Donald Hoffman: Consciousness, the true nature of reality, and the interconnectedness of everything

coming up on the Nick Stanley show perhaps our senses didn't evolve to show us reality as it is we're all basically perhaps just one Consciousness looking at itself through different avatars we have access to that very very deep Realm Of Consciousness the infinite unbounded intelligence that that we are at the deepest level all of our words all of our theories are merely pointers the real thing is the conscious experience the taste of cinnamon the experience of awareness without any content that's the real thing spirituality is about waking up to what you really are it must be the case that you've got to really commit to the illusion to really wake up from the illusion and know that you are not that illusion let's take the red pill stay in Wonderland and let Dr Hoffman show us how deep the rabbit hole [Music] goes Don H Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and professor emeritus at UC Irvine he studies Consciousness visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments he is the author of the case against reality an excellent book that argues that our visual perceptions are not a window unto reality but instead our interfaces constructed by natural selection he contends that Evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic Illusions to help us navigate the world around us drawing on 30 years of research in evolutionary biology Game Theory neuroscience and philosophy the case against reality makes the mind-bending yet utterly convincing case that the world that we see is nothing like what we experience through our eyes his work theorizes that an interconnected Consciousness exists beyond space and time and may be the author of everything we Define as reality he has appeared on the Lex fre man podcast the Tim Ferris show the Jordan Peterson podcast and deepo trois podcast and today he's on the Nick stle show listener I'm convinced that Dawn will one day receive a Nobel Prize for his work but these concepts are challenging as schopenhauer once said all truth passes through three stages first it is ridiculed second it is violently opposed third it is accepted as being self-evident I've experienced all three stages in studying Dr Hoffman's work and you might too as you move through this conversation but if you can keep an open mind I'm confident that you'll end up in a better place for having interacted with these ideas so without further Ado Dr Hoffman welcome to the show thank you Nick it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for that kind introduction my pleasure you started your line of inquiry by trying to locate where Consciousness existed in the brain can you tell us a little bit more about that let's start there and how all of this developed yes many of my colleagues now in the neurosciences are very interested in in Consciousness which when I was a graduate student uh in the 1980s early 1980s we really weren't allowed to talk about Consciousness it was considered a SCH mytical kind of idea and we needed to do serious work but Francis Crick started saying you know we really need to study Consciousness and and he was the winner of the Nobel Prize along with Watson for the work on the structure of DNA and and so he had quite a bit of sway right and his work with Kristoff kooch really became evident that it was time for us to start looking at this as a good technical problem how our conscious experiences related to brain activity and so so many of my colleagues now are are studying that and and what they're looking for are neural correlates of Consciousness what parts of the brain seem to be sort of jointly sufficient for generating conscious experiences and but the Assumption I would say of most most of my colleagues 99% of them is that physical systems are fundamental so space and time and physical systems and inside space and time are fundamental in the case of brains it would be neurons there's various kinds of neural and gal cells that are that are that constitute the brain and somehow networks of these neurons with the right computational or causal properties um somehow give rise to Consciousness and so most of my colleagues who are studying Consciousness and neurosciences are taking that that point of view what did you discover as you kept looking further into that perhaps our senses didn't evolve to show us reality as it is if we're not seeing reality as it is then when we look at brains and neurons we're not seeing reality as it is and and so the whole idea that brains and neurons are creating conscious experiences needs to be Revisited doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong but we need to look at that a little bit more more closely but some work I was doing in studying visual perception and the rules that visual perception uses just you independent of evolution just looking at perception itself made me realize you know that as many of my colleagues were saying perception is a process of inference and inferences require premises and and if your premises are wild then your conclusions may not be related to objective reality and so I needed to really understand what makes me think that the premises that are guiding our perceptual interpretation of the world are are somehow going to give us access to reality I decided I really needed to know evolutionary Game Theory I mean this is a mathematical question you got to now jump in so I got a couple graduate students who were really quite bright Justin Mark and Brian Maran and we jumped in we got a book on evolutionary game theories learned the mathematics started running simulations what we found was to to our surprise that organisms in these simulations that saw reality as it is went extinct when they were competing against organisms that that didn't see any of reality and were just tuned to what evolution calls the fitness payoff functions I thought that might have happened because it takes a lot of resources you know Evolution might be shaping us with tricks and hacks shortcuts heris and I thought maybe that was going to be the reason why but as we looked at the simulations and this is why you do the science because you get surprised what I found was yes that was part of it her istics and shortcuts and tricks were part of the reason why Evolution wasn't shaping us to see the truth but the real thing was that the fitness payoff functions these are the things that are actually guiding Evolution according to evolutionary game the these Fitness payoff functions it's roughly if you're playing a video game and you get points for you know killing certain things or crossing certain boundaries or whatever and if you get enough points uh in a short enough period of time you might survive and go to the next level of the game well in evolutionary theory the idea is that um you're trying to get these Fitness payoff points and if you get enough of them in a short amount of time then you don't go to the next level but you you have kids that go to the next level so that's sort of the analogy of what these Fitness payout it's a technical thing but it's intuitive and and what I found with with my graduate students and it was really I mean again hats off to my graduate students Brian Maran and Justin Mark who helped me really see this the fitness payoff functions almost never contain information about reality mhm right they're functions from reality to the payoffs that's the the what we call the domain of the function the range is some numbers like from Z to 100 zero means you lose 100 means you've got the most points you possibly could so it's it's it's a function and and we realize that if that function doesn't contain any information about the structure of the world there's no way that it could shape your sensory systems to see the structure of the world and that's that was the big Discovery so yeah heuristics and shortcuts and doing things you know quick and cheap that's part of it but the real deep thing that came out of it is that Evolution entails that the fitness functions which are involved in shaping our sensory perceptions don't have the information needed to shape them to see the truth and so they couldn't shape us to see the truth so so now there's lots of details we can go into if you if you want but but that's the top level well to summarize at the top level so you're running these evolutionary simulations right and you've got different organisms in the simulations and some can see reality for what it is and some are trained just for Fitness payoffs right and the ones that see reality as it is keep getting killed off because they're not scoring as many points that's right as the ones that are trained for Fitness exactly their offspring are advancing to the next level that's right and that leads you to this conclusion that we as humans everything that exists on planet Earth would be subject to the same rules and forces of evolution to not be trained to see reality but to see Fitness payoffs instead that's exactly right so this would be a result not just about human perception but about perception all species period that we so and I should say my attitude as a scientist in all of this right I'm using the theory of evolution of a natural selection because it's the single best theory we have right now there there's nothing better than Darwin's theory with the new mathematical spin to understand biological evolution there's just nothing else so I'm not saying that evolutionary theory is correct or the final answer it's the best answer we have so far and so as a scientist it's my duty to take the best we have so far not to not to believe it but to ask what does it in tale about our perceptions now you might say well so much the worst for evolutionary theory and I'm perfectly fine with that as well but of course if you say that then what is your alternative and right now there is there are no alternatives for evolution that come anywhere near the the power of you know Darwin's theory for explaining biological evolution youve you've come to this Insight that perhaps we don't perceive reality as it exists and what was the next step in your inqu as to what reality might be well first I should say the next step was to go to my good uh friend and longtime collaborator chayon prash who is a real mathematician and say look we have this game result suggest to me there's a theem here and so with working with chayon but you know chayon was the mathematician I'm I'm I'm not a mathematician um we published a couple papers where we actually have theorems now so you there's one thing to do games uh but real scien just won't be completely convinced by games theorems and so we published a couple theorems but your question is where do I go from there in terms of how I should think about perceptions when they're not the truth or yeah and how you came to the idea of the desktop interface as a as a metaphor for what we're actually experiencing yes it's interesting that I had started to come to that conclusion even prior to the evolutionary work so I have a book called visual intelligence how we create what we see and it's that book is not about Evolution I almost never mentioned evolution in that book there I'm just looking straight at how does vision work and also I talk a little bit about how our our touch perceptions work and there I I canvased 3035 rules that our field has discovered uh about how we construct our visual world and that was the interesting thing in that in that book you know the title is visual intelligence how we create what we see and so it's a it's a constructive process technically we'll talk they talk about basing inference and so forth but when you get down to it it's it's really a construction process and so I knew that we were constructing and that's so that was standard in in my field I would not without Exceptions there of course every every idea in science has controversy but I would say the vast majority of my colleagues took it that perception as basing inference was a was a pretty solid foundation and so even in my book visual intelligence at the very end I I start speculating about well this this could be like a a VR and that was part of what was in the back of my mind when I said well you know a few years later well let's go check with you know evolutionary theory to see does would it say it's also a VR so then I think the reason I went after this this headset metaphor VR metaphor or desk desktop metaphor from from The evolutionary point of view is how are you going to explain to people in a way that they'd understand why would Evolution shape you not to see the truth I mean clearly it seems perceptions that show you reality as it is are going to make you more fit I mean that's that just seems obvious right how how are you going to be more fit well by