Consciousness, Perception & Reality - Donald Hoffman, PhD | The FitMind Podcast

i've been pursuing the idea that um maybe what's beyond space and time the deeper reality is consciousness itself today i'm speaking with dr donald hoffman who's a cognitive scientist and author of the case against reality why evolution hid the truth from our eyes he is currently a professor at uc irvine where he studies consciousness visual perception and evolutionary psychology and dr hoffman holds a ba in quantitative psychology from ucla and a phd in computational psychology from mit where he was a research scientist at the artificial intelligence laboratory so in the beginning dr hoffman is getting into a little bit about physics you mentioned space time if that's not your cup of tea we do quickly move on to some more down to earth subjects and really comes down to what is consciousness and how does the brain construct reality it's a surprising take and it's something that has a lot of evidence now to support it but it's really changed the way that i see the world so without further introduction here's dr donald hoffman okay don welcome to the fit mine podcast i'm i've been wanting to speak with you really ever since i first came across your work and uh it's just so primary to our experience of the world and fundamentally changed the way that i see the world i really can't think of a more important topic and secondly your theory also in some ways validates the conclusions of different mind training traditions that i've trained in like yoga and buddhism so i'm interested to get your take on that or or at least bring in my understanding of that to your work as well but um i think we should just start with really jumping right into the meat of uh your theory and you know basically please give us the the red pill you know why isn't reality as it seems okay most of my colleagues in the cognitive neurosciences assume that space-time and physical objects within space-time are the fundamental nature of reality and therefore that in studying human psychology and the human mind the brain is is fundamental because the brain is responsible for all of human cognition and all of human conscious experience and i began to study the question of is that true is it true that space-time and physical objects are fundamental and does the brain cause human cognition and conscious experiences i studied it from the point of view of evolution by natural selection i asked a very simple technical question would natural selection shape sensory systems to show the true nature of objective reality or not and i had a suspicion that since fitness is primary in evolution and fitness and truth are very very different things that there might be a chance that evolution would shape us to see fitness but not to see truth and so i had a couple of graduate students justin mark and brian marion working with me and they did their dissertations on this uh working with me and what we discovered in our simulations is that um if our senses were shaped by natural selection then the probability is zero that uh anything that we see space and time physical objects apples sun and the moon that any of this represents objective reality it's just representation of fitness and not of objective reality so so what we discovered was that evolution would shape not just human sensory systems but the sensory systems of any organism to only report fitness and not to report truth so so what i'm saying is is not that maybe you know evolution makes it so that we get the color of the apple a little bit wrong or the shape of the apple a little bit wrong or the distances to various objects a little bit off i'm saying that the very language of space and time and colors and objects and shapes and distances is the wrong language to describe objective reality you could not possibly frame a true description in that language and so that now the reason why that's interesting to my my academic peers is that the general assumption is that evolution of natural selection is the best scientific theory we have so far for understanding um human development the development of all animals and their cognitive and other capacities and so whether or not evolution of a natural selection is a true theory it's it's the best theory that science has so far and so it's a stunning result that that our best scientific theory says that space-time is not fundamental and objects inside space-time are not fundamental now it doesn't tell us what is fundamental all it tells us is that whatever reality is the probability of zero that it looks like space time and colors and objects and you know and shapes that we that we see and hear and smell so so that's the stunning result and and then physicists remarkably are saying something very similar but um coming from from a different angle from from physics they're saying things like that for example nema or connie hamed a professor at the institute for advanced study at princeton says flat out that space time is doomed there's no such thing as space-time fundamentally uh in nature and whatever the real fundamental nature of reality is he doesn't know what it is but he's looking beyond space time to try to find it and so that's that's the again that's the implication of the best theories in physics you know special and general relativity together with quantum field theory and and so when we have our best theories evolution of natural selection and physics theories quantum field theory telling us that um space-time is not fundamental uh that's that's really quite surprising the theories don't tell us what's what the reality is so that's that's the fun of science you have to you know make your own guess write your own theory and then see what it entails and see if you can test it so we're at this exciting point in science where the existing paradigm is is being threatened by the very theories that are paradigmatic of science right yeah and so this is really a profound finding just in terms of our moment by moment experience of the world so basically your what your theory is