Is Reality an Illusion? | Dr. Donald Hoffman | EP 387

Darwin and physics high energy theoretical physics agree that SpaceTime is doomed it's not fundamental reality and the search is on in the last 10 years among physicists to find structures entirely Beyond SpaceTime not not curled up inside SpaceTime Beyond SpaceTime we we've mistaken a headset for the truth because it's easy if that's all you've seen all your life is a headset it's hard to imagine something outside of it now we can we're free using mathematics to ask what kind of structures could we posit um Beyond [Music] SpaceTime hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with author and cognitive neuroscientist Dr Donald Hoffman we discussed Dr Hoffman's research on what we know is reality why SpaceTime itself is now considered by many a doomed framework of interpretation and how Consciousness might be best understood as a vast probability space within which we Orient ourselves hello Dr Hoffman it's very good to see you I've been interested in your theory for a long time partly because I'm quite attracted by the doctrine of pragmatism which was really part of what I tried to discuss with Sam har many many times and seems that your work Bears well it's a broad general interest but it also Bears on specific interests of mind because I'm I've always been curious about the relationship between darwinian concepts of Truth and let's say the concepts of Truth put out by the more Newtonian say objective materialists they don't seem commensurate to me and so would you start by explaining your your theory your broad theory of per ception I know that'll take a while but it's it's a it's a tricky it's a tricky Theory so do you want to lay it out for us to begin with most darwinian Scholars would agree that Evolution shapes sensory systems to guide adaptive behavior that is to keep organisms alive long enough to reproduce but many also believe that in addition uh Evolution shapes us to see reality as it is at least some aspects of reality that we need for for survival so so that's that's often among my colleagues in studying evolution of natural selection they'll say yeah seeing the truth will make you more fit in many cases and so so even though Darwin says it's you know Evolution shape sensory systems just to keep you alive long enough to reproduce uh many people think that uh seeing aspects of reality as it is will also make you more fit and make you more likely to reproduce so I decided with my uh graduate students a few years ago to look into this and there are tools Darwin's theory is now a mathematical Theory we have the tools of evolutionary game theory that John mayard Smith and others uh invented in the 1970s and so it's it's a wonderful Theory so Darwin's ideas can now be tested with mathematical precision and I thought that maybe what we would find is that you know Evolution tries to do things on the cheap it doesn't you know if you have to spend more calories then you have to go out and kill something to get those calories and and so there are selection pressures to do things cheaply and quickly uh heris sixs and so I I went into it thinking that maybe that would make it so that many sensory systems didn't see all of the truth but I just wanted to check and see what would happen to my surprise when we actually started studying this uh there came up principles that made me realize that the chance that we see reality as it is on darwinian principles is essentially zero and that that was a stunning why is zero result for me why zero is a very low number so why zero that that's right so and I can it's a bit technical but in evolutionary theory there are in The evolutionary game presentation of it you think of evolution as like a game and in a game you're competing with other players and you're trying to get points now in the game of evolution the way the it's model is there are these Fitness payoff functions and those are sort of the points that you can get for being in certain States and taking certain actions and so these Fitness payoffs uh are what guides the selections they they guide the evolution and so we began to analyze those Fitness payoffs right the the fitness payoffs to to be very you know concrete about a fitness payoff suppose that you're uh a lion and you want toate well uh a steak won't be very useful for you for that process right you'll have very little Fitness payoff for a steak if you're a lion looking to mate if you're a lion that's looking to eat and you're hungry then of course the steak will have high Fitness payoffs for you so a fitness payoff depends on the organism like a lion versus say a cow uh a stake is of no Fitness payoff for any cow for any any purposes it could be yeah quite the contrary that's right so so the fitness payoff depends on the organism its state I mean hungry versus sated for example and the action feeding fighting fleeing and mating for example so these Fitness payoffs are functions of the world they depend on the state of the world and it structure and the organism its state and its action so they're they're complicated functions and and in some sense you could think that there's just effect effectively One Fitness payoff function there's this one big Fitness payoff function which handles the world and all possible organisms of all possible States and actions so there's there's a big Fitness payoff the question is but but we can think about it as many Fitness payoffs if we want to as well what the question is suppose then so this Fitness payoff function takes as its starting point the state of the world right that's the the domain of the function and the range of the function might be the fitness payoff value say from zero to 100 zero means you lose 100 means you did as good as you could possibly do so zero to 100 say so it's a it's a function from the state of the world cross organism into state in action into this number some Z to 100 to Z to A th000 whatever you want to use so the question then is does this function preserve information about the structure of the world right this is the function that's guiding the evolution of our sensory systems so does this function if if if the function is what mathematicians call a homomorphism a structure preserving map so for example the world might have an order relationship like one is less than two is less than three like a distance or a distance metric or something like that uh then to be a hom homomorphism would mean that if things were like in a certain order in the world they the function would take them into that same order or some you know homomorphism of that order right onto the states of the payoffs so so that's the technical question what is the probability that a generically chosen payoff function will be a homomorphism of a metric or total order or partial order or a topology or measurable structure there any structure that you can imagine the world might have um you can ask what is the probability that a generically chosen payoff function will will preserve it if it doesn't preserve it there's no information in the payoff function to shape sensory systems to see that truth to see that structure of the world so what's what's remarkable is that evolutionary theory um is indifferent about the payoff functions they don't say they have to be a certain shape in other words every Fitness payoff function that you could imagine is on equal footing on current evolutionary theory from to every every other one there's nothing in Darwin's theory that says these are the fitness payoff functions and this is their structure so what we had to do then is to say okay we have to just look at all possible Fitness payoff functions and ask how many of them what fraction of these payoff functions would preserve a total order or a metric or a measurable structure or whatever it might be and here's the remarkable and in retrospect obvious thing to for a payoff function to preserve a structure like a metric or a total order it must satisfy certain equations so you have to write down these equations that the homomorphism must satisfy you that the equ that the function the fitness pay function must satisfy to be a homomorphism well it once once you write down an equation most payoff functions simply aren't going to satisfy it I mean the the equations quite restrictive and in fact uh in the limit as you look at you know a world that has an infinite number of states and a payoff values that go from zero to Infinity the the fraction of payoff functions that actually are homomorphic is goes to zero precisely all right so this is going to be a somewhat Meandering question because it's it's a very complicated thing to get right so people who think that the world is made made out of self-evident facts underestimate the complexity of perception and so here's here's how I'll make that case and you can tell me what you think you could imagine you could ask an engineer a simple question can you build a bridge and you might think the fact of the bridge will be a fact and the answer to the question which would be yes or no will be a fact and that's that it's all self-evident it's sort of like the behaviorists assuming that the stimulus was self-evident it's very much analgous to that okay but here's the problem there's a a whole set of assumptions built into that question that people don't even notice and so let me walk through some of the assumptions it's like well I can't build a bridge if you want it to last 50 million years so I could build a bridge that would last a century or two centuries I can't build a bridge for no money with no labor with materials that are just at hand so the thing you define as a bridge is already subject to all sorts of constraints now we you and I mutually understand those constraints without even having to speak about them so I'm also going to assume that if you say if I ask you can you build a bridge and you say yes you're also saying I'm willing to work with you I'm willing to work honestly I'm willing to hire the right number of people I'm not going to screw you during the construction the bridge that we build both understand that human beings will be able to walk across it and as many as will fit on the bridge without the bridge falling down and also cars and that means it'll have to be about the same width as a car or a truck or four lanes of cars or trucks and it'll have to abide by all the building codes and so forth there's there's so many constraints in that question that it's it would take you an unlimited amount of time to list them all and you don't because you're talking to an engineer and he's a human being like you inculturated like you and so he understands the world like you do and so there's a hundred million things you don't have to talk about and they're but they're