#93 — The Argument Against Reality — Dr. Donald Hoffman

all right listeners today's episode is a mind-blowing one truly mind-blowing conversation with some and i don't i do not use that phrase lightly it has melted my face uh it has blown my mind so much it's with dr donald hoffman who is a professor of cognitive sciences at uc irvine and what started with a ted talk that i randomly came across a few months ago that he did in 2015 that essentially says that his mathematical models him and his team have proven out that the chances that we see reality is zero percent there is zero percent chance that we see what's actually going on that ted talk was recorded in 2015 i just went video after video seeing what then his implications in 2016 said in 2017 and 2018 and it got stranger and stranger but all based on their very quantifiable quantifiable mathematical models and hypotheses turning into scientific theorems this is not just conjecture or philosophical musings it is far more rigorously tested than that we talk about the different viewpoints on on the world we talk about the different camps of is the world material and physical and we talk about emergence of consciousness we talk about the differences of his viewpoints to non-dualism and we give a backstory of each of these it is something that you would think would be over your head and yet he explains it with such great plain english analogies that it's not only uh really fun to follow along but like i said you get to the end of the episode and at least i got to the end of the conversation and felt like oh my god i'm starting from scratch from everything that i thought we knew it really is i'm not getting hyperbolic it really is that type of conversation so without further ado let's get into it with dr donald hoffman this is below the line [Music] all right dr hoffman thank you so much for joining joining me on the podcast thank you james thanks for it's a great pleasure and thanks for the invitation i'm really looking forward to this conversation i have been for weeks um i have uh just eaten up your book um case against reality and i know you've written a couple but that one is the one that i said i've gotta complete before the interview and and this really starts um this really starts from a ted talk you gave five years ago and i only saw it maybe six months ago five months ago and it just completely blew my mind uh we'll put the the link to that in the show notes um but that's you know maybe a 15-minute talk compared to what we're going to chat about here i'd love to kick off the conversation with just essentially the big question of in starting pretty early where did your hypothesis around reality where did it start years ago and how has it evolved um to today and how would you articulate it to today someone you're meeting for the first time well it's been a long personal evolution because the idea is pretty crazy that that we don't see reality as it is and so i didn't just come to it you know immediately it was a long personal evolution like as as i grew up in a mixed background where my my parents had degrees in science my dad had a master's degree in chemistry my mom in biology so i had you know a good science background you know from them in my growing up but they were also religious fundamentalists and so i got this christian fundamentalist picture point of view and and i immediately as a teenager saw the that there was a serious tension between those two points of view right and it made me begin to wonder how to resolve that tension because there were some claims that the fundamentals were making that were just clearly contradicted by the science like the earth is only 6 000 years old and thing things like that and and the you know reliance on on just faith and and and in spite of the facts sometimes kind of attitudes so so i needed to work things out for myself and i got the question what does it mean to be human what are we are we machines or are we something more than just machines it seemed to me at the time as a teenager that the science point of view seemed to be indicating that we were just complicated machines and the religious point of view seem to be saying that there's more to us than just machines you know space time and matter and so i decided that i really wanted to study that and so i studied um as an undergraduate at ucla i studied uh psychology was quantitative psychology it was a mathematical psychology so it was like a minor in math minor in computer science a major in psychology you can see i was trying to get some insight into human nature from the psychology but some rigor from the computer science and the math side and there i i was very lucky i i ran across the work of uh professor david maher who was a professor at mit and his work on visual perception and artificial intelligence so he was doing state-of-the-art work at the time where he he understood the neuroscience he had a phd in neuroscience but he was now trying to understand human vision and vision more generally from the point of view of artificial intelligence how do you build an ai system that can see a robotic system that can see and that really seemed to me a great direction to go it was rigorous i could ask concrete questions of like are we machines by looking at a specific aspect of us human visual perception and really not wave my hands i didn't want to wave my hands i wanted to do something where i really got an answer and this seemed to be a case where i could get an answer about how vision works by actually trying to build vision systems so i i was very fortunate i got to go to mit as a graduate student and i was david maher student for um less than two years because he died right you talk about in the book right yeah it was it was tragic but but i forced they got enough time to work with him and he had assembled a team around him with similar ideas so and uh whitman richards a professor in the was now the brain and cognitive science department um was was my advisor full time after mar died and he was he was pretty renowned um dr maher was pretty renowned even you know in early 30s around the country for you to pinpoint okay i want to work with him he was he was quite renowned he had written several papers that grabbed me because he wasn't just talking about vision with a hand wave and just doing just doing his experiments are important but but he was doing more than just doing experiments about how vision might work he was actually saying here's a mathematical model about how we see in 3d let's write this model down and program it up in a computer and see if the computer can see in 3d now let's compare the computer's performance with human performance that will be the acid test to see whether our model is anything like what's going on in the human brain i thought wow if i want to see if humans are a machine or not this is the way to do it let's build machines that mimic humans like really so that their the original fascination was around our own machines are we something different and that's exactly right so it wasn't about reality it wasn't yet at least it and it wasn't necessarily about vision it was what are we and and can we can we take a career path to try to scratch at that itch and answer that question that's that was exactly it i was really trying to figure out you know what kind of creatures are we but now the the the turn what came was as i began to look at the mathematical models of perception that were coming out of this ai approach it became clear that they all had a similar structure so i began to wonder could i get a general mathematical model of perception and so i began to work on that and when i came to uc irvine i got to work with a couple mathematicians bruce bennett and chaitan prakash and we worked for several years on on a general mathematical model of perception and it was then looking at that mathematical model that one day it hit me the holy smoke maybe we don't see reality as it is maybe do you remember what that day was or what around the year month yeah it was around it was i would say 1985 1986 uh was when it hit me it was in a conversation with my you know again my collaborators bruce bennett and chaitan prakash and we were discussing and by the way for for listeners if you hear a siren in the background that isn't real you're just perceiving that uh yeah this is part of the whole working from home thing you get the note that's a blower going by my house oh it is okay exactly see the siren wasn't real um that they yeah come just before we had to shoot off a bunch of crows that were just parked outside my window were crowing away so this is this is real life so we're gonna take it take it all in but yes keep going so it was about 1985 that you started to think oh we might not see we might not see reality as it is and and i still remember it hit me so hard that i had to actually sit down because that that idea had never seriously occurred to me uh and i i wasn't intending to go there and i was just trying you know innocently to get a general mathematical model of perception because that would that just seemed like a good scientific thing to do but the model came back and started to suggest to me that there was a serious possibility that we don't see reality as it is that everything that we see is constructed and i didn't see that it was necessarily the case that the constructions were tied to reality i didn't see by the way necessarily the case that they're not tied to reality i just saw that there was a possibility that they were disjointed did did that seem galilean in a in a sense of wait the earth might not the sun might not be rotating around the earth and these initial observations suggest this might be uh either wildly different or i'm losing my mind a little bit right well and i think the your analogy with galileo is is very good in the sense that that galileo really challenged a deeply held belief and a seemingly obvious one like obvious oh no well that is obvious i see the sun moving around yeah it's got to be rotating around us absolutely and any fool could see that the earth isn't moving you could just look i mean look it's not moving and it's clear the sun and the moon everything's going it was just obvious uh and so galileo was challenging the obvious and and it also i think seems obvious to us that of course i i look at the moon that's because there really is a moon and i'm seeing the truth and i see the table and you see the table we both agree it's the simplest explanation is there really is a table and we're just seeing the truth of it of course no one thinks we see all of reality but we see the parts that we need and for listeners if your interest is peaked we are going to get into the work that dr hoffman's doing that that would suggest that uh that moon that you see up there that you s that is obviously up there might not be there and it might not be uh a it might not be a representation of reality that that's right um but it took me a while to get there in a way that i felt was compelling so i wrote a book called visual intelligence how we create what we see in 1998 and there i was already convinced now that our perceptions need not be tethered to reality and i had studied some evolutionary theory and i was beginning to think that um you know evolution might not shape us to to see reality as it is but i hadn't worked out any arguments about that so i i just presented the basic um ideas about perception of color and shape and motion and so forth and show how we construct them and and argued that maybe our perceptions are just an interface they're not a window on the truth and and the percep the reception of that book was was interesting it was used as a textbook in various universities it was it was well received except for the last chapter where i suggest that we don't see reality that i say it might maybe it's just user interface and people say you know great book um except for that last chapter where hoffman goes off the rails and and you know things sort of fall apart there but you know if you skip the last chapter it's it's a good book do you mind building out more of what the the uh the nugget of the book we're like i need to write a book about this you know premise build out a little bit more about that interface concept right so so what i argued there was that uh our senses we tend to think of our senses as like a camera and we're just taking a picture of the truth and you know it's a pretty faithful depiction what you see if i see you know an apple sitting on the table i'm not seeing all of reality but it's a pretty faithful depiction of a real apple that would be there even if there were no creatures to perceive it and a real table that would still be there even if everybody on the planet died and so what i argue is that that point of view may not be right it may