saying is that even though i'm seeing a face on the screen as we're talking over zoom what i'm seeing is really an icon that's no different than the folder on my desktop that looks blue but is you know a bunch of ones and zeros in in the hard drive so if you could maybe give an example um i think the examples that were helpful for me were the desktop analogy and also just some of the animal examples of how animals perceive the world differently right so that's a great question because if i'm saying that our best scientific theories tell us we don't see the truth then the natural question is well how should we understand what we do see what how should we understand our perceptions of objects in space and time and what is its relationship to reality and i think a good analogy is like the user interface on your desktop computer or your your mobile device where you you see these um nice little icons if you're if you're writing a an email and the the icon on your desktop for the email is blue and rectangular in the middle of your screen it doesn't mean that the email itself is blue and rectangular and in the middle of your device right anybody who thought that misunderstands the whole point of that interface is not there to show you the truth in fact the interface is there to hide the truth right it's there to allow someone who's completely ignorant of the technology to effectively use the technology and that's what evolution seems to have done for us from from the point of view of evolutionary theory itself it basically is telling us that um sensory systems evolved not to show organisms the truth but specifically to hide the truth and to let them interact with the truth successfully even when they're utterly ignorant about the nature of that truth just like we interact with our technology even though we have no idea about the diodes and resistors inside our device or even the software that's running it doing there are very few people actually understand all of that um most of us don't have to and don't need to and that's the point of an interface and and that's what evolution gave us was a user interface of space and time and physical objects and it's there not to show us the truth it's there to hide the truth it's just there to keep us alive and again i'm just talking in terms of what evolutionary theory says whether evolutionary theory is true or not is a separate question right that's that's but all i can say is it's the best science we have so far and that's what their best science that we have so far is telling us right and so and this isn't just the you know the human mind and so one part of your book that really sank in for me was the fact that if what i am seeing in front of me is if i think this is reality and then we look at how say a snake views the reality it's reality through slits in its head that are perceiving infrared frequencies that we can't perceive which of those is reality and we can't really say that either is true reality we can just know that both species evolve separate ways of surviving and reproducing essentially is that right that that's exactly right so the the the theory of evolution by natural selection uh applies to the sensory systems of all organisms and so what i said is true for humans would be also true for all organisms that their sensory systems evolved not to show them the truth but simply to give them a species-specific user interface and the interfaces can vary dramatically from species to species depending on the fitness payoffs that govern their evolution so for example um being 5000 meters under water would be really terrible for me but it's fantastic for a benthic fish right the so the the same quote-unquote reality but very very different payoffs death is the payoff for me and quite a nice life is to pay off for a benthic fish and so payoffs are going to vary dramatically from organism to organism niche to nations and so you're going to get very very different sensory systems but all of them according to evolution but natural selection will merely be user interfaces that hide the truth and and there are many examples that we can give of animals that have really simple tricks that we can tell from our own perspective that we can see that the organisms have simple tricks and hacks um the one i like to talk about sometimes is the jewel beetle where the the um the the males fly but the females are flightless and the males fly around looking for a female and when a male finds a female he alights and mates if he finds an eligible female and the the jewel beetle is is dimpled glossy and brown has a nice dimpled glossy brown wing casing and and it turns out that these jewel beetles in the outback of western australia where some of them were found um there are these sometimes people guys threw out these beer bottles into the desert that were also um dimpled glossy and just the right shade of brown that they tricked the male beetles into trying to mate with the bottles so the males would fly onto the bottles crawl all over their bottles trying to mate so they had full body contact all of their sensory systems were in some sense engaged and yet they couldn't figure out that this was not a female so so you would think well you know the jewel beetles have been around for who knows how many thousands or millions of years presumably evolution has trained the male jewel beetles to know what a real female is and and apparently not but you know the males just a a female must be anything that's dimpled glossy and brown you know and that's that's something like that is their hack they so they don't have any deep insight into females and maybe human females feel the same thing about human males i don't know i don't have a real deep insight into into the human females but anyway the the the male jubilee was not programmed to know deeply what a real female is he's got a little trick or hack and a jew and a you know a beer bottle of the right color and glass can can trick him permanently the species almost went to extinct they had to actually remove those bottles to save the beetles i