there they're constraining the the set of facts that's relevant to the to the issue and they're constraining them seriously okay so now those constraints those are nested in an even higher orders set of constraints which are darwinian right it's like well the axiomatic agreement that you and I come to as a consequence of our shared perceptions our shared embodiment and our shared inculturation are a consequence of a broader process which is essentially darwinian now that darwinian set of constraints is instantiated in motivational systems in part so we might say well anything that you and I do together will have to be done well taking into account hunger and anger and and fear and pain the whole emotional potentiality of people plus our fundamental motivational systems the manner in which we lay out this particular task will have to satisfy all that now that's also unspoken now when you talk about a evolutionary great game theory and pragmatic constraints let's say uh you talked about the lion who wants to mate and not eat you're referring to one motivational system or another one governing sex per se and the other governing hunger and then the the manner in which the lion is going to perceive the world or the manner in which we're going to perceive the world is going to be bounded by the operation of that motivational system and the perception is going to be deemed sufficient if when we enact it the motivational system is satiated fair enough okay okay now but then there's a there's a a more interesting issue that pertains to the big Fitness payoff so if you look at how the nervous system is structured you have these underlying motivational systems which are goal setting machines and which Define the parameters within which a perception is valid but all those systems have to interact together and and they cause conflict right so if you're hungry and tired you don't know whether you should get up and make a peanut butter sandwich or if you should just go to sleep and leave it till the morning like there's inbuilt conflict and part of the reason that the cortex evolved was to mediate subcortical conflicts and then even at the cortical level the the manner in which you integrate your fundamental motivations and the manner in which I motivate integrate mine have to be integrated or we'll fight and so I would say and I don't know if evolutionary theorists have dealt with this and it's relevant to your theory that perception doesn't map the the real world is there a higher order set of integrated constraints that serves reproduction over the long run that all the lower order Fitness payoffs are necessarily subordinate to and and I know this is a terribly complicated question is that the reality that perception serves you know you you made the case that perceptions will not map one to one on reality and I suppose that's partly because reality is it's infinitely comp Lex right I mean you can fragment it infinitely and you can contextualize it infinitely so it's very hard to calibrate all right so we got put that aside but then I would say well maybe there's another Transcendent fundamental reality that's darwinian and nature that that integrates everything with regards to optimized long-term survival and perceptions are optimized to to suit that so I know that's a terribly complicated question but this is a terribly complicated subject so well so I think we have to think a little out of the box on this this question because when we conclude that Evolution shapes us not to see reality as it is then the question is well what what is it shaping our sensory systems to give us as well as what is reality right that question also comes up yeah AB absolutely and and so the the way I like to think about it is that it Evolution shapes sensory systems to serve as a user interface so like the desktop on your computer for example so when you're when you're actually working on a computer you're in this metaphor what you're literally doing is toggling millions of voltages in a computer in circuits and you're having to toggle them in in very specific P millions of them in exactly the right pattern well if you had to do that by by hand if you had to deal with that reality and Inter interface with that reality one voltage and get it an ex well it take you forever and you probably wouldn't get it right and you wouldn't be able to write your email or or edit your picture whatever you're doing on your computer so what we we spend good money and people spend a lot of time building interfaces that allow you to be ignorant completely ignorant most of us have no idea what's what's under the hood in our laptops we have no idea we know that there's circuits and software but most of us have never studied it and and and yet we're able to very swiftly and and expertly edit our images and send texts and emails and so forth without having any clue literally no clue what's under the hood what's the reality that we're actually toggling and so it seems that that's what evolution has has done for us it's given us an incredibly dumbed down interface we call it space and time and physical objects so we think of space and time as as the fundamental reality and physical objects as as truly existing in in that objective reality but it's really just in this metaphor a virtual reality headset we we've we've evolved a virtual reality headset that that utterly hides the very nature of reality in and on purpose quote unquote on purpose so to speak because it would be we drown in the complexity right you drown in the complexity okay so some evidence for that as far as I'm concerned is is the following I mean first of all if you look at a desktop it consists let's say in part of folders now folders are actually something in the real world that you can pick up and we understand them you can manipulate them you can see how they operate by by using your by but as a consequence of your embodiment and so that embodiment gives you a deep understanding of the function of a folder and then you can represent it abstractly and you can put it on a desktop and everyone understands what it means and that understanding is something like able to map a certain set of functions for a certain set of purposes that's what and it's a constrained set of purposes this is what really struck me about reading the pragmatists say they said and and and purse and and James studied Darwin deeply and they were the first philosophers to realize exactly what implications darwinian Theory had for both ontology and epistemology ontology which is the study of reality for everyone listening um that was a real surprise you could you could understand that you know Darwin's theory might have epistemological implications implications for the theory of knowledge but the fact that it had implications for what reality is per se is something that very few scientists have yet grappled with and the pragmatist always said look when you accept something as a fact one of the things you don't notice is that you set up conditions for that to be factual and the fact is something like this definition will do during this time span for this very constrained set of operations fact okay but the pro the problem with that is that's not a dead objective fact just lying on the ground that's a fact by necessity nested inside a motivational system so facts now all of a sudden become motivated facts and that just reeks Havoc with the notion of objective like of a distant objective materialism because the facts are supposed to be separate from motivation and the pragmatists as far as I'm concerned following Darwin demonstrated incontrovertibly that that's like like you pointed to I think it's an then it's it's analgous that's actually impossible now because you have to constrain reality in order to perceive it because it's too complex you drown in the details otherwise you drown in the complexity now you you made the claim and I want to interrogate this a bit that there's there's really no direct relationship ship let's say between the desktop icon that you think is an object when you look at the world and the actual world but let me offer you an alternative and tell me what you think about this so there's this idea this is a weird way of approaching this but I'm going to do it anyways there's a very strange stream of primarily Catholic thought I believe that tried to wrestle with the idea of how God could become man so because God of course is infinite and everywhere and man is finite and bounded and so the question is well how do you establish a relationship between the infinite and the bounded and that's analogous to the same problem that we're trying to solve and they came up with this hypothesis of kosis which means emptying and their notion was well Christ was God but in some ways like a low resolution representation of God an image of God right so there was a there was a correspondence but not a but not a totality at least not in any one instance now the reason I'm bringing that up is because it seems to me that when we perceive an object that it isn't completely without you call it homomorphism with I believe with the underlying world it's just extremely low resolution like it's a it's a low resolution functional tool that's what an object is but and it's now and and I would say I would evince in support of that for example obviously the icons that we have on a computer screen we can use and we treat them like they're real and clearly they're low resolution but also when we watch an animated show for example like The Simpsons um we're looking at cartoon-like icons right they're emptied even further than like if I saw a Simpson cartoon of you it would be like a very low resolution representation of of the UIC which is a very low resolution representation of whatever the hell you are in actuality like it's a se but I but I but I think the there's an element of that perception that's an unbiased sampling of the underlying reality although it's bent to pragmatic ends pragmatic motivational ends now I I don't know what you think about that I I've thought about it for a long time I can't find a hole in it but I'm wondering what you think well I I think here's an analogy that might help explain the way I I see it suppose you're playing a ver a VR version of Grand Theft Autos you have a headset and bodysuit on and you're playing a multiplayer Grand Theft Auto you're playing with someone in China and England and and so forth and I I'm sitting there in my ride and I've got a steering wheel and gas pedal and dashboard and I'm looking out and I see to my right I can see a red Ferrari and to my left I see a a green Mustang well now of course what I'm really interacting with in this analogy is some supercomputer somewhere right and if I looked inside that supercomputer