seeing reality more more clearly so how in the world could you explain to people why that might not be the case and I realized well the desktop on your computer is a really good metaphor for that if you had to actually to to write a program or send an email or or or you know look at a photo if you had to toggle voltages in your computer to do that they wouldn't be selling like hotcakes right we couldn't do it but so you have a desktop interface which hides what you're doing what you're really doing is toggling in a in a precise sequence millions of voltages and other stuff inside of some really complicated computer you don't want to see any of that reality you just want to press a couple couple buttons and have your photo pop up and and do a few things and you know change the brightness and contrast if you had to toggle millions of voltages you wouldn't so I realize that that's a really good metaphor a desktop is useful because it hides the truth it it controls the truth it lets you control the truth but it keeps you ignorant of what you're doing and it keeps you ignorant of that truth and so I realize that makes perfect sense for evolution the whole point from evolutionary theory is not to see the truth it's to have kids right we not here to see truth you're here to have kids and so what's the quickest way the the the the cheapest way right Evolution does things on the cheap um making you see all the reality and toggle all the bits good luck you're going to die so it gives you a headset that let you play the game of life so that's that was sort of the metaphor if you want to play the game of life you need a headset that that hides the details of reality and just let you play the game it's like a VR headset and a VR game that we're playing right right and I thought it was was interesting that you said that a lot of quantum mechanics and study into reality was almost like looking more and more at the at the pixels on the desktop uh and that studying the pixels is not getting at what's actually inside the computer if we're still using that metaphor one surprising implication of what I've just been saying is that space and time themselves are not fundamental reality they're just the format of our VR headset MH now so here's a cognitive scientist now treading on the turf of the physicist right because space and time that that's the physicist Turf quantum theory and and general relativity and special relativity and so forth so you know I'm treading outside of my field so this is quite a claim for cognitive scientist to say the SpaceTime can't be fundamental you mean on evolutionary grounds and and so you you I can imagine people saying well some cognitive scientist saying this he's not even evolutionary biolog he's he's just a cognitive scientist and he's using evolutionary bi so surely the physicist will put him in his place so I started looking at at the physics of this right and there it's quite striking that the physicists themselves now um I found a paper in 2005 um David Gross Nobel Prize winner for his work on um the strong force yeah in 2005 which was 100 years after Einstein's publication in 1905 of special relativity so it was you know it was 100y year anniversary it was a big deal for the physicist there of course giving praise to Einstein thank you and so forth and and gross does that in his his paper and then in good scientific style says here's the problem SpaceTime is doomed and that's a quote SpaceTime is doomed it cannot be fundamental and he argues so gross argues that it can't be fundamental because uh it it falls apart at the plank scale it has so when you go to smaller and smaller scales of space which you can but by using higher and higher energies you can in smaller and smaller wavelengths of light you can go to smaller scales of space and and measure stuff right that's what microscopes do they use smaller and smaller wavelengths of light to resolve finer and finer details but there's a limit to that as it turns out and I Stein's Theory together with a couple things from quantum theory E equals H new which actually was from Einstein himself so Einstein himself his theories were precise enough to tell us where they stop SpaceTime Einstein SpaceTime has no operational meaning at 10us 33 cm and 10- 43 seconds it's over right and so gross is saying in 2005 thank you Einstein for SpaceTime and SpaceTime is doomed so I realized wow okay this is um along the same lines of of what I'm getting from evolutionary biology that SpaceTime is a useful data structure but from my point of view a shallow data structure it falls apart at 10us 33 cm not 10us 33 trillion CM just 10us 33 C so we have it's a it's only a four-dimensional headset so it's a very very small number of Dimensions it falls apart very very quickly 10us 33 cm so begin to so that's what you'd expect from a cheap model headset from an evolutionary point of view that and that's what we got a cheap model headset that's hiding reality now I should say be very careful here I won't just say the physicists are saying that that's that space time is Doom it's a certain group of physicists who are the specialists in Spa high energy theoretical physicist so that's that's the brand so David Gross uh narani Hamed and and several other um you know big names in that field so these are the ones who it's their specialty right they're the ones that are telling us that SpaceTime is Doom I've I've actually talked with many Quantum theorists at at con Consciousness conferences so these are phds in quantum theory who are interested in Consciousness and giving talks and I've asked many of them at the end of their talks so what do you think about you know the recent work about SpaceTime is not fundamental and they haven't even heard of it right right so so so even physicists don't know about this and the only reason that you know Hoffman a cognitive scientist knows about it is because I went looking for it it's sort of like okay if evolution is saying this I you know I better check with the physicists are saying something different and well most physicists don't know it but the physicists are saying the high energy theoretical physicists are saying SpaceTime is doomed well that's what evolution says too so we have two of our our pillars of modern science you know Einstein's theory of SpaceTime with with quantum theory and evolution by natural selection both saying SpaceTime is not fundamental reality yeah I think one of the things that's really exciting about your work is this multi disciplinary approach that you had ideas as a neuroscientist but then brought in the mathematics yes and brought in the uh was it high energy theoretical physics yeah high energy theoretical physics and really followed the math and the science wherever it led even though it led to this very surprising and to some people upsetting place um but I do think it takes a lot of academic integrity and bravery to just keep running with it if that's where the math and the science are leading you um and actually the gentleman who first turn me on to your work um wanted to make sure that I said thank you for that uh that bravery and and real just curiosity that was going to go wherever your work LED you um and not having preconceived notions about where you would end up so thank you for that well well thank you yeah it's it's my pleasure and I I I should thank the scientific Community because the way that it's set up that this is what tenure is about tenure is not you know you now you're safe you don't have to do you can no tenure is there for now we're saying okay we know that you can do research now we're saying you can do risky research right right before tenure don't do risky research do show us that you can do stuff after 10 year your imagination can go wild we know that you can do good research so go do it and that so that's really good about tenure in academics and also the scientific Community right right so 99% of my colleagues disagree with me mhm but they don't avoid me right we engage in intellectual discussions and and and they may disagree but so that's what I love about the scientific Community it and if of course if they come up with some devastating argument against me that I I find compelling then I would just abandon what I'm so that's right so so it's really just having that's what academic freedom is about and tenure is about is to allow people to and most you know most interesting work of course goes against the current grain that's that's why it's interesting so yeah I think it was MOX plunk who who said that science progresses one funeral at a time or something like that I like that yeah I think we need more of that positive disagreement in all of society um but that we we'll come back to that later when we get to the uh interconnected Consciousness and what that might mean for how we can all interact with each other so looking for where Consciousness originates discovering that reality is not what it appears to be and that space and time itself are doomed as in they are not the most fundamental level of existence is that the right word sure what was what was the next step from that point that's right so the question then is what's beyond SpaceTime right right if SpaceTime isn't it if SpaceTime is just like a VR headset well what's outside and as a scientist again there's a couple things that are guiding me one is there is no Theory of Everything in science so as science of course we want precise theories but we there's also a certain humility that's required because a scientific theory is just a set of assumptions and then the conclusions that you can derive from that set of assumptions if you grant me these assumptions asss then I can explain all this wonderful stuff MH but you don't explain your assumptions you assume them right and of course I can give you a deeper theory that might explain those assumptions but it'll have its own new assumptions and so this is a NeverEnding process and there's infinite job security in science so this a great job opportunity infinite job security because science will never even approach a theory of everything so so my attitude is what's the next baby step right SpaceTime was a really really good set of assumptions for our scientific Endeavors we thought it was the truth it's not it's just a headset so what's outside now what's interesting before I talk about what I'm thinking about yeah the physicists in just the last 10 years have been doing this as well there they the the new generation is going SpaceTime is doomed what's outside SpaceTime and they're looking and they're finding stuff it's called positive geometries and there this month is a kickoff for a big multi-million Euro project International to start studying these positive geometries in the last 10 years so many discoveries have been made of these they're like so positive geometries are like these diamonds these these objects outside of SpaceTime whose volumes encodes really important physical interactions inid space time like the probabilities of particles interacting and scattering right so the volumes of these things are are capturing what we called scattering amplitudes scattering probabilities and the the structure the the vertices the edges the faces is capturing properties of SpaceTime locality and unitarity these are technical prop properties about SpaceTime um but but they're doing it in a format entirely outside of SpaceTime and entirely Beyond quantum theory so these are geometries that don't care a bit about SpaceTime or quantum theory SpaceTime and quantum theory arise as special projections of these much deeper but static structures and so so to name a few there's the amplitud hedrin associ hedrin and then there so these are some of the positive geometries they're finding and then they're finding these other objects that are what they call combinatorial objects that that describe these geometries and something called decorated permutations so permutations are like shuffling cards and decorated permutations are a slightly fancy Twist on that so these decorated permutations turn out to be able to classify these geometries and so so this is all brand new again most physicists don't know about it it's only the high energy theoretical physicists and then a rogue cognitive scientist here and there was looking at this stuff and going oh that's pretty interesting but most people don't know about this but these these positive geometries allow you to compute the scattering probabilities like two gluons hitting each other and four gluons go spraying out when you do it when you do that computation using the tools of SpaceTime namely Quantum field Theory so the standard tools fman diagrams and so forth and we and we're talking about say a particle collider that's right and that's right like a large hron collider or something at fmy lab or