be that our senses are more like a desktop interface on your computer so if you're writing an email uh i mean all you see and say the the icon for your email is blue and rectangular in the middle of your of your desktop that doesn't mean that the email itself is blue and rectangular in the middle of your laptop i mean anybody who thought that would completely misunderstand the point of the the desktop interface is not there to show you the truth that which would be the you know circuits and software the the voltages and magnetic fields in the computer the interface is there to hide all of that really messy reality and give you simple eye candy simple tools that let you control all that circuits and software without having to know anything about the details of it and so well that and that analogy couldn't have couldn't become even more um spot on with this conversation right now over zoom i am obviously i'm perceiving that we're having this conversation i'm getting towards what i ultimately want which would be wisdom and conversation with you but um and my brain is perceiving that you know i'm moving towards that goal but in reality i'm staring at a screen that is plasma that's right just pixels on the screen and yet i infer i think honestly and accurately something about what you're thinking something about what you're feeling and whether you're interested or not so so we get some access to to other people through this but um but yes it's like a instead of saying the space and time and physical objects are an objective reality and we're seeing them fairly truly the idea was that no this is like a vr headset so think of space-time as a virtual reality headset and physical objects as icons in that headset and but i didn't have any proof there was no i mean all i could say was that everything we know about visual perception is compatible with that idea it doesn't dismiss that idea but i couldn't say that any of our best scientific theories entail that idea and so i realized um in like 2005 2006 that um if i wanted people to take this idea seriously i needed to show that it was somehow entailed by our best theories so i looked at evolution by natural selection and i wondered is it possible to show that natural selection itself would not favor organisms that see reality as it is that they would in fact shape our senses natural selection would shape our senses to be more like a user interface my intuition was that maybe i could show that by because seeing reality is going to take too much time and too much energy that was my intuition and it turns out that that's true but not terribly deep but but you start you have to start somewhere so i started with that idea i got a couple really good grad students brian marion and justin mark to start working with me around 2009 we wrote that they wrote a hundred simulations that did hundreds of thousands of um you know games it turns out that evolution by natural selection is a mathematically precise theory there's something called evolutionary game theory so we can actually run simulations about natural selection to see what would happen and i wanted to see if as we played with the costs and so forth that you know the energy costs and so forth the time costs for computing reality that maybe reality wouldn't be favored by natural selection in terms of the sensory systems that evolved and what we found what would be what would be favored as they were or like a user interface so that we would have the natural selection would favor sensory systems of organisms that don't show reality that just show you tricks and hacks about what you need to do just like the desktop interface right i have these little icons and little eye candy that gives me clever shortcuts that what i'm really doing is toggling voltages in the computer that's what i'm really doing but i have these little shortcuts that let me do that without knowing what i'm doing right that's the whole point of the interface and so that was the idea that evolution would give us these little bits of eye candy that we could act on that would then affect reality in the ways we needed to affect reality but we wouldn't really know what we were doing and so that was so they it was those simulations that that showed yeah that that's true but the deeper idea that it hadn't occurred to me and so it only came out of actually doing the hard work of running the simulations and looking at evolutionary theory very carefully that we got the deeper idea which is that the payoff functions that govern natural selection and we can talk about payoff functions in a minute but those payoff functions erase information about reality so so so i'll unpack that a little bit but but that's going to be the bottom line the payoff functions that drive evolution do not contain the information needed to see reality so there's no way that natural selection could shape us or any organisms sensory systems of any kind so not just vision smell touch taste any sensory system of any organism cannot be shaped by natural selection to show reality and so the the notion of a payoff function is a central notion in evolutionary game theory so think it's not too far afield to think about evolutionary game theory as like video games so like in a video game what you have to do is to focus on getting points as fast as you can uh without getting killed and if you get enough points in the allotted time without getting killed uh you get to go to the next level and keep going and it's like that in evolution you have to get fitness payoffs uh and if you get enough fitness payoffs and avoid fitness harm then you don't go to the next level of the game but your genes go through your progeny through your kids into the next generation and so it's just like in a video game if you are dawling around and doing anything but focusing on how to get points you're going to lose and it's the same thing in evolution if you do if your sensory systems do anything else but tell you how to behave to get fitness payoffs and how to avoid fitness harm there then you're going to die you won't pass on your genes to the next generation or at least your probabilities for that will go way down so so that's a key intuition the fitness payoffs are going to drive what your sensory systems tell you because they're going to be guiding your actions they're going to be guiding the prioritization of what you see and it goes into one of the things that you write is fifty percent of our cortex is um is oriented for vision when we open our eyes you've got fifty percent of your neuronal cortex focus on vision which is massive computational power way more than any camera if we were just taking a photo we wouldn't need that computational power but because we're not just taking a photo but we're actually taking a photo and a and this i'm adding my own interpretation there but it it's almost like you're saying you're taking a photo and prioritizing everything you see de-prioritizing things emphasizing certain things worrying about certain things not worrying about other things yes yes yes so obviously about 50 of your brain's cortex is involved in all the various kinds of sensory systems maybe a third of it's involved in in vision which is still i mean it's billions of neurons and trillions of synapses right it's you know it's an incredible amount of horsepower that that seems to be involved when you just open your eyes and and look around and most of my colleagues in the neurosciences cognitive neurosciences assume that all that cortical hardware is working hard to give you um a reconstruction of reality so there's a real apple out there with red color and a particular shape and all this neuronal hardware is needed to actually reconstruct to recover the true 3d shape and color of that apple and other objects around and what evolution is saying is absolutely not if i put it this way if we assume that our sensory systems evolved and we're shaped by natural selection which is a big key it's kind of like if we assume that like exactly and as a scientist we always have to say what theory we're assuming right so that's why i assume that which is rigorously well understood been beaten to hell it's it's it's not the safest of assumptions but it is a pretty safe one to say okay if we assume that that that's right and the reason i assume evolution of natural selection is not because i'm sure that that theory is true but i am sure that we have no better theory for understanding biology and so as a scientist i would be um you know it would be silly for me to use anything less than that tool just to study this and i think it would also be silly for me to assume that that theory is the final word right i think none of our scientific theories are the final word but we we have to go with where we are you know choose a canvas to paint on and and that's almost like the canvas you start the argument with so and that's a very important i'm calling that out for listeners because it's and and within about um five minutes i don't know if this will make sense to you but it'll certainly blow your mind within about five minutes um given uh just what i know of of dr hoffman's hypothesis but uh but that's a very important foundation of if if we assume that that we have evolved through natural selection then then dot dot your thinking goes on yeah then this this follows um what follows is the probability is zero that any aspect of our perceptions tells us truths about the nature of objective reality the structure of objective reality the probability is precisely zero and for people who are interested um i've worked with the mathematician so what we did was we we moved from the simulations the simulations indicated that there was something interesting here so then i went and did the the real thing which is to work with a mathematician and prove a theorem so it's a theorem of evolution but natural selection that the probability is precisely zero that the sensory system of any creature um is giving truths about the structure of objective reality so the the the chances that that apple is objectively there is zero percent exactly right and the chance that the very language of space and time of objects and colors within of shapes within space and time that very language could not possibly give a true description of objective reality so so i'm not saying that we you know vision makes mistakes when we get the colors a little bit off or the shapes a little bit off or the distances and so forth i'm saying it's not possible ever to give a true description of objective reality using the language of space and time and shapes and colors and so forth it's the wrong language just like just to be very very clear no please go long form with these answers because it's going to set up the rest of the conversation very very good yeah so if i ask you to um you know to give a you know i'm teaching a computer science course say and i say to the students i want you to give me a a story about how a computer works but the only language you can use is the language of pixels on your desktop well good luck that's the wrong language you can't use the language of pixels to talk about the circuits and software and voltages and magnetic fields inside your computer it's the wrong language that's how deep this this theorem is it's saying the language of space and time and objects and colors the language of our senses is the wrong language it's trying to use pixels to describe computers you can't do it and so so that's that's a so i got more than i bargained for you know i you know right i i right and i do want to ask a little bit about just the your own internal journey within this um it sounds like from the outside and seeing in other interviews and reading the book that i getting it right that was kind of gradual and it took a while to put these pieces together even to come up with these analogies that that go from wild claim to oh i do experience a version of that every day or use the analogy of if you are in a a vr set your perception of it is it might be real you perceive a steering wheel uh or you're playing grand theft auto you perceive a steering wheel you do turn this or you perceive turning the steering wheel to the left you are not turning a real steering wheel that steering wheel isn't there but there is a cause and effect that continues around this perceptual game of oh you turned it left and then the car went left but the car isn't real the steering wheel isn't real you just perceive that it's real and maybe that perception of the apple is real but it is not objectively uh real absolutely i think that's a great analogy and i think that for a younger the younger generation that is spending a lot of time in virtual reality and virtual realities that are getting more and more compelling more and more immersive it's not a big leap for that