love that example yeah and it makes me think of the ways in which the icons are no longer useful for us humans as well i can think of all sorts of maladapted shortcuts we've taken that can lead to you know a lifetime spent um you know watching pornography instead of uh pursuing uh you know fulfilling relationships and all sorts of other areas of life where we have shortcuts that can be taken to an extreme or over exaggerated just because technology is ra culture is rapidly evolving and those genes are not able to really catch up you know they've evolved for millions of years in a very different environment what i'm asking about is ways in which these icons are no longer necessarily useful to us or in which they have become maladapted in a world where technology has advanced much quicker than our genes genes have been able to keep up right so we have the sensory systems that evolution gave us if you buy the evolutionary model and and as technology evolves we may find ourselves placed in in new worlds uh from the technology what the designers of you know for example the metaverse will will need to do of course is to make sure that the the worlds that they immerse us in can be understood by the hardware in our head so to speak but they can take us to new places that we wouldn't we we can float in the metaverse we can't float on earth but we could we could float in the metaverse we could take all sorts of new different forms so there's going to be some some new freedoms of of expression and in the metaverse that will be lots of fun and and there will be certain hard constraints that you know we don't see an infrared for example so we can we can't do that whereas you know pit viper can we we can't see an ultraviolet so there'll be some hard limits that come from our own sensory systems but we'll have some new freedoms in the metaverse but designers will have to be very careful to understand the limitations that that that we have so for example if you wear glasses prism glasses that invert the entire world so they invert the image of the world um at first it's it's not feasible to to do anything because the whole world looks upside down and all your actions are wrong but if you wear those glasses for a week as the week goes on you'll all of a sudden individual objects will start to turn right side up you'll see them turn right side up then eventually by the end of the week the whole world turns right side up and then you can actually start to to interact properly in that world so we have that flexibility if the sensory input changed that dramatically but but if it turns out if you put on goggles that invert contrast so lights become dark darks become light apparently no amount of experience with that can we can we adjust to it so we're always everything looks weird even after a week on us so we have certain endogenous parameters that we can change and others that we cannot right that that's incredible and so um one thing that i was trying to wrap my head around is so basically i think you mentioned this earlier in the podcast but if not i'll just say one of the reasons that we can't perceive reality as it is is that we just don't have enough calories we don't have enough energy to take in all the information that's out there and so we're constricted by calories and yet we want to find things that are useful for our survival and reproduction i guess one question i have is if our environment is constantly changing and we might encounter a new species or something that doesn't fit our little model of the world um how do we then create a new model of something that just we've never seen before um you know i'm just thinking about humans our environment was constantly changing um is there no value in seeing reality if something new might appear that you have no it doesn't fit into your you know desktop icon system right so that's a great question i sometimes get that by people ask me by email that very question right they'll say if we were shaped not to see reality as it is how come we can see this galaxy that's several billion miles away when we use a telescope what was the fitness payoff for us being able to see those galaxies that are billions of light years away right so what what's going on here how does that fit with the story and and the idea is this what what evolution did according to the evolution's own terms is to shape our sensory systems to be a mapping from objective reality into a set of parameters like space and time and shapes and colors and so forth so there is this fixed kind of mapping that's been built into us so whatever reality might be it gets mapped via these these evolutionarily fixed parameters into our little space-time user interface and and that mapping is there no matter um if we encounter some aspect of reality that we've never encountered before if we encounter some new aspect of reality that we've never encountered before it will get mapped it may map into something we've never seen before like if i see an alien that has green skin and 12 legs and so i've never seen anything like that before but but the reason why i can see it is because um what what's fixed is the mapping from whatever reality is into mice limited set of of symbols so that's why we'll be able to see brand new stuff so if this is true when physicists are studying the universe and they're studying the laws of physics are they not really just studying the laws of our of our interface that's right so space-time we typically think of it as the fundamental reality the the pre-existing stage that was there before there were any organisms and long before homo sapiens ever came along and that's been the standard view that was certainly the view in newtonian science and and also in relativistic um you know einsteinian science is that spacetime is fundamental and what now the physicists are realizing is that space space-time is doomed and now i'm saying with my my collaborators that evolution financial selection agrees space-time is doomed if you think of space-time as being fundamental that view of space-time is doomed and