something like that right when you when you do the computation using Quantum field Theory inside SpaceTime just a single interaction two gluons in four gluons out something like that hundreds of pages of algebra for one inter it's just a mess M when you do it with the new positive geometries three or four terms you can do it by hand right a single page and so so the mathematics all of a sudden becomes simple well simpler right right until I can get up to the Blackboard and do it from memory I won't say it simple okay U and and then they also discover that there are these symmetries that are true about the scattering processes that you can't see in in the SpaceTime description of them so letting go of SpaceTime makes the math simpler dramatically simpler not just a little dramatically simpler and allows you to see new symmetries that are true of the data so there you have it those are that's the killer app and these are clues that you're on the right path when it simplifies the mathematics exponentially that's right yeah absolutely so so so that's why all of a sudden there's a big launch this month you know as we speak this month February of 2024 uh a multidisciplinary multinational um push to go what's going on with these positive geometries what they're like obelisks like 2001 Space aesty remember the little scene where all the apes are gathered around this Obelisk that suddenly appeared and they're they're hooting and hollering and pounding on it and screaming they they know it's it's really important it it it's very meaningful but they don't know what it means and and we're sort of like that right now there's these obelisks Beyond SpaceTime these positive geometries and they're saying we can do powerful things we make the mass simpler we show new symmetries but there's no Dynamics they're just these Jewels sitting out there so so we're this very interesting position in in science where in just the last 10 years the the the new generation of physicists have discovered these things and they don't know what they mean they know what they can do they know that there's a lot more of them to discover and a lot deeper understanding of them to be had and I presume that they're thinking about okay and what dynamical systems might give rise to these things because typically physics is about Dynamics and not just static geometric objects yes okay so you've got this set of indications that you're you're moving in the right direction and then when is the leap to this idea of this interconnected Consciousness so that's the leap so I'm interested in Consciousness as are many of my colleagues and we've as a group have assumed that Consciousness is a latecomer that space and time are fundamental that the Big Bang was just a physical thing and there was no life perhaps for hundreds of millions perhaps billions of years and finally life evolved here and perhaps other places but no but no consciousness and then eventually life got complicated enough that Consciousness that's the standard story right SpaceTime is doomed so is that story that that that can't be the story of Consciousness right so so so what that means is that the theories that 99% of my colleagues are doing which are assuming that physical systems give rise to Consciousness cannot be right by the way these these are my colleagues are brilliant so they haven't made much progress on this because the assumptions are false so I'm hoping you know as soon as they can get the right assumptions they they'll take off on this because they're they're brilliant but what's stopping them from from getting any progress in Consciousness is the assumption that Consciousness is a latecomer and it comes from complicated causal interactions or whatever of of physical systems so it's that in that context that I'm thinking about so how do I think about Consciousness one approach is to say it's an illusion right some of my colleagues Dan dennet um Michael Graziano and others will will say Consciousness there's no such thing there's only the illusion of Consciousness most of my colleagues think Consciousness is is a is a real thing so I I take Consciousness to be a real thing so how am I going to as a scientist understand Consciousness if it cannot possibly arise from SpaceTime because space time's not fundamental SpaceTime is just a headset so For Better or For Worse we have to go big or go home let's reverse the whole thing instead of SpaceTime being fundamental and Consciousness as a latecomer let's switch let's make Consciousness fundamental and SpaceTime the latecomer just one of the headsets MH not not the most interesting perhaps one of the cheaper headsets that Consciousness can use to explore it its own capacities so so what is consciousness right well mystical traditions and spiritual Traditions have talked about it for thousands of years but there's no scientific theories right but we can learn from you know Buddhism Hinduism mystical Christianity mystical Judaism mystical Islam Sufism and so forth there's there's a mystical tradition that goes back thousands of years in in in all of these Traditions so so even if they have no science and no math they they have insights and they have the idea that there is some Consciousness maybe multiple consciousnesses maybe there's some unified deep one Consciousness you could call God so there's there's all these intuitions and of course as a scientist I'll I'll listen to them but they're not rigorous they're not they're Ma they're not mathematical so I listen with respect but the same respect that I give scientific theories right I don't believe them right right I I study them I understand them I don't believe my own theories theories are our tools they're not the truth they're wonderful tools that we create period they're not the truth and the same thing is true of and and I would say the spiritual Traditions also say that you know they'll say that you this the words are just pointers the finger pointing to the Moon is not the moon the da Ching says the to that can be spoken is not the true towel and and if you understand understand that then you can go ahead and read the rest of it and and and profit so so that's my attitude about you know the spiritual Traditions I can get insights from them but ultimately as a scientist I've got to then step back and say how do I turn those spiritual ideas into a mathematically rigorous and testable Theory and so I decided with Jon pros and and also Bruce Bennett years ago we were looking at this to have a network of a social network think of think of it like the Twitter verse or what we call X now but Twitter verse use Twitter verse yeah where you have a bunch of interacting users some tweeting some following and certain things Trend and and so forth that's sort of what I'm thinking about a big social network of what I'll Call Conscious agents but they're not agents inside SpaceTime they're just they're they are the foundational reality they they are they are the starting point and so agents can have conscious experiences and they can affect the conscious experiences of other agents and so we wrote down what's called a maravian Dynamics and the reason for that is it's in some sense the simplest mathematical framework that's completely General someone who knows marov and stuff might say well it's not completely General because it it it only allows finite States and and that's technically true but it turns turns out that you can use as arbitrarily large finite States as you want so so do you need a trillion states do you need a trillion to the trillionth power States you can do it with Mar so as big as you want you can have with marov dynamical systems the only thing you can't have is is pure Infinity okay so fair fair enough fair enough so so so yeah I mean it's it's not it's not doesn't go to Infinity but it's it's a good starting point and I never thought it was going to be the final work words so let's let's go with this and so we're we're now modeling these network of conscious agents and so now the quick here's the here's the idea the big idea the physicists have come from inside SpaceTime and taken a step out they found these positive geometries right but no Dynamics we're starting outside SpaceTime with these dynamics of conscious agents and I want to get back into SpaceTime because I want to test my theory right where am I going to get experiments that test my theory only inside SpaceTime like at the Large Hadron CER or psychophysical experiments in in Psychology Labs well the physicists have already done half the work they they've said if you can get to these positive geometries outside of SpaceTime we'll take you all the way in and we'll give you the scattering amplitudes for particles so so if I all I I don't have to go all the way into SpaceTime myself I can just connect with the positive geometries and and the the combinator objects that classify them like the decorated permutations so that's what we're doing we we have published a couple papers um one called objects of Consciousness and if you just Google my you know Hoffman objects of Consciousness the paper is free you can get it online and also fusions of Consciousness and again paper is free you can get it online and read it for yourself and in the fusions so in the objects of conscience paper we introduced this dynamical system this network the Twitter verse of of Consciousness let put it that way and in our fusions paper which we published last year we we prove that you can map from our dynamics of conscious agents onto one of the combinatorial objects that the physicists have found namely the decorated permutations so we show how to do that so we have one connection we've also shown how to go from specific maravian kernels to the wave function for free particles in SpaceTime so so the quantum wave functions for free particles so we can go from so you can see what we're up to what we're trying to do is to show that we that behind the positive geometries that the physicists are finding there is a rich social network of conscious agents and the positive geometries are simply a projection so they're a a a dumb down story of this deeper network of of conscious agents the if you think about the twitterverse it's complicated right there's millions of users and billions of tweets it's too much for you can't read all the tweets and you can't interact with it's it's overwhelming so you need some kind of ways to so you need to look at at some interfaces to dumb things down so see like see what's trending what what's trending in California versus Australia or something like that so that's what SpaceTime is space time is simply a simplification a headset that certain conscious agents use to grock this infinite Network as far as I can tell it's probably an infinite network of of interacting conscious agents uh and so how are you going to deal with that well headsets and SpaceTime is just one of the possible headsets and and and to connect with some of the positive geometries one of the the most interesting ones right now is something called the amplitud hedrin that was discovered by Nar KH hemed and yav trinka and published in 2014 so just 10 years ago right and that positive geometry has several parameters you know it's a function of four things n k m and Z but the m is the integer m is interesting here all of them are interesting but but for my current purpose the integer m is basically telling you the number of dimensions in your space in your headset so for for this for example to when m is four then you get our current physics right out of it but as they but the mathematics says but this positive geometry M could be six it could be eight it could be whatever you it's a variable and and four is one of the smaller numbers right so so so this really fits in line with what I was saying earlier that you know SpaceTime is one of the cheaper headsets and and now the physicists in in finding these positive geometries are finding that yeah this this parameter m is saying yeah there's lots of different infinitely many possible headsets and M equals 4 is one of the more trivial ones right what's exciting about this is you're dabbling in spiritual Traditions but then trying to come up with a theorem that has predictive power all the way back from this something that's more fundamental than SpaceTime the theorem is predictive power reflects all the way back into SpaceTime right and so it's taking ideas that exist in various spiritual Traditions but using the process of scientific inquiry to see if they really shake out and have scientific value as a academic is that frightening or is that exciting is it both to get into things that usually science does not touch U what are your what are your personal thoughts on on now where this work has taken you well yeah it's interesting that when science starts talking about