Donald Hoffman: Reality is an Illusion

Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview.txt

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs1xv0ZEN-U


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{BATGAP theme music plays} >>Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening
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people, and also people who have some expertise in the field of consciousness and very often
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the field of science and how it interrelates with consciousness or spirituality.
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I've done well-over hundreds of these now and if this is new to you and you'd like to listen to previous ones, please go to www.batgap.com, b-a-t-g-a-p, and click under the �Past Interviews'
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menu, where you will see all the previous ones archived.. This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers,
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so if you appreciate it and feel like helping to support it, there's a �PayPal' button on every page of the site, and if you don't like PayPal, there is a �Donate' button
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link where you can check out other ways of helping. My guest today is Donald Hoffman.
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>>Donald: Thank you very much, Rick, good to be here. >>Rick: Yeah, good to have you.
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Donald Hoffman received a Ph.D. from MIT and is a professor of cognitive sciences at the
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University of California, Irvine. He is the author of over 120 scientific papers and 3 books, including The Case Against Reality:
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Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, which I've been reading this week. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association
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for early career research, the Rustum Roy Award of The Chopra Foundation, and the Troland
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Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, LA Review of Books, and Edge,
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and his work has been featured in Wired, Quanta, The Atlantic, Ars Technica, National Public
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Radio, Discover Magazine, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has a Ted Talk titled, "Do We See Reality As It Is?"
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So, Don, I've spent a really enjoyable week � I often say this but this week was really
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great! � listening to many, many hours of your various interviews and talks and reading most
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of your book. And you know, I just want to say to those who are watching this interview that if you
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find this interview a little challenging in terms of the technicalities we get into and
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all, and the concepts that are expressed, hang in there because you'll grow a lot of brain cells if you really sort of try to understand what we're saying here, and I think it's very
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relevant to spirituality, which is what most of the people watching this show are interested
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in. So that will become clearer as we go along. Um, Don, in one of your interviews I heard you say that you've been practicing meditation
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for 17 years, kind of an average of 3 hours a day, or so.
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My first question is: Do you feel that meditation practice in some way informed or inspired
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the work you do professionally? >>Donald: Well I think it does in the sense that it opens you up to noncerebral ways of
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experiencing the world, and recognizing that reason and logic have their place but they
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also at times need to be set aside and be open to reality just as it is, without a filter
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of thoughts and concepts. And I find it an extremely healing process, to be in silence, and to be with what is without
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concepts. And it's also I think a very relaxing kind of process, so that just in a practical way
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with everyday life, you know, all of us with our jobs there's stress and lots of hard work,
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and you know, dealing with the stress and dealing with destressing is an important daily
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practice to stay healthy and to also be at our peaks. So I found that it's really useful in a variety of ways: spiritual growth but even just as
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simple as destressing. >>Rick: Absolutely! Um, I was impressed with the fact that you didn't actually learn a formal practice of
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any sort, you just sort of did it on your own and yet, you know, you're doing it 3 hours a day and at times you were doing it 6 hours a day and it really seems to work for you.
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I think if I had tried to learn meditation just on my own � in fact, I did try in various ways before I formally learned � but I think my mind would have just wandered and I would
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have ended up not knowing what I was doing. So I was kind of impressed that you just took to it like a fish in water and seemed to have
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really done well with it (chuckles). >>Donald: Well, for me it's not about rules; it's a new form of exploration.
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It's an exploration without concepts but it is � and I view it almost like an experimentalist.
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It's like saying, "Okay, I'm not going to be put in any box.
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I will listen, of course, to everybody. I'm very, very open to people who've had far more experience than me will have insights
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that I can learn from and so I will try that, and I also suspect that what works in this
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moment might not work in 10 minutes." It's really an open exploration but unusual in the sense that it's not about reason and
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concept and logic; it's about exploring, being emotional, and being with what it.
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>>Rick: Yeah. Do you have times during your meditation where you seem to enter a state of deep transcendence,
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where there's actually no thoughts and mental activity and yet you're awake or aware or
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maybe even there's a sense of vastness or unboundedness? >>Donald: Definitely many times which there's deep silence and sometimes it's attached with
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emotion, with, you know, something profound. More often than not it's just deep silence and a sense of peace, and also a sense of
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letting go, at deeper and deeper levels. The way it really feels to me is that my entire personality is being restructured.
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>>Rick: Hmm, hmm. >>Donald: It's not a minor palliative; it's from the ground up, a complete restructuring
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of the personality. It's ... the best analogy I can think of for me, in terms of my own experience of it is,
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it's much like, well, I could imagine it's like for a caterpillar going through metamorphosis
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to become a butterfly. On the science side, it turns out that the immune cells of the caterpillar bite the cells
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that are responsible for transforming it. >>Rick: The imaginal cells. >>Donald: That's right.
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And so ... but eventually, the immune cells of the caterpillar get overwhelmed, and then
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much of the structure of the caterpillar gets liquified. Now that cannot be pleasant, right!
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That cannot be pleasant, you know, liquefaction while you're still alive, and then having those raw materials be turned into something else that you have no prior concept [of] � how
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could a caterpillar know what it means to fly and how to be a butterfly? And that's what I feel.
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It's just, I'm a caterpillar, and often in the meditation, my own caterpillar immune
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cells are resisting like crazy, but eventually I let go at a deeper level and a deeper level
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of transformation takes place and I come out of it a different person. And I'm still enough of a caterpillar that I really don't know what's going on, but I
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do know that whatever it is it's profound and it's humbling. It's humbling to my scientific conceptual systems and so forth, and it challenges me
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as a scientist to eventually try to come up with a deeper conceptual system that might help me understand what's going on.
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>>Rick: That's a great metaphor. I can totally relate to it. I used to do a lot of long meditation retreats, especially back in the 70s, you know, sometimes
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for 6 weeks or even 6 months, and there would be, kind of, that resistance thing where you think, "God!
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I don't want to sit here any longer. I gotta get up and go for a walk. I gotta watch something or eat something," but you just stick to it and after a while,
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you feel like, well, there's the caterpillar analogy and I've used the one of Jell-O; it's like you feel like freshly poured Jell-O that could be formed into any mold.
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And so on those courses, we would actually come down from our meditation very, very slowly,
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carefully, so as to sort of coalesce the personality again into a functional form.
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And there were a couple of occasions where I came down too quickly and it took me months to integrate.
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I felt like that Star Trek thing where they get beamed up, but they don't get totally beamed up, and they're sort of in this half-beamed and half not-beamed � it took a while to
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get balanced! {Irene heard in the background} Yeah, my wife says I'm still half-beamed! (laughter) >>Donald: Yeah, I completely understand that.
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It's very difficult because we have the perspective of the caterpillar. I mean, we're starting to get a little bit of the butterfly, but I don't think I have
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that much of the butterfly; mostly of the caterpillar, and so it's resisting quite a bit of time.
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And you know what's striking to me too is, I've spent a lot of hours and still, I have
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no idea how far along in the process of transformation I am. You know, as far as I know, I'm only 1% through � as far as I know!
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You know, it could be a very, very profound transformation that's going on. >>Rick: Yeah. I think that's a good attitude.
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I think that if one has kind of a static terminus point in mind, one might mistakenly feel one
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has reached it or something and you know, rest on one's laurels. I think it's good to have an open-ended attitude of like, "Well, this is an ongoing process
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and I'm just going to keep at it and ..." you know? >>Donald: I agree. >>Rick: Yeah.
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>>Donald: I agree that that's what it really is about: It's not about arriving, it's about
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being good with the process, and the same thing I think is true of science. And here's where the science has actually helped me on this because as I've done more
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and more science I realize that, you know, I greatly respect current scientific theories,
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I think they're fabulous and they can explain a lot, and I think that each of them � even
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our best theories � is profoundly wrong in deep ways that need to be addressed.
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And my own guess is this: that we'll get new scientific theories that address those problems,
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and then have new ones. And I think that even science itself is an endless ... we're not going to get the final
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static theory of everything; we're going to have this endless exploration.
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And that's part of the deal, is being good with not having arrived but being good with
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being in the process all the time and being open to, in some sense, the excitement, the
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pleasure, the discovery of going where you don't know you're going to go.
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>>Rick: Yeah, again, sort of hints of Star Trek there! >>Donald: That's right!
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>>Rick: Yeah. Another thing I listened to in one of the interviews � you were being interviewed
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by Sam and Annika Harris. Sam Harris was sort of gently encouraging you to try psychedelics, and I'd like to gently
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encourage you not to, not that I haven't tried them, you know, back in the 60s. But you know, I interviewed Michael Pollan who wrote How to Change Your Mind and one
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of the metaphors he uses is of shaking the snow globe. And he sort of argues that you know, you're in middle age and you're getting kind of um,
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calcified in your orientation to life and maybe it'd be good to shake up the snow globe
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and sort of like see things afresh. But I think that somebody who is doing a regular practice, like you are, has been shaking the
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snow globe a reasonable amount on a regular basis and there's no need to shake the hell
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out of it, you know? It's working for you. You're in pretty good shape, why play Russian roulette with your brain?
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>>Donald: That's ... I agree with the Russian roulette thing, and of course, Sam and others that I've talked to will assure me that it's pretty low risk there and the payoff is higher.
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I haven't done it, I have no plans to do it, partly just for health reasons.
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And you know, as I get older I'm less inclined to mess with things because the resilience
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of the body to bounce back becomes less as we get older, and you know, I'm already way
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out there anyway, so yeah. >>Rick: And of course, you know, speaking of older people doing it, they have used psilocybin
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with cancer patients on their death beds and it's been a great solace to them and so on, so those things have their purposes, I'm not dismissing them entirely, but I think it's
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a ... I don't know, I just have this attitude of "safety first" and not shaking things up
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in ways where you might not know the outcome. >>Donald: Right, yes, yes.
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I certainly understand and I haven't taken them ... >>Rick: You've never smoked a cigarette or been drunk either, so that's great!
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>>Donald: Right, right, yeah! Well, my dad was a smoker for much of my early life, so I did enough passive smoking to make
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me realize that it wasn't for me. I probably have enough lung damage just from that, so I didn't inflict my own.
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But I do, you know, I understand the perspective of those who say being shaken up that way
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can really open up your mind to new ideas and possibilities that you might not have
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had otherwise. And out of respect for that, I do read the written experiences of people who have done
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this and are very, very good at expressing where it's taken them and also explaining
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where the language fails. And so I do want to gain those insights.
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So I'm not dismissive of it but there is, as you say, this balance between opening up to new insights and keeping the brain cells that you've got.
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>>Rick: Yeah. Oh and believe me, if you were to do it, you know, high dose, you'd be astounded, but whether
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that would be conducive to your evolution in the most assured and safe fashion is debatable.
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Anyway, here are some discussion points I thought we might cover today. Let me read them to you and perhaps you'll suggest some others that you feel are essential.
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One is that consciousness is fundamental, it's all there is. You often say, "Space-time is doomed; there's a more primordial ground," so we can get into
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that. Another is, "We do not see the world as it is, we see a user interface.
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Evolution shaped our perceptions to hide the truth and guide adaptive behavior, it favors long life and procreation."
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And I think it'd be interesting to get into the word �evolution' a little bit because
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in spiritual circles it's used in a different sense than the Darwinian sense.
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Another is the whole �science and religion' topic.
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Just this morning I was listening to a conversation you had with your fundamentalist Christian minister father and I thought it was fascinating.
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Another is the question of free will. And besides those four, are there any key points that you think you'd really like to
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cover today? >>Donald: Those are the big ones, and of course there's lots of details that we can go into on those, but I'm happy to go where you want.
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>>Rick: Yeah, good. We'll see where we end up going and probably people will send in some questions that might
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take us to other places. So let's start with the first one, consciousness being fundamental, not only being fundamental
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but actually being all there is, and the notion that space-time is doomed, and that consciousness
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is a more primordial ground than space-time itself. Let's play with that for a while.
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I'll let you go ahead and start with it. >>Donald: Right. I'll start with the space-time is doomed part, which is quite fascinating.
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Various spiritual traditions have said that for a long time, that space-time and what
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we call the physical world isn't fundamental. It's maya, or an illusion, or whatever.
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And scientists and physicists for the last 3 centuries, at least, since Newton certainly,
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and before, have assumed that space-time is fundamental.
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Physics has been about what happens in space and time, or space-time. And it's been great, right?
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You know, there's no denying the success of Newtonian physics and then Einstein's special
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and general relativities and quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, which is the quantum
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fields are defined over space and time. So it's been enormously successful, and the very ability that we have right now to use
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the Internet and microphones and all this stuff, is testament to the astounding success
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of that scientific paradigm, and yet, I think it's deeply false and physicists themselves
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are coming to that conclusion, not on spiritual grounds, on technical scientific grounds.
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And the phrase space-time is doomed is not mine; it's from physicists themselves.
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Ed Winton has said that (he won the Fields Medal for Mathematical work in physics), David
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Gross has said that (he won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum theory), and Nima
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Arkani-Hamed, who is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Physics at Princeton,
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is saying that. And people can Google � if you Google "space-time is doomed," you can actually see videos from
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Nima where he explains precisely. Some of them are for a broad audience, so I highly recommend him.
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He's got some very nice videos that are accessible to a broad audience, but I'll summarize the
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idea: You cannot within space-time make certain measurements that physicists want to make.
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Quantum mechanics and Relativity theory entail that if you wanted to measure things smaller
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and smaller and smaller ... so I like to look down at my hand and see the cells of my skin
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and my hand, and then go and look at the chemicals inside them, and then go down and look at the atoms, and then look down at the quarks, and so I would just get a bigger and bigger
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microscope to look smaller and smaller and smaller. And in principle, you would think, "Well I should just be able to keep looking smaller
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and smaller and smaller. And it turns out that within our current frameworks of quantum mechanics and gravity there is
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a fundamental limit. The very notion of space, space-time, ceases to make sense, it ceases to be empirically
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to make anything that you could measure. Right there it is in principle not measurable down beyond roughly 10 to the minus 43 centimeters
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� what's called the Plank scale. So it's not that there are pixels of space-time, it's that space-time itself ceases to be a
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sensible concept. So one argument that they'll make � Nima and the others will make � is that what
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we've learned in our sciences is a concept that in principle can't be subject to experiment
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you know, there's nothing that you can do to measure it � is not fundamental. It is only approximate, it's only emergent from something else.
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So that's one reason that they give. And the reason why you can't measure it .... I should just mention why you can't measure
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it; it turns out that as you measure smaller and smaller you need to use more and more
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energy. It's much like if I want to use a light microscope and to resolve finer and finer things I have
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to use light with a smaller and smaller wavelength because you need smaller wavelengths of light
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to see smaller details. If you have really big wavelengths of light then you can't resolve small details.
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Well, it turns out that the energy of the light increases with the wavelength.
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As the wavelength gets smaller, the energy goes out. So the problem is when you get down to around 10 to the minus 43 centimeters, the energy
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involved is so much in such a small area, that you create a black hole.
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You literally destroy the very thing that you're trying to measure ... >>Rick: Including yourself, I should think, if you create a black hole!
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>>Donald: Well, I would stay far away! I wouldn't be in the room, it's bad for your health.
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And if you say, "Well, look, I'll just try to look even more closely, maybe if I add more energy I can get past that barrier."
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No. What happens is as you add more energy to try and look smaller and smaller and smaller, the black hole just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, so the problem gets worse.
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So that's in some sense one reason, perhaps from the physicists' point of view, the most
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obvious and most sort of trivial reason why space-time can't be fundamental, but it's
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a real reason. A second reason is that in quantum theory you have to separate the universe into the
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observer who is observing, and the rest of the world, and a particular system that you're
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looking at. And we have this saying in quantum physics that's very, very famous, that you only get
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statistics, right? You only get probabilities, you can't get the position, the momentum exactly, that you can only get probabilities and so forth.
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So already it means that to get the probabilities exact, you have to do an infinite number of measurements, right?
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And we don't have an infinite amount of time, so already there's a fundamental limit, once
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again, to what we can measure in space-time because we can only do a finite number of
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measurements. Now in practice that's not a very, very big deal. We can say, "Look, we can get to 10 to the 50 decimal places," whatever you want, you
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know, there's plenty, but there's an even more deep reason that they bring up and that
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is that the measuring instrument itself is a quantum mechanical instrument; it's got
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its own uncertainties, its own fluctuations, and to minimize those you have to keep increasing
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the degrees of freedom of that system, essentially, in fact, to infinity. You have to have an infinite measuring apparatus to get an absolutely precise measurement in
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space, space-time, and once again, for a couple reasons you can't do that.
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If you're in a room and you try to make a measurement in a room, as you make your apparatus bigger and bigger with more degrees of freedom, eventually, once again, you're going to collapse
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and make a black hole, so once again you have this problem.
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And they'll point out that with the universe as a whole now we've discovered that it's
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not only expanding, but the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that
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imposes a fundamental finiteness on our universe.
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We're seeing all that we could ever see, and things are going off our cosmic horizon and
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there are objects that are disappearing in the sense that we, well, let's put it this way ... >>Rick: We'll never catch up with them because
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the speed of light has its limitation and those things are starting to ... they're expanding too fast.
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>>Donald: Yeah. Actually, because space is expanding, galaxies that are very, very far away from us are literally
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moving away from us faster than the speed of light. We might see their light today, so we can see them, in fact, 97% of the galaxies that
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we can see we can never get to, even if we could go at the speed of light. >>Rick: Right, because of the rate of expansion.
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>>Donald: Yeah. It's this big expansion and that means that there's a fundamental finiteness to our universe,
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which means that in principle, quantum mechanics is telling us that we can't measure any ... there
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are not what they call "local observables" in space-time. There's nothing inside space-time that you can measure precisely, which means that space-time
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itself is just an approximate concept, and that's the mind-blowing thing for physicists,
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right? And they're very explicit about it, Nima's very explicit about it. He says, physics has been about what happens in space and time, so if space-time is not
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fundamental, it's not really clear what physics is about, so this is a big one. >>Rick: Yeah. I think there might be another reason, and maybe you're said this but let me put it in
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simple terms - and maybe you haven't � but spiritual traditions, if you read the Bhagavad
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Gita or whatever, and spiritual teachers throughout all the ages have all said that you can't
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really know the Self, the ultimate Self, one's true nature, by standing apart from it and
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observing it as we do with all other things because it is the observer.
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And so the only way it can be known is for, let's say as the Yoga Sutras say, for the
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fluctuations of the mind to diminish and then it becomes revealed unto itself, as a singularity,
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as it knows itself not as a separate object, but just be a sort of a unified self-recognition
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if you will. >>Donald: Yeah. >>Rick: And in a similar sense, if we're trying to sort of, let's say, "detect" the unified
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field with the old observer-process of observation-observed triad, we'll never do it because it's not
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an object that can be observed from afar, it subsumes or includes everything.
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And so it can't be known as a particle could be known, or any other thing that science
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observes. So the scientific method sort of melts at that point and objective observers can't function
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as such, at that level of observation, even if they had the tools to do so. >>Donald: Right.
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So I think that the physicists are to the point where they recognize that this separation
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between the observer and the observed is a problem and that it's leading to the kinds
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of problems that make it impossible to measure local observables inside space-time precisely.
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There are no such local observables. The state of play among them right now is that they're looking for deeper mathematical
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structures, so they're using mathematics as the flashlight into the dark behind space-time.
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Now we're going outside space-time, we're going into something that's, you know, science
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hasn't really gone there before and so it's not clear how to go, and so they're using the mathematics that we do have as a guide.
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I think that the spiritual traditions have some very, very good insights here that may
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eventually be very, very helpful, that the separation between the observer and the observed
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is fundamentally misguided. I myself, on the scientific side of things, have come to that conclusion in my own modeling
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of space-time itself. So most of us think of space-time, and most physicists have thought of space-time as this
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pre-existing stage, the ancient stage, 13.8 billion years old on which the drama of life
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and consciousness has played out, but that the stage was there before there was even any life, much less any consciousness, right?
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That's the standard big-bang cosmology, that at the big-bang there was only space-time
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and energy, and then matter, that there was no life and there was no consciousness, that those came hundreds of millions, billions of years later, and so consciousness from
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that point of view is not fundamental. But space-time is doomed, so that whole story has something deeply, deeply wrong with it.
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And from evolutionary arguments that we'll go into later, I've concluded that natural
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selection arguments entail that space-time is simply a � I use a computer science term
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� a data structure. It's just a data structure that we use to represent fitness payoffs.
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It's not separate from us. It's much like a headset, a virtual reality headset that we use.
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So space-time isn't separate from us, it's part of us. We create space-time and we create physical objects, so the separation between the observer
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and the observed, as the spiritual traditions have said, is false because in some sense
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there's an issue of what it is that's creating all this � the "I", or if you want to call it "the ego" that's creating all this � but the separation between what I call myself
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and space itself, and the sun and the moon and stars and my body, they're all equally
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just symbols that are just being created and none of them is separate from any other.
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They're all within one field, which itself is being created by me.
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>>Rick: Yeah. You know, so many spiritual traditions say that the ultimate reality is oneness � a
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totality, a wholeness that is indivisible, and that it appears to bifurcate and multiply
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into many, many, many parts, but if you get right down to the essence of it there's just
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a oneness or a wholeness or a unity, so the very word �space-time' is dualistic.
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You know, there's space which has what, 3 dimensions, and there's time which ... so it's a dualistic reality and a dualistic concept.
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And so if indeed the essence or the foundation or the ultimate reality of things is unified,
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then space-time has got to be an emergent property, it can't be ultimate. >>Donald: Right.
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And I would just mention, by the way, just to be clear, that since Einstein, at least
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relativistic theories, there's not been a duality between space and time. >>Rick: Right. >>Donald: They've not been dual.
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They've been merged into one structure called Minkowski's Space and it's a 4-dimensional
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unified structure, so we don't want people to dismiss what we're saying on those grounds.
33:00
>>Rick: That even then it has dimensions. >>Donald: It has dimensions, that's right. >>Rick: So that itself is diversified, to an extent.
33:09
>>Donald: Right. The duality between the observer and the thing observed, that duality is one quantum physicists,
33:18
like Nima, recognizes that it seems to be a source of huge problems. So there they would absolutely agree that that subject object duality is a big problem,
33:30
but they don't know yet how to use the tools of science to create a non-dualistic theory.
33:41
And you did raise the issue of, is this an indication of the limits of science, right?
33:50
And it's certainly an indication of limits of a certain idea about how science should
33:59
work, and in that idea, there is an objective observer and an objective external reality
34:14
with external objects that are completely separate from the observer, and these are
34:23
public objects, so, the moon � it's a public, physical object. You see the moon, I see the same moon, we have a touchstone of reality, and as a result,
34:34
I can make my measurements about the moon � it's position and momentum, you can make your measurements, and because we have this touchstone of an objective reality, the one
34:44
moon that we're both interacting with, we can then get verified experiments that test
34:51
our theories, and so forth. >>Rick: Yeah, we can both use a computer to predict eclipses for the next 10,000 years,
34:57
or whatever. >>Donald: Right. And then we can both look at exactly the same eclipse, the exact same physical object.
35:03
This is the idea of third-person science: there are real, public, physical objects in
35:09
a real space-time, and you and I both have access, not, of course, complete, but genuine
35:19
access to these real, physical objects, and so we can compare. I think that that framework is fundamentally wrong.
35:27
Space-time itself is not objective, the sun moon and stars and tables and chairs are simply
35:35
data structures that we create; it's like a virtual reality interface.
35:40
So like if you're playing virtual reality, a game, say some race car game in virtual
35:48
reality, and you're driving a race car and you've got a nice steering wheel in front
35:54
of you and you can see a green Mustang and a red Ferrari. And you have others... it's a multiplayer game, people around the world over the Internet
36:01
are playing with you and they all agree that, "Oh yeah, there's a green Mustang and a red Ferrari." Well, the fact that they all agree doesn't mean that there's any real green Mustang or
36:11
red Ferrari. The reality in this game is just, in this metaphor, it's just a supercomputer that's
36:16
feeding pixels to headsets and as a result of those pixels coming to your headset, your
36:23
own visual system creates a green Mustang, you create a red Ferrari. And when I look over there I see the green Mustang, when I look over there (looking away
36:30
from it, in the other direction) I destroy the green Mustang, there is no green Mustang, literally no green Mustang.
36:35
That Mustang only exists when I look, and I see it. It exists only as a form of my perception.
36:41
Now I look over here and I see the red Ferrari � it only exists as a form of my perception.
36:46
Even the headset only has pixels that are being flashed at me. In the objective reality, there is only the supercomputer.
36:53
So here's a case where we seem to have consensus. We can all say, "Oh yeah, the green Mustang is going 180 miles an hour, the red Ferrari
37:00
is only going 160 � it's going to lose." We can all agree we have this appearance of third-person perspectives and objective science
37:10
and so forth, and it's all an illusion, it's all subjective agreement. And so science, I think, will have to be re-understood.
37:20
There is no objective space-time, physical objects � there are no public, physical objects.
37:26
What we have to do is understand that the essence of science is understanding how we
37:33
seem to come to these kinds of subjective agreements, and the other aspect of science
37:39
is precision. There's a question about what makes science different from other forms of inquiry.
37:47
In the philosophy of science, this is called the demarcation problem: "what is it about science that might make it a better source of knowledge?" � if it is a better source
37:56
of knowledge. And it's been famously difficult. No one has been able to lay down a clean set of principles that demarcate good science
38:07
and scientific knowledge from everything else that's inferior, and so the idea that it's
38:15
about public, physical objects that we can all independently test, I think that idea is wrong.
38:21
I think the heart of science is really taking our ideas and trying to be precise in our
38:33
statement of the ideas so that others can figure out precisely why they're wrong.
38:40
It's this precision, with the goal being to state our ideas so precisely that we can figure
38:48
out where they're wrong and move on. So it's an anti-dogmatic attitude.
38:54
So the mathematical precision and an anti-dogmatic attitude, I view as really going hand in hand.
39:02
It's not about dodging and weaving and protecting my ideas, it's about saying, "These are the
39:07
best ideas we have so far. Of course, we're probably wrong, but let's be precise so that as quickly as possible
39:15
we can figure out where we're wrong," and that I think is a key aspect of science.
39:21
The other aspect is ... so non-dogmatism and precision, that's critical, and I think we
39:27
also want that ultimately in our spiritual explorations, right?
39:32
We of course want to go without concepts, without language, and just be with what is,
39:42
but when we step back from that we have ideas about what just happened, right?
39:51
I've had discussion with some spiritual leaders before and one said to me, "Rumi" - the famous
40:00
spiritual teacher, "Rumi said, �The language of God is silence, all else is poor translation.'"
40:10
And the idea was, science is necessarily not about silence, it's about writing down mathematical
40:21
theories and that's not the language of God, the language of God is silence. And so science is forever banned away, it's not going to be allowed to do this.
40:36
And my attitude is I would absolutely respect a mystic who said, "The language of God is
40:44
silence, all else is poor translation," and then being consistent and says nothing else.
40:50
And I'm not trying to be facetious, I mean I would absolutely respect that, you know? I meditate and I understand someone who meditates and then just says, "Do it for yourself,"
41:02
and leaves it at that. "Go explore yourself, I'm not going to try to tutor you," and then just remains in silence.
41:09
But that's not what spiritual traditions do, right? Hundreds, thousands of pages of writing.
41:17
So now my attitude is, if we're going to say something, we need to be humble about what
41:27
we're saying. My attitude is not, "I know the truth, I've been there, just listen to me and learn,"
41:37
it's rather, "I'm a fellow explorer just like you.
41:43
These are the best insights I think I've had from my journey. Of course they're fallible, of course I'm probably wrong.
41:52
Even though it was me in the experience, my interpretation of this is very, very fallible.
41:57
So let's work together, let's try" � this is now where scientific spirituality can be
42:02
very, very useful � "let's try to be as precise." I mean, by the way, no one has to do this.
42:08
If you don't want to do science of spirituality that's perfectly fine. Silence is perfectly fine, just go with it, but if we're going to talk, if we're going
42:17
to make statements, and we don't have to but if we're going to, then I think we have to
42:22
do it in utter humility, and that utter humility is a complete step away from any form of dogmatism
42:31
whatsoever, and a complete acknowledgment that everything that I think about my experience
42:38
could be wrong, that nothing that I believe � it is quite possible that nothing that I believe from my experience is anywhere near a good description.
42:49
And in that spirit, I write down as precisely as I can, hopefully with mathematical precision,
42:55
what it is I think that I'm saying. And then with that kind of precision, we're no longer trying to dodge and weave and protect
43:02
ourselves and, "This is my theory and no, you can't prove me wrong." It's rather this humble aspect of saying, "This, I think, as precisely as I can state,
43:13
what I learned from that spiritual experience, what do you think? ... Oh! It's different!
43:19
Wow, okay, that's wonderful! I'm glad that it's different, so now let's try to understand the difference," and that's what science is really about.
43:26
So it's not fundamentally about this observer and observed separation, and the reason why
43:34
I can say that is that the scientists themselves are realizing that their own scientific theories are teaching them that, right?
43:40
When these physicists say, "Wow! This separation that quantum mechanics is making between the system that's being observed
43:47
and the observer, it leads to these mathematical problems, therefore, that separation can't
43:53
be right!" That's what science is really about, it's the precision in stating our ideas so that
43:59
that we can learn that what we thought was science isn't science. The observer-observed distinction is not essential to science, what is essential is a humility
44:10
that expresses itself in precise statements that can be tested, and that other people
44:15
can say, "No, that's not what I see, here's why." So that's what I think the heart of science is, and if you look at it that way, then science
44:25
and spirituality really have a deep kinship; it's about a humble exploration.
44:32
The thing that's new in science on this is the precision. The humility is expressed in precision, and that's where I think the spiritual traditions
44:41
can learn from this new idea in science, that it's not about subject-object separation,
44:47
it's not about third-person objective science, it's about a humble precision in our statement
44:55
of our ideas. >>Rick: Beautiful! It's all music to my ears. Few thoughts let me bounce off you based on what you said.
45:02
I think it was Bertrand Russell who said, "What is wanted is not the will to believe
45:08
but the wish to find out," which is the exact opposite.
45:13
And this thing about the language of God is silence, I would say that, yeah, but the language
45:19
of God is also dynamism because look at the universe, and if we're going to relegate God to merely the field of silence and completely ignore the creation which is infinitely dynamic,
45:31
we're kind of you know putting God in a little sort of cubby, in a little corner, and we're
45:39
denying that God � and we may be needing to define �God' � is omnipresent throughout
45:45
all creation. And if we actually look closely at anything, He apparently is not, He's staring us in the
45:50
face, you know, hiding in plain sight, the incredible Intelligence involved in every little thing we observe.
