How Are Conscious Agents And The Subatomic World Unified? Conscious Realism | Donald Hoffman

[Music] thank you look the last time we spoke done we we touched on the fact that physics and evolution agree space-time is doomed at this point um it is not fundamental reality nor are its objects and today I think our focus is going to be on your paper conscious agents and the subatomic World which I've read a couple times and still I don't think I understand it as much as I would have to it's very complicated I don't have a physics background but I'm hoping this conversation is going to help enlighten me a bit more wonderful paper by the way how was it working with uh Chetan and swapem again how's it going very very fun uh you know jaitan has been a collaborator for more than 30 years so we we go back a long time from our youth and so we're continuing to have fun collaborating with each other you know we bounce ideas back and forth he's the mathematical genius I'm the mathematical flunky but uh he's trained me enough so I can actually talk to them about it and then he can do the actual hard math stuff and then schwabon is a um a world-class experimental particle physicist he's at CERN in the Fermi lab and he contacted us out of the blue earlier this year he'd seen our work on Consciousness and his possible relationship to to particle physics and um he thought that there's some possible good stuff there and so he he um looked at what we were doing in the paper I just we were already halfway through that paper yeah um writing it um when he contacted us and and he decided to join the join forces and work with us on us so we're really glad to have a real you know um professor of um particle physics he's a professor at UC Berkeley now now Emeritus but and also at CERN and fermilab so schwabon is has been very very helpful he he he's a no-nonsense guy he knows um what's real and what's not and so he helps really um guide us in terms of the the we have to be daring yeah but sometimes you're daring and and obviously wrong so he helps us that's that's amazing and the fact that you guys have someone like that I mean in this paper you propose a mathematical model in which conscious agents are fundamental and interact by markovian Dynamics and some agents create space-time as an interface whereby they interact um and physics is the projection of that ancient Dynamics onto the interface so this is quite a fascinating idea altogether I mean in a nutshell you're basically saying that conscious agents create the subatomic world let's let's start by exploring that basic concept that that's right so it is out of the box but but here's what I think is the current state of play in physics um that calls for out of the box thinking like this and and that is that space-time first space end time were the foundation for Newtonian mechanics and that was fantastic for for several centuries and so successful that many physicists like in the 1890s figured that uh it was done physics had little mop-up jobs to do here and there but it was done and bright students should go elsewhere to you know because there was just nothing for really bright people to do well that all blew apart in 1900 and then 1905 with the Planck's work and then Einstein's work and basically by 1905 it was over for space and time and it was over for Newtonian as as being fundamental of course we still use Newton to this day but but as a fundamental Theory it was over but it took a few decades for some to to find that out right you know the 1922 Nobel committee giving Einstein his prize made it clear it was not for relativity Theory not for his theory of space-time so so I mean even though it had been over for 17 years um it takes a long time for the community to to understand and and move on well so now um Einstein space time has been a found fantastic foundation for more than a century it's special and general relativity theories but in 2005 David Gross the Nobel Prize winner for his work on the strong force um you know wrote an article that was of course you know in honor of Einstein on the 100th anniversary of his 1905 miracle year and his special theory of relativity but then he you know in the right Spirit of science he said space time is doomed you know thank you Einstein for space-time but now space time is doomed it's time for us to move on and that's the way good science is and and since then a lot of others have echoed the same thing in Neymar and Nathan cyberg and and uh Edwinton and so forth you know are basically saying in their own words space time is doomed and what that means is not that we're going to throw space-time away but that it's it's not a deep enough structure to be thought of as foundational it has specific limits it has no operational meaning Beyond the Planck scale which is like 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and 10 to the minus 43 seconds it just it has no operational meaning which which means that it's not usable beyond that and and it's really pointing to its own limitation so so the question is what how do we go [Music] next because most people think well you know space time is the fundamental reality how can I think outside how could any objects or any entities be outside of space-time space-time is everything there is that's the way we think and and so this requires a new level of creativity because the idea is you have to open your mind space time is not fundamental you have to think could there be new structures entirely outside space-time not curled up inside space-time the little hidden dimensions are entirely outside and and in the last nine years so this is relatively recent um physicists have published structures they've discovered beyond space time not not curled up again in inside space-time entirely outside space-time most people have no idea what that could even mean what could you possibly mean about structures that are outside of space-time but that's that's where we're headed and so that's what we're doing in in our work on conscious agents and I'll just say the reason for what we're doing is is this the physicists uh have discovered structures that are that are static like geometric objects and and um structures like um permutations and so forth but but they haven't yet posited a dynamics that would account for these structures so the structures are like the amplitohedron and and things called decorated permutations and and cosmological polytops and so forth so so they have these these structures but you know ultimately physics goes after Dynamics but this is going to be different because these are going to be dynamical entities not inside space-time but dynamical entities utterly and completely outside of space-time and and so that's not going to be comfortable what what in the world could we are what are these things that are not inside space-time I mean you and I are you know here we are inside Space what are these things that are not inside space-time that are dynamical and and what are they doing and why so you can see that this is this is not a a trivial Endeavor and you have to you know you we're of course we're going to make mistakes here so and that's what we're so we're we're proposing I'll I'll put it in the um the least tendentious way we're just proposing that there are these dynamical entities Beyond space-time that have a markovian Dynamics and the argument for this markovian Dynamics in part is that we show how a markovian Dynamics projects to decorated permutations and and through and therefore through decorative permutations into space-time so so what we're doing is we're saying the physicists discovered decorated permutations Beyond space-time and it's a bit surprising permutations of what and for why why who who ordered this basically you know why why should that be what we're discovering beyond space time and what we're saying is Well um we we discovered that if you have any more clothing dynamical system the so-called the the ergotic communicating classes of it this the recurrent communicating classes of the markovian Dynamics are classified by decorative permutation so that's a new result in a paper we published in January so we we as far as we can tell no one had ever published that before and so we we discovered that and and that gave us a way to take our markovian Dynamics and say this could be a the kind of down makes this Beyond space-time because it does map into these decorated permutations and so there's some kind of dynamical entities yeah that's the least tendentious way to put it what we're proposing is more contentious we're saying well we're also after Consciousness we're interested in Consciousness and the hard problem of Consciousness what's relationship between Consciousness and brain activity and and so we're trying to some sense kill two birds with one stone what's beyond space-time and can we solve the hard problem of Consciousness at the same time with that so we're proposing these are dynamical entities that we'd Call Conscious age but you know the mathematics stands by itself if you don't like the conscious interpretation just say there are dynamical entities Beyond space-time but I'm interested in pursuing the conscious agent interpretation myself and how this can help us with the hard problem of Consciousness um I think look at the moment you're doing very fascinating work I've got a lot of notes in front of me I made tons of notes because your paper is quite extensive as of today I'm not sure it's not yet published if I'm correct done the current paper that's right there's going to be we submitted it as a um contestant in a competition for The Institute of pneumatic sciences and we're one of three winners of that competition and so it's going to be released on on June 24th so um there's going to be an online um I think Zoom anybody that wants to can join in and I'll be talking for 20 minutes describing our work there and then the other two uh groups that are winning or we'll also be describing their work so it's June 24th at The Institute of and wedding Sciences you can just go online and and it's free to log in okay great at some point I will put a link to that and just by the way for everyone listening or watching I'll put the link to our previous conversation as well because there we discussed conscious realism user interface Theory we discussed quite a few things but keeping on track with this paper the theory of conscious agents that there's two assumptions pretty much they exist conscious experiences such as the taste of chocolate or the mood of elation that's something you've written and they exist properly probabilistic relations among experiences as well but then you go further to describe describe what are called CA knits so talk to me about what a CA net is and then we'll move from there and just go through the paper get a bit of assist systematic approach that's right so the way I think to think about it that's the most easy for most people would be think about the twitterverse right it's a big interacting social network there's millions of Twitter users probably billions of tweets that are going along and and if you think about it you're you're following certain people if you're Twitter you follow certain people there may be a few dozen or a few hundred or a few thousand people that you're following and there might be you know a few dozen or if you're lucky a few thousand or you know a few hundred thousand that are following you and and so uh it's a really complicated social network and there's lots of subgroups that are they have their own interests and the things that they're they're following and so forth and and so that's what you should think about when you think about this conscious agent Network there are a bunch of these agents they're interacting what they're passing instead of tweets is their passing experiences they're they're they're affecting and effectively tweets are affecting your experiences they're thinking how you they're affecting how you think what what videos you see what what you're you know what cat video you're looking at and laughing at and so they're affecting your experiences so that's that's quite parallel and so this is just um doing a markovian dynamics of this network of conscious agents and proposing that that's the fundamental reality and and again um by the way I'm I'm absolutely not doctrina about this this is like my attitude is we're taking our first baby steps out of space-time yeah of course we're going to be wrong but you've gotta you've got to do something precise and and and it's going to be you know I think future work will look at that as is our work is simple and but hey you know it was bold and it was precise and that's that's so we're trying to make a bold and precise step outside of space-time and and we're proposing this more Covenant Dynamics um so that's that's sort of the top level now I should say why you know you mentioned that we're talking about um experiences and probabilistic relationships among experiences you might you might wonder well why in the world did they just do that I mean they're thinking about Consciousness there's a lot of stuff in Consciousness there's the self there's learning and memory and problem solving and intelligence and and there's just a ton of stuff that you know Free Will why aren't they you know talking about all of that and putting that right into their model and and the reason we're not putting that right up front is the whole point of a scientific theory is to have as few assumptions upfront as possible if you throw in the kitchen sink what are you going to explain you want to to make the work as hard as possible for you as few and as trivial the assumptions as you possibly can and then you have to do all the hard work to explain all this other stuff so so our attitude was um if we just say that there are conscious experiences like the taste of chocolate smell of garlic whatever it might be and probabilistic relationships among them and we can then say okay the probabilistic relationships will be markovian there will be basically um it just means um probability with a finite memory that's all it really means probability with the finite memory of what happened in the past okay if we start with that um then we can build networks of these interacting trivial conscious entities but these networks it we can