none of the theories tell us what reality is so none of my work in evolution by natural selection none of the work by the physicists you know who say the space time is doomed can tell us what the objective reality is right we have to actually come up with brand new theories uh but at least our scientific theories are good enough to tell us their limits the the limits of those theories and one of the limits is that space time isn't fundamental and so now it's up to us to try to figure out as scientists um and as human beings what what theories of reality can we propose that go beyond space-time and how would they map into space-time and that's what the new that's fun it's it's a new fun challenge for a new generation of scientists to come up with a theory of natural i'm sorry a theory of what is reality beyond space time give a precise mapping from that deeper reality into space time and whatever that new theory is of reality when it maps into space time it better give us back the physics that we know and love evolution by natural selection quantum field theory and so forth if it doesn't give us back our current science as a limiting case then the deeper theory is wrong so we have we can't prove that our new theory is right but we can tell very easily if certain theories just shouldn't be considered at all because they if they can't map into space time and give us back evolution but natural selection has a projection of the deeper theory if they can't give us back quantum field theory as a projection of this deeper theory of reality then the deeper the deeper theory is just plain wrong so we do have a constraint on this our goal of trying to get a deeper theory of reality it makes a lot of sense and so the axiom in your theory is that consciousness is primary right that consciousness is primary and therefore material objects kind of emerge from it as icons instead of you know neurons are creating consciousness so now that's is that a fair way to put it that's a completely separate step that i'm taking so so there's two two moves and we should keep them separate so one move that i'm making is to say let's look at our current best science evolution financial selection and see what it entails and and it entails that we don't see the truth whatever reality is is not what we're seeing we just see a user interface so now so that that's just what natural selection entails so now i'm making a completely separate move and i'm saying okay uh i'm going to take a guess at what reality might be right so so you can not like my guess about reality that's perfectly fine and but the theorem from evolution but natural selection still holds right the evolution of natural selection says we don't see reality so that's independent of you know hofmann's probably wrong guess about what's beyond reality but that's what we have to do with scientists is we we just make our guesses and then try to be precise and and and see what we can do so i've been pursuing what as you said the idea that um maybe what's beyond space and time um the deeper reality is consciousness itself and and of course many um spiritual traditions have said that for for thousands of years but as a scientist i'm trying now to turn that idea which is not a new idea into something that's mathematically precise as much as it can be made precise and that's that's a very interesting topic about the scope and limits of mathematics and the scope and limits of theories when that's a very very interesting topic so there are limits to what we can do with mathematics and there are limits to what we can do with with theories but within those limits i would like as a scientist to try to come up with a theory of consciousness and have it be precise enough that i can see you know propose a mapping from consciousness into space and time and see if it works see if the structures of consciousness that the theory proposes when they get mapped into space and time look like evolution by natural selection look like space and time and and the laws of quantum field theory and so forth so so yes i am i'm proposing that but but i should say that that's um i could be completely wrong about that and that would be independent of this theorem about evolution but natural selection right those are two separate things and the theorem about evolution of natural selection um stands regardless of whether hofmann is wrong about consciousness that's it that's a great point and thank you for clarifying and it is interesting you mentioned spiritual traditions um it's really interesting to me the buddhist concept of emptiness which says that time space and objects are basically empty of inherent existence that they're in the mind and the dhammapada from traditional buddhism talks about mind as the forerunner of all things um you know they talk about consciousness really as fundamental and there's even in the yoga sutras of patanjali which was probably composed around two millennia ago it says objects are perceived as a quote objects are perceived only so far as they're useful to the conditioned mind perceiving them so in other words like a pen is useless to a bird's survival so it's it's perceived only as it's useful to that the conditioning of that mind based on its evolution there is actually kind of a reference earlier to um to evolution in the yoga sutras um the struggle for survival so it's it's really interesting that they came to these conclusions just by observing not through the scientific method per se but just by observing how their minds work and observing how the world around them works i'm curious i guess in general if you've had any exposure to those traditions or how you might see that fit in with your work yes um i i have a very amateur understanding of of buddhism um and and other or hinduism for example i my my background was in um sort of my father was a fundamentalist christian minister so i got sort of the uh a christian upbringing which which didn't have any mystical aspect to it of that sense it was it was very very different but i i i have thought that there are some deep connections