uh and looked for a red Ferrari I would find no red Ferraris anywhere inside that supercomputer I would find voltages so there in that sense the red Ferrari is a symbol in my headset in the in the game and there's nothing in the objective reality in this metaphor that that it's a low resolution version of there's it's it's just literally a completely different kind of Beast there are no okay so let me ask you about that so I get your point especially Germaine with regards to the online game but is it not the case that in that supercomputer architecture there's a pattern that is analogous to the red Ferrari pattern that's the externalized representation of the pattern let's say on your retina and then that propagates into your brain like there is a there is a there is a conservation of pattern now that Ferrari pattern in the supercomputer would be a very T tiny element of an infinite landscape of patterns in the computer but it's not and it's definitely not a pattern of a car per se right it's a pattern of a representation of a car and but it still got some correspondence with a pattern of voltages let's say that that does have some existence within the supercomputer architecture well so in that case I would say that there's a causal connection that what's going on inside the supercomputer has a causal connection with the sequence of um pixels that are being illuminated in my headset so that I see a red Ferrari so there's a caal connection but if I asked is there some sense in which there's a homomorphism of structure between what's going on inside the computer and what I'm seeing on the screen as a red Ferrari uh I would say there's probably no homomorphism and at all and in that sense there's we can't think about it as like a low resolution version of something so to be specific the the electrons in the computer have no color my my Ferrari is red the shape of the Ferrari and the shapes of the electrons or even the pattern of motion of the electrons is is independent and and what's going on in part is that the the the pattern of electrons in the supercomputer they're programmed to operate in certain way to cause certain other things to happen in my headset to trigger voltages that trigger pixels to have certain colors and so there's a whole sequence a whole Cascade of events that are going on there and and so to say that there's a homomorphism I think is is I think it's just barking up the wrong tree according to a recent report Planned Parenthood continues to rake in billions despite dwindling clients the biggest takeaway here is that Planned Parenthood is generating vast profits including millions in taxpayer funding with the help of pre-born you and me we are stealing their clientele meaning the babies they are trying to kill pre-born operates on a very slim budget as they rescue over 200 babies lives every day and they receive no Government funding pre-born network of clinics are situated in the darkest corners competing head-to-head with the abortion Giants they need our help now more than ever when you donate $28 to pre-born you will offer a free ultrasound to an expectant mother caught in crisis once she hears that heartbeat and sees that precious life her baby's chance at life doubles if you would like to sponsor a precious 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not even at the atomic realm you you detected at the level of patternings of molecules in at one level and then not above that it'd be very specific level so it could still be there even though it wasn't propagating through the entire system and then I want to add another twist to that that I think is relevant so I was talking to a biologist last week about how the immune system functions and basically the way that it functions you imagine there's a foreign molecule in your bloodstream and it's it's got a shape well it has a very complex has an endless number of very complex shapes that make up its surface and the complexity of that shape would be dependent on the resolution of analysis right because the the subatomic Contours would be different than the atomic Contours and different than the molecular Contours okay now what the what the immune system wants to do is get a grip on that molecule and it just has to get enough of a grip so that it can register the pattern replicate the pattern and get rid of the molecule So that's its goal you could say that its motivational frame now the way it does that is sort of the way your arm Works imagine you were trying to figure out how to pick up a basketball now a baby will do that in the crib the first thing a baby will do when it's trying to figure out how to use its arms is it'll it uses them very nonspecifically it'll flail about and maybe it'll hit the ball now hitting the ball isn't throwing the ball but it's more like throwing the ball than not hitting the ball right and then the baby does this and then it that works and then it gets a little bit more sophisticated and it does this and then it gets a little more sophisticated and it does this and then finally it can manipulate its fingers so it's specifying the grip at some point the baby can grab the ball and throw it that's kind of what the immune system does it it makes some molecules that kind of stick to the to the surface and then those modify so they stick even better and then the sticky molecules modify so it sticks even better but the point I'm making is that the the immune system appears to generate a sufficient homologue of the molecule to grab it and get it out now you could say that that homologue that it generates there's many levels of reality that the foreign body participates in that aren't being modeled by the immune system homologue but I would say yeah but there's enough of a homology so that the immune system can get a grip and get rid of the molecule now and we're running around the world this is a very good analogy because we're running around the world trying to get a grip all the time and we presume that the map that we've made of the world is sufficiently real if we get a good enough grip to perform the operation that we're intending to perform but that but that still to me that still implies that there's some level of representation that has at least the echo of a genuine homology so I'm wondering you know if if you have objections to that or what you think about that I think that we can't count on any kind of of homology or or homomorphism I think that for example the way I think about it now is that SpaceTime itself and all the particles that we see at the subatomic level and the whole bit that's all just a headset and and that physicists actually agree they they say SpaceTime is doomed so narh hemed David Gross and many are saying that we need a new framework for physics that's utterly outside of SpaceTime and quantum theory uh so and they're finding structures like decorated permutations and so forth these are structures not sort of curled up inside of SpaceTime but utterly outside of SpaceTime and so I think science is is is telling us Darwin Darwin's theory I think is agreeing it's saying that SpaceTime is not fundamental it's just a headset okay okay so if I said there's no ultimate homology but there are proximal local homologies would that do the trick I I have a reason for torturing you about this and I'll leave it soon but but I'm because the issue of grip really makes a difference as far as I'm concerned because getting a grip is very it's sort of the basis of understanding is all of our cognitive Enterprises you could think in some real sense are extensions of our ability to manipulate the world with our hands I mean the fact that our left hemisphere is linguistically specialized looks like it's a consequence of its specialization for for articulation at the at the level of the hand and so getting a grip is crucial here and the homology seems to me to be demonstrated in the fact that like if you pick up a hammer it actually you it actually comes off the ground now I think you could reasonably object that that homology is tremendously limited but it's it's hard for me to exceed to the notion that it's that it's absent now having said that I would I don't I don't want to push that point to stop you let's say from questioning something as fundamental as the objective reality of space and time I think you can have your cake and eat it too in that regard and I want to turn to those more radical claims right away but if I said well if I pick up a hammer and it does in fact raise off the floor how is that not an indication of a homology would you just you would reduce that again to Mere function like it's merely the case that it worked and that's not demonstration of of anything beyond the thing is it worked that's the thing is that that's why I can't shape the notion of some homology well there's I would again say that there's a causal connection you could talk about you know a causal connection between the the reality behind your head headset and what you're seeing in the headset but I think it would be a stretch to talk about some kind of homology of structure it's not it's actually not necessary right to to be successful is not necessary well and and as you pointed out very early in this discussion it also might be hyper expensive right you actually don't want to know more about something than you need to know in order to perform the requisite action that's part of efficiency right so okay so all right so let's leave that aside let me let me on that in the back I'll just say one little if you have like a desktop folder on your on your laptop and the for a file and it's blue and rectangular in the middle of your screen well the file is not blue it's not rectangular and it's not in the middle of the computer there's there's literally no homology for anything that you can see on the in the symbol on the screen and the file itself it's it's just a useful symbol without homology but there is a causal connection between the voltages but but no homology so then what do you okay so okay so let let let maybe we can go down that route sure I guess I'm then unclear about what you mean what exactly do you mean by causal then right so that's already sort of smuggling in A Spacetime kind of analogy right right right exactly exactly so so I'll I'll just say that there's a mathematical connection that maybe not causal but there's some kind of mathematical connection but but the mathematics need not be a kind of mathematics that preserves um you know structure for example right so there's a maatic connection okay I'm GNA have to grind away on that for a bit because you know you you are stating that there is a relationship at least of function and I'm unable to on the Fly thoroughly discriminate between some grip of structure and some function because