45:56
I think that science came along as an essential corrective to the state of affairs prior to
46:03
its birth, I mean you know, guys like Giorgio Bruno were being burned at the stake for suggesting
46:10
that the stars in the sky were perhaps other worlds, other stars like our won and that
46:18
there could be planets around them with beings on them. And you know, Galileo was threatened with the rack and assigned to house arrest for
46:25
the rest of his life for suggesting that the sun was the center of the Solar System and
46:30
not the earth. And so there was � you mentioned the word �dogmatism' � there was this dogmatic
46:37
insistence on certain misguided beliefs as being true and science came along to sort
46:45
of end that way of thinking, for the most part, I mean it's still alive and well if
46:51
you look at our politics. But then science � you mentioned the word �humility' a lot � science got a little
46:59
carried away with itself a being ... as thinking of itself as the only way, arbiter of truth,
47:06
the only way of knowing anything and anything which was outside of its sphere of knowledge
47:12
was questionable of bogus. I think that's hubris.
47:17
>>Donald: Right. >>Rick: But I think what you said is very true, that science and spirituality can be
47:25
very complementary to one another if we perhaps � and maybe one way that can be so is if
47:31
we incorporate the human nervous system as an experiential methodology, an exploratory
47:41
instrument for discerning and discovering more fundamental levels of creation.
47:47
Because if you think of it, in many ways the human nervous system is far more sophisticated
47:53
than the Hubble space telescope or the Large Hadron Collider, even a single cell is, in
47:58
many respects. And perhaps what the mystics had gotten onto was the ability to fine-tune the nervous system
48:07
so as to enable them to directly cognize deeper mechanics of creation and the ultimate reality
48:14
of creation in a way which science will never do � hearkening back to our discussion of 15 or 20 minutes ago.
48:23
Couple more points here then I'll throw it back to you. I think one concept that's handy to throw in here is the notion that reality and knowledge
48:34
are different at different levels. In terms of knowledge, we can say at different levels of consciousness, in terms of reality,
48:42
you know, like you said, space-time is doomed. And perhaps in the same way that Einstein and quantum physicists doom Newtonian physics,
48:54
but that doesn't mean that Newtonian physics isn't legitimate on its own level. If you doubt that, try stepping off the edge of the Grand Canyon.
49:03
So each field of knowledge like that has its domain and it may not be ultimately true but
49:09
its conditionally true, in a way. There's a term in Vedanta called �mithya' � m-i-t-h-y-a, and let's say you're in India
49:18
and you go into a shop that sells clay pots, so there's all these hundreds of pots. And you can go in there and you could say, you could truthfully say, "There are no pots
49:27
in this shop, it's all just clay," and that's true, that's true in a fundamental way but
49:33
it's not true in a practical way because obviously there are pots. You can buy them, you could put beans in them or use them as drums, or whatever you wanted
49:41
to do with them. So these different levels of reality, each of them have their relevance at their own
49:48
level. And even though they may be sort of invalidated at a deeper level, that is not to say they're not valid at their own level.
49:55
So that's enough for now, throw it back to you. >>Donald: Yeah, you've raised a lot of very interesting and good points there.
50:04
So you're right that there were ... you mentioned Galileo and Giordano Bruno and the split between
50:12
science and Catholicism, science and Christianity, but science and spirituality more fundamentally.
50:20
And at the time it was the dogmatism of the spiritual traditions, right � "the Bible
50:28
is true, every verse is absolutely infallible," and that dogmatism is of course anathema to
50:38
inquiry, right? If they can't possibly be wrong then what are you going to study?
50:45
And so Galileo and the early scientists were saying, we need to be free to challenge everything
50:57
and look for ourselves. Now it ended up of course taking ... it was in its first baby steps and it took space-time
51:08
as fundamental and it took a reductionist point of view as a result, so reductionism
51:15
has been a huge aspect of science from early on. And the sort of more modern forms of it are that micro-physical particles, quarks and
51:28
electrons are the fundamental constituents of objective reality, and if we understand
51:35
their properties and how they interact, then everything else will follow, It will follow
51:44
as just emerging from the basic laws, that's why science has talked about getting a theory
51:50
of everything. If we get the theory of exactly how the reductionistic foundation works � the quarks and leptons
51:58
how they work � then everything else will follow.
52:05
And so people have identified ... >>Rick: I think they may be right, but they're not going deep enough.
52:11
Keep going. >>Donald: Well, the reductionism was I think really mixed up as a central idea in science
52:20
for centuries. Of course, scientists have always talked about emergent properties as well, I mean but emergent
52:29
in a way from the reductive fundamentals. And what they're discovering now, when they say that space-time is doomed and that the
52:39
notion of smallness ... you know, going smaller and smaller in space-time doesn't even make
52:44
sense after a point, I mean it's not there are pixels of space-time, it's that it literally ceases to make sense.
52:51
That means that the whole reductionist paradigm is wrong.
52:57
There is no smallest entities that are the foundation of everything, that whole framework
53:02
of trying to find the smallest things and then build them up from that, at least the things in space-time.
53:07
Now there may be conceptual foundations, but they're not small things in space-time, it's going to have to be more sophisticated.
53:14
There's not little you know microphysical particles and their properties; it's going
53:20
to have to be a deeper conceptual kind of idea that's foundational in the science.
53:26
So reductionism is not essential to science, the assumption that space and time are fundamental
53:37
is not essential to science, what is essential is precision and humility and careful observation.
53:47
And so this gets to another point that you raised which is, part of those observations should be of ourselves!
53:54
In meditation, that's absolutely a legitimate area for us to observe and to explore.
54:02
>>Rick: Yeah, and what if in meditation, one settles to the state of samadhi and discovers
54:09
experientially that you know, "I am Brahman," as the Upanishads say, and then opens one's
54:17
eyes and that state is so established that one sees, "Oh, and all this is that also" (states it in Hindi).
54:26
Then the human nervous system has served as a tool to not only cognize the ultimate reality
54:35
but to consciously live as the ultimate reality, for that to become a living reality.
54:41
And what if that's the same ultimate reality that we're alluding to in terms of what science is seeking, that consciousness is the foundation of everything, "we are that," and the whole
54:53
universe emerges from that, or appears to, and then we can get into the mechanics of
54:58
how it would do so. How could, if there's but consciousness, where did all this "stuff" appear to come from?
55:05
>>Donald: Yeah, I agree that those kinds of experiences blow open our preconceptions about
55:14
what kind of stories we need to tell, right? They open us up to a new framework in which space-time might not be fundamental.
55:23
Maybe it's consciousness somehow that's fundamental, but again, my attitude is, even there, I want
55:32
to be humble, so what exactly do I mean by that, right? And again, not everybody is a scientist and I'm not saying that if you want to have a
55:41
spiritual practice you need to be a scientist, I'm not saying that at all. >>Rick: Not all scientists are scientists. >>Donald: That's right, that's right, yep!
55:49
But what I am saying is that to the extent that we want to make knowledge claims we need
55:55
to be humble. What we can say is, "The best understanding I have so far of my spiritual experience is
56:05
to express it this way." If we then tack on the next phrase which is, "Of course I'm probably wrong, we are all
56:14
explorers here," that I think is the healthy attitude that we then have to say, "Okay,
56:20
what was your experience? Let's go back and forth. What are we really saying here?"
56:25
Now someone might say, "Look, humility is great but precise statements will never get
56:39
you anywhere," one could say that, that's a different interpretation of the Rumi statement
56:45
"The language of God is silence." The interpretation of it might be to say, "Look, even if consciousness is fundamental
56:55
and is dynamic, the tools of description of science, precision, will never, ever be up
57:04
to the task, even in a tiny little failing way, they will never be up to the task."
57:12
That's one attitude you can take, and I don't think that's right, but I can't dismiss it
57:19
out of hand, I can't dismiss it away. >>Rick: Well it's an interesting question, I mean maybe science just has its niche, you
57:26
know, maybe it has its area that it's relevant in and beyond that it's just not a relevant
57:33
tool, or, maybe somehow the scientific method can be applied to spiritual experience and
57:41
spiritual exploration. But then it gets tricky because every nervous system is different and we're dealing with
57:48
subjective experiences that we can't really articulate in a meaningful way, any more than
57:54
we can articulate the taste of an orange � has to be something that the other person can also experience.
58:00
And there are neurophysiological correlates, but they are very imprecise, it's like, what
58:05
do they actually indicate? - and so on. So it's like, can spiritual development or spiritual practice ever become as rigorous
58:14
scientifically as we would like them to be, and of course even psychology has had this problem over the years, you know, it's kind of a soft science, it's not really very easy.
58:25
>>Donald: Yeah, I'm on board with all these comments that you're making.
58:33
The way I think about science is that it's really just a form of human exploration.
58:41
>>Rick: M-hmm, it's a tool. >>Donald: It's a tool. And when we � even putting science aside � when we start to talk about our spiritual
58:51
experiences, we're forced to use concepts, we're forced to use words that we hope we
58:57
have shared meaning among other people that we're talking with, that they know what those words mean.
59:07
So for me, the only difference between that and science is the effort of science to be
59:14
as precise as possible. In other words, even when we're just talking informally about our experiences, we're doing
59:22
what I might call "proto-science," we're saying, "We're putting our experiences into concepts,
59:28
we're sharing them with others and we're comparing notes," so I would say that science is a very
59:34
human activity. The only thing that science has said is, "Look, we make more progress if, number one, we're
59:40
humble, and number two, we're precise, and number three, if we say, �Here's what you
59:47
could do to show me wrong! This is an experiment you could do that would show my idea is wrong," and that, I think,
59:56
is a fundamentally important move whenever we put out our ideas.
1:00:02
It turns out psychologically, this is from evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology,
1:00:10
we have a tendency to use our reason and logic not in pursuit of truth, but as a tool of
1:00:18
persuasion � to persuade others about what we already are sure is true. So there's two problems: first, we tend to be sure that we're right, and we tend to use
1:00:28
reason and logic not to find out where we're wrong, but to persuade others that we're right.
1:00:35
So that's the human condition, and if you think about your interactions with people
1:00:41
you'll see that reason and logic in political discussions and informal discussions, even
1:00:48
about how to spend the family budget; reason and logic is both mostly to support what you
1:00:55
already know to be true. So science is basically, I would say, is just taking this what we do in spiritual traditions
1:01:03
� if we're going to try to think about them we have to use concepts, we try to tell other
1:01:09
people to write down what we think it means, and so forth. All science is saying, essentially, is � this new form of science I'm talking about, not
1:01:17
the reductionist science ... observer, observed, separation, not that � this really stripped
1:01:23
down to the essential aspect of science is: let's be humble in our statements, as precise
1:01:29
as we know how, and try to figure out what we could do to show that we're wrong!
1:01:38
That's what I would say ... so when I say a "scientific spirituality," that's all I mean: humility, precision, and saying what someone could do to find out you're wrong,
1:01:47
and of course that's what we want to do if we're really seekers. If we're trying to be merely persuaders about what we already know, quote on quote "know,"
1:01:56
then, of course, you don't want to do this, but if we're really seekers who say, "Even
1:02:01
though I've spent tens of thousands of hours of meditation and I think I've all these insights,
1:02:07
it's quite possible that I'm still at square zero. It's quite possible that I'm at square zero and that the fundamental reality far transcends
1:02:17
anything that I could even imagine so far. My guess is, in fact, that that's the case."
1:02:23
>>Rick: Yeah. Speaking of this point, there's something I thought I might want to share with you from the Rig Veda, this great little series of verses towards the end of the tenth mandala,
1:02:33
it goes like this: "Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and
1:02:39
whence comes this creation? The gods are later than this world's production, who knows then whence it first came into being?
1:02:47
He, the first Origin of this creation, whether He formed it all or did not form it, whose
1:02:54
eye controls this world in the highest heaven. He verily knows it, or perhaps He knows not."
1:02:59
>>Donald: Right. That humility of saying, "Maybe it's this way, but maybe ...
1:03:08
>>Rick: Maybe even God doesn't know! >>Donald: That's right, and I think that that's a really healthy attitude.
1:03:15
We should explore, I think it's part of human nature to explore and who knows, maybe exploration
1:03:21
is part of what this is all about, I mean that's certainly possibly in the cards, and
1:03:27
I'll tell you why I think it might be that way.
1:03:33
One of the most profound results in all of mathematics, perhaps the most profound result
1:03:42
in all of mathematics is something called G�del's Incompleteness Theorem, and maybe
1:03:47
you sound like you know about it? >>Rick: Well I've heard you talk about it and I've heard it in the past. I couldn't actually tell you what it is right now, but I've heard people like you talk about
1:03:55
it. >>Donald: Right. I won't go into any technical details, partly because you know, the technical details ... the
1:04:04
mathematics is beyond me, it's really deep stuff. But intuitively what it means is quite clear, that no matter how much mathematical structure
1:04:19
you create there's always, G�del shows us, an infinite expanse of other mathematical
1:04:31
structures that you haven't yet seen. No matter how much we explore in structure, we've essentially never started; that's what
1:04:40
it's saying. And the reason I think that that's relevant here � you know, mathematics is mathematics,
1:04:46
consciousness is consciousness, so what are you talking about? Why are you talking about the two and the same? It turns out ... one area of research that I've done in science is something called psychophysics,
1:04:55
and it's the scientific study of consciousness, of sensory.
1:05:01
In fact, scientists since 1850 have been studying conscious experiences very, very systematically
1:05:09
in laboratory settings � studying color experiences, heat, shape experiences, all
1:05:17
these sensory experiences with great, great precision. And there's a lot to say but the fundamental thing is, every conscious experience that
1:05:28
we're studied is structured. There's a mathematical structure associated with each conscious experience.
1:05:36
It's not that consciousness is mathematics, there are some who would say that, like Max
1:05:41
Tegmark and others would say that mathematics is the final reality and everything else is
1:05:47
just mathematics. My attitude is more that the relationship between consciousness and mathematics is like
1:05:53
the living organism and the bones. Without the bones, the organism can't work, but the organism is not just its bones.
1:06:03
Consciousness is this living thing, but it has structure, the bones of mathematics.
1:06:10
And in this sense, what G�del is telling us is that there's an infinite variety of structures for consciousness, and that means that no matter how much we explore consciousness,
1:06:25
we'll never get anywhere but just the beginning.
1:06:32
We're always just beginners. So I call this "G�del's candy store theory of consciousness."
1:06:40
So consciousness is this infinite candy store that consciousness itself has not explored
1:06:48
yet because it can't! G�del tells us that it's impossible to fully explore this.
1:06:55
It's hard to wrap our heads around it but that's what his theorem is telling us. Here's one theory about ... and again, I'm just putting this out as a humble idea to
1:07:04
be tested and to be explored, that the fundamental dynamic of consciousness is exploration, and
1:07:11
the reason why it continues to go on is because in principle, it can never stop, and it's
1:07:17
always only at the beginning. So that's why we would always need to take all of our current understanding and all of
1:07:24
our current concepts as this is step zero, and we'll always be at step zero, but we can
1:07:30
enjoy the ride, we can enjoy exploring. >>Rick: Yeah, and you know, if we remind ourselves that when we refer to consciousness we're
1:07:40
not just referring to individual consciousness � human consciousness or cat consciousness or something like that, but we're referring to consciousness as a fundamental reality
1:07:49
of ... and as actually the totality of everything, then what we're really saying when you say
1:07:57
that the ... how did you phrase it, that the consciousness is eternally exploring? >>Donald: Yeah.
1:08:03
>>Rick: So it's actually consciousness that's eternally exploring itself. >>Donald: Yes.
1:08:08
>>Rick: And this actually gives rise to an interesting theory about how the creation
1:08:14
may have arisen, which is that if consciousness is the foundation, then at that level it's
1:08:22
the only thing down there, there's nothing for it to be conscious of other than itself, so it does that. It becomes conscious of itself but in so doing it sets up a triad.
1:08:30
Consciousness is a singularity and yet in becoming conscious of itself we have an observer,
1:08:36
and observed, and a process of observation, and that process continues to bifurcate.
1:08:44
And there's a term in physics called �sequential spontaneous symmetry breaking,' where things
1:08:50
just kind of ... the symmetry gets more and more fragmented and diverse and complex as
1:08:55
things go on, and so what if consciousness does that?
1:09:02
That the whole universe is the expression of the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness,
1:09:11
through its self-observation creating more and more and more diversity and complexity?
1:09:16
That's a whole other thing that books have been written on by some friends of mine that you might be interested in. I actually shared an article with you back in January I think, I don't know if you had
1:09:24
a chance to read it but anyway, that's it in a nutshell. >>Donald: I would love, by the way, for pointers to those books.
1:09:31
>>Rick: I'll send it to you again and I can actually put you in touch with a couple of people if you feel like having discussions with them, who can discuss this much more
1:09:39
intelligibly than I can. >>Donald: Well, it's interesting because what you just described is precisely the scientific
1:09:48
theory that I'm working on right now. >>Rick: Excellent! >>Donald: And again, it's in the same spirit of, "Of course I'm probably wrong but hey,
1:09:56
you're got to be precise and see where it goes." And the idea is what you said that consciousness itself is fundamental � not just my consciousness
1:10:03
or a bird's consciousness but consciousness itself is fundamental. >>Rick: Yeah, yeah. >>Donald: And what it's up to is this process of self-exploration and spinning off new protocells
1:10:17
to do more exploration. And I'm literally with a team, we're writing down mathematical models of this dynamics.
1:10:25
>>Rick: Yeah. There's another wrinkle to it which is that consciousness contains the potentiality of
1:10:33
everything that we now see as the manifest universe, so everything exists in sort of seed form.
1:10:40
And there's another verse in the Rig Veda which goes something like, "richo akshare
1:10:45
parame vyoman yasmin deva adhi vishve nisheduh" ... and it goes on but what it's saying is
1:10:51
that the richas or the impulses of intelligence that give rise to creation reside in kind
1:10:58
of an unmanifest, latent form in the transcendental akasha � in the field of consciousness � and
1:11:05
that they then, through this process of self-interaction, begin to assume more and more active roles
1:11:11
in the manifestation and orchestration of creation. So what we're saying here is that consciousness is not just a plain vanilla kind of field,
1:11:21
but it's actually a field of all possibilities � to borrow a term that Deepak is fond of
1:11:26
using. So all the beauty and complexity and dynamism and everything that we see in creation is
1:11:35
pregnant within the unmanifest field of consciousness and then from there it just sort of explodes
1:11:41
out. And it's not just something that happened 14.7 billion years ago or 13.7, it's something that's happening continuously, even now, because all these levels from unmanifest to most manifest
1:11:52
exist simultaneously and are continuing in a continual state of manifestation.
1:11:59
>>Donald: That's exactly the kind of idea that I'm exploring with my science, absolutely,
1:12:06
trying to take that idea and write down a specific dynamics.
1:12:13
Now one goal would be to then show that if I could get a precise theory of this dynamics
1:12:24
of consciousness and then a precise model of how it maps into what we call space and
1:12:32
time. So the idea would be, I have this thing I call �conscious agents' - it's an analytic
1:12:41
tool I use, so consciousness is itself a kind of what I call a conscious agent but as you said, it spins off all this spontaneous symmetry, it spins off all these other conscious agents
1:12:49
>>Rick: Yeah, it's the big daddy conscious and then all these little offshoots! >>Donald: All these other conscious agents, but in fact, they're always unified as well,
1:12:55
so they're separate but they're also one, and it checks out ... >>Rick: Exactly.
1:13:01
>>Donald: And mathematically it turns out to be exactly right. They're separate and yet they're all one, mathematically too, which is really cool.
1:13:06
>>Rick: Right, because how can one become many if it can actually change into something
1:13:13
diversified? Then what happens to it, you know? Does it lose its oneness? It couldn't, so there has to be sort of one and three simultaneously.
1:13:21
And that's another little wrinkle is that because of this one and three thing there's
1:13:27
an infinite frequency as it goes back and forth between them, and that creates the sort
1:13:34
of infinite dynamism of creation. >>Donald: Right, right. >>Rick: Yeah. >>Donald: And there's a branch of mathematics that I'm going to start to explore, it's called
1:13:40
�infinity category theory,' which also gives tools for dealing with this kind of dynamism where you don't want to have strict equalities; it's more similarities.
1:13:51
So infinity categories give us a way of talking about how the one could be constantly changing and yet quote on quote "the same."
1:13:57
>>Rick: Yeah, yeah. Excellent. >>Donald: So the one consciousness. But what we ultimately want to do then, it's of course great fun to be thinking at this
1:14:07
high level but how do we get it to say something where we could be wrong?
1:14:13
Ultimately, we would like to be able to turn this into something where we can go do an experiment and see if we're right or not, in the experiment.
1:14:23
>>Rick: Yeah. So about being wrong, I mean sure, science wants to have testicle ... testicle! (laughter)
1:14:31
Okay, depends on which science! Testable hypothesis that you know, can be disproven, and we have to have the humility
1:14:40
to welcome that, but at the same time, does science get wronger and wronger as it goes
1:14:45
along, or does it actually gain more and more verifiable knowledge and yet at the same time
1:14:52
realize that the extent of what it knows is probably continually dwarfed by the extent
1:14:58
of what it doesn't know? >>Donald: Right, so as science progressed from one theory to another we typically want
1:15:08
the new scientific theory to either show why the previous theory was deeply wrong in some
1:15:16
way or to include the previous theories as a special case.
1:15:21
So in the case of like Einstein's Theory of Relativity, it does change Newton's Theory
1:15:29
of Gravity and Motion, and so forth - accelerations and forces - in a fundamental way.
1:15:38
The notion of mass in Einstein is really fundamentally different than the notion of mass in Newton.
1:15:44
Mass for Einstein can change with your velocity, that's not the case for Newton. >>Rick: Right, but it's not a problem if you fly in an airplane.
1:15:51
>>Donald: Right, you have to go pretty fast to have that mass change be an issue for you.
1:15:57
And so you can show in some sense that Newton is a special case of Einstein as the speed
1:16:02
of light in Einstein's theory goes to infinity. So if you assume the speed of light is infinite, then you can get an approximation of Einstein
1:16:10
that looks a lot like Newton, and so you can sort of think of Newton as a special case of Einstein.
1:16:17
You can also think of Newton sort of as a special case of quantum mechanics as something
1:16:22
called Plank's Constant goes to zero. Not exactly, but you can sort of see the relationship between them.
1:16:29
And so as science progresses, in some cases, we just throw away ... there was a theory called phlogiston, and when we moved on we just threw it away, there was nothing to be
1:16:37
saved. So sometimes there's nothing to be saved and sometimes know there are deep insights but
1:16:43
what you want is a deeper framework, and then you realize that there was some good in that prior theory but that even the very conceptual framework.
1:16:51
The notion of time in Newton is different than the notion of time in Einstein.
1:16:56
The notion of space in Newton is different than the notion of space-time in Einstein
1:17:01
� mass and so forth, and so there's a change in your conceptual framework that's required.
1:17:10
But we don't know, I mean philosophers and scientists are divided about whether is science
1:17:19
is progressing toward ever more true theories or whether it's in some sense just storytelling
1:17:26
that doesn't ever really get anywhere. There are realists about scientific theories and anti-realists, my own attitude is that
1:17:39
I'm a realist in a sense that I think it's a legitimate goal of science to try to come
1:17:45
up with true theories, so I'm a realist in that sense, but I'm an anti-realist in the
1:17:50
sense that I say no scientific theory has yet succeeded, and I suspect that we never
1:17:57
will, partly because of G�del's Incompleteness Theorem � there will always be an endless
1:18:04
exploration so that we'll just continue to explore and we'll have to be good with that
1:18:09
exploration. But we do want ... it's still possible to be deeply wrong, right?
1:18:16
We may not be right, but we can be deeply and profoundly wrong in the sense that our
1:18:22
... I mean if I have a theory of gravity that says it's fine to jump off the Empire State building, well that theory of gravity has some serious bad problems, right, so I don't
1:18:30
want to do that. So there are tests that we can put to our scientific theories and that's I think in
1:18:43
a spiritual context as well. When we have a theory that says consciousness is fundamental and that new conscious agents
1:18:51
are being spun off all the time and they're exploring and so forth, as a scientist, we
1:18:57
want to say, "Exactly what do we mean by �they're exploring'?
1:19:03
What can we write down with mathematical precision what we mean by exploring? How are they exploring?
1:19:09
What are they exploring? Can we write that down with mathematical precision or are we going to just be stuck with a handwave?
1:19:14
(moving his hands in expressive circles) Just sort of imprecise ... and that's perfectly fine, I mean not everybody has to be a scientist, right?
1:19:22
I'm absolutely not saying that, but I'm saying that to the extent that we're taking our stories
1:19:28
about our spiritual experiences seriously, then we do want to be precise.
1:19:34
If we just want to take our stories as our stories that's perfectly fine, and we're humble about them and say, "This is the way it seems to me, of course, I'm probably wrong" - if
1:19:42
we put it out in that spirit that's perfectly fine. But if we want to say, "No, I want to really test my ideas," then that's a different game,
1:19:50
then it's being absolutely precise d then saying, "Here's what you could do to show
1:19:55
me wrong," or "Here's what I could do to show myself wrong" � that's a completely different game. Now I'm not saying everybody has to play that game, I'm just saying that is the science
1:20:02
game. And not everybody has to be a scientist but if you don't play the science game then what
1:20:08
you should be is absolutely humble about what you're saying: "This is not tested.
1:20:14
I haven't shown you how you could prove me wrong so I'm probably wrong, and here are my ideas.
1:20:19
And in the spirit of sharing ideas, that's how I'm sharing my ideas." So how could we do the science game on this?
1:20:26
Well, it turns out we can, I think, even though all of science so far has pretty much been
1:20:34
a study of space-time and its contents, right? And I just said space-time is doomed, right?
1:20:43
So we might go, "Well all that work of the sciences was for nothing" � absolutely not.
1:20:49
It was exceedingly valuable. >>Rick: Sure, it eradicated smallpox and gave us all kinds of wonderful things.
1:20:56
>>Donald: Absolutely! >>Rick: And yet at the same time, it may have brought us to the brink of extinction, so
1:21:02
it's obviously incomplete if human flourishing and the flourishing of other forms of life is the goal of science and every other human endeavor.
1:21:10
>>Donald: Agreed, agreed. And that's another topic we can talk about which is, the best tools that science has
1:21:19
on that side is the tools of evolutionary psychology, and that by itself is a very profound
1:21:26
discussion about the evolutionary psychology of why we're in the fix that we're in, like
1:21:32
with climate change and the human condition more generally, the problems that we have.
1:21:40
And so understanding why we behave the way we do and understanding in a principle way
1:21:46
how we can change the structure of society and the structure of our relationships to bring out what some evolutionary psychologists like Stephen Pinker call "the better angels
1:21:56
of our nature." There are "good aspects" of our nature and there are the dark sides, and understanding
1:22:04
why we have both � like in an evolutionary framework � and how the dark side or the
1:22:10
better angels can be triggered, can really help us in a non-hand-wavy way, in a very
1:22:18
precise way, to craft new social and political systems that can bring out the best in human
1:22:25
nature, but that's a completely different topic. But the issue of ... >>Rick: Just before you get off that topic,
1:22:34
quickly. There is a verse in the Gita which says something like, "For many-branched and endlessly diverse
1:22:42
are the intellects of the irresolute, but the resolute intellect is one-pointed," and I think science itself is kind of many-branched and endlessly diverse, and people specialize
1:22:53
way off on the little twigs of branches without really having a holistic overview of the whole
1:23:00
picture, nor without having any connection to the foundation, which we've been discussing
1:23:06
is consciousness. And I think if people in general and scientists, in particular, could be grounded in the foundation,
1:23:18
in that resolute intellect, while yet pursuing their specialized knowledge off on some branch,
1:23:23
then it could perhaps render the whole enterprise of science much more benign, much more beneficial
1:23:31
and well-coordinated so that we don't inadvertently create disasters when we're trying to solve
1:23:37
a particular problem or accomplish a particular thing in one particular area.
1:23:42
>>Donald: I agree, and I think that's an issue partly of how we educate our scientists, that
1:23:49
we need to educate our scientists not just to be brilliant in their own little area in
1:23:56
which they're studying � which you need to be, I mean to understand how to build a
1:24:02
vaccine for the Covid-19 thing, you better be really good.
1:24:07
You've got to know a lot of molecular biology and to understand that takes years and an
1:24:13
IQ of astronomical and so forth to even do that, but I think you're right, that in addition
1:24:21
to all that detailed expertise you need in this tiny, tiny little niche, it's good in
1:24:26
our education to make sure that we also have a big picture - some grounding in the humanities, for example.
1:24:32
>>Rick: Yeah, well experiential grounding in consciousness which is, as we've been discussing, the foundation of the whole thing.
1:24:37
And it's not an either-or proposition; the one doesn't handicap you in the area of the other, just a matter of sort of learning to maintain broad awareness while focusing on
1:24:48
specific boundaries. >>Donald: I couldn't agree more, absolutely. >>Rick: Now I kind of interrupted you.
1:24:54
You were about to launch into something, and I said, "Well let's cover this first." Do you remember what that was? >>Donald: Sure, yes, so how could we test this theory of consciousness, that consciousness
1:25:04
is fundamental, and potentially be wrong, right? That's the whole point, is if we want to say consciousness is fundamental and is doing
1:25:11
this exploration then we have to be precise: how is it exploring? In what way does it explore?
1:25:17
And how can we show that we're wrong � in principle that we're wrong in what we're claiming about consciousness?
1:25:23
Well, it turns out that all the work that science has done in space-time, like Einstein's
1:25:29
theory of Special and General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, String Theory, Darwin's
1:25:35
Theory of Evolution of Natural Selection, and this modern mathematical reformulation, these are all only theories essentially within space-time, but what's great about them is
1:25:47
they're really well-developed theories, they're highly tested and they've passed a lot of
1:25:54
tests, which doesn't mean that they're true, it just means that a lot of tests have been done and they've passed a lot of tests.
1:26:00
So the idea is what we have to do is get a mathematical model of consciousness � if we want to do the science � its dynamics and show a particular projection of that theory
1:26:10
of conscious dynamics into the space-time perceptions of certain consciousnesses.
1:26:16
You and I are certain kinds of consciousnesses which happen to use space-time as the way
1:26:22
we perceive. Well, we've studied that way of how we perceive, that's what science has done.
1:26:27
We understand ... I'll put it this way, it's our virtual reality.
1:26:34
Space-time is the virtual reality that certain consciousnesses use. We understood that headset. We understood that headset.
1:26:40
So now we need to project our theory of consciousness outside our headset, propose how it projects
1:26:46
into our particular headset of space-time, and then make predictions of what we should see in the headset.
1:26:51
Well, there we've made great progress in the last three centuries! We know how the headset works quite well!