between what i'm saying and sort of certain ideas in buddhism as well as i understand them and and hinduism and i i did have the chance to um to talk with the dalai lama i've got a a video of of a talk with the dalai lama um about this and we had some back and forth on on these concepts and the relationship to buddhism and i think that there's a lot at a very very high level i think there's a lot in common and i think that there there's a lot of potential profit going forward for a a dialogue between the spiritual traditions like buddhism and and um hinduism and mystical strings in in islam and also there are mystical strands in christianity there's the benedictine monks they have a very mystical aspect to christianity and those mystical traditions i think have a lot of wisdom and insight um from first person experience and meditation that i think could be very very helpful to scientists like me trying to work on a theory in which consciousness is fundamental and it could go the other way as well that as we develop mathematical models of consciousness that that precision can lead new insights that may be helpful to people in these various mystical traditions so i i think that there could be a very profitable um dialogue between mystical religious traditions and and a new science of of consciousness and i uh myself would like to promote that and look forward to to to more i i do try to listen to and read um buddhist kind of literature and listen to buddhist speech speakers and and also hindu and and so forth and try to grab the the key ideas that they're they're communicating and see if they make sense for me as a scientist trying to to build a precise theory so absolutely i think that there's a lot of [Music] profit from having a dialogue absolutely yeah that's really exciting to hear that you've already dialogued with uh dalai lama and he's been particularly open to science he's even said that if science were to prove his beliefs wrong he would change his beliefs and he's had a lot of the advanced tibetan monks now come and do certain studies essentially guinea pigs for neuroscientists a lot of the times so it's exciting and i think it's really needed because in the the new age circle will promote a lot of new pseudoscientific ideas that sound good or they're kind of feel good but it's nice that actually you know hard science is being brought to those and at least those ideas are being entertained and then explored in kind of a scientific way um where can folks find that conversation with a dalai lama if they're interested yeah i can send you a link it's um it's it's not like a youtube video it's a special but it is available for free online but it's a it's a weird link so i'll send it to you and you can you could post that if you want okay we'll post that in the show notes right yeah so i think that that one of the key things that we see throughout human history is that humans get it wrong and yet they think they're right we sell this in science we see in science for example in in the 1890s physicists thought that um basically physics was over newton was right and we we'd solved it and um you know just a few years later with feinstein's theory of special and then general relativity and quantum theory we we realized that that the physicists who thought that the physics was done were deeply wrong there was there was a lot more to discover and and now we know then we thought that okay now we've got it you know quantum field theory is it and and and now we realize no space time is doomed and we don't know what's beyond space time and so we what we have to do is to take our best ideas but not hold them too tightly we should explore them really understand them and be willing to then go beyond them we should never be wedded to our current ideas we should always be open as scientists and also as spiritual seekers we should understand our current views as best we can and and be open to being wrong and what we know right now is that probably all of our scientific theories um need to be deeply revised we need to go to the next level and and probably many of our spiritual ideas will find there's much deeper ways to go with the ideas that we've had um in in spiritual traditions and so what we need to do i think is have an open mind science should listen to spiritual traditions and vice versa and but then we should always have the attitude that of course we're probably deeply wrong of course we want to be open-minded um and look for brand new ideas that transcend what we already have but that perhaps um show how what we already had is a special case our current theory our current ideas may be a special case of a much deeper understanding and that's that's what i think um science really has some good tools for um bringing us down right it's it it's really wonderful when a scientific theory tells you um this is the limit and beyond this we can go no further when when physics itself tells you the space-time is doomed wow that is really impressive that it tells you where it stops that's very impressive and we would like i would like that same kind of rigor to help us in the spiritual realm where we realize okay these ideas can only go so far now we need some new concepts and at some point i think it will be the case that that um we understand that reality actually in some sense transcends any concepts right so that's that's a pretty that's a tough thing for a scientist to say but but i think it it's something that science will have to grapple with um and and and we do in a way grapple with it in the sense that we have incompleteness theorems like there's girdles in completeness theorem and and there are also theorems about how a system can't completely represent itself that that point to the fact that our descriptions and science is about writing down mathematical descriptions precise descriptions the descriptions of course are never the reality the the the map is not the territory the the menu is not the meal that that standard kind of thing so so our theories are never the reality and in that sense there's never