Is Reality an Illusion? - Professor Donald Hoffman, PhD

[Music] professor hoffman is a professor emeritus of cognitive sciences at the university of california in irvine he's authored over 100 scientific papers and three books including visual intelligence and the case against reality how evolution hid the truth from her eyes professor hoffman has been awarded with a distinguished scientific award from the american psychological association the rustom roy award of the chopra foundation and the trueland research award of the u.s national academy of sciences his writing has appeared in age new scientist la review the early review of books and scientific american and his work has been featured in wired quanta the atlantic and through the wormhole with morgan freeman professor hoffman's ted talk do we see reality as it is has over 2 million views you can follow him on twitter at donald d hoffman so i'll talk about is reality an illusion and i'll start with our everyday perceptions uh are of objects in space and time we see trees and deer and foliage light and shade we see a three-dimensional world of of shapes and objects and for most of us we we take that world as objective that we we assume that what we're seeing is pretty close to what's really there if i see a deer that's because there really is a deer there if i see a tree that's because there really is a tree there and most of us have the idea that space and time are fundamental it began with a big bang 13.8 billion years ago there was no life uh just matter at the beginning at the big bang but as it uh went on and cooled we got you know particles and then stars and galaxies and so forth and eventually we got life appearing and finally after you know who knows how many hundreds of millions of years or billions of years um consciousness appeared among certain life forms and so so we take a standard physicalist view that uh the universe began with a big bang and it's basically space-time and objects within space-time particles and so forth and consciousness and life are relative newcomers in in this framework and we typically take a reductionist point of view we we assume that uh as you go to smaller and smaller scales of space-time you find more and more fundamental objects particles for example and you also discover more and more fundamental laws so typically modern physical science assumes that space time is fundamental and that physicalist reductionism is a good methodology that we go to smaller scales of space and time to find more fundamental laws and right now the the most fundamental levels are the quarks and leptons and bosons of the standard model of physics before that we thought about the periodic table of elements and before that we thought about earth air fire and water so it's been the same kind of idea for for millennia but we have it updated with the the current fundamental particles of quarks leptons and bosons so that's those have been wonderful pillars of science for for many decades centuries actually and they've done a great job we we assume that from these fundamental particles we can build up um larger objects such as pyramidal neurons and with those kinds of objects we can build up even bigger objects like like brains so we have this idea of a hierarchy of of objects in space and time from the very microphysical particles um all the way up to macroscopic objects like brains and even stars and galaxies we do know that that some of these objects seem to have consciousness so when we look at our face in the mirror we know firsthand that what we see in the mirror which is just skin hair and eyes is hiding something very very important it's our conscious experiences our our love of chocolate um our love of poetry or whatever whatever we might like our fears our hopes our desires our friendships all the things that are important to us that we're conscious of um are hidden behind a face but if you look at a person's face you can get some insight into what they're thinking what they might be experiencing you get some insight into their consciousness so so the the face gives us a little portal into the consciousness of the person that we're looking at when we look at a um an object like a cat now you know our our image of the cat gives us less insight into the consciousness of the cat we probably most of us think cats are conscious um and we have some idea about their consciousness what foods they might like or dislike but we don't have as much confidence as we do with people when we get down to a mouse we're perhaps even less confident when we get to objects like microbes we figure they're probably alive but we might debate whether they're conscious at all and when we get down to things like particles and rocks uh we're pretty convinced that we're dealing with something that is not only not conscious but is not living at all and so so we have this idea then that um space-time is fundamental physical objects like particles are are fundamental and only if you get certain complicated arrangements of particles do you get life and only if those living creatures have certain special properties will they have some kind of consciousness and from this point of view then it's an interesting idea whether if particles in the brain can create consciousness maybe you know other kinds of particles that we build into artificial intelligence may also be conscious if we get the right kind of organization so somehow the idea is that maybe the organization of the particles if they have the right functional properties would lead to consciousness but we'll also talk about pan psychism which takes a slightly different view because philip just talked about that so but but the idea in artificial intelligence is that maybe if we get the right kind of architecture the right program then we might also boot up consciousness in a physical system so so the idea then in most approaches to understanding consciousness the assumption for human consciousness and animal consciousness is that brains are are going to be fundamental somehow or embodied brains and brains then somehow give rise to our conscious experiences so the matter in space and time is fundamental um and we'll see with pan psychism as phil goff talked about the idea is that space and time and particles are fundamental but the particles themselves um uh have consciousness are conscious so we'll talk about that but in this physical framework we have quotes like this from john searle at uc berkeley the brain is a machine it is a conscious machine so of course some machines can think can be conscious your brain and mine for example so so the idea is that somehow once you get a physical system such as a machine uh complicated enough in the right way then consciousness will emerge that's a functionalist point of view and presumably then that would work um for artificial intelligences uh we if we get them working in the right way maybe patterned after human brains but maybe patterned uh just out of the principles about consciousness then we could boot up consciousness in an ai as david chalmers put it back in 1996 one idea is that implementing the right computation the right algorithm suffices for rich conscious experience like our own so somehow your conscious experiences are really the consequence of a complex interaction of physical systems circuits in the brain or circuits in a computer and perhaps you need embodiment maybe the brain has to be an embodied brain that's interacting with an environment but somehow that kind of physical architecture will lead to consciousness from the raw ingredients that are not conscious and if this is right the idea is that eventually once we understand the program in the brain that is running human consciousness your consciousness has all your your hopes your fears your desires your memories your goals in life once we have all that we can you know we and understand how to decode that we can download presumably um your consciousness your memories uh into a computer and you could be immortal as long as the computer is running so in principle and many you know i a i think this may be possible that we'll be able to reverse engineer the the code of the brain that causes consciousness and um download your consciousness into a computer and give you some kind of immortality um so so the idea then is that you know your your sensory experiences sometimes they're called qualia um something as bright as all the splashes of color that we see or the feeling of pain or the taste of chocolate all of this qualitative experience that we have really is nothing but uh complicated programs running in physical systems or as we'll talk about in the pan cyclist idea that that consciousness is fundamental to the particles themselves and you know one one bit of evidence um in favor of this kind of point of view it comes from hemiachromatopsia so there are people who have a stroke in say the left hemisphere of the brain in an area called area v4 visual area four and for those people their color experience in the left visual world can be normal but in the right visual world they will only see shades of grey like like a black and white image because of the stroke to the left v4 and if you had the stroke on the right v4 instead you would have the reverse you would have color on the right and only black and white on the left visual field and you can also do this with magnets so you can take a normal person and take a transcranial magnetic stimulation device and touch it to the skull outside the um you know near the v4 area and inhibit it and when you do that the the normal person will report that all of their color experience drains away it just goes the color goes away and you just see black and white but then when you take the magnet away then they fill and experience the color rushing back into the visual field so that seems to be a a pretty important piece of evidence there's this tight correlation between manipulations of area v4 of visual cortex and the conscious