Consciousness we're necessarily now on the turf that that many spiritual Traditions have been talking about for thousands of years and they have a big history of meditation and and and and very kinds of aesthetic PR practices and so forth to study Consciousness and and of course as scientists we would be wise to listen to what they have to say about it they they they're there before us um and we would also be wise to apply the same grain of salt that we apply to ourselves right in in everything and and of course the the good thinkers in those mystical Traditions have themselves said that what we're saying is just a pointer it's not the truth so don't take anything that we're saying here literally so hats off to them for for recognizing that and and the same thing is true for scientific theories as I said they're never a theory of everything they're they're just our tools right and so so my attitude is no problem here I'm I'm happy to get my ideas wherever I might even in a glass of beer whatever where whatever it might be wherever you can get your ideas get them right have fun with them at some point you got to get serious write them down in mathematics and and then the real testing begins and then you find you will you will find the limits of your theory there is no Theory of Everything That means every theory has its limits the only question is is your theory precise enough and are you clever enough to use your theory to find out what those limits are so so we so every theory has a shelf life right there's never going to be a theory of everything so so if you're a young person want wanting to go into science don't worry it's not all been done almost none of it's been done there's everything is open for you and what I'm doing now um if it holds it up holds up at all will eventually be replaced and I hope in my lifetime to to to see it be replaced that's the same attitude that the good spiritual Traditions have when they say that these are Pointers don't take them seriously don't fight over these pointers mhm M right don't fight over the theories find their limits and the nice thing about the scientific pointers is the those pointers themselves tell you where they stop the spiritual pointers do not well I use the word love or God and so forth or Consciousness those pointers are not precise enough to tell you their limits but Einstein when he wrote down his idea about SpaceTime right his big idea that was if I'm standing on a a weighing scale in an elevator and someone cuts the cord of the elevator and all of a sudden I'm in free free fall how much would I weigh I would weigh zero all of a sudden I would weigh zero on the scale right that was his big idea for for general relativity it took him many many years to turn it into mathematics and was Einstein right but he turned it into mathematics and then the mathematics together with his equals H new equation basically then told us the limit of his idea Einstein your your idea is great and it stops at 10us 33 cm and 10- 43 seconds it has no operational meaning beyond that that's perfect that's how science Works no theory is the theory of everything and so so the science so the science and spirituality they interact the spiritual Traditions have said our pointers have their limits but but the pointers themselves don't tell you their limits in science our pointers tell you their limits and so and and and so this leads to an interesting thing that happens in science and this is very very important because here's an objection that people will have to what I've been saying yeah I I get this actually from Bright scientific colleagues and and and philosophers Hoffman you're using the theory of evolution by natural selection to prove that we don't see reality as it is but the theory of EV evolution by natural selection is a mathematical you know the mathematics is is codifying Darwin's ideas about physical objects like organisms inside Space and Time competing for physical you know resources like food ands so you're using the mathematics of evolution to shoot yourself in the foot logically right cuz you start off with a theory that assume space and time in physical objects that they're real and a mathematics that's that's built on that theory and then you conclude that space and time isn't and physical objects are not the fundamental reality so clearly you you've shot yourself in the foot logically and and the way they'll say it is this either your mathematics evolutionary Game Theory Faithfully you know represents Darwin's ideas or it does not if it doesn't then of course you couldn't use it to disprove Darwin's Assumption of physical objects in space and time and if it did Faithfully represent Darwin's ideas it couldn't possibly contradict his assumptions either way you're you're messed up either way you can't win so that's the argument that that's actually not just an informal argum it's been published in in Premier SC um philosophical journals Sy taste the the the reply is very very simple that completely misunderstands how science science works every scientific theory that's mathematically stated will have a limit the only question is is the theory precise enough to show you the limits and what you what you do is is you take that mathematical Theory and you then like Einstein's theory of SpaceTime you find it limits space time is great until you get to 10us 33 cm then it's over well Darwin's theory is great but but when you look at it mathematically it entails that that resources and and organisms cannot be fundamentally objects in SpaceTime that can't be the final reality that's just an implication of the mathematics of evolutionary Game Theory the way science works is that our scientific theories have their limits everyone will have its limits a good scientific theory will be precise enough that you can compute what its limits are you can the theory will tell you what its limits are it can't tell you what's next what's the deeper Theory I can't tell you that but when you get a new deeper Theory you're going to want to project it back to the old theories that we know and love and test them back there so our theories of SpaceTime can't tell us what's beyond SpaceTime Einstein's theory can't tell us what's beyond SpaceTime nor nor can Quantum field Theory it can't tell us what's beyond space time but the new positive geometries that they're finding outside of space time have to project back into SpaceTime and give us testable predictions that we can test inside SpaceTime so so Einstein's theories our SpaceTime theories can't tell us what is next but they can say no if you come up with something that you think might be next and you project it back into SpaceTime and it contradicts what we have inside Space time then you're probably wrong so so that's the way science science Works we're pulling ourselves up by the bootstrap we use in in my case I use the theory of evolution by natural selection the mathematical model of it evolutionary Game Theory to find limits of the concepts of that theory of evolution now what's beyond Evolution but selection well I'm proposing the theory of conscious agents I have to now project that theory of conscious agents back into SpaceTime and I better get evolution by natural selection and also Einstein's theory of gravity and and Quantum field Theory as as special projections of this more deeper Theory or I'm wrong or I need to show why I'm having a my new Theory projects into a correction of those theories but in either case those theories um are going to play a role of thumbs up or thumbs down on the deeper theor so it's so that's the way science works we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and we use the math of our own theories to prove the limits of our own theories without self-contradiction that's just the way it works you mentioned Einstein let's say for the moment that the series of conscious agents or this interconnected Consciousness let's take that as an assumption here that the the science has led us there and you mentioned with Einstein that he first glimpsed some of his insights like the how much would he weigh in a falling elevator as an image and then later the math came later the ultimate theories came I'm interested in that because Rick Ruben who's done a lot of work on creativity talks about a very similar process mike check sent me high who wrote Flo uh who I worked for for a number of years uh he did a lot of work into creativity and both scientists authors painters sculptors a lot of them talked about a process of tapping in to something bigger than themselves it wasn't so much that ideas were coming from them but through them and trying to furiously get it down before the faucet turned off yes is it possible that in those moments of great Insight uh and and c s High defined all of that whether it was good science or good artwork as creativity is it possible that we are tapping into that interconnected Consciousness in those moments when these insights pour through US yes now there are two levels of answer I think that I would want to talk about first is in in the field of cognitive science we we do talk about you know creativity and and and there is sort of like a right hemisphere versus left hemisphere kind of attitude toward things so sometimes you're more left hemisphere and and you're doing more rational step-by-step procedural kind of things and then the right hemisphere might be a little bit more you know broad spectrum thinking out of the box kind of thing more visual perhaps so so there's that there's then there's books like you know Danny conman's Thinking Fast and Slow which goes at the different ways that that that cognition happens and and and there's a lot of work on Insight where you know you might be working on a problem for a long time and then you sleep on it and wake up in the middle of the night with it so there's things are you know unconscious might be working on so there there's that one level of of description which I think is very very interesting but you're asking at a deeper level so you're asking so I just wanted to point to that literature to not ignore that literature I think it's good and I think there's a lot of good research there but this idea that Consciousness is fundamental um does lead to a different framework for thinking about that the the the framework I just talked about is is more a brain-based framework a Consciousness arises from the brain activity and so forth now I'm saying the brain is just a user interface symbol to something far deeper so that gets to your version of the question is there does creativity come from some deeper aspect of this conscious Network Beyond SpaceTime that only looks like a brain through a simple projection and I I think of course the answer has to be yes from from the point of view of this deeper framework but but that gets it an interesting technical question and that is um many spiritual Traditions talk about the one or something like the one a God or the one or Brahman or or the the ultimate somehow there might be multiple consciousnesses like in Christianity there are angs and so forth right but then ultimately then there's a trinity but then there is in some sense the one the one God and you get that kind of idea that there could be a diversity but also a Unity uh in this Consciousness so there's a technical question for me then right I'm writing down all these individual conscious agents what about this Unity versus diversity kind of aspect it turns out the mathematics guides us right the mathematical model of conscious agents actually gives us ways to combine agents so when you take two agents you can in some cases combine them we have um they're described by markovian kernels we've discovered an order relationship on markovian kernels it's it's called the trace order and we haven't published it yet this is brand new stuff but so this is what what I'm talking about is is not even not even published yet MH the set of all possible cont ious agents has an order on it and that order tells you how they combine and which ones are are compatible and which ones are incompatible so there is in some sense one big social Consciousness with all these individual parts dissociations so so to speak but it's not trivial and it's so non-trivial that we're we have to do theorem and proof theorem and pro to understand what's going on here so what what's exciting to me about this is that there's been this informal purely verbal description of there's some kind of unity but some kind of diversity in Consciousness we now have and I'm not saying it again this is the final word but it is a completely rigorous word it's a partial order and I'll just State one one maroven kernel is less than another if it's a trace chain of the other I just gave the entire definition out of that comes out a non Boolean logic a