inadequate. So we have to go into that infinite intelligence in pure silence and then learn how to come back and take whatever insights we have gotten into terms that we can actually write down in mathematics and we go back and forth that way. So that's where I see science and spirituality eventually going. So it can require a scientist to actually be not only a master of mathematics and the theories, but also a master of letting go of thought and actually going into the deep intelligence, if this whole approach is correct. How much pushback slash blowback criticism have you had to deal with from the scientific community for bringing the S word, spirituality, into the fold of conversation? Have you experienced that or have you not really run into it? My colleagues have treated me very well,

Starting point is 02:01:09 I think. As a scientist, I absolutely not only expect, but request hard-nosed pushback. I mean, I'll be the first to say that my theory of conscious agents is probably wrong. And I should, just to confirm that, before we started recording, you were like, the more you push back, the better. Love it. Hard questions, that's my job, is to contend with that. So I just wanted to confirm that. So please continue. Yeah, that's right. So I'm not interested in my own dogmatism at all. I would like to be disabused of my own mistakes as quickly as possible. And when my colleagues, what I usually talk with them about is not so much the spiritual side of things,

Starting point is 02:01:53 but more evolution of a natural selection entails that physicalism is false. I mean, we have to get over that hump before we even get anywhere near spirituality. So that's where I've really pushed with my colleagues. And I'm getting good feedback and good pushback of the kind that I would hope. So there's a team at Yale, for example, that, I mean, are trying to defend realism. They're trying to use evolution by natural selection. They're looking at the simulations we've done and the mathematics we've done. They're trying to find conditions in which systems could evolve to see the truth, if there were the truth. And so we're having a very profitable back and forth on that. And my own

Starting point is 02:02:26 attitude is that it's no surprise that you can find certain conditions in evolutionary theory in which under those special conditions, yeah, organisms could see the truth. The thing will be that they are probability zero. So if you are going to bet, you would not bet on them. So, and that's a whole other discussion. I'll just say one thing about it, and it has to do with their approach is if you have lots and lots of fitness payoff functions, and you force the organism to only see the world as a unified whole, you can't carve it up. Then in that special condition with many thousands of payoff functions that are coming very, very quickly, you can't adapt to any payoff function, and so truth is what you sort of default to.

Starting point is 02:03:09 So that's great. I'm grateful to them for doing that. What we've shown is that if you allow an organism to cluster the payoff functions into similar payoff functions so that you can sort of take these 50 payoff functions are roughly the same so we will just make one payoff function for all of them now a quick question fitness payoff function I mean I think of I'm probably very simplistic a viewing fitness payoff function as successful reproduction what would other payoff functions be if I'm not totally misunderstanding it you understand correctly evolutionary theory has been turned into mathematics called

Starting point is 02:03:45 evolutionary game theory. And in evolutionary game theory, what you do is you set up a game where players have different strategies. And when one strategy interacts with another strategy, it will get a payoff, a dollar amount or something that it gets for that. So for each strategy interacting with another strategy, you get a matrix of these payoffs that you get for strategy interacting. You have rules for accruing points effectively. That's right. And the more points you get, if you get more points in the competition, then you have a greater chance of reproducing effectively than the competition.

Starting point is 02:04:17 Those are the payoff. So you have these payoff functions. So when you mathematize evolution by natural selection, you get these payoff functions. And yes, if you allow an organism now that's dealing with thousands of payoffs, and we do, we have thousands of payoffs that we have to deal with. But if you can group them, cluster them into these actions with these payoffs, you have roughly the same payoff. So let me make what I call an object out of them. So what we call visual objects or physical objects are merely data structures by which we sort of put together a bunch of payoff functions together so that we can just use that as a shorthand. If I have an apple, you can bite it, you can eat it. I wouldn't do other things with it.

Starting point is 02:05:00 I wouldn't try to drink it. I wouldn't try to mate with it. So there are certain payoffs you're not going to get from an apple. With a stick, I can beat someone with it, but I wouldn't want to eat it and I wouldn't try to drink it. So different objects will have different payoffs. And so what we've showed in our simulations just in the last couple of weeks, so this is just brand new. So this is in response to the team at Yale. We found that what they did was correct. But as soon as you let organisms cluster the payoff functions into objects, then you get far more payoff for not seeing the truth. You make these

Starting point is 02:05:32 fake objects, which are just data structures for the fitness payoffs. And so once again, we actually then see where objects come from. They come not as representations of the truth, but as mere conveniences for representing payoffs. Don, this has been tremendously fascinating. I could certainly continue with many questions for many hours, perhaps another time, perhaps a round two. Is there anything else you'd like to say, anything else you would like to mention before we bring this first conversation to a close? I think the thing I would highlight, we've talked about it before, but I would highlight it at the very end. And that is the nature of science. Good scientists understand that we will never have a theory of everything. When they talk about a theory of

Starting point is 02:06:13 everything, it's with a wink and a nod. The science is a never ending process of getting deeper and deeper theories, but each theory always makes assumptions. And as scientists, it's not our duty to believe our theories. It's our duty to study the theories, really understand them thoroughly, and then try to break them. The point is to break your theories. When you can break your theory, when you find its limits, that's when you break out the champagne because that's when you're going to go to the next step. And Gödel's incompleteness theorem tells us that this process will never end. So there is job security. Go to science. Job security. I love that. Well, Don, people can find you on Twitter at Donald D. Hoffman. You have a fantastic

Starting point is 02:07:03 Twitter feed. You really share quite a bit in terms of references and articles and so on. That's Donald D Hoffman, H-O-F-F-M-A-N. And it has been so much fun to have you on and to have this conversation. I appreciate you taking the time. It was a great pleasure, Tim. Thank you so much. And for everybody listening, we will add copious and detailed links in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off.

Starting point is 02:07:37 And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #585: Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More

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