experience of color so so and there this is one of many neural correlates of consciousness that have been discovered and that's one of the big uh areas of research that's going on right now in cognitive neuroscience of consciousness is to find neural correlates of consciousness and this this area v4 is one of of many now we know of course that um correlation does not imply causation rooster crows and sunrises are highly correlated and indeed often the rooster crow is before the sunrise but but none of us think that the rooster crow causes the sunrise and so we you know it's not enough to say that we've found these correlates these neural correlates or artificial intelligence correlates of consciousness um we need to actually have a scientific theory that explains exactly how the kind of physical activity of the brain or the ai system could possibly cause specific color experiences or specific taste experiences so we we need a scientific theory uh that explains the neural correlates of consciousness so the neural correlates are not a theory um not even close they're they are the data that need to be explained by a proposed theory of consciousness and it's turned out to be very very difficult uh this is this problem has been well known for centuries um the idea of trying to understand how conscious experiences could somehow be booted up by physical systems and their activity this was a problem that leibniz posed in his modelology 300 years ago so this is this is an old problem you know this we call the hard problem of consciousness but it's it's it's not a new problem it's it's been a mystery um thomas huxley said that we have as much insight into it as when uh you know aladdin uh rubbed his lamp and out came a genie right so yeah you you do something to the brain and now comes conscious experiences or conscious experiences go away but it's just as mysterious as a genie popping out of a lamp so but there have been a number of attempts to understand how we could relate in a scientific way uh our conscious experiences to the physical world of space and time and particles so um all of the approaches that i list here um all assume that space and time and physical particles are fundamental so the global workspace theory of bars and others has the idea that somehow it's um what's in working memory of of a com computing system the items that are in working memory and that are available broadly to the rest of the computational system somehow those are the ones that that enjoy conscious experiences although it's not um made clear how integrated information is perhaps the the most well-known right now and it it basically starts with space time and particles and says if particles have certain patterns of causal architecture a sort of an integrated information architecture that's quantified by something called fee then they can have um or give rise to conscious experiences so the that same physical system without the right causal architecture would not have consciousness but with the right causal architecture it somehow creates consciousness and then there's the work of penrose and hammeroff um where they suggest that somehow certain quantum states of microtubules in in neurons in the brain and certain orchestrated collapse of the quantum states of these of electrons in the microtubules somehow gives rise to conscious experiences in in in the brain and then there's pancychism which you heard about from phil goff where where they take space and time is fundamental uh and the particles are fundamental but the particles in addition to their their physical laws that they obey they also um are in fact themselves consciousness so so consciousness each particle has some element of consciousness an electron a proton and so forth have the unit of consciousness and when they combine to make uh you know an atom of some kind then you um will have a combination of the consciousnesses into new a new consciousness and also perhaps the subjects uh into a new subject so so the idea then is that the laws of physics are fundamental but though but the the things the entities behind the laws of physics you know what what drives the whole thing is are these units of consciousness so so the units of consciousness um are their behavior is captured by the laws of physics and uh and but the laws of physics don't tell you that these things also have consciousness inside them and then finally illusionism um which is a theory that keith frankish and um dan dennett and others propose is to say it's just space and time and particles and physical objects all the way down and there is no real thing as consciousness uh our feeling that we have consciousness or that other creatures might have consciousness is an illusion it's a user illusion it's it's just an artifact of certain um programs that are running in our brain introspection programs for example or could be uh how we represent our intentional system as in the attentional schema theory so that's also an illusion this kind of approach so there's all these many theories and stephen pinker who's a very famous cognitive neuroscientist and interested in the mind-body problem um he likes the global workspace theory and he points out that you know he thinks that consciousness consists of a global workspace representing our current goals memories and surroundings but then he he points out though even though he likes us there he points out that the last dollop in the theory that it subjectively feels like something to be such circuitry may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops and what what steve pinker is pointing out here is that the global workspace theory and this is true of all the other theories um all the other physical theories they're trying to boot up experiences from physical activity have been unable to give a concrete example one concrete example like the taste of chocolate or whatever so pinker is pointing out here that it's a great theory but it doesn't explain how or why it subjectively feels like something to be such circuitry and so pinker thinks that these theories will have to just stipulate this as a fact about reality where the explanation stops well so to be specific right what we want from all of these physicist theories is not just a hand wave about how conscious experiences might somehow arise from orchestrated claps of microtubules or somehow arise as integrated information or you know the contents of working memory what we want are specific experiences like the taste of chocolate what is the orchestrated collapse of microtubules that must be the quantum states of market treatment that must be the taste of chocolate and could not be say this the sound of a trumpet what is the global workspace architecture or contents that must be um the you know the taste of potatoes and could not be the you know the taste of a carrot um what is the um architecture that you know integrated information architecture that must be the smell of a rose and could not be the the smell of a lemon or what is you know again the the architecture of um that must be the sound of a saxophone and could not be you know the sound of a trumpet what's remarkable is that brilliant scientists have been working on this problem for decades and there is to date not a single specific conscious experience that can be explained not one and that's a remarkable failure that that there is for all the work that's been done by by brilliant brilliant uh research many of them friends of mine and colleagues um but there's not a single specific conscious experience that that can be explained by any of these theories not even close and that's why steve pinker said we may just have to um say that we have to stipulate the conscious experiences um we can't explain them so why is this well i want to offer an interesting idea about why i think these all these brilliant theorists have failed to boot up consciousness from inside space time and and this comes from something within physics itself um for a long time physics has been about space and time and what happens in space and time but recently physicists have discovered that their own theories of quantum field theory and gravity together entail and this is a quote that space time is doomed so this is what the physicists are saying space time is doomed and i'll i'll explain a couple reasons why so when you in physics if you want to measure uh something smaller and smaller like say measure a property of an electron and it's very very small well to to resolve a smaller and smaller object intuitively to see it you're going to need to use say light or some kind of radiation with smaller and smaller wavelengths you need small wavelengths to resolve small objects if the wavelength is too coarse then you can't resolve the thing that you're looking at so that's fine we can make light for example with smaller and smaller wavelengths and and in principle we can do this um as as fine as we want now quantum theory tells us that as we increase the frequency of the light or or reduce the wavelength so we make the wavelength smaller the energy of the light gets bigger and gets higher and higher so to resolve smaller objects you need more energy and this is why when you know physicists smash particles into each other to probe the very very small parts of space and time they need really high energies that like the large hadron collider in geneva so this seems a little bit counter-intuitive but to see really small you need lots of lots of energy well so in a world where there's just quantum theory that's no problem you could in principle just keep increasing the energy and making the wavelength smaller and resolve as far as you want indefinitely but it turns out that gravity spoils the picnic here because einstein's theory of relativity and gravity tell us that energy and mass are the same thing they're convertible so as you make more energy into a smaller smaller area of space um you're concentrating more mass in that area and and einstein's theory of gravity