generation to take off their headset and go hmm what about this maybe this is also just a vr headset whereas you know for for my generation it was like a crazy idea for someone that's been that's going to spend a fair fraction of their day in vr realities that they're quite immersive and compelling it's not a a big leap it's just like it was a big leap in galileo's time to think the earth isn't the center of the universe but for someone who's been in a rocket ship and you know gone to the moon and got it's all of a sudden it's not it's not a big leap anymore sort of like duh yeah i think it it's gonna so for our generation this might be like holy smoke this is you know you know incredible stuff but you know i would guess in 20 30 years a generation that's been raised on vr is going to look back on us is like old fuddy does that why didn't they get it well and to your point the um you know gin z has a phrase of keep your third eye high and and it you know this which is a uh hindu concept of your third eye your mind's eye that is a very you know ancient concept and yet they're using it so casually of there is more to perceive than just your two eyes visually there is a higher perception of what's going on or the concept of woke i mean that's pulled straight from uh from had some um some in-betweens but pulled from a spiritual concept of awake from this dream state this you are asleep the um and it's you know it's casually tossed around it as if that is obvious that people are sleeping we need to wake up or third eye high or or the vr set the simulation um for for listeners i've wanted to talk about this for a while on the podcast but i'll give the two minute people have called in and asked if if uh they think that really if i think we're living in a simulation and this is in the similar area code um of of what we're going to talk about um but elon musk have you heard his argument that we're that we are living in a simulation yes sir it's very simple and brilliant uh it's just but it goes off of exactly what we're talking about you use this technological framework that we're familiar with video games over the last 30 years i'll do this in 30 seconds for people then i'll shut up for you to talk but um his argument is for the last 30 years we've seen video games go from pong and tiny little uh two-bit representations of of things to a vr headset that just in 30 years feels like you're in a brand new world with amazing graphical interfaces now imagine whether that's a hundred years from now continuing that or a thousand years from now that it is seemingly inevitable we will have the computational power and the graphical interface power that we will develop a world a thousand years from now you can go he's like go to whatever degree you feel safe ten thousand years from now that you could recreate something that feels like real life with computational um exponential computational growth and and just technological graphical interfaces he said if that's the case then it's only a matter of time and and then from there um the grab the computational power will also allow for essentially infinite numbers of these um maybe it's another 10 000 years and it's not just five different worlds you can choose from but fro but from near infinite numbers and therefore there's going to be one base reality an infinite number of of virtual realities or simulated realities in the future so what are the odds that we're living in right now the base reality well it's one in a billion if there's going to be a billion 20 000 years from now so he's like that's the odds that so he's like the odds say that we're not living in a in um you know a base reality um but it's it's similar to you it's it it becomes so easy with technological uh anchors in the argument and i feel like exactly like if you were to talk about what you're talking about in 1830 i it wouldn't have these these analogies what would what would that even be like if you were to try to talk about this in 1775 well i would probably be um drawn and quartered uh hang for heresy burned at the stake i mean they would just be completely although you know there was uh bishop barkley uh so he was a a bishop of the of the church and he argued that we don't see reality as it is either that um that when we see things that there are only ideas in our minds which is very similar to what i'm i'm saying now he he said that they're real because they're they are ideas in god's mind as well so even if i'm not looking at the apple and having the apple in my mind the apple is always in the mind of god so so it was it was a very similar idea to what i'm talking about i mean i'm not postulating you know that god and the idea of an apple in the mind of god giving it the reality but but his idea that um to exist as barclay put it to be is to be perceived or to be a perceiver and that i agree with i mean that so so barclay did that and he he wasn't hung uh or you know burned at the stakes so maybe i should pull that back maybe i he but he um he in fact was a bishop of the church so so maybe this idea would have been received i think you have to be careful how you say it i guess right right and it might have taken another 10 years of finding a way to navigate it articulately right i think bishop barkley found a way to say it that would that kept him from being you know taken to task by by the church he certainly um i think wasn't well received by by many scientists uh on that point of view and and so that's one reason why when i'm talking about this i immediately go to this theorem from evolution by natural selection right that changes the whole game here it's one thing for me to say i think that our sensory systems don't show us reality as it is there's no reason for me to be taken seriously if i just throw that out there interesting idea so what but when there's a theorem on the table it's a very very different game now so it doesn't mean i'm right but it does mean that if if someone wants to dismiss it they need to say what aspect of the theorem what what assumptions that went into the theorem do they disagree with right i mean and what what are the critiques what would you say the most um paper-thin uh idiotic critiques are the the ones that you just feel like are way for thin and then what are the big critiques you'd say yeah that's a really good critique that you've gotten over the years well uh here one critique that um that i is from a a a friend of mine who i highly respect reiner mousefeld he's a professor uh of psychology in in germany brilliant brilliant thinker and and one thing that he he pointed out uh was that um here i'm making this claim that we don't see reality as it is based on evolution by natural selection and he pointed out that there's a lot more to evolution than just natural selection right so there is genetic drift there's linkage and plyotrophy and the fact that there are constraints from chemistry and physics on on how evolution can go and there's a big debate in the theory of evolution evolution in general dark darwinian evolution about how important natural selection is to the the development of creatures the evolution of species and so i haven't i haven't heard that what's what is the debate um kind of the rough outline well so um gould stephen j gould and and lewinton uh are two very very famous uh gould is is now dead but uh very famous evolutionary theorists who who suggest that there's very small role for natural selection that that other things um like genetic drift and so forth um what is that so genetic drift just means that there are these random mutations of genes that really don't get selected pro or con but they do change our our our functionality and there's been a huge debate about whether um that there is so much more genetic drift than than selection and there's a big debate as well about you know clearly certain aspects of our biology are not selected for for example all of us have white bones but is that because there were selection pressures for our bones to be white no there were selection pressures presumably for our bones to be strong and yet not brittle and it turned out that calcium was a a fairly good element to use in the construction of bones to to get those properties of being strong but not brittle and it turns out that calcium looks to us to be white and so so the whiteness of bones was not selected for it was what they call a spandrel it's sort of an accidental byproduct spandrels in architecture are you know features of an arch um that you weren't really trying to design you're trying to design so much but you get these little gaps and so forth that come out as sort of accidents of what you're really trying to design for their spam they're called spandrels so it there's a debate about how much of our sensory systems and how much of our you know physical bodies more generally are re result of specific selection pressures versus how many are spandrels and or genetic drift or and so forth that's a legitimate uh and serious debate between the so-called selectionists and those who are not so much into selection if oh go ahead go ahead weiner reiner mouseville didn't raise that he said look um you're making your your theorem is based on evolution of natural selection where your your your proposal and uh you know for all we know that's a really small part of you know evolution so that's not interesting and and so you know and and reiner is a good friend he's a smart guy and so a nice challenge and so i i uh we published back we wrote and said um you know reiner's absolutely right we have no idea how and it's not been settled how much um natural selection features as a central role in in evolution i think it does but maybe it doesn't but here's the point the key point to our reply when when it's argued that we see reality as it is on evolutionary grounds so most of our colleagues would say that evolution shapes us to see the truth right right argument is that seeing the truth will make you more fit in other words it's it's it's a fitness consequence that of of seeing reality that that it makes you um more likely to survive and pass on your genes that's a natural selection argument right it's saying natural selection has shaped our senses to is going to choose the more accurate perception of reality because they're going to be more more fit yeah they and and just to recast this to see if i'm i'm following correctly the the quote unquote it's obvious that the sun rotates around us statement within natural selection is it's actually the fitness is going to align with whoever can grasp a reality the best see the clearest we'll get them accumulate the most food stay the most safe fight off the most uh you know of the dangers and and mate the best because they find the most apples and they can find more perceive more from 50 feet away uh versus you know only needing to be five feet away so they're gonna win over time that's the the the conventional argument or oh it's obvious that fitness is going to favor uh perception of reality correct exactly exactly right exactly right and so that argument is based on natural selection and and your argument is saying that sounds obvious but when you take the telescope and and measure the sun and we actually do the mathematical modeling if you were to have one mouse that doesn't see uh one species of mice that does not uh that sees reality completely one species that sees partial reality and one that doesn't see any reality but is damn good at mating and finding food that you run the models these first two go extinct every single time and the one that is really just really well engineered for uh fighting fleeing and mating is is going to put these other and it sounds even that kind of i don't have the mathematical modeling in front of you it sounds somewhat plausible that they're going to find the the the girls at the bar much faster than the ones that are like well is the bar here is this even real is this and the the the mouse and the girls are gonna find the guys at the bar same same way that it's like oh i'm wired for this function and maybe for a generation these two are better philosophers and and pers you know are are closer with reality but within a few generations much less two billion years of evolution they're gonna be kicked out of the uh out of the chain right is that accurate that's a very good analogy and i think just to another analogy that can help sort of bring this idea home is that you know have two people trying to win the game of say grand theft auto say a vr version of grand theft auto one person has the a vr headset and has a steering wheel and is playing the game that way the other person has the ability to toggle voltages as fast as he can inside the supercomputer so he has to toggle voltages as fast as he can to try to win the game who's going to win the guy