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

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a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal metal cellar. S Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job sometimes to interview world class performers from all different disciplines to tease out habits, routines, etc. And other times it is my job to grab world class performers who intersect with the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, or just the strange frontiers of, say, science. And this is a case of those two lines converging. My guest today is Donald Hoffman. H O F F M A N. Donald received a PhD in computational psychology from MIT and is a professor emeritus of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is an author of more than one hundred and twenty scientific papers and three books.

including The Case Against Reality, subtitle Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Award of the Americological Association. the Trollant Research Award of the US. National Academy of Sciences, and many other awards. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, News Scientist, Elliot Review of Books, and Edge, and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His TED talk. titled Do We See Reality As It Is has almost four million views. That might be higher, might be past four or five, who knows by now, by the time you listen to this. And uh you can find him on Twitter at Donald D. Hoffman. And this conversation ended up covering a lot of ground. We got into some very

Very fascinating. Territory that gets very strange. And uh Provokes a lot of questions. So we talk about science. We talk about death, what the implications of his research and some of his

Theories have. For Consciousness. How we wrap our minds around consciousness

Weather space time. As a construct, as an interface. is doomed and certain physicists would certainly say that is the case based on recent data and Much, much more. So

Let me just say this from the outset. If you get lost As I did at a few different points. Just give it a few minutes and hopefully I will have Or Donald will have pulled it back into a thread that can be followed. But I had a blast with this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed being a part of it. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Donald Hoffman.

Don, it is a pleasure to see you and thanks for making the time to come on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you for your very kind invitation. It's a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this conversation for for some time and I'd like to start with perhaps a name that my listeners will not recognize, and that is the Helmholtz Club. Could you please give us some background and explain what is or what was? I don't know the tense on this. The Helmholtz Club.

The Telmos Club was a a group of neuroscientists primarily, and some cognitive scientists. Like me. That met Roughly once a month. At the University of California at Irvine?

But it was neuroscientists from the whole southern California area. From UC San Diego All the way up to U C L A and US C and Cal Tech. And uh of course you see Urban. And sometimes from UC River side.

And the point was for us to get together It was sort of l led by Francis Crick and Cherry Sanowski and VS Ramakondren. But it was to get neuroscientists together to discuss Conscious. What was the state? Of neuroscience as related to consciousness.

We were trying to problem solve This open issue in cognitive neuroscience, which is What is the relationship between brain activity and our conscious experiences? And When I was a graduate student

At MIT in the early eighties. It wasn't really Appropriate. for graduate students to talk about consciousness. You know, it was sort of a fringe kind of thing. But

In the early nineties Francis Crick basically made the case that This problem needed to be addressed. Consciousness needed to be addressed. And He felt that he could address it.

In pretty much the same fashion that he had addressed the issue of of life. Life. It'd been an open mystery. You could

You imagine that there was maybe some Ilan Vital that was some special spirit inside living things that wasn't inside inanimate things, but you know, when Crick and Watson Elucidated the structure of DNA. it became obvious that that maybe you didn't need an a launch vital anymore, you could sort of give him Reductionist.

physicalist Account of many of the basic functions of life. And so I think What Crick and The Helmholtz Club was really about was doing the same thing for consciousness that

Crick and Watson had done for life, which was to take this thing which Right now seems mysterious and Get a neural. Reductionist. Story for it.

In the same fashion that we got a biological a molecular biological reductionist story f for life. And so so we met And uh it was it was a lot of fun. I must say it was Private.

So we we met in secret basically at the University Club at U C Irvine. Not because it was clandestine in any bad sense, but because Oh, Francis Crick. If people knew that Francis was there, we would be mobbed and we wouldn't get anything done. I mean he was For good reason.

A very, very popular man and people would want to talk with him. So we met in secret And it was invitation only. So uh each of the members Of the club could invite one or two people. to join at any given time, but it was a the intention was to keep it really small.

There were maybe Fifteen to twenty of us at most. In a meeting. And we would start We was usually on Tuesdays we would have lunch together.

And then we would go at it all afternoon. We would invite two speakers whose neuroscience work seemed pretty interesting. Even if they weren't directly working on consciousness, we thought it might be We would bring them out and grill them. It was pretty fun. It was intense, but it was not at hominem or anything like it. It was really just, you know, a very intense time. And

We would then adjourn And have dinner. Together at at some restaurant, usually s near South Coast Plaza, a place near near Irvine. We close the place out, you know, ten, eleven o'clock we'd be there talking and and then we'd finally leave. So it was a very intense afternoon and it was A rope.

Privilege. For me, I I started as a young assistant professor in the group and I got mean I continued all the way through being a full professor, but it was fun for me to see How Francis thought. He was absolutely brilliant. Even into his late seventies and eighties, he was like

A complete genius and His understanding of the field, his command of the facts, his logic. Was Beyond anything that I ever could imagine for myself at my prime in my twenties.

was stunning. So it was a great pleasure. And of course the other members of Terry Sanowski David Van Essen, John Allman and uh Yes, Robert Condren. The list it was it was truly a fun And engaging time. So I always Left inspired and thinking about consciousness. Wow. I wish I wish I wish there were a a current club, maybe there is, where I could be a fly on the wall at the very least with

Such great and what I'd like to do before we get too far into this conversation is define some terms. So Consciousness is a word that people have heard in many contexts. It is a term or concept that in one form or another. has been of great interest for thousands of years, at a minimum, and

You know, there are quotes we might unpack later, but quotes I'm fond of. That use this word, like Max Planck, the German physicist, right? I regard consciousness as fundamental, I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness. Could you please give us a Working definition. Of consciousness.

Intuitively. Your experiences if you hit your thumb with a hammer The experience of the pain. If you see a blue sky, it's the experience of the blue. In some sense with words we can only point to it and I have to

Hope that you have Your own experiences that that I can point to in this way indirectly. That's not So different from what we have to do with other things. When I tell you, you know, what is space?

What is empty space? Well If you've never seen and you're not cooperative, I you know, I can use all the metaphors I want, you're not gonna get it. Right. And if I if you're blind and I try to say, you know Something about the color red. You're not going to get it. And so In some sense we're not in any special problem here with consciousness that we're not with other things So to be really clear, when w we take a child and we are trying to teach them the name of something like the word rabbit.

What does a mother do, right? She or her father sit there and they point And they point to some furry object that's sitting there and they say, Rabbit. And The child has to be old enough. A three month old is not gonna get it.

But an eighteenth old will get it. And so they have to have had their own experience to have Their visual system has to be Developed well enough. And when the mother points she doesn't go BiPed

Or quadruped. Or mammal. She doesn't use those kinds of terms or she uses like rabbits. So she knows don't use quadruped because you're gonna mess up your kid. The first thing you need to say is is rabbit. And so we learn by ostensible. That's called ostensibility. And in some sense, we have to also point with ostensi to what we mean by consciousness. And we have to say, if you hit your thumb with a tham hammer Yeah, that feeling of pain.

That's part of a conscious experience. When you fall in love, that's a conscious experience. When you're Yeah, deep sleep. Dreamless sleep.

That's in some sense when you don't have this conscious experience. So we have to use ostensible, but I don't feel too uncomfortable about that'cause we use it all the time and we don't even know that we're doing it that way. Alright, so we're gonna certainly come in and out of the territory well, I suppose we're always in the territory of consciousness on some level, but we'll be explicitly exploring that from a a number of different angles. Like a lot of people, I was exposed to your TED talk, Do we see reality as it is? And was struck by the desktop interface metaphor. Could you please just explain that in brief and then we can take that in a a number of of any directions.

The question is how shall we understand our perceptions and their relationship to reality. Most of us Just Assume that we know the answer.

Our perceptions show us reality. Not all of it, but when I see the moon, there really is a moon. And of course I don't see everything about the moon, but I see what I need to see. When I see a carrot I I'm seeing the truth. I'm seeing the the correct shape, the correct color.

The correct. Wait if I pick it up. And of course I'm not seeing as molecular structure, so there are things I don't see, but but I'm seeing truly if Incompletely. And

The interface theory of perception Takes a different tack on on what perception is. It it says If we take Evolution by natural selection seriously. We can ask a technical question.

Would Evolution by natural selection shape sensory systems. Two Tell truths about The physical world around us.

Or whatever the world might be around us. That's the technical question. What is the probability? The natural selection would shape sensory systems to report. true properties of objective reality. And

You can show through theorems and simulations. So my graduate students working with me on this Brian Marion, Justin Mark, and others. So my colleague Shaitan Prakash, Mani Singh and I've been have worked on this Robert Pratner, a number of us have worked on this and The simulations and the mathematics

All agree. The probability is zero. That natural selection Wood shape. Any sensory system.

Of any organism. To reveal any. True properties of objective reality. That's precisely zero.

And one Intuition about that is that Fitness payoff functions. We can go into this later on if you want. Fitness payoff functions Almost surely.

Have no information. About objective reality. They are not so called homomorphisms of structures in objective reality. And so If we're tuned to fitness

And the fitness payoffs literally are not homomorphisms of structures in reality. Then there's no way that our perceptions can be homomorphic to reality. To The structures of reality. So what then We take

evolution of a natural selection seriously, and I think we should Not because I'm claiming it's the final story. But it's the best story we have. Science.

Always. To us. Credit. Gets new theories. And what we thought was the

The final theory a hundred and twenty years ago. We now look back on it, you know Newton was great, but we have much better theories today. And so I have the same view about all of our scientific theories that we have today. The reason I take them seriously is not because I think they're the final word. It's just that we have as human beings no better theories. So we have to take our our current theories

Seriously. And so if we take evolution of a natural selection seriously Of course, as scientists we're gonna eventually try to show its limitations. Right. What it says in its current form Yeah.

That the probability is zero that our senses have shaped us to see the truth about the world around us. So what have they shaped us to do? Well, the the answer for within evolutionary theory It it's all about fitness. Our sensory systems

Have shaped us. To Guide adaptive behavior. So that we can s live long enough to reproduce. Basically.

So Bombayrot. Put that in a metaphor that's easier to understand is to say that Natural selection didn't shape us to see the truth, but it shaped us

With sensory systems that are like a user interface to the truth. So you know, right now We're both sitting in front of Laptops. And

We're able to I mean I've got Gigabytes of of memory and all the circuitry inside my laptop, I have no idea. About it the truth of that? I mean I I I know the words. I'm not a you I'm not a Engineer of that type. So I don't really n I if I had to toggle voltages inside my computer to do this video with you.

It wouldn't happen. So if I actually knew the truth and I had to actually Toggle all the bits and bytes and so forth and voltages in the computer. To make this video happen and you had to do it, it wouldn't happen. We have a very simple dumb down user interface that lets us control

the complexity of the computer without having any expertise in what's really going on inside. And that's what evolution did for us. It gave us simple user interface. That lets us stay alive long enough to reproduce, to interact with reality in the ways that we need to interact with it to stay alive and reproduce.