grip is a function so so I'll just put that aside for now let's go on to Consciousness itself now you said a variety of very radical things including criticizing the entire notion of space and time and so we'll delve into that but but I want to tell you something that I learned from Reading mythology and I want you to tell me how that relates if at all to the way that you're conceptualizing Consciousness which is obviously not the way that people generally conceptualize it okay so I've read a lot of different mythological accounts and I've studied a lot of analysis of mythological accounts and I think I've been able to extract out commonalities and regularities across the meth methods of assessment and I think I've been able to triangulate them against findings from Neuroscience let's say the Neuroscience of perception now the the mythological stories that represent the structure of reality Proclaim you could say that there are three interacting causal three interacting fundamental causal agents or structures causal agents is probably a better way of thinking about it there there's a realm of Potential from which order can be extracted that's often given feminine symbolism the realm of potentiality and I think that's because feminine creatures are the creatures out of which new creatures emerge so there's a deep analogy there so there's a realm of potentiality then there's a realm of a prior order that's often given patriarchal or paternal symbolism that's the great father and so if you read a book book let's say the book offers you a realm of potentiality which is the multitude of potential interpretations that the book consists of but then you impose an order on that that's a consequence of well every book you've ever read and every experience you've ever had and the the book itself is a phenomena that emerges as a consequence of the interplay between The Interpreter and the realm of potentiality okay then there's one additional factor which I think is identical to Consciousness itself it's associated in mythology with the sun with the Sun that sets and then Rises triumphant in the morning it's associated with the Conquering Hero and it's the thing it's the active agent that transforms this infinite potentiality into concretized reality it TR literally makes order out of chaos that's the right way to think about it and that we part as conscious beings we partake in that process in fact that process is our Essence and that's what makes us made in the image of god let's say but also instantiated with something like intrinsic value now you have a very strange concept of Consciousness and so partly because you're attempting to make the case that what we think of as objective reality so that's just the facts ma'am objective reality is actually an emergent property tell me if I've got this wrong it's actually an emergent property of Consciousness itself and so that in your scheme of things Consciousness is more fundamental than than objective reality doesn't even obvious in your scheme that objective reality so to speak is exists so so so tell me what tell me how you've grappled with the relationship between Consciousness and the world as such what have you concluded Darwin and physics high energy theoretical physics agree that SpaceTime is doomed it's not fundamental reality and the search is on in the last 10 years among physicists to find structures entirely Beyond SpaceTime not not curled up inside SpaceTime Beyond SpaceTime and they found structures I mentioned like the decorated permutations amplitud hedrin and so forth and so I'm also thinking about Consciousness utterly outside of SpaceTime so it it's it's a fundamental reality and SpaceTime um which we have think thought of for most of human history as the fundamental reality that we're embedded in is trivial headset that's all it is we we've mistaken a headset for the truth because it's easy if that's all you've seen all your life is a headset it's hard to imagine something outside of it but science is good enough to recognize that uh SpaceTime is just a headset so now we can we're free using mathematics to ask what kind of structures could we posit um Beyond SpaceTime and in my case I'm I'm trying to also deal with the Mind Body problem how is consciousness related to what we call the physical world so I've decided to try to get a mathematical model of Consciousness now of course spiritual traditions and and um Humanity for for thousands of years has thought about Consciousness and so forth but as a scientist what I want to do of course is listen to their insights but I need to write down as minimal a mathematical structure as I can to boot up a completely rigorous Theory and so what we've done in our our Theory we call the theory of conscious agents is a very minimal structure a conscious agent um has a a probability space that it's defined on so it's a probability space starting a business can be tough especially knowing how to run your online storefront thanks to Shopify it's easier than ever Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify is there to help you grow our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with 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easy for me to pick up this pen right so that's a high probability pathway laid out in front of me so I mean the the the mythological motifs that I referred to insist that what people face is something akin to the prec cosmogonic chaos that God himself faced when the Cosmos first sprang into being right and so that the way to construe the world isn't as a place of clockwork automaton machines self-evident objects but as a realm of possibility that differs in probability and then the issue becomes how do you best Orient yourself so that you contend you can contend properly with that probability landscape now is that am I walking on Parallel ground here we're in Broad agreement in that in in the sense that our theory of conscious agents by writing down a probability space it is a space of potentiality for example to be very very concrete suppose my my experiment is just to flip a coin twice heads and tails well what's my probability space well I could get heads heads Heads tail Tails Tails Tails or tails heads right so there's four possible it could land on the edge yeah right right so yeah yeah well then I'd have to increase my probability space to if I wanted to include that but but now notice I I write down the probability space first but I haven't fli my coin yet so it's it's it's the space of potential outcomes of things that I can do and that's what probability spaces are and so yeah okay so when I write down a probability space for Consciousness it's a probability space in which I'm thinking about about in the in the first instance that it's about what is the probability of this I'll experience green or um Mint or the sound of a trumpet or or so all these different conscious experiences so the probability space is a space of all possible kinds of conscious experiences that this particular agent might have and you could imagine there's for some agents maybe it's they're simple they only have the experience of red period that's it that's all this agent has red the another one the other one can experience red and green and and other can have 10 trillion experiences you could imagine agents with and and then they can be related right well maybe the red agent can be thought of as a Subspace of the one that says red and 10 million other things so we can now right depends on how articulated the organism is right so yeah the simpler organisms exactly their probability space around them collapses that's right and so right right and so all the infinite number of potential probabilities that we see in front of us just collapse into maybe five choices something like that and yeah okay so so you know Carl friston so this is quite interesting so I talked to Carl friston about emotion about Mo about Hope positive emotion let's say uh incentive reward positive emotion so positive emotion in that sense is a reward that signals advancement towards a goal now I'd already been conceptualizing with my students as had friston anxiety as a marker for the emergence of entropy but friston pointed out now and I want to make a connection between his thinking and yours here friston pointed out that you can map positive emotion with respect to entropy too because if you're looking for a desired outcome so imagine you're trying to get a grip on the World to bring about a certain reality if you see yourself making a step towards that end such that the number of potential Pathways to that end decreases somewhat that produces a dopamine kick and that's a signal of reduced entropy in relationship and it seems to me that entropy is always calculated in relationship to a goal right you're saying well how entropic is the current space and you can't answer that you have to say how entropic is the current space in relationship to the ordered state that I'm trying to bring about as a consequence of my actions and then now and then you'll stumble across something that blows up in your face let's say like I've always thought about this like imagine you're driving your car to work okay and you might say well what is your car and the objective materialist would say well it's a enclosed shell with four tires it would give you a a materialist description but I would say no no no that's not how your nervous system is responding at all your nervous system for your nervous system the car is a conveyance from point A to point B so it's a tool and it's a tool that signifies zero entropy essentially as long as it performs its function and then let's say your car breaks down and now you're on the side of the road now what happens to you is the probability space around you I would say it becomes more distal any of your desired goals become more expensive and harder to compute right what's wrong with my car was I an idiot for buying that car am I generally an idiot am I going to get in trouble with my boss what's going to happen to the rest of the day you know um what's what's going to happen when I go see the mechanic right the landscape blows into a broader range of unconstrained potentiality and that seems to be signaled by anxiety and anxiety Then prepares your body for a multitude of potential actions and the problem with that is that it's very physiologically costly right so that's stress and that'll wear you to a frazzle so okay so is any of that not in accord with the manner in which you are modeling your theory of conscious agents right so in the theory of conscious agents I should say that in addition to the probability space and the conscious experiences that it allows there is the Dynamics it's a a mar what a marov chain a marvian Dynamics where