show are computationally Universal so anything you can do with neural Nets you can do with these conscious agent Nets even though they start off with just experiences and probabilities of relationships and long experiences you can build anything that you want out of it because they're computationally Universal so we can build theories of learning memory problem solving intelligence and and so forth we can do all that and and it's even more interesting because markovian dynamical systems are not limited to computation the they're defined on you know probability spaces and the measurable sets in the probability spaces in which they're defined on need not be computable so this could actually we're not doing that right now in our work we're only looking at the computational aspects but um you know if if we upgrade our brains we might be able to go after the non-computational the the Beyond computational aspects but I'm happy just to look at the computation for now but so so that's sort of the the the top level View and why we picked what we picked we you know if we put a self in there to begin with it seems like we're just throwing too much of the kitchen sink in up front um and and same thing with intelligence and and and even you know specific kinds of memories I mean we have this one just a finite memory of conversations but then you think about humans we have episodic memories and and you know memories about things learned in language the structure of language the the grammars of language that we know and so there's lots of different kinds of memories short-term memory long-term memory so that will have to all build out of networks so so that's sort of the top level I think that that approach is is both it's it's a humble approach and very strategic in a sense obviously you don't want to put too much out there and focus on too much you want to maintain a core focus and I think that's great um but I think it's it's also nice to see someone who's claiming something so extravagant I mean it to some people this is very outside the box it's it's extremely out there and when they approach you it can't with any questions I always see I love how humble your approaches because you'd expect someone who's claiming something outrageous to actually say defend themselves a lot but you don't you often say your goal is to be proved wrong you want people to actively prove you wrong that is that is something that's science right I love that yeah that's what I actually love about your approach to this whole thing um so far when you've started since starting how much like let's say pushback have you gotten from the scientific community yeah so my a lot of my um closer colleagues are are you know studying Consciousness the hard problem of Consciousness and something my training is in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence and and so a lot of my colleagues um uh and good friends who are physicalists and looking after you're looking for how the brain or computer systems could create Consciousness so we're all we're all good buddies and friends and so forth um uh I think most of them aren't persuaded um by a long shot and you know I'm sure if you secretly think that uh you know you know you have a lot of promise but look what he he's squandering it you know so so yeah I'm sure but you know they'll be polite and have a beer and we'll we'll have a good discussion and and so forth so you know and that's to be expected I mean it's it's there's nothing new Under the Sun this is the way it's always been in science the the most of the quote unquote Innovations turn out to be wrong and and the ones that turn out to be right aren't usually recognized for a long time and that's just that's just and and that's the way it should be science is a conservative um Enterprise in the sense that as a social institution it's conservative of course we you need entrepreneur individual entrepreneurs within science to push different ideas and and take them to their limits and of course in most cases be wrong but but then science as a as a social institution checks and rechecks and shows you where you're wrong or where you need to polish your assumptions and so forth so so yeah but but then you know the pushback goes both ways when my whenever I get together with my colleagues on stage who are physicalists the the one question I always ask is okay so um you have a a theory in which um you know integrated information patterns or orchestrated collaps of quantum states of neuronal microtubules or some Global workspace architecture um uh you claim gives rise to conscious experiences okay great so what specific conscious experience like the taste of chocolate or what whatever whatever anyone you want can you give me one example where you say um this pattern of integrated information must be the taste of chocolate it and these are the reasons why that pattern of integration is necessarily the same thing or give rise to the taste of chocolate and could not possibly be the taste of vanilla I mean this is supposed to be a theory of Consciousness so um what one conscious experience can you explain and there's and this is a stunning result there is in all of the physicalist theories and I include IIT in that group they may say it's not necessarily physicalist but yes anyway yeah I just spoke to Christoph cook the other day and I know it's almost it's kind of like an idealist um I'm not sorry a and psychist approach but you're not really just like it yeah exactly they would say yeah that's right so so but I would say that they're trying to have some kind of you know computational core like integrated information shape or something like that that gives rise or is identical to the so if if you think it gives rise to it or is identical to give me one just give me one example where your theory works on ones I want one specific conscious experience that we can go test right if you don't have one with a specific conscious experience that we can go test how can this be a theory of consciousness and so there's there's literally not one experience that has been able to be explained by any of these theories where they say this pattern of you know neuronal collapse of micro two you know Quantum states of neuron microchipose must be the taste of chocolate or This Global workspace architecture and this pattern of activity and must be the smell of uh you know a cherry there's nothing on the table and and I think you know Stephen Pinker understands this he's he's a you know a friend of mine for many years and Brilliant and he likes the global workspace model but he he says in his book recent book The Enlightenment now book um I think 2018 or something like that that um he likes the global workspace but but the connection between the state of the global workspace and specific conscious experiences he says if something is the is the last dollop of a theory that will have to be stipulated and he's right the the connections are stipulated so there there's not they're not explained and that's the key thing there's they're they're they're saying we have a theory of Consciousness but no specific conscious experience is ever explained it's always stipulated and so so what I always say to like my friends is look you guys you're stipulating these are you know like the neuronal workspace the global global workspace architecture or IIT or uh orchestrated collapses you're stipulating that and you're stipulating these conscious experiences and then you also have to stipulate the relationship between them well I'm only stipulating the conscious experiences and I propose to show you where space-time and physical objects come from So based on what we call Occam's razor you know the theory with the simplest set of assumptions wins this Theory should Prevail because we don't have I don't have to stipulate as much as you stipulate so that's my attitude about it and one reason I took this direction if I could have given the physicalist theory I would have yeah but I I realized decades ago it it it's not possible it's just not possible and why why waste my time so as strange and as counter-intuitive as it might be let's just let go of space-time let's I mean if I have to let go of if I if I'm wrong that I have conscious experiences I'm not sure I'm right about anything so so I'm you know again I might be wrong but but boy you know so let's assume that there are conscious experiences Taste of chocolate smells let's just make that mathematically precise and then let's see if it's possible to boot up space-time and that's what this last paper is about say okay well finally I can say we can have a Marconi dynamics of these conscious experiences interacting and the the physicist told us that we need to get it mapped on to decorated permutations if you're going to map it into space-time well we can do that we can map that's a new mathematics but we we discovered this new mathematics we map markovian Dynamics to canonically into decorated permutations and then the physicists tell us how to take it into scattering amplitudes like particle scattering in space-time so that's that's sort of the big picture what why we're making these bold crazy moves beyond space time um the bottom line is when you try to do it inside Space time you learn first space-time is doomed at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and second the best and brightest Minds my colleagues are brilliant these best and brightest lines on the planet cannot figure out how to boot up conscious experiences not even one from inside space-time and it's not because they're dumb they're brilliant it's just that you can't do it from within space time and and that will be the lesson but we had to really we had to spend a lot of hard work and a lot of careers to learn that it can't be done are there any specific people you can think of who do not follow your theory or perhaps even go against it because you find relatively convincing or at least respect and admire their work for example someone with a neuroscientific theory or philosophical differences any people that stand out to you any theories oh well I mean I know most of all all the big players in their friends and I think they're brilliant and I think that the theories are are brilliant it's just up there I think they're brilliantly wrong I think that but the thing is that they have insights and some of those insights might be salvageable and reused in a completely different framework in other words maybe there is something about integrated information theory that will turn out to be um very interesting but it won't be that it's how unintelligent and unconscious systems with the right kinds of information theoretic properties um either give rise to Consciousness or or just our conscious um is going to be different if we think of space-time not as the fundamental reality but just as a user interface maybe integrated information Theory might be telling us something about what patterns in our user interface are giving us better pointers to the Consciousness behind the interface so they're not they're not telling us how Consciousness is created they're telling us how our in how our interface sometimes sometimes the interface will give us better insights into Consciousness and sometimes less so maybe it will you know there'll be a complete rethinking of of what they've done so it's not that their work will be lost but it will be just reinterpreted just like a lot of Newtonian stuff gets reinterpreted um you know in an Einstein and framework and so forth so so yeah no yeah I they're you know Stuart hammeroff and I yeah I love to hang out with him and you know it's these are all good people and friends um what about banana Castro I mean your thoughts on on his work and what he and everything he talks about regarding idealism well Bernardo and our are good friends and uh I've I've begged him to come work with us he's he's got he's a philosopher but he also um has another PhD with a lot of mathematical [Music] um so I would love to end anytime Bernardo wants to come work with us because you know philosophically we're on the same page right our theory is an idealist Theory and um and I respect bernardo's um decision to to spend his valuable time um taking up the philosophical aspects of this and we've decided to I mean there is a little philosophy in what we do and and we have a collaborator Robert prentner who is a professor not a professor but uh you know his phds and one of his phds is in philosophy and so he brings a lot of philosophical sophistication that I don't have um to to our work in idealism but you know my my background I have a little bit of background in philosophy enough to talk and get myself in trouble but not enough to be a professional yeah and and I don't know enough math to be a mathematician but but I know in how to collaborate with the the appropriate people who can listen to me and say Well done it's not quite right but here this this will this will fix it what are you some of your favorite aspects of bernardo's work what what what intrigues you most about it uh well I think that Bernardo is giving um good philosophical Arguments for why physicalism um is in some sense almost self-contradictory and and but we couldn't possibly be um the way forward and why idealism shouldn't be dismissed I mean I think a lot of for most philosophers or well most people just in general the the a prairie assumption is that of course space time is fundamental and the burden of proof was and whoever wants to say that you know this Consciousness stuff is is I mean surely you're you have the burden of proof if you talk about Consciousness being fundamental because we all can see that space-time and particles and physical stuff is fundamental of course brains are there and created Consciousness you have to be a fool I mean you know to not to not think that so so Bernardo does a good job of turning the tables and saying no really the burden of proof is on the physicalist um and science itself is already saying that we need to move into a post space-time framework for for science so so I like bernardo's work um and he's uh he's a very forceful we have different personalities in terms of how we present our ideas very very different personalities but but he and I when we get together we get along quite quite well yeah Bernardo when I