Without Having any idea what that reality is. You don't have a need to know, so you don't know. And that's just the way it is. Very few of us know exactly how the the desktop interface on our computer works. And When you

Drag an icon to the trash can. To delete a file. There's a lot of stuff going on inside there that's involved in dragging you in in deleting the file. We're blissfully ignorant. has done it it makes us blissfully ignorant about the nature of reality.

And gives us icons that all allow us to control reality. So To be very, very clear. Space and time. Wh

typically think of as fundamental reality. It's just the format of our three D desktop. We have a instead of a flat desktop, we have a three D Space Time Desktop. And objects in three D are merely the icons in our desktop. They're

Not Pointers to objective reality in any sense. There's the colors, the shapes The positions that we see have nothing to do with true colors and shapes and objective reality. They're just a nice format that evolution gave us. And it that format's gonna vary from species to species. So as you said.

The theories that we have are the sort of the best stories or plausible explanations of how things work, but those will change. They're constantly in flux and the theories We had the best theories a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty years ago, two years ago, get replaced, and there's this constant process. Uh for placement as we update. And I'm just gonna try to

Encapsulate some of what you said and please Correct me, feel free to stop me if I get any of it wrong. Optimized through natural selection for Sexual reproduction. There's no sort of intrinsic

value in accurate representation unless it contributes to more effective Reproduction. Hence the discussion of layers of abstraction and simplification. Just like you would have the desktop and then many layers below that, you would have assembly language, many layers below that, machine code, and then you get into the circuitry and so on. What are some of the implications? of this research because I think for a lot of people listening.

Yeah. Consciousness has been the domain of philosophers and pontificators who are operating outside of the scientific method or A world where things are falsifiable or testable. So I would just love to know

What excites you about this And what some of the implications are, scientific or otherwise. I like y your summary. I would o I would make just one little Change to the summary that you gave and that is that

Evolutionary theorists we probably wouldn't In general want to say that Evolution optimized us for anything. Got it. There's the term that they use called satisficing.

You just have to be a little bit better than the competition. Right. Right. That's a good point. So that that also then, you know, is an interesting thing about it. We're we're not the best at anything. We're just better than the competition and that that's all we need to be. So The idea then that Evolution of a natural selection has not shaped us to see the truth, it's just given us a user interface. And that space and time themselves are

Are not fundamental. They're merely a data structure. That evolution gave us. Whether what I've just said is true or not depends on, you know, whether evolution by natural selection is a fairly accurate theory. So I'm I'm just saying that that's what natural selection entails. We may get better theories further on down the line and then we'll have to revisit it. But that's what we got.

Now why is that interesting with respect to consciousness? The reason it's interesting there is that I would say My colleagues in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence who are interested And the philosophy of mind.

who are interested in consciousness I would say At least ninety five percent of them. Are physicalists. That is.

at least ninety five percent of the effort in science in understanding consciousness. Assume. That certain objects in space and time are real. That they exist whether or not they're perceived. that they have genuine causal powers. In particular

For example, neurons and brains. So neurons exist and brains exist. Whether or not they're perceived, they have genuine causal powers. Most neuroscientists would just say, of course. Space and time are fundamental.

Physical particles exist when they're not perceived? The brain exists when it's not perceived. We have to explain how consciousness could arise from Physical processes that in themselves are not conscious. At least most physicalists would say they're not conscious. We can talk about panpsychism and so forth later on.

So the standard Work of uh most of my good colleagues, good friends. Who are studying this? Is We will boot up a theory of consciousness.

From a theory of neuroscience. Or from a theory of integrated information, a little bit more abstract theory. or a theory of attention schemas in in neuroscience and and and so forth. So but the idea is that we're gonna start with Objects in space and time. That we take to be fundamental reality.

And then boot up a theory of consciousness. So the the first thing Well If you take evolution from natural selection seriously.

You should not start there. You should not start with space and time and objects in space and time. Those are not fundamental reality. No. I should also at this point say You know, I'm a cognitive neuroscientist.

What in the world do cognitive neuroscientists know about Physics. With I'm not talking physic, right? This is space and time. Yeah, is not fundamental. Surely the physicists will be happy to put a cognitive neuroscientist in his place.

And let him know that he's out of his leak. And indeed, I'm not a physicist. What? The physicists themselves, independent of this work on evolution of a natural selection And I quote

Space time is doomed. This is Nima Arkani Ahmed. David Gross and many other Current physicists. I can go into why they're saying that. I mean I can actually explain it to a broad audience why physicists are saying this. But basically physics

At least since Newton Has been About What happens in space and time? And now

Physicists like Neymar Khanny Hamet are saying Space time is not fundamental. In fact fairly obvious from recent advances in the study of gravity and quantum theory that it it cannot be fundamental. And

They're spending their careers Looking for the deeper structures. That are beyond space and time. That will give rise to space and time. as some kind of simple projection.

Of a much deeper Deeper story. So the state of play is really quite interesting. Cognitive neuroscientists studying consciousness. Believe in space time.

And objects in space time is fundamental. When the physicists are saying we're spending our careers looking for what's beyond space time. Space time is doomed. It's really time for the cognitive neuroscientists who are studying consciousness To catch up with what the physicists have already said.

Space time had a good run. It was a really wonderful framework. And it's over. And by the way. The reductionist methodology. So methodological reductionism, which Reductionism.

And space time. have been spectacularly successful assumptions of science for centuries. Absolutely spectacular. Hats off, those were wonderful assumptions.

Science Really needed those assumptions. But it's the glory of science not to get stuck in. Ian It's current theories. It's the glory of science to have theories that tell you

Where they stop? That's how you avoid dogmatism and when evolution of a natural selection says Probability is zero that space time is fundamental. And then the physicists independently say, our theory of gravity tells us. That space time cannot be fundamental.

We have our two Pillars of modern science saying the same thing. Space time has had a good run. But it's over. So the methodology of methodological

Reductionism. Which is The idea that is We go to smaller and smaller scales in space. We find more and more fundamental laws.

How do we explain temperature of the air? Well, if we go to the molecular level we can Understand that Molecules bouncing around have certain kind of kinetic energy and the mean molecular kinetic energy At the microscopic level can explain

what we call the temperature of the air at a more macroscopic level. So That kind of Going to uh a Reductionist. Smaller scale, deeper laws.

has worked in many ways spectacularly in science. But we now know There is a hard limit to how small you can go. Without approach. It's ten to the minus thirty three centimeters.

And In some sense. That's not very small. If someone said, you know, it's ten to the minus twenty trillion. Centimeters. I would go, Oh, who cares? Ten to the minus twenty trillion.

Tons of zeros, but you know, but this is only thirty three Ten to the minus thirty three. The space time story stops. It's not like there's pixels of space time at ten to the minus thirty three centimeters. It's that space time doesn't make sense. We need a different framework. And in fact as you try and we can go into it if you want, but as you try to probe

space time at you know higher, higher energies and smaller, smaller scales. You just start Actually engaging bigger and bigger volumes of space, not smaller. So gravity Destroys Reductionism.

Reductionism is It worked for a little bit, but Deeply, deeply false. So that's why This kind of stuff is really interesting for the theory of consciousness. I think a hundred years from now.

When Scientists and historians of science look back at this period. They look at it with with some interest. We have Right now, clear evidence that space time is doomed.

Reductionism is false. We still have this very interesting sociological phenomenon that ninety five I I would say probably ninety eight, ninety nine percent of my colleagues who are Seriously studying consciousness. Are disregarding that?

And are trying to give reductionist accounts in which space time and particles are fundamental. Even panpsychism does that, we can talk about it. And I think it's gonna be, you know, a century from now when the new physics is probably well established and we actually understand these new structures. Deeper than space time. And we already have great hints. There I we can talk about some of the hints I mean I can talk about them for a broad audience. Some of the hints that they already have from Nemar, Connie Habet, and others cosmological polytopes. Amplitudehedron was there are these structures.

That have names and and are being deeply studied. that are much deeper than space time. For which space time arises as in some sense a trivial projection. And in fact when you go to these deeper Structures.

You find deep symmetries that are true of the data that you cannot even express in space time. Space time actually becomes a handcuff. It keeps you from actually doing what you need to do. It's gonna be interesting sociologically that The cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers of mind

who were studying consciousness, you know, in twenty twenty. We're Disregarding what evolution told them and what physics was telling them that that's the wrong Foundation. Now

What is the right foundation? To say that space time isn't Fundamental. Is not to say what is fundamental, right? So the best ideas we have right now are things like the cosmological polytope and amplitudehedron and socihedron and so forth that

Nima and one Maldusane and others are are working on. So Here's where I then are looking at consciousness in a different way. I can't In good conscience.

attack it from a physicalist framework anymore. I mean that Our best theories tell us that's not the right way to do it. See the theories tell us where they stop. But they don't tell us what the next theory should be. What we have to do

As scientists, and this is part of the fun of science. Is we have to Be creative. We have to take A leap.

Into the unknown where we Say what if it was such and such, like the cosmological polytope? We write down this mathematical structure. Now Then we say okay, we have to be able to test our idea. So you have to show a mapping

From whatever it is you start with, like the cosmological polytope. How does space time arise from that polytope? We can only measure things in space time, right? That's where we can do Our experiments. Large hadron collider or Neural E G or F M R I. We do all our data collection in space time.

Not because space time is fundamental. But because evolution has forced us. To use an interface and that's what we're forced to do. So we're stuck with this interface. We have to

project everything into our interface. So whatever deeper structure we get. Beyond space time. We will have to show how it maps to the interface that evolution gave us. So we can actually do experiments and test it. So of course

Any proposal. That I make. is almost surely wrong. It would be a miracle if I was right. Right.

In fact, I'll go even further than that. I'll say that Science can never have a theory of everything. Why is that? For two different reasons. First, what is the theory?

Scientific theory. Here's an explanation. It says If you grant me these assumptions I can explain these other things.

You grant me molecules. And The idea that they bounce around and have kinetic energy, I can explain temperature. In thermodynamics. But I'm assuming those molecules.

So whatever you assume is a thing that you're not explaining there on What I would call the miracles of the theory. Now of course you can then try to say, Well I can get rid of those miracles. I can say that particles Are themselves.

What the Physicists would call Irreducible unitary representations of the Poincare group. Which is uh the symmetries of space time. So I can have my theory of space time and say particles are merely These representations of properties of space time.

But now I'm assuming space time. So every scientific theory is going to have this thing where it says, These are my assumptions. And those are the miracles. And that's what a scientific theory is. So By definition, a scientific theory can never be a theory of everything. It's a theory of everything except it's assumptions. The assumptions are the thing it's not explaining. It's turtles all the way down. That's right, it's explanations all the way down. And there's another Deep reason why that has to be true.

And it comes from Girdle's incompleteness there. Girdle showed that Any fine Axiomatization of mathematics that you make. That's at least rich enough to account for

Arithmetic. Will have a weird property. That There are truths. That cannot be proven.

From that system. And he he actually showed up. But there are Statements that are true. But cannot be proven from within the system. And if you add those true statements to your axioms, to your assumptions.

So those axioms are like the assumptions of a scientific. Then Girdle's theorem still comes back and says well there'll be new statements. That are true. That cannot be proven from within that new axiomatization.