1:26:59
And so whatever projection we get from our theory of consciousness into our space-time interface, if it doesn't give us evolution by natural selection, general relativity,
1:27:09
quantum field theory, and so forth as a special limiting case � projection case � then
1:27:15
we're wrong. Conversely, suppose that we have this theory of consciousness but we're not really sure
1:27:24
� you know, we have this idea about what it's up to but we're not really sure, maybe
1:27:30
we're just not smart enough to figure it out, maybe this G�del's candy store idea that I put out there and that there's constant exploration, maybe that's just totally wrong;
1:27:36
it's something else that consciousness is up to, some other dynamics. And so I find out that I'm wrong about the G�del's candy store thing and so now I'm
1:27:44
lost, you know, what is the fundamental dynamical principle of consciousness? I need an idea.
1:27:50
If I'm not smart enough, what I can do is say, "Look, let me propose a mapping from
1:27:56
consciousness, whatever it's doing, into our headset of space and time. And now, once I've got that proposed projection, let me take like evolution of natural selection
1:28:06
and pull it backwards, I'll unproject it back into consciousness." So I have this dynamic of evolution by natural selection, I have this dynamics of quantum
1:28:13
field theory when I pull them back out into this realm of conscious agents, what would the conscious agents have to be doing to make it look like evolution, to make it look like
1:28:23
quantum mechanics? And that would then give us some new ideas that might be game-changers for what we think
1:28:30
about consciousness. So it can go both ways: we can use a theory of consciousness in this dynamics to make
1:28:37
a projection into space-time to see if it's right. If we're wrong and we're not smart enough to figure out what to do, then we can use
1:28:45
what we see in space-time and try to pull it backwards through, mathematically, into
1:28:50
this realm of the conscious dynamics and see what kind of dynamics it might suggest.
1:28:55
So this is how we ... notice again the humility that's required in this.
1:29:02
We're saying, "We're trying to be precise. G�del's candy store is a nice, precise idea but it might be wrong, so here's how we'd
1:29:08
say if it is wrong and I'm not smart enough to get myself out of that hole, then here's how I might get some new ideas going the other way."
1:29:17
And that's sort of what we need to be in the process. I don't want to convince you I'm right; I want to make clear what my ideas are and of
1:29:25
course, I'm probably wrong and we're in this adventure together. If we think we're right, we won't explore, we will never learn.
1:29:33
That's the key. So don't ever ... I guess the bottom line is, never believe you're right.
1:29:41
Always believe that you're in the process of learning. >>Rick: Beginner's mind.
1:29:46
>>Donald: That's right, a beginner's mind. We're all neophytes, all the time. >>Rick: Or as the Firesign Theater put it, "We're all bozos on this bus!"
1:29:55
>>Donald: (laughing) >>Rick: You know, one interesting thing, I think this relates to what you just said: What if Jesus really did walk on water?
1:30:05
What if St. Joseph of Cupertino and St. Teresa of Avila really did levitate?
1:30:11
What if all the different siddhis Patanjali talks about in the Yoga Sutras actually could
1:30:16
be performed if one knew how to do it? And what if there were people currently � which I have actually yet to meet � who could
1:30:26
do these things predictably and measurably? What would that say about the nature of consciousness vis-a-vis for instance the laws of gravity?
1:30:38
It could actually strongly suggest that consciousness is more fundamental than gravity because somehow
1:30:45
or other these people who are so intimately familiar with consciousness are able to do
1:30:52
something that doesn't violate the laws of gravity any more than an airplane does, but
1:30:58
kind of overrides them or uses them or sort of counteracts them in a way that enables
1:31:06
them to do this kind of stuff. And I have another friend who wrote a book � a big, thick book � just on the idea
1:31:14
of being able to levitate, and there are hundreds of examples of people throughout history who supposedly had done this.
1:31:21
What if those are real? What does it imply? >>Donald: Right.
1:31:28
I think that the idea that consciousness is fundamental, and that space-time is just a
1:31:34
headset, it's just a virtual reality headset that we're using, it's not the final reality, means that the limitations that we see within space-time are our fictions, they're just
1:31:46
fictions. >>Rick: Yeah. >>Donald: Now that doesn't mean that I buy every extraordinary experience that's purported,
1:31:55
right? >>Rick: Oh no. >>Donald: By no means, in fact, probably most of them are not true.
1:32:01
I believe that, for example, it's possible for a human being to run a 4-minute mile,
1:32:07
many have done it. >>Rick: Yeah, but for a long time it was thought they couldn't. >>Donald: Right, and if an average Joe comes up to me and says, "I can run a 4-minute mile"
1:32:14
I don't believe them! Right? Right. Not because I think it's in principle impossible but it's very, very unlikely that you can
1:32:21
run a 4-minute mile. >>Rick: But it's testable. >>Donald: Yeah, it's in principle possible. >>Rick: Yeah, go ahead and do it, I'll watch.
1:32:27
>>Donald: Absolutely, absolutely. So if someone, you know, could repeatedly do it, that's as a scientist I would pay very,
1:32:35
very close attention. But there's two important points on this: one is, if we develop a science of consciousness
1:32:47
and it works, we actually can develop a model of this dynamics of consciousness, how it
1:32:54
projects into our space-time interface, and show how it gives rise to what we call "quantum
1:33:00
mechanics" and "general relativity" and "evolution by natural selection," we're going to be able
1:33:05
to develop technologies that will make any of these levitation claims look trivial.
1:33:13
We'll be able to warp space-time. Well, it's like this ... it will be so ... we won't need these things.
1:33:22
We will be playing with our physicalist ideas in ways that would persuade everybody that
1:33:29
there's something far deeper. >>Rick: Yeah. >>Donald: It would be like ... suppose that you're a genius player at Grand Theft Auto
1:33:34
� you're a wizard. You know all the rules of the game, you can do everything, everybody's just astonished
1:33:39
at you. But then there's this one geek who doesn't really know how to play Grand Theft Auto very
1:33:47
well but learns how to hack the code in the supercomputer. And that ... she can go in there and empty the tank of the wizard, or make the road bend
1:33:59
in weird ways, or have trees fall down in front of him, or just give it four flat tires. Well, the wizard is powerless.
1:34:06
The geek has all ... and that's what I'm saying. If one we � and by the way, if people are scared when they hear me saying this, I think
1:34:16
that's a reasonable response. If we actually reverse engineer our space-time interface in terms of a theory of consciousness,
1:34:26
we're going to unleash technologies that from our current perspective will appear absolutely
1:34:31
miraculous, just like if I showed a cell phone to somebody in 1750, it would look like an
1:34:37
absolute miracle, an act of God! Why can we do that? We got a deeper understanding, from science, of our interface.
1:34:46
This would be even more profound; this would be a deeper understanding outside our interface; we could play with the very parameters of space and time themselves.
1:34:56
So this will be ... so we won't need, you know, levitation and so forth; this will be
1:35:02
far more profound. Now let me go the other way.
1:35:08
Suppose it turns out that every act of apparent levitation and so forth is all fake, that
1:35:14
none of this is true, would that count against consciousness being fundamental?
1:35:20
Absolutely not! Suppose that there's no violation of our known laws of physics -no problem for me.
1:35:28
Consciousness is still fundamental, why? Because the laws of physics just are our simplified way of describing the dynamics of consciousness.
1:35:37
It's all about consciousness. So if there are no violations of gravity that we can detect, that's just because we have
1:35:45
a good interface. Gravity is how � in a dumbed-down fashion � we describe the dynamics of consciousness.
1:35:53
I have good friends who are studying parapsychology and studying these things.
1:36:04
Smart people, good friends, well-intentioned, but my attitude is that deep down what they
1:36:12
really ... their framework is this: the universe is fundamentally a machine, it's a space-time
1:36:19
machine, but, there is a ghost in the machine, and I can prove that there is! But it's a wimpy ghost � I have to do these experiments and at the eighth decimal place
1:36:29
I can get ... if I do it a thousand times or a million times I can get a significant small effect at the eighth decimal place, so there is a ghost, but it's a pretty wimpy
1:36:39
ghost. So that's a dualist framework. The machine, the physicalist's machine, is fundamental, but there's a ghost in the machine
1:36:45
� that's a dualism, and I'm saying something far more radical than that. I'm saying there is no machine.
1:36:51
What we call the machine is just our virtual reality headset that we're using to understand
1:36:58
the realm of conscious agents. It's much like this: our view that there's all these conscious agents out there and consciousness
1:37:07
is fundamental, think about it like a vast social network, like the Twitter-verse.
1:37:12
So right now there's tens of millions Twitter users, literally billions of tweets, and lots
1:37:19
of stuff trending. There's no way that a Twitter use � you and me � could ever read all the tweets
1:37:26
or interact with every one of those twitters � we just can't, it's overwhelming. The social media data is just too big, the social network is too complex.
1:37:37
So what do we do if we want to really grasp what's happening in a social network like the Twitter-verse?
1:37:43
We build visualization tools, like a VR, so I can like use little colored objects and
1:37:51
their motions to see what's trending in London, what's happening in New York, what's happening in California.
1:37:57
So I use little, simple graphics that I can understand, of course, it's not showing me
1:38:03
the billion tweets, it's not showing me the 10 million users, it's showing me a summary
1:38:08
of the long-term interactions of all those users and what's trending.
1:38:15
That's what space-time and what we call "the physical world" is. It's a visualization tool.
1:38:24
We're visualizing this vast social network of conscious agents. Of course, you don't see the Twitter users in your headset right?
1:38:33
If you have a visual you see color graphics, you're not seeing the individual users, you just see colored graphics.
1:38:38
Now if you were really na�ve you'd go, "Oh, there's nothing but what I see in my headset" and you just could ignore the whole Twitter-verse ... "The reality is just what I'm seeing as
1:38:46
I move my headset around!" Well, that would be a rookie mistake, and that's what physicalism is.
1:38:53
Science, physicalist science has made a rookie mistake: we've mistaken space-time, which
1:38:59
is just our headset, for the reality. It's just a headset that we're using as a visualization tool for this vast network of
1:39:07
conscious agents. So if the headset turns out to be really good and our visualization tool has no exceptions
1:39:15
� no levitation, no extra-sensory stuff going on in it � perfectly fine with me,
1:39:21
it just means it's a good headset! So I don't need for these parapsychology results to come out to still claim that consciousness
1:39:30
is fundamental. If they don't come out that's perfectly fine. >>Rick: I think the parapsychology results � the kind of stuff that Rupert Sheldrake
1:39:36
does and the kind of stuff that Mark Gober has been summarizing is actually good evidence
1:39:42
for consciousness being fundamental, but I just want to reflect on your Twitter analogy.
1:39:47
The servers at the Twitter company � however it works, presuming there's some big servers there which handle all the tweets, and then we out here sending a tweet, reading a tweet,
1:39:57
are using these visualization devices to see what's happening with the Twitter-verse in London and so on, we're just kind of using a user interface to dip into a little tiny
1:40:09
bit of what those servers know. So I think by the same token we can think of ourselves as sense organs of the Infinite
1:40:19
� and little tiny sense organs at that, by comparison with what is out there in the
1:40:25
whole universe. But like any sense organ, we are connected at our root, at our basis, with consciousness.
1:40:32
And not only connected with it, we are it. So on some deep level, we contain within ourselves all of the ... we are the server at Twitter
1:40:42
that contains all the tweets. We contain within our deepest self, we can say or use the term "home of all knowledge,"
1:40:50
"home of all the laws of nature." We sort of are the repository of all. We are the intelligence which gives rise to the universe, speaking of our universal self,
1:41:00
of our deepest nature. But in terms of our individual self, we couldn't handle that much information, we're not designed
1:41:07
to. There are some verses in the 11th Chapter of the Bhagavad Gita where Arjuna wants Krishna
1:41:13
to show him his Divine form. He wants to see, "Okay God, what are You really? What is the reality from Your perspective?"
1:41:21
And Krishna says, "You can't handle it. Don't ask for this." And Arjuna persists, so Krishna shows it to him and then the rest of the chapter he's
1:41:27
begging him to take it away because it's too much. So you know, we don't know everything, we can't know everything, as individual units,
1:41:36
but we can be sort of rooted or grounded in that level which is the home of all knowledge.
1:41:44
And if we align with that clearly enough, our individual lives can sort of function in a way that takes advantage of that omniscience if you will, without actually being omniscient.
1:41:55
What do you think of that? >>Donald: I like that idea a lot! Absolutely.
1:42:01
In fact, that kind of idea is informing the mathematical model I'm building of these conscious
1:42:10
agents and it was one reason why I went after this kind of model. It's the idea that in some sense I have a limit, like I only see things in space and
1:42:20
time, and I have profound limits, for example, if I ask you to imagine a specific color that
1:42:26
you've never seen before. Like nothing happens, right? Talk about limits!
1:42:31
I can't even imagine one specific color that I've never seen before! That is a profound and humbling limit.
1:42:37
So when I see those limits right there in my face, then I know that I have profound
1:42:44
limits as a conscious being. On the other hand, there is some way, as you said, that I'm connected with everything and
1:42:51
part of everything � the deepest consciousness. So as a scientist now, I want to take those intuitions which are onto something and say,
1:43:02
"Okay, how can I make that idea into something precise that I can then explore mathematically"
1:43:09
� that's actually what my team is up to. So the very idea that you said is at the very, very core of the mathematics that we're developing.
1:43:16
>>Rick: Excellent! Well as I say, I'll introduce you to some people. >>Donald: Yeah. >>Rick: So some really good questions came in.
1:43:22
I'm having so much fun talking with you I've been neglecting to ask them, but I've scanned all four of them and they're really good, so let's do it.
1:43:30
And we can't give 15-minute responses to these or we just won't have that kind of time, but
1:43:35
let's give a pithy response to these questions. So first it's Ravi from the United Arab Emirates who asks, "Can scientific theories of the
1:43:46
Truth (capital T) of Reality (capital R), such as String Theory or your version of the
1:43:51
"desktop user interface evolutionary approach to reality", help one subjectively experience
1:43:57
the Truth, similar to a spiritual epiphany or nirvana? The two approaches seem tangentially opposed: subjective versus objective, surely we can't
1:44:05
reconcile the two or can we?" >>Donald: Great question.
1:44:10
I think that there are two aspects of inquiry, two aspects of exploration: there's the personal
1:44:19
meditative kind of exploration, and then there's the stepping back and asking, "What have I
1:44:26
learned in that process of exploration?" So I go without concepts, just being with what is, and then sometimes when I step out
1:44:37
of that I reflect and ask, "What just happened? What could I learn from it? What should I learn from that?"
1:44:43
So there's going to be this interaction between concepts on the one hand � science, and pure experience that goes beyond any conception.
1:44:52
So I think that they will inform each other. There's one pithy thing ... quantum computing.
1:45:02
On the one hand, you have to use absolute precision to set up the quantum bits and gates.
1:45:08
Absolute clean, hard-nosed science. Once you set them up and start the computation going, you cannot look.
1:45:15
If you look at what's going on in a quantum computation you destroy it. >>Rick: Ah!
1:45:21
Cause you collapse the function or something? >>Donald: That's right, you collapse the superpositions and so forth, you wipe out the entanglements
1:45:27
and so forth. So what happens with quantum computing is a really interesting metaphor, it shows this
1:45:33
synergy: absolute precision on the one hand � you couldn't build the gates and circuits
1:45:40
without absolute precision, and then you have to let go completely - you cannot look at
1:45:46
all when you start the computation. If you don't look, you open up this incredible flood of computational power - we don't understand
1:45:54
it, if you look, you destroy it. So if you don't look, you get this huge flood of computing power that comes out, and then
1:46:02
at the very end, you can look at the bits and gates to get little trickles of that huge, thunderous, roaring waterfall of computation that happens.
1:46:11
>>Rick: So you don't destroy it retroactively if you look at the end? >>Donald: Well you destroy, but if you look carefully, the little trickles that you get
1:46:20
are informative about the whole computation. That's the best we can do. >>Rick: You just peak with one eye! >>Donald: That's right!
1:46:26
You get a little bit at the very end there. So this quantum computation seems to be telling us that there's this really interesting dance
1:46:34
between precision and tight concepts. By the way, there's no reward for sloppy thinking, right?
1:46:43
Sloppy thinking gets you killed, your science experiments don't work, you fall off cliffs, the whole bit.
1:46:48
Sloppiness ... So what seems to be going on: absolute precision, and then no concepts whatsoever.
1:46:56
So, complete no-concepts, and then absolute precise concepts � that seems to be where
1:47:01
the sweet-spot is, for whatever reason. >>Rick: I think what you just said is perfectly applicable to spirituality too.
1:47:08
There's no place for sloppy thinking. There's a great quote, Padmasambhava, he said, "Although my awareness is as vast as the sky,
1:47:18
my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour." >>Donald: (laughing) That's pretty funny!
1:47:26
>>Rick: (laughing) Yeah! And really, this thing about sloppy thinking, there are so many people who crash and burn
1:47:33
because somewhere along the spiritual path they get sloppy, or they get lax, or they
1:47:40
assume - they lack humility, like you've been emphasizing. They assume that they're much more enlightened than they actually are, and they begin to
1:47:49
justify all kinds of behaviors and whatnot that end up destroying them. >>Donald: Yes, yes.
1:47:54
>>Rick: Yeah, so it's razor's edge. >>Donald: I agree it's a razor's edge in the following ... because you have to have the
1:48:01
humility that anything that you think and propose could be wrong, on the other hand,
1:48:08
you have to have enough interest and hope in what you're doing to be energetic to pursue
1:48:13
it, right? >>Rick: Yeah, it's a balance. >>Donald: So you want to be excited to pursue it and yet on the other hand not be dogmatic
1:48:20
about it, and that's the balance, the razor's edge. >>Rick: Yeah, and I think the key thing is that if you're actually making genuine progress,
1:48:29
there's experiential verification at each step of the way, which is a scientific thing, you know?
1:48:35
So it's not like you're just totally lost and full of doubt and you never get any kind of reward for your efforts, but again, it's that there's never going to be ultimate absolute
1:48:45
certainty, I don't think, or else ... and yet it's the most rewarding thing one can
1:48:51
pursue in life. >>Donald: I agree. >>Rick: Yeah. Okay, here's a good one from Abbey in Denmark who asks, "Regarding the concept that space-time
1:49:01
is doomed, who am I looking at in the mirror?
1:49:07
Or can science ever lead to the answer to �who am I and my purpose in this body?'"
1:49:14
>>Donald: Very, very profound questions. Of course, the right answer is I don't know, at this point, but I can tell you the direction
1:49:25
I'm pursuing, and the idea is that our headset � space-time is just our headset and we
1:49:32
use our headsets to come up with things we call our bodies. And what you see when you look at your face in the mirror ...
1:49:40
When you look at your own face in the mirror you know that what you see first-hand � skin,
1:49:45
hair, and eyes � is not the real you. What you can't see in the mirror � your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your
1:49:53
love of music, your headache � all that rich world of your conscious experiences is
1:49:59
just hidden behind this very simple thing of face, skin, hair, and eyes. So what we know first-hand is that what we can see of our bodies and so forth is not
1:50:10
at all definitive of who we are, we transcend that. We're this whole realm of conscious experiences.
1:50:18
This body, my face, is just a user interface symbol, it's just an icon on my interface.
1:50:25
When I look at you I see an icon � I see skin, hair, and eyes � I believe firmly
1:50:31
that behind what I see is the whole rich world of your conscious experiences. I believe it so profoundly that I would not in any way try to use my talents to hurt you,
1:50:41
to hurt your icon, because I believe I would actually affect your conscious experiences, so that's how deeply I believe that.
1:50:47
So I'm committed to this realm of conscious experiences beyond what I can see in space
1:50:53
and time, but what am I? The question was, "What am I beyond that?"
1:51:00
The best answer I can give right now is I'm a conscious agent, looking at all the other
1:51:05
conscious agents through a headset and I'm participating in the exploration.
1:51:12
But I'm also not divorced from all those other conscious agents and so there's a lot I don't understand; I'm working on the math on that.
1:51:20
So the answer is I don't know but those are some ideas. >>Rick: Yeah ... and in terms of the answer you just gave, "I'm a conscious agent looking
1:51:26
at other conscious agents and not divorced from them," I would say that relatively we are conscious agents with our space-time limitations, and absolutely or more deeply we are consciousness
1:51:39
and everything is consciousness, so we're all one at that level of consciousness.
1:51:45
And in fact, many people reach a stage of unity consciousness where when they look at
1:51:51
something they're actually seeing themselves, they're not themselves individually � I don't look at the rock and see Rich Archer's face there, but they see it all in terms of
1:52:03
the Self (capital S) ultimate level of consciousness; everything is that and that ultimately can
1:52:09
become a living experience. Yeah, okay, here comes another one.
1:52:16
Really good questions ... this one is from Matt in Toronto who asks ... he has two parts
1:52:22
to this; the second part is small. The first part is: "If we take the interface theory of perception fully, would it follow
1:52:28
that psychological states, thoughts, intuitions, and feelings themselves are also evolved interfaces
1:52:36
that guide adaptive behavior? If so, do you have any ideas about how the structures of feelings, thoughts, or intuitions
1:52:43
- as we know them - map on to the activity of the network of conscious agents?"
1:52:49
Sounds like this guy has read your book. >>Donald: Yeah, it's a very, very good question.
1:52:55
So the answer [to the] first is yes. I believe that our experiences, our emotions, for example, are also part of this interface,
1:53:03
and so we can use the tools of evolutionary psychology to explore the logic of those emotions
1:53:12
and to ask within the framework of evolutionary psychology why do we have those emotions?
1:53:17
Why do we feel anger when we think someone is cheating? Why do we feel attracted to someone when their pupil is dilated?" and so forth.
1:53:27
We can actually give precise scientific answers to these kinds of questions, and we can use
1:53:33
them to answer deeper questions like how can we devise a society in which we bring out
1:53:40
the better aspects of human nature? Positive, altruistic behaviors as opposed to selfish and destructive kinds of behaviors?
1:53:49
So absolutely yes, those are part of the interface and we can develop scientific theories of
1:53:55
them. Remind me of the other parts of his question? >>Rick: Well let's see, "If so, do you have any ideas about how structures of feelings,
1:54:03
thoughts, or intuitions - as we know them - map onto the activity of the network of conscious agents?"
1:54:09
And I'll throw in his second question here too, you can answer that as well: "How would you describe mental illness by way of conscious realism?"
1:54:16
>>Donald: Right, so yeah, in terms of "how do these map onto the dynamics of conscious
1:54:22
agents � all these emotions that we have", that's a really profound question. So in the interface, we have evolutionary psychology and we have an evolutionary model
1:54:31
that gives us one kind of explanation, in fact, the only precise explanation humans have ever come up with for the logic of human emotions.
1:54:40
So that's the best tool we have so far, there's no tool that comes anywhere close to the power
1:54:46
of evolutionary psychology for giving the deep logic of human emotions.
1:54:52
Now how does that story which is in space and time pull back to this theory of conscious
1:54:59
agents? I don't know, but one possibility is that evolution requires limits, limited resources,
1:55:14
limitations of various kinds. If there were no limits of resources there would be no need to compete, there'd be no need to be more fit, and the whole game of evolution just wouldn't be played.
1:55:24
So the question ... this person from Toronto, the question really comes down to: When we
1:55:32
do this theory of conscious agents, will there also be limits in that realm or not?
1:55:39
If it turns out that in some sense there are no limits, then we're going to have to show
1:55:44
that whatever the dynamics of consciousness is, when we project it into an interface that has ... that imposes limits � the interface itself imposes limits � then you get what
1:55:53
looks like evolution by natural selection and you're forced to see the dynamics of consciousness through this lens of competition and the emotions that come out of competition, and so forth.
1:56:06
So the ultimate answer is I ... the question he has just asked is one that I'm asking,
1:56:11
and I've been asking for several years, and I intend to try to address it in my theory of consciousness and its dynamics.
1:56:18
And I don't know if it's going to end up being that the emotions are an artifact of the limits
1:56:24
of our interface, that's one possibility, that it's just an artifact because our interface is limited, or, is this telling us something deep about the dynamics of consciousness itself?
1:56:33
I'm leaning toward thinking it's an artifact of the interface, but I don't know, so that's
1:56:39
an open scientific question, it's the kind of thing exactly that a mathematical model is going to play with, going to play with that idea.
1:56:45
Great question. >>Rick: Okay, I won't presume to conjecture on that one.
1:56:50
Okay, here's a question from a dear friend of mine, we've been friends for almost 50
1:56:57
years ... 45 years. His name is John, he's from Salt Spring Island and he actually helped me prepare for this
1:57:03
interview, we've been bouncing ... >>Donald: Salt Spring Island? >>Rick: Yeah, Salt Spring Island up in Canada. >>Donald: Canada! Okay.
1:57:09
>>Rick: Yeah, you know, it's kind of near Vancouver Island on the west coast. Anyway, John says, "Is the idea that we will always be seekers?
1:57:19
In the Vedic tradition, enlightenment means you are not a seeker anymore; you are a seer.
1:57:25
Science may never end but direct experience, if deep enough, should lead to the ultimate ultimate, not understanding but being the goal?"
1:57:34
Does that make sense to you? >>Donald: Yeah, that's an interesting idea. I mean I could, I could understand that it may not be contradictory in the following
1:57:45
sense, that if it's true that exploration is endless, suppose it's true that consciousness
1:57:53
is about endless exploration � G�del's candy store, being aware of that and being
1:57:59
good with that could be this other sense of just being.
1:58:06
I'm being, I'm content - content knowing that I don't know, and I'll never know, but that's
1:58:14
what I know, is that I don't know, and also being good with the endless exploration.
1:58:22
So again � and of course I haven't read that particular kind of writing that he's
1:58:30
referring to, sounds pretty interesting, but it may be that they're not contradictory. >>Rick: Yeah, I think you're right.
1:58:38
John and I have had discussions about this and I've talked about it on these interviews,
1:58:43
but in the Vedic tradition which he refers to there's a notion of kalas, which are supposed
1:58:49
to be levels of evolution and they're supposed to be 16 of them, and human evolution � by
1:58:56
evolution I don't mean Darwinian but spiritual development � is supposed to occupy maybe the 4th through the 8th kala.
1:59:03
So then, you know, if that's true, then the greatest sages who ever walked the earth are
1:59:09
still relative beginners compared to what is possible. Now they may have glommed onto the ultimate reality in terms of their direct experience
1:59:18
� you know, feel the pure consciousness that we've been talking about, but to what extent do they embody it?
1:59:25
To what extent? In the relative field, how much can they know?
1:59:30
How much can they do? And it's thought that there are higher forms of life which are mythically referred to as
1:59:37
"gods" and so on but are actually thought to be much more powerful conscious agents
1:59:43
� in your terminology � which have vast capacities for knowledge and action, which
1:59:50
can know and do far more than a human being ever could. So you know, maybe souls evolve into those once they reach the ultimate level of human
2:00:00
spiritual evolution. >>Donald: It's quite possible. I'll just say that the G�del's candy store theory says that there's not just 8, 10, 50
2:00:14
billion levels; there are countless levels. >>Rick: Zillions ... countless! >>Donald: And that it's literally countless, that even if you were infinite, you're still
2:00:26
a baby beginner, that's the weird thing, so it stretches our imagination to the breaking
2:00:34
point, which is good. It's literally saying that if you have some finite number of levels, that's probably not
2:00:40
it. That's just the first baby steps and it's literally endless. And I mean, I'm not saying that the G�del's candy store is right but what I'm saying is
2:00:49
that's what that theory would entail, is that there's no small number of steps and then
2:00:54
you're there, it's that you cannot ever get there. In principle, the reality is that you can never get there no matter how long you pursue,
2:01:06
so just enjoy the process. Enjoy the process and enjoy, in some sense, the profound consciousness.
2:01:18
The entirety of consciousness will be profoundly ignorant compared to its future potential,
2:01:28
always, and no matter how much it expands into that potential, it will be always not
2:01:34
having begun. That's how profound G�del's theorem is. It's saying, no matter how far you go, you really haven't begun, and that's hard to wrap
2:01:45
our heads around ... we would like to say that we can grasp. G�del is saying, G�del is absolutely saying, you cannot grasp it.
2:01:53
In principle, it cannot be grasped, even by an infinite. An infinite intelligence, an infinite consciousness could not grasp it; the infinite consciousness
2:02:02
is still a baby beginner and will always be. >>Rick: Huh. Yeah, you know, I could think of rebuttals to that but on the other hand, I'm not committed
2:02:13
to them. It's one of these both-and things, where I think you can sort of fathom the infinite
2:02:22
nature of consciousness and live as that, and certainly not feel any sort of lack or
2:02:28
emptiness or you know, unfulfillment, and at the same time, there's still an infinite
2:02:36
... I mean the field of consciousness itself is infinite, and if it contains all the potentiality,
2:02:44
infinite potentiality, then that field alone offers the opportunity for endless exploration.
2:02:51
You know, it's said that the Vedic rishis who cognized the Veda � the Vedas are said
2:02:56
not to have been written down or conceived by human minds but to have been some kind of primordial reality that can be cognized � even they can only cognize a certain portion
2:03:06
of it and other rishis cognized other portions of it. So, you know, you can sort of have it all, you can sort of have your cake and never stop
2:03:18
eating it! (laughter) >>Donald: These are the deepest, deepest questions,
2:03:24
absolutely, and of course I'm probably wrong! >>Rick: Yeah! And probably me too, but we're having fun.
2:03:31
You have time for another one? Another question? >>Donald: Sure. >>Rick: Okay, this is from Michelle Romero and I don't know where she's from: "Regarding
2:03:37
the idea of always being at zero" � this is just what we were talking about � "as we explore consciousness and the relationship with mathematics to consciousness as structures
2:03:46
to dynamic organism, reminds me of form in relationship to the formless.
2:03:51
My question is: are we always at the beginning or zero because just as we can't add to or
2:03:58
reach the speed of light because it is a fixed constant, we can never fully experience consciousness
2:04:05
because it is infinite and formless?" Just what we were talking about. >>Donald: Yeah, in a word, yes.
2:04:13
What G�del's theorem is saying is so hard to grasp, that no matter how much you explore,
2:04:26
you've literally not begun compared to what there is to explore. It's almost like a train that is building the track just one more track length ahead,
2:04:37
and just keep going, and we're just building tracks as we go ... we have trains [going everywhere].
2:04:42
There aren't pre-existing tracks; we're just building, and there's an infinite number of ways to have it going so we're just building it as we go.
2:04:50
It's hard to wrap our heads around it. This is one where smoke starts coming out of my own ears. (laughing) >>Rick: (laughing) Kind of reminds me of Jeremy,
2:04:56
the nowhere man in Yellow Submarine, he kept sort of creating things as he learned and
2:05:02
he said, "So little time, so much to know." >>Donald: Right. Exactly, exactly.
