Proof That Reality Is An ILLUSION: The Mystery Beyond Space-Time - Donald Hoffman | Know Thyself E63

each one of us is the deepest reality and the deepest truth and the deepest love that is possible most of us are spending our lives completely ignorant of who we really are most of my colleagues they assume that space time is fundamental which is false they assume that brain activity somehow gives rise to conscious experiences which is false and what they're missing is this space and time and objects in space and time do not exist when they're not perceived we've mistaken a limit of our headset for an insight into to the nature of reality there's that old saying if a tree falls in the woods and no one sees it does it still make a sound but you're saying like does the tree even actually exist that's exactly right the question then is what's outside of our SpaceTime headset science will continue to progress because we are not little three-b brains we are the infinite intelligence each of us is infinitely precious and infinitely intelligent anything that you can say is perhaps ultimately trivial compared to the reality that you are but on the other hand you can know it not intellectually but by [Music] being hello beautiful beings welcome back to the no thyself podcast where every single week we get the honor and privilege and opportunity to sit down with a brilliant mind a deep soul to see what we can learn more about the true nature of self and the world around us at deeper and deeper levels my guest today has a PHD in cognitive psychology he is a professor of cognitive Sciences at UCI who groundbreaking research shakes the very foundations of our understanding of reality he is an author of visual intelligence and the case against reality his extensive research in cognitive psychology and evolutionary game theory has made him a leading figure in the field of Consciousness studies his theory suggests that our perception of the world is not a direct representation of objective reality but rather our brains construct reality as a user interface almost like a desktop screen that is to a computer in order to help us navigate the world and it's with that therefore that reality is much more elusory than we potentially think it is and that we may be even living in a simulation of sorts today we're going to be exploring these ideas at depths and exploring the implications that they have about our understanding of the world and our place in it Dr Donald Hoffman thank you for being here my pleasure thanks a lot for having me audre yeah it's it's my honor I've been really loving just digesting more of your content your books it's so mindbending and opening and I would love for you just to start out with like what the technical question that you and your team set out to kind of answer as you started on the journey that you're on well so there's a couple strands to our research one is evolution and what does it entail about sensory systems and does evolution shape sensory systems to see reality as it is or not that's that's one strand of our research and another strand is the question of um Consciousness and can we as scientists get a mathematically precise model of Consciousness and of its relationship to physical objects like brains and neurons and so forth and does Consciousness arise from the brain or or what what is that relationship and so those are the two strands Evolution and what it shapes sensory systems to see and Consciousness and its relationship to the physical world and our work on Evolution has focused on this a technical question does evolution of natural selection shape sensory systems to see truths about objective reality true structures of objective reality and and most of us would say well of course I mean I mean it's all about Fitness and surely seeing the truth is going to make you more fit and that seems like just an a no-brainer sure and many of my colleagues think that but when you look at Darwin's theory with mathematical precision as we can with the tools of evolutionary Game Theory which was John Mard Smith brought the tools of Game Theory which is a mathematical Theory together with Darin's ideas to give us evolutionary Game Theory so we can actually now not just talk informally about what evolution does we can actually write down mathematical equations and run simulations and so forth and so I decided with my graduate student including Justin Mark Brian Maran and others to address this question you know it's a nice clean technical question so what is the probability that natural selection would shape our sensory systems any sensory systems to see any truths about the structure of reality and by structure me you for example maybe there's a reality has some distance metric things are far apart so what is the probability that it tells us TR is about distances or orders like 1 2 3 4 5 is a total order if the real reality has some total order what's the probability that Evolution would shape our sensory systems see that total order and topologies and and other things you can imagine so we went at it and I thought you know maybe Evolution will do things on the cheap and so maybe every once in a while it won't show us the truth and you know because it's it's you don't want to waste calories and but when we got into I was surprised it turned out that the math was very very clear there are selection pressures against seeing the truth period there in fact our our theorems basically tell us that the probability that any sensory system of any organism has ever been shaped to see any aspect of objective reality any structure of objective reality is precisely zero in the limit precisely zero zero zero and intuitively I mean that sounds crazy and but intuitively the reason is well well I I'll give a couple reasons first evolution shapes sensory systems to guide adaptive Behavior any evolutionary biologist would would agree with that and and basically what I'm saying is yes it shape sensory systems to guide adaptive Behavior period it doesn't shape in addition to see truths and that and and that seems so counterintuitive but that's really what evolutionary theory is telling us and and Steven Pinker talked about this in a paper of his also in a book called how the mind works but in a paper um called so how does the Mind work and and he outlines for evolutionary reasons in in that beautiful paper about you know why there would be selection pressures against true beliefs and and true perceptions so so Steve's work is is is brilliant but but he left open the door that we might have some true perceptions about everyday objects so that was my focus was about those everyday objects like tables and chairs and the Moon and the Sun and so forth and and there we basically pinker's logic continues even for those objects and and we don't see the truth even there for everyday middle-sized objects so I I'll give a brief technical reason why and and then I'll give an informal technically Evolution as formulated by evolutionary