that sees the truth namely the computer or the guy that has a virtual reality um game interface that allows him to just turn the steering wheel press on the gas and so forth it's really clear that every time i turn the steering wheel i'm toggling millions of voltages good luck trying to toggle those millions of voltages fast enough to win the game and that's sort of what evolution gave us it gave us this vr headset to allow us to toggle the voltages of reality very very quickly without knowing what we're doing the audience for blue line is one of the dense maybe the densest audience of founders in the world with about 10 000 uh lessons per episode there is a maybe 50 are founders of businesses and if you have ever as a founder thought about selling your online business and then been rightfully apprehensive because it is a nightmare so many so much of the time it is just just goes not only does it last six months eight months of negotiation three more months of finalization of the deal then a new owner runs your business into the ground that you spent years pouring yourself into there is a reason people say acquisitions are extremely painful but not anymore with tiny capital tiny capital has built the dream scenario for 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with maybe just the the most the latest version of the one or two lines that is maybe just the most out there that doesn't have all these bread crumbs to to build an argument around it but it's crazy right well that space time is doomed space time we've assumed is fundamental reality phys physics for hundreds of years is assumed space time is fundamental reality and objects in space time that's the fundamental nature of reality science has been based on that and what i'm saying is it's a theorem of evolution but natural selection that that's false space-time is not fundamental it's our headset space and time we think of them as the pre-existing stage on which the drama of life is played out it started 13.8 billion years ago at the big bang there was no life there was no consciousness just matter and energy in space life came hundreds of millions billions of years later and consciousness came after that and so we are bit players consciousnesses bit players that came on very very late on the pre-existing stage of space time i'm saying that entire framework is false space time is merely in the computer science language a data structure it's a data structure that we that we have that is like a vr headset that we use to interact with some other reality so they're so i'm not denying that there is a reality i'm just saying if we take evolution by natural selection seriously the probability is zero that anything that we see here is anything but a vr headset it's all a vr headset the reality is something entirely different so that's that's the most like stunning way of thinking about this and so i hope i get to both the conventional obvious next questions for listeners as well as uh the unconventional ones um the conventional one would be what well first off when you have been proposed as you've been proposing this has there been any internal turmoil obviously darwin famously faced excommunication uh and you know just is very stressful internal turmoil has there been any within you of piecing this together and saying okay i'm going to look like a loon um to put this forward well you know absolutely right this is um tell me about one of those scenarios where you had the insight and then said okay well i'm going to public i'm going to have to put this forward and potentially have blah blah blah yeah this is so far out of the mainstream idea now i should say that there are i'm not alone they're uh stephen pinker at harvard right i'm not going to say that he endorses everything i'm saying here i'm not saying that but but pinker has very clearly written that that natural selection will shape us to have uh untrue beliefs and he's very he's got a paper uh called so so how does the mind work a brilliant paper 2005 that i highly recommend and a book called how the mind works where he gives the evolutionary arguments for why um evolution could shape us to have false beliefs what would be an example that's what he believes what would be an example from his paper and book um well the kinds of things that i'm talking about but here here's a i mean this is this is fun stuff so i'll mention please no indulge go this this is a space where you can go as wide vast as you want right so um one one argument is that um it's sort of sort of deep um in a species that's cooperative it's very fit for all of us to cooperate like we we're hunter gatherers we all go out and hunt for food and if i come back and i didn't get much today i didn't have a bad day maybe you can share some of yours with me today and then i'll share tomorrow that kind of thing but um if everybody's cooperating then another strategy from evolutionary theory that's quite fit then is to just cheat instead of going out there and you know risking my life bringing down bisons and mammoths and so forth i just go sit down by the river you know enjoy myself drink some water relax go back and say oh boy i just didn't get anything today could i have some of yours and um and just be a freeloader well that turns out if you're the only freeloader it's an incredibly fit strategy you you minimize the risk to your body and you have all the food that you need so but of course if everybody's a freeloader then the whole system falls apart right if everybody's a freeloader there's no food we all die we all starve to death so this is what's called frequency dependent selection that that you know if everybody's cooperating then it's really fit to be the one freeloader but if everybody's freeloading then it's not fit anymore you're going to die so so our we haven't died our species hasn't died so that means um that we somehow were able to keep the freeloaders from overriding this so so what what what's going on well one one possible mechanism is that we began to detect the cheaters right i mean when i tell you that i tried real hard and didn't get anything i'm lying well you know i might betray and i might blush i might get shifty eyes i might do something that might betray that i'm lying to you so there would be selection pressures then for the species to start to be able to detect the cheaters well then you'll get an evolutionary arms race where the cheaters get better at cheating and lying and so so um so there'd be a natural selection favoring of get better at cheating get better at at lying get better online this is um get better at being lazy and and yeah okay and so robert trippers who's a one of the most brilliant evolutionary theorists of the last several decades point out that the ultimate deceiver the one who's really best at this evolutionary arms race deceiving is the one who's self-deceived who no longer believes leaves their own that's exactly right they were deeply self-deceived and so on evolutionary grounds you you could argue that maybe most maybe almost everything that i believe about myself and my own motives is deeply false and that there were selection pressures for me to be self-deceived so so that's an interesting argument because it's deeply efficient that's right um it's like that in that community that's right for those who've seen sign filters george says it's not a lie if you believe it right right and there's a great book a great leadership book on on self-deception and and it is uh it's a book that if someone hands it to you you might recoil and yet it you read it you take a few chapters in and you realize holy i'm self-deceiving myself to a to a degree that i by definition thought this book is for other people and three chapters in to exactly your point it is you start to think wait i i have constructed so much of of this uh artificially and it can result in something real so you think oh let i am a good leader i'm a 22 year old i'm a good leader i'm going to start a software company that starts to do do well like maybe i am a good leader because you lying got you food in that community and it was efficient so you're like oh this is how you get food um but in the book it does right fake it till you make it right in the book it uh talks about the the massive comeuppance that is um that is waiting for you and similarly you know the community disappears you get separated for the community you don't really know how to get food you're you're pretty aft that's right that's right so so so these kinds of arguments are are not new in evolutionary theory there are arguments that you know we're going to have shortcuts heuristics um we're going to cut corners they're going to be some selection pressures to be self-deceived and so forth but what's interesting to me is that even the theorists who have made these arguments when it comes to everyday perception looking at an apple almost every one of them stopped short there so that's where i sort of jumped off the cliff even for for these evolutionary theories every day middle sized objects like tables and chairs and so forth to say that we've been shaped to be deceived about them that they're not the truth that's i there's very few people who are saying that and and so that's where i knew i needed to have the theorems when did you start what year about did you say okay i'm about to take both feet off this ledge and there's no one really saying this in my book visual intelligence i propose the interface theory and when i got deafening silence on that aspect of the book i realized okay um there's only one way for me to be taken seriously i need a theorem so that was around 2006 i realized okay i've got to take this to the next level if i if i have a theorem then this will have to be taken seriously and by the way if i can't get a theorem then maybe i shouldn't take it seriously either right so so that was so when when did you have the theory around 2009 2010 um well we got i got the simulations that were pretty compelling for my my two graduate students 2010 and we published them in the journal of theoretical biology which is a very prestigious journal it's it's the premier journal in this area so it was was that exciting just to get it i'm so interested in this part of of you do work and then it's it's once you get a ted talk it's one thing but the five years before and you're kind of in the wilderness that's what i'm always interested in yeah that was in the wilderness and it was it was difficult we we had published we we've done the simulations and my students had worked very very hard they probably ran roughly a million simulations we were just looking for good enough statistics to get confidence in this result but here's a natural so we published it um it's a strong result but the reply that people could still give is look simulations or simulations maybe you didn't get the right set of conditions that would show the cases in which truth would evolve so we remain unconvinced and that's a as a scientist i perfectly understand that i mean that's a that's a fair position and i and so that's why i went to jaitan prakash my my good friend and mathematician and said shaytan i think there's a theorem here in fact i need a theorem you know for this to be taken seriously and so chaitan and i worked on that for several years but it was chaitan's brilliance as a mathematician that that pulled it through and this this last year um we had the theorems it took us several years to get through the review process but last year we got two papers published in in peer reviews journals um with theorems and what was the reaction there well um the reaction is i mean scientists have their ideas and what they think is right but they also listen when there's contradictory strong evidence and so when i say i've got a theorem and here's i state the theorem and i give the logic of it i'm treated with respect absolutely so this is not like so so my colleagues i think are doing exactly the right thing they should be skeptical absolutely this is a really bold and unusual claim on the other hand i mean so for example um uc davis there's a neuroscience research institute up there with lots of um cognitive neuroscientists studying um the brain and postdocs and so forth they invited me up a couple years ago to give a talk on why neurons don't exist when they're not perceived right they invited me they knew i was going to say that so so here these are neuroscientists and i'm saying that nothing in space time exists when it's not perceived we construct everything including we construct brains and we construct neurons so strictly speaking neurons cause none of my behavior and none of my conscious experiences they invited me to come up there and tell them that and i was treated very very respectfully and i gave them my logic and we had a a very cordial and professional