2:05:08
>>Rick: Okay, let me see, John just added a follow-up question. Let me see if it makes sense.
2:05:15
Okay, I think I can get this. John said, "I mean not end to the expressions but a complete experience of the Source."
2:05:25
And I think we were both saying that yeah, you can completely experience the Source but
2:05:33
even there, I mean, okay, let's theorize two ways. One is, you can completely experience the Source by becoming that and still have endless
2:05:43
expressions of the Source to explore, and another way of looking at it is within the
2:05:50
Source itself, which actually the whole universe is contained within because it's the totality.
2:05:57
Well this gets tricky because I mean, we can think of the Source as being unmanifest and
2:06:03
we can think of exploring within the unmanifest all the possibilities that are latent within it � "the Source" meaning consciousness � but at the same time from that perspective,
2:06:12
if we're really living that, then the whole universe is within us. And so when we're exploring the universe in a way that others would perceive as outwardly,
2:06:22
we're actually not outward, there is no "outward. We're exploring within the self because the self engulfs everything � consciousness
2:06:30
is the totality. Does that make sense? >>Donald: It's certainly ... it's a wonderful idea, it's a wonderful idea, it's worth really
2:06:39
pursuing. In some sense, I'm not divorced from the Source ... >>Rick: Can't be.
2:06:45
>>Donald: I can't be, right, but I wonder if the Source itself is constantly reawakening
2:06:52
to new possibilities. >>Rick: I think it is, you know, because again, it's sort of this eternal self-interacting
2:07:00
dynamics of consciousness which goes on and on and on and continues to churn out universes
2:07:06
and infinite possibilities. >>Donald: Right. That would be my best guess right now, would be that the Source itself is constantly surprised
2:07:18
by the new possibilities. >>Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah! It's like, "Wow! Look what I can do now!" >>Donald: That's right, and that's the experience of delight at being surprised, trying a new
2:07:32
chocolate in the candy store. >>Rick: That's funny, an email just came in advertising chocolate just as you said that.
2:07:37
(laughter) >>Donald: (laughter) >>Rick: There's a synchronicity for you! >>Donald: That's right, so again, I mean, these are ... this is pretty heavy ground
2:07:46
and there's all sorts of ways to be wrong, deeply, and profoundly wrong. But on the other hand, we have to be bold enough to explore and go in these ideas even
2:08:00
if they seem way out there and crazy. We have to boldly explore and then later on we have to pull back and say, "Okay, what
2:08:06
have we really done? Can we make those ideas precise" � if we want to do this scientifically. So you have to have this creative time like we're doing right now, where we just go out
2:08:15
there and let our ideas go wild, and then a second phase where we go back and say, "Okay!
2:08:20
That was nonsense, no, but that one, that's interesting. Okay, what did we really mean by that one?
2:08:26
Let's try to pull that down, make it precise, make predictions. And that's sort of the game we play, and that may be a picture of the whole process here,
2:08:36
of fun exploration then, "What have I really learned?" More exploration, what have I really learned, and this whole process of exploring.
2:08:44
>>Rick: Yeah. This thing of the Creator or the Source of creation or something being endlessly creative
2:08:52
and just surprising Itself with Its creations. You kind of ... maybe it's just an assumption but you can sort of see in looking at nature.
2:09:04
You know, all the different fish, and birds, and unusual things, and giant tubeworms living
2:09:10
at the bottom of the ocean living around thermal vents, and there seems to be no end to the creativity.
2:09:15
>>Donald: That's right. >>Rick: Yeah, and then this is just one measly little planet, I mean what else is out there?
2:09:22
>>Donald: Exactly, oh absolutely, that's right, yeah, yeah. It's almost like someone showing off, "Look what I just came up with.
2:09:28
Bet you've never thought about that was possible!" >>Rick: (laughter) >>Donald: And then again, all in good humor, right? It's sort of there's a funny side to this whole thing.
2:09:35
There's a levity. There's a seriousness but also a levity in the exploration. >>Rick: Yeah!
2:09:41
>>Donald: It's fun to explore but there's also the serious side of it's easy for us to be self-deceived, so we need to be serious about getting rid of the nonsense.
2:09:50
>>Rick: You know the term �lila'? >>Donald: No. >>Rick: It means play, and the whole creation is said to be the Lord's lila, He's having
2:09:58
fun, it's play. >>Donald: Oh! Okay. Well, that's a nice congruence of ideas, absolutely.
2:10:04
>>Rick: Yeah. Alrighty. Well God, I've just so much enjoyed talking to you and preparing to talk to you, it's
2:10:13
been quite a week for me, and this is really the icing on the cake � having this conversation. >>Donald: Thank you, Rick, it's been a great pleasure.
2:10:20
It's just been a wonderful conversation and I really thank you for giving me this chance to talk with you. >>Rick: Yeah, I don't know if you remember when I first suggested that we'd do this,
2:10:28
but we were standing at nearby urinals at the Science & Nonduality Conference and I said, "Hey, do you want to ..." >>Donald: I do remember, right, that's right!
2:10:36
(laughter) >>Rick: (laughter) >>Donald: That was a couple of years ago, back when we could actually have a conference. >>Rick: It was actually last October but it seems like an eternity ago.
2:10:44
>>Donald: It was just last October, wow. Just before this whole thing just clamped down.
2:10:49
The Science & Nonduality meetings can't be in person this year. >>Rick: No, they're canceling it this year.
2:10:55
There's a virtual one coming up shortly after I release this video, so maybe people can
2:11:01
catch that if they wish. Alright, well thanks so much, Don. I really appreciate having had this conversation and I'm sure we'll have another one, one of
2:11:11
these days, you know, and we can sort of like pick up where this one has left off.
2:11:18
And it'll be interesting to see how your research progresses because I think you're really onto some really good, basic, important, fundamental stuff, which is not by any means just a kind
2:11:29
of intellectual game you're playing. I think the understanding of consciousness as fundamental and not as merely an epiphenomenon
2:11:37
of brain functioning is the ultimate paradigm that needs to be turned on its head � or
2:11:43
the materialist paradigm needs to be turned on its head in order for the huge changes
2:11:49
to take place in the way we interact with the world, that need to take place if we're
2:11:56
going to continue to live in the world. >>Donald: I absolutely agree. If we can get these brilliant physicists on board, watch out - we're going to learn so
2:12:06
quickly! I'm hoping to get these physicists who are beginning to realize that space-time is doomed
2:12:12
to start exploring the idea that consciousness is fundamental. There are some really high IQs out there, this thing could really take off.
2:12:18
(laughter) >>Rick: Oh yeah, it could, great. Well thanks, and thanks so much to those who've been listening or watching, I hope you've
2:12:24
hung in there with us cause you know, personally, as you can tell, I find this whole conversation
2:12:29
to be fascinating and I really have enjoyed speaking with Donald. And there's plenty more of him online.
2:12:36
If you want to listen to some more of his talks and lectures just look on YouTube, and I think there's an index to those on your website also, which I'll be linking to from
2:12:44
your page on BATGAP. >>Donald: Very good, thank you very much, Rick. >>Rick: Thanks, Don.
2:12:49
>>Donald: Okay. >>Rick: Talk to you later. >>Donald: Talk to you later. Okay. >>Rick: Bye, bye. {Credits roll and BATGAP theme music playing}.

gistfile1.txt

0:00
whatever reality is it's not what you see what you see
0:06
is is just an adaptive fiction
0:12
the following is a conversation with donald hoffman professor of cognitive sciences at uc irvine focusing his
0:18
research on evolutionary psychology visual perception and consciousness
0:23
he's the author of over 120 scientific papers on these topics and his most
0:29
recent book titled the case against reality why evolution hid the truth from
0:34
our eyes i think some of the most interesting ideas in this world like those of donald
0:40
hoffman's attempt to shake the foundation of our understanding of reality and thus
0:46
they take a long time to internalize deeply so proceed with caution
0:52
questioning the fabric of reality can lead you to either madness or the truth and the funny thing
0:59
is you won't know which is which this is the lex friedman podcast to
1:04
support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's donald
1:10
hoffman in your book the case against reality why evolution hid the truth from
1:16
our eyes you make the bold claim that the world we see with our eyes is not real
1:21
it's not even an abstraction of objective reality it is completely detached from
1:26
uh objective reality can you explain this idea right so this is a theorem from evolution by natural
1:33
selection so the technical question that i and my team asked was
1:38
what is the probability that natural selection would shape sensory systems to see true properties of
1:44
objective reality and to our surprise we found that the answer is precisely zero except for one
1:50
one kind of structure we can go into if you want to but for for any generic structure that you might think the world
1:55
might have a total order a topology metric the probability is precisely zero that
2:02
natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to see any aspect of
2:07
objective reality so in that sense uh what we're seeing is
2:13
what we need to see to stay alive long enough to reproduce
2:18
so in other words we're seeing what we need to guide adaptive behavior full stop so
2:24
the evolutionary process the process that took us from the origin of life on
2:29
earth to the humans that we are today that process does not maximize
2:36
for truth to maximizes for fitness as you say fitness beats truth and fitness does not have to be
2:43
connected to truth is the claim and that's where you have an approach
2:48
towards zero of probability that we have evolved
2:54
human cognition human consciousness whatever it is the magic that makes our mind work
3:00
evolved not for its ability to see the truth of
3:05
reality but its ability to survive in the environment that's exactly right so most of us intuitively think that
3:12
surely the way that evolution will make our senses more fit
3:18
is to make them tell us more truths or at least the truths we need to know about objective reality the truths we
3:24
need in our niche that's the standard view and it was the view i took i mean that's sort of what we were
3:30
taught or just even assume it's just sort of like the intelligent assumption that we would all make but
3:35
we don't have to just wave our hands the evolution of natural selection is a mathematically precise theory uh john
3:41
maynard smith in the 70s created evolutionary game theory and
3:46
we have evolutionary graph theory and even genetic algorithms that we can use to study this and so we don't have to wave our hands it's it's a matter of
3:53
theorem and proof and or simulation before you get the theorems and proofs and a couple graduate students of mine
3:59
justin mark and brian marion did some wonderful simulations that tipped me off that there was something going on here
4:06
and then i went to a mathematician chaitan prakash and manish singh and some other friends of mine chris fields
4:13
and but chaitan was the real mathematician in behind all this and he's proved several theorems that
4:18
uniformly indicate that with one exception which has to do with probability measures um
4:25
there's no uh the probability of zero the the reason there's an exception for probability
4:30
measures so-called sigma algebras or or um sigmative classes
4:36
is that for any scientific theory uh there is the assumption that that needs
4:42
to be made that the whatever structure the
4:48
whatever probabilistic structure the world may have is not unrelated to the probabilistic structure
4:55
of our perceptions if they were completely unrelated then no science would be possible so and so this is technically the
5:02
the map from reality to our senses has to be a so-called measurable map has to preserve sigma algebras but that means
5:09
it could be infinite to one and it could collapse all sorts of event information but other than that
5:15
there's there's no requirement in standard evolutionary theory for
5:20
fitness payoff functions for example to preserve any specific structures of objective reality so you can ask the
5:26
technical question this is one of the avenues we took um if you look at all the fitness payoffs
5:32
from whatever world structure you might want to imagine so a world with say a total
5:39
order on it so it's got end states and they're totally ordered and then you can have
5:45
a set of maps from that world into a set of payoffs say from zero to a thousand or whatever you want your payoffs to be
5:52
and you can just literally count all the payoff functions and just do the combinatorics and count them then you can ask a precise question
5:59
how many of those payoff functions preserve the total order if that's what you live or how many preserve the
6:05
topology and you just count them and divide so so the number that are homomorphisms
6:11
versus the total number and then take the limit as the number of states in the world and the number of
6:17
payoff values goes very large and when you do that you get zero every time okay you've
6:22
there's a million things to ask here but first of all just in case uh people are not familiar with your
6:29
work let's sort of linger on the big bold
6:34
statement here which is the thing we see with our eyes
6:40
is not some kind of limited window into reality it is completely detached from reality
6:47
likely completely detached from reality you're saying 100 likely okay
6:53
so none of this is real in the way we think is real in the way we have this intuition there's um
7:01
like this table is some kind of abstraction but underneath it all there's atoms and
7:07
there's an entire century of physics that describes the functioning of those atoms and the quarks that make them up
7:13
there's many nobel prizes about particles and fields and all that
7:20
kind of stuff that uh slowly builds up to something that's perceivable to us both with our eyes
7:25
with our different senses as this table then there's also ideas of chemistry
7:33
that over layers of abstraction from dna to embryos the cells
7:39
that make the human body so all of that
7:44
is not real it's a real experience and it's a real adaptive set of
7:51
perceptions so it's an adaptive set of perceptions full stop we want to think perceptions are real so
7:58
so their perceptions are real as perceptions right they are we are having our perceptions but we've assumed that there's uh a
8:05
pretty tight relationship between our perceptions and reality if i look up and see the moon then there is something that
8:13
exists in space and time that uh matches um what i perceive and
8:20
all i'm saying is that if you take evolution by natural selection seriously
8:27
then that is precluded that our perceptions are there they're there to guide
8:32
adaptive behavior full stop they're not there to show you the truth in fact the way i think about
8:38
it is they're there to hide the truth because the truth is too complicated it's just like if you're trying to you
8:44
know use your laptop to write an email right what you're doing is toggling voltages in the computer but good luck
8:50
trying to do it that way that's the reason why we have a user interface is because we don't want to know that quote unquote truth the diodes and
8:57
resistors all that that terrible hardware if you had to know all that truth it would your friends wouldn't hear from
9:02
you so you so what evolution gave us was perceptions that guide adaptive behavior
9:10
and part of that process it turns out means hiding the truth and giving you
9:15
eye candy so what's the difference between hiding the truth
9:20
and forming abstractions uh layers upon layers of abstractions over
9:26
these of our low level voltages and transistors and
9:32
chips and programming languages from assembly to python that then leads you to be able to
9:39
have an interface like chrome where you open up another set of javascript and html
9:45
uh programming languages that lead you to have a graphical user interface on which you can then send your friends an
9:51
email is that completely detached from the zeros and ones
9:58
that are firing away inside the computer it's not of course when i talk about the user
10:04
interface on your desktop um there's this whole sophisticated
10:10
backstory to it right that that the hardware and the software that's allowing that to happen evolution doesn't tell us the backstory
10:16
right so the theory of evolution is not going to be adequate to tell you what is that backstory it's going to say
10:24
that whatever reality is and that's the interesting thing it says whatever reality is you don't see it
10:31
you see a user interface but it doesn't tell you what that user interface is how it's
10:37
built right now we can we can try to look at certain aspects of the interface but
10:43
already we're going to look at that and go real okay before i would look at neurons and i was assuming i was seeing
10:49
something that was at least partially true and now i'm realizing it could be like
10:54
looking at the pixels on my desktop or icons on my desktop and good luck you
11:00
know going from that to the data structures and then the voltages and i mean good luck there's just no way so what's
11:07
interesting about this is that our scientific theories are precise enough and rigorous enough to
11:13
tell us certain limits but and even the limits of the theories themselves
11:19
but they're not going to tell us what the next move is and that's where scientific creativity comes in
11:25
so the stuff that i'm saying here for example um is not alien to physicists
11:30
the physicists are saying precisely the same thing that space time is doomed we've assumed that space time
11:36
is fundamental we've assumed that for for several centuries and it's been very useful so all the things that you were
11:41
mentioning the particles and all the work that's been done that's all been done in space time but now physicists are saying space time is doomed there's
11:47
no such thing as space time fundamentally in the laws of physics
11:53
and that comes actually out of gravity together with quantum field
11:59
theory it just comes right out of it it's it's it's a theorem of of those two theories put together
12:05
but it doesn't tell you what's behind it so the physicists are know that their their best theories
12:11
einstein's gravity and quantum field theory put together entail that space-time cannot be
12:16
fundamental and therefore particles in space-time cannot be fundamental they're just irreducible representations
12:22
of the symmetries of space time that's what they are so we have so space time so we put the two together we put
12:27
together what the physicists are discovering and we can talk about how they do that and then we the new
12:33
discoveries from evolution of natural selection both of these discoveries are really in the last 20 years
12:38
and what both are saying is um spacetime has had a good ride it's been very useful reductionism has
12:44
been useful but it's over and it's time for us to go beyond when you say spacetime is doomed is it the space is
12:51
the is the is it the time is it the very hard-coded specification of four
12:56
dimensions um or are you specifically referring to the
13:01
kind of uh perceptual domain that humans operate in which is space time you think like
13:08
there's a 3d um like our world is three dimensional and
13:14
time progresses forward therefore three dimensions plus one for d what uh what what exactly do you mean by space-time
13:21
what do you mean by space-time is doomed great great so this is by the way not my quote this is from for example nema or
13:28
kanye hamed at the institute for advanced study at princeton ed whitten also there david gross
13:35
nobel prize winner so this is not just something the cognitive scientists this is what the physicists are saying yeah
13:40
the physicists are space-time uh skeptics we are they're saying that and i can say
13:47
exactly why they think it's doomed but what they're saying is that you know because your question was what what aspect of space
13:53
time what are we talking about here it's both space and time they're union into space time as an einstein's theory
13:59
that's doomed and they're they're basically saying that
14:05
even quantum theory this is with neymar connie ahmed especially so the hilbert spaces will not be fundamental
14:12
either so that that the notion of hilbert space which is really critical to
14:17
quantum field theory quantum information theory uh that's not going to figure in the fundamental
14:24
new laws of physics so what they're looking for is some new mathematical structures beyond space-time
14:31
beyond you know einstein's four-dimensional space-time or supersymmetric version
14:37
geometric algebra signature two comma four kind of there are different ways you can represent it but they're finding
14:44
new structures and then by the way they're succeeding now they're finding they found something called the amplitude this is nema and his
14:50
colleagues the the cosmological polytope these are so there are these like
14:56
polytopes these polyhedra in in multi-dimensions generalizations of simplices
15:02
that are coding for for example the scattering amplitudes of
15:07
processes in the large hadron collider and other other colliders so they're finding that if they let go space-time
15:13
completely they're finding new ways of computing these scattering amplitudes that turn
15:19
literally billions of terms into one term when you do it in space and time because
15:25
it's the wrong framework it's it's it's just a user interface from that's now from the evolutionary point of view it's
15:30
just user interface it's not a deep insight into the nature of reality so it's missing deep symmetry something
15:37
called a dual conformal symmetry which turns out to be true of the scattering data but you can't see it in space-time
15:42
and it's making the comp the computations way too complicated because you're trying to compute all the loops
15:47
and feynman diagrams and all the finement integrals so see the feynman approach to the scattering amplitudes is
15:53
trying to enforce two critical properties of space time locality and unitarity
15:58
and so by when you enforce those you get all these loops and multiple you know different levels of loops and for each
16:04
of those you have to add new terms to your computation but when you do it outside of space time
16:11
you don't have the notion of unitarity you don't have the notion of locality you have something deeper and is
16:17
capturing some symmetries that are actually true of the data and but then when you look at the geometry of the facets of these
16:23
polytopes then certain of them will code for unitarity and locality so it actually
16:31
comes out of the structure of these deep polytubes so what we're finding is there's this whole new world now
16:37
beyond space-time that is making explicit symmetries that are true of the data that cannot be seen
16:43
in space-time and that is turning the computations from billions of terms to one or two or
16:49
a handful of terms so we're getting insights into symmetries and we're and all of a sudden the math is becoming
16:54
simple because we're not doing something silly we're not adding up all these loops in space time we're doing something far deeper but they don't know
17:01
what this world is about also you know they're in an interesting position
17:06
where we know that space time is doomed and not i should probably tell you why it's doomed what they're saying about why it's doomed but but they need a
17:13
flashlight to look beyond space-time what what flashlight are we going to use to look into the dark beyond space time
17:19
because einstein's theory and quantum theory can't tell us what's beyond them all they can do is tell us that when you
17:25
put us together space time is doomed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters 10 to the minus 43 seconds
17:31
beyond that space time doesn't even make sense it just has no operational definition
17:36
so but it doesn't tell you what's beyond and so they're they're just looking for deep structures like guessing
17:42
it's really fun so these really brilliant guys generic brilliant men and women who are doing this work
17:48
physicists are making guesses about these structures informed guesses because they're trying to ask well okay
17:54
what deeper structure could give us the stuff that we're seeing in space time but without certain commitments that we
18:00
have to make in space time like locality and so they make these brilliant guesses and of course most of the time you're
18:05
going to be wrong but once you get one or two that start to pay off and then you get some lucky breaks so they got a
18:12
lucky break back in 1986 a couple of mathematicians named park and taylor
18:18
took the scattering amplitude for two gluons coming in at high energy and four gluons going out at low energy so that
18:25
kind of scattering thing so it's like apparently for people who are into this that's sort of something that happens so
18:31
often you need to be able to find it and get rid of those because you already know about that and you need to so you needed to compute them it was billions
18:37
of terms and they couldn't do it even for the supercomputers couldn't do that for the many billions or millions of times per
18:44
second they need to do it so they they begged the experimentalists begged the theorists please can you you got it and
18:51
so park and taylor took the billions of terms hundreds of pages and miraculous miraculously turned it into
18:57
nine and then a little bit later they guessed one term expression that turned out to be equivalent so
19:03
billions of terms reduced to one term the so-called famous park taylor formula
19:09
1986 and that was like okay where did that come from what this is a pointer
19:15
into a deep realm beyond space and time but but no one i mean what can you do with it and they
19:21
thought maybe it was a one-off but then other formulas started coming up and then eventually neymar connie hamad and
19:28
his team found this thing called the amplitude which really sort of captures the whole a big part of the whole balox
19:35
i'm sure they would say no there's plenty more to do so so i won't say they did it all by any means they're looking
19:40
at the cosmological polytope as well so what's remarkable to me is that
19:46
two pillars of modern science quantum field through with gravity on the one hand
19:52
and evolution by natural selection on the other just in the last 20 years have very clearly said
19:58
space time has had a good run reductionism has been a fantastic methodology so we had a great ontology
20:04
of space time a great methodology of reductionism now it's time for a new trick
20:10
but now you need to go deeper and and show but by the way this doesn't mean we throw away everything we've done not by
20:16
a long shot every new idea that we come up with beyond space time must project precisely
20:22
into space time and it better give us back everything that we know and love in space time or generalizations
20:28
or it's not going to be taken seriously and it shouldn't be so so we have a strong constraint on whatever we're
20:34
going to do beyond space-time it needs to project into space-time and whatever this deeper theory is it may not itself
20:40
have evolution by natural selection this may not be part of this deeper realm but when we take the whatever that thing is
20:46
beyond space-time and projected into space-time it has to look like evolution by natural selection or it's wrong
20:52
so so that's so that's a strong constraint on this work so even the evolution
20:59
by natural selection and uh quantum field theory
21:05
could be interfaces into something that that doesn't look anything like
21:11
like you mentioned i mean it's interesting to think that evolution might be a very crappy interface into something
21:17
much deeper that's right they're both telling us that the framework that you've had can only go so far and it has
21:23
to stop and there's something beyond and that framework the very framework that is space and time itself now of course
21:30
evolution by natural selection is not telling us about like einstein's relativistic
21:35
spaces that was another question you asked a little bit earlier it's telling us more about our perceptual space and
21:41
time which um we have used as the basis for creating first a newtonian space versus
21:48
time as a mathematical extension of our perceptions and then einstein then took
21:55
that and extended it even further so the relationship between what evolution is telling us what the physicists are telling us is that in some sense the
22:02
newton and einstein space time are formulated
22:08
as sort of rigorous extensions of our perceptual space
22:13
um making it mathematically rigorous and laying out the symmetries that that they find there so that's sort of the
22:19
relationship between them so it's the perceptual space time that evolution is telling us is just a user interface effectively
22:27
and then the physicists are finding that even the mathematical extension of that into the einsteinian formulation
22:34
has to be as well um not the final story there's something deeper so let me ask you about reductionism and interfaces
22:43
as we march forward from newtonian physics uh to quantum mechanics
22:49
these are all in your view interfaces
22:56
are we getting closer to objective reality how do we know
23:01
if these interfaces in the process of science the reason we like those interfaces is
23:06
because they're predictive of some aspects strongly predictive about some aspects of our reality
23:14
is that completely deviating from our understanding of that reality or is
23:19
it helping us get closer and closer and closer well of course one critical constraint on all of our theories is that they are
23:25
empirically tested and past the experiments that we have for them so so no one's arguing
23:32
against experiments being important and wanting to test all of our our current
23:37
theories and uh any new theories on that so that's that's that's all there
23:44
but we have good reason to believe that science will never get a theory of
23:50
everything you know everything everything everything everything right a final theory of everything right
23:56
i think that my own take is for what it's worth is that girdles in completeness theorem
24:01
sort of points us in that direction that even with mathematics uh any finite accidentalization that's
24:08
sophisticated enough to be able to do arithmetic it's easy to show that there'll be statements that are true that can't be
24:15
proven can't be deduced from within that framework and if you add the new statements to
24:20
your axioms then there'll be always new statements that are true but can't be proven with a new axiom system
24:26
and the best scientific theories indian physics for example and also now
24:33
evolution are mathematical so our theories are going to be they're going to have their own assumptions
24:38
and um they'll be mathematically precise and they'll be theories perhaps of everything except those assumptions
24:44
because the assumptions are we say please grant me these assumptions if you grant me these assumptions then i
24:49
can explain this other stuff but so you have the assumptions that um [Music]
24:55
are like miracles as far as the theory is concerned they're not explained they're the starting points for explanation and
25:01
then you have the mathematical structure of the theory itself which will have the girdle limits
25:07
and so my my take is that um reality whatever
25:13
it is is always going to transcend any
25:20
conceptual theory that we can come up with there's always going to be mystery at the edges
25:26
right uh contradictions and all that kind of stuff okay and truths
25:32
so there's an this idea that is brought up in the financial space of uh settlement of transactions
25:39
it's often talked about in cryptocurrency especially so you could do you know money cash is
25:44
not connected to anything uh it used to be connected to gold
25:50
to physical reality but then you can use money to exchange uh to exchange value to transact
25:56
uh so when it was on the gold standard the money would represent some
26:02
stable uh component of reality isn't it more effective
26:09
to avoid things like hyperinflation if we generalize that idea isn't it
26:15
better to connect your uh whatever we humans are doing in the social interaction space with each other
26:22
isn't it better from an evolutionary perspective to connect it to some degree to reality so
26:28
that the the transactions are settled with something that's universal as
26:33
opposed to us constantly operating in something that's a complete illusion isn't it easy to hyperinflate that
26:41
like when where you really deviate very very far away from
26:47
um from the underlying reality or do you not never get in trouble for this
26:53
can you just completely drift far far away from the underlying reality and never
27:00
get in trouble that's a great question on the financial side there's two levels at least that we
27:05
could take your question one one is strictly like evolutionary psychology of financial systems um and that's that's
27:12
pretty interesting um and there the decentralized idea that the d5 kind of idea in cryptocurrencies
27:18
may make good sense from just an evolutionary psychology point of view having you know human nature being what
27:24
it is putting a lot of faith in a few central controllers
27:30
depends a lot on the veracity of those and trustworthiness of
27:35
those few central controllers and we have ample evidence time and again that um that's often betrayed
27:41
so it makes good evolutionary sense i would say to have a decentralized i mean
27:46
democracy is a step in that direction right we're we don't we don't have a monarch now telling us what to do we
27:53
decentralize things right because if the monarch if you have marcus aurelius as your emperor you're great if you have
27:58
nero it's not so great and so we don't want that so democracy is a step in that direction but but i think the defy
28:06
thing is is an even bigger step and is is going to even make the democratization even even greater so so
28:13
that's one level also the fact that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is also
28:19
an evolut a consequence of evolution right that's also a feature i think
28:26
right you can argue from the long span of living organisms it's nice for power
28:31
to corrupt for you to it so uh mad men and women throughout history
28:38
might be useful to teach us a lesson we can learn from our negative example
28:44
right exactly right right right so power does corrupt and i think that
28:50
you can think about that again from an evolutionary point of view but i think that your question was a little deeper when that was
28:57
is does the evolutionary interface idea sort of unhinge science from
29:04
from some kind of important test for the theories right we don't want it
29:10
doesn't mean that anything goes in scientific theory but there's no if there if we don't see the truth is
29:15
there no way to tether our theories and test them and and i think
29:22
there there's no problem there we we can only test things in terms of what we can measure with our senses in space and
29:29
time so we're going to have to continue to do experiments and but we're going to re
29:34
we're going to understand a little bit differently what those experiments are we had thought that when we see
29:41
a pointer on a some machine in a you know an experiment that the machine exists
29:47
the pointer exists and the values exist even when no one is looking at them and that they're an objective truth and and
29:53
our best theories are telling us no the pointers pointers are just pointers and that's what you have to rely on for
30:00
making your judgments um but um that even the pointers themselves are
30:07
not the objective reality so and and i think girdle is telling us that
30:13
not that um anything goes but you know as you develop new axiom systems you will find out what goes
30:19
within that axiom system and what what testable predictions you can make so i don't think we're we're
30:25
untethered we we continue to do experiments what i think we won't have that we want
30:31
is a conceptual understanding that gives us a theory of everything that's final and complete i i think that
30:38
this is to put it another way this is job security for scientists
30:44
our job will never be done is job security for neuroscience because before we thought that when we looked in
30:50
the brain we saw neurons and neural networks and and uh you know action potentials and
30:56
and synapses and so forth and that's that was it that that was the reality now we have to reverse engineer that we
31:01
have to say what is beyond space time what is going on what is a dynamical system beyond space time that when we
31:08
project it into einstein space time gives us things that look like neurons and neural networks and synapses
31:14
that's so we have to reverse engineer so there's going to be lots more work for neuroscience it's going to be far more
31:20
complicated and difficult and challenging but but that's wonderful that's what we need to do we thought
31:26
neurons exist when they aren't perceived and they don't in the same way that if i show you when i say they don't exist i
31:32
should be very very concrete if i draw on a piece of paper a little sketch
31:38
of something that is called the necker cube it's just a little line drawing of a cube right on a flat piece of paper if
31:44
i execute it well and i show it to you you'll see a 3d cube and you'll see it flip sometimes you'll see one face in
31:49
front sometimes you'll see the other face in front but if i ask you know which face is in front when you don't
31:54
look you know the answer is well neither face is in front because there's no cube
32:01
this is a flat piece of paper yeah so when you look at the piece of paper you perceptually create the cube