And what what this means is that Any conceptual scheme. That we come up with. Well Always and only

Barely scratch the surface of reality. This is a truly humbling Point of view. Every scheme we come up with you can show that You can actually write down truths.

That are true, but can't be proven. And so Our theories will always Never. Get all of the truths. And so

This is great job security for mathematicians and scientists. We'll always be doing this. So that's why I don't believe my own theory. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling. If you're just busy.

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and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash. Tim. I So let me hop in just for a minute here.

And just to sort of tell a story that leads to a question, and it may or may not be related to cosmological polytopes, or a singular or plural. I don't I d I'm not actually familiar with that term, but Just to perhaps also try to highlight a few things that you said. Again. Please fact check anything that I get wrong. I'm not a physicist nor am I a cognitive neuroscientist, but I am an avid

watcher of documentaries. And I was watching a PBS documentary which was produced and then made available online pretty recently called Einstein's Quantum Riddle. And there were a lot of credible scientists in this a lot of scientists and communicators like Sean Carroll, who has a fantastic podcast, if people haven't seen it. And Towards the end of this discussion, because it tracked the chronology. of Newtonian physics, which had incredible explanatory power and utility for a very long time, still does.

But then uh It traced the debates between Einstein and Niels Bohr related to the implications of quantum mechanics, right? And there's a lot of disagreement. These two behemoths meeting multiple times a day for a period of time. And then ultimately

getting to the point towards the end of this where they were gathering experimental data to Test the hypothesis of quantum entanglement in the Canary Islands. Fascinating documentary. I r I highly recommend it. And where it kind of wraps up at the end is at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. where I did not spend any time as a researcher, but I was an undergrad nearby for a period of time.

And the halls of of that place, I mean, have just had the footsteps of so many luminaries. It's it's incredible to look at the list. And the Director at the time Robert with two Bs, he's Dutch. I cannot pronounce his last name. Towards the end of this. Trace out on a blackboard.

The possibility of a holographic universe or the universe as we experience it being a projection of some type. And I think I found on your Twitter you have a great Twitter feed by the way. Thank you. I found a link to nature. And a paper, I believe it was a paper, called Simulations Backup Theory that Universe is a hologram. And this is actually this point somewhat I don't want to say dated, but it's older, two thousand thirteen.

Could you elaborate On This holographic model of the universe, this this concept. This is the physicist now, this is not cognitive neuroscience, so but but I I understand enough to explain it to a broad audience, and and that is that They've discovered that

You can Think of The universe as being a hologram. It's called the ADS CFT, anti deciders space conformal field theory um duality. So you can have a a field theory.

Without gravity on a boundary. And that's it turns out to be dual or equivalent to a theory with gravity. In the space of one higher dimension. Now it turns out this was a major Advance, Juan Maltesena was a a a key figure in in in doing this.

Essential figure in in doing this. But everybody understands that this is not our space. So w we don't live in an anti decider space. Holographic principle Works for a space that's not ours. And one problem with the ADS CFT

Holographic Principle is that. The time on the boundary is the same as the time. In the what they call the bulk, the bigger space. So you don't get emergent time, you only get emergent space in this. So so the holographic principle as it currently stands is very, very

intriguing and suggestive and it's leading Juan Maldusena and and Nimar Kani Hamed and others to try to do the same thing for our Space time, which is a a a desider space. So we we have a Different thing than anti-desider space. But I'll give you just an idea about this holographic principle in a compact sense.

And where in some sense the idea first came from. When they studied black holes. And they were trying to figure out, you know, when when you stick stuff into black holes They get bigger. And in some sense as they're getting more as you

put more things, more information into the black hole, they get bigger. And so they wanted to know how much information could you stick Inside a black hole. What's the m and you might think, well How much Memory I could store into hard drives would depend on the volume of the hard drives, right? And you know so what was the maximum that I could compress hard drives into a certain volume to store information.

Well, when they worked out and this was um Steven Hawking. who did the math, there was another physicist who first proposed this. But Hawking was the one who actually Proved it.

The amount of information that you can stick into a black hole Does not depend on this volume. It depends on the surface area. That's the universe we live in.

You should really let that sink in. Yeah, that's squirrely for for me to wrap my head around. It's truly stunning. But i if you let that sink in you begin to understand why space time is doomed. Space time is a great data structure, but it's not the object that we thought it was. It's the data structure.

It has certain interesting properties. And so The Amount of information you can stick in a black hole depends only on the surface area of the black hole. And and then it it's easy, uh physicists have shown that that's true of any region of space. So it's not just black holes. I mean they they first discovered it in black holes with Hawking's work, but Any volume of space

The amount of information you can store and it has nothing to do with the volume, it has only to do with the surface area. So bizarre bizarre to think about So that's the holographic principle. And so we're really trying to understand what that means, but it it does mean that space time is doomed and we're looking for a deeper A deeper story. So let me hop in. What I'd love to ask is no doubt something that a lot of Listeners are wondering and I'm wondering also. Let's say space time is doomed. And that we are

as humans operating on this very high level of abstraction That serves to satisfies our drive and our evolutionary imperative to procreate. As we

Realize that Space time is doomed. And that these Paradigms need to be revised. These theories need to be revised. Are there practical ramifications?

Perhaps at some point quantum mechanics were viewed as sort of an academic exercise, but then before you know it And it might be Contending with the shut up and compute.

school of thought where you let's not worry about how it works if we can use it to make something work. You're seeing quantum computing, the I think the implications of which are are quite profound. What might things look like in the next five, ten, twenty years as we begin to fundamentally revise how we think of Reality matters. the interplay of consciousness or the

role of consciousness is fundamental. What happens? What might manifest, what might change. Any thoughts on that? Quite a bit. Every new advance in science

Leads to Unexpected. Miraculous. Technologies. Maxwell.

Wrote down Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism. In the mid. Nineteenth century. He wrote down these equations which sort of captured all of Faraday's experiments with electricity and magnetism and so forth. So Faraday have done all these experiments, wonderful stuff.

Maxwell realized that all of the experiments could be captured in A few equations. True. Tour de force. Our modern technology.

is largely due to Maxwell. I'm talking to you today Cross country. Because of Maxwell. Yeah. Maxwell's equations. Stimulated Einstein.

to come up with special relativity in part. So I think that the scientific theories that are being developed right now, like the cosmological polytope and so forth, and My understanding is that These guys understand that there's really hard work ahead. decades before they can this is really, really tough.

But Once We have a really strong theory that can be mapped back into space time to make predictions. Mm-hmm.

Here's the kinds of technologies that You could Conceive. Might come out of there. When we realize that space time is not fundamental reality.

And we get technologies. Based on Structures beyond space time. Why about to go to Alpha Centauri? I may not need to spend light years.

In a ship. I may be able to go outside of space time. And just get there. And I'm not even through wormholes. Just understanding the the true nature of reality beyond space time, realizing that it's a data structure, we can play with the data structure. We can reverse engineer it.

I can just put myself there. So I think The kinds of things that we take as fundamental limits on us right now. Will not be fundamental miss. So in other words, to answer your question, you really have to think out of the box in ways that that What would happen if space time was no longer a limited? You can just go around space time.

Right now. For example, the physicists will tell us that Because of the expansion of the universe. Most of the galaxies that we can see, we could never get to. They're going way too fast. You can go at the speed of light and you'll never get there. So as fast as we can go through space time

It's I think ninety percent or more of the galaxies are are inaccessible to us. Too bad, all that real estate is just gone. Well, what if we don't have to go through space time? Suppose we can use Some new structures that the physicists find. that projects into space time but is is far more comprehensive. And then we get technologies built out of that.

We just go around. We go outside of space time and pop up where we want. So it's gonna be Very very different. But that theory is going to perhaps What more interesting

than than space time. So the work that I I'm doing is a theory of conscious agents. I'm proposing a model in which consciousness is fundamental and there are innumerable agents. Beyond space time. If that model is on you know, and again I would bet against myself. I mean that's that's just a good scientific attitude to assume that you're wrong and try to get a a theory

That as quickly as possible. We'll Make predictions that you can test and show you're wrong. That's just the the good scientific attitude. So with that in mind, I'll I'll just go with the story of conscious agents. So there are countless conscious agents interacting. So I get a model of how they Interact?

I get a model of how certain conscious agents we call human beings use a space time interface. A data structure of space time to interact with them. And we use that data structure, we have portals, but right now I've a portal into your consciousness. Yes.

Called your body. And we we're using Лаптопс і технології то Take an uh pixels which are an image of your body Yeah, your voice.

And It gets projected to me and I then Understand something about your consciousness. And then you understand something about my consciousness. And I think that I'm genuinely

Changing your consciousness, and you're genuinely changing things in my consciousness through the portals that we call our bodies. So we know that there are portals. in our space time interface into consciousness. So the question that comes from the point of view of what I'm working on is Once we understand The theory of conscious agents and how

Space time. arises as a as an interface that some agents use, can we open up new portals in that interface? Maybe hallucinogenic drugs do that. I don't know. Maybe they don't. But could we develop new technologies that open up new portals into the realm of conscious agents? And if so, Are they friendly or hostile?

And Could they teach us stuff or or you know so you can see once you start thinking out of the space time box As a scientist, you want to let your imagination go. You don't want to be constrained. You really have to think outside of the box. But then you always have to take your theory and say, Okay

I need to make predictions in space and time. That my colleagues can go and show me wrong. That's why this is not dogmatism and it's not just High in the sky. You have to think pie in the sky. You you gotta think big. To write down your theory. You gotta think big.

But then you also have to say. Here's how you can pop my bubble. Do this experiment. That's how you pop my own. So question about the conscious agents, right? I'd I'd love to hear more about how you workshop this or simulate or use computer models. In other words, how do you poke and prod at this? With the understanding that as you said, this is a hypothesis worth disproving. And uh you want there to be some predictive power or make an attempt at constructing a model that has predictive power. You want it to be falsifiable, right? You want to tell people how they can burst your bubble.

Exactly. How do you explore this? How do you explore this struggling for the right word, but this theory of of of conscious agents. So there's a there's a couple steps. We've published a paper That people can look up is called Objects of Conscious. So if you just Google Objects of Consciousness and and you know, my name, Donald Hoffman. It's free online and you can just see a paper where we propose

A simple model of consciousness using simple mathematics probability theory. Those things called Mercovian kernels. And my attitude about it is I'm trying to start off with a very, very simple model, what our one point oh model. The simplest math that I could do that sort of models the idea that

Conscious agents. Have experiences, they make decisions, and they act to change the experiences of other conscious agents. That's the basic idea. Mathematically now, you you get a dynamical system. It's called a Markovian dynamical system.

So now we can start to study these Markovian dynamical systems of conscious agents. And Look at how They're

Behaviour. Would predict properties of consciousness. And how they might predict. The emergence of space time. So one thing that I've been working on

I was working on this very very heavily Little over a year ago and then Covid took me down. For about a year. So I I've been I was out of commission for a year with with Covet, uh long haul Covet, it took out my heart. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, it did um.

made my heart um almost fail. So it it it's taken me a year to get back on my feet. So I plan to get back to what I was doing before Covid took me out, but The idea of I was pursuing is that The long term behavior. of these conscious agents. The so called asymptotic

Behavior. Has Structures that are very Interestingly related to Structures that Nimar Kani Hamed is finding beyond space time.

