Does Consciousness Survive Death? | Prof. Donald Hoffman | The Tim Ferriss Show

[Music] how do you think of death given all that we're talking about and sort of the first order second order third order implications of all that how do you think about death so physicalism has a very clear implication for death if space time is fundamental and elementary particles like electrons and quarks and protons and so forth are the fundamental nature of reality and what you are what your body is is just an assemblage a complex assemblage of particles and your consciousness is somehow an emergent property of certain activities of those particles say brain activity then it's very very clear that that in death when the brain dissolves your consciousness dissolves and that's the end of the story that's that's the end that's it that's a very very clear implication of physicalism we can talk about pan psychism but but physicalism strict physicalism that's that's the end of the story if consciousness is fundamental and space-time is just an interface and our bodies are merely icons that we use to represent certain assembly interactions of conscious agents and we can go into how i think about that then on that approach there is the possibility that some aspect of my consciousness survives death now there i have to look at you know the mathematics of the model and and go into it but it may be for example that the bear awareness that's associated with me just awareness without content that that survives but all the details of donald hoffman and his life story within this interface maybe that all dissolves maybe we can and that that's a story about what is consciousness up to we can talk about what is you know if consciousness is fundamental what is it doing and why what what what is the dynamics of consciousness about and we we really to answer the question about death we might have to answer that question too it's a big one please continue [Laughter] so i'll try a stab at that question because i think it relates to the death question so what is consciousness doing and why you know the the right answer is i don't know and i've only seen one idea that seems deep enough to at least be worth thinking about i'm not saying it's the right idea but the only one idea that seems deep enough to at least be a candidate and it again comes from girdles and completeness theorem girdle says that essentially no matter how much you explore within a particular conceptual system there's you can't get all the truth there's there's always going to be more to explore mathematically so if consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness is all there is then mathematical structure is only about the possibilities of consciousness that's all that there is to be about and so what if what consciousness is doing since the exploration of mathematical structure is in principle unending then perhaps the exploration of the possibilities of consciousness itself is in principle unending and therefore consciousness what is up to is exploring all of his potentialities and the reason is continuing to do that from our perspective is continue to do that is because there's no end to it in principle so consciousness itself is in some sense always learning about itself and so perhaps then what we are what you what people are and what cats are and what dogs are and what amoebas are and so forth is consciousness trying on different headsets different realities and exploring and and losing itself i mean so this very interesting idea that consciousness chooses to really explore so deeply that it loses itself in the exploration doesn't even know what it is it becomes a physicalist it actually thinks that consciousness isn't fundamental it goes through the whole bit and then slowly has to wake up and and so doing it really explores what it's not and what it is in some sense to know what you are you have to know what you're not and so so on that point of view the hoffman icon is simply consciousness ex taking a perspective on itself looking at itself through a particular space-time headset taking a little projection and from that headset i there's a finite there was a birth there was growing strong until your 20s and 30s and then after your 40s you start declining and you know in your 80s and 90s you die and that whole process is just consciousness exploring itself from a particular perspective in which case maybe the hoffman icon and and maybe a lot of stuff can be left behind but in some sense consciousness itself has has learned something through that experience and the 8 billion other people and the quadrillions of amoebas and the who knows how many viruses and and so forth consciousness is just trying on innumerable headsets and when it's done with that headset it takes it off and awareness is is perfectly fine the the raw awareness is fine but the the the detailed icons that happen to appear space-time icons objects in space and time brains neurons all those things those were you know those are just those were just icons and you know you studied them and then you realized pretty cool really you know mount everest what a beautiful icon death valley what a beautiful icon these are really but i'm not that i'm something even more transcendent than space and time i'm more transcendent than death valley and so so consciousness is just waking up i mean again i'm trying to tell a story i'm not saying that it's it's correct but it's just it's the only story i've seen so far that at least is deep enough that is worth taking seriously who is the origin of this this story and can you ever know that it's accurate do you think through testing or experimentation the story that i'm saying right now has an interesting way that you might be able to test it so this dynamics of conscious agents as i mentioned is a markovian dynamics right you can make it so-called stationary dynamics in which the entropy of the dynamics doesn't change but you can show that even if you have this markovian dynamics of consciousness in which the entropy never changes any projection by by conditional probability any projection looking at that dynamics we'll see it as increasing an entropy in other words the arrow of entropy the arrow of time is an artifact of the projection so consciousness itself has no arrow of time but you can prove from this mathematics that you get an arrow of time by projection the proof is trivial like two or three lines so here's a project that i think would be really fun can we show that when you look at all the different ways that you could project consciousness in this mathematics the conditions under which all these different arrows of time the entropy that you get satisfy the lorentz transformations in other words can we get special relativity out of this we would have to model also the space aspects of it what's happening to space as you know projection of the dynamics of of these conscious agents but we see the time aspect so could we actually show how special relativity arises as just different perspectives that consciousness can take can take on a fundamental dynamics of consciousness that's that's that has no arrow of time that's the kind of thing where we could start to make brand new predictions that could be testable you

Channel: Tim Ferriss

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Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, angel investor, ferriss, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Tim Ferriss Podcast

Id: hbWGJeKq4tU

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2022