you have these matrices that describe the probability if I'm experiencing red now what's the probability I'll experience green the next time I haven't experience or so there's a dynamical and and when we do the analysis it turns out that our maravian Dynamics um need not have an entropic arrow of time it can be a stationary Dynamics in which the entropy does not increase so entropy right right in this realm of kind what you hope right you know that's one of the things that makes things constant right is that you assume that the entropic transformation is negligible that's why you can ignore things right when you ignore things when you ignore almost everything you're assuming that the entropic transformation is negligible well what I'm saying is that it's possible to to model a reality in which entropy doesn't increase period it's not ignoring anything thing that's the nature of this deeper reality outside of SpaceTime but then it turns out to be a theorem that if you take a projection of that non- entropic you there's no Arrow of time in the sense of increasing entropy of this of this Mar Dynamics but if you take a projection of it by conditional probability any projection of it it's a theorem that you will as an artifact of projection have the illusion of an arrow of time you will get an well well is is that is that because well look if you're if you're pursuing a pragmatic goal things can fall apart and go wrong and that is an increase in entropy within the universe defined by that goal that that may say nothing about entropy per se as a characteristic of broader reality see I've always had this this issue with entropy because entropy always seemed to me to be by necessity subjectively defined it has to be disorder in relationship to some posited state of order and then you get back into the darwinian problem at that point like if it's well if it's bounded by motivation then it's encapsulated within a darwinian space so okay so in terms of your conception of objects let me try this out so I'm looking at this uh this teleprompter here and you're sitting in the middle of it now I'm treating that like a set of conditional probabilities right I'm presuming that what this machine is doing right now is very much predictive of what it's going to do in a second and I'm predicating my perception itself on that reality now you know it could burst into flames now I feel that the probability of that is very low so I'm not going to perceive the machine that way now you know there are disorders obsessive compulsive disorders is a good example where people stop being able to reduce that probability landscape to predictable safety and they start reacting to almost everything as if it's unpredictably dangerous and you know things are so I had clients for example they would go into a building and the first thing they would do is look for all the fire escapes and what they asked me was well why don't you do that because the building could burn down and people do get trapped in buildings and that's a horrible way to die so the mystery isn't why they did that the mystery for them was why everyone didn't do that all the time and I actually do believe that the great mystery is why people aren't scared out of their skulls all the time not why they're sometimes calm but so can you imagine an object now the object is surrounded by a probability distribution I would say and that probability distribution is all the things that object might turn into in some period of time let's say and I would say to some degree when you look at the object you actually also perceive that probability space because you know although I see that this teleprompter is stable it's unstable enough and dynamic enough to provide me with a representation of you and so I'm playing with the by by by seeing the object and interacting with it I'm playing with the probability space around it so the is it the case that you see the damn probability space when you look at the object well I don't know if we see it this the space itself we we certainly I we're estimating what we think are the probabilities for various good things and and bad things to happen um but but I would say that this this whole business about entropy increasing and so forth first I I should point out that Shannon entropy which is what we're talking about here um it turns out not to be the most General notion of entropy there are mathematicians and and physicists are looking at at broader definitions of entropy there's something called the Solis entropy and and others so there there are technical reasons for why I mean Shannon entropy is great and it's very very useful and when I was talking about the entropy of our dynamical systems and not having you know increasing entropy I was talking about Shannon entropy but there are more more General Notions of entropy that are that are important so so I would say that that the very whole the whole structure of needing to estimate probabilities and worrying about outcomes and and and you know rewards and so forth from the point of view of of our dynamics of conscious agents all of that in fact all of darwinian theory is an artifact of projection so so it so here's a a dynamic of conscious agents outside of SpaceTime there need not be any competition no limited resources no no Arrow of time and yet when I take any projection of that Dynamics to get a new Marian dynamics that has lost just a little bit of information I will have an arrow of time and it can look like separate organisms um competing for resources and so forth in other words I mean I love Darwin's theory of evolution of natural selection is very powerful I think the entire theory is not a deep insight into reality I think it's an artifact of projection the very Arrow of time think think about the arrow of time it is the fundamental limited resource in evolutionary theory time is the fundamental limited resource if I don't get food in time I die if I don't made in time I don't reproduce and if I don't breathe air in time so time is the fundamental limited resource and the arrow of time itself need not be fundamental it could be entirely an artifact of projection so that what that means is and this gets again to the so okay well then I I'd like to know this is back to the most fundamental possible question we could be describing is well what's the nature of reality itself I mean when I was debating with Sam Harris we got hung up on this consistently because I wasn't willing to use the same definition of truth that he was he uses an objective materialist definition and I think that you know truth flies like an arrow let's say it it's got a functional element to it that's that you cannot eradicate there's no way out of that with an objective materialism as far as I can tell now you said the darwinian race and the arrow of time is just an artifact but if I said well hold on a second I don't exactly know what you mean by artifact then because if I don't act like there's an arrow of time and red and restricted resources in that regard then I'm going to die and that's real enough for me you know you might even say well my death has little to do with the fundamental structure of reality but I would say Well it has enough to do with it so it happens to concern me and and and so you know we start to get into a discussion about what constitutes reality itself if it if this is just a projection what in principle would be real right so on this Theory then Consciousness is the fundamental reality and the conscious experiences that that observers have as a fundamental reality and the experience that we have with space and time is a projection of a much deeper reality and that and that projection because it loses information is necessarily going to have artifacts in it and among the artifacts are things like um separate objects in space and time space and time itself is an artifact so so one reason I'm not a materialist is because our best materialist theories namely evolution by natural selection and also um Quantum field Theory and and Einstein's theory of gravity they tell us that SpaceTime has no operational meaning at 10us 33 cm or 10- 43 seconds in other words our theories our scientific theories that are that are the foundation of our material ideas tell us precisely the scope and the limits of materialism materialism that kind of materialism is fine down to the plank scale 10 Theus 33 cm and after that it it it completely falls apart it it it's utterly it's irrelevant it's that's right the SpaceTime physicalist matter kind of materialism falls apart and it's not because of religious ideas I'm saying it's I'm just listening to the science that science tells us SpaceTime has no meaning beyond the plank scale and that's why the the you know guard high energy theoretical physicists are now looking for structures entirely outside of SpaceTime not curled up inside Space time entirely Beyond so so it's in that sense that yeah I I I materialism and by the way this is I should say this about all scientific theories my my view about all scientific theories is that each scientific theory starts with certain assumptions the premises of the theory and it says if you grant me those assumptions then I can explain all this all this wonderful stuff okay okay so how did you come to that conclusion because that's see see this is I've been trying to wrestle with this with regards to say the potential relationship between the Integrity of the scientific process and an underlying Transcendent ethic so I think for example I talked to Richard Dawkins about this a little bit although we didn't get that far for a variety of reasons but like I think that to be a scientist there's certain things that you have to accept on faith these would be equivalent to those axioms and I'm not talking about necessarily A scientific theory here as you were but the practice of science itself so for example you have to act as if there is truth you have to act as if the truth is discoverable you have to act as if you can Discover it then you have to act as if you discovering the truth and communicating it is good and none of that is provable scientifically you have to start with those axioms before you can even make a move and it could be wrong you know I mean we think that delving into the structure of the world with Integrity is Redemptive we think that knowledge is useful pragmatically but you know we've invented all sorts of things that could easily wipe us out like the hydrogen bomb perhaps being foremost among those and so the evidence that that set of claims is true is sorely lacking or you could say it's 5050 that's another way of thinking about it but I'm very curious about how you came to the conclusion that scientific theories themselves have to be axiomatically predicated