then says that you know as you put more mass into a small region of space the space curves and the more mass you put in there the more the curves and at some point you put if you raise the energy high enough you get enough mass that you create a black hole and you literally destroy the object you're trying to measure say the electron or the proton whatever it might be so so space time as it turns out by the time you get down to not very far is only 10 to the minus 33 centimeters by the time you get down to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters or 10 to the minus 43 seconds space and time cease to have any operational meaning they're just meaningless in terms of there's nothing operational that makes sense of them so so space and time or space time is doomed um at what we call the planck scale so that's uh that's that's one thought experiment and i can do another one later on if people are interested in more about this but but these kinds of thought experiments have have led physicists to to the conclusion that space-time cannot be fundamental um and they're looking for and they're finding new structures beyond space time so structures something called the amplitude cosmological polytopes association so physicists have already the new generation of physicists many of them have already let go of space and time and they've found they're taking a flashlight into the dark beyond space time and they're finding new structures that that in which there are no particles there is no quantum theory there is no space and time these are structures beyond all of that and but these structures then project down you can as a special case they can project down to space and time and and particles and so forth so so already the the hunt is on and is succeeding at leaving space time behind and going beyond it to deeper and more fundamental structures and and so space time we thought was fundamental but space time is doomed and you know i would have been impressed if you know space time went all the way down to say 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters i would say that's a pretty impressive data structure but it's only 10 to the minus 33 centimeters not 10 to the minus 33 trillion so space time gives up the ghost very very quickly it's it's a it's not a very deep data structure so the problem is that as you try to to measure things um smaller and smaller um you don't you don't have to go very small 10 to the minus 33 centimeters is all you have to go and you create black holes and all of a sudden space and time themselves make no sense so this has led many physicists to say that space time is doomed so ed whitton at the institute for advanced study princeton says everyone strength theory is convinced space time is doomed uh nathan cyborg also at princeton i'm almost certain that space and time are illusions these are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated and nema akane hamad also at princeton says the very notion of space time is not a fundamental one space time is doomed there is no such thing as space time fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics and and these guys are not just saying this they're actually going beyond space time and they're finding things they're finding the antitohedron and the cosmological polytope so it's it's really over for space-time it's not fundamental and just like uh newton's notion of space and time separately um you know was the bedrock of science for centuries but when einstein came along it was over for newton i mean if you were interested in a fundamental understanding of physics newtonian space and time were not it anymore it was it was einsteinian space time well now even einsteinian space time we realize is not fundamental that einstein's space-time is doomed and the physicists are finding much deeper structures and if you want we can talk a little bit more about the structures that they're finding and what's going on there um so that's one pillar of science it's um quantum field theory and einstein's theory of gravity tell us that space time is doomed but another pillar of science evolution by natural selection says the same thing it agrees that space and time cannot be fundamental and that therefore particles in space and time and physical objects in space and time are not fundamental so the um we can ask a specific technical question of darwin's theory of evolution the question is does natural selection favor um accurate or vertical perceptions this is a it turns out that darwin's theory has been made mathematically precise um and we can we can try to answer this kind of question um and when we start to when we just start to look at darwin's theory we um we do get some hints uh we have in the past of the evolution of illusion and so pinker stephen pinker in 2005 has a wonderful paper called so how does the mind work so how does the mind work and in that paper he he outlines um several intuitive reasons why um evolution might not favor or shape organisms to perceive accurately or perceive the truth about the world around them and the first is that to see the truth it takes time and energy it's costly to do that and so sometimes the racist to the swift it's if you if it takes you 10 minutes to figure out that that something's about to kill you well that that may not be so good so you need to be able to do things quickly so we often in evolution find that we sacrifice truth for speed we sometimes have to have hypotheses make inferences about nature and those inferences that we make are based on our prior experience in the the hypotheses we bring to to our experience the so-called priors but priors can be fallible you know what you assume about reality may or may not be true so given that we're going to be making inferences based on our past assumptions our our inferences are only as good as the accuracy of those assumptions social pressures often we um have an in-group and an out group and we need to um express certain opinions and beliefs to to be in a group or out of a group so there are social pressures that shape us not necessarily to believe the truth but to believe whatever is convenient for social convenience intellectual virtuosity this is particularly true among academics that you may offer ideas or claim to have ideas um simply because they're exotic and make you look smart whether or not they're truthful and finally it turns out that for humans for example um we're a cooperative species and if everybody cooperates that that works if we're hunter gatherers and we go out and and um hunt and gather and it's you know tom doesn't get something today but bill does and bill shares with tom tomorrow then tom will share with bill if you get something so everybody goes out there and does their best to hunt and gather and then and then shares then and we cooperate then it's good for for the species but it turns out when you do the analysis that um if tom decides look everybody else is hunting and gathering i'm just going to go sit down by the river and take it easy i'll just hide there and not risk life and limb and just come back and say i couldn't find anything and could i have some of yours so those are those are the people who are not cooperating they're defecting they're they're deceiving and it turns out when you do the analysis of using evolutionary game theory if if there's just one deceiver and everybody else is a cooperator being a deceiver is a wonderfully fit strategy because you're not risking life in limb and you're still getting fed whereas everybody else is risking life and limb but if everybody is a deceiver and no one's hunting and gathering then the whole thing collapses right because no one's bringing home any food so so you have the idea though that there's going to be some selection pressures for people to deceive and then it turns out that you'll you can show that that there'll be selection pressures for the um the cooperators to detect the deceivers so you figure out who's lying to them and to you know figure out the liars and and then to punish them so you start getting our moral emotions and so forth wanting to punish people and so forth as part of this reinforcement of trying to get people to cooperate instead of deceiving but it turns out you get an evolutionary arms race as the cooperators get good at finding the deceivers the deceivers can get better and better at deceiving and so you get this this race where you get better um detection better deception and robert trivers a famous evolutionary theorist um pointed out that the best deceiver is someone who has evolved to the point where they don't even know that they're lying they're self-deceived they think that they're telling the truth and that way they don't betray with blushing skin or shifting eyes or whatever body language that they're that they're lying so trevor's argues that we have selection pressures to be not only lying to others but even lying to ourselves so we've been shaping natural selection not even to know our own motives so let's so there's these kinds of notions of illusion that have been out there for quite a while in evolutionary theory and without going into the mathematics i'll just say that evolution by natural selection is a mathematically precise theory and we have the replicator equation which is here um which you can use now to frame and answer very precise questions and so the the the question i'm gonna ask is does evolution of natural selection shape sensory systems to perceive the truth about the world around them to perceive truly and the key notion that i want to talk about is the notion of fitness in evolutionary theory because that's the key idea that is in that equation so if i have a t-bone stake and ask what is the fitness payoff that that stake offers say to very various organisms say a hungry lion well if it is a hungry lion then that t-bone steak would offer a lot of fitness payoffs for for the lion if if the lion is not hungry but it's it's um it's wanting to