completely non- Boolean logic it's locally Boolean so the answer is there may be some deep deep unified Consciousness that that sums sums up all this but it's not going to be any simple conception that we have of it is going to be wrong and and even even I haven't been able to I Define this logic I actually wrote down the basic definition but it's mathematicians now who are actually exploring I'm not smart enough to explore the mathematics and we don't understand it yet so so this is it's really complicated but ultimately you might say could the one could I as a scientist and I'm here I am just a particular little conscious agent you know Don Hoffman but I'm not divorced from the one and maybe in some sense I am unified with the one I I think so and I want to study this this Trace logic and we're writing a paper now called traces of Consciousness that's the paper we're writing it'll probably be a year before it's out so and in that paper we're going to go through this Trace logic and go at this question long answer to your question bottom line yes I think that as as an individual Consciousness I'm probably not separate from the one and that I can tap into an infinite intelligence if I open myself up to it and that's what many spiritual Traditions have also been saying is is that through the practice of meditation and so forth you let go of your ego you let go of uh attachment to this this body and and and me being better than you being me being different from you you know competing with you all of that all that stuff that that is part of the sort of evolutionary you know competition realm and you get to this deeper realm in which that's all just a game right it's just a headset a projection of a much deeper Unity that we're all we're all basically perhaps just one Consciousness looking at itself through different avatars right and in science and in in everyday life we have access to that very very deep Realm Of Consciousness the infinite unbounded intell literally infinite unbounded intelligence that that we are at the deepest level and the only barrier is open ourselves up to it um which is a pretty big barrier um it is it is what role has meditation played for you in thinking through all of this if that's if thinking is the right word um but in in the process of discovery and insight how has meditation played a role I do meditate and I've meditated for about 22 years that wasn't for any deep spiritual reasons that I just needed to sleep and I didn't want to take pills and so I said okay maybe meditation is a way to relax myself and but then I realized as I started to do it you know it it has a life its own it it starts to you begin to realize this is pretty important uh and then it starts transforming you as you really start to to let go of of your fears and anxieties or or at least face them um and then slowly have your your personality transformed by it it's it it it it's so it's played a a big role it's help me to take Consciousness quite seriously because when you spend time in meditation you're you're letting go of sort of attachment to the the Physical Realm the realm of form so to speak and you're you're in the realm of conscious experiences and so I think that that's helped and there are times when I you know I'm working on a technical problem I will just ask the one for help and sometimes yes and some sometimes no right but sometimes I get help almost immediately I'm I'm stuck on a problem I'm walking I just ask for help and 3 minutes later I've got the answer and then other times it's no you I can't give it to you because you simply don't have the the mathematical background to even understand the answer right so there are cases in which you can ask for for help but but since I don't know the math I I can't get the help I couldn't understand it if it was given to me right so so there's going to be but then I might the help might get my get is okay well you need to learn this and yeah I mean one of the things that really clicked for me with your work was if you meditate for long enough um on a regular basis at some point you have an experience where you realize you are not your thoughts yes because most of us walk around thinking that our we are our thoughts and that they belong to us but with meditation at some point there's a break from that where you see this Thought Machine firing off ideas and yet it does not feel like that is what is at the most fundamental level that's right that's right and the only way I've ever known how to describe it is consciousness is all that's there at the in those deep levels of meditation and I'm certainly no master meditator and I think other people are able to stay in that space for a lot longer but even glimpsing it yes when I was reading and listening to some of your your latest work on this internet connected Consciousness it really reminded me of those experiences and so I wanted to ask about the meditation I I agree that meditation does lead you to realize at some point that thoughts are just thoughts and we tend to identify with the thoughts that's me and and and believe our thoughts and some point you get to step back and say I can just look at those thoughts and I can realize that many of them are are dumb and and they're painful and they're stupid and and and the emotions that come with them are are just emotions and I don't have to believe the emotions either I I can just watch the emotion um some of the emotions are very very deep and so I have to watch them and and and you know spend time with them before they dissolve but but but I agree and and what's below all those thoughts and feelings is just a field of awareness pure awareness without any particular content and that has a mathematical concomitant in our in our Theory there are the contents of the conscious exper conscious experiences of the agents but the the fundamental structure itself is a measurable space and that that measurable space really is our mathematical structure is pointing to this awareness without content so so we and by the way I didn't intend it that way right I when I was writing down the mathematics with with with of course my colleagues chayon and and Bruce and so forth we're forced to write down these measurable structures you can't write down probabilities unless you write down these me and and it was only years later that I was looking at that and going so what does that measurable structure correspond to when there's no contents and I realize oh that must correspond to awareness without contents so so so were so the mathematics forced us to write it down and and I was you know so slow that it took me more than a decade working on the theory before I realized the implications that pure awareness is the infinite intelligence and and our scientific theories and our thoughts and so forth are the dumb down projection of it right so science can never be a Theory of Everything the everything is that awareness and of course I'm only pointing to it right by saying that I'm not defining it I'm just pointing to it and that's an important Point let me just say what I mean by that if I talk about cinnamon say you know if you've never had cinnamon and I want I try to describe it to you and say well it's it's slightly sharp but um it's not really sweet it's not I'm going to have a hard time right what's the best way to I give you a piece of cinnamon say taste it for yourself and you taste on go we call that cinnamon and so now I can use the word now did I explain anything to you no I let you taste it for yourself and and and that's that's how you you got it and it's the same thing with this awar awareness is awareness no description is it descriptions don't come anywhere near the reality descriptions are just if you want to know cinnamon you got to taste it for yourself I can talk the same thing is true about Consciousness and conscious awareness I can talk until I'm blue this is what we call in cognitive science ostensive definition you know defining by ensive definition when when you teach a child the names of objects like you know Chris is is now 18 months old and it's time to teach Chris um the name of a rabbit so there's a rabbit on on the floor and on a on a blanket and Mom or Dad points and says rabbit and Chris and at the right age Chris gets it like once or twice and and that's it Chris knows now did you explain what a rabbit is no you just pointed and said rabbit now what you didn't do is point and say um quadrip right or or mammal or thing or or you didn't say white you know it's not or or you didn't talk about the fur if you think about what what is how does Chris get this when you just point and say rabbit it could be the ear it could be the the fur the furriness the color it could be the tail and the in the front left leg M it could be the the left ear and the rug there there are an infinite number of hypotheses that Chris could entertain you just pointed and in you there's some kind of agreement unspoken agreement if you know actually sounds funny if if Mom pointed and said you know quadruped that actually sounds funny it's like are you trying to mess up your kid are you trying to screw them up we just know that that's not so all of our words all of our theories are merely pointers the real thing is the conscious experience the taste of cinnamon the experience of of the rabbit or the experience of awareness without any content that's the real thing any scientific theory any verbal description is of course important we need them but they're trivial compared to the reality and they they they in no way right the the word cinnamon in no way grabs on to any structure about it's just some sounds we make noises and and that noise so so think of words is just noises that we make they're no there no explanation whatsoever the real thing is the conscious experience so this turns the whole physicalist paradigm around instead of you know SpaceTime being the fundamental reality the little objects we see fundament no no the things we say about them the experiences we have and the things we say about them are are trivial compared to the Deep awareness yes yes if there is this inter fundamental interconnected Consciousness then what is death that's a big one uh if you're a physicalist and take space time is fundamental it's it's very very clear death is the end of the brain and the brain is the source of your Consciousness and so that's it right so there's there's no question about that if Consciousness is fundamental and SpaceTime is just a headset then death has to be something like just taking off this particular headset the the Consciousness is not dependent on the headset the headset is dependent on the cons so so to be very very clear my I don't have any neurons right now if you looked inside my skull you would find neurons because you you would be creating them as you looked you you create everything that you perceive just like in a VR headset right if you're playing Grand Theft Auto and I look over and I see a red Ferrari racing me well when I look over there I render it I render the red Ferrari but as soon as I look away it it ceases to exist there's no red Ferrari in the supercomputer is playing the game and and just to clarify that point for uh viewers so just like the headset when I turn when I turn to the side to see the car the headset renders the Ferrari if I turn away it doesn't want to waste the energy rendering the Ferrari anymore that's right and your contention is that our brains and visual system are doing the same thing and so that's why you're saying there are no actual neurons but if I looked the you would see neurons this this headset would be rendering those neurons as a way to interact with this reality absolutely that's right so so so I'm I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and I love cognitive neuroscience and I love the study of the brain but I think it's it's much more complicated than we thought we we thought it's really complicated there's 86 billion neurons in the brain and roughly that number of gal cells and there's thousands of different types of these of these cells it's really really complicated well it is complicated but it's triv compared that's just a projection of a much deeper reality that's just a headset projection of something so we need more money for Neuroscience not less because it's much much more compli 86 billion neurons is Tri is Trivial compared to what we're going to have to deal with we have to reverse engineer the brain to find out what's beyond it so so the brain doesn't exist and it doesn't create my conscious experiences um it doesn't exist when it's not perceived so that it can't be then I mean the the logic that if there's no brain there's no consciousness that doesn't work because right now I don't have a brain and I still have Consciousness so so here I already have