going to be a theory of everything right science cannot have a theory of everything in because a theory basically what a theory is is it says grab me these assumptions and if you grab me these assumptions then i can explain all this other stuff but those assumptions are not explained they're the miracles of the theory and that's the way theories are every scientific theory is an explanation and every explanation starts with a few miracles it says if you grant me those miracles then i can explain all this other stuff so like einstein is special theory of relativity he's he um in that theory takes the the speed of light as an assumption and he says i will assume that there's this stuff called light and that it has a speed and that i'm going to assume that that speed is the same for all observers no matter the in this what's called an inertial reference frame any observer in any inertial reference frame will always have the same measurement of the speed of light that's my assumption and if you make that assumption um and also a couple other assumptions like this speed of if i send light to a mirror and back that the speed from the mirror back is the same as the speed from here to the mirror so there's a couple other assumptions that that are required um then you get the beautiful structure of special relativity and all the power that's come out of his theory of special relativity but but then einstein spent the rest of his life um wondering about what light is in fact in 1905 he published a paper on the photoelectric effect where he's trying to you know understand um light but even later on decades later as he was an old man he basically said i've spent my life trying to understand light and i don't understand it so so that was a fundamental assumption of special relativity but but but he understood he was trying to understand that assumption what is this light that is the foundation of the special theory of relativity and he he never felt that he understood light and that's that's the way science goes is you always have theories that make certain assumptions to begin with and those assumptions um are miracles for the theory because they're not explained by the theory they're they're assumed you can try to get a deeper theory that explains those assumptions but the new theory will have its own assumptions and it's in that sense that i say that that science has no theory of everything because it'll always have a theory of everything except my assumptions and those assumptions will always there will always be assumptions and it seems to me that there will be no end to the quest for deeper and deeper assumptions it's just like when a child asks the parent but why and you say and then they well why is that the case and at some point you just say well that's just the way it is well and and that's not what the way scientists mean we're like little children and the we have to we'll get deeper and deeper assumptions but in some sense reality will be infinitely beyond our best theories and that's just the way it is right i mean it just it occurs to me that any you know answer you could come up with about reality would be in the form of mathematics or concepts that are the invention of the very same mind that is examining them and uh yeah i mean overall what you've said just brings such an importance to the philosophy of science which i think has kind of gotten left in the dust and you know it seems like over throughout history we become dogmatic with the axioms that are assumed and then we forget that their assumptions or we forget to challenge them so you've you've really highlighted the importance of questioning beliefs and it also your theory makes me realize the importance for questioning my own day-to-day beliefs because if i can't even be certain about the existence of this table that my laptop's on you know how can i be so certain about my politics or my beliefs about you know whatever wacky conspiracies might be floating around on the internet you know so it just kind of paints this picture of reality in which we should always take everything you know lightly and kind of with a you know knowing that whatever we know is is so small compared to all the information that's out there and any kind of sense of it that we could make is just in our little limited desktop icon format so um i think there are so many implications i i agree i think that um it requires a humility to say that these are the best ideas we have so far and no matter how good those ideas seem to me right now and how well they've worked out probably i know very little there's a lot more to know and in a century from now the the people there will look back at this time and go wow how little they knew and so we might as well just accept that when we look back to the 1890s and go well you know how silly at this physicist thought that newton was the final word how silly is that well we should we shouldn't be that silly now we should just always take our own state of the art as not the final word not the theory of everything but uh the best that humans have come up with so far and boy i wish i could see 200 years down the line when they see how silly we were and they have something far deeper yeah absolutely um so based on what you've been saying there's an image of the world that's emerged for me and it's really changed the way that i see reality and i want to run it by you and you can please correct me but my understanding is there's a bunch of energy out there coming in different forms is basically information nuclear energy thermal electromagnetic sound energy chemical gravitational so much of it but due to evolutionary constraints we can't we don't have the energy the calories to take in all that information that might be useful so we evolved to through our five senses and other senses we might not even really be aware of um we evolved to take in a small fraction of all that information and use what was useful to get our genes into the next generation and of that super small subset of through the five senses there's an even smaller subset that's