mate then that t-bone steak is not been offered any fitness payoffs at all and for a rabbit uh for any action in any state of the rabbit the t-bone steak probably has very little fitness payoff or for a cow for example so you can see that um fitness depends on whatever the world is in this example i'm using t-bone steak as an example of the world but that's you know i'm not claiming that t books one stakes are real so whatever the world is fitness depends on that but also on the organism like lion versus rabbit it's state like hungary versus sated and the action like feeding fighting fleeing and mating so fitness payoff functions are really complicated functions of the world the organism its state and its action and so in simulations with some graduate students of mine justin mark bryan marion and [Music] and others kyle stevens we found that organisms that we allowed to see the truth in the simulations could not out-compete organisms of equal complexity that didn't see the truth and were just tuned to the fitness payoffs so we when we got this result around 2010 i then went to a mathematician and decided it's worth trying to prove a theorem here and so i went to chaitan prakash i've also worked with manish singh um and chris fields and others but but jayton prakash was the the key mathematician on this and and chaitan proved a series of results which show that effectively the probability of zero that any sensory system of any organism has ever been shaped to see any aspect of the truth or the true structure of the world around us probability is precisely zero so it's it's truly stunning that here we see evolution of natural selection telling us that our perception of objects in space-time is not the truth the probability that it is the truth is zero and that's exactly what physicist physicists are finding as well with the space time is doomed work that they've they've come up so the two main pillars of modern science evolution of natural selection and quantum field theory with gravity both are telling us that space-time and its objects are not fundamental that's a stunning result so how shall we understand space and time and physical objects if you know if space time isn't fundamental what is and and what is it that we're seeing and what's interesting is that our scientific theories are wonderful because they tell us where space time stops they say you know space time um is not fundamental and in fact it it isn't even a useful data structure after 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and evolution by natural selection tells us that space time and its objects um are not the truth but those theories don't tell us what the truth is and they can't that's all they can do is say within the framework of the theory i can tell you that space time is not fundamental and physical objects are not fundamental but those but those scientific theories themselves can't tell us what's beyond so we have to make a creative leap we have to go beyond space time and and posit a brand new theory beyond space time and that new theory then has to be mathematically precise and when we project it down into space time we we have to get back um like evolution of natural selection and quantum field theory as special projections of this deeper deeper theory so so intuitively what i can say is a way to think about what evolution of natural selection is telling us is that we're not seeing the truth we're seeing something that guides adaptive action right so because evolution is about acting adaptively staying alive long enough to reproduce so that that suggests a an interesting metaphor in which space-time and objects aren't the truth they're just a user interface like a virtual reality interface to to a game so it could be a game like grand theft auto or something like that and and so there you are if you're in the game you can see various cars um you know i turned my vr headset to the right i might see a red camaro i turn my headset to the left i might see a white porsche when i turn my head headset to the right i create the red camaro when i look there is no red camaro when i look to the left and see a white porsche i create that white white porsche there's there's no white portion in reality those are all just um my constructions what i'm interacting with in this metaphor is a supercomputer somewhere i don't even have to know about that and diodes and resistors and voltages and magnetic fields and when i turn the steering wheel and step on the gas and so forth what i'm really doing is manipulating you know voltages toggling voltages in some supercomputer that i don't even see and that's great the the vr interface lets me control that reality control that supercomputer without even knowing what that what that computer is so i just have little eye candy like a steering wheel and cars and so forth gas pedals that let me control reality even though i am completely ignorant about what that reality is and that seems to be what evolution by natural selection did for us it um lets us play the game of life it gives us our senses our perception of space and time and objects as a virtual reality interface that lets us act adaptively and play the game of life without even knowing what the reality is that we're interacting with we don't need to know the truth to to win the game in fact if you um had to know the truth to play this game and you were in the super computer and toggling voltages as fast as you could to try to drive a car you would lose to someone who actually was just using a virtual reality headset and knew nothing about the truth so so actually knowing the truth gets in the way of playing the game so that's why evolution apparently has shaped us not to see the truth it just gave us a simplified virtual reality headset or you can think about what evolution is done as like a desktop interface on your computer so if you're uh you're writing a book or writing an email uh or paper or something like that and the the icon for your your your paper is blue and rectangular and in the lower right corner of your screen does that mean that your paper itself or your book is in the lower right hand corner of your computer and that is blue and rectangular not at all anybody without that misunderstands the whole point of the desktop interface is not there to show you the truth of the computer which is again the diodes and resistors and voltages the the interface is there to hide the truth and give you simple eye candy like blue blue icons that lets you control all the diodes and resistors without having to know anything about them now if you had to toggle voltages to send an email your friends would never hear from you so you don't want to see the truth you want something to hide the truth but let you manipulate the truth even though you're arbitrarily ignorant about the truth so that seems to be what evolution has done for us so space and time and objects are not the truth they're just a really dumbed down user interface that gets us through the day so you could think about it this way the view of objects that i've been talking about is like this um so-called neckercube when you look at this you probably see a cube in three dimensions popping out of the screen and sometimes you'll see that face is in front other times you might see that face in front when you're not looking at the at the screen which faces in front is it that face or that face well the question seems pretty silly there's neither face is the other cube is there when you don't look is just a flat screen so the cube only exists when you look you create the cube when you look the screen is flat so any 3d that you're seeing is your construction and you have two different constructions you make and you flip back and forth between them you'll see one cube and then it'll flip and you'll see the other cube but you are creating the three-dimensional cube and also if you notice the cube has a volume inside of it you're actually creating space you're actually creating a visual perception of 3d space and so the the object that you're perceiving the 3d object does not exist when you don't look you create it in the active observation and that's effectively what evolution of natural selection is telling us that all objects are the same way you create them when you look and you delete them when you look away now an obvious objection to this is there are a number of objections and i'm sure we'll get more in the q a but one objection that's obvious is well look if you think that icon that that train coming down the track at 200 miles an hour is just an icon on your desktop why don't you step in front of it and after you're dead and in your silly theory with you you will know that the train was real and and it really can't kill and that's that's a fallacious argument i wouldn't step in front of the train for the same reason um we'll see i'll go move forward now i guess i'll go back here so i wouldn't stem for the train for the same reason that i wouldn't carelessly drag this icon to the trash can if i drag that icon to the trash can um i will lose i could lose a lot of work so i'm i take this icon seriously if i drag it to the trash i could lose a lot of work but i don't take it literally and that's the point we must take our physical object experiences seriously evolution says that they were shaped to keep us alive if you don't take them seriously you you won't survive so if you see a snake don't pick it up if you see a cliff don't step off you must take your perception seriously but that does not entitle you to take them literally so that's just a simple error that we make but with a psychologically compelling argument that because i must take my perceptions seriously therefore that means i must take them literally another argument is um look that um train everybody would would agree that they see a train and since we all see the train clearly it must be that the train really exists right tom joe mary samantha they all they all agree that i see a train