conversation and i didn't hesitate at the right point of my talk to say what this entails is that although for everyday neuroscience it's perfectly fine to talk as though you know area v4 of visual cortex causes my color experiences and i do that myself in everyday neuroscience i talk that way but strictly speaking it's false and i gave them the reasons for it and i was i was well received and that's what i love about science they will not count in its fools so if someone is saying something as nonsensical as that you don't that neurons don't exist if they don't have a theorem they don't have anything like that then they will not be listened to but if it sounds nonsensical but you have a theorem that's based on our best current science they will listen respectfully they will try of course to take it down that's what science is about so so i felt that science is working the way it should there's the right kind of skeptical reception but there is reception people listen and they know that okay i've raised the bar there's a theorem on the table now it's not about hand waves it's what assumptions of the theorem do you disagree with and what what would you change right so i've raised that and right and i've seen a lot of the uh the counter arguments are are they kind of they just ding off they're pretty uh easy to deflect and that's the power of a theorem and and all of the modeling what are what do you call your position and do you mind telling listeners the names of the other positions um you know physicalists or materialists just to give a kind of landscape here right so i would say that you know 95 plus percent of my colleagues who are the syrian scientists in cognitive neuroscience and so forth are physicalists so i would say that you know this is almost the universal foundation for science for the last 400 years is that space time is fundamental space time and its contents are the fundamental nature of reality at least since newton galileo even and and before that it was it was more spiritual of this is a temporary well before then we didn't really have science and and you know the the ideas of the greeks were interesting you know but plato aristotle and so forth but there's nothing there that is recognizable as like modern science where you start you really start to see that with galileo careful experiments very very controlled looking at data and then trying to write down mathematical equations to capture what you're what you're doing that that you don't i mean you see brilliance in the greeks but you don't see that and so the the the real the big shift happened around the time of galileo and and part of that shift was the central role of mathematics and making our ideas precise and looking for the implications of our ideas and also the framework that galileo said as well that things like he thought that things like colors odors and smells um were not objective reality they were just sort of our senses you know that's what we create what we what we so he actually believed that we create what we smell and the colors that we see those aren't objective reality but he thought that space-time and physical objects with their their you know their their mass and their positions and their movements that that was objective reality and that framework um is central to physicalism and it's been uh incredibly successful since galileo so science has been built on this physicalist framework so consciousness is not fundamental life is not fundamental space-time and particles now we would call them particles elementary particles and energy are fundamental those are the canvas and everything else is is painted on that canvas absolutely it's painted on that canvas in a precise reductionist sense that the laws as you go to smaller and smaller scales in space-time you get to more and more fundamental nature of reality and you find deeper and deeper laws so the laws of particle physics are the deepest the laws of chemistry are emergent from the deeper laws of physics the processes of biology are emergent from those of chemistry the processes of neuroscience are emerging from the processes of biology and consciousness is emergent from presumably the neuroscience although some physicalists would also say it could be emergent from other complex physical systems that don't involve neurons say the rightly crafted artificial intelligences might also have the right kind of complex physical dynamics to give rise to consciousness but the big picture is this reductionism we go to smaller and smaller scales to get the deeper and more fundamental laws and then from those we can show how the other laws of the less fundamental or special sciences are emergent from these deeper laws of physics and so physicalists would be similar to emergence a theory of emergency they would be uh one and one to one in terms of how they would view the world that's right because they would say it's a physical emergence and what is what are the all terms and what do you call your position well so an alternative that descartes offered rene descartes is famous for saying um that there's in addition to the physical world which is like a machine there is this spiritual world of yeah and and so it's called dualism there's physical stuff and then there's sort of mental or consciousness stuff or spiritual stuff and they're on equal footing so the physicalist says there's only physical stuff and what looks like consciousness really is just some complicated action of physical stuff that's what it really is the duelist like descartes says no there's really the the machine the physical stuff uh and but then there's all the also this soul stuff and and many um religions take this point of view and that descartes you know what he said was fit in with the christianity which was dominant at the time that there's a soul and a body and and they're in some sense perhaps um one's not reducible to the other right physical stuff stands on its own the the soul stuff stands on its own but they do interact and and descartes famously thought that they interacted at the pineal gland um which of course is is just false but it was it was a brilliant hypothesis at the time um and then there's the point of view that's sometimes called idealism and so barkley um was an idealist you know saying that all that exists to be is to be perceived or to be a perceiver that's a nice statement of idealism uh kant hegel so there's a whole tradition of idealism my my views fit into that but i don't call my view idealism partly because there's a lot of baggage idealism is often conflated with anti-realism that you're that you don't think that certain things are real and and but you don't but you don't think certain things are real you don't think anything that we perceive is real oh i see but you do think there is a canvas beneath it that is real yes that's right so i call it conscious realism my view is i call conscious realism and and i should say um the the theorem that i have about evolution by natural selection that says none of our senses show us the truth again i'm not saying that evolution of natural selection is true i'm not saying it's correct i'm saying i don't have a better theory and that's what our best theories entails i would like to think that we do perceive some aspects of reality we might not but i would like a deeper theory that allows the possibility that human beings do have some traffic with the truth right uh no do and do we do you do you personally said you would like to believe do you feel like we do have some traffic with the truth with the truth i think i think so and that's what i'm working on is a theory that would make that possible that would that according to this this theory um it it may be that strictly speaking spate our perceptions of space and time and matter and so forth are not telling us reality as it is but some of our there is some aspect of what we're perceiving that that is true and of course what i have to do to be taken seriously on this is i have to show first if there's a deeper theory of reality what is that theory what is that reality what is this dynamics it has to be mathematically precise then i have to show how space time emerges from it and so i have to show some kind of projection from this deeper theory to space-time and in that projection i have to show why this deeper theory looks like evolution by natural selection in the space-time projection so so so the so a lot of work that i have to do right so if i if so if i want to say that evolution by natural selection entails we don't see the truth but evolution financial selection is not the deepest theory then i need a deeper theory and i need to show how evolution of natural selection emerges from that deeper theory precisely i've got to get exactly evolution of natural selection or i'm wrong so that i can understand why evolution is telling us that we don't see the truth but this deeper theory allows us to at least see some of the truth to give an analogy of what we have to do here when we had newton's theory of physics right and in newton's theory um we had the notion that that you have a definite position and a definite momentum every object has a definite value of both things that happen here simultaneously there's a notion of simultaneity that's true across the universe and so forth and when einstein came along and wrote down special relativity and then general relativity one thing that we wanted to do was to make contact with newton in other words how how does newton fit into this deeper broader theory and and you can make that kind of connection you know in some sense you can get newton um as a limiting case of einstein as the speed of light goes to infinity so if you take einstein's theory and just let the speed of light get bigger and bigger and go to infinity then you get something that looks like newton's newton's theory and so you could make this contact and see physicists could see how newton was in some sense i mean newton was great on its own it's its own its own theory and even the notion of mass and newton is different than the notion of mass in einstein but nevertheless you could see broadly how newton is a special case of einstein and also how newton is a special case of quantum theory when quantum theory came around in some sense something called planck's constant if that goes to zero then you get something that looks like newton so was it was that einstein's work to incorporate this previous notion or step on the ladder and obviously break ground on a new step of the ladder and incorporate them within each other or was that so it was that physicist outside of einstein that uh compatib compatibilized them well well i think einstein his own work made it pretty clear right up front that the the relationship between the two but of course many philosophers of science and many physicists have thought about that and and elaborated on it in the decades since einstein but you know i mean already i would say that it was pretty clear from einstein's own work how newton sort of fit in there it was pretty clear from the first work on quantum theory how again newton's kind of framework would fit in in the special case when planck's constant got arbitrarily small um and and so i need to do the same kind of thing here if i have a deeper theory um that allows us to see the truth then i have to show how space time and evolution of natural selection are special cases of that deeper theory which is not a trivial task right that's not right in the models it says that uh and so a few of these conventional questions um well first off you can close your eyes and and not perceive the sun but it would still influence through gravitational pull the earth right there would be influence outside of perception or the moon and the waves how how do you uh how does your argument feature that influence outside of perception right so even our experience of gravity is from the point of view of evolution but natural selection um merely a format of our perceptions not a deep truth so so einstein's theory of gravity says that gravity is the shape of space-time the curvature of space time i'm nodding my head but i'm like uh i'm a simple texan just trying to put this together okay yeah keep going well you know almost everybody's had trouble with einstein's theory there but it's it's incredible that that that gravity is according to einstein how space is curved that's what it is so we think of spaces you know well if we think about it at all is flat and einstein said no it's not flat it curves and it's the fact that we live in curved space that's pushing my seat into the chair right now i'm sitting pushed into the chair not because there's a force of gravity but because i'm in a curved space and i'm just moving along the curve and that curve is putting me into my chair and so that's