available to our conscious awareness because much of it you know like the bottom of my feed is taking in uh the feeling of the ground and if there was a spike all of a sudden my attention would go there so there's all this other information and we're getting a very very tiny fraction of that in our conscious desktop and then on top of that very small fraction we're layering our perceptions and our conceptual layers and our stories and our emotional you know in our even our belief systems and so what it kind of what i'm picturing is like this massive funnel where you have all this information and then we filtered it down to a tiny little amount that's in conscious awareness and then we've labeled and then on top of that we've built our our own kind of monstrosity of just guesses basically just beliefs about what might be useful is that um is that more or less in line with your theory pretty that's pretty accurate abs absolutely uh so it's it's a very humbling point of view because what we would like to think of is you know i i look i watch i walk around and i see the sun and the moon i see trees and rocks and pretty much i'm seeing the truth and i'm seeing it you know pretty much as it is that that's a very sort of comforting point of view and and the point of view that you just outlined is um for a lot of people very disconcerting to to realize in some sense there's a reality around that um completely transcends my concepts it makes you sort of feel vulnerable and vulnerable and naked to this this deeper reality because you don't you can't see it you can't even perhaps even conceptualize it so it's in some sense it requires it it is i think a real shock to the senses a real shock to our minds to to realize that we know so little yeah absolutely and i think it's also in some ways empowering because you know and and i don't wanna i know this isn't what your theory is implying but you could say you know if our uni if our universe is our mind plato said we can change our reality by changing our mind and i think what he meant by that is you know if i choose to be angry all the time at people then you know my perception that's my universe and um so you know if i think in that way if i think that my mind is creating the world around me therefore i actually have some power over this world and this is really the way the tibetan buddhists use it you know they create this very empowering worldview where they see themselves as almost like you know and just an enlightened being and everyone around them is enlightened being and so they have different kind of belief systems that they build that are just very empowering um so i think in that sense if you wanted to go in that direction it doesn't necessarily need to be seen as scary it can also be kind of empowering that you suddenly you know you can change your world i i think so i think that there are a lot of really good ideas in buddhism and other mystical traditions where they're taking consciousness to be fundamental and and exploring what we how to reconceive of ourselves if we are fundamentally this awareness and we're not just merely these bodies um we're not the the forms were the the conscious awareness in which those forms appear and that's that's a really a really um deep idea and this one in the mathematics that i'm working on it has a mathematical structure that that corresponds to that so when i build a mathematical model of consciousness i see in the mathematics itself the that the mathematics says yes the if if i'm if i'm a conscious agent then my essence in that framework is not the particular body that i see the brain and so forth the the my real the deepest entity that i am is this just pure awareness that's independent of any particular form that appears in the awareness and that's something that the spiritual traditions say but it's it's right there it just hits you in the face in the mathematics as as i work on that and so it's it's so it i think there's a lot of convergence and the nice thing about the mathematics then is that of course the mathematics that i'm talking about suffers from the same thing that i was talking about earlier there are going to be deeper and deeper mathematical models that i can use right so i'm using right now i'm using um probability and measure theory and markovian dynamics and i see already what i was saying in that framework but i can easily imagine that we could then go to category theory and we could use the deeper mathematical structure and topoi theory and so forth and so so the stuff that i'm taking is first baby step in this whole mathematical exploration of consciousness and as we go up layer after layer after layer in the mathematical exploration we will probably unpeel layers of of understanding about what it means to say that we're pure awareness and that uh you know the forms are not the the fundamental thing they're they're but we'll get deeper and deeper insights so that my my first step with my collaborators um you know i should mention chaitan prakash in particular the mathematician without whom none of my mathematical work would be done so so hats off to chaiton but all of my collaborators manish singh and chris fields and robert prentner and and others that i've that i've worked with um bruce bennett and federico fergie all these guys are are really so it's not just me bunch of these guys but but all the work that we've done of course is just the first baby step even just in the mathematics but but the baby step step that we've taken so far already is pretty interesting that it gives a mathematical pointer to the idea that yeah awareness is what we fundamentally are not the forms that appear in awareness and that's a fundamental thing that i have seen in in buddhist and and hindu um and also christian mystical uh traditions yeah that's that's fascinating i mean that math i i don't think we we have time to get into that nor would i comprehend it but uh if there's any math wizards listening is there a place where they could find all these formulae or a place where you're explaining it yes i can send