with some blue on it and white on it and red on it since we all agree clearly we're all seeing the truth but and and we're not making it up but again we all see a cube but there is no cube we're all hallucinating the cube when we look at the screen so the fact that we agree does not mean that we see the truth it just means that we are using the same kind of user interface but we don't see the truth so then the question becomes well how shall we begin to understand consciousness and its relationship to the physical world and what becomes clear is that the physicalist framework um is false from the very start space and time are doomed space time is doomed and also reductionism is doomed and physicists are very very clear about this nema arakani ahmed the physicist has pointed out very very clearly that the doom of spacetime spacetime also means the doom of reductionism going to smaller and smaller scales of space will not give us inevitably deeper and more fundamental laws of nature at some point space and time just give up and science has to continue to get deeper theories but not in a reductionist physicalist framework so so reductionism is dead and and this also poses a a real serious problem so so so it poses a problem for the physicist approaches that i mentioned before like integrated information theory global workspace theory and um you know other orchestrated collapse of microtubules these theories all assume that space time and particles are fundamental those assumptions are false so therefore those physicalist theories just have no chance no the the researchers who are working on those theories are brilliant but when you have false assumptions you you can't you just can't succeed if we were starting with earth air fire and water good luck anybody it doesn't matter how smart you are if you're starting with earth air fire and water that's just the wrong starting point to boot up a theory of consciousness it doesn't matter how smart you are so you can't boot it up a physicalist theory from from space time and particles but it's also now a problem for pan psychism um because what the pancychists do is they they say that um we're going to take space-time and particles as fundamental so space-time is fundamental the the leptons quarks and bosons are fundamental but each each of those particles also has consciousness inside of it and so now consciousness is being strapped to laws of particles inside space-time where the particles space-time and the laws are not fundamental and so we're tying consciousness to entities which our best science are telling us is not fundamental we might as well be tying consciousness to earth air fire and water we also know that those are not fundamental so so that's why i i think the pan psychism has a serious problem here uh taking it would have been fine 20 or 30 years ago but now that physicists have discovered that space time is doomed and that the laws of you know particle behavior are not the fundamental laws then pan psychism shouldn't tie itself to laws that we know are not fundamental so how should we proceed then you know what's left well the direction that my colleagues and i are looking at is to say let's start with consciousness and let's try to boot up space-time and particles and eventually things like brains so instead of starting with space-time and physical objects and trying to boot up consciousness we know that our best scientific theories tell us you can't do that because space time is not fundamental so let's let's go the other way let's let's get a theory of consciousness not strapped to the laws of physics as pan psychism does so pan psychism straps primitive consciousnesses to obey the laws of physics well we know that those laws of physics are not fundamental so that's there's there's no reason to strap our theory of consciousness to those laws of physics instead what we want is to be have a deeper theory of consciousness completely transcending space and time that completely beyond the laws of physics and this deeper theory then must give rise to space and time it has to actually show how space time arises and how the laws of physics arise as a special projection of a much richer theory so the idea will be that that the dynamics of consciousness could be extremely rich much much richer than the structure of space-time and the laws of quantum field theory and so forth inside space-time so if we tried to just as as pan-psychism does try to just attach consciousness to the little particles in space-time we would be hamstringing ourselves we would only be looking at a projection of a much richer dynamics of consciousness that's possible so that's the direction that we're pursuing here we start with the mathematical model of consciousness on its own terms not as having arisen from some physical system and then we show how physical systems arise from consciousness and its dynamics that's that's the goal and uh if i have another set of slides if if there's time and there's interest i can go into the mathematics so right now i'll just talk at high level about the the idea of consciousness that we're working on but if people are interested um i have slides prepared i can just go to another little presentation and show you the mathematics but the but here i'll just say the intuition it's we have a notion of a conscious agent and intuitively a conscious agent has just two basic properties it has experiences like the experience of a headache or the color green or something like that it has experiences and all agents have their own experiences and the experiences of an agent can affect the experiences of other agents that's the only assumptions so and that's the sort of a goal with scientific theory is to have as few assumptions as possible because everything you assume is something you're not ex you're not explaining you're assuming so you want to have as few assumptions as possible and then boot up everything else so i mean when we think about consciousness we want you know a conscious agents for example we would want to understand learning memory problem solving intelligence the notion of a self free will there's lots of things that you would like a theory of consciousness to deal with but if i threw all those into to begin with and as my assumptions then i wouldn't be explaining anything so so we start off with we think is the minimal starting set for a a general theory of consciousness conscious agents are entities that have conscious experiences and influence the conscious experiences of other agents those are the the only assumptions and then the mathematics of it is something called markovian kernels we can talk about that if you want so think about it as a vast social network like the twitterverse this is this really is this like modern social media where you have um various conscious agents tweeting and following and so forth so you have all these links and connections and and what one one agent tweets another one follows and maybe uh retweets and so forth so so you have this this this network dynamics and that's the idea so it's this network of conscious agents it's not a network in space and time it's a network of agents that are entirely outside of space and time and the idea is that when you look at the long-term behavior of these agents like in the twitter verse if you look at the trends what's trending in twitter that's the long-term behavior on twitter when you look at the long-term behavior it turns out that the long-term behavior of the conscious agents plugs into the structures that the physicists are finding beyond space-time like the amplitude so so the physicists have been starting with space-time and looking for structures behind space-time they found things like the amplitude and it turns out the amplitude fundamentally is all the physical invariant data is captured in permutations um so behind space time or is the amplitude at the foundation of the amplitude is permutations and it turns out now we go the other way we start with these networks of conscious agents we look at their long-term behavior and it turns out the long-term behavior is much more general than permutations but it has a canonical projection you can simplify the behavior of the conscious station network down to permutations so so the idea would be the the dynamics of consciousness is very very rich far far richer than permutations but you can project it to permutations when you do that then you can go through the amplitude and create space time as a dumbed-down user interface that some agents use to understand and interact with other agents so so you can see that the big idea here then instead of starting with space time as fundamental and particles in rooting of conscious agents or consciousness we start with consciousness a network of conscious agents and we boot up space time so that's once again the difference between this point of view and the panzika's point of view here i'm taking consciousness is fundamental it's not a fundamental part of property of particles it's a fundamental part property of of agents beyond space time and beyond particles and particles are just a little user interface description that some agents use but there would be many many other interfaces space time is just one there are countless other interfaces what humans see is just one small sample of the kind of interfaces that are available so once again spacetime is not fundamental it's just a user interface so the idea then is that we start with a network of conscious agents and from that network we boot up the virtual reality interface that we call space-time and physical objects so if we start with consciousness as being fundamental then there there is a an interesting question that is what is consciousness up to and why what what is consciousness doing right and right when we think about consciousness inside space and time we often think about it in terms of evolutionary theory and we say well you know consciousness maybe helps you to survive somehow