proof that I don't need a brain to to be conscious and so when my when it appears that my brain is completely destroyed there's no reason to believe that my Consciousness will will be destroyed now that's an intellectual argument how do I feel about it I don't believe it emotionally right if you put a gun to my head I'd be scared right so so it's it's really quite interesting to me to be in this this state where intellectually clear as day and my emotions have a long way to go to to come now meditation does have the ability to and I can feel it integrating that so that this is no longer just it's less and less just an intellectual thing is more and more becoming a lived thing but but but it's very very interesting that in some sense this Consciousness when it projects itself into a headset decides to go all in mhm to completely lose itself to to in some sense fall asleep some spiritual Traditions will talk talk about we're we're almost asleep and spirituality is about waking up to to what you really are and I I think that there's something to that and but it's almost moments of waking up and then falling back asleep that that that's right and then you do see a few people where it looks like they woke up and and stay awake right you know like someone like an Arta or something right there or maybe a Jesus or a Buddha or or Muhammad or or something like that right yeah these figures that that perhaps were were um awake all the time to go a little bit deeper on that on that topic um on the I believe on Lex's show you mentioned you had a a brush with death a few years ago can you if you're comfortable with can you tell us about that and how that further informed your thinking on all of this yeah um apparently was a a consequence of of covid it um it inflamed my heart and gave me arhythmia that they couldn't stop for 36 hours and at the end of 36 hours no sleep heart racing 190 beats per minute I I fig well they can't do it if they've been at it for 36 hours they can't do it do it and my heart's not going to be able to do this much longer so I I texted my wife goodbye and that was exceedingly painful and um and and and quite scary quite painful and and my heart is still um questionable right I've had a surgery since then but the damage is pretty severe and uh um it it still goes into a rhythm and and every time it does there is the potential that this is it it's it's it's wow it's it's it's so it really I have a short teller um and it does Focus the attention when you when death is not an abstract idea it is something I face every day the potential the real potential every day um not to overblow it I mean I don't spend my time worrying about it but when my heart goes into arhythmia then the potential is right there I have some you know pills to take and and so forth for that um but when it takes several hours for the pills to work then there you are you face to face so so I then see um what do I emotionally believe as opposed to what do I intellectually believe right the intellectual stuff is pretty clear it's really quite striking how the emotions um are largely aut the fear is is there I would say it's less than it was I think that there is a the meditation has been slowly affecting my emotional system um there are some like C too who apparently like it happened overnight apparently he was a mess one day and completely out of it the next and you know um I might wish for that although I guess apparently the the stress that he was under was so extreme so maybe I wouldn't want to go through through that kind of extreme stress where you it's so nasty that you pop out you pop awake permanently right right that maybe I couldn't handle that um so I I'm apparently one of those that's awake asleep awake asleep mostly asleep but but but waking up a little bit more I I spend time every day in meditation um and and coming to terms with with death I mean it's it's obvious that we're all going to we're all going to face it MH um and taking that seriously means that almost everything that we're spending our our time on has to be reevaluated and our Mo especially our motivations for you am I trying to become rich because I think that's going to make me deeply ultimately permanently happy no it's just more to walk away from in a few years when you die you're it's not going to stop you from dying um you're going to walk away from all reputation you're going to walk away from that you're going to walk away from it all ultimately I think the analogy that that comes to me is that that's perhaps most helpful if you're in a video game it's a first- person player video game so you have an avatar and you maybe you're shooting up and so forth and and things are people are trying other avatars are trying to attack your avatar there are two ways you can play the game one is I'm I'm just sitting in my chair having a good time and there's my avatar and and and if if they shoot it up hey you know no big deal the other thing is you get lost in the game and sometimes the games are so immersive that you like you you forget that it's a game and and you're and now something happens to your avatar is happening to you and so that's so I I'm identified with my avatar I i' I've still I'm I'm immersed in the game m and I'm slowly waking up and saying oh you know I have the mathematics that says that you know I have no neurons when they're not perceived and this my hands don't even exist when they're not perceived um so it's just an avatar and and it doesn't matter um so I intellectually understand that um but I'm still immersed in the game emotionally sure so I'm trying to to wake up in some sense from from that immersion and so why would the infinite unbounded Consciousness do that to itself why would that why would it allow that it's painful it it it's quite painful ultimately it's an illusion and we can laugh at the pain but but when you're in it you're not laughing it's just painful right and the answer is I don't know but but there's one idea and that is how can the infinite formless awareness know itself maybe it's about knowing itself and there's a theorem so here's the mathematics that that no system can ever completely understand itself can never build a model of itself if you have a computer for example and you want the computer to build a model of itself well it's going to have to have a program in it that sort of is talking about it structure well as soon as you have the program inside the computer now it's different it's it's more complicated so now to model itself you need to model it with that model M well you can see it's an infinite regress right so you get an infinite regress here so so there could be a theorem here that that the one can never ever completely know itself and there's in some sense this interesting case in which the one must necessarily always be exploring itself it can never and how do how do you explore yourself well you can know yourself perhaps by saying well let me put on look at myself through this perspective through so I put on a particular headset so I'll put on this little 4 dimensional SpaceTime headset I'll look at myself through that headset and I'll let myself go completely into it I'll get completely lost in it identify with that and think that that's me really spend 70 80 90 years in it and then slly wake up and I'll know that whatever I am it wasn't just that so I know what I am by knowing what I'm not but to really do it you got to have sort of skin in the game right really really it's it's not just I'm not that no no no you need to really think you're that really take it seriously and then wake up and realize I really am not that but I really know what that is and I know that whatever I am is deeper than that M no description of the one will ever be anything but absolutely trivial but by looking at an infinite number of descriptions the one can know more deeply its Transcendent nature it's almost like the taste of cinnamon so that Oneness could not know itself but by by splitting into billions if not trillions of different manifestations that is the only way to actually experience itself just like you can't think through the taste of cinnamon or what the color blue is you have to see it taste it to have those to know I think that's a very good point I think that is a very very good point so yeah so you have to really just experience it for yourself and then you can know deeply that you're that that's an aspect of you but you transcend that aspect by the way the the that also leads to something that the spiritual Traditions talk about which is you know like Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself well that makes sense because your neighbor is yourself just under a different Avatar you and your neighbor are that one Consciousness just looking at itself and and and under the illusion that you're someone I need to compete against right you're my enemy or you're my friend but I'm only you're my friend because I can get something from you that kind of thing and eventually that kind of sleeping you wake up to realize no no love your neighbor as yourself because that is myself that really is me I and the way I treat that person or that animal is the way I'm treating myself like right now two avatars that are connected to that interconnected consciousness yes would you would you say the same Consciousness looking back at itself that's right through different through different frames basically through different avatars so it's ultimately the one Consciousness but but adopting different perspectives on itself I'm looking at through through a Hoffman Avatar you're looking at it through a Nick avar and so forth right which is a very different way to approach the world than saying playing the games of wealth accumulation right right and again this goes back to the you know the VR games analogy again if you're if you're in there and you're trying to beat everybody and get more territory and whatever it might be if you know it's a game then you're just doing for fun and and you're really not being hostile toward the other people it's it's all in good humor and good laugh and we'll you'll take off our headsets and have a beer afterwards but if you get immersed in the game then you take it seriously like oh no they really are my enemies I really do need to compete for that and I I really do need to impress M and so forth so it's it's it's really identifying with the Avatar so in spirituality in some sense is understanding this is just a game it's just a headset take it off I'm reminded of this story my father told me he was at a many years ago at a business uh Team Building conference they was they said we're going to play a game split into four or five different teams and they said the object of the game is to maximize resources and it was pretty loose other than that and then they let everybody go plan their strategy and they came back and wheeling and dealing with each other and my father was really excited because they tricked some of the other groups into alliances and then won the game really that's cool very cool and afterwards the gentleman running the game said now I know you're all patting yourselves on the back there for winning we never said you had to defeat the other teams and if you actually wanted to maximize resources all the teams would have just worked together and built actual alliances and then everyone in the game wins very clever very clever very much ties into I think what you're getting at with with a different framework for what it means to exist and the different games we can play or Frameworks we can use to look at everyone else yes we can really transcend that competition that's instilled in us through these evolutionary forces with a little bit of waking up I I agree and and and this is very interesting politically because communism is has a really nice philosophy right it from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs and it it sounds great but the 20th century showed catastrophic failure right capitalism it's it's nature read in truth and Crum me me versus you U we need a legal system to make sure that everybody plays by the rules we need a constitution we need courts and and it works much much better than communism but if human nature were different if we actually took what Jesus said seriously love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself then communism would work it actually would work and we would actually be better off than capitalism so today I'm glad I'm in a capitalist Society because it's it communism doesn't work but if we become a spiritual people that actually wake up then I think we will just naturally we won't need the capitalist structure we would then move to Communism um not going to happen anytime soon so I'm not I'm not so for the record I'm not advocating communism right I am advocating waking