32:08
and when you look at it then you fix one face to be in front and one face to the other so that's what i mean when i say
32:14
it doesn't exist space time itself is like the cube it's a data structure that
32:20
your sensory systems construct whatever your sensory systems mean now because we now have to
32:25
even not even take that for granted but there are perceptions that you construct on the fly
32:31
and uh their data structures and the computer sciences and you garbage collect them when you don't need them so you create them and garbage collect them
32:37
but is it possible that it's mapped well in some concrete predictable way to
32:44
objective reality the sheet of paper this two-dimensional space or we can talk about
32:49
space-time maps in some way that we maybe don't yet understand
32:55
but will one day understand what that mapping is but it maps reliably it is tethered in that way well
33:03
yes and and so the new theories that the physicists are finding beyond spacetime have that kind of tethering so they're
33:08
they show precisely how you start with an amplitude and how you project this high dimensional structure into
33:16
the four dimensions of space time so there's a precise procedure that that
33:21
relates the two and they're doing the same thing with the cosmological polytopes so so they're the
33:27
they're the ones that are making the most uh you know concrete and and fun advances going beyond space time and
33:33
there they're they're tethering it right they say this is precisely the mathematical projection from this deeper
33:39
structure into space time one thing i'll say about as a non-physicist what that i find
33:45
interesting is that they're finding just geometry but there's no notion of dynamics
33:51
right now they're just finding these static geometric structures which is impressive i'm so i'm not
33:57
putting them down this is what they're doing is unbelievably complicated and brilliant and uh
34:04
adventurous although it's all those things and beautiful beautiful yeah from a human aesthetic
34:11
perspective because geometry is beautiful it's it's absolutely and it's f they're finding symmetries that are true of the data that can't be seen in
34:17
space-time but i'm looking for a theory beyond space time
34:22
that's a dynamical theory i would love to find and we can talk about that at some point a theory of
34:28
consciousness in which the dynamics of consciousness itself will give rise to the geometry that the
34:35
physicists are finding beyond space time if we can do that then we'd have a completely different way of looking at
34:40
how consciousness is related to what we call the brain or the physical world more generally right right now
34:47
all of my brilliant colleagues well 99 of them are trying to
34:53
they're they're assuming space-time is fundamental they're assuming that particles are fundamental
34:59
quarks gluons leptons and so forth elements atoms and so forth are fundamental and that therefore neurons
35:05
and brains are part of objective reality and that somehow when you get matter
35:10
that's complicated enough it will somehow generate conscious experiences by its
35:16
functional properties or if you're pan psychist maybe you in addition to the physical properties of particles you add
35:23
your consciousness property as well and then you have you combine these physical and conscious
35:30
properties to get more complicated ones but they're all doing it within space time
35:36
all of the work that's being done on consciousness and this relationship to the brain is all assumed something
35:43
that our fit our best theories are telling us is doomed space time why does that particular assumption bother you
35:49
the most so you bring up space time i mean that's just one
35:55
useful interface we've used for a long time uh surely there's other interfaces is
36:01
space time just the one of the big ones that you to build up people's intuition about the
36:06
fact that they just do assume a lot of things strongly or or it is is it in fact the
36:12
fundamental flaw in the way we see the world well everything else that we think we
36:19
know are things in space time sure and so
36:24
if you when you say space time is doomed this is a shot to the heart yeah
36:30
of the whole framework the whole conceptual framework that we've had in science
36:35
not to the scientific method but to the the fundamental ontology and also the
36:41
fundamental methodology the ontology of spacetime and its contents and the methodology of reductionism
36:47
which is that as we go to smaller scales in space-time we will find more and more fundamental
36:53
laws and it's been very useful for for the space and time for centuries
36:59
reductionism for centuries but but now we realize that that's over
37:04
reductionism is in fact dead as is space time what exactly is
37:09
reductionism what is the process of reductionism that is different
37:15
than uh some of the physicists that you mentioned that are trying to think trying to let go of the assumption of
37:20
space-time looking beyond isn't that still trying to come up with a simple model that explains this whole thing
37:27
isn't it still reducing it's a wonderful question because it really helps to clarify two different
37:32
notions which is scientific explanation on the one hand and a particular kind of scientific
37:38
explanation on the other which is the reductionist so the reductionist explanation is saying i will start with
37:44
with things that are smaller in space-time and therefore more fundamental where the
37:49
laws are more fundamental so we go uh to just smaller and smaller scales
37:54
whereas with in science more generally we just say like when einstein did the special
37:59
theory of relativity he's saying let me have a couple postulates i will assume that the speed of light is universal for for all um
38:06
[Music] observers in uniform motion um and that the laws
38:12
of physics so i feel for for uniform motion are are those that's not a reductionist that those are
38:18
saying grant me these assumptions i can build this entire concept of space time out of it it's not a reductionist thing you're not going to
38:25
smaller and smaller scales of space you're you're coming up with these deep deep principles same thing with this
38:31
theory of gravity right it's the falling elevator idea right so this is not a reductionist kind
38:37
of thing it's it's it's it's it's something different so simplification is a bigger thing than just reductionism
38:45
reductionism has been a particularly useful kind of scientific explanation for example in thermodynamics
38:51
right where the notion that we have of heat some macroscopic thing like temperature and heat
38:56
it turns out that neil boltzmann and others discover well hey you know if we go to smaller and smaller scales we find these
39:02
things called molecules or atoms and if we think of them as bouncing around having some kind of energy then um what
39:09
we call heat is is a is really can be reduced to to that and and so that's a particularly useful
39:17
kind of reduction is a useful kind of scientific explanation that works within a range of
39:22
scales within space-time but we know now precisely where that has to stop at 10
39:28
to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds and i would be impressed if it was 10 to the minus 33
39:35
trillion centimeters i'm not terribly impressed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters [Laughter]
39:43
i don't even know how to comprehend either of those numbers frankly uh do just a small aside because i am
39:50
a computer science person i also find cellular automator beautiful yes and uh so you have somebody like
39:56
uh stephen wolfram who recently has been very excitedly exploring um
40:02
a proposal for a data structure that could be um the numbers that would make you a
40:07
little bit happier in terms of scale because they're very very very very tiny
40:12
do you like this space of exploration i'm really thinking letting go of space time letting go of everything and trying
40:19
to think what kind of data structures could be underneath this whole mess that's right so if they're thinking
40:25
about these as outside of space-time then that's that's what we have to do that's what our best theories are telling us you now have to think outside
40:31
of space-time now of course i should back up and say we know that einstein
40:38
surpassed newton right but that doesn't mean that there's not good work to do a newton there's all sorts of newtonian
40:43
physics that takes us to the moon and so forth and there's lots of good problems that we want to solve with newtonian
40:49
physics the same thing will be true of space-time we'll we'll still it's not like we're going to stop using space time we'll continue to do all sorts of
40:55
good work there but for for those scientists who are really looking to
41:01
go deeper to actually find the next you know just like what einstein did to newton what what are we going to do to
41:06
einstein how do we get beyond einstein and quantum theory to something deeper then we have to actually let go and and
41:13
if we're going to do like this a automata kind of approach
41:18
it's critical that it's not automata in space-time it's automata prior to space-time from which we're going to
41:24
show how space-time emerges if you're doing automotive within space-time well that might be a fun model but it's not
41:30
the radical new step that we need yeah so the space time emerges from that
41:35
whatever system yeah like you're saying it's it's a dynamical system do we even have an understanding what dynamical means
41:42
when we go beyond when we start to think about dynamics
41:47
that could mean a lot of things even causality could mean a lot of things if if we
41:54
if we realize that everything is an interface like what how much do we really know is
42:00
an interesting question because you brought up neurons i got to ask you and another yet another tangent there's a
42:05
paper i remember a while ago looking at called uh could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor and i just
42:12
enjoyed that thought experiment that they provided which is they basically it's a couple of uh neuroscientists eric
42:19
jonas and conrad cording uh who used the tools of neuroscience to
42:25
analyze a microprocessor i saw a computer computer chip now if we lesion it here
42:31
what happens and so forth and if you go on lesion in the computer it's very very clear that lesion
42:37
experiments on computers are not going to give you a lot of insight into how it works and also the measurement devices and the kind of sort of just using the
42:43
basic approaches of neuroscience collecting the data trying to intuit about the underlying
42:48
function of it and that helps you understand that our scientific exploration of concepts
42:57
depending on the field uh our are maybe in the very very early stages
43:04
i wouldn't say it leads us astray perhaps it does sometimes but it's not a
43:10
uh it's not anywhere close to some fundamental mechanism that actually makes a thing work i don't know if you
43:16
can sort of comment on that in terms of using neuroscience to understand the human mind and
43:22
neurons are we really far away potentially from uh understanding in the way we
43:28
understand the transistors enough to be able to build a computer so one one um
43:36
one thing about understanding is you can understand for fun the other one is
43:42
to understand so you could build things and and that's when you really have to
43:47
understand uh exactly in fact what got me into the field that i
43:53
at mit was um worked by david marr on this very topic so david maher
43:58
was a professor at mit but he'd done his phd in neuroscience studying just the architectures of the brain but he
44:05
realized that his his work it was on the cerebellum um he he realized that his work
44:12
as as rigorous as it was left him unsatisfied because he didn't know what the cerebellum was for
44:18
yeah and and and why it had that architecture and so he he went to mit and he was in the ai lab
44:24
there and and uh he said he had this three-level approach that really grabbed my attention so i
44:31
when i was an undergrad at ucla i read one of his papers in a class and said who is this guy because he said you have to have a computational theory what is
44:37
being computed and why an algorithm how is it being computed what what are the percep
44:43
algorithms and then the hardware how does it get instantiated in the hardware and so to really do
44:49
he argued we needed to have understanding of all those levels and i that really got me i loved the
44:54
neuroscience but i realized this guy was saying if you can't build it you don't understand it effectively and so that's
45:00
why i went to mit and i had the pleasure of working with david until he died as
45:06
just a year and a half later so there was there's been that idea that
45:11
you know with neuroscience we we have to have in some sense a top-down model of what what
45:16
what's being computed and why that we would then go after and same thing with the you know trying to reverse engineer
45:22
you know a computing system like your laptop we really would we really need to understand what the user interface is
45:28
about and why we have what are keys on the keyboard for and so forth you need to
45:34
know why to really understand all the circuitry and what it's what it's for
45:40
now we don't the evolution of natural selection
45:46
does not tell us the deeper question that we're asking the answer to the
45:52
deeper question which is why what what why what what's this deeper reality and
45:57
what's it up to and why it all it tells us is that whatever reality is
46:04
it's not what you see what you see is is just
46:10
an adaptive fiction so just to linger on this fascinating bold question
46:15
that shakes you out of your dream state does this fiction still help you in
46:21
building intuitions as literary fiction does about reality
46:27
the reason we read literary fiction uh is it helps us
46:33
build intuitions and understanding in indirect ways sneak up to the difficult
46:38
questions of human nature great fiction same with this observed reality
46:44
um does this interface that we get this fictional interface help us build
46:49
intuition about deeper truths of how this whole mess works
46:54
well i think that each theory that we propose will give its own answer to that question right so
47:01
when the physicists are proposing um these structures like the amplitude and
47:07
cosmological polytope sociohedron and so forth beyond space time we can then ask your question for those specific
47:13
structures and say how much information for example does evolution financial selection and
47:19
the the kinds of sensory systems that we have right now give us
47:24
about this deeper reality and and why did we evolve this way we can try to
47:30
answer that that question from within the deeper so there's not going to be a general answer i think we're going to
47:35
what we'll have to do is posit these new deeper theories and then try to answer your question
47:41
within the framework of those deeper theories knowing full well that there will be an even deeper theory
47:47
so is it is this paralyzing though because how do we know we're not completely
47:52
adrift uh out to sea lost forever from
47:57
so like that our theories are completely lost so if if if it's all
48:03
uh if we can never truly deeply introspect to the bottom
48:09
if it's always just turtles on top of turtles infinitely um isn't that paralyzing for a
48:16
scientific mind well it's interesting that you say introspect to the bottom
48:23
because there there is that there is one i mean again this isn't the same spirit
48:28
of what i said before which is it depends on what answer you give to what's beyond space time what answer we
48:33
would give to your question right so but one answer that um is interesting to
48:38
explore is something that spiritual traditions have said for thousands of years but haven't said precisely so
48:44
we can't take it seriously in science until it's made precise but we might be able to make it precise and and that is that um
48:51
they've they've also said something like um space and time aren't fundamental they're maya they're their illusion
48:56
and but but that um if you look inside if you introspect
49:03
and let go of all of your particular perceptions uh you will come to something that's
49:08
beyond conceptual thought and that is
49:14
they claim uh being in contact with the deep ground of being that that transcends any particular conceptual
49:19
understanding if that is correct now i'm not saying is correct but and i'm not saying it's not correct
49:25
i'm just saying if that's correct then it would be the case that as scientists because
49:31
we also are in touch with this ground of being we would then not be able to conceptually understand
49:38
ourselves all the way but we could know ourselves just by being ourselves
49:43
and so we would there would be a sense in which there is a fundamental grounding to the
49:49
whole enterprise because we're not separate from the enterprise this is the opposite of third the
49:55
impersonal third person science this this would make science be personal personal all the way down
50:01
and and but but nevertheless scientific because the scientific method would still be
50:06
what we would use all the way down for the conceptual understanding unfortunately still don't know if you went all the way down it's possible that
50:13
this kind of whatever consciousness is and we'll talk about it is getting um
50:20
the cliche statement of be yourself uh is is it is somehow digging at a
50:26
deeper truth of reality but you still don't know when you get to the bottom
50:31
you know a lot of people they'll take psychedelic drugs and they'll say well that takes my mind to certain places
50:37
where it feels like that is revealing some deeper truth of reality but it's
50:43
still it could be interfaces on top of interfaces that's that's um in your view
50:48
of this you really don't know it means gato's and completeness is that
50:54
you really don't know my own view on it for what it's worth
50:59
because i don't know the right answer but my own view on it right now is that it um it's never ending
51:05
i think that there will never that this is great as i said before great um job security for science
51:11
and that we if this is true and if if consciousness is somehow important or fundamental in
51:18
the universe this may be an important fundamental fact about consciousness itself that that it's the never-ending
51:24
exploration that's going on in some sense well well that's interesting you push
51:30
back on the job security okay so maybe as we understand this kind of
51:36
idea deeper and deeper we understand that the pursuit is not a fruitful one
51:42
then maybe we need to maybe that's why we don't see aliens everywhere as you get smarter and
51:49
smarter and smarter you realize that like exploration
51:54
is uh there's other fun ways to spend your time than exploring you could be
52:01
you could be sort of living maximally in some way that's not exploration
52:06
you know i could there's all kinds of video games you can construct and put yourself inside of them that don't
52:12
involve you going outside of the game world it's uh you know feeling for my human perspective what seems to
52:19
be fun is challenging yourself and overcoming those challenges so you can constantly artificially generate
52:24
challenges for yourself like sisyphus and his boulder just and and that's it so the scientific
52:31
method that's always reaching out to the stars that's always trying to figure out the puzzle on bottom puzzle the the
52:36
trick always trying to get to the bottom turtle maybe if we can
52:42
build more and more the intuition that that's uh infinite pursuit we get um
52:48
we agreed to start deviating from that pursuit and start enjoying the here and now versus the
52:54
looking out into the unknown always maybe that's a looking out into the unknown as a
53:00
early activity for a species
53:06
that's evolved i'm just sort of saying uh pushing back because you probably got a lot of scientists excited in terms of
53:12
job security i could i could envision where it's not job security where
53:17
scientists become more and more useless uh maybe they're like the holders of the
53:24
ancient wisdom uh that's that allows us to study our own history but
53:30
not much more than that just to get well let's push back that's good push back
53:36
i'll i'll put one in there for the scientists again yes but but sure but then i'll take the other side too so
53:43
when faraday did all of his experiments with magnets and electricity and so forth he
53:50
came with all this wonderful empirical data and james clerk maxwell looked at it and wrote down a few equations which we can
53:56
now write down in the single equation the maxwell equation if we use geometric algebra just one equation
54:03
that opened up unbelievable technologies where you know people are zooming and talking to each
54:09
other around the world the whole electronics industry there was something
54:15
that transformed our lives in a very positive way with the theories beyond space time
54:23
here's one potential right now most of the galaxies that we
54:28
see um we can see them but we know that we could never get to them no matter how fast we traveled they're going away from
54:34
us at the speed of light or beyond so we can't we can't ever get to them so there's all this beautiful real estate that's just
54:41
smiling and waving at us and we can never get to it yeah but that's if we go through spacetime
54:47
but if we recognize that spacetime is just a data structure it's not fundamental
54:52
we're not little things inside space time space-time is a little data structure
54:58
in our perceptions it's just the other way around once we understand that
55:04
and when we get equations for the stuff that's beyond space time maybe we won't have to go through space
55:10
time maybe we can go around it maybe i can go to proxima centauri and not go through space i can just go right there directly it's a data
55:17
structure we can start to play with it so so i think that my for what it's worth my take would be
55:24
that that the endless sequence of theories that we could
55:31
contemplate building will lead to an endless sequence of new remarkable insights into
55:38
the potentialities the possibilities that would that would that would seem miraculous to us and that we will be
55:44
motivated to continue the exploration partly um just for the technological
55:50
innovations that that come out but you're the other thing that you
55:55
mentioned though what about just being what if we when we decide instead of all this doing and exploring what about
56:01
being my guess is that the best scientists will do both and that
56:07
the act of being will be a place where they get many of
56:13
their ideas and that they then pull into the conceptual realm and i think many of the
56:19
best scientists like einstein comes to mind right where these guys say look i didn't come up with these ideas by a
56:25
conceptual analysis i was thinking in vague images and i was it was just something
56:32
non-conceptual and then it took me a long long time to pull it out into concepts and then longer to put it into
56:39
math but the real insights didn't come from just slavishly right you know playing with equations they came from a
56:46
deeper place and so there there may be this going back and forth between the complete
56:52
non-conceptual where there's essentially no end to the wisdom and then conceptual systems where
56:58
there's the girdle limits um that we have to that and that may be if consciousness is
57:04
is important than fundamental that may be what consciousness at least part of what consciousness is about is this
57:10
discovering itself discovering its possibilities so to speak we can talk about what that might
57:15
mean um by going from the non-conceptual to the conceptual and back back and forth
57:23
to get better and better and better at being right let me ask you just to linger on the
57:29
evolutionary because you mentioned evolutionary game theory and that's really where you
57:35
the perspective from which you come to form the case against reality
57:40
uh at which point in our evolutionary history do we start to deviate
57:47
the most from reality is it uh is it way before life even originated on
57:54
earth is it um in the early development from
57:59
bacteria and so on or is it when some inklings of what we think of as
58:05
intelligence or maybe even uh complex consciousness
58:11
started to emerge so where did this deviation [Music] just like with the interfaces on in a
58:18
computer you know you start with transistors and then you have assembly
58:23
and then you have c c plus plus then you have python then you have guise
58:29
and all that kind you have layers upon layers when do we start to dva well david maher again my advisor at mit
58:37
in his book vision suggested that the more primitive sensory systems were less
58:43
realistic less vertical but that by the time you got to something as complicated as the humans we were actually estimating the true
58:51
shapes and distances to objects and so forth so so his point of view and i think it was probably
58:57
it's not an uncommon view among my colleagues that
59:02
that yeah the sensory systems of lower creatures may just not be complicated enough to give them much much truth
59:09
um but as you get you know to 86 billion neurons you can now compute the truth or at least the parts of the truth that we
59:15
need when i look at evolutionary game theory
59:21
one of my graduate students justin mark did some simulations using genetic algorithms
59:27
so there he was just exploring we start off with random organisms random
59:32
sensory genetics and random actions and the first generation was unbelievably there were it was a
59:38
foraging situation they were foraging for resources and most of them you know stayed in one place didn't do
59:44
anything important and and but we could then just look at how the genes
59:50
evolved and and what we found was what what what what he found was that uh
59:57
basically you never even saw the the truth
1:00:02
organisms even come on the stage they they if they came but they were gone in one generation they just they just
1:00:08
weren't so they they they came and got they came and went uh even just in one generation they just
1:00:15
are not good enough the ones that were just tracking their senses just were tracking the fitness payoffs
1:00:20
were were far more um fit than than um the truth seekers
1:00:26
so from so an answer at one level i want to give an answer at a deeper level but
1:00:32
just with evolutionary game theory because my attitude as a scientist is um
1:00:37
i don't believe any of our theories i take them very very seriously i study them i look at their implications but
1:00:43
none of them are the gospel they're just the latest ideas that we have and you know so
1:00:48
the reason i study evolutionary game theory is because that's the best tool we have right now in this area
1:00:54
there's there isn't nothing else that competes and so as a scientist it's my responsibility to take the best tools
1:01:00
and see what they mean and the same thing the physicists are doing they're taking the best tools and looking at what what they entail
1:01:07
but i don't i i think that science now has enough experience to realize that we should not
1:01:13
believe our theories in the sense that we've now arrived in 1890 it was a lot of physicists
1:01:20
thought we'd arrived they were discouraging um bright young students from going into physics because
1:01:27
it was all done and that's precisely the wrong attitude yeah forever this is the wrong attitude forever
1:01:34
the attitude we should have is i uh a century from now they'll be looking at us and laughing at
1:01:40
what we didn't know and we just have to assume that that's going to be the case uh just just know that everything that
1:01:45
we think is so brilliant right now our final theory a century from now they'll look at us like we look at the
1:01:51
physicists of 1890 and go how could they have been so dumb yeah so so i don't want to make that mistake so so i'm not
1:01:58
doctrinaire about any of our current scientific theories i am dr nir about
1:02:04
this we should use the best tools we have right now with with humility well
1:02:11
so let me ask you about game theory there's um i love game theory uh evolution game theory
1:02:18
um but i'm always suspicious of it um like economics um when you construct models
1:02:25
it's too easy to construct things uh that oversimplify
1:02:31
just because we our human brains enjoy the simplification
1:02:36
of constructing a few variables that somehow represent organisms or represent
1:02:42
people and running a simulation that then allows you to build up intuition and it
1:02:47
feels really good because you guys can get some really deep and surprising intuitions but how do you know
1:02:54
your models aren't the assumptions underlying your models on some fundamentally flawed and because of that
1:03:00
your conclusions are fundamentally flawed so i guess my question is what are the limits in
1:03:06
your use of game theory evolution game theory your experience with it what are the limits of game theory
1:03:12
so i've gotten some pushback from professional colleagues and friends who have tried to rerun simulations and
1:03:19
try to i mean the idea that we don't see the truth is not comfortable and so many of my colleagues are very interested in
1:03:24
trying to show that we're wrong and so the idea would be to say that somehow we did something as you're suggesting maybe
1:03:30
something special that wasn't completely general um we've got some little special
1:03:35
part of the whole search space and evolutionary game theory in which this happens to be true but more generally
1:03:40
organisms would evolve to see the truth so the the best pushback we've gotten is from a team at
1:03:47
yale and uh they suggested that um if you use
1:03:52
thousands of payoff functions so we in our simulations we just use a couple one or two
1:03:58
because it was the first simulations right so that would be a limit we had one or two payoff functions we showed the result in those
1:04:04
at least for the genetic algorithms and they said if you have 20 000 of them
1:04:10
then we can find these conditions in which um truth seek seeing organisms would be the
1:04:16
ones that that evolved and survived and so we looked at their simulations and
1:04:21
and it certainly is the case that you can find special cases in which truth can evolve so when i say it's probability
1:04:28
zero it doesn't mean it can't happen it can happen in fact it could happen infinitely often it's just probability of zero so if probability of zero things
1:04:36
can happen infinitely often when you say probability of zero you mean probability close to zero
1:04:41
to be very precise so for example if i have a unit square on the plane
1:04:48
um and i use a measure in which the um on a probability measure in which the
1:04:54
area of the region is this probability then if i draw a curve
1:05:00
in that unit square it has measure precisely zero precisely not approximately precisely
1:05:07
zero and yet it has infinitely many points so there's an object that for that probability measure has probability of
1:05:12
zero and yet there's infinitely infinitely many points in it so that's what i what i mean when i say that the
1:05:18
things that are probability of zero can happen infinitely often in principle yeah but infinity
1:05:24
as far as i and i look outside often i walk around and look at people i haven't never seen
1:05:30
infinity in real life that's an interesting
1:05:35
issues i've been looking i've been looking ahead i don't notice it infinitely small or the infinitely big
1:05:41
and so the tools and mathematics you could sort of apply the same kind of criticism that it is a very convenient
1:05:47
interface into our reality that's a big debate in mathematics the intuitionists versus the ones who take for example the real
1:05:52
numbers as as as as real and that's that's a fun discussion nicholas giesen has a physicist said really interesting
1:05:59
work recently on how if you go with intuitionist mathematics uh
1:06:05
you could effectively quantize newton and you find that the newtonian
1:06:11
theory and and quantum theory aren't that different once you go with it it's funny it's really quite
1:06:17
interesting so so the the issue you raise is a very very deep one and one that i think we should take quite
1:06:22
seriously which is you know how should we think about the reality of
1:06:28
the contours hierarchy aleph one lf2 and all these all these different
1:06:34
infinities versus um just um
1:06:39
a more algorithmic approach right so where it's everything's computable in some sense everything's finite as big as
1:06:46
you want but but but nevertheless finite so yeah that ultimately boils down to
1:06:52
whether the world is discrete or continuous in some
1:06:57
general sense and again we can't really know but there's just a
1:07:03
mind-breaking thought just common sense reasoning that something can happen and this yet
1:07:10
probability of it happening is zero percent that doesn't that doesn't uh compute for
1:07:16
common sense computer right um this is where you have to be a sharp mathematician to really and i'm
1:07:22
not sharp is one word what i'm saying is common sense computer is i i mean that
1:07:29
[Music] in a very kind of in a positive sense
1:07:34
because we've been talking about perception systems and interfaces if we were if we are to reason about the
1:07:40
world we have to use the best interfaces we got and i'm not exactly sure
1:07:47
uh that game theory is the best interface we got for this oh
1:07:53
right and applications of mathematics tricks and tools and mathematics the
1:07:58
game theory is the best we got when we're thinking about the nature of reality and fitness functions and
1:08:05
evolution period right well that's a fair rejoinder and i think that um
1:08:12
that was the tool that we used and if if someone says here's a better mathematical tool and here's why this is
1:08:18
this mathematical tool better captures the essence of darwin's idea john maynard smith didn't quite get it
1:08:24
with evolutionary game theory there's this better this thing now there are tools like evolutionary graph theory
1:08:30
which generalize evolutionary game theory and then there's quantum game theory so so you can you can use uh
1:08:39
quantum tools like entanglement for example as as a resource in games that that change
1:08:45
the very nature of of the solutions of the the optimal solutions of the game
1:08:50
theoretic well the the the work from yale is really interesting it's a really interesting challenge of that kind of
1:08:57
of these ideas where okay if you have a very large number of fitness functions or let's say you have
1:09:04
a nearly infinite number of fitness functions or a growing number of fitness functions what what kind of interesting
1:09:11
things uh start to emerging emerging if you are to be an organism if to be an organism that adapts means
1:09:18
having to deal with an ensemble of fitness functions right and so we've actually redone some
1:09:26
of our own work based on those and this is the the back and forth that we expect in science
1:09:31
right and what we found was that they in their simulations they were assuming that you
1:09:38
couldn't carve the world up into objects that uh and so we said well let's relax that assumption allow organisms to
1:09:45
create data structures that we might call objects and an object would be you take you you would do hierarchical clustering of your
1:09:51
fitness payoff functions the ones that have similar shapes if you have 20 000 of them maybe these 50 are all very very
1:09:59
similar so i can take all the perception action fitness stuff and make that into
1:10:04
a data structure and we'll call that a unit or an object and as soon as we did that then all of
1:10:10
their results went away it turned out they were the special case and that the the organisms that were allowed to only
1:10:17
see that that were shaped to see only fitness payoffs were the ones that were
1:10:22
so so the idea is that objects then what are objects from an evolutionary point of view this bottle
1:10:28
we thought that when i saw a bottle it was because i was seeing a true object that existed whether or not it was perceived
1:10:34
evolutionary theories suggest a different interpretation i'm seeing a data structure that is encoding
1:10:42
a convenient way of looking at various fitness payoffs i can use this for drinking
1:10:48
i could use it as a weapon not very good one i could beat someone with head with it um if my goal is mating this is
1:10:55
pointless so i'm seeing for what i'm coding here is all sorts of
1:11:01
actions and the payoffs that i could get when i pick up an apple now i'm getting a different set of actions and pay and
1:11:07
payoffs for when i pick up a rock i'm getting so for every object what i'm getting is a different set of payoff
1:11:14
functions um and act with various actions and so once you
1:11:19
allow that then what you find is once once again that
1:11:24
truth goes extinct and the organisms that just get an interface are the ones that that win but the question uh just sneaking up on
1:11:32
this is fascinating from where do fitness functions originate
1:11:38
what gives birth to the fitness functions so if there's a giant black box that just
1:11:43
keeps giving you fitness functions what are we trying to optimize you said that water uh has different
1:11:49
um uses than an apple so there's these objects
1:11:56
what are we trying to optimize and why is not reality a really good generator of
1:12:02
fitness functions so each theory makes its own assumptions and says grant me this then i'll explain
1:12:09
that so evolutionary game theory says grant me fitness payoffs right and grant me strategies with
1:12:15
payoffs and i can write down the matrix for this strategy interacts with that strategy these are the payoffs that come up if
1:12:21
you grant me that then i can start to to explain a lot of things now you can ask for a deeper question like okay
1:12:27
how does physics evolve biology and where do these fitness
1:12:32
payoffs come from right now
1:12:38
that would be that's a completely different enterprise and of course evolutionary game theory then would be
1:12:43
not the right tool for that it would have to be a deeper tool that shows where evolutionary game theory comes from
1:12:50
my own take is that there's going to be a problem in doing that