how did you walk down that road because that's not a road that very many people walk down well if you just look at any scientific theory say Einstein's theory of special relativity he says let's start with two assumptions that uh you know the the speed of light is universal for for all observers and that the the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames says if you grant me those two Miracles then we go does the same thing is reman and Darwin starts off and says grant me that there are organisms in space and time and resources and these organisms are competing for for resources now I can give you a theory so so every when when you just yeah so if you just look at any scientific theory um a good theory will make explicit the assumptions but if if it's not you can find what the assumptions are so there's no Theory okay so there's no Theory of Everything do you think that there's is there any difference between technically I'm thinking philosophically I don't see any difference between the claim that a given theory has to have axioms that aren't provable from within the frame of that theory that's gel's theorem as far as I can tell applied much more broadly I don't see any difference between that and the proposition that to get the game started there has to be it's something akin to a miracle I mean because these axioms imagine that a miracle inside a system is defined as any occurrence that isn't governed by the rules that re that that apply within that system that's a good working definition now your proposition is well I don't care what theory you're coming up with there's going to be a set of axiomatic presuppositions that are a launching Point see I also think those axiomatic presuppositions are where you put all the all the entropy you say grant me this it's like well that takes care of 95% of the mystery so we'll just shove that invisibly right because it's it's hidden inside the axioms and then you can go about manipulating the small remnant of trouble that you have left over I also think this is why people don't like to have their axioms challenged he because if you say well I'm not going to accept that then you let loose all the demons that are encapsulated within those axioms and they start roaming about again and people don't like that at all well yeah a good scientist will want to have the their assumptions made absolutely mathematically precisely and explicit so they they're just laid out there and they say these are the assumptions of the theory and given these assumptions I can now prove this and this is the the glory of science where we put down precisely what our assumptions are and that then we look at it mathematically and we can get both the scope of those assumptions how how much can we do with those assumptions and the limits like in the case of SpaceTime the limits are 10us 33 cm game over by the way it's not that deep in my view it's 10us 33 trillion cmet it's just 10us 33 and the game is over for SpaceTime so so that's a good antidote for dogmatism because your own Theory a mathematically precise Theory will tell you the limits of your assumptions and then say okay now you need to look for a broader framework with with deeper assumptions but this but they will be new assumptions and so I view this as infinite job security for scientists because we will never ever get a Theory of Everything we will always have a theory of everything except our current assumptions and and and those and I agree with you that those assumptions will essentially be the whole baileywick of of what we're what we're doing so so there's reality whatever it is now this is for me something of an interesting mystery our theories in some sense don't even scratch the surface of the truth and yet because this process will go on forever and and we'll still essentially have measure zero of of the truth and yet Einstein's theory and quantum theory gave us the technologies that allowing you and me to talk across the country well so you could say well you could say that partly what's happening there is that the more sophisticated the theory the broader range of probable states of Any Given object or or system of objects can be predicted it's something like that a psj pointed that out when he was talking about developmental Improvement in children's cognitive theories and and so you know if you look at someone like Thomas presumed that we we under took multiple scientific revolutions but there was no necessary progress there were diff just different sets of axioms and PJ knew about Coon's Theory by the way but P's point was no you've got it slightly wrong because there is a regression of theory in that a better Theory allows you to predict everything the previous Theory allowed you to predict plus some additional things now your point would be well we can just continue that movement upward forever right because the the landscape of potentiality is inexhaustible and so again you can have your cake and eat it too we can learn more Einstein got us farther than Newton which doesn't mean that Einstein's axiomatic set is the final set okay so let me put a Twist in this I've been thinking about this recently I'll be I'm writing a new book and one of the things I'm doing in that book is doing an analysis of the story of Abraham Abraham's very interesting story okay so Abraham is called out into the world even though he he sort of hung around his father's tent till he's like 70 so he he had he had Utopia at hand he didn't have do any work to get everything he needed but that wasn't good enough so a voice comes to him it's the voice of conscience I would say and says look you've got all this security but that isn't what you're built for get the hell out there in the world and so he does that and then all hell breaks loose it's one bloody catastrophe after another starvation and tyranny and warfare and uh the necessity of sacrificing his son it's just like one bloody thing after another okay but during that process Abraham Abraham continues to aim up and he makes the proper sacrifices and the consequence of that is that God God promises him that his descendants will be more numerous than the Stars so I was reading that from an evolutionary perspective and I thought okay what's happening here is that that the narrative is trying to map out a pathway that maximizes reproductive Fitness All Things Considered now the problem I have with theories like Dawkins let's say is Dawkins reduces and you tell me if you think this is wrong Dawkins implicitly reduces sex to lust then he reduces reproduction to sex and the problem with that is that reproduction is not exhausted by lust or sex quite the contrary especially in human beings because not only do we have to chase women let's say but then when we have children we have to invest in them for like 18 years before they're good for continual reproduction and we have to interact with him in a manner that's predicated on an ethos that improves the probability of their reproductive Fitness and so reproduction see this is something that the the darwinists the Casual darwinists do very incautiously as far as I'm concerned because they identify the drive to reproduction with sex and that's a big mistake because sex might ensure your reproduction proximately for one generation but the pattern of behavior that you esta Lish and instantiate in your Offspring which would be an ethos might ensure your reproduction multigeneration you see and that's appears to be what's being played out in this story of Abraham is that the unconscious mind let's say trying to map the fitness landscape is attempting to determine what pattern of behavior is most appropriate if the goal is maximal reproductive Fitness calculated across mult multiple Generations or maybe across infinitely iterating generations and so that points to something again like you said earlier you you called it a general fitness what was it I got to get it here big Fitness payoff right and that could be the ethos to which all these subsidiary ethoses are integrated see see okay okay so well so I'm wondering what you think about that is that first of all what you think about the proposition that evolutionary biologists to Dawkins is a good case in mind have aired when they've too closely identified reproduction with like with short-term sex it's like that isn't a guarantee of reproduction we wouldn't invest in our children if that was the case we would just leave them the sex sex is done we've reproduced you need an ethos to to guarantee reproductive Fitness across time well there's several LS levels here F first um I'm Dawkins of course understands that most sex is aex most reproduction is asexual right so sexual reproduction is a relatively recent thing um most most reproduction has been asexual so Dawkins is very famous for talking about the selfish Gene and it's really when he talks about reproduction it's about genes reproducing themselves really not so much about SE sex is one way of having that happen but but you know bacteria do it without sex and and so so so the emphasis on sex was I would say you Dawkins of course understands that sex isn't fundamental now when it comes to human motivations and you know mammal motivations perhaps in that specific context you might then be talking about it but but even there when you when you start talking about sexual reproduction there are many many strategies that organisms use so for example some spiders will have just hundreds of babies and and eat some of they they'll eat some of them uh you know and let the others do that having the babies is their only job and after that the babies are on their own so you and and so there are different strategies so this is where you know Dawkins is quite famous justifiably for you know his his his work on the selfish Gene idea that is there are different strategies but the only thing that matters in this framework is what is the probability that the particular genes you know spread through the population in later generations sex came along apparently to to deal with um okay as one of the pathways to that right one of the that's right and and so but but there's another framework in thinking about all this as well so again I love evolutionary theory I think in terms of models of of or Evolution and so forth of of creatures and and their behaviors it's an incredibly powerful Theory I've used it a lot my book case against reality talks about it in great detail It's a Wonderful Theory but I think that from this deeper framework that science is now moving into Beyond SpaceTime all of evolutionary theory all of it is an artifact of projection it's not in other words if if you're looking like from a spiritual point of view for some deep principles deep spiritual principles Evolution I don't think is