up mhm first yeah and then and then let's see let's see what happens from there but I think only only good things would happen from there that's right I did want to ask how do you think your current lines of inquiry jive with Carl yung's idea of a collective unconscious at you at a a very high level yes I mean I'm sure there are details of his theory that that you know are specific to some certain models of the brain and so forth that he might have but I think the the just at a high level I would say yes and it might be complicated so it it may not go back just to the the one it may go back to this the the the commonality of the kinds of avatars that we that we have in this particular simulation so there are some simil similarities between our avatars and that and then there's some some some history that we have together MH and that sort of shapes the perspective that the one has on itself so that could be you know at top level kind of connection between the collective unconscious and and yung's ideas um very very Loosely now what about Robert sapolsky's latest work on that we basically do not operate with free will so he is against Free Will right at this point right now at this point he is and I have really struggled with work but I always really liked his thinking his ideas and I just wanted to know your where do you weigh in on Free Will as scientists have a mathematical theory that involves probabilities right so whenever talking about something where there's probabilities there are typically two deep ways of interpreting those probabilities one is random chance right so you might say that you know when there's this probability that a uranium atom will fision in a certain amount of time a certain halflife mhm well you can think of that probability as just some kind of objective chance and that but it's certainly a place where where explanation stops if if you if your theory can only give you a probability and and can't say anything more then that's where explanation stops but another way to so so probabilities when you see probability in the theory that's a pointer that says um here is where ignorance begins uhhuh what's the nature of that ignorance well we in one case we might call the ignorance objective chance if we're a physicalist for example if you if you're taking Consciousness is fundamental and you're thinking about agents now conscious agents and you have a notion of agency then you might say well if if there are fundamental probabilities in my theory then it doesn't make sense to talk about that as just objective chance it's it's it seems like there's something else that that we might want to talk about with with agents and there there then there's the notion then of free will now neuroscientists many of my colleagues will will say we have clear evidence against Free Will I you know I can put a person in an experiment and ask them to you know to decide at certain random time when they're going to push a certain button and I can predict several seconds before they go to push the button from their brain activity and then motor cortex or something like that or preot cortex um what that one that they're going to and which button they might want to P push or something like that so so I can actually tell them before they know what they're going to do so clearly it's all um forced by the the neural activity there's no free will there and there are many theorists who would say that my attitude is that neurons don't exist when they're not perceived so we have to think about those experiments a little more more deeply you might say okay well if you're going to think more deeply you still have to reverse engineer that to something outside of space so it's not neurons but it's something deeper outside of space time and still using that I could predict before that person what what they were going to do so where is their free will the the the fact we have to face is I'm here I just now chose to put my hand and take a drink that's that's just a fact of what happened now was that just random chance was that Free Will and what do what do we even mean by Free Will does it is it perfectly free and you can see I'm on the fence um what I can say is that this new order that we've discovered the trace order on the on these Marian kernels gives me a way of taking different conscious agents looking at a a one big conscious agent as as a combination of a bunch of little agents mhm I can think about them as making Free Will choices and the mathematics allows me in a completely coherent fashion and I just discovered this this week so this is just yesterday or the day before I discovered in the mathem it allows me in a completely coherent way to assign Free Will choices probabilistic Free Will choices to all the agents and their combination and each agent will have if if the choice is going from red to green or something you seeing red and then going looking at Green MH the probabilities for each agent of doing that will be different and yet they all cohere into one big agent which has its own prob probabilities its own free will so so I have I have for the first time a mathematical model in which I can have a bunch of and then so this is only two days old right yeah I don't haven't even told chayon I don't think I've told chayon about this so so this is the first person you're the first person I've told this well that's pretty exciting so the mathematics and chayon will maybe come back and slap me on the wrist with with a mathematical ruler we'll see but it looks looks to me like the mathematics are saying that there's a completely consistent mathematical way of of assigning probabilities of of free choices for the same action to the big agent and to all the little agents to tons of count little agents and each would have their own free will Choice with different probabilities literally different probabilities but they all cohere into one formal partial order that that that's consistent as of the last two days I now see no formal obstruction to having a really interesting notion of Free Will in which I could talk about a big agent would say a billion by a billion States MH and then look at there's probably the number of sub agents inside that are more than the number of particles in the known universe so the so there's the sub agents are are and all those sub agents could have different probabilities for the same choice but they all cohere they all combine into one consistent agent so it's possible to have an A a theory of free choice and and still have a combination of of agents and all their choices remain the same and yet the choice of the one agent is different and and it's all math ically consistent another way then to step back on this is to say well you know Free Will is just a name just like cinnamon is just a name there's something going on there and that's very very deep maybe what's going on is going to be much much deeper than anything that we've thought about philosophically that's what that's what happens when we have mathematical science right it may be that this this partial order that I'm talking about will change the game in how we think about the whole Free Will question it may change the very rules of of how we're going to play that game so and that's the way science works right so we talked about SpaceTime in a certain way prior to Einstein Einstein wrote down some mathematics that Chang the game on how we even talk about space and time completely changed the game we can we should have our debates about free will or not but I think that what we'll have to wait is the arguments that we've given against Free Will were based on one kind of science we've now transcended that science neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived so the neural arguments against it aren't as compelling as they were right now we're getting these new mathematical structures that may if if Jon tells me I'm not completely off may be showing there's this new consistent way that we've never even seen before of thinking about Free Will choices that look very very different and all integrating in in a co coherent manner that may completely change the whole intellectual scape so so I would say at the current state we may be using very very primitive tools when we ask this question and we as we begin as we continue to explore the concepts and the mathematics we find may find much deeper deeper Frameworks um for it one of the things I find really refreshing about the way you approach questions uh is that you'll look at it through different lenses and and you keep coming back to mathematics and one of the questions I had when I was when I was reading the case against reality Evolution selecting for Fitness payoffs and not reality seeeing payoffs is selecting for the ability to understand mathematics a fitness payoff so I should now step back a little bit about evolution okay as as you know I've made a big case against reality based on Evolution right I think evolution is not deeply true right I think it's a headset story of something that's far deeper and so when I look at the conscious agent Dynamics outside of SpaceTime it's it's possible for me to write down a dynamical system of conscious agents in which there is no Arrow of time m the entropy of the dynamical system is constant it doesn't grow entropy does not grow the entropy that's right the sort of the the randomness in some sense of of the of of the Dynamics but the entropy of the system does not grow as the system proceeds and that means there's not an arrow of time there's no entropic Arrow of time like in the second law of Thermodynamics right the second law of Thermodynamics says entropy is always increasing and time and and the second law of Thermodynamics are deeply entwined mhm well but it's a theorem so if I I take my dynamics of conscious agents I can write down the system which the entropy is not increasing but it's a theorem if I take a projection of that dynamical system where I'm losing some information then I will I will have a new dynamical system and it will be not as complicated as my original and it will have an arrow of time so so the arrow of time the increasing entropy is not an insight into the deeper Dynamics mhm it's 100% an artifact of the loss of information from going from this deep fundamental level to a a less fundamental level right our space time level yes our space time level okay so so there's this deeper dyamics of conscious agents outside SpaceTime I'm now projecting it through a headset into SpaceTime looking at it I'm going to get an arrow of time as an artifact not as an insight into the deeper reality it it's not an Insight it's wrong there is no Arrow of time in the deeper reality you're seeing an arrow there is no Arrow so it's not an Insight it's wrong now what is the fundamental limited resource in evolution it's time if I don't breathe in time I die if I don't get food in time I die if I don't made in time I don't reproduce time is the fundamental limited resource mhm all of evolution but natural selection I think all of it is an artifact of the projection none of evolution by natural selection is an insight into the deeper nature of reality Beyond SpaceTime that again is showing you what I think about how science works I used the theory of evolution inside SpaceTime to find its limits to actually say this can't be the final space and time themselves object it can't be the final reality and that's that's the glory of evolutionary theory the glory is it tells you its limits I only hold inside SpaceTime I don't hold outside space time well yes and we can actually show that outside of space time we can come up with a dynamical system in which there is no limited resource perhaps there's no competition so all the stuff of evolution isn't even there but when you look at this realm Beyond SpaceTime through a headset it looks like evolution of natural selection that's the artifact of the projection so that's my attitude about about Evolution it's my attitude about all scientific theories they're tools they're not the truth MH and if you don't want to look dumb a century from now don't talk about a the of everything don't think that you are anywhere near you're going to look unbelievably dumb in just a century because the next generation will be happy to show you wrong right and and they'll be able to assuming we don't blow ourselves up but and the question why would we evolve to get math that's what set me off this why would we evolve to so so you can now see that I don't take the evolutionary explanations too deeply MH right so I think that the whole story of evolution is an artifact so so I'm not surprised if if evolutionary explanations aren't going to always work okay but but now let me just play the game within the story of evolution so I'm I'm going to put aside what I just said I'm