spoke when I had when I interviewed him he actually asked me during our round two he wants me to interrogate him a lot more intensely apparently so he likes to be challenged he loves that active interrogation he said I was like I can't help him but he wants that anyway let's go back to the paper right so we think of conscious agents Trace change decorated permutations and then you go to the amplitohedron and then particles in space-time let's run through that process how do we get from conscious agents to particles in space-time right so I mean there's a very well it's a layered question because there's so much to actually go into that there's so much I know so maybe absolutely we'll go into it a bit more in detail afterwards or just a summary okay yeah so the top level the idea is that there are there is a markovian Dynamics which basically a Marco Dynamics is the the simplest probabilistic Dynamics you can imagine which doesn't mean to say that it's simple but it's just the simplest that that you could write down um and within that Dynamics of these what we call conscious agents but you know these entities Beyond space-time certain there are certain patterns of the Dynamics where you get coherence where a group of them have a stable um dynamical system we call these recurrent communicating classes or ergotic so you have a big dynamical system but but subsets of States um are ergotic and they give you a little ergotic Markov chains where is it they have long-term Behavior that can be described by a probability measure an invariant probability measure and it's these different ergotic subsets essentially of the Dynamics that we've discovered map onto the decorated permutations so the decorated permutations are basically telling you which states go together this group are together form under God except this group forming their God except so that's what the decorative permutations are doing so that's the new interpretation that we're proposing um so that's the new actually a new as far as we can tell a new contribution to mathematics it is and and then from that the the the physicist then can take the decorative permutations and um show that how they're related to um something called an amplitude hadron and now this is not for all particles the amplitude hitters only for massless particles yeah and it's also that it's a special case where they it's a supersymmetry n equals four supersymmetric kind of thing so it's in some sense a toy model but it's um it's close enough to reality that that physicists take it quite seriously and and more recent work they've been able to let go of the toy and do it for all masses and spins but but for for now um now we're trying to understand that that new work and connect with that as well but but for now you we can say this map gives us for the massless particles um and we I think also the massive um a map through decorative permutations through the amplitude heating for the massless particles and and there into scattering in space-time and by scattering I mean you know you have like the Large Hadron Collider and other you know fermilab colliders and so forth where you take particles at high velocities like two protons or electron smashing into a proton and you see it's um you see the particles smash into each other and then the stuff going out and you try to figure out what's going on it's like trying to figure out how cars are made by Smashing them into each other and seeing all the wheel flies off the hubcap and the engine it's hard work you can imagine so how do you figure out you know it's not easy but it takes a lot of but that's what they're doing there's they're smashing particles together and seeing what flies out and that's called particle scattering and that's what you can predict using these decorated permutations and the amplitahedron you can actually predict the probabilities what they call the amplitudes for these and so what we're doing now is is saying what properties of the conscious agent Dynamics these recurrent classes correspond to mass momentum spin energy and how do the evolving Marconi Dynamics project to what we look and see as scattering of particles in space-time that's sort of the the top level picture okay so it's interesting when you think okay so when you think of a collection of Agents um I know at some point you mentioned in your paper I think it was Erwin schroding as essay mind and matter you you mentioned how it links to this concept how are these two links that concept of or his book on mind and matter well Schrodinger in a number of of the early Quantum theorists um we're thinking about like the collapse of the wave function yeah yeah that so you have in in quantum theory you have Schrodinger's equation for for non-relativistic um Quantum systems and you have this differential equation which shows how the state evolves as a function of time and it's deterministic and unitary but when you make a measurement that equation no longer holds if you if you want to actually say what value of the spin you got or what value of the position you got or momentum um you have a different object it's the the collapse operator and and that's non-linear the shorting your equation is linear so so you have this weird situation in quantum theory where when essentially you're not looking there's one evolution and when you look when you measure it's a different Dynamics well that's not a very happy situation yeah for most scientists I mean that's that's not happy at all and and the you know of course that's led to all sorts of you know Multiverse kinds of explanations and and um many worlds interpretations and and so forth right um basically it's more than many worlds not the Multiverse many worlds that that came out of that so I think you're at some point you you spoke about any collection of Agents is itself an agent um and and then you said there is ultimately One agent and that sort of links to this right yes that's right so yeah that gets to what Schrodinger was after was there is some kind of unity behind all this diversity and Schrodinger was was looking at that he he I think was interested in some of the Eastern mystical ideas and and and and and incites them and so there's this notion of of some whole wholeness from Unity Beyond space-time and and maybe we're gonna have to go there David ballm also in his book wholeness and the implicate order um has the same same idea this is different than his Pilot wave work um you know but but his physicalness and the implicit order is is going after the same kind of thing I think the shorteninger was talking about that maybe we have to go to a deeper point of view in which there is a reality beyond space time um that is somehow unified and we go we do go there so yeah thanks for you know for putting me on track here we do go there with our work because we um it turns out to be the case that um we can think about ever larger conscious agents and then all but any huge conscious agent can be articulated into a bunch of interacting smaller conscious agents which which constituted and and so we're sort of led to you know we can have um accountable infinitive agents which are all part of One agent then an aleph1 a lift two there's the old cataract cancerous hierarchy of of Infinities we can imagine uh agents with you know alif 2 trillion States in it and having a Dynamics and then all the sub agents that could come out of it yeah and ultimately this this learn leads you to say there's well there's ultimately just one agent but we could never actually write down the mathematics for it we can only write down you know projections of it you know the the part the partial agents that that cut that are part of it but even there we might be able to make uh some progress but it is interesting that the mathematics says you know if Consciousness is fundamental we're using this mathematics there is one agent um and you can do a lot of mathematics but you'll never get to that one agent your mathematics will never be able to you can address projections of that one agent you can do that but you'll never be able to give the mathematical theory of the Dynamics of the one agent yeah okay what are your thoughts on mathematical realism in general your views on that concept I think that's a deep deep question and I I go back and forth on it my uh you know I the the way it's typically put our mathematical theorems invented or discovered right that's that's the the big the big divide and my I go I go back and forth on that myself I really go go back and forth somehow my my feeling is that perhaps the equate the question itself is making a false Division and it's both I mean that in some sense if we really understood this if I even understood my own ideas about Consciousness being fundamental deeply enough I would realize that that the difference between invention and Discovery here was was um artificial on my part that that I I wasn't thinking deeply enough but but again I I'm not able to think deeply enough to to actually um say anything deeper about that so if I had to bet on one I would say discovered not invented but but our own work on Consciousness makes me head myself and say ultimately we may find that um invention is Discovery yeah I so I so that's that's very very deep one yeah no it is kind of fun um back to the paper so at some point you said a physicist discovered their surprise today's surprise sorry that decorated permutations invariantly categorize the physical content of scattering amplitudes for particles in space-time and then there you go on to say that you guys prove that Markov chains project sorry um where am I reading sorry project to decorated permutations and thus onto particle scattering how do you guys prove that well so we what we show is that um well we we prove it by actually writing down the projection so so what we do in the paper is we say here for any Markov chain here is the algorithm by which you get a decorated permutation and and when you when you look at the the algorithm is basically telling you how to divide the entire State space of the Markov chain into this the collections of states that have their own recurrent communicating class so so the way we prove it is to actually do it we we we we give you the prescription yeah for for the algorithm for doing it I think on page 11 11 of your paper you discuss the the precise hypothesis and you and you label them one to six I don't know if you want to go through that because that's actually quite a very fascinating component of this type altogether right um and obviously at some point when the paper is out I will put a link for everyone listening or watching just to follow through it yeah it should be a link should be put up any day now by The Institute of novemic Sciences right certainly by the 24th of June which is just a week from Saturday yeah it'll be up because that's when we're going to be doing I should probably pull up the paper um but or I could just talk the top level about these paper um and just so you can go through those points I think so that'll be quite I think good for the listeners and the viewers as well I mean number one you talk about each elementary particle of the standard model of physics each boson lepton and Quark is a projection of a recurrent communicating class and its markovian kernel that arise in samplings of Trace chains of conscious agents that's the first one and then you go on very fascinating work right so I'll pull that page 11. page 11 okay um I mean let's run through those hypotheses and discuss how you call you you act I think that's a really good idea yeah okay so there it is okay okay that right okay each elementary particle the standard model of physics each post on electron and Quark is a projection of recurrent communicating class um and it's more coving kernel that arrives in samplings and price chains of conscious agents so it's one thing so what we're doing there is get back where I can see you okay um so what the first thing we're doing is we're saying there's going to be a mapping between the Dynamics of conscious agents and Elementary particles in the standard model of physics so the bosons leptons and quarks those the bosons are the mass well the the force carriers some of the more matchless photons and gluons are massless the others the the Higgs and the Zeon uh W plus and minus are are massive and then there's leptons which are like electrons muons and Taos and electron neutrinos Talon neutrinos and neuron neutrinos and then there are the quarks um there are up and down charm and strange and top and bottom quarks so then and that's the whole basic particle Zoom then you combine those to get other things like pions and mesons and other other things that you that you protons and neutrons and so are our the first thing that we're proposing is that there is a mapping between the concentration Dynamics and these Elementary particles and that is the recurrent communicating classes both the Marco and Dynamics and conscious agents that will correspond to these Elementary particles now I should say not every recurrent communicating class so the conscious Dynamics will project to a particle yes a probably a trivial subset there's the Marco Dynamics is going to have a lot of stuff going on there yeah what we're doing here is saying okay ultimately we have to get a mapping from the conscious agent Dynamics not just to particles but to um organisms to brains to neurons to neural networks and so we're gonna there's gonna be a mapping so what we're doing in this paper is saying the first connection we're going to try to make is the elementary particles and so the obvious question is why yeah I mean I mean literally everybody thinks that brain activity is related to and you know it's it's so why go after you know bosons leptons and quarks when surely the the little hanging fruit is the brain and that's that's where we have the neural correlates of Consciousness and so forth so you guys already you know shooting at the wrong target and and the reason we're going after the elementary particles um it is because we we figure that those are the most simple connections that we can make and and I I said that even though I'm not a particle physicist so I'm I'm a you know a cognitive neuroscientist for me talking about the brain is much much easier than talking about elementary