it's a it's a strange thing to wrap your head around but but then i'm saying that space time itself which einstein took as fundamental right you're saying space time is fundamental but it curves and that's what gravity is i'm saying space time is doomed space time is not fundamental there's something deeper and what does it where does that uh epilogue go or the next chapter of space time is maybe the second third chapter what is what is chapter four what is the deeper reality uh well the right answer is i don't know but as a scientist i'm going to propose a theory and please please and then hopefully my other scientists will come along and spank me with with their own you know mathematics and their own observations well what's great is you've already proven uh to be very very uh very thoughtful if if someone's gonna go against what you're thinking because you tend to follow it up with theorems but yeah tell me what this chapter if chapter three is is space-time uh is infinite that is the that is the reality what's chapter four so i'm my proposal is that consciousness is fundamental and and the reason i go there is partly poverty of my imagination in the in the following sense i'm one of the biggest open problems in cognitive neuroscience today what we call the hard problem of consciousness is the question of how our conscious experiences like the taste of chocolate the smell of garlic a headache the feeling of velvet how are these simple conscious experiences related to brain activity or to the physical world more generally but usually we think about it in terms of brain activity and and we call it the hard problem of consciousness because my brilliant colleagues have for many decades now been trying to show how brain activity can cause specific conscious experiences and have utterly failed we we can't none of the theories can explain how brain activity causes even one specific conscious experience we can go into those theories and why they fail if you're interested but so my attitude was okay if we can't if we fail to start with physical stuff like the brain and we can't boot up consciousness and now evolution is telling us well there's a theorem that that no physical objects exist when they're not perceived anyway brains don't exist when they're not perceived so that's why they don't do it the reason why we can't get brain activity to boot up consciousness is because brain activity isn't fundamental it doesn't even exist when it's not perceived so let me start the other way let me start with consciousness and try to boot up space time and brains so so my most my colleagues are starting with space time and brains and try to boot up consciousness but that contradicts evolution with natural selection evolution of natural selection says it's the wrong direction that's not it's not too dissimilar from you have the brain and last night you created an entire world in your dream that included walls that included other people and that dream included you having a brain within it and exactly and you you felt like it was real um and yet that was complete figment of of consciousness that's a a good analogy to think about this as space time is just the format of the dream so this is a dream in consciousness or i like to use virtual reality headset and and so so here's the the big picture of where i'm going with this i'm proposing that reality is like a vast social network of interacting conscious entities that i call conscious agents so think about the twitterverse right there's tens of millions of twitter users billions of tweets there's no way that a twitter user could ever read all the tweets or interact with all the twit it's just overwhelming so what do we do when we have just overwhelming quantities of of social media data what do we do we use visualization tools case would be to have a vr headset that we use that i can like zoom out and see what's trending in all of the united states and zoom in and see what's trending in new york city and then zoom zoom in and see what my three friends are saying my friends are doing exactly zoom back out and and notice when you do that you're going to have some simple eye candy like colorful objects that are doing certain things that you know how to interpret that oh this is what's trending in new york versus what's trending in beijing and and so forth and you don't only if you zoom into a particular twitter user or you're going to see an actual user right most of the time you're only going to see icons that are sort of smearing over and simplifying stuff well that's the point so reality is this vast social network of conscious agents and some conscious agents have a visualization tool we call it space-time and physical objects that's so space time is just the vr headset that some agents maybe a very very small vanishing small fraction of agents use the kind of headset that we use most conscious agents probably have conscious experiences that you and i can't even concretely imagine meaning like a red blood cell has a different conscious experience that we great great question it's it's not that for example red blood cells are conscious or in fact strictly speaking the human body is not conscious right the human body that you see is just an icon that you create when you look at me when you when i look at you i see an icon that i created of your body when i look away i delete that icon fortunately i don't delete your consciousness your consciousness still exists so so the body that i created clearly not identical to your consciousness because you're still conscious and potentially could be so obsessive and and you are just playing around in the vr world by yourself you're absolutely that i can't dismiss solipsism which is the idea that all that exists is me and my perceptions i mean i can't dismiss that although i'm not proposing it but i can't dismiss it and just just from a high level there was there was uh physicalism emergence there was dualism there was uh idealism there's conscious realism your your articulation solipsism could be a you know a fifth version and there could be a sixth of non-dualism um or would that kind of differ there is something something that's called an uh neutral monism that certain philosophers have proposed so a neutral monism my feeling is that neutral monism doesn't really work that it um it either degenerates into a physicalism or a dualism um okay so we'll take it well but i but i just wanted to recap that for my own right for my own notification and so okay so the um the white blood cell uh or go back to that red blood cell example where you're kind of correcting my my language of it's conscious but we i can't you know connect with its conscious experience right yeah that's an important little distinction here because if we take seriously that that everything that you see is just a headset and just a virtual reality then the things that i see in it like like blood cells and people they're just icons right i see so strictly speaking they're not conscious nothing that i see is it self-conscious i'm just seeing an icon so so then why would you say when you look away you delete me as an icon but my consciousness that's going why would you assume that i have a consciousness oh so that's the assumption of this theory so that's that's the big the big founding assumption of conscious realism that the space time isn't fundamental physical objects aren't fundamental but what does exist contrary to solipsism so i'm i'm proposing that solipsism is false and that there are countless other consciousnesses out there i'm i i have a consciousness um and i may be many many consciousnesses that that collaborate to create the consciousness that i call my consciousness but that there are countless other there's a whole vast network of consciousnesses so it's a vast social network that's the proposal and why why couldn't a red blood cell just so that i understand the specific point why would you say no that's a slight distinction that red blood cell couldn't have consciousness if if for example for the same reasons that i claim that your body doesn't have consciousness oh okay i see so it's um there there could be this collaboration of consciousness says within me but to ascribe them to specific parts um wouldn't wouldn't necessarily work well yes it's like saying if i'm using this vr headset for the twitterverse right and i'm i'm you know i've got some icon for what's trending in the united states and say it's a it's a green ball and if i say well so that are you saying that the green ball is a bunch of twitter users well no no no i'm not saying that green ball is a bunch i see green ball is just my icon that's showing me what's trending across the united states of the twitter so me being a collaboration and i've heard you talk about this i'd love to uh here you go i want to pursue this further i could be a collaboration of consciousnesses but um and and when i when these words are coming out of my mouth and i'm speaking in a space-time constrained way it is consciousness going through you know a coffee straw and and having to articulate these words and these words um are a culmination of a collaboration of is that and you're not saying it's your your red blood cell and your kidney is a con as a collaboration you're saying that maybe my consciousness with my wife my children my parents my friends it's that inter-stitched consciousness that has created me um or created this culmination of of consciousness in which these sentences are falling out of my mouth right and also maybe a whole lattice of other consciousnesses that that for example um [Music] so there's the sort of the outside conscience like your your children your wife and so forth but there's also other consciousnesses that are collaborating to create you and when we use our interface when you use your interface too now we're getting funky by the way everybody uh we are getting uh the the world in general is getting so weird so fast but this is uh this is one of the main pillars in which any listener listening to this not only is this cr it's just so out there and awesome i i actually won't say it's crazy because it's uh well you got a theorem and and it also is uh we've been so wrong about what we thought was obvious before we we likely will be again but even this conversation is getting so weird so fast but in such a awesome way so okay so keep going on the collaboration of consciousnesses right so so i would the way that this model is working out it turns out when two conscious agents interact they form a new conscious agent and this can go on forever so we're forming one new a new conscious agent right now that's right and and i'm very interested to know how much the the lower level agents can know about the higher agent that they're creating this let's see now this is all mathematics by the way the theory of consciousness is published i'm working it's called if you want to google and read the math it's called um objects of consciousness so if you google objects put the link yeah we'll put the link in in the show notes you can go read it you can see the math you can see the mathematical proposals but the math says that two agents interacting create a new agent and at higher higher levels agents create more and more agents so that you are not just one agent you're this whole lattice of interacting conscious agents and when you use your interface your space-time interface to try to interact with that whole lattice of conscious agents what you see are things like bodies brains neurons and cells but those are just the interface icons that you use that dumb down this really complex vast social network that's you so you're this incredible social network very very complicated an entire nation of interacting conscious agents but all you can see of yourself is what your dumbed-down user interface lets you see and what you see is neurons and brains and cells and so forth those are just icons which are hiding an incredible complex reality two two questions uh one is there any ancient mythology or philosophy that gets close to this there are uh i i have been um and by the way do you do you feel like you have to tiptoe around things like that because you are a scientist and and and you feel like okay there's i have to be conscious i have to be cognizant of of what sticks on me in these conversations just how to carry personal curiosity do you feel like you have to okay i'm not gonna wait in that water because it's not serious well for for me as a scientist um that's what tenure is for tenure is is there not for you to just sit down and rest on your laurels tenure is there for you to be brave to go out there and try if you're not the freeloader but we already talked about the evolutionary pressure that direction not at the university of california i'll say university of california