deep enough I think that it's all of it is an artifact of space-time projection and if you're going to be thinking looking for deep principles about you know that that spiritual tradition is talking about Abraham and really thinking big I think that um Thinking Inside SpaceTime is not big enough you've got to step entirely outside of SpaceTime SpaceTime has all these artifacts and and we're so used to being stuck in the headset there is an well there is an insistence upon that in in in the judeo-christian tradition because God is conceptualized uh what would you say traditionally as being entirely outside of time and space and so whatever works for human like the human landscape and the Divine landscape they're not the same there there's a relationship between them however but they're not the same okay so now okay so let me let me ask you about that now you have made the case not least in this interview that Consciousness is primary now Consciousness uses these projections so how do you reconcile the notion that Consciousness is primary and and I want to make sure I'm not misreading what you're saying that Consciousness is primary but Consciousness operates in the world with these projections see because this is the thing I grapple with is that if survival itself is dependent on the utilization of a scheme of PR pragmatic projections in what sense can we say that reality is something other than that like because see part this is something that Pur and and and uh and uh um William James wrestled with too it's like well why make the claim that there is a reality outside of the human concern with survival and reproduction and and and if con like if Consciousness is the primary reality and it's using projections to orient itself so that it can survive and reproduce in in the biological sense how can you even begin to put forward a claim that there is a reality that transcends that like on what grounds does it transcend it in relationship to what right so these are deep Waters and the idea that I'm playing with now is that this Consciousness is there's one ultimate infinite Consciousness and it what is it up to knowing itself but how do you know yourself well there are certain theorems that say that no system can actually completely know itself right right right so so if the if this one infinite Consciousness wants to know itself all it can do is start looking at itself through different perspectives so putting on different headsets so SpaceTime is one one headset and from that perspective here's a pro so this is a projection of of of the one infinite Consciousness and in that perspective it looks like evolution by natural selection it looks like Quantum field Theory and so forth and and and it looks like I need to play the game this way but this is yeah a trivial headset this is actually I think one cheaper headsets okay that's very interesting okay so one of the things so well writing the book that I'm writing now I've been walking through all these biblical narratives and one of the things they do every single narrative provides a different characterization of the infinite there's no real replication it's like well here's a picture of the Divine and here's another one and here's another one and here's another one now there's an insistence that runs through the text this unites the text that those are all manifestations of the same underlying reality but it is definitely the case that what's happening is that these are movies so to speak shot from the perspective of different directors and it does seem to me akin to something coming to know itself there's this ancient Jewish idea this is a great it's like a Zen cone it's a great little mystery he says so here's the proposition so God is traditionally imbued the following characteristics omniscience omnipresence and omnipotence what does that lack and you know you think well that's a ridiculous question because by definition that lacks nothing but the answer is limitation that lacks limitation and that's that's actually the classical explanation for God's creation of man is that the unlimited needs the limited as a Viewpoint it has something to do with the development of as you pointed out I believe it has something to do with the with the possibility of coming to it's something like conscious awareness you see see this in TS Elliot too I don't remember which poem where he talks about coming back to the point of origin which is like the return to Childhood you know that that Heavenly notion that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven you have to become as a little child it's like but there's a transformation there so that that return to the point of origin is accompanied by an expansion of consciousness it's not a it's not a a collapse back into childish unconsciousness it's the reattain of a what would you say it's it's the re attainment of the state of play that's a good way of thinking about it that obtained when you were a child but with conscious differentiated knowledge so there there is this tremendous narrative Drive in the western tradition towards differentiated comprehensive understanding as a positive good and that seems tied up with the continual drama between God and man so and I do think the scientific Enterprise is an offshoot of that that's what it looks like to me historically so okay so how in the world do you survive in Psychology departments given what you're thinking about well I've got the mathematics so as long as if I was just talking this stuff without any mathematical underpinnings to it it would be dismissed of course but but the you know we we've in the case of the evolutionary stuff we've published papers and the journal theoretical biology for example and and and elsewhere where we actually put the mathematics out there so it's peer-reviewed and I think that it's a bit surprising but and I you know I I'm a minority a small minority but you know that's that's the way science progresses you it proceeds one funeral at a time and it progresses by by minorities of one exactly right so so and and and scientists understand that you know you you want to have independent ideas think out of the box make it mathematically precise most of our ideas will be nonsense including mine but you you got to put them out there and and push them and and and see see what happens um I I I have I'll say in terms of I've I've gotten some stiff push back for example some philosophers have published papers recently where they give the following argument against my darwinian theory they they'll say look Hoffman uses evolutionary Game Theory to show that uh space and time and physical objects and organisms don't exist well he's got himself what they say an unenviable dialectical situation um either evolutionary Game Theory um Faithfully represents Darwin's ideas or it doesn't they say okay so if it doesn't then he can't use it to say that organisms and resources are not fundamental in SpaceTime and if it does Faithfully represent Darwin's ideas well Darwin's ideas are that SpaceTime is fundamental and their organisms and resources so so it couldn't possibly contradict that so either way Hoff is screwed right there's nothing he can do so so and and so and that's been published actually in high high value philosophy journals and my response is is is quite simple that misunderstands science completely every scientific theory has when you write it down mathematically it has a scope and its limits and the mathematics tells you both the scope and the limit so for example just to be very concrete Einstein's theory of gravity right and I think 1907 or so he had this the big idea if I was standing on a weighing machine in an elevator and all of a sudden the cord was cut and I was in freef Fall the I would all of a sudden be weightless that was his big idea for his theory of gravity it took him years seven or eight years to actually make the mathematics but he write wrote down his field equations so so those field equations are Einstein's mathematics to capture his idea that SpaceTime is fundamental and has certain properties well a year after he published it uh Schwarz Shield a German scientist discovered that they entail black holes and we eventually found out that this Theory entails that SpaceTime itself has no operational meaning Beyond 10us 33 cm so we could use the same argument that's been used against me against Einstein now look okay Einstein's field equations either they're Faithfully representing Einstein's ideas or they're not so so we can use the same argument you against Einstein have been used against wther that either Einstein's field equation capture his ideas Faithfully or they don't if they don't then we couldn't use them to show that SpaceTime isn't fundamental and if they do they couldn't possibly show that space time isn't fundamental that last step is the wrong one the equations are there to show you the limits of your Concepts they give you precise and that's so that's what what these philosophers have missed is that the equations that we write down tell us not just the scope but the limits of our theories and that's that's why science is so valuable because it tells us your theory your assumption go this far and no further so that's all I've done with's theory of evolution is to say that also okay man but that also sounds to me very much like a Vindication of the fundamental claim of the pragmatists which is that we accept something as true without noticing that what we mean is true in a time frame with certain implications for for instantiation it's something like that and so true true is a lot more like does the bridge stand up when a 100 cars goes AC go across it it's not some final comprehensive all-encompassing definition of the truth for all time and you've already made the case that it can't be because that truth is an Ever receding goal it's always bounded okay so when I came across that I thought okay well bounded by what and it's well it's bounded by our aim and and then that's bounded by our motivation and then that's in nested inside a darwinian world okay now let's go after the game theory let me just say one thing about first thing i' like sorry go ahead go ahead yeah I would just say that the very deep deepest spiritual Traditions really say that up front like the to De Ching starts off that says the towel that can be spoken of is not the true towel once you understand that then goad and read the rest of it that's a good example because that's a great book yeah a great book and I think that that's also the way we should think about our science the science that can be spoken of is not the final reality but but given that it's a wonderful thing to do science we and we should do science and we should do it very very rigorously but we should always understand