you a link to a paper that's available free online it's a scientific paper peer-reviewed that that has our math uh a first mathematical theory of consciousness is not the last it's the first baby step but it it's it's an interesting baby step in the sense that uh you know it's something that people can look at and say okay i can do better here's here's what we need to do to make it better but i can send you a link to to that mathematical model okay awesome so i'll post that too for folks who are interested and i just in our last few minutes here i want to make sure we have time for some rapid fire questions so uh fasten your seat belt uh are you ready for the rapid fire if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it does it make a sound there is no tree so i think given so in the context of our conversation i think that will make sense and let's see if you could change one thing about the world what would it be and why well the why is because of my ignorance if i want to change anything my guess is this because i don't understand very well what's really going on my guess is that things are going the way they really need to go and and my resistance is not an insight into what needs to be changed it's an artifact of my ignorance but at a superficial level sure you know there there are things that uh you know poverty illiteracy cruelty and things like that um and of course i think it's our responsibility to alleviate suffering wherever we wherever we can but but but there is this deeper sense that i have that that the suffering that i know each of us suffers um and in some sense there is no pointless suffering even though i think it's our duty of course not to inflict suffering and to relieve suffering wherever possible um i think that there is no pointless offer yeah that actually reminds me of a point i wanted to make really briefly based on what you were saying earlier which is that a lot of these spiritual traditions aren't trying to figure out the truth they're so geological so like they're in other words they're concerned with the liberation of the mind like yoga and buddhism and so i just wanted to point out that we shouldn't take they're not like buddhism for example isn't saying how the world works necessarily it's just saying how your mind works and therefore you know if you follow this protocol you'll have less suffering um you know was it was never a description of reality so you know that just that's just to say that you know there's a place for science because spirituality certainly is not science um but um but yeah so next next question here uh and this is gonna i don't wanna open a can of worms at the last minute but i just wanna if if you do have a short answer to this do we have free will uh i think that there's i say the answer is yes but it's it's a complex issue in in the sense that um the notion of self is usually involved there's got to be some self that has free will and i think that that there can be a notion of free will without a self and that would be a whole whole discussion so when i talk for example with annika harris and sam harris about free will i think that you mean they don't believe in free will and i've in my discussion with them i've said i do and i think that part of the difference may be just that the notion of a self that i don't think that you need to have a self to have free will that you could have this notion of of in some sense of pure awareness and and and a notion of free will without a self of the pure awareness but that's that's a deeper topic okay i guess i'll refer folks to that conversation then on sam harris's podcast if they want to check it out all right so this is a question i asked everyone ahead of the so this is a this is a commercial but it's not for your work we'll plug your work afterwards it's just a 15 second message for the world that you'd like everyone to know some kind of takeaway in 15 seconds or so oh i would say um as a scientist the interesting takeaway here is that there is no theory of everything that we shouldn't take our theories as the final word we should always be willing to question all of our assumptions and all of our beliefs rigorously and be willing to go to the next level that's the only way that we're going to live fulfilling lives and learn and be open to to learning so never hold on to your theories dogmatically always question them and always be willing to move on wonderful yeah so that's a good note to end on i think and then just where can folks find i'm holding up for the video oh man my my zoom is going to make it blurry well it's called the case against reality why evolution hid the truth from our eyes um fantastic book easy read i highly recommend it where can folks find your your other work or follow you if they're interested i do have a a twitter um i haven't i i was ill i had the cardiac procedure in june and so i've been um down so i haven't posted but i'm about to start posting again on my twitter now that i'm starting to get healthy again um this this is in fact the first podcast that i've done since last may i i had to stop and take care of myself for the last eight months um recovering from a cardiac procedure but i'll be posting on my twitter account um so as you can see on my twitter account i've got pointers to a lot of my podcasts and and so forth thanks so much this has been a real blast i've really enjoyed speaking with you and thank you for your time my pleasure [Music] you

Channel: FitMind

Views: 13,113

Keywords: donald hoffman, dr donald hoffman, donald hoffman phd, consciousness, perception, reality, donald hoffman consciousness, donald hoffman simulation, donald hoffman interview, reality is an illusion, user interface theory, consciousness explained, mathematical theory of consciousness, space time, spacetime is doomed, what is consciousness, ancient wisdom in modern times, cognitive science, don hoffman, evolutionary psychology, the case against reality, free will, game theory

Id: AU2StucRS6A

Length: 55min 2sec (3302 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2022