That The asymptotic behavior of this conscious agent dynamics How's a fit with some of the structures.

Like the ample twohedron. cosmological polytope that they're finding Behind space time. But If that were right, then the structures that they're finding behind space time

Would still be simplifications of the Conscious agent dynamics because they would only capture the asymptotic the the long term behavior, not the full dynamics of the consciousness. So we'd have the full dynamics of consciousness, a certain projection of that would lead to the cosmological polytope and the amplitudehedron, and a projection of those leads to space time. So the idea would th be to start with a theory of conscious agents.

Do the asymptotics project to the cosmological polytope? project to space time and that way we would get consciousness Leading to predictions in space time that we could test. So that's a big project and I you know I'm glad to put it out there so that someone who's much smarter than me can go ahead and run ahead of me. And beat me to it. So I would just be delighted to read about it from someone who could beat me to it.

We're gonna come back to cosmological polytope, because I feel like i w after the seventeenth time it comes up we should probably return to it and and cover it. However, I want to ask you something first. And I'm gonna wade into this maybe in a roundabout way and we'll see where it goes. Might be a dead end, might not be. But if if we're talking about If I'm understanding correctly. the possible fundamental error. of taking a bottom up approach to understanding consciousness.

That is sort of starting with the neurological structures and uh using our space-time tools to kind of build from the smallest. Upward. to sort of explain the phenomenology and the subjective experience that people have that they label consciousness. How would you answer the question? Is consciousness.

Localized. And I ask that, understanding there's there's a lot of controversy around this and People will look at different types of injuries and Either use it as proof for or against

the idea that consciousness is locally generated, so to speak, by what we you know, the three pounds of goo that we hold between our ears. But there are people who take the opposite stance and even though I think it's very difficult to test might look at the the brain as a almost a receiver of sorts. How do you think about this and I apologize if it's a it's a sloppy question, but it's a great question. If you wouldn't mind unpacking that however it it seems best. I'd I'd love to hear your thoughts.

So a lot of people might think that I'm proposing a receiver theory, that the brain is a receiver for consciousness. And I'm absolutely not. Because That theory would Is assuming that the brain exists and is a a real object with real causal powers. And that somehow

There's the brain and there's consciousness, and somehow consciousness interacts with the brain as a receiver. That's absolutely not what I'm saying. Nothing inside space and time has any causal powers. Nothing. Everything inside space and time.

are merely perceptions within consciousness from this framework. So the brain Is An icon in my desktop. That appears when I look inside skulls.

And as soon as I look away, I delete that icon and there is no brain. So Right now, I have no brain. There is no brain. If you looked inside my skull, of course you would see a brain.

But that's an icon that you create on the fly. The icon Exists when you create it and it you delete it when you don't need it. So neurons do not exist. When they're not perceived. Nor does space time.

That's my point of view. Again, I could be wrong. But but I just want to make very, very clear it's not the brain receiver because that's giving the brain too much Existence. Right. The brains only exist when they're perceived. Just to stand in for the audience, the people might be sure squirming a little bit in their seat here. Uh course. So if you say that nothing in space time

if I'm getting this right, act as a causal agent. That's not to say that if someone holds a gun to your head and pulls the trigger that it's not gonna splatter your brains all over the wall behind you, but that rather that that is In abstraction. On the User interface. that we are using. I mean there can still be

Consequences experientially. So is the question then just a It's based on false assumptions because it predicates that the brain is actually something that exists and persists, whether or not we're looking inside your Skull.

That is the big assumption. That physical objects exist. And have causal powers even when they're not perceived. And and by the way, the the physicists have tested this site. There's two very technical terms for this. One is

Local realism? And the other is non contextual realism. So local realism is the claim. That physical objects like electrons. Have Properties.

Like position, momentum, and so forth. Real values of those properties that exist. Whether or not they're perceived and that have Influences that propagate no faster than the speed of light. So the realism is the claim that they have the properties.

Even if they're not Received? And the locality, the local is that they Influence. No faster than the speed of light. So together it's called local realism.

And most of us might think that of course local realism is true. It turns out local realism is false. It's been tested. And local realism is dead. Is simply untrue. And that's the end of the story. Local realism is false. Non contextual realism

Is the claim. That Again, realism, the property particles, for example, have their properties like position and momentum and spin when they're not observed. and that the values of those properties Do not depend on how we measure them.

That's the non contextuality. And non contextual realism is false. So local realism is false, non contextual realism is false. I conclude. But

Particles. Don't exist. When they're not perceived. They have no property, they have no position, they're not there.

If you have no position, you're not there. So they're not there. In space time itself. is not there space time itself is merely a data structure. And particles, by the way, when we say that physicists say that they're irreducible representations of the Poincaré group, they're basically saying that The representations of the structure space on is what particles are.

They fall from the structure of our of our interface. I think a better framework is to think about this as a data compressing error correcting code that we're using. If you think about Space time and particles as part of a a data structure for data compression and error correcting code as part of our sensory interface.

I think it'll be a much more useful Framework. So I may take us into Uh deep water here with With my next question, but

I will ask you because I know that your next commitment today relates to the subject of Death so in a few hours you have a commitment. Not a funeral, but rather an event that is uh d discussing Various

topics and questions surrounding death. How do you think of death given All that we're talking about. And First order, second order, third order implications of all of that. How do you think about

Death. Physicalism. Implication for death. Space time is fundamental.

And Elementary particles like electrons and quarks and protons and so forth. Or the fundamental nature of reality and what you are. But your body is is just an assemblage. A complex assemblage of particles.

And your consciousness Is somehow an emergent f Property. Oh. certain activities of those particles, so say brain activity.

Then it's very, very clear that In death. When the brain dissolves. Your consciousness dissolves and that's the end of the story. That's it. That's a very, very clear implication of physicalism.

We can talk about panpsychism, but physicalism, but you know, strict physicalism, that's that's the end of the story. If consciousness is fundamental and space time is just an interface. And our bodies are merely icons that we use to represent certain assembly interactions of conscious agents. And we can go into the

How I think about that. Then On that approach There is the possibility. That some aspect of

My consciousness Survives death. There w I have to look at you know the mathematics of the model and and Go into it, but It may be, for example, that

The bare awareness That's associated. With me. Just awareness without content. That survives.

But all the Details of Donald Hoffman. And his life story within this interface. Maybe that all dissolves. Maybe That's a story about what is consciousness up to. And we can a talk about

If consciousness is fundamental, what is it doing and why? What is the dynamics of consciousness about? To answer the question about death, we might have to answer that question too. It's a big one. Please continue. So I'll try a stab at that question because I think it relates to the death question. So what is consciousness doing and why?

The right answer is I don't know. And I've only seen one idea. That Seems deep enough. to at least be worth

thinking about. But only one idea that seems deep enough to at least be a candidate. And it again comes from Girdle's incompleteness there. Girdle says that Essentially. No matter how much you explore within a particular conceptual system,

you can't get all the truth. There's always gonna be more to explore. Mathematically. So if consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality. And consciousness is all there is. then mathematical structure is only about the possibilities of consciousness.

That's all that there is to be about. And so What if What consciousness is doing since the Exploration of mathematical structure is in principle a

Unending. Then Perhaps the exploration of the possibilities of consciousness itself is in principle a Unending And therefore

Consciousness. What it's up to is Exploring all of his potentialities. And the reason is continuing to do that. from our perspective as continue to do that, is because there's no end to it in principle.

So consciousness itself in s is in some sense Always learning about itself. And so Perhaps then What we are

What people are and what cats are and what dogs are and what Amoebas are and so forth. Is consciousness Trying on different headsets, different realities. And exploring.

And losing itself. I mean, so here this is very interesting idea. The the consciousness chooses to really explore so deeply that it loses itself in the exploration, doesn't even know what it is. It becomes a physicalist. It actually thinks that consciousness

isn't fundamental. It goes through the whole bit and then slowly has to wake up. In and so doing it really explores what it's not. And what it is. In some sense to know what you are, you have to know what you're not. And so

On that point of view The Hoffman icon. is simply Consciousness. Taking a perspective on itself.

Looking at itself through a particular space time headset. taking a little projection. And from that headset I there's a finite there was a birth There was Growing strong until your twenties and thirties and then after your forties you start declining and you know, in your eighties and nineties you die.

And That whole process is just Consciousness exploring itself from a particular perspective. In which case Maybe the Hoffman. Icon and and maybe a lot of stuff

Can be left behind. But In some sense consciousness itself Has learned something. through that experience and the eight billion other people

Yeah. Quadrillions of amoebas. And the who knows how many viruses and and so forth. Consciousness is just trying on Innumerable headsets.

And when it's done with that headset, it takes it off. Awareness is Perfectly fine. The raw awareness is fine, but the detailed icons that happen to appear, space time icons, objects in space and time, brains, neurons, all those things Those were just icons, and you know, you y you studied them and then you realize pretty cool. Really near you know, Mount Everest, what a beautiful icon.

Death Valley, what a beautiful icon. These are really But I'm not that. I'm something even More transcendent than space and time, I'm more transcendent than Death Valley. And so consciousness is just waking up. I mean I again I I'm trying to tell I'm not saying it Then it's it's correct. It's it's just

It's the only story I've seen so far that at least is deep enough That is worth taking. Seriously. Who is the origin of this story and can you ever know? That it's accurate, do you think?

Through Testing or experimentation. The story that I'm saying right now has an interesting Whether she might be able to test it, so Dynamics of conscious agents is I mentioned as a Markovian dynamics. Right.

You can make it so called stationary. Stationary dynamics in in which the entropy of the dynamics doesn't change. But you can show that even if you have this Markovian dynamics of consciousness in which the entropy never changes. Any Projection.

By conditional probability. Any projection Looking at that dynamics. We'll see it. As Increasing in entropy.

In other words. The arrow of entropy, the arrow of time. Is an artifact. of the projection. So consciousness itself has no arrow of time.

But you can prove From this mathematics that you get an arrow of time by projection. The proof is trivial, it's like two or three lines. Here's A project that I think would be really fun. Can we show? When you look at all the different ways that you could project consciousness in this mathematics

the conditions under which all these different arrows of time, the entropy that you get Satisfy the Lorentz transformations. In other words, can we get special relativity out of this? We would have to model also the space aspects of it. Wha what's happening to Space. as you know, projection of the dynamics of of of these conscious agents. But we see the time aspect. So could we actually show how s special relativity

arises as just different perspectives that consciousness can take. On a fundamental dynamics of consciousness that has no arrow of time. That's the kind of thing where we could start to make brand new predictions that could be testable. And I just wanna as a sidebar

Say to folks that I know we're uh probably serving quite a bit up on the plate to chew on in this conversation. And I would highly recommend folks who are like, good Lord, I mean how do I even wrap my head around one tenth of this? To Consider Exploring some of the

Documentation of For instance. Quantum entanglement, which does get mi I think misappropriated and used by a lot of kind of hand wavy new agey folks, but if you just look at the experimental data and double slit experiment and then the kind of later generations of Of experimental data.