we make sure that there are very very few free loaders we're on it but what tenure is really for is once a person has proven that that they are a scientist that they can do creative work then we give them tenure and we say okay um you've proven that you're not just a charlatan that you can actually do serious work you're now free to go into dangerous areas that that may not be well received and and may take take years before you actually get but but when it gets into the how would you say kind of the uh intuitive side of the brain that is that has led to a lot of cultures developing a concept of a higher power of of a a higher perceiving consciousness uh for lack of a better term do you feel like you you have to uh maybe do it's better for your credibility to not enter and wade into that territory or do you feel like with tenure no i can go we can walk wherever we want i feel that as long as i'm sticking to doing rigorous science i'm free to get my ideas wherever i wherever i want so i'm very happy to to listen to the ideas of buddhists hindus are there any ancient philosophies that you feel like you'd say wow there's some uh strange similarities i i think that there are um deep similarities deep resonances with with um mystical traditions of of all sorts of types around the world eastern and western especially the mystical traditions of those um i think there's a lot in context i've i've given a talk to the dalai lama and had a conversation with the dalai lama about ideas here i've um are there any specific philosophies that you'd see because it's almost like if they talk too much if they say too much then they'd get disqualified in this realm in which you're chipping away at but if they stick to almost uh a local uh area code and stick to that area code this is not real or this is real that maybe it almost lays or it's hand in glove with what what you're proposing are are there any that are hand and glove that come to mind well i would say that there are some that that are are very broadly compatible right right uh in the sense that so for example in in i'm no expert in these areas but in in some versions of of hindu philosophy there's this notion of maya um that sometimes translated illusion they're you know one could make the argument that that notion of maya in in hindu philosophy is something like my idea idea of a user interface that we've been shaped not to see the truth but we have a user interface i mean so but my attitude about these things is i do want to listen to the various spiritual traditions and i and i actively interact with people from these those traditions and listen to their ideas because they've spent a lot of time thinking about consciousness in these traditions um and scientists are our relative newcomers to the table when it comes to studying consciousness now we um catch up quickly and we have some tools that no one else has but but the so i listened to spiritual traditions and their ideas just like i listened to the ideas of my scientific peers with the appropriate skepticism right so i i i take nothing for granted by the way i don't believe my own theories right if i had to bet is my theory of consciousness correct i would bet against me that that mean and i i would bet that our current best theories in in physics and in natural sciences will be overthrown that we will find deeper theories so so that is my attitude about things what we do is work with what we have right now try to get the best theories and be precise so that we can figure out as quickly as possible precisely where we're wrong so i i'm not worried about um hanging out with people from very spiritual traditions and listening to their ideas um i listen for good ideas i don't believe them more i don't believe my own theories it's not about belief is really about getting the best ideas asking can we fashion these ideas into a mathematically precise theory see what that theory entails and figure out where it's wrong that's sort of my attitude manages of course we're wrong we probably have little insights here and there that are really useful insights that we should draw on probably most of what we think our insights are nonsense and that includes in science and in spiritual traditions so so i'm arguing for a deep humility on all sides the humility to listen attentively and respectfully to the ideas think about them for ourselves figure out which ones make sense try to turn them into a mathematically precise theory and then see where that leads so so i have a amen to the the humility um you know that's the delineation between philosophy and uh and religiosity um and and it's it's that's refreshing to hear from uh from a scientist that is also making these these um wild wildly different claims but also has the the mathematics and modeling and and rigor behind it the are are there um in that realm of kind of crazy territory um are there what's the best way of asking this are there substances like something like dmt uh are there psychedelics that substance substances out there that would dial down the um the the focus on fitness payoffs and allow you to see more objectively um and a great way to ask the question that's a really good way to ask the question i think the answer is yes and to get specifics about how that might work i have to actually elaborate the mathematics that i'm working on of conscious agents and show precisely how space time arises as a interface and i i have to show precisely how we get the laws of particle physics for example the scattering amplitudes that you know two gluons smashing into each other four gluons go spraying out at the large hadron collider we can write down scattering amplitudes i need to start with the theory of conscious agents in this dynamics show exactly how it projects into space time and show exactly what aspect of the dynamics gets projected into what we call gluon gluon scattering and i have to show exactly the right scattering amplitudes arise from that projection then then i can start to answer the kind of question that you just posed which is when i do something like take a chemical like you know five dmt to answer your question i'm gonna have to now say okay i've got the chemical structure of five dmt now that i've got this mapping from consciousness into space time i can reverse engineer i can pull back and say okay what does 5dmt correspond to back in the realm of conscious agents what dynamics is going on there when i take 5dmt and it's interacting with certain receptors it brings the pineal gland back into the uh conversation potentially yeah yeah and you'll gland there's potentially the pineal gland the the uh right right yeah it potentially brings it back into the conversation at least we don't know how it works but from my and i've never done uh well i've done ayahuasca i've never done uh five eo uh five is it five imeo dmt i'm not i'm not and i've never done it but i uh they they surmise that it's working on the dmn the default mode network which in your theory would say none of this exists and this is these are all just limited limited words but and icons but and the ego um the the self and perception of self and preservation of of this bodily self as located in that dmn and uh and dmt lowers the volume on that um somehow um so that's why i ask around around dna i think that that's a a very promising direction absolutely and and by the way um i would not say not to use that language of the default mode network and so forth because that's the best language we have right now so i would myself describe it that way because i don't have the deeper theory but the deeper theory to really answer your question at a deep level i need to be able to pull back both the default mode network and five muodmt back into the realm of conscious agents and that's what's going on there are they really is what's happening when i put five mao dmt into my neurons or the pineal gland whatever wherever it's acting or affecting the default mode network am i do i have evidence that what that's doing is really changing the structure of my interface construction in this this realm of conscious agents because my interface itself is the product of conscious agents that are collaborating they collaborate to create my interface so when i pull back all these things into the realm of consciousness i can ask does oh does this plant con consciousness one plus one equal three of this plant consciousness and my own conscious i guess there is a language in which it does fit within your uh language um but i i see that it's it's a you know we also uh have value in saying all right there is this dmn default mode network and i i see if if i were to you know what's going through my head is that i think it was in 2017 we uh scientists showed that uh moods are contagious like a cold that you can catch negativity you can catch positivity um and that's going through my head of this when you say this kind of connected consciousness um in collaborating consciousness also in the lotus sutra um i know that it talks about a buddha can only and this isn't canonical within all of buddhism but within a lot of sutra it says that buddha can only become buddha when interacting with another buddha and requires interaction with another consciousness yes to become buddha which is which then basically kind of you could follow that line of thinking the implications are um pretty profound when it's like okay you cannot do this on your own and then yes but uh yes and then the other thing within maya my uh i'm a a massive fan of the philosophy of vedanta which is at the the seat of of hinduism which you know is the the seat of buddhism and buddhism at the seat of you know all of the sub divisions and zen and so on but all going back five thousand years ago to vedanta where it is a central premise of this is all illusion which sounds crazy it's all it's similar to you it is always the last chapter of the book it's always very uh very easy to understand things and then the last chapter is oh and by the way maya this is all an illusion um the better the spiritual teacher the better you know they can navigate that but these are different things that are going through my head it's it it makes me want to also ask and that is interesting that that uh i didn't know what you'd say on the question of substances dialing down our focus on fitness paths but if i were to recast the the concept uh in my uh in my own words when i'm just describing it to a friend at dinner or or uh my wife would it am i getting this right that you're saying that through the theory of evolution or evolutionary uh influences towards natural selection it's it's we're sitting here right now like a a magnet that thinks okay i can look in 360 degree uh degrees i could go in any direction i want i've got free wheel a free will and then you introduce an electric magnetic pulse that turns on or was always on and that magnet thinks it can go anywhere and yet it's like no okay i have one degree and i don't get to choose the others because of what's within me and the the pressure within me reacting with the pressure to uh just reacting instead of acting and and similarly these fitness payoffs are what's going through my head constantly of i'm not just viewing the world i'm thinking is there a snake in those rocks as well as that apple is three feet away that's a better apple to eat to satiate some um you know biological urge and that's better than the apple 100 feet away so i'm going to choose that and all of these things are happening with these fitness payoffs and i think oh i'm choosing my world and yet i'm more like the magnet that can really only go one degree and not 360. is this is that accurate at all well within the framework of my colleagues of physicalism and neurobiological reductionism and evolution by natural selection absolutely that's within that framework what you've described is i would say a standard view that that uh our feeling that we have free will is a useful illusion but we don't really have free will we're sort of pushed and pulled by the the neural circuits that they've been shaped by evolution of natural selection and i that's a by the way that's the best language that we have so far right that's the best theory we have so far when i go to conscious realism i'm hoping to find a deeper theory in which there is free will that it is really real that there is consciousness that space-time is just a headset it's just a vr headset and the story that we just told in which we are you know it's a reductionist story in terms of neurons and neural processes and so forth and no free will that we will understand that story as the natural headset version the dumbed down version of a deeper theory of consciousness in which it's this vast interacting social network of conscious agents where there is perhaps genuine freedom of will