1:12:57
because space time isn't fundamental it's just a user interface
1:13:04
and that the distinction that we make between living and non-living is not a fundamental distinction
1:13:10
it's an artifact of the limits of our interface right so this is a new wrinkle and this
1:13:16
is an important wrinkle what it's so nice to take space and time is
1:13:21
fundamental because if something looks like it's inanimate it's inanimate and we can just say it's it's not living
1:13:27
now it's much more complicated certain things are obviously living i'm
1:13:32
talking with you there's i'm obviously interacting with some something that's alive and
1:13:37
conscious i think we've let go of the word obviously in this conversation i think nothing is obvious this is obvious
1:13:43
that's right but when we get down to you to like you know an ant it's obviously living but i'll
1:13:50
say it it appears to be living it won't get down to a virus now people wonder and when we get down to you know protons
1:13:57
people say it's not living and and my attitude is look i have a user interface
1:14:02
the interface is there to hide certain aspects of reality and others to to to
1:14:09
it's an uneven representation put it that way certain things just get completely hidden
1:14:14
dark matter and dark energy are most of the energy and matter that's out there our interface just plain flat out hides
1:14:21
them the only way we get some hint is because gravitational things are going wrong
1:14:27
within our so so most things are outside of our of our interface the distinction between
1:14:32
living and non-living is not fundamental it's an artifact of our interface so if so this is the if we
1:14:39
really really want to understand where evolution comes from
1:14:44
to answer the question the deep question you asked i think the the right way we're going to do that is to come up with a deeper theory than space time
1:14:52
in which there may not be the notion of time and show that
1:14:57
whatever this dynamics of that deeper theory is and by the way i'll talk about how you
1:15:03
could have dynamics without time but the the dynamics of this deeper theory when we project it into
1:15:09
in certain ways then we do get space time and we get what appears to be evolution by natural selection so i
1:15:15
would love to see evolution by natural selection nature red and tooth and claw people fighting and animals fighting for
1:15:20
resources and a whole bit come out of a deeper theory which perhaps it's all cooperation there's no no limited
1:15:26
resources and so forth but as a result of projection you get space and time and as a result
1:15:32
of projection you get nature red and tooth and claw the appearance of it but it's all an artifact of the interface i
1:15:39
like this idea that uh the line between living and non-living is very important
1:15:46
because that's that's the thing that would emerge before you have evolution the idea of death
1:15:55
so that seems to be an important component of natural selection if and if that
1:16:00
emerged because that's also um you know asking the question i guess
1:16:05
that i asked where do fitness come fitness functions come from that's like asking
1:16:10
the the old meaning of life question right it's a what's the why why
1:16:16
why and one of the big underlying lies okay you can start with evolution on earth but
1:16:23
without living without life and death without the line between the living and the dead
1:16:28
you don't have evolution so what if underneath it there's no such thing as the living and the dead
1:16:34
there's no like this concept of an organism period there's a living organism that's defined
1:16:42
by a volume in space-time that somehow interacts
1:16:48
that over time maintains its integrity somehow it has some kind of history it has a
1:16:54
wall of some kind the outside world the environment and then inside there's an organism
1:17:00
so you're defining an organism and also you're defining that organism by the fact that it can move
1:17:07
and it can be come alive which you kind of think of as moving
1:17:12
combined with the fact that it's keeping itself separate from the environment so you can point out that thing is living and then it can also die
1:17:20
that seems to be of all very powerful components of space time that
1:17:26
enable you to have something like natural selection and evolution well and there's a lot of interesting
1:17:32
work some of it um by collaborators of carl fristen and others where they they have um
1:17:39
bayes net kind of stuff that they built on in the notion of a markov blanket so you have some states
1:17:45
within this network that are inside the blanket then you have the blanket and then the state's outside the blanket and
1:17:50
the states inside this markov blanket are conditionally independent of the states outside the blank blanket conditioned on the blanket and what
1:17:58
they're what they're looking at is that the dynamics inside of the states inside the markel blanket seem to be trying to
1:18:05
estimate properties of the outside and and react to them in a way so it seems like you're doing probabilistic
1:18:10
inferences in ways that might be able to to keep your life so there's interesting work going on in in that direction but
1:18:17
but but what i'm saying is is something slightly different and that is like when i when i look at you
1:18:24
all i see is skin hair and eyes right that's all i see but
1:18:29
i know that there's a deeper reality i believe that there's a much deeper reality there's the whole world of your experiences your thoughts your hopes
1:18:34
your dreams in some sense the face that i see is is just a symbol that i create right
1:18:42
and as soon as i look away that i delete that symbol but i don't delete you i don't delete the conscious experience
1:18:48
the the whole world of your so i i'm only deleting an interface symbol but
1:18:53
that interface symbol is a portal so to speak
1:19:00
not a perfect portal but a genuine portal into your beliefs into your conscious experiences into
1:19:07
that's why we can have a conversation we genuinely but your consciousness is genuinely affecting mine and mine is
1:19:12
genuinely affecting yours through these icons which which i create on the fly i
1:19:17
mean i create your face when i look i delete it i don't create you your consciousness that's there all the time
1:19:23
um but but i do so now when i look at a cat i'm creating something that i still call living and i
1:19:30
still think it's conscious when i look at an ant i create something that i still would
1:19:35
call living but maybe not conscious when i look at something i call a virus now
1:19:40
i'm not even sure i would call it living and when i look at a proton i would say i don't even think it's not alive at all
1:19:48
it could be that i'm nevertheless interacting with something that's just
1:19:54
as conscious as you i'm not saying the proton is conscious the face that i'm creating when i look at you that face is
1:19:59
not conscious that face is a data structure in me that face isn't it
1:20:05
it's an experience it's not an experiencer similarly a proton is is is something
1:20:11
that i create you know when i look or do a collision in the large hadron collider or something like that
1:20:18
but what is behind the entity in space time so i've got this space-time interface and i've just got this entity that i
1:20:24
call a proton what is the reality behind it well the physicists are finding these big big structures
1:20:31
the sociohedron what's behind those could be consciousness
1:20:37
what i'm playing with in which case when i'm interacting with a proton i could be interacting with
1:20:42
consciousness again to be very very clear because easily i'm not saying a proton is conscious
1:20:49
just like i'm not saying your face is conscious your face is a symbol i create and then delete
1:20:55
as i look and so your face is not conscious but i know that that face in my interface the lex friedman face that
1:21:01
i create is an interface symbol that's a genuine portal into your consciousness the portal is
1:21:07
less clear for a cat even less clear for an ant and by the time we get down to a
1:21:12
proton the portal is not clear at all but that doesn't mean i'm not interacting with consciousness it just
1:21:17
means my interface gave up and there's some some deeper reality that we have to go after so so that so
1:21:24
your question really forces out a big part of this whole approach that i'm talking about so it's this portal unconscious i wonder
1:21:30
why you can't your portal is not as good to a cat
1:21:36
to the cast consciousness than it is to a human does it have to be have to do with the fact that you're
1:21:42
human and just similar organisms organisms that similar complexity are able to
1:21:50
create portals better to each other or is it just as you get more and more complex you get
1:21:55
better and better portals well let me answer one one aspect that i'm more confident about then i'll
1:22:01
speculate on that why is why is it that the portal is so bad with protons
1:22:07
well and and and elementary particles more generally so quarks leptons and gluons and so forth
1:22:12
well the reason for that is because those are just symmetries of space-time
1:22:19
more technically they're irreducible representations of the poincare group of space-time
1:22:25
so they're just literally representations of the data structure of space-time that
1:22:32
we're using so that's why they're not very much insightful they're they're just almost entirely tied to the data structure
1:22:39
itself there's there's not much that they're telling you only something about the data structure not behind the
1:22:44
data structure it's only when we get to higher levels that we're starting to in some sense build portals to what's
1:22:49
behind space time sure yeah so there's more and more
1:22:55
um complexity built on top of the interface of space time with the cat so
1:23:02
you can actually build a portal right yeah yeah right
1:23:08
yeah i this interface of face and hair and so on my skin
1:23:16
there is some sinking going on between humans though where we think like
1:23:21
you're you're getting a pretty good representation of the ideas in my head and starting to get a
1:23:27
foggy view of uh my memories in my head even though
1:23:34
you know this is the first time we're talking you start to project your own memories you start to solve like
1:23:40
a giant hierarchy of puzzles about a human because we're all uh there's a lot of
1:23:46
similarities a lot of it rhymes so you start to make a lot of inferences you build up this model
1:23:51
of a person you have a pretty sophisticated model what's going on underneath
1:23:57
again i just i wonder if it's possible to construct these models about each other and
1:24:02
nevertheless be very distant from an underlying reality
1:24:08
there's a lot of work on this so there's some interesting work called signaling games where they they look at how people
1:24:14
can coordinate and come to communicate there's some interesting work that was
1:24:20
done by some colleagues and friends of mine louis nerens natalia komarova and
1:24:26
kimberly jamison where they we're looking at evolving
1:24:33
color words so you have a a circle of colors you know this is the color circle and they
1:24:39
wanted to see if they could get people to cooperate and how they carved the color circle up into two units of words
1:24:45
and so they had a game theoretic kind of thing that they'd had people do and what they found was that
1:24:51
when they included so most people are trichromats you have three kinds of cone photoreceptors but
1:24:57
there are some a lot of men seven percent of men have are dichromates they might be missing the red cone photoreceptor
1:25:04
they found that the dichromats had an outsized influence on the final ways that the whole space
1:25:11
of colors was carved up and and labels attached you needed to be able to include the dichromats in the
1:25:18
conversation and so they had a bigger influence on how you made the boundaries of the language i thought that was a
1:25:23
really interesting kind of insight that there's going to be again a game perhaps a game where evolutionary or genetic
1:25:30
algorithm kind of thing that goes on in terms of learning to communicate in ways that
1:25:36
that are useful and so yeah you can use game theory to to actually explore that or signaling games
1:25:42
um there's a lot of brilliant work on that i'm not doing it but there's work out there
1:25:47
so if it's okay let us tackle once more and perhaps several more times after
1:25:53
the big topic of consciousness okay this this very beautiful powerful things
1:25:59
that perhaps is the thing that makes us human what is it what's the role of consciousness in um
1:26:06
let's say even just the thing we've been talking about which is the formation of this interface um
1:26:11
but any kind of ways you want to kind of start sure uh tracking and talking about
1:26:17
it well let me say first what most of my colleagues say
1:26:22
99 are again assuming that space time is fundamental particles in space-time matter is
1:26:29
fundamental and most are reductionist and so the standard approach to
1:26:36
consciousness is to figure out what
1:26:41
complicated systems of matter with the right functional properties could possibly lead to the emergence of
1:26:47
consciousness that's the general idea right so maybe you have to have neurons maybe
1:26:55
only if you have neurons but that might not be enough they have to certain kinds of complexity in their
1:27:00
their organization and their dynamics certain kind of network abilities for example
1:27:06
so there's there are those who say for example that
1:27:11
consciousness arises from orchestrated collapse of quantum states of microtubules in neurons certain
1:27:18
so this is hamroff and penrose have that's kind of so it's it's a you start with something
1:27:24
physical a property of quantum states of neurons
1:27:30
of microtubules and neurons and you say that somehow an orchestrated collapse of those
1:27:35
is consciousness or conscious experiences or integrated information theory again you start with something physical
1:27:42
and if it has the right kind of functional properties that's something they call fee with the right kind of integrated information then you have
1:27:48
consciousness or you can be a pan psychist philip gough for example where you you
1:27:55
might say well in addition to the particles in space and time
1:28:01
those particles are not just matter they also could have say a unit of consciousness
1:28:06
and so but once again you're taking space and time and particles as fundamental and you're adding
1:28:12
a new property to them see their consciousness and then you have to talk about how when a proton and neutron
1:28:19
where proton and electron get together to form hydrogen then how those consciousnesses merge to or interact to create the
1:28:26
clutchness of hydrogen and so forth um there's a tension schema theory which again this is how neural network
1:28:34
processes representing to the network itself its attentional processes that
1:28:40
could be consciousness um there's global workspace theory
1:28:45
and neuronal global work experience workspace theory so there's many many theories of this type what's what's
1:28:50
common to all of them is they assume that spacetime is fundamental
1:28:56
they assume that physical processes and space time is fundamental pan psychism adds consciousness says an
1:29:01
additional thing is almost duelist in that regard and
1:29:06
my attitude is our best science is telling us that space-time is not fundamental
1:29:13
so why is that important here well for centuries
1:29:19
deep thinkers thought of earth air fire and water as the fundamental elements it was a
1:29:26
reductionist kind of idea nothing was more elemental than those and you could you could sort of build
1:29:31
everything up from those when we got the periodic table of elements
1:29:37
we realized that um of course we want to study earth air fire and water there's combustion
1:29:43
science for fire there's you know um there's sciences for for
1:29:48
all these other things water and so forth so we're going to do science with these things but but fundamental no no
1:29:54
if you're looking for something fundamental those are the wrong building blocks earth has many many different kinds of
1:30:00
elements that project into the one thing that we call earth if you don't understand that there's silicon that there's iron that
1:30:07
there's all these different kinds of things that project into what we call earth you're
1:30:13
you're you're hopelessly lost you're not fundamental you're not going to get there and then
1:30:18
after the periodic table then we came up with quarks leptons and gluons the the particles of the standard you know the
1:30:24
standard model of physics and and and so we actually now know that if you really want to get fundamental
1:30:33
the periodic table isn't it it's good for chemistry it's just wonderful for chemistry but if you're trying to go
1:30:38
deep fundamental what is the fundamental science that's not it you're going to have to go to
1:30:43
quarks leptons and gluons and so forth well now we've discovered space-time itself is
1:30:50
doomed quarks leptons and gluons are just irreducible representations of the symmetries of space-time
1:30:57
so the whole framework on which consciousness research is being based
1:31:02
right now is doomed and for me these are my friends and colleagues
1:31:09
that are doing this they're brilliant they're absolutely they're they're brilliant i
1:31:14
my feeling is i i'm so sad
1:31:19
that they're stuck with this old framework because if they they weren't stuck like with earth air fire and water
1:31:25
you could actually make progress so it doesn't matter how smart you are if you start with earth air fire and water you're not going to get anywhere right
1:31:31
can i actually just uh uh because the word doomed is so interesting let me give you some options multiple
1:31:37
choice quiz is space time we could say is reality
1:31:43
the way we perceive it doomed
1:31:48
um wrong or fake
1:31:54
because doomed just means it could still be right
1:31:59
and we're now ready to go deeper it would be that so it's not wrong it's
1:32:05
not a complete deviation from a journey toward the truth
1:32:10
right it's like earth air fire and water is not wrong there is earth air fire and water that's a useful framework but it's
1:32:17
not fundamental right well there's also wrong which is they used to believe as i recently
1:32:23
learned that george washington was the president of the first president in the united states was bled to death
1:32:30
uh for something that could have been easily treated uh because it was believed that you can
1:32:35
get actually i need to look into this further but i guess you get toxins out or demons out i don't know what you're
1:32:41
getting out with the bleeding of a person right but so that end up being wrong but
1:32:47
widely believed as a medical tool so it's also possible that
1:32:53
our assumption of space-time is not just doomed but it's wrong
1:32:58
well if we believe that it's fundamental that's wrong but if we believe it's a useful tool
1:33:04
that's right but he could see but bleeding somebody to death was believed to be a useful tool and that was true
1:33:11
it wasn't just not fundamental right it was very i'm sure there's cases in which bleeding
1:33:17
somebody would work but it would be a very tiny tiny tiny percentage of cases
1:33:23
so it could be that it's wrong like it's a side road that's ultimately leading to
1:33:29
a dead end as opposed to a truck stop or something that you can get off of
1:33:34
my feeling is not the dead end kind of thing i i think that the what the physicists are finding is that there are
1:33:39
these structures beyond space time but they project back into space time and so space time
1:33:45
when they when they say space time is doomed they're explicit they're saying it's doomed in the sense that we thought
1:33:50
it was fundamental it's not fundamental right it's a useful absolutely useful and brilliant data structure but there
1:33:57
are deeper data structures like cosmological polytube and and and space-time is not
1:34:03
fundamental what is doomed in the sense that it's wrong is
1:34:09
reductionism which is saying space-time is fundamental right right the idea that that somehow
1:34:18
being smaller in space and time or space time is a fundamental nature of reality
1:34:23
that's is a that's that's just wrong it turned out to be a useful heuristic for for thermodynamics and so forth and
1:34:30
several other places it reductionism has been very useful but that's in some sense
1:34:35
an artifact of how we use our interface um yeah so you're saying size doesn't
1:34:41
matter okay this is very important for me ultimately ultimately right i mean it's
1:34:46
useful for for theories like thermodynamics and also for understanding brain networks in
1:34:51
terms of of individual neurons and neurons in terms of chemical
1:34:56
systems inside cells that's all very very useful but but the idea that we're
1:35:01
getting to the more fundamental nature of reality no when you when you get all the way
1:35:07
down in that direction you get down to the quarks and gluons what you realize is what you've gotten down to is not fundamental reality just the irreducible
1:35:14
representations of a data structure that's all you've gotten down to so you're always stuck
1:35:19
inside the data structure so you seem to be getting closer and closer i went from neural networks to
1:35:24
neurons neurons to chemistry chemistry to particles particles to clerks and gluons i'm getting closer and closer to the
1:35:31
ground no i'm getting closer and closer to the the actual structure of the data structure of space and time the
1:35:36
irreducible representation so that's what you're getting closer to not to a deeper understanding of what's beyond
1:35:42
space-time we'll also refer we'll return again to this question of dynamics
1:35:48
because you keep saying that space-time is doomed but mostly focusing on the space part of
1:35:53
that it's very interesting to see why why time gets the bad cred too because
1:35:59
how do you have dynamics without time is the thing i'd love to talk to you a little bit about but let us return
1:36:04
um your brilliant whirlwind overview of the different
1:36:10
theories of consciousness that are out there what is consciousness if
1:36:16
outside of space-time if we think that we want to have a model of consciousness we as scientists then
1:36:22
have to say what do we want to write down what what what kind of mathematical model are we going to write down right and if you
1:36:28
think about it there's lots of things that you might want to write down about consciousness really complicated subject
1:36:35
so most of my colleagues are saying let's start with matter or neurons and and say what properties of matter could
1:36:41
create consciousness but i'm saying that that whole thing is out space time is doomed that whole thing is
1:36:46
out we need to look at consciousness qua consciousness in other words not as something that
1:36:52
arises in space and time but perhaps it's something that creates space and time as a data structure
1:36:58
so what do we want and here again there's no hard and fast rule but what you as a scientist have to do is to pick
1:37:05
what you think are the minimal assumptions that are going to allow you to boot up
1:37:12
a comprehensive theory that is the trick so what do i want so what what i chose
1:37:18
to do was to have three things i said that there are conscious
1:37:24
experiences feeling of headache the smell of garlic
1:37:29
um experiencing the color red there are those are conscious so that's a primitive theory and the reason i want
1:37:35
few primitives why because those are the miracles of the theory right the primitives the assumptions of your theory are the things you're not going
1:37:41
to explain those are the things you assume and those experiences you particularly mean
1:37:47
there's a subjectiveness to them that's what's the thing when people refer to the heart problem of consciousness
1:37:53
is it feels like something to look at the color red okay exactly right it feels like something to have a
1:37:59
headache or to feel upset to your stomach it feels like something and so though so i'm going to grant that
1:38:08
in this theory there are experiences and they're fundamental in some sense so conscious experience so they're not derived from
1:38:15
physics they're not functional properties of particles they are sewed generous they're they exist
1:38:21
just like we assume space-time exists i'm now saying space-time is just a data structure it doesn't exist independent
1:38:27
of conscious experiences sorry to interrupt once again but should we be focusing in your thinking on humans alone
1:38:35
or is there something about in relation to other kinds of organisms
1:38:42
that have a sufficiently high level of complexity or even or is there some kind of
1:38:48
uh generalization of the pan cyclist idea that all consciousness permeates all matter
1:38:55
outside of the usual definition of what matter is inside space-time so
1:39:01
it's beyond human consciousness human consciousness from my point of view would be
1:39:07
one of a countless variety of consciousnesses and even within human consciousness there's a there's countless variety of
1:39:13
consciousness within us right you have your left and right hemisphere and apparently if you split the corpus
1:39:20
callosum the the personality of the left hemisphere and the religious beliefs of the left hemisphere can be very different from the right hemisphere and
1:39:26
their conscious experiences can be disjoint one could have one conscious
1:39:31
experience they can play 20 questions the left hemisphere can have an idea in its mind and the right hemisphere has to guess and it might not get it so so even
1:39:39
within you there is more than just one consciousness it's lots of consciousnesses so i the the
1:39:46
general theory of consciousness that i'm after is not just human consciousness it's going to be just consciousness and
1:39:51
i presume human consciousness is a tiny drop in the bucket of the infinite
1:39:57
variety of consciousnesses that said i should clarify that the black hole of consciousness is uh
1:40:05
the the home cat i'm pretty sure cats lack uh is the embodiment of evil and lack
1:40:12
all capacity for consciousness or uh compassion so i just want to lay that on there but that's the theory i'm working
1:40:17
i i don't have any good evidence that's just a shout out
1:40:23
sorry to distract so that's the first assumption first assumption that's right the second assumption is that these
1:40:29
experiences have consequences so i'm going to say that conscious experiences can trigger other conscious
1:40:35
experiences somehow so so really in some sense there there's
1:40:42
two basic assumptions there's some kind of causality is there's a chain of causality does this relate to dynamics
1:40:50
i'll say there's a probabilistic relationship okay um and then so i'm trying to be
1:40:56
as non-specific to begin with and see where it leads me so what i can write
1:41:01
down are probability spaces so probability space which contains the conscious experiences that this
1:41:08
consciousness can have so i i'll i call this a conscious agent
1:41:14
this technical thing now i annika harris and i've talked about this and and she rightly
1:41:21
cautions me that people will think that i'm bringing in a notion of a cell for agency and so forth when i say conscious
1:41:26
agent so i just want to say that i use the term conscious agent merely as a technical term there is no notion of
1:41:33
self in my fundamental definition of a conscious age there are only experiences
1:41:38
and probabilistic relationships that of how they trigger other experiences so the agent is the generator of the
1:41:44
conscious experience the agent is a mathematical structure that includes a probability measure
1:41:51
a probability space of possible conscious experiences and what in a markovian kernel
1:41:58
which describes how if this agent has certain conscious experiences how that will affect the experiences of other
1:42:04
conscious agents okay including itself but you don't think of that as a self no there there
1:42:10
is no notion of of a self here there's no notion of of really of an agent
1:42:17
but is there a locality is there an organization
1:42:22
so this is this is um these are conscious units conscious entities but they're
1:42:28
distinct in some way because they have to interact well so here's the interesting thing when we write down the mathematics um
1:42:36
when you have two of these conscious agents interacting they s the the pair
1:42:41
satisfy the definition of a conscious agent so they are a single conscious agent so there is one conscious agent yeah but
1:42:48
it it has a nice analytic decomposition into as many conscious agents that's a
1:42:53
nice interface it's a very useful scientific interface yeah it's it's a scale-free or if you
1:43:01
like a fractal-like approach to it in which we can use the same unit of analysis at all scales in
1:43:08
in studying consciousness but if i want to talk about so there's no notion of learning
1:43:14
memory problem solving intelligence self agency
1:43:20
so none of that is fundamental so and the reason i did that was
1:43:26
because i want to assume as little as possible everything i assume is a miracle in the
1:43:31
theory it's not something you explain is something you assume so i have to build networks of conscious agents
1:43:38
if i want to have a notion of a self i have to build a self i have to build learning memory problem solving intelligence and planning all
1:43:45
these different things i have to build networks of conscious agents to do that it's a trivial theorem that networks of
1:43:51
conscious agents are computationally universal that's trivial so anything that we can do with neural networks or
1:43:56
you know automata you can do with networks of conscious agents that's trivial but
1:44:03
but you can also do more the events in the probability space need not be computable so the markovian dynamics
1:44:11
is not restricted to computable functions because the very events themselves need
1:44:16
not be computable so so this can capture any computable theory anything we can do with neural networks
1:44:22
we can do with conscious agent networks but but it leaves open the door for the possibility of non-computable
1:44:30
interactions between conscious agents so we have to to if we want a theory of of memory
1:44:36
we have to build it and there's lots of different ways you could build we've actually got a paper chris fields took the lead on this and he
1:44:43
we have a paper called conscious agent networks where where chris takes the lead and shows how to use these networks
1:44:48
of conscious agents to build memory and to build primitive kinds of of learning
1:44:53
but can you provide some intuition of what conscious networks
1:44:58
network of conscious networks of conscious agents helps you well first of all what that looks like
1:45:07
and i don't just mean mathematically of course maybe that might help build up intuition but how that helps us
1:45:13
potentially solve the heart problem of consciousness right or is that
1:45:19
baked in that that exists is the can you solve the hard problem of
1:45:25
consciousness why it tastes delicious when you eat a delicious ice cream
1:45:31
with networks of conscious agents or is that taken as an assumption so the the
1:45:37
standard way the heart problem is thought of is we're
1:45:42
assuming space and time and particles or neurons for example these are just physical things that that
1:45:48
have no consciousness and we have to explain how the conscious experience of the taste of chocolate could emerge from
1:45:54
those so that's the typical hard problem of consciousness is that problem right how do you boot up the taste of
1:46:01
chocolate the experience of the taste of chocolate from neurons say or the right kind of
1:46:07
artificial intelligence circuitry how do you boot that up that's that's typically what the hard problem of
1:46:13
consciousness means to to researchers notice that i'm changing the problem i'm not trying to boot up conscious
1:46:20
experiences from the dynamics of neurons or silicon or something like that i'm saying that that's the wrong problem
1:46:27
my heart problem would go in the other direction if i start with conscious experiences
1:46:33
how do i build up space and time how do i build up what i call the physical world how do i build up what we call
1:46:38
brains because i'm saying consciousness is not something that
1:46:43
brains do brains are something that consciousness makes up
1:46:49
it's one among the experience it's an experience an ephemeral experience in consciousness
1:46:54
i look inside so i'll to be very very clear right now i have no neurons
1:46:59
if you looked you would see neurons that's a data structure that you would create on the fly and it's a very useful one as soon
1:47:06
as you look away you garbage collect that data structure just like that necro cube that i was talking about on the
1:47:11
piece of paper when you look you see a 3d cube you create it on the fly as soon as you
1:47:17
look away that's gone when you say you you mean a human being scientist
1:47:22
right now that's right more generally it'll be conscious agents because as you as you pointed out in my
1:47:28
asking for a theory of conscience only about humans no it's it's consciousness which human consciousness
1:47:34
is just a tiny sliver so but you are saying that there is
1:47:40
that's a useful data structure how many other data structures are there that's why i said you human if there's another
1:47:46
earth if there's another alien civilization and doing these kinds of investigations
1:47:51
would they come up with similar data structures probably not what is the space of data structures i guess is what i'm asking um
1:47:59
my my guess is that if consciousness is fundamental consciousness is all there is
1:48:07
then the only thing that mathematical structure can be about is possibilities of consciousness
1:48:15
and that suggests to me that there could be an infinite variety of consciousnesses
1:48:21
and a vanishingly small fraction of them use space-time
1:48:26
data structures and the kinds of structures that we use there's an infinite variety of data structures now this is very similar to
1:48:33
something that max tegmark has said but i want to distinguish it he has this his level 4
1:48:38
multiverse idea he thinks that mathematics is fundamental and and so that's the fundamental
1:48:44
reality and since there's an infinite variety of endless variety of mathematical structures there's an infinite variety
1:48:49
of multiverses in his view i'm saying something similar in spirit but importantly
1:48:55
different there's an infinite variety of mathematical structures absolutely but mathematics isn't the fundamental
1:49:02
reality in this in this framework consciousness is and mathematics is to consciousness
1:49:09
like bones are to an organism you need the bones so mathematics is is
1:49:14
not divorced from consciousness but it's not the entirety of consciousness by any means
1:49:20
and so there's an infinite variety of of conscious consciousnesses and and
1:49:25
signaling games that consciousnesses could interact via and therefore worlds you know common
1:49:32
worlds data structures that they can use to to communicate
1:49:37
so space and time is just one of an infinite variety and so i i think that what we'll what we'll find is that as we
1:49:43
go outside of our little space-time bubble um
1:49:48
we will encounter utterly alien forms of conscious experience that we may not be able to
1:49:56
really comprehend in the in the following sense if i if i ask you to imagine a color
1:50:03
that you've never seen before does anything happen
1:50:08
right nothing happens nothing happens and and that's just one color i'm asking for
1:50:13
just a color we we actually know by the way that there apparently there are women
1:50:19
um called tetraphams um who have four color receptors
1:50:24
not just three and kimberly jamison and others who studied these women have good evidence
1:50:29
that they apparently have a new dimension of color experience that the rest of us don't have so so
1:50:37
these women are apparently living in a world of color that you and i can't even concretely imagine no man can imagine
1:50:43
them yeah and and yet they're real color experiences and so in that sense i'm
1:50:48
saying now take that little baby step oh there are women who have color experiences that i could never have well
1:50:54
that's shocking now take that infinite there are consciousnesses
1:50:59
where every aspect of their their experiences or is like that new color it's something utterly alien to
1:51:05
you you you'd have nothing like that and yet these are all possible varieties of conscious experience when you say
1:51:11
there's a lot of consciousnesses it's a singular consciousness basically the set of possible
1:51:18
experiences you can have in a subjective way as opposed to the met the underlying
1:51:24
mechanism because you say that you know having uh extra color receptor
1:51:31
uh ex ability to have new experiences that's somehow a different consciousness is
1:51:36
there a way to see that as all the same consciousness the subjectivity itself right because when we have
1:51:43
two of these conscious agents interacting in the mathematics they actually satisfy the definition of a
1:51:48
conscious agent so in fact they are a single conscious agent so so in fact
1:51:53
one way to think about what i'm saying i'm postulating with my colleagues jayton and chris and others robert
1:51:59
prentner and so forth there is one big conscious agent infinitely complicated
1:52:05
but fortunately we can for analytic purposes break it down all the way to in some sense the
1:52:10
simplest conscious agent which has one conscious experience one i like this this one agent can
1:52:16
experience red 35 that's it that's what that's what it experiences you can get all the way down to that
1:52:22
so you think it's possible that consciousness whatever that
1:52:28
is is uh much more is fundamental or at least
1:52:34
much more in the direction of the fundamental than his space time as we perceive it
1:52:40
that's the proposal and therefore what i have to do in terms of the heart problem of consciousness
1:52:47
is to show how dynamical systems of conscious agents could lead to what we call space
1:52:53
and time and neurons and brain activity in other words we have to show
1:52:58