going to now just assume evolutionary how how would I try to answer your question within that framework and by the way this is what we should always be doing in science we just say here's the framework now which I'm I'm going to try to answer it's not the truth it's not the final word but this is the scientific frameworker that I'm using right in the within science scientific framework Evolution what you could say is this knowing the difference between having two bites of a hamburger versus one bite of hamburger could be useful to you knowing that two bytes is better than one one bite m is is is good for Fitness right so there could be selection pressures for some Elementary capacity with with numbers and there's some evidence that that many creatures have some Elementary capacity for you know not noticing the difference between one two and and many or something like that and so you could similarly give stories for various kinds of mathematical um like like Notions like distance right a predator that's twice as far away from me maybe half or or less as dangerous as one that's twice as close to me so so you can start to get Notions of of um mathematical Notions like metrics or distances and so forth so you can put together a story where there could be selection pressures and evolution for ele capacities and then you could then have that there could be some mutations where see most of us have trouble even balancing our checkbooks sayh but every once in a while you get the right mutations and you get a a Von noyman who who can do unbelievable math in his head right so most of us are not V Vons but if you have a billion people on the planet you're you're bound to get perhaps a Von noyman right and so and then the Von noyman then can teach the rest of us Schmucks you know a few things and we can then if we study really really hard we can do maybe 2% of what V what Von noyman could do you know so that's that's how I could you could give an evolutionary story about how mathematics a lot of the mathematical advances I mean there were of course the Greeks were doing lots of interesting stuff in mathematics you know before Christ but the you know a lot of the deep advances have happened just on the last you know 600 years U and and we see it building on itself that um most of us would have spent our lives you know a thousand years ago not not knowing anything probably Von noyo wouldn't have not not known too much mathematics but we build we stand on the you know the the the giant right right I I understand that Newton said that as a sort of a hit on hook who was a a small guy oh a competitor okay and so he he it was sort of put it was sort of a little punch in the stomach to hook to to say that oh that's interesting if if I if I've seen further than other people it's because I've stood on the shoulders of giants not of midgets uhuh uh but but anyway so so so without that negative connotation standing on the shoulder of giants in mathematics maybe most of us have to really struggle we we have to go to school to to write right again our ancestors 20,000 years ago maybe I don't know when writing happened but say 30,000 years ago we didn't have writing say m they've probably had I we actually know that our brains have gotten smaller our brains are getting smaller right the the the brain volume has has dropped dramatically in the last 10 15,000 years so homo sapiens is losing brain volume I'm not sure that that means that we're losing IQ but I wouldn't think that this means that we're gaining IQ it it's not clear that our ancestors 30,000 years ago that maybe Couldn't Write read or write or couldn't do mathematics or are dumber than us I think the reason we can do it is that that we've just had enough enough outliers enough Von nyans along the line who who then stuff that we then have to go to school elementary school and Junior High and painfully learn this stuff and we'd rather be out there just doing you know fun stuff yeah we have to learn all this stuff and it's very very painful for us in your opinion I guess why is math so insightful that it's what can help prove what exists at the most fundamental level I think what makes math really insightful as as we see it in the Sciences right where we really see its power Einstein's predictions black holes and so forth it's it's just stunning what it can do what's going on with mathematics the reason why it's so powerful is not that it is the truth I I think that the relationship of mathematics to reality the you know the full conscious reality is like the bones to the living organism you need the bones but they're not the whole living organism and so I think that mathematics is an aspect an important aspect of of Consciousness girdle has these these famous incompleteness results basically if you give me any set of axioms mathematical axioms there'll be a set of things that I can prove if you give me a consistent set of aims I can prove a bunch of theorems and perhaps an infinite number of theorems but there will be always statements that are true but can't be proven they are true but they're not so mathematics will always be incomplete necessarily or inconsistent but assuming it's consistent it's it's incomplete you can always add if I if you give me a St statement that's true but not provable within my current axioms I can then say well I'll make that a new axom that's fine then girdle will give you a new statement this goes on so so mathematics is open-ended at least mathematics is that we can do as humans can never be complete it suggests again an infinite realm it suggests to me that the notion of Truth mathematical truth transcends the notion of mathematical proof so that's powerful so I mean so there's an Infinity there's an Infinity to mathematics that's that's Godlike but I think it's it's Godlike but but it's only one asp ECT again the Consciousness transcends it but almost like another pointer it's it's it's it's going to be it's another pointer ma in mathematics and and it's precise so it's a point a pointer system that allows you to see the limits of your pointers so it's powerful in in that respect it's perhaps the most precise and self referential set of pointers that we can have like anguage natural language English Spanish French whatever it might be is is wonderful It's a Wonderful tool but it has definite limits to this precision as we see in in even the spiritual traditions where the the the founders of the tradition have said these are just pointers don't take them seriously in a century or two later we find the followers fighting each other to the death over you said it wrong no you know you don't you don't believe in that and and killing each other and so forth so so natural language pointers have their limits MH mathematics also has its limits but the pointers are far more precise in telling you their limits it's almost easier to agree on the limits of the mathematics with language it becomes much more subjective on what those limits are and and to your point to the to the point of people fighting each other to the death over over it that's right and Dylan I've got a 11-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter congratulations thank you they asked me what I was doing today and I told them over the last couple of days that I'd be talking to you and they said oh what's what about and so I was trying to explain these ideas to them if you were going to bring your theory of reality and Consciousness and present it to an 11-year-old how would you do that in your words that's a great question video games are going to be a big help here right especially immersive games in VR games where they actually can get immersed and multiplayer games so to to use the metaphor of a multiplayer game that this is that we're really in a multiplayer game I have grandkids um who are a grandson who's 13 and a granddaughter who's 10 or 11 so about the same age as your your kids and yeah and they'll they'll of course play with people they don't even know they'll play these these games where there's maybe somebody from another state or even another country that they're they're playing Minecraft with or whatever they might be and and and they they just see their avatars and and they play so that I would probably use that as the metaphor to say this is just a headset it's just a like a video game and there's a deeper reality but what's weird about this deeper reality is that um it may be that all of us are just really one player playing all the different roles of that of that game well that's what's different about it so in the multiplayer games that you play you think of there's a person that's separate from you in China that's playing and someone from Arizona that's playing I'm in California and and so these are separate people so if you you just have to let go of that a of separate people and and realize ultimately that there's this there's one player playing all of this that's great which would then raise some questions why in the world is he doing it yeah that's a good starter of the conversation I wanted to close out with this quote actually from a comedian uh it was U Bill Hicks and he said wouldn't this be a nice news story today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to to a slow vibration that we are all one Consciousness experiencing itself subjectively that there is no such thing as death life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves now here's Tom with the [Laughter] weather I like that last bit now here's time with the weather is that's great yeah I thought that made the quote because that's almost the experience I keep having with these ideas I just come back to now here's Tom with the weather I get sucked back into everyday life me too it's very very interesting even though I've been working on this for for decades when I when I'm not in my thinking cap mode I am a physicalist like everybody else and I'm in the game and I'm I'm playing the game and I feel competitive and and and and the whole bit and I think it's what I'm doing is really important and and you know I need to you know all the stuff yeah it's it's it's all there and but then when I step back I I I then I smile at it and laugh at it and but then I get lost in it again and and I guess what's really interesting that about that is the one Consciousness really does go in with both feet it jumps in with both feet and lets itself get completely lost in the game loses itself completely it must be the case that you've got to re commit to the illusion to really wake up from the illusion and know that you are not that illusion it must be that you've got to rub your nose in the illusion until you really really get it that you're not that it must be because I I have to I have to rub my nose in it every day yeah as do we all that do we all that's right yeah well thank you so much for coming in it is a honor and a priv privilege to sit down and talk to you I am such a huge fan of what you've done and I'm excited to see what you do next thank you Nick it was really really a lot of fun great questions I appreciate it oh and what and if anyone wants to follow your work what's the best place to keep up with what you've got going on well I have a a Twitter so Donald D Hoffman um all one word h f f Donald D Hoffman okay Twitter I I tweet you know links to papers that I think are interesting or papers that I've done videos I think are interesting and I've you know for people who are interested I've got um a paper objects of Consciousness just Google that name and it'll come up as free uh fusions of Consciousness that's a paper uh and then my book the case against reality and also visual intelligence how we create what we see for those who are interested in just visual science or photography that the visual intelligence book um has a lot of really interesting it's used by photographic classes and so forth so and I highly recommend the case against reality I'm going to read the visual uh principles visual intelligence book next um and then traces of Consciousness that paper will be coming next yeah hopefully this year okay yeah I I would guess by summer I should have it submitted um yeah okay excellent well thank you so much and just have a excellent day and I I hope we get to talk again sometime in the future we're close so yes okay all right excellent thanks thanks a lot Nick wow well my mind is blown in the best possible way and I hope yours is too if you're watching this on YouTube please like And subscribe emphasis on the Subscribe if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast platform please make sure to review us on Apple podcast rate US five stars on any other podcast platform and follow us on Instagram @ Nick Stanley n i c k s a n d l EA okay everybody until next time ask questions don't accept the status quo and be [Music] curious