particles I'm having to do lots and lots of remedial reading and homework to even talk to lingo and and but but I realized it's it's it's hopeless to go after the brain it's too complicated the the simplest thing inside space-time are these Elementary particles so if we're going to do this the best shot we have is to connect to the elementary particles and then gradually work our way up okay Elementary particles now can we get to protons and neutrons oh we okay and then can we get to atoms yes now can we get to molecules now can we get to larger molecules no okay now we can try to maybe climb our way up to the brain but that that's not going to happen in my lifetime I mean I I if we can get the particles in my lifetime I'll be delighted um so that's that's our strategy we're not going after particles because they're the most important thing or the most interesting thing they're the simplest possible thing which is not to say simple but they're the simplest possible connection that we could make so that's that's why we're going after them and and most recurrent classes of the conscious Angel Dynamics will have nothing to do directly with particles most of it but we're going to try to find the you know mappings that that do relate to particles so we can still build our way up so that's sort of the meaning of that first of all and the second one so then number two huh properties of a free particle the spin the mass the energy momentum our projections of the properties of the kernel of the recurrent communicating class he for example the periodicity the entropy rates marketing times and stationary distributions of that communicating class so the idea here is one thing to say recurrent communicating classes correspond to at least some of the correspondent particles but you need to do more you need to say which particles is it opposed on electronic work and you all need to say okay what property of the recurrent communicating class of market dynamics corresponds to the energy what corresponds to mass the momentum and the spin right no hand wave now right you said a recurrent communicating class projects to a particle well particles have energy momentum spin Mass then Mass so where's the beef what's the in other words you know the very same thing I was pointing at my good friends and colleagues where I said where's the beef what's you know what specific conscious experience can you get out of your theory the the the same finger points back at me you're saying recurrent communication classes give us position momentum well give me one exactly what property of the recurrent communication class is the mass for example so we have a proposal for each one of those in this in this um document for Mass it's we propose it's What's called the entropy rate of the of the dynamical system of the recurrent communicating class and entropy is uh you know a measure everybody knows entropy is a measure of disorder yes an entropy rate basically takes a markovian kernel that has a bunch of rows and columns right it's it's you think of it as a square Matrix and if each row each row is a probability measure essentially you drove a markovian kernel is a probability measure so if it's an N by n Matrix you have each row is uh it has n entries in it and in all the entries sum to one they're all they're all non-negative they're greater than zero they're all between zero and one and they all sum to one that's effectively what a markovian kernel is if you write down an N by n Matrix each row has numbers between only between 0 and 1 and each row sums to one you've got a markovian kernel that's what it is and if the if that markovian kernel is is recurrent that is that um any state within the European States if you can get from any state to any other state in a finite amount of time and Back Again basically uh then it's recurrent yeah and if it's if the entropies in the rows are not all zero [Music] um in other words we have some if Pharrell has just zeros and then there's a single one in that row that that's a legitimate Row in general but but um a a recurrent Community a recurrent class in which Every Rose like that is a periodic Markov chain you know and and you're and you're going basically from Step you know State one to state three with probability one and then just State four with you know and then back to state two whatever it might be you're going from each one with probability one so that's a periodic chain um those each row has zero entropy in that case um but what we will it's a little complicated I'll just say this the entropy rate basically says this saying that that's the mass means if the markovian kernel is periodic so if you're in this state then you will necessarily with probably one go to that state and there's so there's a like it's almost like a deterministic set of states that you go through and Cycles so you're cycling through States in a specific order that will have zero Mass so we we propose that periodic kernels map to massless particles yeah okay not massless bosons makes a lot more sense I mean from reading the paper it's a lot it's a lot better to hear you say it yeah it's more there's more intuition this was the intuition that sort of guided it um well no I'll tell you what the intuition was they got it but but in the case of I'll just say a little bit more of what it means that I'll give you the intuition that God does as much detail as you want on go go ahead yeah okay so if if if there are entries other than zeros and ones in your recurrent communicating class then it's going to have mass according to this entry rate it'll be massive and the reason why we were thinking about it this way was the following intuition what does what does mass mean intuitively right this is what the kind of thinking you have to do when you're trying to make these connections you have to say okay we're trying to say what aspect of conscious agent Dynamics corresponds to physical Mass we're going to think abstractly what do we really what is mass in the physical and at least inertial mass in some sense well I'll just say mass in general has something to do with how much you can be influenced and how much you influence right if if you're massless you have less influence than if you're massive and so what would correspond to influence in The Social Network who are the influencers in The Social Network so this is the way you have to think to because these these conscious age networks are social networks so think you know the internet twitterverse and so forth well the influencers are those who have the most followers and and so if in other words they have the most connections the more so Hoffman has a lot fewer connections on his website than Google Google has you know a few a couple dozen more Connections in Hoffman has a lot more power and they're a lot richer so so that that's the notion of influence how connected are you well now if we look at this Markov chain if this state has in this role of the markovian kernel has all zeros and only a single one that means it's not talking to anybody except one guy yeah he's only talking to one guy well that's as little influence as you can have and if you're talking only to yourself [Laughter] but then you're then then you're you're out you you so so that was you can see the intuition that went into this and so but if you're if you're connected to everybody um that you're going to be more influential well if you look at how you're going to be connected everybody that means that the entropy in your row is going to increase the the more connections you have in general you're going to be you're having more non-zero entries in your own if every entry is non-zero um that's gonna in general you know it's a bit of a hand wave but but it's going to in general mean that you're going to have greater and greater entries so we just said okay let's make it um in some sense the the influence of a state is the entropy of its row right but now we're talking we have to give a a an influence for the in some sense a mass to the whole recurrent class so we need to wait all the all the influences of those other guys we have to wait them what's the right waiting that we have to give to them well the old there's only um one canonical measure for the waiting is so-called invariant measure it's the there is a probability measure that the when you multiply so if we have a kernel P we'll call this Matrix p and we have a measure m so m is the measure if M times P equals m that's called an invariant measure so m p equals m um there's for recurrent communicating cluster is a unique measure that has that property and so that's the invariant measure is the measure that's left alone by the whole kernel and so we use that to wait the entropies of the rows and that and and Claude Shannon you know the inventor of information theory he was the one who first defined entropy rate I mean I'm sort of giving sort of the kinds of ideas that might go into that but with Cloud Shannon um is the genius who invented information Theory and he came up with the definition of entropy rates so we just borrowed Cloud Shadows definition eventually right and said that is for the intuitions I just gave give some notion of the influence or inertia of this group of interacting conscious agents yeah each year each Road corresponds to an agent and and that's interactions and that then leads to as soon as you make that move that means that periodic Markov chains we go from one state to the next state you know one agent talks only to this agent he only talks to the next agent and so forth they're massless so somehow now see this is now that one definition gives us a real grip on things because we know that the massless particles always move at the speed of light um right so now we all we get a handle okay so and the massive ones are always moving less than the speed of light and the projection in the space time now now so that so that gives us another thing then we can say okay well we have the mass we made one other postulate and that is that the let me go to the paper talk about periodicity it interprets hitting times and stationary distributions that's right um so let me let me just go down to so I would make sure I say what we did correctly even though it's my own work um I mean okay we all often do we write papers and then we do forget certain details it's Noble yeah yeah here you're saying the wrong uh it has to be said exactly right or you're wrong so um so the one one thing we're saying is that a communicating class so this recurrent communicating class if it has n States because it has momentum in and it has a mass equal to its entry rate we just talked about okay so that so that's so I I bring that up because that's another postulate the momentum is the number of States a number of agents in in the class that's the momentum and once you have those two things then the energy falls out right so so once once you have those then you then we used um well um there one could say we're cheating a little bit and swapon has suggested to me that we'll need to think more about this um we're using the physics equation now that relates energy momentum and mass um Mass squared um but so we we do that for now and we may need to give deeper motivation for it later but but right now I'll just say with that Proviso once we have the momentum being the number of states and we have the mass being the entropy rate then the energy falls out as as um from from Einstein from Einstein's um special theory of relativity um and so so now we've got energy mass in momentum the spin is now spin is an interesting yeah tricky thing um spin of a particle is is something that's I think counterintuitive to a lot of people it's if you if you're spinning you have a basketball player that's spinning a basketball on the fingertip you they can go at any speed that you want you know they can go fast slow but spin for per particles you can only go spin a certain speeds and there's no speed in between you you you jump at your spin values which so the spin is is um is counterintuitive what we what we do is we use um a branch of mathematics called geometric algebra sort of a generalization of something called Clifford algebra and we this this this gets a little bit technical but what we what we do is we use trying to see if there's a way to say this here's an intuition when a markovian kernel right it's a it's an envion Matrix you can actually ask yourself what does it do if I have um an n-dimensional space and I have unit vectors A unit Vector pointing on each of the N dimensions let's just think about three dimensions that'll keep it real easy so I have a a three by three markovian kernels got three rows and three columns and it's all and I have I'm looking at three vectors you know my my finger my thumb that are orthogonal and that are um each is uh length one and I ask okay when when this markovian kernel acts it's going to move these vectors around that's what it does it moves it it moves them around it might shrink them it might expand them so so suppose I start off with a unit volume so this is I have three vectors and each is um going one inch long and so I've got a one inch uh Cube yes a cube of one inch one inch cubed when I act on it with the markovian kernel those vectors are going to move they're going to like scrunch in or spread apart somehow and some of them are going to get longer I can't do that with my fingers some are going to get shorter that would be too painful but but but what's going to happen is um and they may switch maybe maybe this one um it was this order but maybe this one switches over and they they can cross in certain ways so the volume of that they Define right they're going to follow here they're a cubed but they're going to in general have a parallelogram of some kind or a parallel pipette parallel pipette that they're going to Define and the volume is going to be um somewhere between zero and one it won't increase the volume but it it can decrease the volume and it can change the sign if I think of this as a you know using a right hand rule that this is a positive sign volume then maybe that is a negative sign volume okay so it can it can go be so it can change the volume which was one to any volume between minus one and plus one okay so that's what the kernel is doing and that operation on these basis