how you get space-time and physical objects in entirely from a theory of conscious
1:53:05
agents outside of space time with the dynamics outside of space-time so that's that's and i can tell you how
1:53:12
we plan to to do that but but that's that's the idea okay the magic of it that chocolate is
1:53:17
delicious so so there's a mathematical kind of thing that we could say here how it can
1:53:23
emerge within the system of networks of conscience agents but um
1:53:31
is there going to be at the end of of the proof why chocolate is so delicious
1:53:36
or or no i guess i'm going to ask different kinds of dumb questions to try
1:53:42
to sneak up oh well that's the right question and when i say that i took conscious experiences as fundamental
1:53:47
what that means is in the current version of my theory i'm not explaining conscious experiences where they came
1:53:54
from that's the miracle that's one of the miracles so i have two miracles in my theory there are conscious experiences
1:54:00
like the taste of chocolate and that the there's a probabilistic relationship
1:54:06
when certain conscious experiences occur others are more likely to occur those are the two miracles that
1:54:12
are possible to get beyond that and somehow start to chip away at the
1:54:19
miracleness of that miracle that chocolate is still delicious i hope so
1:54:25
i've got my hands full with what i'm doing right now but but the i can just say at top level how i would
1:54:31
think about that that would get at this
1:54:37
consciousness without form this is going to be really this is
1:54:43
really tough because it's consciousness without form versus the various forms that consciousness
1:54:49
takes for the experiences that it has right right
1:54:54
so there's so when i write down a probability space
1:55:01
for these conscious experience i say here's a probability space for the possible conscious experiences right
1:55:06
it's just like when i write down a probability space for an experiment like i'm going to flip a coin twice
1:55:12
right and i want to look at the probabilities of various outcomes so i have to write down the probability space there could be heads heads heads tails
1:55:18
tails heads tails tails so you before as any class and probability you're told
1:55:23
write down your probability space if you don't write down your probability space you can't get started so here's my probability space for
1:55:29
consciousness how do i want to interpret that structure the structure is just sitting there there's going to be a dynamics that
1:55:36
happens on it right experiences appear and then it disappear just like heads appears and disappears
1:55:41
so so one way to think about that fundamental probability space is that
1:55:48
corresponds to consciousness without any content the infinite consciousness
1:55:55
that transcends any particular content well do you think of that as a mechanism
1:56:00
as a thing like the the rules that govern the dynamics of the thing
1:56:06
outside of space time isn't that if you think consciousness is fundamental isn't it essentially getting like
1:56:12
it is solving the hard problem which is like from uh
1:56:18
where does this thing pop up which is the mechanism of the thing popping up
1:56:24
whatever the consciousness is the different kinds it was so on that mechanism
1:56:29
and also the the question i want to ask is uh how how tricky do you think it is
1:56:36
to solve that problem you solved a lot of difficult problems throughout the history of humanity
1:56:42
there's probably more problems to solve left than we've solved
1:56:49
by like an infinity uh but along that long journey
1:56:55
of intelligent species how when when we solve this consciousness one which is one way to
1:57:01
measure the difficulty of the problem so i'll give two answers there's one problem i think we can solve
1:57:08
but we haven't solved yet and that is the reverse of what my colleagues call the heart problem
1:57:14
the problem of how do you start with conscious experiences in the way that i've just described them in the dynamics and build up space and time and brains
1:57:22
that i think is a tough technical problem but some principle solvable so i think we can solve that so we would
1:57:28
solve the hard problem not by showing how brains create consciousness but how networks of conscious agents create what
1:57:33
we call the the symbols that we call brains
1:57:38
so that that i think but that does that allow you to so that's interesting that's an interesting idea consciousness
1:57:43
creates the brain not the brain creates consciousness but does that allow you to build the thing
1:57:49
my guess is that it will enable unbelievable technologies once
1:57:54
and i'll tell you why i think it plugs into the work that the physicists are doing so this theory of consciousness
1:58:00
will be even deeper than the structures that the physicists are finding like the amplitude
1:58:06
but the other but the other answer to your question is less positive i as i said earlier i think that there
1:58:12
is no such thing as a theory of everything so that
1:58:17
i think that my the theory that my team is working on this conscious station theory is just a
1:58:23
1.0 theory theory we're using probability spaces and markovian curls i
1:58:29
can easily see people now saying well we can do better if we go to category theory and we can
1:58:36
get a deeper perhaps more interesting and then someone will say well now i'll go to topoi theory and then they'll be
1:58:42
so i imagine that there'll be you know conscious agents five ten
1:58:47
3 trillion 0.0 but i think it will never end i think ultimately
1:58:53
this question that we sort of put our fingers on of how does the formless
1:59:00
give birth to form to the taste the wonderful taste of chocolate
1:59:06
i think that we will always go deeper and deeper but we will never solve that
1:59:12
that that in some sense that will be a primitive i hope i'm wrong maybe i'm maybe it's just the the limits
1:59:19
of my current imagination um so i'll just say my imagination right
1:59:25
now doesn't appear that deep hopefully so i don't by the way i'm
1:59:30
saying this i don't want to discourage some brilliant 20 year old who then later on proves me dead wrong i
1:59:38
hope to be proven dead right just like you said essentially from now everything we're saying now everything you're saying all your theories will be
1:59:44
laughing stock they will respect the uh the the the puzzle solving abilities and
1:59:51
how how much we were able to do with so little but uh outside of that it will all be just uh the silliness
1:59:58
will be entertainment for a teenager especially the silliness when we thought that we were so smart and we knew it all
2:00:05
so it would be interesting to explore your ideas by contrasting you mentioned annika monica harris you
2:00:12
mentioned um phil goff so outside of if you're not allowed to
2:00:17
say the fundamental disagreement is the fact that space time is fundamental
2:00:23
um what are interesting distinctions between ideas of consciousness between you and hanukkah
2:00:29
for example you guys have uh you've been on a podcast together i'm sure
2:00:34
in in in in private you guys have some incredible conversations so what where are some sticky interesting sticking
2:00:41
points some interesting disagreements let's say with annika first maybe there'll be a few
2:00:46
other people well annika and i just had a conversation this morning where we were talking about our ideas and what we
2:00:52
discovered really in our conversation was that um we're pretty much on the same page it
2:00:57
was really just consciousness unconsciousness yeah we're our ideas about consciousness are pretty
2:01:02
much on the same page she rightly has cautioned me to when i talk
2:01:08
about conscious agents to point out that the notion of agency is not for is not fundamental in my my
2:01:14
theory the notion of self is not fundamental that's that's absolutely true i can use
2:01:19
this network of conscious agents this and i now use tech as a technical term conscious agent is a
2:01:25
technical term for that probability space with the markovian dynamics i can use that to build models of a self
2:01:31
and to build models of agency but they're not they're not fundamental so she she has
2:01:37
really um more been very helpful in in helping me to be a little bit clear
2:01:42
about these ideas and not say things that are misleading sure the word i mean this is the
2:01:47
interesting thing about language actually is that language quite obviously is an interface
2:01:53
yes um to truth it's it's so fascinating that
2:01:59
individual words can have so much ambiguity
2:02:05
and the the and the slight the specific choices of a word within a
2:02:11
particular sentence within the context of a sentence can have so much uh such a difference in meaning it's quite
2:02:17
fascinating especially when you're talking about topics like consciousness because it's a very loaded term it means
2:02:24
a lot of things to a lot of people and the entire concept is shrouded or mystery so combination of the fact that
2:02:30
it's a loaded term and that there's a lot of mystery people can just interpret it in all
2:02:35
kinds of ways and so you have to be both precise and help them avoid getting um
2:02:42
stuck on some kind of side road of miscommunication
2:02:48
lost in translation because you used the wrong word that's interesting i mean because for for a lot of people
2:02:54
consciousness is ultimately connected to a self
2:03:00
i mean that's our our experience of consciousness is very
2:03:06
it's connected to this ego i mean i just i mean what else could it possibly be i
2:03:12
can't even how do you begin to comprehend to visualize to conceptualize a consciousness that's
2:03:19
not connected to like this particular organism well i have a way of thinking about this
2:03:25
whole problem now that's that's that comes out of this this framework that's different
2:03:30
so we can imagine a dynamics of consciousness not in space and time just
2:03:36
abstractly it could be cooperative for all we know it could be very friendly i don't know
2:03:43
but it and you can set up a dynamics a markovian dynamics that is so called stationary and that's a technical term
2:03:50
which means that the entropy effectively is not increasing there is some entropy but it's constant so there's no
2:03:55
increasing entropy and in that sense the dynamics is timeless
2:04:01
there is no entropic time but it's a trivial theorem
2:04:06
three line proof that if you have a stationary markovian dynamics any projection that you make of
2:04:13
that dynamics by conditional probability and if you want i can state a little bit more even more mathematically precisely
2:04:19
for for some readers for listeners but if any projection you take by conditional probability
2:04:25
the induced image of that markov chain will have increasing entropy
2:04:32
you will have entropic time so so i'll be very very precise i have a mark of chain x1 x2 through xn where x
2:04:40
and n goes to infinity right [Music] the entropy h
2:04:46
capital h of xn is equal to the entropy h of xn minus 1 for all n so the entropy
2:04:53
is the same but it's it's a theorem that h of x n
2:05:01
say given x sub 1 is greater than or equal to h of x n
2:05:07
minus 1 given x 1. sure where does the greater come from
2:05:13
because with the theorem of three-line proof h of x n
2:05:19
x1 is greater than or equal to h of xn given x1 and x2
2:05:26
because conditioning reduces but then h of xn minus 1
2:05:32
given x1 comma x2 is equal to h of xn
2:05:38
um given x2 xn minus 1 given x2 by the markov property
2:05:43
and then because it's stationary it's equal to uh h of x um
2:05:49
um i have to write it down next time sure right anyway there's a three-line proof
2:05:56
sure so but the assumption of stationarity
2:06:02
we're using a lot of times that people will understand right doesn't matter the uh so there's some kind of some markovian
2:06:09
dynamics is uh basically trying to model some kind of system with some probabilities and
2:06:14
there's agents and they interact in some kind of way and you can say something about that system as it involves uh
2:06:21
stationarity so a stationary uh system is one that has certain
2:06:27
properties in terms of entropy very well but we don't know if it's stationary now
2:06:32
we don't know what properties uh right uh you have to kind of take assumptions and see okay well what is
2:06:39
what does the systems behave like under these different properties the the more constraints the more assumptions
2:06:45
you take the more predictive the more interesting powerful things you can say but sometimes the limiting
2:06:52
that said we're talking about consciousness here how does that you said cooperative okay
2:07:00
competitive it just i like chocolate i'm sitting here i have a brain i'm wearing a suit
2:07:08
it sure as hell feels like i'm myself now what am i tuning in am i plugging
2:07:15
into something am i a projection a simple trivial projection into space-time from some
2:07:22
much larger organism that i can't possibly comprehend how the hell you're
2:07:27
saying some yes you're building up mathematical intuitions fine great but
2:07:32
i'm just i'm i'm having an existential crisis here and i'm going to die soon we'll all die pretty quickly so i i want
2:07:38
to i want to figure out why chocolate is so delicious uh so help me out here so let's just
2:07:44
keep sneaking up to this right so the whole technical technical thing was
2:07:51
to say this even if the dynamics of consciousness is stationary so that there is no entropic
2:07:57
time any projection of it any view of it
2:08:03
will have the artifact of entropic time that's a limited resource
2:08:10
limited resources so that the fundamental dynamics may have no limits limited resources
2:08:16
whatsoever any projection will have certainly time is a limited resource and
2:08:21
probably a lot of other limited resources hence we could get competition and evolution and nature red
2:08:29
and tooth and claw as an artifact of a deeper system in which those aren't fundamental and and in fact i take it as
2:08:37
something that this theory must do at some point is to show how networks of conscious agents even if they're not
2:08:44
resource limited give rise to evolution by natural selection via a projection
2:08:49
yeah but you're saying i'm trying to understand how the limited resources that give rise to
2:08:54
um so first the thing gives rise to time that gives rise to limited resource that
2:08:59
gives rise to evolution by natural selection how that has to do with the fact that chocolate is delicious
2:09:05
well well it's it's not going to do that directly it's going to get to this notion of self so oh oh it's going to
2:09:11
give you the notion of so evolution gives you the notion of self and also of of of a self separate from
2:09:17
other selves so so the idea would be that competition has life and death all those kinds of things that's right so it
2:09:24
it won't i i don't think as i said i don't think that i can tell you how the formless gives rise to the
2:09:30
experience of chocolate right now my current theory says that's that's one of the miracles i'm assuming
2:09:35
yeah that's so my theory can't do it and the reason my theory can't do it is because hoffman's brain can't do it right now
2:09:40
[Laughter] but but the notion of self yes the notion of self can be an
2:09:47
artifact of the projection of a so there's one conscious agent
2:09:55
because any time conscious agents interact they form a new conscious agent so there's one conscious agent any
2:10:00
projection of that one conscious agent gives rise to time even if there wasn't any time in
2:10:06
that one conscious agent and it gives rise i i want to now i haven't proven this so this is so now
2:10:11
this is me guessing where the theory is going to go not i haven't done this there's no paper on this yet so now i'm speculating my
2:10:18
guess is i'll be able to show or the or the my brighter colleagues working with me will be able to show
2:10:23
that that we will get evolution of natural selection the notion of individual selves individual physical
2:10:29
objects and so forth coming out as a projection of this thing and and that the self this then will be be really interesting
2:10:35
in terms of how it starts to interact with certain um spiritual traditions right where they
2:10:41
will say that there is a notion of self that needs to be let go which is this finite self that's competing with other
2:10:47
selves to you know get more money and prestige and so forth that self in some
2:10:52
sense has to die but there's a deeper self which is the timeless
2:10:58
um being that preclude that precedes not
2:11:03
precludes but precedes um any particular conscious experiences the ground of all
2:11:09
experience that there's that notion of a deep capital self but our little
2:11:16
capital lowercase s selves could be artifacts of projection and
2:11:22
it may be that what consciousness is doing in this framework is right it's it's projected
2:11:27
itself down into a self that calls itself dawn and a self that calls itself lacks
2:11:33
and through conversations like this it's trying to find out about itself and eventually transcend
2:11:40
the limits of the don and lex little icons that it's using
2:11:45
and and that little projection of itself through this kind of conversation somehow it it's learning about itself
2:11:53
so that that thing dressed me up today in order to understand itself
2:11:59
and in some sense you and i are not separate from that thing and we're not separate from each other yeah well i have to question the fashion
2:12:06
choices on my end then all right so uh you mentioned you agree on in terms of consciousness on
2:12:13
a lot of things with anika is there somebody friend or friendly foe that you disagree with
2:12:23
in some nuanced interesting way or some major way about consciousness about these topics
2:12:29
of of reality that you return to um often it's like uh uh
2:12:37
christopher hitchens with the rabbi david walby have had interesting conversations
2:12:43
through years that that added to the complexity and the beauty of their friendship is there is there somebody
2:12:48
like that um that over the years has been a source of disagreement with you that
2:12:54
strengthened your ideas my ideas have been really shaped by
2:13:01
several things one is um [Music] the physicalist framework that
2:13:07
my scientific colleagues almost to a person have adopted and that i adopted to
2:13:12
until i the reason i walked away from it was because i uh it became
2:13:18
clear that we couldn't start with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness can you define physicalists
2:13:25
in contrast to reductionist so a physicalist i i would
2:13:32
say is someone who takes space time and the objects within space time as ontologically fundamental
2:13:38
right and then reductionist is saying the smaller the more fundamental that's a methodological
2:13:45
thing that's that's saying within space-time as you go to smaller and smaller scales in space you get deeper
2:13:51
and deeper laws more and more fundamental laws and you know the reduction of
2:13:56
temperature to particle movement was an example of that but i think that that that
2:14:03
the reason that worked was almost an artifact of the nature of our interface that was for a long time many of your
2:14:09
colleagues including yourself or physicalist and now you broke away broke away because i think you can't start
2:14:15
with unconscious ingredients and boot up consciousness and so even with roger penrose where there's
2:14:21
like a gray area right and here's the the challenge i would put to to all of
2:14:28
my friends um and colleagues who are give one specific conscious experience
2:14:35
that you can boot up right so if you think that it's integrated information and this i've asked this
2:14:42
of julia to know me a couple times back in the 90s and then just a couple years ago i asked julio okay so great and
2:14:48
great information so we're all interested in explaining some specific conscious experiences so what
2:14:53
what is you know pick one the taste of chocolate what is the integrated information [Music]
2:14:59
precise structure that we need for chocolate and why does that structure have to be
2:15:04
for chocolate and why why is it that it could not possibly be vanilla is there any elastomer is there
2:15:10
any one specific conscious experience that you can account for because notice they've set themselves the task
2:15:18
of booting up conscious experiences from physical systems that's the test they've set themselves but that doesn't mean
2:15:23
they're uh i understand your intuition but that doesn't mean they're wrong just because
2:15:28
they can't find a way to boot it up yet that's right no that doesn't mean that they're wrong it just just means that um
2:15:35
they haven't done it i think it's principled the reason is principled but but i'm
2:15:41
happy that they're exploring it but the fact is the remarkable fact is there's not one theory so integrated information
2:15:47
theory collapse of microtubules um global workspace
2:15:54
theory these are all theories of consciousness these are all theories of consciousness there's not a single theory
2:15:59
that can give you a specific conscious experience that they say here is the physical dynamics or the physical
2:16:05
structure that must be the taste of chocolate or whatever one they want so you're saying it's impossible they're
2:16:11
saying it's just hard yeah my attitude is okay no one
2:16:17
said you had to start with neurons or physical systems and boot up consciousness you guys are just you chose that problem so since you chose
2:16:24
that problem how much progress have you made well when you've not been able to come up
2:16:29
with a single specific conscious experience and you've had these brilliant people working on it for decades now
2:16:36
that's not really good progress let me ask you to be to play devil's advocate can you try to steal man
2:16:44
steel man meaning argue the best possible case for reality the
2:16:49
opposite of your book title so um or maybe just sticking to consciousness can you take the
2:16:54
physicalist view can you steal man the physicalist view for a brief moment playing devil's
2:17:00
advocate to or um steel man the person you used to be right the physicalist
2:17:07
what's the good like saying that you might be wrong right now
2:17:12
what would be a convincing argument for that well i think the
2:17:19
the argument i would give and that i believed was look when you have very simple physical systems like
2:17:26
a piece of dirt there's not much evidence of life for consciousness it's only when you get really complicated
2:17:31
physical systems like that have brains and really the more complicated the brains the more it looks like
2:17:38
there's consciousness and the more complicated that consciousness is surely that means
2:17:43
that simple physical systems don't create much consciousness or if maybe not any
2:17:48
or maybe pan cyclists they create the most elementary kinds of simple conscious experiences but you need
2:17:55
more complicated physical systems to boot up to create more complicated
2:18:01
consciousnesses i think that's the intuition that drives most of my colleagues and you're saying that this
2:18:06
concept of complexity is ill-defined when you ground it to space-time
2:18:13
well well i think it's well-defined within the framework of space-time right no it's
2:18:18
ill-defined relative to what you need to actually understand consciousness because you're grounding complexity in
2:18:25
just in space-time well got you right right yeah yeah what i'm saying is
2:18:31
if it were true that space-time was fundamental
2:18:36
then i would have to agree that if there is such a thing as consciousness given the data that we've got that you know
2:18:42
complex brains have consciousness and you know dirt doesn't that somehow is the complexity of the
2:18:47
dynamics or organization the function of the physical system that somehow is creating the consciousness
2:18:54
um so under those assumptions yes but when the physicists themselves
2:18:59
are telling us that space time is not fundamental then i can understand see then the whole picture starts to come into focus
2:19:06
why my colleagues are brilliant right these are really smart people i mean
2:19:12
francis crick worked on this for the last 20 years of his life these are not stupid people these are
2:19:18
brilliant brilliant people the fact that we've come up with not a single specific conscious experience that we can explain
2:19:24
and no hope there's there's no one that says i'm really close so i'll have it for you in a year no
2:19:29
there's just like there's this fundamental gap so much so that steve pinker in in one
2:19:35
of his writings says look he likes the global workspace theory but he says the last dollop of the theory in which you know
2:19:42
there's something it's like to he said we may have to just stipulate that as a as a brute fact
2:19:47
i mean he that's i mean that one and pinker is brilliant right he he's he understands
2:19:53
the state of play on this problem of the hard problem of consciousness starting with physicalist
2:19:59
assumptions and then trying to boot up consciousness and you've set yourself the problem i'm starting with physical
2:20:05
stuff that's not that's not conscious i'm trying to get the taste of chocolate out
2:20:11
as maybe some kind of function of that of the dynamics of that we've not been able to do that and so
2:20:16
pinker is saying we may have to punt we may have to just stipulate that last bit he calls it the last dollop um and
2:20:24
just say stipulate it as a bare fact of nature that there is something it's like well
2:20:29
from my point of view as the physical the whole point the whole promise of the physicalist was we wouldn't have to stipulate i was going to start with the
2:20:35
physical stuff and explain where the consciousness came from if i'm going to stipulate consciousness why don't i just
2:20:41
stipulate consciousness and not stipulate all the physical stuff too so i'm stipulating less i'm saying okay i
2:20:47
agree perspective well it's it's actually what i call the conscious realist perspective consciousness
2:20:53
pan cyclists are effectively duelists right they're saying there's physical stuff that really is fundamental and then consciousness stuff so i would
2:21:00
go with pinker and say look let's just stipulate the consciousness stuff but i'm not going to stipulate the physical
2:21:05
stuff i'm going to actually now show how to boot up the physical stuff from just the consciousness stuff
2:21:10
so i'll stipulate less is it possible so if you stipulate less is it possible for
2:21:16
our limited brains to visualize reality
2:21:22
as we delve deeper and deeper and deeper is it possible to visualize somehow with
2:21:28
the tools of math with the tools of computers with the tools of our mind are we hopelessly lost
2:21:34
you said there's ways to intuit what's true
2:21:40
using mathematics and probability and um
2:21:46
sort of uh markovian dynamics all that kind of stuff but that's not visualizing that's
2:21:52
what's the kind of building intuition but is it possible to visualize in the way we visualize so
2:21:58
nicely in in space time in four dimensions in two in three dimensions
2:22:03
sorry well two we really are looking through a two-dimensional screen until
2:22:08
what we intuit to be a three-dimensional world and and also inferring dynamic stuff
2:22:16
making it 4d anyway is it possible to visualize some pretty pictures that give us a deeper sense of the truth of
2:22:24
reality i think that we will incrementally be able to do that
2:22:29
i think that for example the picture that we have of
2:22:34
electrons and photons interacting and scattering
2:22:40
wasn't it may have not been possible until faraday did all of his experiments and
2:22:45
then maxwell wrote down his equations and and we were then sort of forced by his equations to think in a new way
2:22:52
and then then when planck in 1900 you know desperate to try to solve the
2:23:00
the problem of black body radiation that what they call the ultraviolet catastrophe where newton was predicting
2:23:05
infinite energies where there weren't infinite energies in black body radiation
2:23:11
and he in desperation proposed packets of energy the
2:23:20
then once once you've done that and then you have an einstein come along five years later and show how that
2:23:26
explains the photoelectro photoelectric effect and then then eventually in 1926 you get quantum
2:23:33
theory and then you get this whole new way of thinking that was you know from the newtonian point of view completely
2:23:40
contradictory and and were counter-intuitive certainly yeah
2:23:45
and maybe if jesus is right not contradictory maybe if you use intuitionist math they're not contradictory but still
2:23:52
certainly you wouldn't have gone there and so here's a case where the experiments
2:23:57
and then a desperate mathematical move sort of we
2:24:03
use those as a flashlight into the deep fog right where and and so that science may
2:24:08
be um the flashlight into the deep fog yeah i wonder if it's still possible to
2:24:15
visualize in the in the deli like uh we talk about consciousness in from a self perspective experience that
2:24:23
hold that idea in our mind the way you can experience things directly we've evolved to experience things
2:24:30
in this 3d world and it's that's a very rich experience
2:24:35
when you're thinking mathematically [Music]
2:24:40
you still in the end of the day have to project it down to a
2:24:46
low dimensional space to make to make conclusions their conclusions will be a number
2:24:51
or a line or plot or a so i wonder like how we can really touch
2:24:58
some deep truth in this in a subjective way like experience it really feel the beauty of
2:25:04
it you know in the way that humans feel beauty right are we screwed
2:25:10
i don't think we're screwed i think that we get little hints of it from from
2:25:16
psychedelic drugs and so forth we get hints that there are certain interventions that we can take on our interface
2:25:21
i apply this chemical which is just some element of my interface to this other
2:25:27
to a brain i ingest it and all of a sudden i seem like i've opened new portals into
2:25:34
conscious experiences well that's very very suggestive that's like um the black body radiation doing
2:25:41
something that we didn't expect right it doesn't go to infinity when we thought it was going to go to infinity and we're forced to
2:25:47
propose these quanta so once we have a theory of conscious agents
2:25:53
and this projection is based on i should say i should sketch what i think that projection is um
2:25:59
but then i think we can then start to ask specific questions when when you're taking
2:26:05
dmt or you're taking lsd or something like that
2:26:10
now that we have this deep model that we've reverse engineered space and time and physical particles we've pulled them
2:26:16
back to this theory of conscious agents now we can ask ourselves in this idealized future
2:26:22
um what are we doing to conscious agents when we apply 5mo dmt what are we doing
2:26:29
are we opening a new portal right so when i say that i mean i have a portal into consciousness that i call my
2:26:36
body of lex friedman that i'm creating and it's a genuine portal not perfect but it's a genuine portal i'm definitely
2:26:43
communicating with your consciousness and we know that we have one technology
2:26:49
for building new portals we know one technology and that is having kids
2:26:54
having kids is how we build new portals into consciousness it takes a long time can you elaborate
2:27:00
that oh oh oh you mean like your son and your daughter didn't exist
2:27:06
that was a portal though you're having contact with consciousness that you never would have had before but now
2:27:12
you've got a son or a daughter you had you went through this physical process they were born then you
2:27:18
there was all the but is that portal yours so when you have kids are you creating
2:27:24
new portals that are completely distinct from the portals that you've created with other consciousness like can you
2:27:29
can you elaborate on that to which degree is are the consciousness of your kids
2:27:35
a part of you well so every person that i see
2:27:40
that symbol that i see the body that i see is is a portal potentially for me to interact with with
2:27:47
a consciousness yeah um and and each consciousness has a unique
2:27:53
character and we call it a personality right and so forth so with each new kid that's born we come in
2:28:00
contact with a personality that we've never seen before and a version of consciousness that we've
2:28:05
never seen before at a deeper level as i said the theory says there's one agent so this is a different projection
2:28:12
of that one agent but but so that's what i mean by a portal is
2:28:18
within my own interface my own projection can i
2:28:24
see other projections of of that one consciousness so can i
2:28:30
get portals in in that sense and i so and i think i think we will get a
2:28:35
theory of that that we will get a theory of portals and then we can ask how the psychedelics
2:28:40
are acting are they actually creating new portals or not if they're not we should nevertheless then understand
2:28:47
how we could create a new portal right maybe we have to just study what happens when we make when we have kids
2:28:53
we know that that technology creates new portals so we have to reverse engineer that and
2:28:58
then say okay could we somehow create
2:29:04
new portals de novo with that uh like uh brain computer interfaces for
2:29:10
example yeah so maybe just a chemical or something else probably more complicated than a chemical that's why i think that the psychedelics the psychedelics may
2:29:17
because they might be affecting this portal in certain ways that it turns it around and opens up
2:29:22
in other words it may be once we understand what this thing is important your body as a portal and understand all
2:29:27
those complexities maybe we'll realize that that portal can be shifted and into different parts of the the deeper
2:29:33
consciousness and give new windows on it and so in that way maybe yes
2:29:38
psychedelics could open up new portals in the sense that they're taking something that's already a complex portal and just tweaking it a bit
2:29:45
well but creating is a very powerful difference between morphing right right tweaking versus creating i
2:29:52
agree but maybe it gives you intuition to at least the full space of the kinds of
2:29:58
things that this particular system is capable of i mean i mean the idea your idea the consciousness creates brains i
2:30:05
mean that breaks my brain because because i you know i'm i'm i guess i'm
2:30:10
still a physicalist in that sense because that you could it's just much easier
2:30:16
to intuit the world um it's very it's practical to think all right there's a neural network and
2:30:23
what are the different ways fascinating uh capabilities can emerge from this
2:30:31
neural network uh it's free it's easier and so you start to
2:30:36
and then present to yourself the problem of okay well how does consciousness arise how does intelligence arise
2:30:42
how does emotion arise how does memory arise in the
2:30:49
how do we filter within the system all the incoming sensory information we're
2:30:55
able to uh allocate attention in different interesting ways how do all those mechanisms arise
2:31:01
to say that there's other fundamental things we don't understand outside of space-time that are actually core to how
2:31:08
this whole thing works is uh is a bit paralyzing because
2:31:13
it's like oh we're not we're not ten percent done we're like zero point zero zero one
2:31:19
percent done it's the f is it's the immediate feeling certainly understand that my attitude
2:31:24
about it is if you look at the young physicists who are searching for the instructors
2:31:31
beyond space time like amplitude and so forth they're having a ball
2:31:38
space time that's what the old folks did that's what that's what our the older generation did
2:31:44
we're we're doing something that really is fun and new and and
2:31:50
they're having a blast and they're finding all all these new structures so so i i think that we're going to um
2:31:59
succeed in getting a new deeper theory i can just say what i'm hoping with the theory that
2:32:05
i'm working on i'm hoping to show that i could have this timeless dynamics of consciousness no entropic time
2:32:12
i take a projection and i show how this timeless dynamics looks like the big bang
2:32:18
and the entire evolution of space-time in other words i see how my whole space time interface
2:32:25
so not just the uh the projections just doesn't just look like space-time you can explain
2:32:31
the whole with it the whole from the origin of the universe that's that's what we have to do and that's what the physicists understand when they go
2:32:37
beyond space time to the amplitude and the cosmological polytube they ultimately know that they have to get
2:32:42
back the big bang story and the whole evolution that whole story where there
2:32:48
were no living things there was just a point and then the explosion and then
2:32:53
just particles at high energy and then eventually the cooling down and the differentiation and finally
2:32:59
matter condenses and then life and then consciousness that whole story has to
2:33:04
come out of something that's deeper and without time and that's what what we're up to that's we we want to to get this
2:33:11
so the whole story that we've we've been telling ourselves about big bang and how brains evolved in unconsciousness will
2:33:17
come out of a much deeper theory and and for yeah for someone like me um
2:33:22
it's a lot i mean but for the younger generation this is like oh wow
2:33:28
um all the low cherries aren't picked this is really good stuff this is really new fundamental stuff that we can do so
2:33:35
that i can't wait to read the papers of the of the younger generation and i want
2:33:40
to i want to see them uh kids these days with their non-space
2:33:46
time assumptions uh it's just interesting looking at the philosophical tradition of this
2:33:52
difficult ideas you struggle with if you look like somebody like emmanuel kant what are some interesting
2:33:58
agreements and disagreements you have uh with a guy about the nature of reality
2:34:04
so there's a lot in agreement right so kant was an idealist
2:34:09
transcendental ideas and he he basically had the idea that um
2:34:18
we don't see nature as it is we impose the structure on nature
2:34:23
he and and so in some sense i'm saying something similar i'm saying that by the
2:34:30