or uh you know maybe maybe it was an accident but maybe it helped us to survive but now we have to think completely differently space and time are not fundamental evolutionary theory is not fundamental consciousness itself is fundamental so what is consciousness up to in i don't know but and i've only found one idea that i think is deep enough so far to to take seriously i'm not saying that this is right but it's at least deep enough to to be interesting and to take seriously and it comes from a guy named kirk girdle around 1930 he proved uh what are called as incompleteness theorems girdles and completeness theorems and what girdle discovered was that effectively the exploration of mathematical truths is unending there there is no way to be omniscient about mathematical truths and what's interesting about that idea then is that if consciousness is fundamental and consciousness is all there is then mathematics is all and only about consciousness and that means since mathematics is endless the exploration of mathematics is endless then that means the the exploration of the possible varieties of consciousness and conscious experiences is also endless and so maybe what consciousness is doing is exploring its own possibilities and it's a theorem that that exploration will never stop and so maybe that's what consciousness is up to it's it's constantly exploring itself and so in that case what's happening right now where we you know where we go to classes and we talk and we have question and answer we have lectures and so forth this is just consciousness um in space and using space time as a virtual reality and and exploring some of his possibilities so that would be what we're doing right now would be just an example of consciousness um just putting on a headset and and exploring one of many many different possibilities this is we have only 3d space there could be worlds in which there are attendee spaces or in which the very notion of a dimension of a space is irrelevant there's there is no dimension there's something else and which there are instead of three um axes of color uh hue there you know instead of just like a red green and blue photoreceptor system we could have you know 30 or 50 or or something completely different so our perceptions are just one of of countless different perceptions and so one theory then is that according to girls in completeness theorem um applied to consciousness being fundamental we would say that maybe consciousness is exploring all of its possibilities and i'm not again i'm not saying that that's right but it's an interesting hypothesis to explore we should look for others and help them compete um what about time but time seems to be an important feature of of our lives and it's it's it's a limited resource you know in some sense many theories time is the fundamental limited resource and you know that's so where what how does time come about um and does is time fundamental in in consciousness or not and it turns out it's quite interesting that the dynamics of conscious agents that we've developed um need not have an arrow of time by era of timing physicists talk about entropy and you know you know second law of thermodynamics says that as uh time moves on things fall apart things become more disordered and those are tightly coupled so the second law of thermodynamics entropy is always non-decreasing and the arrow of time are tightly linked but we can it's easy for us to write down many different dynamics of conscious agents in which there is no arrow of time no entropic error of time but it turns out that when we it's a simple theorem that when you project the dynamics on onto any projection by conditional probability then you will induce an apparent arrow of time it is an artifact of the projection so it's not a fundamental aspect of reality it would be an artifact of projections you take a dynamics of consciousness which is timeless so consciousness itself could have a timeless dynamics no entropic time but any view of it any looking at it from any particular view necessarily it's a theorem it necessarily creates the illusion of an arrow of time and so that leads to a very interesting possibility that that maybe the realm of conscious agents maybe it's a realm in which we it's there's cooperation there's no competition and there's no limited resources but when you look at that realm by projection as an artifact of that projection you get limited resources and therefore you get competition and you get evolution of a natural selection and that whole process is uh not fundamental it's an artifact of the projection just like space-time and particles and the laws of physics are not fundamental they just arise because they're properties of a projection so in this is the kind of direction we will have to go because if we if we take consciousness as fundamental we have to show how we can boot up space and time and how we could boot up evolution financial selection um as projections of the dynamics of consciousness that's what we have to do as scientists so so there's a lot of work ahead but it's really promising that as a theorem that at least for the time part it's a theorem that um a timeless dynamics of conscious agents will necessarily project you know when you have more coding dynamics it necessarily projects to um a uh something looks like it has an error of time an entropic error of time as an artifact so from that point of view the whole history of our universe from the big bang and perhaps going back to a big crunch or to a cold and tropic death we're not really sure how it's going to to go or or ripping a part of the space time in the limit that whole notion of a big bang and time evolving and so forth would be not fundamental it would i mean it would be a projection it would be an artifact of a projection of a timeless dynamics of conscious agents but but when you take a projection then time arises as an illusion and you get the big bang and and physical evolution and um you know particles and organisms as an artifact so that's that's the direction we would want to to go with this uh so now getting back to let's see how i'm doing the time oh i'm a little over uh should i should i quit pretty quick well i'll go ahead and just wrap it up here um so when you see your face in the mirror you know firsthand that what you see is just skin hair and eyes but but behind that is the realm of your conscious experiences your face is just a portal behind your face is the realm of your all of your conscious experiences with the cat the portal is dimmer with the mouse it's dimmer still with microbes the portal into consciousness is very very dim and with rocks um our interface gives up but that's no surprise the whole point of of an interface is to simplify things um and and hide most of the truth so it's no surprise what this means is the distinction that we make between living and non-living is not fundamental it's an artifact of the limits of our interface similarly the distinction we make between conscious and unconscious is not fundamental it's an artifact of the limitations of our interface so this is a radical implication of this approach um is it possible to open new portals into the realm of conscious agents um i think so i think i think once we understand uh this network of conscious agents and how space time arises as a user interface then i think that we'll be able to reverse engineer the whole thing and and play with the software behind space time and open up new interfaces uh within space time we already have one technology for doing that that we know and it's having kids every time you have a child a new interface into a new portal into the realm of conscious agents opens up so if we can reverse engineer that we may be able to open up new portals and they may look like artificial intelligence um so i'll before i say thanks to my call i'll just say one thing one question that often arises so about this whole view i said earlier on that evolution of natural selection entails that the probability is zero that any of our perceptions are true right so space and time and physical objects are not the truth they're just a user interface and now all of a sudden i'm saying that if you look at a person's face that's a portal into consciousness so now you are getting uh a window into truth you're getting uh uh you're getting something true about the person's consciousness so how haven't i contradicted myself haven't i got myself in shooting myself in the foot and the answer is no you have to understand how science works here it's two steps the first step is you take evolution of natural selection and you study that theory because it's the best theory we've got in this area and that theory tells you very clearly everything that you see is not the truth it's just a user interface but it doesn't tell you an interface to what so so natural evolution of natural selection saying look space and time and physical objects they're not the reality there's a deeper reality but i can't tell you what that reality is so natural selection can't tell you what it is it can just tell you that whatever that deeper reality is the probability is zero that it's space and time and physical objects and laws of physics and particles that that i can tell you that is ruled out space time and particles and physical objects are ruled out that's not the reality but it can't tell you what the reality is so now second step is to say okay as a scientist i now am going to make a new step and i'm going to propose that the reality behind space and time is consciousness and if that's the case then i can say that when you look at a person's face you are you could be getting genuine insight into their conscious experiences but that's notice that's a new hypothesis beyond the evolutionary one and this is what we have to do all the time in in as we go from one level of scientific theory to the next the scientific theory tells us where it stops we have to make a creative leap and go beyond