vectors is what we call the spin what it does to the volume is the spin so that so there is a way to do it intuitively Ah that's that's okay there is a way to do it into it if you if you want to go into the finer detail you're more than welcome though Don okay yeah well that was a good one because it wasn't very good that is actually an accurate it was very um an accurate description of what we're what we're saying is happening what what the spin is and but by the way one thing that this then tells us is if only periodic chains are massless then you can from what I just said um one can show that if the number of states is even you have to again now you look at our paper because I have to say it exactly right your other makes sure yes um this is tricky enough it's very complicated so I'm glad you actually have the paper on hand yeah I just want to make um make sure I say it exactly right I don't want to say it wrong and then have to yeah then the comment section Goes Wild that's right okay so if C if this class is massless and has n States if n is even then this Matrix has to have spin minus one well it's been one but with minus sign okay spin one but minus sign and if it's if the number of states is odd then it has um spin one that's with positive sign and what that means is you can't have which page are you on at the moment this is Page um 27. [Music] what that means it was stunning to me what it means is if you have a massless particle according to our Theory and you change the sign of the stem plus one to minus one it has to have a change in energy yes change should I change them yeah the change in energy it has to have so you cannot have two massless particles um of the same energy and opposite spins it's not possible see so when I so when I ran when I realized that from our mathematics and and I I thought oh well that's that's weird that's that seems to be that's a very very strange prediction um well maybe that's what we're going to be shown to be wrong I mean that's that's that's really wild or or if it's true maybe you know you can have n and n plus one so maybe you know the the the there could be uh an energy of you know one million and then it has to be one million plus one so maybe it'll be too small to to see the the difference I was thinking so um that's true what I don't know about physics um it was it was a couple weeks later that um I realized no this is what what they found is is that there's this fine structure to like the orbital the electron orbitals now now what what's going on there is you in the Bohr model of the atom you have these different orbitals but when you look at them very really fine you find that there are there's actually two two little bands there and so the photons that you're going to get aren't the same energy photons they're actually they're just fine so so always and so there's a lot of fine structure there and so so that doesn't mean that we're right but it means that one thing that I thought well that's to blow us out of the water I mean this is a pretty strong prediction that there's going to be this fine structure well yeah there is and they call it there is this hyperfine structure and and there's the fine structure concept so now I'm very interested in looking at the Divine structure constant and seeing how that plays a role in our covenant Dynamics so so so you but that by itself made me think well you know of course we're probably wrong but this is pretty this is a pretty interesting game now you know the math came and hit me in the face and said you're predicting that you can't have two massless particles um of opposite Spin and have the same energy that is a strong strong prediction I mean there you there you can be I mean surely you can be falsified right on the get-go from with that one yes and it doesn't look like we're falsified right out of the get-go on that one so so that gives me hope not that we're ultimately right but that um this horse may have a lot of writing to do before we find out its limitations am I pronouncing it correctly yeah um is he the one who figured this Auto was it was it you and prakash um what did you guys well you did yeah I I was the one who okay but then as soon as I said a short clone of course knew about the uh of course soccer playing structure so it was it was me you know because of my ignorance not knowing about it and going through a couple weeks was flooding and thinking about it um I I was the one who had first noticed that oh wow we make this weird prediction and uh and I worried about it for a couple weeks until I I happened to run across a video um I was doing some remedial physics training on myself and I I happened to run across this video on hyperfont I said you've got to be kidding me I couldn't have asked for something better than that so it was my ignorance first swap on it was just falling off a log he understood this and shaytan yeah okay let's move on to number three then of the of the hypothesis um each projection is perceivable by some CA via a window of some finite number of steps in which the agent observes the corresponding Trace chain and yeah I think at this point we can discuss Trace chains and everything around that yes let me pull up page 11. all right right page load okay all right yeah I find this page actually this I love the way you set this up oh good good makes it a lot easier for I mean particularly for this interview in this conversation right yeah and that was partly because the Institute of emotic Sciences asked for a certain format in the in in these proposals so it was very helpful to to make it and their goal was to try to make it accessible so they did a good job of that it's quite right so so you're doing number three okay each projection is perceivable by some CA via Windows unless there was something about number two that you still wanted to touch on are you fun are we done with that one um yeah I'll I'll just say um one one other thing about two um that might be of interest and that is um we I haven't yet worked out the like the notion of the velocity of particles in space time um but we know that that the massless particles go at the speed of light so we know that answer so whatever our ultimate story is going to be about the massive particles and their speed and I can just say at top level the kind of thing I'm thinking about right now um that our team is thinking about but I won't this is what I'm thinking about I'm not going to blame my team for any bad ideas so if it's a bad idea it's it's all Hoffman if it's a good idea it's the team um and and that is we want some notion of the of velocity within this Markov kernel that will translate to what we call through projection to velocities in space time and the massless particles which are the periodic ones you that means that you know from this state you always go with probably one to that state and then probably one to the next there's no messing around you go bang bang bang you you if there are end States you go through a cycle in N steps no it takes you only end steps to go through a complete cycle and every cycle is but for the other if it's massive then it might take you if it even if there's end States it might take you um five n steps before you actually start with one particle and visit all the other particles and get back to where you were right so that's there's a notion of of you can see there's a notion of speed that that's very natural there and it's um technical term is the commuting time so you can talk about the commuting time of an ergotic chain and so what we're thinking about what I'm thinking about again um I won't blame them yet is that the commuting times of within a communicating class are going to somehow be related to the velocities that we say the particle has a space time um but that hasn't been that's not in our proposal and and we're still working on that but but given that I've already you know given my provisos they'll just put it out there it's part part of the reason I'm doing this is people can see how fun this is right you're you're playing I mean this is you're exploring you're playing and you go what about this what is what if this property of the Dynamics of conscious agents corresponds to what we call velocity in space-time of course I'm probably wrong but hey it's a fun idea and you know it's not obviously stupid um and and we'll see you know it's the exploration that really matters I mean it's such an enjoyable journey and watching you talk about it as well you can tell how much you you're having fun discussing it I mean it's it's very apparent I'm like a kid in a candy store with this stuff you know you know all along that that of course you're probably probably wrong but you also have a feeling that there may be something of this that that actually some of this may stick well we'll see um and so some will be corrected and and so forth sometimes I just have to be brave and put the idea out there that's just that's what science is let's get it that's right the nice thing about this is um I mean I do get emails a lot from people who have that are probably very very brilliant and they have lots of ideas about how cotton is related to space-time but but out of 100 emails I won't get one or someone has said here's the mathematical connection uh they're in proposing and and and until you can do that there's nothing that scientists can look at yeah the the the the it's when you say something here's the mathematical connection and this connection says you cannot have a massless Boson um with one energy having the same you know a plus and minus spin one value it can't be when your mathematics gets that that specific then you've got something the scientists will look at because well and most times they'll say you're wrong and here's you know this prediction is wrong but but until you are mathematically precise you're not even wrong and and see that's the point you're not on the playing field until you can be wrong exactly there's no fault scientists won't pay attention to you yeah at least I'm wrong maybe yeah no hopefully I mean hopefully you're not wrong hopefully you're right I'm not wrong anyway let's get to number three yeah okay so each projection is perceivable perceived by some conscious agent via a window of finite steps um in which an agent observes the corresponding Trace chain so so the idea is how are we going to get from the conscious agents to the observations that we make you have mass and energy and so forth well we're going to use other conscious agents we're going to have to use systems of conservation so what we're going to have are systems of conscious agents basically that um do this mapping what we're what we're doing right now in this proposal is we're not trying to go through and show how you construct a dynamic of conscious agents to do this we're going to for for now we're just going to make the correspondence between these recurrent communicating classes and their properties and and space time but ultimately we want to actually build um a if space-time is an interface right and it's constructed by a network of conscious agents like like a neural network but it's a network of conscious agents doing this construction we we need to write down what that construction is and then show how it works to create that that interface um what we can do and and we do plan to do that but that's that's you know one step at a time that's we have probably several years of work on this particle stuff before we actually start to do to do that but one thing I will say on that is that my my feeling is if we take once we have built that network of conscious agents that is taking the map from conscious agents into our space-time Network and we take that and we turn it on itself we actually use the interface that they construct to look at the set of conscious agents that are creating the interface okay that's really self-referential kind of thing but this is pretty cool what are you going to see well I think in some cases you'll see in like in for us it'll look like neurons and brains okay neurons and brains are what you see in your interface when you take the network of conscious agents that they constructing your interface and have it look at the construction process itself and that's why I think Neuroscience is going to be we need more funding for Neuroscience not less I think neurons don't exist when they're not perceived the the so neurons cause none of our behaviors but neurons are the symbols that we see in our interface that are the best the symbols closest to the construction process of our interface and and so Neuroscience is going to be a lot more complicated than we thought we thought I look into brains I see neurons and synapses and and you know calcium and sodium and potassium and other ion and that's because that's what's really there that's what's no no that's your interface description it's hiding an unbelievably complicated Dynamics behind it you thought neural networks are complicated than they are but each neuron is hiding behind it an incredible so we need far more funding this is job security for Neuroscience for a long long time to reverse engineer neurons into this network of conscious agents it's going to be a lot of work so and so but we're not we're going to try to work on that interface but um I I suspect I'm have to pass the torch to a younger generation that's that's a hard hard problem it's a lot of work what I will say on on that that point three yeah is what we can do is is say um what that process is going to have to do if I have some big Master Markov chain well typically when you're thinking about a Markov chain it goes as an infinite number of steps the chain is an infinite number of steps what happens when you so suppose I have just a like a a three by three Matrix right and I um or or four by four you know small Matrix um well you and I haven't lived forever we're not seeing an infinite chain of steps so we must be we must be sampling we must have this this Dynamics outside of space-time of conscious agents and we have to make a simple maybe I have a window maybe like I look at a trillion steps which is a lot of steps or a million steps or or a thousand steps but it's not infinite I mean I'm not looking at an infinite number of steps so we're sampling so now we get into the statistics of sampling I've got this