Like what was done in the Canary Islands. Think they were using two quasars. Which is just like who funds that I w I wanna know. It's incredible that somebody actually put the money up for that. Pretty awesome. If you start to even dip your toes into that. Or watch a few presentations by Carlo Rovelli, who is

As I understand it, I mean a a skilled practitioner and physicist, I think he focuses on quantum gravity. He's brilliant. Yeah, brilliant guy. So he's not just uh you know a a kind of a stage Presenter. with a a decorative title. This guy actually does serious work. You'll begin to see just how Weird.

some of this gets uh when you start to push around the edges. Let's chat for a second because it's a term that has come up. Panpsychism. Could you please explain What this is. So there are various versions of panpsychism, but the basic idea is that if you take

Elementary particles, l electrons and protons and so forth. In addition to their physics. Position, momentum and spin and so forth. And psychosis they also have an elementary unit of consciousness. And

When you take an electron and a proton and put them together to form a hydrogen atom Then Somehow the consciousness of the electron, the consciousness of the proton Together somehow combine to create the new consciousness of the hydrogen atom. Two hydrogens get together and and an oxygen get together and combine to form water.

Molecule than The consciousnesses of the hydrogens and oxygens somehow combine to create the consciousness associated with the water molecule. And then by the time you get up to humans, you have so many Of these particles. coming together that human consciousness emerges somehow. It takes

Physicalism too seriously. From my point of view. It's saying that these electrons exist. They really do exist in space and time, so these things are fundamental. fundamental reality and in addition they have this other fundamental unit of consciousness.

One analogy that's sometimes given is that Particles had position. And Momentum. In Newtonian theory, but

With quantum you discovered that that wasn't enough. You needed something called spin. So they just added spin. So particles now have spin, right? And and and so the same thing we could do the same thing with consciousness. We had they positioned momentum spin. We now have to just add this other unit of consciousness. They have a unit of consciousness, we'll do the same thing we did with spin, sort of the idea. And so I my approach I call conscious realism, where I say consciousness is fundamental reality and space time is merely One user interface out of countless that consciousness can use. There's countless interfaces, space time is just one. Panpsychism, at least the version that I'm talking about here, and I think is is the standard sort of the the standard one.

Yeah. Isn't I think smuggling in The idea that space time and particles are still somehow fundamental Reality. Philip Gough, I think.

We could have a good discussion about it. I think that that's what what he says. I would love to have him disagree with me. Who who is uh Philip Goff? Philip Goffy's a a very famous panpsychist. Pan psychist. Now are just because I I I think it'd be satisfying for me to to know this just based on my curiosity. Are there what you would consider credible scientists who Ascribed to panpsychism or is it relegated to kind of other arenas?

Well, I think that the integrated information theory that Christoph Koog and Giulio Tanoni Are studying. It's often taken as a panpsychist. theory, it says that certain physical systems also have unit of consciousness. If they have the certain property called integrated information, the right kind of integrated information, then they also have, you know, a certain amount of uh consciousness that's quantified The amount is quantified by the degree of

fee but the integrated information. So that's a sort of a panpsychist thing because they're taking Again, space time and particles As a reality. Right. As an objective reality. But that reality, if it has certain kinds of properties, also has consciousness. So it's it's in that sense a panpsychist. kind of approach. So the and Tanoni and and Christoph Cove are are of course Brilliant.

Brilliant scientists. I mean we The fact that I disagree is ir irrelevant. These these are geniuses. I did a bit of reading on this prior to this conversation, Panpsychism, and having lived in Japan, it struck me how the sort of output of these assumptions and these models is actually very similar to in some respects, not all, but animist religions like Shintoism, right? The rock, the moss, the dirt, everything has sort of a A consciousness of one type.

Or another. Just a a quick sidebar. Not to say they're related, nor that all panpsychists are Shintoists. I agree, but that that raises a question that I I I would like to um mention briefly and that and and that is I'm saying that The question of which Objects are conscious in which are not. Or the question of

Which things are alive and which things are not. The answers that we give right now Or an artifact. Of our interface. If reality is not space and time and physical objects.

Our interface is then giving us more or less information about some realm beyond space and time, beyond our interface. When I see a a cat, I think it's alive. I see a mouse. I think it's alive when I see uh Ameeba, yeah.

A virus, I don't know. I see electron, I say no, definitely not alive. Well Is that a genuine insight into the nature of reality? Or am I mistaking a limitation of my interface for an inside into reality? So this is the kind of question that arises when you no longer take space and time as fundamental.

It opens up the possibility that we've Actually got the question of life and the question of consciousness so fundamentally wrong that we're asking it the wrong way. The question could an electron be alive or not? is the wrong question.

In fact. My body is not alive. My body is merely an icon. It's not alive. In fact If you close your eyes, my body disappears. I close my eyes, my body does this is merely an icon. So the the the only question is

Which icons on our desktop Give us effective portals into life or consciousness. And ones that do not. Doesn't mean that we're not interacting with life or consciousness. It just means that our interface is giving up.

Of course it had to give up. Reality is complicated. So once again, th this actually shows how important it is. If space time is just an interface, we better get on with the program and not Fool around with space time being fundamental. We get life wrong.

The question of what's living and and not living is in fact the wrong question. This is what how important it is. If space time is not fundamental We need to change our science how we're doing our science. It's gonna be uh quite a Copernican upset. It's gonna make people very, very unhappy. For a long time, I expect. Let's segue to Cosmological Polytope, which if I ever go back to Burning Man, I feel like that should be my nickname on the playa Cosmological Polytope. What is The cosmological polytope.

Or the amplitude, uh if I'm getting that correct. Yeah, the amplitudehedron and so forth and society. What I'll talk about is at at at high level what what these guys are are up to and what they're finding. Yes, please. They're looking for structures beyond space time. That can give rise to space time. And they want to do it in a way.

That they can test. Empirically. The tests that they have are of two Fundamental kinds. One is The

Scattering. studies that they do at the Large Hadron Collider, where you take Subatomic particles are high. energies smash'em into each other and And see what sprays out.

What they do is they they look at the the so called scattering amplitudes. If you have like two gluons hitting each other and four gluons go spraying out. What is the amplitude of the probability for the various kinds of ways that that can happen. And it turns out those the scattering probabilities for these various Um events.

is the fundamental data that needs to be explained. So those those are the big big data. And Several decades ago when they were starting to try to build the superconducting super collider in the United States, which didn't happen, but They realize they were gonna be doing so many of these

Collisions per second. then most of them would be things that weren't interesting. So you needed to be have some way of analyzing the data very, very quickly and getting rid of the stuff that was not interesting so you could find the the the needle in the in the haystack that was interesting. So they needed to compute these scattering processes.

The so called scattering apple tubes. And it turned out If you got You know, like two gluons in and three going out. It was A lot of algebra.

And before it going out is like hundreds of pages of algebra. For one, computation. For one amplitude. It was nasty. They were doing it using quantum field theory and Feinmann's uh approach to to things.

The experimentalist said to the theorist, Look We can't do hundreds of pages. Of algebra. Billions of times a second. Well supercomputers can't do this. W you you've got to simplify the math for us. And so some

Mathematical physicists. Said, okay, we got we gotta help out our experimentalist friends. So they They found that they A miracle they could collapse all this stuff down to a couple pages. And then another miracle they

Claps down to Two or three terms. They couldn't believe it. They thought This must be a one off. But over the decades they discovered one after another all these scattering apple juice that were going into hundreds of pages of algebra

could be collapsed to three or four terms that you could write down by hand. And so that's what the amplitudehedron and the cosmological poly to they're actually showing that there's this deeper Reality. There are deeper symmetries. But they discovered there are deeper symmetries that are true of the scattering data that cannot be seen in space time.

So when you let go of space time, you are now dealing with deeper symmetries than space time that are true of the data. And all of a sudden the math becomes trivial. If you do it in space time because you got the wrong framework, you're doing it In this projection space that's not Right, it's not the right it's not the deepest reality. When you go to the deeper reality

You see the deeper symmetries and the math becomes trivial. So that's the kind of thing that makes them think they're on to something here. We're seeing new symmetries. The computations become much, much easier, and now we're seeing these structures. Now they don't know what the structures are about. This is really an interesting

point in the history of physics. So these geniuses We're trying to go beyond space time. What the heck is beyond space talk? How do we go there? Wha what kind of flashlights can you use? Now you're speaking my language. So hats off to these guys like

Nimar Connie Hammed and Juan Maldusana and these these guys. They're brilliant and they're brave. So what they're doing is they're saying We have to of course really know all the physics in space time and they know it backwards and forwards.

They know all the scattering stuff, they know all the symmetries. They're going Now we're discovering that there are these symmetries in the data. that can't be explained in space time. We need to go to these deeper structures. So you have to

Take a leap, you have to propose these structures like the cosmological You have to propose them. and then propose how they map back into space time and show that you can make predictions that are testable. Now the other thing they're looking at

It's not just a scattering. Data from the large hadron collider and other Colliders. But also they're looking at the Yeah.

the correlations you see between stars and various objects in space. the two and three point correlations and so forth. The idea is that they might Think of the whole universe as one big scattering event from the big bang. And they might be able to get Data that you couldn't get there.

energies high enough in in this you know the colliders that we could build on earth, but there was much bigger energies of the Big Bang. And so we might be able to probe nature more deeply by looking at the sky. At the macro. And looking at these correlations in the sky. Wow. Just so I can take a note for myself. Who are the researchers or the institute that if people want to do a Deeper dive on this they should look up. In this case. Well, you're like this. Nima Arkani Hammed.

Mm. The Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton. Oh look at that. Makes sense. It makes sense. As is I think B one Moldesina. as well. So so a lot of work is being done there. But Nima's influence is is huge. He's he's trained a large group of young people who are working on this. If people are interested in it I highly recommend Nima Arkani Hamid.

Kave A semester long class. At Harvard. Yeah. the fall of twenty nineteen. So if you just Google

Nima Arkani Hamid Harvard Lectures twenty nineteen You can get everything that I've been talking about in all the detail. He's got twenty more lectures on this stuff. That's incredible. Okay, so we will put this for everybody listening, we'll put those in the show notes since if you like me are not quite clear how to spell this person's name, we will get it We'll find the links, we'll put it in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. I'd love to Return to something you mentioned in passing. Which is

hallucinogenic drugs. So You may or may not know, I've been very involved with funding scientific studies over the last I don't know what the exact range is. Six to eight. years within the realm of

psychotropic drugs with a focus on psychedelic compounds. Across a whole spectrum of, say, classes, so tryptomines, phenethyl amines, but also including some stranger ones like Salvinorin A, which is derived from uh Savior doing Roman. This is an area of deep interest to me.

And I would love to know what you find. interesting about hallucinogenic drugs or what questions they raise Anything at all that leads you to find them.