so so it's not logically shooting my self from the foot to say evolution of a natural selection tells us that we don't that what we see is not the truth and then to say well okay space and time and objects aren't the truth but i'm going to propose that consciousness is the truth and so when i look at a face and get hints about consciousness i am getting a true insight and that doesn't contradict the the work on evolution is just saying that the face itself is not literally the truth but it is a portal to the truth it's it's a user interface to the truth and the truth is the consciousness of the person behind the face so that just gives you an idea about the logic of how this thing works and the kinds of arguments that could come against it the first one is from lily spector have you tested your mathematical formula of truth on altered states of consciousness for example with psychedelics well that's going to be a very interesting direction to explore for two reasons when we have psychedelic experiences the question is are we just hitting the head with a hammer basically we're just messing up the brain and then you know what we see is just you know an error something messed up or is it possible and this is now becomes possible with this theory of conscious agents is it possible that somehow drugs themselves the right drugs could open up new portals into this realm of conscious agents and so i if you if you're a physicalist the answer is very very clear there is no realm of consciousness beyond space time space and time are fundamental so um the there's absolutely no way that the the psychedelic drugs are opening up new portals into new varieties of consciousness they're just sort of screwing with your brain and messing it up like as if someone hit you with a hammer or something but but with the conscious agent theory it leaves open the possibility that maybe some psychedelics not all but maybe some are opening up genuine portals so what we have to do is take the mathematical model of consciousness the conscious agent theory we have to do that entire mapping that i that i outlined where we have to take the long-term behavior of conscious agents the asymptotic behavior take the projection of that down onto permutations and then use the permutations to go through the amplitude into space-time the part that the physicists give us once we have that whole mapping we can then ask okay how do we how do we get faces to be portals into consciousness once we understand that and how do we open up new portals like having kids then we can ask finally get to this technical question that that lily asked which is could it be that psychedelics open up new portals so you can see we have a lot of work to do but this framework makes it at least conceivable that we could find that the answer is yes and we understand how it works and that then we could engineer even better um new portals into the the um realm of conscious agents and this by the way gives us a different twist on the fermi paradox right the fermi paradox enrico fermi is famous for talking about um alien intelligence is saying where are they right this big question is where are they we can't find them well the answer that conversation theory would give is um they're all around you take off your headset you're looking inside your headset but they're all around you there's conscious agents everywhere so so we're we've been looking it's like you have your headset a virtual reality headset on there's people all around you and you can't see them you're looking inside your all i have to do is take the headset off and you'll see them there so we may be looking in the wrong places um sure we have some portals our headset gives us some portals into the consciousness but very very few um you you if you want to see the content more conscious just take your headset off so that would be an interesting new approach to the fermi paradox that's fascinating and terrifying at the same time so next one here is from christina the infinite exploration of possibilities makes me think of the spiritual idea that we're all manifestation of god exploring itself i believe spiritual or religious ideas could provide valuable ideas for further scientific exploration have you any thoughts on that i i completely agree i think that this is a chance for science and spirituality to begin to seriously cooperate right recently it's you know since galileo for example it's it's been sort of bad blood between science and and religion but and the physicalist framework of science has been you know inimical to most spiritual traditions where they spiritual traditions have been saying that space time is doomed that space time is not fundamental and but and and physics scientists have now just in the last 20 30 years realize that's right but and we can prove it space time is doomed it's not fundamental so i think now the the door is open for science and spirituality to to really begin to to interact i think that the that scientists can listen to some of the insights that the spiritual traditions have have had and and i'm not saying that you know we should take everything at face value of course we just like we do with our scientific theories we we come at it with care we're careful we test everything and we try to find out what what ideas are reasonable and work out and which ideas are are less fruitful so so i'm not saying just accept everything that the spiritual traditions say but i i would say have a very fruitful and respectful dialogue and scientists can do something for the spiritual traditions which is spiritual traditions talk a lot about um pointers what you know that like the tao de ching the dao that can be spoken is not the the true doubt and so all they only talk about pointers and in the the buddhists say the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon it's just a finger pointing to the moon and so the the point is that all these the oral traditions and the writings of the spiritual traditions are not to be taken as the truth but pointers to the truth well science can help us evolve the pointers and get better and better pointers so for example the the pointer that um the the dow that can be spoken is not the true dal but we now have girdles in completeness theorem that's that's what the dalai la ching is starting with is girls in completeness there but we now have a proof of that and the intuition of the spiritual tradition the space time isn't fundamental we now have a theorem space time is doomed so you can see that as we start to move in this direction science and spirituality can go back and forth um and one really good thing that science brings to the table here is humans tend to be dogmatic scientists included we're dogmatic just like everybody else but science as a social institution pits scientists against each other and as a social institution science is not dogmatic as we see science can think that for for hundreds of years that space and time or space time is fundamental and then wake up and say oh wow space time is doomed that's that's anti-dogmatism right there you know centuries of dogma have are being overturned as we speak so that's what we really need as we pursue the spiritual realm because we the we haven't had the precise tools in the spiritual we've had of course meditation and first-person experience which is really important but we've not had the benefit of the the formal mathematics and by the way it's not that the mathematics could ever be the whole truth i agree with the dalai lama ching the dao that can be spoken is is not the true doubt and girdle tells us the same thing but what's really interesting is for some reason consciousness does play with forms it does explore even though consciousness itself will always transcend space and time and what it can do in space time or any thing it always but somehow it's very important for consciousness maybe what consciousness has to do is put on a virtual reality headset plunge itself in to a new virtual environment explore that lose itself completely lose even lose its identity doesn't even know that it's consciousness it thinks it's a little tiny creature inside this vast you know 93 billion light years across space time and it slowly wakes up over a lifetime or maybe not maybe he dies at age 70 and never woke up but but it what it's doing is is immersing itself very seriously learning what it can and then it takes death is taking the headset off and moving to the next to the next game and the next so so you can see there's a lot of possibility between science and spirituality going forward and and and again it needs to be respect from both sides but both sides will have to give up a lot that they hold very dear that's how things work giving up space time is a real painful one for the scientists but they're having to give it up you will have to give up our pet ideas in many cases or find that there are new ideas that are far more deep and insightful than the ones that we thought were the final word okay i love that viewpoint i think it's a really interesting uh perspective and if that is the case if that's what's happening with consciousness it sort of places responsibility on the individual to make an interesting and worthwhile experience as well i suppose um is anybody from here want to come forward yeah please do just introduce yourself and yeah uh hi donald uh my name is alex uh quick question most of your examples i mean i think all of them uh to explain your views are based on digital world examples so the 3d cube the video games the desktop have you considered that living through this invention influenced your views so because i would think that explaining what you explained without those examples would be very hard because it's only by having this notion of something in an analog in a real world and in digital world can you see the difference because what i would think um and i still believe in the view that we actually yes i completely agree that we see a very very simplified