markovian Dynamics um and if I if I sample and I then look at what and estimate the kernel that I've sampled I'm not going to get exactly the right value I'm going to get a kernel that's maybe close the more samples I have my estimate of what the kernel is Will can be closer to the real thing but it's not going to be the real thing so we're going to have sampling errors and then we're also going to have just due to temporal sampling but you could also have space what we might call spatial sampling suppose I have you know a trillion States so I have this huge recurrent communicating class it's got a trillion States well you know I don't think there's any computer on Earth right now that could actually simulate that Markov kernel because you you it has one trillion times one trillion entries it's got I don't know how many this is a lot of entries in it and and so to just do one step of that thing is going to be tremendous amount of compute power just to compute one step if you want to compute a million steps I mean I don't think you know I think super computers are going to be you know grinding to a halt so so simulating this thing is going to be is going to be difficult right we're going to have to but but what we can do is talk about I talked about there's this one huge Master markoving currently we can never look at we're going to have to look at just some of its states we can't look at all of them and so you can take a big markovian kernel and look at at only what happens on a few of its states and get a new markovian kernel so and the the whole markovian kernel is influencing what you see on the smaller States right it's influencing them but what you're doing is you you're getting a kernel just on the small set of it and that's called a trace process so you when you take a big kernel and you say what what kernel does it induce on a subset of states um that's called the tracing process and so so that's going to be like spatial sampling sampling so we'll have temporal windows and spatial windows and what we're going to be doing what we're proposing in the in this proposal is those windows are what we're going to use to try to model the the momentum distributions of quarks and gluons inside the proton so particle scattering have um experiments have looked at um quarks and gluons inside the proton proton at one scale has like three valence quarks two up and one down but when you go at smaller spatial resolution and smaller temporal resolution that dissolves you see at the very finest resolution that they've gotten so far you see a what they call a a gluon sea or a ocean of gluons so it's all these massless particles just in there and they're just roiling all over the place and then when you back off a little bit you reduce the spatial and temporal what they call the bjorkin x and q squaredness or the technical terms they use Bjork and X is like the temporal window and the Q squared is like the spatial window when you back off then you get to the point where the gluons they say are splitting into Quark anti-cork Pairs and then and so you get this us what they call a quark C you get so all this energy and momentum in these quarks and then when you back off you you still have all the gluons messing around on all these little C quarks but then you get these three big valence corks so the proton is really complicated mess and what we're going to try to do is show that as we go from really really small windows of time and larger Windows of Trace we're getting closer to that gluon c and as we back as we trace on fewer and fewer States so we're making the trace smaller but we're making the um and we're making the temporal window bigger then we're getting closer to the valence quirks so what we're hoping to do is is show for it for a particular class of Master kernels that we can do various Trace chains and sampling windows and and model all of the um what what they call the momentum distributions one dimensional and then ultimately three-dimensional momentum distributions um that the various Bjork and x and q squared I was just going to ask you about that what is what are one-dimensional momentum fractions or longitudin momentum brushes yeah apparently um the the current techniques that particle physicists have have allowed them to assess the momentum only in in one dimension not all three but they're apparently there are some new techniques that that are coming online that will allow them to estimate in three dimensions and so so what we what we'd like to do is even before they get all the three-dimensional data if we could if we could match the one-dimensional data and predict the three-dimensional data before they get it that would be really cool uh we'll see uh for sure okay number four uh done do you want to check it up on your own or should I yeah I'll pull that one up again all right yes this is this is a very interesting conversation I'm so glad we're talking about it because the paper makes so much sense listening to you express yourself oh good it's probably easier than just reading the paper um yeah I mean for the listeners and the viewers whoever are too lazy to read the paper I recommend they do but it is a lot better to have you chat about us yeah it gives the intuitions that like what didn't you know we didn't have the space this proposal we had a specific word limit for each section so we had to get the ideas and we couldn't really say here here's where our intuitions this is what we were thinking I'm able to do that here but I couldn't do that I think that's a big function of this podcast is to allow you the opportunity to do this absolutely I appreciate that yeah so four says the projection perceived by a conscious agent is a discrete sampling of the trace chain um of a tracing about larger Dynamics onto the states of that country so we've really gone into that so I just said that you know there's going to be a trace chain um so number five is um the particles perceived by a conscious agent depend on a subset of states and the number of steps in the window is Trace and that's the that's the interesting thing we so most of us think you know an electron is an electron that's because it really is an electron and a proton is a proton because it really is a proton and so forth a quark is a quark and this our whole approach here forces us to say no there are no in Ultimate Reality there are no particles there are no quarks leptons and so forth those are entirely artifacts of our user interface they're not insights into the nature of objective reality they're statistical artifacts they're sampling artifacts so for example if I have a small temporal window suppose I won't I I'm and I'm only looking at two states and I only look at say um three steps and what I find in in those three steps project that I see only three steps in my little two-state subset now I notice that um in one step State one went to state two and then in the next step state two went to State one and that's all I've got well then I can I can put a mate my Matrix would be like this would be zero one zero that would be my Matrix now that might have been a projection of a matrix that have numbers that were not ones and zeros in it it might have had all sorts of weird numbers in it right there could have been but because it's an artifact I only looked at a small number of steps The Matrix that I see is zero one one zero I see a periodic Matrix in other words I see in our language a massless particle yes but the message is is not because there's a deep massive particle it's because that's an artifact of my small sampling size and what we're the intuition here is why are the physicists seeing all these massless particles when they make their temporal windows so small for the reason I just gave when you're do when you're when you're looking at lots of states and small window you're only going to have zeros and ones everywhere in your Matrix that's all you're going to have those are massless so that's why you get this gluancy yes and why is it when you start to increase the temporal window and reduce the number of states that you start to see Mass well yeah now you're starting to get things besides zeros and ones in your Matrix you're starting to get massive particles and that's the big idea about how like a top level we think we're going to be able to to get the momentum distributions for the mass list then going to massive and then finally the valence the valence quarks now an obvious for you know the the intelligent listener will go you know I mean it's one thing to say what you just said is another thing to get the exact momentum distributions and I agree to get the exact momentum distributions we're going to do more than just a hand wave that I just said but the hand wave lets you know that there is some reason to hope that we could get it but to get it exactly we're going to have to have exactly the right class of Master Matrix right so what is what is the bigger markovian Matrix that we're going to start with that we're going to do all the sampling for of traces and windows of time and and so that's going to be for a computational experiment that we proposed and we're putting together ideas about how to construct it won't just be one master Matrix it'll be a whole class of them that that will will have this property but we have a lot of freedom frankly we will be able to play with this and until we get a master a group of Master matrices that do the job so I'm I don't see any principled obstruction right now to us doing that the in in fact the argument might eventually go the other way Hoffman you had so many ways to do it um what is this really telling us and in the answer I think will probably be what we had so many ways that wouldn't do it as well so this is very interesting to ask if there's this huge dynamics of conscious agents what trivial aspect of it is being captured by our space-time in other words we think of space-time as the be all and end-all and what we're going to be saying is no no way this is space-time is one of an infinity of different user interfaces an infinity and we have to let go of the constraint on our thinking and our creativity and and open up to the possibility of there's all these other um interfaces and and so by showing that yeah there's maybe we'll find that there's a whole class of matrices an infinite class of matrices that will give us our space time but we'll show that that infinite class of matrices has measure zero in the set of bigger matrices and that will sort of make the point that um space-time is just a headset and in my view as I've said in a number of podcasts I think we got a cheap model we got it's only three dimensions of space I would like to be able to visualize in 20 Dimensions or a thousand dimensions and I can't I feel I feel really real stupid I mean like I I can imagine a three-dimensional geometric puzzle and I can make you know I can see it a four-dimensional geometric puzzle completely Beyond me 10 dimensional now it's like theorem and proof theorem and proof to even crawl your way up to figure out what's going on with the geometry of an object intend dimensions and we're doing that I mean chaitan and I and our team we're trying to study these Mark the the space of all possible markup of kernels like the space of all 10 by 10 Markov kernels is a polytope and it's the markup polytope of you know on on 10 states and and it's um I've forgotten how many dimensions I think it oh it yeah well it's an end to the so it's a 10 to the 10th dimensional space and it's um a so it's it's a 10 and I think it's so it's n times n minus 1 is the is the number of dimensions of the political but it's embedded in an end to the oh sorry it's got this I'm making the point I'm now trying to talk about a higher dimensional thing and you can see I'm I'm struggling and so forth where as the three dimensions I could just see it you could just see it and here now is theorem proof they're improved to even talk about this stuff and so so that's why I feel like we're cheated um and I you know I would love you know once we take off this headset I'd love to put on one that's you know that has a trillion dimensions and boy that'll be that'll be something and and why only three dimensions of color one of the a trillion dimensions of color I mean the mantis shrimp seems to have more than 10 colors the the pigeons have four humans get stuck most of us with only three yeah like you know pigeons apparently seeing colors that I can't even imagine I I didn't I just feel cheated so I can't wait to um you know well I'll wait no I'm not eager to die right away but um you know think about it they can see ultraviolet I mean birds it's the ultraviolet I mean snake infrared with this we saw the red biologically just read there's some birds with me can see polarization we can't see polarization bats perceive an echolocation what is that like to pursue I mean they see a three quote unquote see a 3D World with echolocation what's that like um there's a famous paper about what's it like to be about um yeah that's right negle exactly right yeah I don't know let's move on to number six then done six yeah so larger subsets of states and smaller Windows of sampling seam under stimulations to favor periodic perceptions which we conjecture and project to mass this particle yeah that was exactly the point I was just making that with you know the smaller temporal window with more States than your Trace it's more likely that you'll get just zeros and ones in in the kernel that you create and therefore it'll be a massless particle so so that was yeah so if that's I think first of all that's brilliant page in its own but talk to me about the towards the end of the paper I think you talk about future experiments the computational experiment that you proposed um right let's talk about that what's what's what is the next step here all together well so the The Next Step I think is we're gonna need some bigger computers um because these Markov chains you know as you as the number of states grows as and grows the number of entries in the Markov kernel grows as N squared if this is it gross explanation it's going to continue to go it's because it's huge [Music] um so the the next step is going is going to be um uh I think there's a a few steps and so I can use this as a recruiting time we need uh