Just in an area. Of interest. I should first say that uh I I'm interested, but I haven't actually explored myself. Not that I won't, but but I haven't yet. But I have

Many friends who have. And some who've really done it systematically. with five MEO DMT, some who have been very, very systematic about it, and and others who've taken Silo Cybin and and so forth. And The reports that they have are very interesting. In many cases they do find themselves interacting with other agents.

Other conscious agents. And some of those agents are you know Teaching them. And some of them are rough. They're rough teachers and so forth. And

From a physicalist framework. You have to conclude that this is just brain malfunction, right? This is not inside into reality. This is the brain. being kicked in ways that it wasn't intended to be kicked with neurotransmitters at levels or concentrations that are are not supposed to be there. And that's the whole story. And the same thing happens at death with near death experiences. Those are merely brain malfunctions, effectively.

But in a theory in which consciousness is fundamental It still may be the case. that these are are merely hallucinations and no insights, right? This is uh absolutely possible. But it also I I cannot with my theory of conscious agents I cannot dismiss the possibility

the drugs are somehow opening up new portals into this realm of conscious age, new access, new that we didn't have before. To a different interface. That's right, or through a different aspect of our interface that you know that hadn't opened up before. So From my point of view then

What I really need to have is a theory of portals. I have a portal. Right the portal is your body and I'm interacting with your consciousness. And we have one technology. We have one technology by which we know how to open up new portals. One really important technology. It's

Very low tech, but it's having kids. When you have a kid You open up a new portal into consciousness. So we do know that there is a way to open up new portals into Consciousness. Could you elaborate on that just a little bit? What do you mean by that?

You and your significant other? Decide to have a kid. And you have no idea what you're doing. Who that person's gonna be like, right? You start off as a sperm and an egg and nine months later through

A magical process of morphogenesis? Which we don't understand, by the way, Mike Levin at Tufts is doing some beautiful work on morphogenesis and showing that It's not just the molecular biology that's involved, it there's bioelectric fields. Electric fields that are actually

Guiding. The body growth, the body morphology and the morphogenesis is Truly stunning. So there may be A lot there, but but by the time the child is born You now have this little portal, you have very little insight into the conscience. You know if the the if it's happy or sad. Right. You it cries or or not.

But over a period of years you see the portal. getting more and more sophisticated. You're getting deeper and deeper insight into The conscious agent that you're interacting with. And so Studying that and studying the morphogenesis process, we may be able to come up with new technologies that that allow us to open new portals into the realm.

of conscious ages. And who knows? That technology may look like silicon circuits. Who knows? If so. It might look like artificial intelligences that are conscious. But it would be very, very different from the standard

approach to this, right? Standard approach of people thinking about this is that if I get My Artificial robot. Complex enough.

With the right kind of complexity, maybe the first fickerings of consciousness will emerge from the pattern of activity in the hardware. Somehow. And if I get it really sophisticated, they'll be more conscious. So somehow it the physics of the AI is fundamental, but if the physics of the AI has the right dynamics then consciousness might emerge. I'm saying something entirely different.

Physics is not fundamental. Space time is not fundamental. Consciousness is What we call physical objects are merely the ways that we play with our interface to open new portals into the realm of conscious agents. And so once we understand You know, maybe it's the amplitudehedron, the associon, the cosmological w what's behind space time and maybe conscious agents behind that if if we're lucky.

Then and we understand how the interface is related to it, we then be able to build technologies that open new holes, new portals in our space time interface. And Then when once we've done that, once we've figured that out. Then we might be able to answer your question, which is Or

These Drugs Really opening up new portals. Now we have a theory of portals. Do the drugs really open up new portals or are they just screwing up the interface? Right. Is it just pathological Firing. Or is there more to it? So we have a little work to do.

Yeah, we do have a lot of work to do. And I just want to share a few things that may be of interest. So the first is that with many of these compounds, I mean there are people who I consider I'm not gonna name them by name because a lot of them are under the radar at the moment, but Intelligent, thoughtful. you know rational. To the extent that any human is rational, rational actors.

who are very interested in trying to get a deeper understanding of at least experiment with these entity encounters, which And the example that's in my mind surface very consistently with DMT or NN DMT, which is very different

Subjectively in its experience than five M O DMT, five ethoxy DMT. So they've looked at means of extending the interactions. by changing, say, the mode of administration to intravenous and so on. At the very least the questions are very

Interesting. And I I recognize for a lot of people listening this is gonna sound like we're going well, I'm not gonna use we that's the royal we. It's unfair to you, Don, that I'm just going to uh Crazy Town. But Just uh allow me to be kinda self indulgent for a second. If you if you also look at the sort of ethnobotanical and uh Ethnographical studies. And just self reporting in the histories of tribes, say in South America, who use Ayahuasca is just one example.

It is largely accepted among the cultures down there, and it, you know, it hinges on certain cosmological views and so on, but that shared visions are common. So that people in Close proximity. Taking these drugs at the same time.

often have sharions. They see the same thing. Slash experience the same thing. So it's easy I think to on one hand, just dismiss all of this as kind of the the ravings and made up stories of people who

Have taken drugs that have kicked their brain as you put it in ways that the brain is not intended to be kicked. But You know, these things have also been used And I don't think the people in these tribes are stupid by any stretch of the imagination. And furthermore, I'd say, you know, the pharmacopia and their knowledge of

Medicine often outstrips what we would consider modern medicine. Like for a long time Curare which came from the Amazon and played a huge role in the creation of anesthesia as we know it today in hospitals was studied in many different capacities and there were certain ingredients that were included in these mixtures, such as black pepper or various species of pepper that were thought to be inert. And the conclusion of the the Western chemists who were doing the analysis was, you know, the

These tribesmen have no idea what they're talking about. Yeah, they got one or two things right, but this has no bearing. And that may be true in very many instances, but it turned out that, you know, bioperine, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. in these pepper species increased bioavailability. So it it increased the speed of onset of these paralytics. And uh I'm gonna stop in a second, but this is an area of deep interest. If you look at how Let's just say ayahuasca has been used historically, it's also been used for

Hunting and warfare. And I'm not saying any of this holds water, but at the very least You know, consistent use by humans over millennia would seem to imply some utility. And if one is to believe the claimed utility. It raises questions that we are currently not able to answer.

From a Physicalists. Paradigm. Anyway. End of speech.

Mm. I Agree, and I think that this is very much worth Exploring. I think that I cannot dismiss and and should not dismiss the possibility that these

Drugs? are opening up portals into this this other realm. I mean it's also possible that they're not. We need to have a mathematically precise theory of what we think This room. beyond space time is and what portals are, but I I don't dismiss this at all.

There's A brilliant researcher named Monica Gagliano. who have spent time with these native societies and and There are Using these plants?

She's got a book called Thus Spoke the Plant. Uh love the title. But Monica Gogliano and She was Inspired by these Tribes and their their work.

to do new experiments on plants that showed that Plants. F Capabilities that we never thought they can do classical condition She's done classical conditioning on plants. Plants can learn to associate a sound with food.

And they will grow their roots. to just the sound that's been paired with the food when there's no food there. So you can do classical conditioning with plants. And She's got other

remarkable discoveries about plants. And so She says there's a a a wonderful Movie that just came out. Called aware. Where she and Christoph Koch and and s and several other people are are interviewed, I highly recommend the movie's called Aware.

I forgot the subtitle of something like Explorations of Consciousness or something like that for the subtitle, but the the movie's called Aware. It just came out very recently. So M Monica is in that, Christopher is in that. And she they they go through and talk about her experiences with the tribes. Do you see her sitting with the tribes? Then you see the experiments that she's done. So I think that there's

Again. I don't know. What the answer will be here? Because until we have the science W you know, a mathematically precise science, we just don't know.

It could just be screwing up the brain in you know, in some sense. Or it could be a genuine insight. So There's a lot of hard work ahead. Yeah. To to to do this. But you're if you're a physicalist, we know the answer. You're just screwing up your brain. Yeah, you're you're just completely cuckoo bananas and should be Put in a padded room. So you can't damage yourself. Which, you know, in fairness, some of these things you do have to be careful with. This book looks fascinating. Thus spoke the plant. Yeah, Monica Gagliano. Two hundred fifty three ratings, it's like four point five, four point eight. And I should also recommend You know, in conjunction with this or

If people wanted a place to start. that is a little shorter. There's a piece called The Intelligent Plant that Michael Pollan wrote for The New Yorker at one point, which also speaks to this, in so much as plants can sense gravity, the presence of water, feel an obstruction in the way of their roots before coming in contact with them. There's Time lapse. Videography or photography of plants finding poles to climb up.

in using means that are very unclear. Really, really fascinating piece. That's a bit older, two thousand thirteen. So I would imagine that Monica's book has has more up to date Science. This this this is we'll s we'll give food For thought to vegetarians. Yeah, yeah, that's true. The ethical consideration are this intelligent. I mean, are they sentient? From my point of view, of course That's the wrong question, right? The question of which things are conscious, which or or or are living in which is is the wrong question. We're always interacting with consciousness. When you see something that's called a plan, you're interacting with consciousness.

It's just that your symbol is what you call a plant, but you're really interacting with consciousness. That's right. For the for the bioethicists and um I I'd love to ask you about a book which was gift to me. I did not agree with everything in it, but I did find some of the explanations and thought exercises to be Worthy of exploration. Very simple, but uh are you familiar with the book called Biocentrism? Have you ever heard of this book? Yes.

What is your what is your opinion? Of this book. So I agree with him that physicalism is is an inadequate framework. So Absolutely. I gr so I agree with him on that. The disagreements.

May or may not come. In what we propose is beyond space time. So I w particular model of conscious agents that Is mathematical and he may or may not like that. I mean he he may disagree. In in his case he he doesn't have any specific mathematical model. So it's it's more

Just using the current evidence to suggest that Physicalism Is false. That something More lifelike, more conscious like, maybe fundamental.

But it doesn't go to the next scientific step, which is okay, give me a mathematical model that's falsifiable. More testable. Thank you for answering that. Uh you mentioned a number of names. Nima something something Hammed, which I will get right in the show notes.

Which scientists They don't have to be scientists, but I do like playing within the realm of falsifiable hypotheses If proven true, that have predictive Powers.

Anyone you would suggest. Taking a look at her if you find Interesting. in terms of what they are attempting to figure out or or testing. One person I'm I find brilliant and interesting is Chris Fuchs, F U C H S.

He's a physicist? And uh one of the founders of Cubism. Q B I S M. Formerly called quantum Bayesianism, but I think he dropped that and just now calls it cubism.

Cubism is catchier. Cubism is catchier and And he had some technical reasons for maybe dropping the quantum Bayesian name. But he and and also David Merman is a another Rudiger Schock. They're all

Quantum cubists. And It's an interpretation of quantum theory. That Is

Very, very close to what I'm saying. That They make the point that Each act of observation. In physics.

is an act of fact creation. When you measure the position of the electron. You're not measuring a pre existing fact. You're creating. The fact

In the act of measurement. So that's the cubist Approach. And of course I I find that very, very cordial to what I'm saying, that space time is just an interface and these properties are things that we create when we look. They're data structures. You create when you look and then you garbage collect. You destroy it when you don't need it.