and free creation and it's a creative process of exploration it's not reductionist it's not um mechanistic in any way but it looks mechanistic it looks reductionist it looks deterministic and looks like there's no free will when you collapse it into our headset representation so it's it you're basically saying yeah that that shirt you chose where you chose to live um that career where where and how you're sitting is is not based on reality but based on fitness payoffs and like the magnet in the electromagnetic switch um there is a world in which you turn it off and the magnet is not influenced you know it does not just have this illusion of 360 degrees but really is free to go in any direction but when you put that vr headset on or when you wake up in 2021 the world we're living in right now that electromagnetic switch is on and you are seeing you are so influenced by that it's it is uh it's not even one degree of 360 degree you are shielded from all 360 degrees right so that you don't have to say right if i'm getting this wrong by the way but i'm just trying to kind of it blew my mind just in the first half of your argument to realize every decision i'm making is so many ways obvious but is around fitness payoffs um to the nth degree that i'm only seeing the world in fitness payoffs and 24 hours a day i'm thinking about efficiencies and accumulation and dot dot all these and that first half blew me away and then i guess the second half is there is a world in which you can turn that or it doesn't exist that's right the first the first world that you've described turns out to be extremely powerful is the field of evolutionary psychology it's an incredibly powerful field evolutionary psychology and for people who are interested i a good book to start is stephen pinker's how the mind works a great introduction to evolutionary psychology incredibly powerful it's right now the best tool we have for understanding human behavior and i've used it as a consultant in for companies to help them with their marketing and advertising and product design and so forth it works it works incredibly well so when i say i want a deeper theory that goes beyond evolution financial selection goes beyond evolutionary psychology it's not because i disrespect evolutionary psychology we don't have a better theory that is the best theory of human nature that we have right now is the most predictive theory that we have it's incredibly powerful so i'm going for a deeper theory that that shows why evolutionary psychology principles emerge from this deeper more free notion of of consciousness when it gets projected into a headset in which you have limited information and that's that's the goal of what i'm trying to get at there um we'll see if it works and and so you're you're going this third step of of not just everything is influence your mind but you're saying can that organism see reality and you're saying uh and the mathematical model says zero percent chance it sees that objective reality yes that's that's right and and here's a nice way to think about it um from this broader point of view evolution but natural selection is a theory only inside the headset right it's it's it's and what that theory tells you is everything you see around you hey this is just a headset in other words the theory worked evolution with natural selection is telling us hey this is just a headset space and time isn't the reality it's a headset and by the way physics also says the same thing so physicists like nima arkani hamid and and others are saying space time is doomed that space time has been assumed to be fundamental but it's over that the space and i can explain why precisely they want to get rid of it as the fundamental but they're looking for deeper structures beyond space time so so everybody and what what are the proposed i feel like i i need to ask for a minute of just what are the proposed structures beyond space time so what what these guys are finding are two big features of space time are what we call um locality and unitarity things happen locally in space time you know at points in space time and unitarianity is something about quantum mechanics that um things evolve probabilistically and the probability is always sum to one and so forth well it turns out they're finding structures like something called the amplitude or cosmological polytote there there are deep geometric structures that are not in space time they're beyond space-time um they don't even have hilbert spaces in them like which you need to talk about quantum mechanics so so they're they're beyond quantum mechanics because these that they have no obvious hilbert spaces they're they're not restricted to locality and space time do we perceive them at all is there any way to perceive them is this related in some way to dark matter or anything just they just write these things down as mathematical entities so right now all we have is math so it's it's almost like not being able to smell bacon if the whole world couldn't smell bacon but uh you theorized i think there is a smell out there no one could smell at all you theorized i think there is a deeper something out there that you can smell um and trying to hypothesize on that that's what the physicists are doing they're saying look we have all these mathematical models of space-time which have been very very good but now we have good reason to believe that space-time is doomed it's not fundamental and they're they're they're trying to flash a flashlight into the dark what's what's behind space time right that's this darkness out there how do you how do you start to see what might be behind space time the only tool they have is mathematics and they're finding these mathematical structures and what they find is these structures do actually let them predict the scattering processes precisely they they can actually predict particle scattering events at the large hadron collide with the probability of the amplitudes with high precision and the the interesting thing is these new structures don't care about space-time they have symmetries that can't be seen in space-time and they make the math much easier they can what what if you do it in space time using what we call finding diagrams it takes hundreds of pages of algebra just to write down the amplitude for one scattering like two gluons in five out so it's like equals m c squared of but for this fourth dimension or or what what this this uh larger structure outside of spacetime that's that that's the weird thing it's fun for for the young physicist this is really fun because they found these structures and they're exploring them they don't know what it's about right it's like if you ask them well what's going on out there what are the processes that are going don't know but there are these mathematical structures that then allow us to see symmetries in the data that we can't see in space-time which is huge so nuts really it's really fun and and young physicists this is not a problem this is like thank you this is an incredible gift we get to explore we're the pioneers beyond space time and we're gonna make everyone look like newton's smart step in the right direction but vastly incomplete so as we near the end of our time um two quick questions for you this is just so fascinating and basically you're and when you say doomed you're basically saying like that's gonna be we're gonna look back and say oh that's when the world everyone thought the world was flat oh that's when everyone thought that so it's not like that's a step in the right direction you feel like that's just going to get tossed out of the textbooks completely except for the footnote of this is what they used to think how ridiculous that type of it's doomed well yes well so space time is doomed is actually not my quote is that phys the physicists themselves say space time is room that's their quote so i'm quoting them and it's not that they're going to disrespect space-time it's rather they're going to treat it like they treat newton i mean we treat newton with great respect i mean it was an act of genius and an incredible step forward and yet it has so many limitations that we now know how to go past sorry well and and what i always say is if newton was so smart why didn't he do the einstein stuff and i kind of have a point there um no i'm just gonna yeah the uh last question that i that i have for you um or no i'm gonna uh pull you for two one is uh is there a part of us that desires reality in these models where we have zero percent chance of seeing reality is there this common thread that is just there that is in extinguishable even though the everything else goes uh extinct that wants to see reality i think so i i personally feel that and in the theory of consciousness that i'm developing my proposal right now the best proposal i've got for why there's a dynamics of consciousness at all is that consciousness is always exploring new possibilities for conscious experiences exploring new realities of conscious experiences and there's something called girdles incompleteness theorem that that i argue means that this exploration process will never end it's it's intrinsically not going to stop and that's what consciousness is about if you if if if you were to ask me what is consciousness about what is it doing the best answer i've got right now which doesn't mean it's right is just the best answer i've got right now is it's exploring all the possibilities of consciousness and girdle girdle's theorem um entails that that exploration has always only just begun and it will always only have just begun well it's are you familiar with uh dr philip clayton at all he's a dual phd at uh yale philosophy and science philosophy and theology and he's on uh he was on the podcast just recently and talked about western uh spirituality is has been uh consumed with the exterior infinitude the god beyond us beyond this this realm and eastern philosophy is oriented around the interior infinitude right going within going deeper and it it seems to jive well with that of it is it is never ending the further we see and perceive in the universe even in this spacetime version it is never ending and um from the the um the micro quantum side of things it is you think an atom is the end of the story and then it's you know neutrons and then neutrinos and quarks and and never ending uh as well i i would agree that it's a an endless exploration and it's both exhilarating and terrifying it's exhilarating because you're learning new stuff but it's terrifying because you have to let go of what you think you know right going into the unknown is can be terrifying uh your people who meditate know that if you actually go into silence um it's it's not all goodness and light there's there's it's scary if you really let go of all thoughts you're letting go of all your teddy bears and you know comfort blankets so right amen um it's not the experience you you want but the one that you need as as they say um the and speaking of after two hours of conversation it it we i feel like we've covered gone past any chapter of the book that i've ever gone past and then still end with feeling like okay this isn't even the introduction to the book this is this is the first three words um like we're starting to express right um the last question dr hoffman where can people find out more about you and your work online oh well the book the case against reality um is is a good place to find out about excellent place yes and if people want to i have a twitter feed where i put the links to i'll put a link to to this conversation and and but all conversations and to some of my papers so it's at donald d hoffman it is the the twitter link with people awesome and if you just google donald kaufman and university california irvine you can go to my webpage and i've got um a link to my veto that has all of my publications on it with links to copies so people probably the easiest way if you want to see my actual papers and read the scientific papers just go to google scholar type in my name okay and we'll put those links we'll put the links in the in the show notes well dr hoffman thank you so much for this incredibly elusive conversation but like i said now i just feel like i need to toss out the old book and i'm starting from scratch with a brand new one but thank you so much for the time and generosity insight thank you so much james it's a great pleasure to talk with you this is awesome thank you [Music]

Channel: James Beshara

Views: 16,888

Keywords: startup investing, founding, startup founders, angel investing, silicon valley, tech podcasts, techmeme, motivational podcasts, tim ferris, joe rogan, jordan peterson, theo von, magic mind, forbes, lex friedman

Id: Ac8Kdn7ocZQ

Length: 119min 48sec (7188 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021