we need some Geniuses to to help us out um The Pedestrian thing will be to find and it's not pedestrian but it's you know relatively pedestrian see as I mentioned to find this class of Master Markov chains and the set of um subsets of states and windows temporal windows that will give us the momentum distributions that they're seen inside the court but now there's but and so but that's that's just the first base that's what this proposal is about and that's the whole thing for this proposal but that that's obviously just the first baby step and if we can't do that then we're wrong and but if we do that that doesn't mean we've we're done it means we've taken our very first baby step there's this huge world to explore now so I mean a part of the exploration um we really then want to understand in Greater detail this mapping from the markovian Dynamics the Markov kernels um through decorative permutations into space-time that that really right now the and the physicists are working really hard on that I mean among them are Neymar and his collaborators and they have they were the ones who discovered the decorative permutations the amplitahedron but but they haven't stopped there they're looking they're looking they've got stuff on um effective field theories and and and what they call the EFT hedron and so there's I think a lot of algebraic geometry we need an algebraic geometry someone up with a a brilliant mind and a PhD in algebraic geometry to work with us uh and and so if someone if there's someone who's listened to this and you have a PhD in algebraic geometry that you find this interesting contact me because we we um we had one we had a wonderful friend Bruce Bennett and a brilliant algebraic geometry and he he died we've lost him and we need an algebraic geometry to um to help us here because the a lot of the stuff is the connections we need to make require algebraic Junction that is an incredibly difficult branch of mathematics uh it's it's way above my pay grade do I mean way above my pay grade yeah so we need we need people way above my pay grade here to to work on this but that will really nail down right our mapping between Markov kernels and decorated permutations in the algorithm we I mean that's an important link but it's like the the initial Bridge we need to build a multi-lane highway you know to to bridge the conscious agency domain into space-time so we really need now that we know that we think we have a connection we need to have really smart people working with us to help us you know where I you know I won't even be able to understand what they say it's algebraic geometry it's really really but I will try I will I will give it my My Level best so there's there's a ton of work in algebraic geometry to really nail down exactly how the properties the Marconi Dynamics map to properties like unitarity locality and so forth inside space-time and really all the all the complexities of that the physicists have found in Quantum filter I mean Quantum filter is incredibly complicated kind of thing there are all sorts of interesting Casimir effect and all this this interesting stuff um getting these momentum distributions inside the proton we chose that not because it's the most important but because we think it's the the E perhaps the easiest thing we could do immediately to make people say oh well it's not obviously wrong okay you know they can do something it's small but they can do something maybe then we can get I mean real smart people way above my pay grade who can then start to move in who know their Quantum field Theory and no algebraic geometry and there are a bunch of other branches of mathematics that are going to be so so in other words if we if we succeed beyond my wildest hopes in this we will have only taken a tiny baby step and we really need reinforcements from really smart people to to move it forward yeah and a lot of different methods and Mathematics is going to be the king here well of course we need the theoretical physicists who know the current theoretical physics because we that's what we have to project to as the limiting case but for my money it's going to be the mathematical physicists yes who are going to really be able to bring this thing home I think well let's just summarize this last part of the paper you said the computational experiment proposed here explores how the strong force which dominated thy protons may arise from a dynamics of conscious agents future computational experience experiments will explore Gravity the weak Force the electromagnetic force dark matter and cosmology from The Big Bang to the entropic death of the Universe I mean there's so many areas here you're going to explore which ones are you most excited about well there I feel like a kid in a candy store I want to know them all and I want to explore them all but but each one is um will require a team of geniuses different things as well to do it but I'll just give you um one I mean here's one that's really interesting to me um our dynamics of conscious ages it's more coving Dynamics need not have an arrow of time so it's a dynamical system but it need not have an arrow of time you by that I mean you could write down a markovian Dynamics in which the entropy doesn't increase there's no there's no second law of Thermodynamics in it but if you it's a theorem that if you take such a Dynamics and you project it by conditional probability so I'm I've got this big Dynamics it has no error of time but I'm I'm going to project it in a way that loses a little bit of information and but I got a like a a projected Dynamic so I've got a new markovian Dynamics but it's it's slightly simpler than the bigger one because it's a projection the new Dynamics will have an arrow of time because it lost information so the projection will have increasing entropy now that suggests that's very suggestive to me that once again here we are in a world that we think is ruled by the second law of Thermodynamics exactly it started with the big bang is going to end maybe in an entropic death or some big crunch who knows but it's going to it it's got a a finite shelf life on this universe and and things are running down and that that's a fundamental principle in physics it's also the fundamental thing in evolution of natural selection right where um the fundamental limited resource that we're competing against is time right if I don't get food in time I die if I don't mate in time the species doesn't survive so so time is the fundamental limited resource and so this this fact suggest to me that of course we expected to get space and time as artifacts of the projection so space and time are not fundamental there are they they're not fundamental to the deeper reality they're only properties of this projection well here's here's how time is an artifact it's it's a theorem you can have no entropic Arrow of time but when you take a projection you will necessarily have and so it's an artifact it's not an so our Arrow of time is not an insight into reality time is not fundamental that that notion of time is not fundamental it's entirely artifactual and that means and I've done a lot of work in evolution of natural selection and and you know and I'm very interested in evolutionary Game Theory and I think evolution is absolutely the best and cleanest scientific model we have to explain biological evolution and so forth so I love that theory but but this is saying that that is a theory inside our space-time interface it's wonderful Theory inside our space-time interface it does not generalize Beyond we could imagine that so so I'll be I'll say inside space and time we have organisms competing for limited resources [Music] and going extinct and so forth we have an arrow of time but that could be a projection of a markovian Dynamics where there are no there is no competition there are no limited resources and there is no error of time and and so what what ultimately another thing I'd love to do is to show exactly how evolution of a natural selection arises as the projection of a Dynamics where there is no competition and no limited resources and that see that's what we really want um when we transcend a previous scientific theory we don't disrespect it quite the opposite right we respect Newton what a genius I mean hats off to new he was brilliant and but it's limited Einstein is better but but space time itself is doomed and so we're going to transcend space line but we're going to again hats off to Einstein to Quantum field Theory and to evolution of natural selection whatever new Theory we propose Beyond space-time has to project into space-time and give us back those theories yes that's what that's going to be the discipline that our new theory has to to satisfy before we are willing to saddle up on that pony and take it where it's going to go if that if that doesn't give us back you know Einstein and Darwin and Quantum field Theory and so forth inside Space time then that's not the horse we need to write that's the wrong horse so these theories are still doing incredible work for us so so you can see the attitude is not oh we're right and they're wrong and those those stupid no no no no no that was brilliant work and every scientific theory is just the next baby step mine included you know a century from now hopefully much much sooner if this holds up it'll be viewed as just a next baby step and we know far you know the next generation will know far deeper and and and we'll understand what I've done what we've done is as just a special case of something far more General and that's just the nature of science there is no Theory of Everything yes in principle there can be no Theory of Everything because every scientific theory starts with assumptions we need to tell Kurt that [Music] is not Theory of Everything oh right right he has Theory of Everything well and and I I think most scientists who talk about a Theory of Everything Is with a wink and a nod um because I think they understand that uh and I think Kurt as well I think yeah that goes with this podcast as well when you think about it because I called it Mind Body Solution paying homage to the mind-body problem but I don't really think I've got we're going to find the solution it's more of a it's just in the name it works yeah that's right the hunt yes but but in principle we can never get a final Theory of Everything because every theory has to have assumptions and those are the things that you don't assume I'm sorry that you don't explain you assume them but you don't explain them so it means we'll never get the final ex explanation um although we may be ourselves the final explanation there are you know theories in which you are what you're looking for but but but you'll never be able to write it down so you are it but but you can't write it down because you transcend anything that you can write down um but this is infinite job security for Science and I you know I love that I love that as well I mean your goal is to give the scientific Community a reason to take seriously the idea that Consciousness is fundamental that Consciousness can be modeled with precise mathematics and make precise experimental predictions and that the Dynamics of Consciousness gives rise to space Time Life space-time physics yeah and when you think about this whole journey and everything you've done regarding this paper specifically what has been the most Most Fascinating aspect of it all and just the coolest part of it I uh for me it blew me away a couple things blew me away just in the last year a year ago we didn't have this mapping into the from Markov chains to the decorated permutations yeah and when we could do that a light went on to me I go oh wow this is real this this is a real potential here and then when we said okay well you know that's that's cool but you need to get Mass being an energy momentum and you've got to get those from kernels good luck and when we start when they started cracking when we started getting what we just described it today um and then we got that that hyperfined structure prediction that really that was when I began to start to believe that this might be the next baby step this this might actually be it it I I couldn't believe it seem too good to be true as you know so but we'll see um maybe it is too good to beat real quick maybe it isn't but but what what I would say is is this um the thing you read at the end about trying to make precise predictions and so forth that's that's what makes what we're doing here different from um pan psychist approaches where um and and again these are my good friends and so forth so there's nothing personal here at all um but and pan psychism means a lot of things so I'll say the the version of pan psychism that I'm thinking about here there's a version in which we take space-time is fundamental we take Quantum field theory is given and the particles of you know the standard model is given the lepton's bows on the quarks and what we do is we say um consciousness is the fire behind those equations each particle has you know an electron has some conscious experience uh gluon has some conscious and the different colors of gluons have different conscious experiences and so forth and um my my attitude about that is there's no progress we're not explaining consciousness we're it's pen psychism but that version that I just talked about of a pan psychism is really a dualism physics stuff is real in addition there's Consciousness behind it and there's no principle why should the elect what experience what specific experience should the electron have and how does that differ from the electron neutrino and the Tau neutrino and the Tau and the mule what are the specific experiences that are attached to each one and why no one's trying that and good luck so so to just say that their experiences from me as from my point of view as a scientist nothing's been accomplished nothing has been accomplished it's a dualism the version I just said what we're trying to do in contrast is say okay we're not assuming the standard model and space time is fundamental they're not part of our assumptions we have to derive them all of it were some in Consciousness conscious experiences is fundamental and we're going to have to project into space-time and give and explain all that and that seems I mean we haven't