version of the reality but it is still reality and my example of it would be driving a car where by steering a wheel you cannot of course know exactly what's going on inside the car but you can you can still see like a little part of that reality and perhaps yes space-time is tuned but not in terms of not being true but in terms of again just another simplified version and yes we can dig deeper and deeper and deeper but i would think that this digital world must stop our heads and now it gives you a very good ground of explaining your theory just because of you have this example and in grand scheme of things it's just a flick we will invent many many other things and we will be able to explain maybe through some very different ways of thinking um that the reality is some sort of other way but i'm saying that this current state of explanation and your views are heavily influenced by having this digital example of having hardware and software completely separated have you considered that a great question so so a couple a couple of thoughts on that the evolution of natural selection has is just simply a theorem of that theory that the probability of zero that space time and its objects are fundamental that that but it doesn't tell us how to think about them it just says that whatever the reality is is not what you see and now the physicists are finding the same thing is is simply a theorem of quantum field theory together with with gravity that the probability is zero that that space time is fundamental and what's happening and i should i didn't say let me just say what's happening on the physics side because they're not using my my metaphor at all and then that's not stopping them so the the metaphor isn't what's really driving the the the virtual reality interface metaphors and what's driving i just use that to help people out to to grok the idea because it's so counter-intuitive but here's what the physicists are doing the physicists um they're trying to explain scattering processes like in the large hadron collider like two gluons go smashing into each other four gluons go spraying out and it turns out when you try to do that using space-time physics like quantum field theory um you use feynman diagrams and you have to compute all the these loops and definement diagrams it turns out just to do two gluons in four gluons out it takes billions of terms to compute the scattering probability what they call scattering amplitude billions of terms hundreds of pages and it was such a big problem for the experimentals trying to do you know collisions that they beg the theorists to to simplify it and in 1986 two mathematicians worked really hard and they they collapsed the hundreds of pages down to nine pages and then they published it and everybody was going wow that's that's amazing that they and then those guys they spent so much time with it they guessed a one-term answer and it turned out to be right it's called the park taylor formula it came out in 1986 it collapsed billions of terms into one term and people were stunned this was a hint that doing things inside space time was missing it was making it unreasonably hard so they began to look for other examples and they found example after example and by the time we got to the amplitude so that's in 2013 the amplitude was published what they find is all these if when you do all the computations in space time so use space and time is fundamental you get these nasty nasty billions of terms i mean just billions of terms hundreds of pages when you do it when you let go of space time and use the new structures that they're finding so you just say forget space time let's go deep there by the way forget quantum theory what's what they're going they're leaving hilbert spaces behind so you leave hilbert spaces in einstein's space time you leave them behind you go into this new realm of the amplitude and you discover the math becomes trivial you can compute these amplitudes by hand and second you discover new symmetries something called the dual conformal symmetry that you cannot see in space-time so what happens is space-time is a really terrible interface it's making the computations built literally billions of times harder than they have to be and it's hiding symmetry so so now the physicists are really on board they don't know what this realm of beyond space time is but whatever it is there are beautiful symmetries there that that they're discovering and the math becomes easy so so the younger generation is just all in now they're they're you know newmar connie on bed and so forth and they don't have this user interface metaphor that i'm talking about so so the spacetime is doomed stuff is completely under independent of that but i'll say this the new generation that's being raised on the metaverse they're just going to get this right they spend a few hours in the metaverse on a daily basis they take their headset off it's going to be a no-brainer that i'm not seeing the truth it'll just be obvious to them that it's very very likely that what they're seeing in space and time is just another headset and they'll they'll be the ones that can then really take the physics that the amplitude heat and so forth to to the next level because they won't have any hangups about letting go of space time they'll just they'll be they'll be done with space time so so the metaverse and you know virtual reality is a good metaphor for us i think it'll eventually be a help but it's definitely not what's motivating the physicist they're letting go space-time for their own reasons thank you for the talk i think a lot of interesting points i think we all agree that we don't see reality as it is that will be highly inefficient uh some video another one i wanted to ask on one point in particular that you brought up a number of times being the incompleteness theorem now my understanding of this if i remember my uni education correctly is that it states you can either have contradictions in the system or there will be theorems that are true but unprovable within a system complex enough i what i'm trying to understand is the implications on physics or philosophy or everyone frame that from those statements right so so so most you can't prove that the consistency of the mathematics and then girdle shows that you can have it's either cons consistent and incomplete or it can be complete and inconsistent i guess and and no one really goes for the inconsistency because if it's inconsistent then then the whole thing unravels so everybody interprets pretty much that that what girdle is telling us is that um that any finite accidentization of mathematics will always be incomplete and and therefore what that means by the way for science since our scientific theories in general are mathematically precise and have you know at least the power of arithmetic um girl's incompleteness theorem applies to our scientific theories every scientific theory um leaves out infinitely many possibilities of of truths that that are things that are true given the axioms but cannot be proven by the set of vaccines themselves so what that means um is that there can be no theory of everything in science there is no theory of everything there can only be a theory of everything except my assumptions the assumptions of a scientific theory are the miracles of that theory and of course you can then say well i'll give you a new theory that um explains those assumptions but then your your new theory will have its own assumptions and this this is never ending so the good news from girdle and from this there's no scientific theory of everything is that there is infinite job security for scientists this is really good news for us so so we should rejoice brilliant okay one more question is to finish off your donald um i'm just curious about your um how he has exploring consciousness for all these years impacted your own sort of sense of spirituality and i know recently you've had a brush with your own mortality i'm just curious about what your thoughts are on on death and how your theory relates to that well yeah yeah i i covet um damaged my heart and just about killed me about a year ago and i'm still recovering it's it's a very very long and slow recovery so yeah it uh i i actually faced death and said goodbye to my wife i thought it was over about a year ago so really you know it takes it from the abstract and makes it a very real um real thing and i must say like like any normal human being um i'm inconsistent so right now i'm talking all the science and saying space time is is doomed and it's not fundamental and so forth but as soon as i start talking and i go walking around in everyday world i i behave and feel like i'm in the real world you know the the the car is really there so i it's it's but what spiritual traditions do is right they they get you to wake up in a more not just intellectual sense but to really experience yourself um as not inside space and time and so i i meditate um and maybe i'm a real hard nut to crack i even with all the the science that i've been studying um i i go around believing the space time is fundamental and physical objects are fundamental and worried about death a lot of the automatic worries about death but when i when i'm when i really sit back and and dispassionately looking at it the evidence is all very clear that death must be just taking off a headset so so part of me part of me knows that the intellectual part of me it hasn't gotten through the entire um subcortical limbic system the limbic system is still afraid of death and maybe it'll take a lot more meditation for the limbic system to get get caught up with the cortex that's a nice end to the day that death is just taking off a headset

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 331,456

Keywords: Reality of Consciousness, Consciousness, Mind Illusions, Surviving Reality, Prof Donald Hoffman

Id: vhGYsUitgNk

Length: 92min 5sec (5525 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022