And so Particles are things that we create when we need them and and and He's got a paper called Cubism. Outer fringes of quantum Bayesian just was a two thousand and ten.

Paper. I can give you the exact title of it. But in that paper Chris Fuchs actually describes an experiment, a mathematical experiment that some other mathematical physicists did in which they prove They show using quantum theory.

A series of ex of measurements that you can make. Where you can predict with probability one What the outcome will be? But you can prove. Yeah.

Quantum mechanics is incompatible with the value being there before you measure it. I think I'll need you to say that one more time. Yeah, that's right. So so so it's a it's this isn't Chris Fuchs paper, but it's some other work. A series of ex uh of measurements that you make where you can prove That with probability one what The outcome is going to be

But you can also prove That The outcome did not exist. The value did not exist before you made the measurement. You can prove it.

So that's again against the The local realism. But it's also against what Einstein says. So now Einstein was a realist, right? Who said if you can without Interfering in any way with the system.

Predict. With probability one. What the outcome of measurement Well be Then there's an element of reality corresponding to the thing.

That you could measure with you. Get with probability one. If without Disturbing a system. You can predict with probability one

What the measurement will be. Then there's an element of reality corresponding to that measured value. That's what Einstein said. Really nice idea. Chris Fuchs in his paper shows is

Here's something. Probability one, we know what the outcome is going to be and we can prove it didn't exist. So this is once again uh The nail in the coffin. of space time and particles being fundamental reality. They don't even

exist when they're not perceived, when they're not measured. So Cubism says Every physical measurement. Is An act of fact

Creation. You create it in the act of observation. That agrees with what I'm finding from evolution by natural selection. You create the symbols you need on the fly. To survive.

Long enough to reproduce. So Cubism for folks, we'll put this in the show notes as well, and we'll get the title of that paper is QBIS. M. Yeah. Not to be confused with Cubit, although I do recommend for people interested that you maybe listen to my conversation with Steve Jurvidson, who's very involved with D Wave and other quantum computing companies, which will also s really stretch the boundaries of

the mind just to consider what is involved. And these are things that are happening right now. I mean these are you know Google and many of these companies have vast resources dedicated to quantum computing. It is of great practical value, but it gets into some very, very strange Territory. Right. I'd love to know what experiments you know, if you could wave a magic wand, or if you just had a pet. Billionaire. Who would fund Whatever you thought was worth funding, what type of experiments

would you like to see or do any experiments come to mind that you would like to see You would love to see done. In the next five, ten years. The magic wand I I would

The the stuff I'm working on. We need to just be funded for the next ten years to really get the mathematics worked out of this third consciousness. But for in terms of experiments that could be done right now, my take would be I would Go to Nima Arkani Hamed.

Institute for events study Princeton's sake. Here's all the money you want. Wha what experiments do you want to do because you're the one who's actually telling us how to go beyond space time. What do we need to do to go beyond space time and really understand the structures behind there? So he's He's got some ideas. Reps still is.

sort of the lead on a new collider that was gonna be built in China. I don't know what's happening on that. So I would say So of the most beneficial experiments we could do right now are the ones that really help us push beyond our current space time. understanding and really go into

the structures that are beyond space talk. That's gonna be our our best bet. I mean the kinds of stuff That I would do I think as as a neuroscientist and so forth are They're incremental, but uh his stuff would be transformational. On my part, I think we we have to just go after the mathematical modelling and then try to tie it into the structures that they're finding. I think that's the best way for science to

to move forward in the in the quickest way. On this. I'm gonna ask a totally unrelated question. Thank you for that. I did finally I I found I'll just I'll just read it for folks. So Nimar Kanihammed N I M A

Next word A R K A N I A M E D, American Canadian Physicist. I will be looking into this gentleman. Also, the older I get, the more I'll view other people as young. But he's done a lot. He's forty nine. I mean he's he's really he's gotten a lot done. Wow. Very impressive. Brilliant and hard working. What are you reading?

these days or what do you have on deck. Could be something that you've finished Reading something you're working on currently something that you're looking forward to digging into. I'm just curious what Yeah. What your information diet looks like these days.

Several different fronts. One is on on the very technical front, so I'm I'm studying some information theory and the s the entropy, conditional entropy and so forth. And then you know the Poincare group. And irreducible representation of the Plancrey group to see if I can't show how space time Emerges

From these conditional probability projections of the dynamics of consciousness. So the idea is that consciousness has this dynamics that has no arrow of time. There's no change in entropy. Anytime you look at that dynamics from a perspective, but using conditional probability You get an a an arrow of entropy, but different ways of looking at it

will give you different entropic rates. So the rates will change depending on how you How you condition? I would like to show that I could get A group of transformations of the these entropies That

Then give me back the Point Correct group. For example. That would be Again it wouldn't prove I'm right, but it would at least prove That

We have a theory that's compatible. with what we know that can actually map into space time. Tremendous. So I'm looking at technical stuff on Markov chains. information theory and and of course the the related physics on this. I'm also in a completely different direction. Because I feel like when we're studying consciousness on its own terms

There's very few of us. As scientists. who are trying to study consciousness on its own terms. So I'm not trying to think of consciousness as some you know, how does Neural activity would give rise to consciousness. And so forth.

I'm asking what is consciousness Ponsciousness. I want a scientific theory of consciousness. It doesn't assume A physical world as the foundation. At all.

Sounds very difficult. It absolutely is. You have to just like reboot everything without all the props that we've had of space and time. So what do you want in a mathematical model Of consciousness. Now As I mentioned, I published that paper, um, objects of consciousness a few years ago.

And people can can read what we have there. But I realize that I should listen to various spiritual traditions.

But no Spiritual traditions are a mixed bag. Right? Yes. I have no doubt that many practitioners have had deep insights. And then I have no doubt that many of the things that they say are dogmatic nonsense. And the question is how to separate The two, right?

Part of it is that They have had insights, but without the scientific technique. of writing down mathematically precise theories and then testing them, you just can't make progress, even if your insights are deep and correct. You can't take them and evolve them. Very far.

If you're just using words, you have to use mathematics and then make testable predictions. And so I'm reading Not the Well, I mean I I've I've read the Bible. And that's a mixed bag.

So I'd get some insights from that. I Had a chance to talk with the Dalai Lama? And give a talk to him and and get some Interaction with with him?

And I'm reading Ecartola. And uh Rupert Spira. Who is Rupert Spira? Rupert Spira. S P I R A. Rupert Spira. Who is that? I just I don't recognize that one. He's a a spiritual teacher from England. And I've run across him, uh had a chance to have breakfast with him. Up in San Jose, there's a

Science and Non Duality Conference. That I've gone to many times. It's called Science and Non Duality, meets once a year. Until sort of uh you know, it got messed up with Covid, but It'll probably r restart. And there, you know, th they bring together scientists and and people from spiritual traditions to have a a dialogue, which I found

Very, very useful. So again, my attitude is As a scientist I don't think any of our current scientific theories are correct. Including my own?

I think A century from now we'll all look back. And look at our current theories like we look at Newton's theory. It was great for its time. But it was time to move on. And I think all of scientific theories will be the same way. So I have the same attitude about even the spiritual teachers and the way they think about what they've experienced.

On the other hand, I think it's important for me as a scientist To listen very carefully. are doing they seem to have explored in ways that perhaps I and other scientists have not. And can I get insight. So I

I'm spending time reading, you know, Eckhart Tola's books and Rupert Spira and and just Again. Taking everything with a grain of salt. But but I don't want to just ignore this. I want to really think about it deeply as I try to get a mathematical model. Yeah, I wonder if you know, as you're talking about this, I wonder I'm just thinking about the convergence of Spiritual practice not just

the saturation of religion, but let's just say practises and mathematics I mean, just offhand and this could be completely misguided, I'm wondering If There have been any

pairings of mathematicians and spiritual practitioners in, say, India. I mean, there's such a strong certainly millennia long a set of traditions related to deep practices of various types, but also mathematics. I mean you have a you have an incredible Well, I wanna say tradition, but y you do have a historical record of of outstanding mathematicians out of out of India as well. I know two of them.

I am very, very lucky to count them among my longtime collaborators. So Chaitan Prakash? And Manish Singh. These guys are mathematical geniuses. And with also deep

spiritual understanding, they have their own spiritual purposes. And Shaitan has worked with me for over thirty years and Manish for almost thirty. My superior. He's absolutely brilliant. These so these any mathematical savvy in our papers is not due to me. It's due to them.

And perhaps any spiritual salvy is also due to them. So I don't know what I do. But but anyway, these guys are joint. And also I was very fortunate to work with a gentleman named Yeah, he wasn't. Indian, he he was Jewish. Bruce Bennett. He was just

A flat out genius mathematician with with also deep spiritual Understanding of eastern spiritual traditions, I think, informed his stuff. So I've I've been around, I've been fortunate to be and to collaborate with these brilliant mathematicians. So I agree, absolutely. So as you I I'd love to just know as you're reading from these religious and spiritual texts, whether it's scripture like the Bible

Or Any other source. How do you pull from that? Like what is your kind of filtering mechanism? Could you give any Examples.

Right, because I I think that there are There are people who can Hold on. the let's just call it kind of rationalist Mathematical

faculties while simultaneously having Faith based. religion or spiritual practices. They don't have to be faith based. I mean you could be a a mystic, uh, with direct experience. It's very different though to integrate those things. You can have those two things coexist in you.

but some would view them as antithetical to one another, right? So how do you how do you filter? And d are there any examples that come to mind of things you've pulled from spiritual practices and look to port over into the scientific. A couple of things. One From the Upanishads.

There's the saying Not that which the eye sees. But that whereby the eye can see. Note that alone to be Brahma, the eternal, and not what people here adore. Not that which the ear hears, but

But that whereby the ear can hear. Know that alone to be Brahma the eternal nut. But people. but that whereby the mind can think. Know that to be.

So there's this distinction between Pure awareness. versus the contents of awareness. And When I

realized that they were making that distinction. I look back at my math and I realized that when I was writing down these Mathematical models Consciousness. They're probabilistic models. And you have to write down When you do that, you have to write down a probability space.

So there's just this thing. It's this timeless thing. Probability space. And then you have the dynamics. occurring on that space.

So The mathematics itself also models the There's this Pure awareness beyond time. Beyond the dynamics.

That's the what I call the probability space. And then there is the dynamical system. of the contents that appear and disappear. within that system. So I realized that There is this

Really interesting. correspondence between the kinds of things that they're saying There's pure awareness and in some sense they'll say What you are is not any of your contents. You're not your body. You're not

The sound of your voice, your not your possessions None of that stuff is you. You are the pure awareness and and the pure awareness is what survives death, but not necessarily any content. That does seem to correspond pretty well with some of the mathematics that that I w wrote down just because I had to write it down that way. Th that's just what you do when you write down the mathematics. And so so I I find these kind of correspondences Really interesting and I want to

pursue them further. The other one th that I think is really interesting is the insistence. You get this in many of the spiritual traditions, but I see it really clearly like when Eckhart Tola is explaining these things. In his books like A New Earth and uh The Power of Now and and so forth. He points out that

Thinking. is not a very deep intelligence compared to The realm of our reality beyond thought. So in these spiritual traditions, one of the things you do in meditation is you let go of thought. Completely.