done it yet so you know I'm not congratulating myself but I'm saying that that at least that attempt that direction of attempt is very different from saying well electrons have experiences in Tau and muon have experiences in quarks and it as a scientist I find that exceedingly unsatisfying I don't see where it's going to go in terms of giving me a new mathematics that can actually do something make predictions and eventually make new technology yes if this approach we're talking about works if we can actually talk about the Dynamics of conscious agents outside space-time and we understand what particles are and what mass is we understand how space-time is constructed as an interface then think about what you can do if you're playing Grand Theft Auto you're you're a user you might be a super user and you're able to drive your car and out and outrun everybody it that's fantastic so it's a great skill but if you know the code if you understand Grand Theft Auto is just a piece of software and you wrote the code or you know how it's written then you can do stuff that's completely miraculous to the guy who's the expert inside Grant you can take the all the gas out of this tank you can change you can give them flat tires you can take away a steering wheel or you could change the geometry of the road he's driving you can do or you can get him from A to B without going through the space you can just get them you can just you can appear anywhere you want to in space so if we really if it's really possible for us to show how space time is just a headset and we know the the software of conscious agents that that crazed that headset and and it turns out we can Tinker with that software and there's a question of whether we can Tinker with it but if we can Tinker with it then the Andromeda galaxy is what something like 2.4 million light years away going through space time we're not going to get there anytime soon but what if we don't have to go through space-time what if we can just go around space-time and just be there that the technologies that this might open up are completely mind-blowing so so that's again I'm saying that it's it's guaranteed but I can guarantee that the pan cyclist version thing that I said will never get there there's nothing that that even has a hope this at least has a hope we'll see if the hope is dashed but at least it's a direction where it it might happen we'll see I mean if it does it's absolutely crazy I'm pretty sure someone who's listening to this last portion of the podcast if they just decided to listen to they think we're talking about some crazy things I mean it's highly plausible when you take everything into account it makes sense that's that's could possibly be the future that's right but to someone who believes in Flat Earth around Earth is a crazy thing yeah exactly it's done I mean this is the last time we did this thing where I told you last minute objections anything you think you're going to get any sort of uh feedback on perhaps counter arguments this is the yo lot like a chance for you to just Express certain views and anything about this paper that you find you didn't speak about yet that you want to just clarify or mention uh just one thing that I'll I'll point out um these are objections that I get all the time in emails um from people and they'll they'll say um also two things so Hoffman of course you say that what we see is not the truth is you know it's our construction well you know what if a car hits you from behind you didn't see it coming but it still killed you so there there you go it's all over you know you you you know the car really does exist and and that's that's simply just not a not a counter example I mean if you're um if you're again in Grand Theft Auto right and and in your driving and you there's a if you look behind you and you see that the red Porsche is about to come up and crash you from behind right well if you don't look you're not going to see that red Porsche and you're not going to render it so there's no red portion right there in the super computer there is no red Porsche does that mean that you're not going to get hit from behind anyway and and and have damaged no you're still going to get hit but there was no red Porsche there's some reality namely the supercomputer and the software that's going to enforce but the reality is not what you see in your headset so that that's so for that whole class of arguments well you'll often want to step off a cliff it will kill you even if you don't think it's real all those just my my response for for people of those objections if you just think about putting on a headset and being in a virtual reality game just run your question the same thing that you think is an objection to what I'm saying just run it in virtual reality and see if it still flies there when you think about in virtual reality you'll realize oh wow it would happen even if I didn't render it and and but it doesn't the rendered thing doesn't exist the Porsche doesn't exist the cliff doesn't exist until I render it but the software is not the Porsche or the cliff the software is something utterly outside the headset and that that is a reality so I'm not denying reality I was just I'm denying that space time is the reality so that's one objection the other objection and hopefully that will you know Save A Lot you know thousands of people having to write me emails saying you know here's an obvious objection to what you're saying the funny thing about that is is that you obviously claim that Consciousness is fundamental but then you've got people like that Dennis and Frankie who also get told the same can't argue I mean if Consciousness doesn't exist I get knocked by a bus quite because I'm unconscious yeah that's good and by the way there I they're both wonderful men I mean even though we disagree I mean I I they're great then they're brilliant and I'm glad to have people that bright that disagree yeah just just raised real quick um is the objection that when I say that evolution financial and I didn't go that into that too much today but when I say that evolution of natural selection um we use evolutionary Game Theory to show that we evolved not to see the truth that that natural selection would not shape us to see the truth um there are a lot of people including some professional philosophers who have come back and said that is um self-contradictory and the contradiction is this like so evolution of a natural selection Darwin's idea is that there are physical objects called organisms competing in space and time for physical resources like food and now evolutionary game theory is a mathematical statement that's supposed to capture Darwin's idea now either evolutionary Game Theory succeeded and it Faithfully represents Darwin's ideas or it didn't if it didn't then you can't use evolutionary Game Theory to show that organisms and space-time are doomed okay and if it did if if evolutionary Game Theory does successfully capture Darwin's ideas then you couldn't possibly use it to show that he was wrong yeah so there's no way that you can do what you're doing without shooting yourself on the foot logically either way so you so as one philosopher put it you know Hoffman is in an unfortunate dialectical situation okay so I'm in an unfortunate dialectical situation and and my response is no I'm in the normal situation of how science progresses from one Theory to the next the way science progresses is you take your ideas like Einstein's idea that space-time is fundamental and the speed of light is universal and that if you're an elevator and you're falling you'll be massless you you would you would weigh nothing those are his intuitions he labors and labors and laborers for for the general relativity for many many years and and sleepless nights deep deep struggle in the 1915 he puts down his field equations okay now when you use Einstein's field equations and also because his his 1905 paper where he uses Planck's constant to essentially introduce quantum theory although I didn't like it he introduces quantifier when you bring in Quantum field Theory which which is based on space time and you bring in Einstein traffic so which are all assume space time is fundamental fundamental you look at the mathematics the mathematics tells you that space-time has no operational meaning beyond the plank scale 10 to the minus 33 centimeters 10 to the minus 43 seconds in other words Einstein's theory that was capturing his intuitions about space-time comes back and tells us that space time itself cannot be fundamental so Einstein is now in this very unfortunate dialectical situation either these mathematically precise theories captured Einstein's intuitions or they did not if they did not then they couldn't possibly show that space-time was not fundamental and if they did capture his on his intuitions then they wouldn't contradict him that's the mistake they wouldn't contradict him every scientific theory has premises and the when you make it but it has a limited scope every scientific theory has limited scope when you write down the mathematics which you hope is your mathematics is precise enough to find what is the limited scope of your assumptions how far do your assumptions go and where do they stop because a scientific theory is not a Theory of Everything it's has a limited range so what the power of science is is we make our mathematics our assumptions precise not so that our assumptions can never be disproved but so that we can find their limits and say space time is great until you get to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters and then goodbye and and so that's the way science progresses is by one set of equations capturing one set of intuitions and showing you their limits and then being the the test bed for your next set of ideas because you're now you have to take a leap right there's this and this is the fun of science well part of the fun I mean the mathematics is fun too if you're a mathematician it's hard for me I can see how it can be fun but it's just hard for me but the the fun is now you have to take a creative leap to get a new framework and then projected back into the old framework and make sure you get that old framework generalization of that old framework the the old framework can't tell you what leap to take but it can tell you if the leap was wrong because if it doesn't project back to so so that's how science progresses it's not that if our mathematical theories capture our intuitions they could never prove us wrong is that that mathematical theories to capture intuitions better show us the limits of those of those assumptions um or they're not terribly useful because because we know we don't we know we don't have the final Theory we know that the only question is are our equations smart enough to help us to see the limits of our current theory or not if if not then our mathematics hasn't gone far enough we need to get a deeper mathematics find the limits of our current so so that's uh at some point I have to write a paper to respond to you know because this has been published the the in philosophy journals and so forth and so I'll I'll need but there you know there's a finite amount of time and I I think addressing it here is is easy it takes me 10 minutes to address it writing the paper would take me months and I'm not sure at this point in my life I want to spend months doing that when I have some other more fun stuff to do so I may who knows I may never respond in writing this may be the only thing I do um we'll see I think look ideally you're doing a great job at the moment I mean I've watched many of your podcasts you do you start you do such a fantastic job at a certain repetitive answers that you've got that work perfectly so when I watch some of your interviews I'll enjoy that some of your answers are well rehearsed in the sense that you know exactly what's been working and what isn't and I think that's right this can be very complicated so it's helpful to cut through it all and try to get to the clean intuition because otherwise it can be very murky yeah yeah Don before we end this paper specifically I mean let's just summarize it the fact is that subatomic particles created from Consciousness that's that's pretty much what we're talking about yeah that's that's the proposal I wouldn't say the fact but I would say that that's the proposal anything about this paper that you want to talk about in detail specifically that you feel we haven't touched on that you want to address uh not not today except to say that um it should be posted pretty soon and within a week and a half it should be posted um online and I'll I'll send I can send you a link to when the Institute and wedding Sciences posted something but it's going to be um Saturday June 24th at 11 o'clock a.m Pacific time that there's going to be a a live Zoom where um all the three groups that got awarded this prize will be um discussing their proposals and so I recommend it's free people can just walk on yeah and I'm excited for that uh thank you Don it's uh once again a pleasure it's always been a pleasure too Anna thank you so much I mean I've been I can't wait to continue to watch this journey and hopefully continue to interact about it every paper that comes out you can expect an email from me I'll be happy to I'll be happy to make alert you to the papers too absolutely I know that's it's been a pleasure thank you so much Don and good luck okay I cannot wait for this paper to be published and I'm looking forward to the I think the view is in for a treat for this one I mean it's it's pretty epic work thank you so much [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: Mind-Body Solution with Dr Tevin Naidu

Views: 58,708

Keywords: Does Consciousness Define Reality, Donald Hoffman's Revolutionary Experiment, Mind-Body Solution, Cognitive Science Insights, Donald Hoffman Consciousness, Reality Perception, Influence Of Consciousness, Subatomic World Experiment, Cognitive Sciences University Of California, MIT Ph.D. Donald Hoffman, Case Against Reality Book, TED Talk On Reality Perception, Distinguished Scientific Award Winner, Chopra Foundation Rustum Roy Award, Troland Research Award, MbS&x%, Define

Id: Toq9YLl49KM

Length: 130min 56sec (7856 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2023