way i don't call myself an idealist i call myself a conscious realist because idealism has a long history a lot of
2:34:35
different ideas come under idealism and there's a lot of debates and so forth it this
2:34:42
tends to be identified with in many cases anti-science and anti-realism and i don't want either connection with
2:34:48
my ideas and so i just called mine conscious realism with an emphasis on realism and not and not anti-realism
2:34:56
but but the one place where i would of course disagree with kant was that he thought that um
2:35:01
euclidean space time was a priori right we just know that that's false
2:35:08
so so he he went went to too far on that but
2:35:13
but in in general the idea that we don't start with space time that space and time is in some sense forms of our perceptions yes absolutely
2:35:21
and i would say that you know there's a lot in common with barclay in that regard
2:35:28
there's a lot of ingenious arguments in barclay leibniz leibniz in his monodology
2:35:35
understood very clearly that the hard problem was not solvable he posed a hard problem and basically
2:35:41
dismissed it and just you can't do this and so if he came here he and saw where we are he said look guys i
2:35:48
told you this 300 years ago and he had his momentology he was trying to do something like this it's
2:35:55
um it's different from what i'm doing but he had these things that were not in space and time the these moan ads he was
2:36:00
trying to build something um i'm trying to build a theory of conscious agents my guess is that if
2:36:07
he came here i could just if he saw what i was doing he would say he would understand it and immediately
2:36:14
take off with it and go places that i couldn't he he would he would so there would be
2:36:19
right there would be overlap of uh the spirit of the ideas absolutely totally overlapping but his genius would then
2:36:26
just run with it far faster than i could i love the humility here so let me ask you about sort of
2:36:31
practical implications of your ideas to our world our complicated world when you
2:36:36
look at the big questions of humanity of hate
2:36:42
war what else is there evil
2:36:48
maybe there's the positive aspects of that of meaning of love
2:36:54
um what is the fact that reality is an illusion
2:37:00
perceived what what is the conscious realism
2:37:05
when applied to daily life what kind of impact does it have a lot and it's it's
2:37:11
sort of scary um we all know that life is
2:37:16
ephemeral and spiritual traditions have said wake up to the fact that you know anything that you do here is going to
2:37:22
disappear but it's even more ephemeral than perhaps we've thought i see this bottle
2:37:29
because i create it right now as soon as i look away that data structure has been garbage
2:37:35
collected that bottle i have to recreate it every time i look so i spend all my money i buy this fancy
2:37:40
car that car i have to keep recreating it every time i look at it it's that ephemeral
2:37:46
so all the things that we invest ourselves in we fight over we kill each other over and we have wars
2:37:52
over these are all it's just like people in a virtual reality simulation
2:37:58
right and and there's this this porsche and we all see the porsche well
2:38:04
where that porsche exists when i look at it i turn my headset and i look at it and
2:38:09
and then if joe turns his headset in the right way he'll see his porsche it's not it's not even the same portion that i
2:38:14
see he's creating his own porsche so these things are exceedingly ephemeral and and now
2:38:22
just imagine saying that that's my porsche well
2:38:27
you can agree to say that it's your portion but but really the porsche only exists as long as you look
2:38:32
so so this all of a sudden what the spiritual traditions have been saying for a long long time this gets cashed
2:38:38
out in in mathematically precise science it's saying in femoral yes in fact it
2:38:44
lasts for a few milliseconds a few hundred milliseconds while you look at it and then it's gone so so the whole
2:38:50
idea why are we fighting why do we hate it's
2:38:58
we fight over possessions because we we think that we're small
2:39:03
little objects inside this pre-existing space time we assume that that that mansion and that car
2:39:11
exists independent of us and that somehow we these little things can have our
2:39:16
sense of self and importance enhanced by having that special car or that special house or that special person
2:39:23
when in fact is just the opposite you create that mansion every time you look
2:39:29
that's that's you're the you're something far deeper than that mansion you're the entity which can create that mansion on
2:39:36
the fly and there's nothing there there's nothing to the mansion except what you create in this moment so all so
2:39:42
all of a sudden when you take this point of view it has all sorts of implications
2:39:49
for how we interact with each other how how we treat each other um
2:39:57
and again a lot of things that spiritual traditions have said it's a mixed bag spiritual traditions
2:40:03
are a mixed bag so let me just be right up front about that i'm not promoting any particular but they do have some insights yeah they have wisdom they have
2:40:09
certain wisdom they have i can point to nonsense i won't go into it but i can also point to lots of nonsense so so the
2:40:15
the issue is to then to look for the key the key insights and they i think they have
2:40:20
a lot of insights about the ephemeral nature of of objects in space and time and not being attached to
2:40:26
them including our own bodies and reversing that i'm not this little thing
2:40:31
a little consciousness trapped in the body and the consciousness itself is only a product of the body so when the body dies the consciousness disappears
2:40:39
it turns completely around the consciousness is fundamental the body
2:40:44
my hand exists right now because i'm looking at it my hand is gone i have no hand i have i have no brain i
2:40:52
have no heart if you looked you'll see a heart whatever i am [Music]
2:40:58
is this really complicated thing in consciousness that's that's what i am all the stuff that i thought i was
2:41:05
is something that i create on the fly and delete so this whole so this is completely a radical restructuring of how we think
2:41:12
about possessions about identity about
2:41:17
survival of death and and so forth this is completely transformative but the nice thing is that
2:41:24
this whole approach of conscious stations unlike the spiritual traditions which have said in some cases similar things
2:41:30
they set it in precisely this is mathematics we can actually now begin to stay
2:41:37
precisely here's the mathematical model of consciousness conscious agents here's how it maps onto spacetime which i
2:41:42
should sketch really briefly and here's why
2:41:48
things are ephemeral and here's why you shouldn't be worried about the ephemeral nature of things
2:41:54
because you're not a little tiny entity inside space and time
2:41:59
quite the opposite you're the author of space and time the i and the am and the i am is all
2:42:05
kind of emerging through this whole process of evolution and so on that's
2:42:10
that's just surface waves and there's a much deeper ocean that we're trying to figure out here so how does you said
2:42:16
this said this some of the stuff you're thinking about maps the space time how does it map the space right so so just a
2:42:22
very very high level and i'll keep it brief the structures that the physicists are finding
2:42:27
like the amplitude it turns out they're just static structure they're polytopes
2:42:34
but they remarkably most of the information in them is contained in permutation
2:42:39
matrices so it's a matrix like an n by n matrix
2:42:45
that just has zeros and ones that contains almost all of the
2:42:50
information and you can they have these plabic graphs and so forth that they use to boot up
2:42:56
the scattering you can compute those scattering amplitudes almost entirely from these permutation matrices
2:43:03
so that's just now from my point of view i have this conscious agent dynamics
2:43:09
it turns out that the stationary dynamics that i was talking about the the where the entropy is increasing
2:43:15
all the stationary dynamics are sketched out by
2:43:21
permutation matrices so if you there's so-called burkhoff
2:43:26
polytope all the vertices of this polytube all the points
2:43:31
are permutation matrices all the internal points are markovian kernels
2:43:38
um that have the uniform measure as a stationary measure i need to intuit a
2:43:43
little better with what the heck you're talking about but so basically there's some complicated
2:43:50
thing going on with the network of conscience conscious agents and that's mappable to
2:43:55
this you're saying a two-dimensional matrix that uh uh scattering has to do with what with
2:44:02
our perception like that's like photon stuff or i mean i don't know if it's useful to sort of
2:44:07
uh dig into detail i'll do just a high level thing yes so the the the high level is the
2:44:14
long-term behavior of the conscious agent that makes so that's the projection of just looking at the long-term behavior
2:44:20
i'm hoping will give rise to the amplitude the amplitude then gives rise to space-time
2:44:27
so then i can just use their link to go all the way from consciousness through its asymptotics
2:44:32
to through the amplitude into space time and get the map all the way into our interface and that's why you
2:44:38
mentioned the permutation majors because it gives you a nice thing to to try to generate that's right it's the connection with the amplitude the
2:44:44
permutation matrices are the core of the amplitude and it turns out they're the core of the asymptotic description of
2:44:50
the conscious agents so not to sort of bring up the idea of a creator but i i like
2:44:56
first of all i like video games and you mentioned this kind of simulation idea first of
2:45:01
all do you think of as an interesting idea this thought experiment that will live in a simulation
2:45:06
and in general do you think we live in a simulation so the nick bostrom's idea about the
2:45:12
simulation is typically couched in a physicalist framework yes
2:45:18
so there's the bottom level there's some programmer in this physical spacetime and they have a computer that
2:45:25
they've programmed really cleverly where they've created conscious entities
2:45:30
so you have the hard problem of consciousness right the standard hard problem how could a computer simulation create a constant
2:45:36
which isn't explained by that simulation theory but then the idea is that the next level the the entities that are
2:45:43
from the that are created in the first level simulation then can write their own simulations and you get this this nesting
2:45:50
so so the idea that um this is a simulation is fine
2:45:55
but the idea that this starts with a physical space i think isn't but there's there's different
2:46:01
properties here the the partial rendering and to me that's the interesting idea
2:46:07
is not whether the entirety of the universe is simulated but how
2:46:12
efficiently can you create interfaces that are convincing to
2:46:19
all other entities that can appreciate such interfaces how little does it take
2:46:25
because you said like partial rendering or like temporal affirmative rendering of stuff
2:46:31
only render the tree falling in the forest when there's somebody there to see it it's interesting
2:46:37
to think how can you do that super efficiently without having to render everything and that to me is one
2:46:42
perspective on the simulation just like it is with video games right where a video game doesn't have to render every
2:46:48
single thing it's just the thing that the observer is looking at right there is actually that's a
2:46:54
very nice question and there's whole groups of researchers that are actually studying in virtual reality
2:47:00
what what is the sort of minimal requirements on this system what how
2:47:06
does it have to operate to give you an immersion experience to give you the feeling that you have a body to to get
2:47:13
you to take it real and there's actually a lot of really good work on that right now and it turns out it doesn't take that much you do need to get the
2:47:19
perception action loop tight and and you have to give them the perceptions that they're
2:47:25
expecting if you want them to but if you you you can lead them along if you give them
2:47:30
perceptions that are close to what they're expecting you can then maybe move their reality around a bit yeah
2:47:35
it's a tricky engineering problem especially when you're trying to create a product that costs little but that's i it feels
2:47:41
like an engineering problem not a deeply scientific problem or meaning obviously it's a scientific
2:47:47
problem but as a scientific problem it's not that difficult to trick us uh descendants of apes but here's here's
2:47:53
a case for just us you know our own this is a virtual reality that we're experiencing right now so
2:47:59
here's something you can try for yourself if you just close your eyes
2:48:04
and look at your experience in front of you to be aware of your experience in front of you
2:48:09
what you experience is just like a modeled dark gray but there's all sort of
2:48:14
there's some dynamics to it but it's just dark gray but now i ask you instead of having your attention
2:48:20
forward put your attention backward what is it like behind you with your eyes closed
2:48:29
and there it's like nothing it's real
2:48:35
so what is going on here what what am i experiencing back there
2:48:44
right well it's it's i i don't know if it's nothing it's it's like i guess it's the absence of it's not even like
2:48:50
darkness or something it's it even it's not even darkness there's no there's no
2:48:56
qualia and yet there is a sense of being and that's the interesting thing there's
2:49:02
a sense of being back so i close my if i put my attention forward i just i have the quality of a gray model thing
2:49:08
but when i put my attention backward there's no quality at all but there is a sense of being yeah
2:49:14
i i personally uh now you haven't been to that side of the room i have been to that side of the
2:49:19
room so for me memories i start um i start playing the engine of memory replay
2:49:28
which is like i i take myself back in time and think about that place where i was hanging out in that part that's what
2:49:34
i see when i'm behind so which that's an interesting quirk of hum humans too we're able to we're collecting these
2:49:40
experiences and we can replay them in interesting ways whenever we feel like it and it's almost like being there
2:49:46
but not really but almost that's right and yet we can go our entire lives on
2:49:52
this you're talking about the minimal thing for vr we can go our entire lives and not realize that all of my life
2:49:58
it's been like nothing behind me yeah we we we're not even aware that all of
2:50:04
our lives if you just just for the just pay attention close your eyes pay attention to what's behind me we're like oh holy
2:50:11
smoke it's totally scary i mean it's like nothing there's no quality there at all how did i not notice that my entire
2:50:17
life we're so immersed in the simulation we buy it so much yeah i mean uh you
2:50:22
could see this with with children right with persistence you know you could do the peekaboo game you can hide from them
2:50:29
and appear and they're fully tricked and in the same way we're fully tricked
2:50:34
there's nothing behind us and we assume there is that's really interesting these theories
2:50:40
are pretty heavy you as a human being as a mortal human being
2:50:46
how has these theories been to you personally like are there good days and bad days
2:50:51
when you wake up and look in the mirror and the fact that you can't see anything behind you
2:50:57
the fact that it's rendered like is there interesting quirks you know you know nietzsche with his if
2:51:03
you gaze long into the abyss the abyss gazes into you um how's this theories these ideas
2:51:10
change you as a person it's been very very difficult
2:51:16
this stuff is not just abstract theory building because it's about us
2:51:21
sometimes i realize that there's this big division of me my my mind is doing all this science and and coming up with
2:51:27
these conclusions and the rest of me is not integrating i was just like i don't believe it i just don't believe this i mean it seems so as i start to take it
2:51:34
seriously it's get i get scared myself it's like but it's very much then i read these
2:51:42
spiritual traditions and realize they're saying very very similar things it's like there's a lot of conversions so for
2:51:48
me i have the first time i thought
2:51:54
it might be possible that we're not seeing the truth was in
2:51:59
it was from some mathematics we were doing and when that hit me it hit me like a ton of
2:52:05
bricks i had to sit down it was it it really it was scary it was really a shock to
2:52:12
the system and then to realize that everything that has been important to me
2:52:18
like you know getting a house getting a car
2:52:23
getting a reputation and so forth well that car is just like the car i see
2:52:28
in the virtual reality it's there when you perceive it it's not there so the whole question of you know what am i
2:52:35
doing and why what what's what's worthwhile doing in life clearly
2:52:43
getting a big house and getting a big car i mean we all knew that we were going to die
2:52:48
so we we we we tend not to know that we tend to hide it especially when we were young before age 30 we don't believe we're
2:52:53
going to die yeah we factually maybe know that you're you kind of are supposed to yeah but but they'll figure
2:53:00
something out and yeah we'll be the generation that is the first one that doesn't have to die that's the kind of thing but but when
2:53:05
you really face the fact that you're going to die
2:53:11
and then when you when i start to look at it from this point of view that well this thing was an interface to begin with so what i'm really is what i'm
2:53:18
really going to be doing just taking off a headset so i've been playing in a virtual reality game all
2:53:23
day and i i got lost in the game when i was fighting over a porsche and i i shot
2:53:28
some guys up and i punctured their tires and i got the porsche now i take the headset off and what was that for
2:53:35
nothing there was just it was a data structure and the data structure is gone so so all of the wars the fighting and
2:53:41
the reputations and all this stuff you know where it's just a headset
2:53:48
so now and you know so my theory says that intellectually my my
2:53:54
mind my my emotions rebel all over the place this is like i
2:53:59
you know and so so i have to imagine i meditate a lot well what percent of the day would
2:54:04
you say you spend as a physicalist um sort of living life pretending your car
2:54:12
matters your reputation matter like like how much uh was that tom wait song
2:54:19
i like my town with a little drop of poison how much poison do you allow yourself to have i think my default mode
2:54:26
is physicalist right i think that that's just the default i i when i'm not
2:54:33
being conscious yeah consciously attentive intellectually consciously because if
2:54:39
you're just you're still if you're tasting coffee and not thinking or drinking or just taking in the sunset
2:54:45
you're not being intellectual you're but you're still experiencing it right so it's when you turn on the like the
2:54:51
introspective machine that's when you can start and turn off the thinker when
2:54:56
i actually just start looking without thinking so that's that's when i feel like i
2:55:03
all of a sudden i'm starting to see through sort of like okay
2:55:08
part of part of the addiction to the interface is all the stories i'm telling about
2:55:14
it's really important for me to get that really important to do that all so i'm telling all these stories and so i'm all wrapped up
2:55:21
almost all the mind stuff that's going on in my head is about attachment to the interface
2:55:28
and so what i found is that the
2:55:34
essentially the only way to really detach from the interface is to
2:55:39
[Music] literally let go of thoughts altogether and then all of a sudden
2:55:46
um even my identity of you know my whole history my name my education all this
2:55:52
stuff is almost irrelevant because it's just now here is the present moment
2:56:00
and this is this is the reality right now and all of that other stuff is an
2:56:05
interface story but this conscious experience right now this is the only
2:56:11
this is the only reality as far as i can tell the rest of it's a story and
2:56:17
but that is again not my default that is i have to make a
2:56:22
really conscious choice to say okay i know
2:56:27
intellectually this is all an interface i i'm going to take the headset off and so forth
2:56:33
and and and then immediately sink back into the game and just be out there playing the game and get
2:56:39
lost in so i'm always lost in the game unless i literally consciously choose
2:56:45
to stop thinking isn't it terrifying to acknowledge that
2:56:53
to look beyond the game isn't it uh scares the hell out of me
2:56:59
it really is scary because i'm so attached i'm attached to this body i'm attached to the interface
2:57:05
are you ever worried about breaking your brain a bit meaning like
2:57:11
it's uh i mean some of these ideas when you think about reality even with like
2:57:17
einstein just realizing you said interface just realizing that
2:57:24
light you know that there's a speed of light and you can't go fast in the speed of
2:57:29
light and like what kind of things black holes and can do with light even that can mess
2:57:35
with your head yes but that's still space time
2:57:40
that's a big mess but it's still just space-time it's still a property over interface that's right but it's still
2:57:45
like even so even einstein realized that this particular thing some of the stories we
2:57:52
tell ourselves is constructing interfaces that are oversimplifying the way things work
2:58:00
because the it's nice the stories are nice stories are nice this rep i mean just like video games they're nice
2:58:07
right and but einstein was a realist right he was a famous realist in this in the sense that he he
2:58:13
was very explicit in a 1935 paper with um podesta and rosen the epr paper where he
2:58:19
they said if without in any way disturbing a system
2:58:26
i can predict with probability one the outcome of a measurement then there exists in reality
2:58:34
that element right that that value that and we now know from quantum theory that
2:58:39
that that's false that einstein's idea of local realism is
2:58:44
is strictly speaking false yeah and and so we can predict we can
2:58:50
set up in quantum theory you can set up and there's a there's a paper by chris fuchs quantum basianism
2:58:56
where he he scouts this out it was done by other people but he gives a good presentation of this where they have a sequence of
2:59:02
like something like nine different quantum measurements that that you can make and you can predict with probability one
2:59:08
what a particular outcome will be but you can actually prove that it's impossible
2:59:15
that the value existed before you made the measurement so you know with probability one what you're going to get but you
2:59:20
also know with certainty that that value was not there until you made the measurement so the so we know from
2:59:26
quantum theory that the act of observation is an act of fact creation
2:59:33
and that is built into what i'm saying with this theory of consciousness if consciousness is fundamental
2:59:39
space time itself is an act of fact creation it's it's an interface that we create consciousness creates plus all
2:59:45
the objects in it so local realism is not true
2:59:50
quantum theory is established also non-contextual realism is not true and that that it fits in perfectly with
2:59:56
this idea that consciousness is fundamental these things are these exist as data structures when we create them
3:00:03
as as as chris says the act of observation is an active fact creation
3:00:08
but i must say on a personal level i'm having
3:00:14
to spend i spend a couple hours a day
3:00:19
just sitting in meditation on this and facing
3:00:24
the rebellion in me that goes to the co it feels like it goes to the core of my being
3:00:30
rebellion against these ideas so so here is very very interesting for me to look at this because so here i'm a scientist
3:00:36
and i'm a person the science is really clear local realism is false non-contextual realism is false space time is doomed
3:00:43
it's very very clear it couldn't be clear and my my emotions rebel left and right
3:00:50
when i sit there and say okay i am not something in space and time then something inside of me says
3:00:56
you're crazy of course you are and i'm completely attached to it i'm completely attached to all this stuff i'm attached
3:01:02
to my body i'm attached to the headset i'm attached to my car attached to people i'm attached to all
3:01:08
of it and and yet i know as a absolute fact i'm going to walk away from all of it
3:01:14
i'm going to die it'll you know
3:01:19
in fact i almost died last year i mean covet almost killed me it i i i sent a
3:01:25
goodbye text to my wife so i was i thought you really did i sent her a goodbye i thought i was in the emergency
3:01:31
room and uh it had attacked my heart and it been at 190 beats per minute for
3:01:38
36 hours like i couldn't last much longer i knew i could they couldn't stop it
3:01:43
so that was that was it so that was it so so i texted her goodbye from the
3:01:49
emergency room i love you goodbye kind of thing yeah right yeah that was it so so were
3:01:55
you afraid yeah i was scared to help you right but there there is there was
3:02:01
you're just feeling so bad anyway that that all you know you that's sort of what you're scared but you're just feeling so bad that in some sense you
3:02:07
just wanted to stop anyway yeah so so i've i've been there
3:02:14
and faced it just just a year ago how did that change you by the way having having this intellectual reality
3:02:21
that's so challenging that you meditate on that you're it's just an interface and one of the
3:02:27
one of the hardest things to come to terms with is that that means that you know it's going to end
3:02:34
um how did i change you having come so close to the reality of it it's not just an intellectual reality it's
3:02:40
it's a reality of death it's it's forced i've meditated for 20
3:02:46
years now and then i would say averaging three or four hours a day um
3:02:52
but it's put a new urgency but is it urgency is not the right word
3:02:59
because that that it's it it's riveted my attention i'll put it that way it's really riveted my
3:03:06
attention and um i've really paid i spent a lot more time looking at what
3:03:12
spiritual traditions say i don't by the way again not taking it with the you know
3:03:19
i take it all with a grain of salt but on the other hand i think it's stupid for me to ignore it so i try to listen
3:03:26
to the best ideas and and to sort out nonsense from
3:03:32
and it's just we all have to do it for ourselves right it's not easy so what makes sense
3:03:37
and i have the advantage of some science so i can look at what science says and try to compare with spiritual tradition
3:03:42
i try to sort it out for myself and but then i also look and realize that
3:03:48
there's another aspect to me which is this whole emotional aspect the i i seem to be wired up
3:03:56
as evolutionary psychology says i'm wired up right all these defensive mechanisms you know
3:04:04
i'm inclined to lie if i need to i'm inclined to to be angry to protect myself to have an
3:04:11
in-group and an out group to try to make my reputation as big as possible to
3:04:17
try to demean the out group there's all these things that evolutionary psychology is is spot on it's really
3:04:23
brilliant about the human condition and yet i think evolution as i said evolutionary theory
3:04:30
is a projection of a deeper theory where there may be no competition so how so i'm in this very interesting
3:04:37
position where i feel like okay according to my own theory i'm consciousness and maybe
3:04:43
this is what it means for consciousness to wake up it's not easy
3:04:49
it's it's it's almost like i have i feel like i have real skin in the game
3:04:54
it really is scary i really was scared when i was about to die it really was hard to say goodbye to my
3:05:01
wife it really it really pained and
3:05:07
to then look at that and then look at the fact that i'm going to walk away from this anyway and it's just an interface how do i so
3:05:13
it's it's trying to put all this stuff together and really grok it so to speak not just
3:05:19
intellectually but rocket at an emotion yeah what are you afraid of you silly evolved organism that's
3:05:26
gotten way too attached to the interface what are you really afraid of that's
3:05:32
right is there uh very personal you know it's very very personal yeah yeah
3:05:38
i mean speaking of the text what do you think is uh this whole love thing
3:05:43
what's the role of love in our human condition
3:05:49
this interface thing we have this is this somehow interweaved interconnected with consciousness this attachment we
3:05:55
have to other humans and this deep like some um
3:06:00
there's some quality to it that seems very interesting peculiar
3:06:07
well there are two levels i would think about that there there's love in the sexual
3:06:12
sense and there's love in a deeper sense and in the sexual sense um we can give an evolutionary account of that and and
3:06:19
so forth and i think that's pretty clear to people um in in in this deeper sense
3:06:27
right so of course you're married you're i love my wife in a sexual sense but there's a deeper
3:06:32
sense as well that when i was saying goodbye to her there was a there was a deeper much deeper love that was really at play there that's one place where i
3:06:39
think that the mixed bag from spiritual traditions has something right when they say you know love your neighbor as
3:06:45
yourself that that some in some sense love is fundamental i think that they're on to something
3:06:51
something very very deep and profound and every most of all i can get a personal
3:06:58
glimpse of that when i especially when i'm in the space with no thought
3:07:03
right when when i can really let go of thoughts i get little glimpses of
3:07:09
of a love in the sense that i'm not separate it's a it's a love in the sense that i'm
3:07:14
not different from that i you know yeah if you are separate then then
3:07:20
there's i can fight you but if you and i are the same if there's a union there the togetherness of it yeah what what uh
3:07:27
who's god all those gods the stories that been told throughout history you said through
3:07:34
the spiritual traditions what do you think that is is that us trying to find that
3:07:40
common thing at the core oh well in in many
3:07:47
traditions not all the one i was raised in so my dad was a protestant minister
3:07:54
we tend to think of god as a being
3:07:59
but i think that that's not right i think the closest way to think about god is
3:08:06
being period not a being but being the very ground of being itself is god i
3:08:12
think that's the the deep and from my point of view that's the ground of consciousness so
3:08:17
the ground of conscious being is what we might call god but but the word
3:08:23
god has always been you know for example you don't believe the same god as my god so i'm going to fight you or i will
3:08:29
we'll have wars over because the being the specific being that you call god is different from the being
3:08:35
that i call god and so we fight whereas if it's not a being but just being and you and i
3:08:41
share being then you and i are are not separate and there's no reason to fight
3:08:46
we're both part of that one being and and loving you is loving myself because
3:08:52
we're all part of that one being the spiritual traditions that point to that
3:08:57
i think are pointing it in a very interesting direction and that does seem to
3:09:03
match with the mathematics of the conscious agent stuff that i've been working on as well that it really fits with that although that
3:09:10
wasn't my goal is there uh you mentioned you mentioned that the young physicists
3:09:17
that um you talk to or whose work you follow have quite a lot of fun breaking with
3:09:24
the traditions of the past the assumptions of the past uh what advice would you give to young
3:09:30
people today in high school and college not just physicists but uh
3:09:35
in general how to have a career they can be proud of how they can have a life they can be proud of
3:09:41
how to make their way in the world from the lessons from the wins and the losses in your own life what what what little insights
3:09:48
could you pull out i would say the universe is a lot more interesting
3:09:53
than you might expect and you are a lot more special and interesting
3:09:58
than you might expect you might think that you're just a little tiny irrelevant
3:10:05
100 pound 200 pound person in a vast billions of light years
3:10:11
across space and that's not the case you are in some sense the being that's
3:10:18
creating that space all the time every time you look so waking up to who you really are
3:10:25
outside of space and time as the author of space and time is the author of everything that you see
3:10:31
the author of space and time sorry you're the author of space and
3:10:37
time right and i'm the author of space and time and space and time is just one little data structure many other consciousnesses are
3:10:43
creating other other data structures they're authors of various other things so so realizing and then realizing that
3:10:50
that um i had this feeling that growing up and going and called reading all these textbooks oh man it's
3:10:56
all been done yeah if i'd just been there you know 50 years ago i could have discovered this stuff
3:11:01
but the you know it's all in the textbooks now well believe me the textbooks are going to
3:11:06
look silly in 50 years and it's your chan your chance to write the new textbook so so
3:11:12
of course study the current textbooks you have to understand them you there's no way to progress until you understand
3:11:19
what's been done but but then the only limit is your imagination
3:11:25
frankly that's the only limit the greatest books the greatest textbooks ever written on earth are yet to be
3:11:31
written exactly uh what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing what's the meaning of life
3:11:38
from your limited interface can you can you can you figure it all out like why why so you said the universe is kind of
3:11:45
trying to figure itself out through through us uh why why
3:11:53
yeah that's the closest i've come so i'll give you so i
3:11:59
will say that i don't know but but but i'll here's my guess right that's a good first sentence that's a good starting
3:12:04
point and and maybe that's going to be a profound part of the final answer is to start with the i don't know
3:12:10
it's quite possible that that that's really important to start with the i don't know my guess is that if consciousness is
3:12:17
fundamental and of girdle girdles and completeness theorem holds here
3:12:22
and there's infinite variety of structures for consciousness to some sense explore
3:12:31
um that maybe that's what it's about this is something that
3:12:37
anika and i talked about a little bit and she doesn't like this way of talking about it so i'm gonna have to talk with some more about this way of talking but
3:12:43
right now i'll just put it this way and i'll have to talk with her more and see if i can say it more clearly but the way i
3:12:50
i'm talking about it now is that
3:12:55
there's a sense in which there's being
3:13:01
and then there's the experiences or forums that come out of being that's one deep deep mystery
3:13:09
and the the question of that you asked what is it all about somehow it's related to
3:13:14
that why does being why does it just stay without any forms why does it
3:13:20
why don't why do we have experiences what why should why why not just have when you close your eyes and you pay
3:13:27
attention to what's behind you there's nothing but there's being
3:13:33
why is why don't we just stop there why didn't we just stop there why did we create all tables and chairs and the sun
3:13:39
and moon and people that all this really complicated stuff why and and
3:13:47
all i can guess right now and i'll probably kick myself in a couple years and say that was dumb but
3:13:52
but all i can guess right now is that somehow consciousness wakes up to itself by
3:13:57
knowing what it's not so here i am i'm not this body and i sort of saw that
3:14:05
it was sort of in my face when i sent a text goodbye but then as soon as i'm better it's sort of like okay i i
3:14:12
sort of don't want to go there right okay so i just so i am my body you know about my go back
3:14:18
to the standard thing i own my body and you know and then i want to get that car and even though i was just about to die
3:14:24
a year ago so that comes rushing back so so consciousness immerses itself
3:14:30
fully into a particular headset
3:14:37
gets lost in it and then slowly wakes up just so it can escape and that is the waking up but he
3:14:42
needs to have needs to know what is not it needs to to know what you are
3:14:48
you have to say oh i'm not that i'm not that that wasn't important that wasn't important that's really powerful don let me just
3:14:55
say that um because i've been a long term fan of yours and we're supposed to have a
3:15:01
conversation during this very difficult moment in your life let me just say you're truly special person and i for
3:15:08
one and i know there's a lot a lot of others that agree i'm glad that you're still here with us on this earth
3:15:14
if for a short time um so whatever um
3:15:20
whatever the universe this whatever plan it has for you that brought you close to death
3:15:26
to maybe enlighten you some kind of way um i think i think he has a
3:15:32
has an interesting plan for you you're one of the truly special humans and it's a huge honor that you would sit and talk
3:15:37
with me today thank you so much thank you very much alex i really appreciate that thank you thanks for listening to this
3:15:43
conversation with donald hoffman to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now
3:15:50
let me leave you with some words from albert einstein relevant to the ideas discussed in this conversation
3:15:56
time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live
3:16:04
thank you for listening and hope to see you next time