that if we're talking about a theory of everything it should be with a wink and a nod because there is no theory of everything that we can write down right it's the every the theory of everything that we've discovered so far maybe but um it will never be the final Theory of Everything right and it might have a broader and broader range of potential applications as well but that doesn't mean that we've exhausted the landscape of comprehensive theories right okay so now the philosophers that you described as objecting to your theory said that if evolutionary game theory is correct and it models Darwin's propositions appropriately then well so game theory is extremely interesting to me although I wouldn't say I'm an expert in its comprehension but I understand its gist I believe and it seems to me to be something like this is that if you iterate interactions an ethos of one form or another emerg so for example if you play tit fortat simulations you find out that the best trading strategy is cooperate but slap when necessary and then forgive something like that and so what it points to very interestingly is something like a concordance between objective reality in so far as objective reality is an emergent pattern uh coming out of iterative interactions and something like an ethos so the first question I have is like why are you interested in evolutionary Game Theory and why do you think that it is a valid representative a more differentiated representative if I've got the language right of darwinian theory oh well I'm interested in it because that's within the field of evolutionary theory itself evolutionary game theory is is taken as you know the prize mathematical tool for really understanding things so that's just the framework of the science that's accepted as far as you're concerned yeah I mean of course there's always debate but by the sub but there this it's it's it's the received opinion so if I wanted to the the as a scientist if I wanted to analyze Darwin's theory for this issue about truth and I wanted to do it rigorously the the tool was evolutionary game theory that was that was the tool to use and it's not because I think it's the final word or or or that or the truth it's just our current state of play in the field right now that's the best we have and I wanted to use the best tool we have have and and that's the way we're always pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps in science right we always say these are the best theories we have and the best tools we have so far of course our goal is not to prove that we're right our goal is to find the limits of our current theories and transcend them so I we're we're looking for are the best tools that will say aha Darwin goes this far and no further SpaceTime goes this far you know high energy theoretical physics Einstein's wonderful theories they're they their Incredible Gift they go to 10us 33 centimeters and they stop that gift stops right there and now we have to go entirely outside and and and that will be the NeverEnding pattern of science is that whatever the scientists are finding outside of SpaceTime that will just be our next baby step and we'll analyze that and then say okay what's beyond that and beyond that and and science will continue to so as long as you recognize that that's the game you you'll realize that there's no Theory of Everything in science and then you the question is who Am I who are we that that are able to do this game and that's a very interesting question well you know there's lots of things I'd like to ask you about but that's a pretty good place to stop and we're damn near at an hour and 30 so um I hope I have the privilege of furthering my discussion with you at some point in the not new not too dear future I would like to say is there anything in closing that you would like to bring to the attention of the listening audience the watching audience that you think that we needed to cover to make what we have covered comprehensible or is that also in your estimation a good place to stop I I'll just say one little thing I guess and that is some people might think well he's got this the of Consciousness out outside of SpaceTime so what who cares and the and and I would agree with that unless I did something more so what what we're trying to do now as scientists to say we have this mathematical model of Consciousness outside of SpaceTime um we we just published a proposal um for how to actually test it so we're going to have a projection into SpaceTime we're working on that projection we'd like to model the the inner structure of the proton we would like to have a dynamics of conscious agents that projects down and gives us what What's called the um the momentum distributions of quarks and gluons inside a proton and all the Bor con x and q squ the different spatial and temporal resolutions that particle physicist have studied so and and the reason we're going there is not because I think that's the most important applic of a theory of Consciousness it's the most accessible one that's the simplest part of our science right now ultimately of course the brain has the the nice neural corat of Consciousness we want to understand that but that's really complicated so we're going to go after if we can model the proton and get it exactly right get the momentum distributions to several decimal places doesn't mean our theory is right but it does mean it can't be dismissed out of hand and so that's that's what our our goal is to take a theory of Consciousness not just to Airy fairy waiver hands and but to actually get in there and predict the structure of the the in structure of the proton with great detail if we can do that then I would say we then can start to move up you know to molecules and and then ultimately to neural systems in the brain and try to understand the neural corelates of Consciousness but not the neural corelates the brain does not cause Consciousness on this model the brain is merely a symbol inside the headset right so so and in fact I would say this neurons do not even exist when they're not perceived neurons cause none of our behavior and yet I'm I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and I think we we should study we we Neuroscience is wonderful and we need more funding for it because yeah it's more complicated than we thought we thought we look inside the brain we see neurons that's because that's the reality there are neurons no that's that's the interface description of something that's much much more complicated we have to reverse engineer neurons to this network of contous Agents outside of SpaceTime so we need more funding for Neuroscience it's much more complicated so so I would just a little brief of course as you can imagine I'm I'm talking about something that could take hours to go into detail but but just to to put those out there and say these are objections and people might have so we're headed I do have one okay I do have one other question and I guess I do have to throw it out so you have a very radical conception of Consciousness what has that done for you existentially do you think I mean you're obviously thinking about the place of Consciousness while you're thinking about it existentially you're thinking about the place of Consciousness in the cosmos and you regard it as a fundamental reality so what has that done to the manner in which you contemplate your own say mortality or the purpose of your life and what what's that done for you on that on that side of things quite a bit that it's um really hit me in the face because I'm intuitively as much a physicalist and a materialist as anybody else I mean like right I'm wired up to to believe all that and so it's it it's come as a a terrible shock to me my my whole self-image has had to change and it's it's and I what direction in what direction your self-image changed what changed well I thought of myself as a little object in SpaceTime right right right and the death of the body is is ultimately the death of me and now it's our best science says that this is you know my body is just an icon in a headset so in some sense it's just an avatar this body is just an avatar it's not and so death is more like uh taking off a headset so but but my emotions don't agree with that so I've got this really interesting well that's probably just as well right yeah exactly so so it's it's so I do spend a lot of time in meditation and my father was a um a Protestant Minister a Fundamentalist Protestant Minister I was so I was raised on the Christian church and so I I look at those points of view I look at the Eastern mystical stuff um I meditate myself and my My ultimate thinking about this is as I said we can never have a theory of everything and that includes of who of who I am so the question about who I am my best guess right now is at the deepest level I and you are in fact the one Consciousness just looking at itself through different avatars so it's really the one using a Jordan Avatar to talk to the one you a Hoffman a avatar and that's that's what's what's what's going on here and and in that sense so are you responsible for being the best possible Avatar you can be so to speak well in in some sense within this projection within this head set morals of a certain kind are are the rules of the road but but my guess is that when we take the headset off we'll just laugh that was that was that was what we had to do in this headset but that was I am not this Avatar I am the Consciousness that's far that transcends space and time well you know with the next time we talk maybe that's a road we should wander down because we didn't we didn't get into the metaphysics of Ethics let's say during this conv and there's plenty of that's obviously a whole other area okay okay well that would be good all right well so to everyone watching and listening thank you very much for tuning in to this podcast I as most of you know I'm I'm going to talk to Dr Hoffman for another half an hour behind the daily War plus platform and I'm going to see if I can find out where in the world his interests stemmed from and how they initially manifested themselves and developed across time we'll do that as much as we can in half an hour thank you to the crew here up in Northern Ontario for uh journeying up here to do this podcast thank you Dr Hoffman very much for your time today to the dailywire plus people for making this possible that's also much appreciated and uh we'll see all of you watching and listening hopefully on another podcast thank you very much sir thank you [Music] Jordan

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 406,260

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: SPnyxnvU4ko

Length: 95min 21sec (5721 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023