Yeah. Any thoughts that come up you Don't fight them, but you don't Give them a new Space.

Do you they can let them go? The point that they make is That as you do that. And it may take you years to really

You are getting in touch with An infinite intelligence. That is much, much deeper than any thought intelligence. And in fact is the source of all intelligence that

If that's right, that that also makes sense from this Girdles incompleteness theorem point of view that I've been taking on on this. That is that consciousness There's no description of it, including any conceptual thought description that we can give. That even scratches the surface of the depths that Girdle's incompleteness theorem says is there. So I see this correspondence again between So there's this really interesting thing.

We need thought. Without words. We wouldn't have this This conversation, right? Hard to podcast. Very difficult. Hard to podcast with so so it's not like words are bad and concepts are bad. The question is how what is the relationship between conceptual systems and this intelligence that transcends any conceptual system? That's the really interesting the spiritual traditions will say it's a pointer relationship. I'm using

The word aware is a pointer. Of course, the word aware don't take it too seriously. You can also call it consciousness, whatever, but don't take the pointer too seriously. And then some pointers are really bad, right? So we have this notion of good and bad pointers. So as a scientist, I go now that's really interesting. What do we mean mathematically by a good pointer versus a bad pointer? Can we actually Take these ideas and make them more rigorous. So so for example

I'll just give a really simple concrete idea of The real numbers. The real line, you know, the from minus infinity to infinity. So that's a lot of numbers.

I'm the mathematician, but it sounds like a lot of numbers. It's a lot of numbers, right? And now just the integers from Minus infinity to infinity. Well There's between zero and one. There's a whole bunch of real numbers, right? So there's there's a sense in which the integers are a very good

approximation to the real numbers. There's so many real numbers between zero and one. Zero is not really telling me anything about the integers between zero and one. So You could say that the integers are a pointer to the real numbers But it's it's a really bad Pointer. But now take the rational numbers. A rational number is an integer divided by an integer.

So we just take any two integers. You get a ratio. Those are called the rational numbers. And it turns out that the rational numbers What mathematicians call dense. in the real numbers. You can approximate

A real number As close as you want. With rational numbers. But not with integers. Now it turns out there's just as many

Rational numbers as there are integers. This sounds crazy. So the number of integers equals the number of rational numbers. The integers are a bad pointer to the real numbers, but the rational numbers are a good pointer to the real numbers. They can approximate them. So this is the kind of thing

Can we take the spiritual idea that What we are There's an infinite intelligence that cannot be captured by any Finite conceptual system language, for example. Speech, thought.

We have this notion of good Bad and worse pointers. Can we make this idea, which has been for thousands of years in the spiritual traditions, can we now, you know, dust it off and make it serviceable in a more rigorous way? Can we actually take

Spirituality. And turn it into A scientific discipline. Which is not to desiccate it and deprive it of of its life. But to make it precise and and make it actually

Serviceable. Actually make predictions. I would love to. My father was a minister in a Protestant fundamentalist church. The sermon, the guy gets up and his sermon is guess what we just discovered mathematically about spirituality this week? You won't believe it. Here's this new theorem about spirituality. Sign me up. I would love to go to a church like that where the you know they're telling you the new discoveries, you know, where rigorous discoveries about good pointers to, you know, here's here's how to think about consciousness, here's a better way to do your meditation. And we now have this mathematics to explain why you should do it this way and not that way. I would just love that kind of thing. And I think that

science and spirituality eventually could Collaborate. Now question for you, would spirituality not at that point cease to be a useful term, in so much as If spirituality is

And please feel free to disagree with the wording, but An attempt To describe With

These sort of clumsy Imprecise labels. glimpses somehow, if we if we look at the mystic traditions, mystical traditions into this Fabric beyond Space time.

Like by the time they converge, we will have the the tools and the mathematics to obviate the need for this word spirituality. Is that nonsense that I'm spouting? I think that's a very natural question. And my attitude is that Science itself.

Is in the same boat. Science will never have a theory of everything. And science will always as as Newton put it. Newton described near the end of his life, he described himself as A little boy on the seashore.

Amusing himself with a little shell. Or a pebble. When The vast ocean of truth lay unexplored all before him. I think that's exactly right. And that's the right attitude the science should have is that

No matter how far we get with our scientific theories We have to understand That we will always be Playing with pebbles on the seashore. Just like Newton was. At least Newton.

Was smart enough to understand that. Yeah. He was And so the fact that the spiritual people are also just playing with pebbles on the seashore, but they're pointing to the ocean beyond and saying it's it's it's beyond conception. That's why I think the notion of the pointers is really important.

Good pointers versus bad pointers. We can never get a theory. Yeah. But If the spiritual traditions are right and if conscious realism is right, Even though you can't

Get a theory of it. You can know it by being it. You can't No that infinite intelligence through your conceptual analysis, you can get good pointers to it, and science can help us get good pointers.

But you can only deeply know it by actually letting go of But And being it. But then

As a scientist. You can go there and be it. And then come back. With the goods. In your own conceptual system

And make progress in your science. And that's where I see this possibly going, scientists would actually learn Once we let go of our physicalism. Would learn actually how we as scientists are that infinite intelligence. But our conceptual

Tools are inadequate. So we have to go into that infinite intelligence. In pure silence. And then learn how to come back and take Whatever insights we

I've gotten into Terms that we can actually write down to mathematics. And we go back and forth that way. So that's where I see science and spirituality eventually going. So it's gonna require a scientist to actually be not only a master of mathematics and the theories, but also a master of letting go of s of of thought And actually going into the deep intelligence if this whole approach is correct.

How much pushback slash blowback criticism have you had to deal with from the scientific community for bringing The S word spirituality into the fold of conversation. Have you experienced that or have you not run really run into it? My colleagues have have treated me very well, I s I think. As a scientist, I

Absolutely not only expect, but request. Hard nose pushback. That's I mean I'll be the first to say that my theory of conscious agents is probably wrong. So And I should just to confirm that before we started recording, you're like the more you push back, the better. Like Love it. Hard hard questions. That's my job is to contend with that. So just wanted to confirm that.

So please continue. Yeah, th that's right. So I I'm not interested in my own dogmatism at all. I I I I would like to be disabused of my own mistakes as quickly as possible. And when my colleagues What I usually talk with them about is not so much the spiritual side of things

But more evolution of a natural selection. entails that physicalism is false. I mean we have to get over that hump before we even get anywhere near spirituality. So that's where I've really pushed with my colleagues and I'm getting good feedback and and good pushback of the kind that I would hope. So there's um a team at Yale, for example. Yeah. are trying to defend realism. They're trying to use evolution by natural selection. They're looking at the simulations we've done and and the mathematics we've done. They're trying to find Conditions in which

systems could evolve to see the truth. If there were the truth. And so we're having a very profitable Back and and forth on that. And My own attitude Yeah,

It's no surprise that you can find certain conditions. In evolutionary theory. In which under those special conditions yeah. Organisms could see the truth. The thing will be that they are probability zero.

So if you are going to bet. You know you would not bet on them. So and and that's a whole other discussion. I'll just say one thing about it and it has to do with Their approach is if you have lots and lots of fitness payoff functions. And you force the

organism to only See the world as a unified whole. You can't carve it up. then in that special condition with with many thousands of payoff functions, they're coming very, very quickly. You can't adapt to any payoff function, and so the truth is what you sort of default to.

So that's great. I'm grateful to them for for doing that. What we've shown is that if you allow An organism

To cluster the payoff functions. into similar payoff functions so that you can sort of take these fifty payoff functions are roughly the same, so we will just make one Pay off function for all of them. I'm probably very simplistically viewing fitness payoff function as successful reproduction. other payoff functions be.

If I'm not totally misunderstanding it. You understand correctly. Evolutionary theory has been turned into a mathematics called evolutionary game theory. And in evolutionary game theory, what you do is you set up a game where players have different strategies. And when one strategy interacts with another strategy, it will get a payoff.

a dollar amount or something that it gets. For then so for each strategy interacting with another strategy, you have what you you get a matrix of these payoffs that you get for strategy interacting. You have rules for accruing points effectively. That's right. And the more points you get, if you get more points than the competition, then you have a greater chance of reproducing effectively than the competition. Those are the payoff. So you have these payoff functions. So when you mathematize

evolution financial selection, you get these payoff functions. And Yes, if you If you love an organism now that's dealing with thousands of payoffs and we do. We have thousands of payoffs that we have to deal with.

But if you can group them, cluster them into these These actions with these payoffs You have roughly the same payoff. So let let me make what I call an object out of them. So what we call visual objects or or physical objects

Are merely data structures. By which we sort of put together a bunch of payoff functions together so that we can just use that as a shorthand for if I if I have an Apple You can bite it. You can eat it.

I I wouldn't do other things with it, you know, I I wouldn't try to drink it. Right. I I wouldn't try to mate with it. So there are certain payoffs you're not gonna get from an apple. With a stick. Right. I mean I can beat someone with it, but I wouldn't want to eat it and I wouldn't try to drink it. So different objects will have different payoffs. And so Well, we've shown in our simulations just in the last couple of weeks, so this is just brand new.

So this is in response to the team at Yale. We found that what they did was correct. But as soon as you let Organisms Cluster the payoff functions into objects.

Then you get far more payoff. For not seeing the truth. You make these fake objects which are just data structures for the fitness payoffs. And so once again we we actually then see where objects come from.

They come not as representations of the truth, but as mere conveniences for representing payoffs. Don this has been tremendously fascinating. I could certainly continue with many questions for many hours, perhaps another time, perhaps a round two. Yeah. Is there anything else you'd like to say? Anything else you would like to mention? Before we bring this first conversation to a close. I think the thing I would highlight, we've talked about it before, but I would highlight it at at the very end.

And that is The nature of science. Good scientists understand that we will never have a theory of everything. When they talk about a theory of everything, it's with a a wink and a nod. The science is a never ending process of getting deeper and deeper theories, but each theory

Always makes assumptions. And As scientists It's not our duty to believe our theories, it's our duty To

Study theories. Really understand them thoroughly. And then try to break them. The point is to break your theory. When you can break your theory When you find its limits

That's when you break out the champagne because that's when you're going to go to the next step. And Girdle's incompleteness theorem tells us That this process will never end. So there is job security. Go to science. Job security. I love that. Well

Done. People can find you on Twitter at Donald D Hoffman. You you have a fantastic Twitter feed. You you really share quite a bit in terms of references and articles and so on. That's Donald D. Hoffman. Hoffman H O F F M A N And it has been uh so much fun to have you on and to have this conversation. I appreciate you taking the time. It was a great pleasure, Tim. Thank you so much. And for everybody listening, we will add uh copious and detailed

Links in the show notes as per usual at Tim Dotblog. Slash podcast. And until next time, thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

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