Game Theory think of it as a game and in to win a game you you have to get more points right than than your competition for example or enough points to get to the next level or something so in evolutionary theory the points are what they call payoff functions so if I'm a lion and I'm hungry um a cow or stake would have great payoff for for me as a lion if I'm the same lion and I'm full and I want to mate well a cow has no payoff for for me at all right so so there are these payoff functions that tell you roughly The evolutionary points you're going to get which correspond to your chances of reproduction in in The evolutionary thing and so these are mathematical functions they they they're functions from the world whatever the world is the world its state the organism like the lion um it's its par particular sensory um systems and his particular physiological State like hungry or sated and the action feeding fighting fleeing and mating you know the famous 4fs so it's it's a complicated function from the world into payoff value say zero was a bad payoff to 100 which is a great payoff it doesn't matter what the numbers are but say 0 to 100 or Z to A th and so what we what we do is we actually analyze do those Fitness payoff functions actually contain information about the structures of reality mathematically we'd say are they homomorphisms of the structures of reality that is do they preserve these structures and so that's what working with Jon prosh more recently so I did simulations but then when we got the hint that this was what was going on I went with a wonderful friend of mine long-term collaborator Chon prash who's a mathematician and and uh so chayon has proven these these terms I'm not blaming him but you know and and what what we what we found is that the probability is precisely zero you can there are some payoff functions that will preserve objective reality structures there not that there aren't any but when you take the ratio of the number that preserve the structures of reality versus all of them the total number of payoff functions that ratio goes to zero as you as the number of states in the world and the number of payoff functions gets larger so would you say that what we see is connected to the structure of reality but that the structure of reality is made up of something completely different than what we're experiencing yes it's it's connected but very very different and so here the informal now talk about the informal metaphor that you mentioned earlier on which is like the a user interface on your computer right if you're writing a an email and the icon on your desktop is blue and rectangular for some email you're writing that doesn't mean the email itself is blue and rectangular and if the icon in the middle of the screen doesn't mean you're your your email is in the middle of your computer mean anybody who thought that just misunderstands the desktop interface is not there to like resemble the truth it's there to hide the truth which is diodes and resistors and magnetic fields and voltages you know you're actually toggling millions of voltages in a precise sequence to write that email if you had to do that good luck if you had to do it directly if you had if you had to see the reality and do that directly you you'd never send your email out so the user interface allows you to inter interact with reality and control the reality with the kind of precision you need even though you're utterly ignorant most of us have no idea about the voltages that we're toggling we're we're completely ignorant about the reality that we're actually interacting with and so that's what evolution did Evolution gave us our senses you know seeing hearing smelling so forth um as a virtual headset so to speak we we got a headset to play the game of life and that head headset uh hides reality but allows us to control objective reality in the ways that we need so it's like if you're playing like the Grand Theft Auto like VR kind of analogy like if you're if you're playing a multiplayer game um I might be playing with someone in China or India or wherever around the world and I could look over with my headset on looking over I see a red Ferrari and my friend in China might also say oh yeah I see a red Ferrari but of course the red Ferrari is only there when I render it when I look I the pixels appear in my headset I then see a red Ferrari but there's no red Ferrari on the supercomputer and if I look away my friend in China might say well I still see a red Ferrari well she's seeing her red Ferrari the one that she's she's creating in her conscious experience from her headset so there so we we have the feeling we could have the feeling that the red Ferrari is always there but in fact there is no red Ferrari anywhere except in the moment of someone's perception so this is really fascinating and this conversation is going to be very trippy um the so the Nobel Prize that was kind of recently awarded for proving that local realism is false is speaking to this right it's like there's that old kind of saying if a tree falls in a in the woods and no one sees it does it still make a sound but you're saying like does the tree even actually exist if no one's perceiving it so what what right what are the powerful implications of uh you know proving that local realism is false what does that mean right so that's a good point to move to because someone might say well you know it's one thing to talk about Evolution but this is you're talking about objects in SpaceTime that's not evolutionary theories Bailey wi that's physicists surely the physicist will put you in your place and tell you that you're you're full of it well but as you said the the Nobel Prize last year in physics went to uh three physicists who had done a lot of empirical work actually verifying the predictions of quantum theory that local realism is is false so Anton Zinger and John clauser and and Allan aspect were the the winners and and so local realism has two parts the local and the realism realism is the statement that physical objects like an electron or a proton have definite values of their properties like position and momentum and spin even if they're not observed that's that's realism so things exist and have their properties even if they're not observed which we all intuitively say of course and then local is the claim that those properties have influences that propagate through SpaceTime no faster than the speed of light you know Einstein's got the speed limit on so that's local realism and it it turns out that local realism is is false and clauser did the first experiments decades ago and didn't get the Nobel Prize because you this is this is the kind of stuff where you you really want to nail it down so then aspect did some more and then Zinger did some more so after decades and decades you know even the conservative body like the Nobel committee says okay you know game's up local realism is is is false now some people will say that that this doesn't rule out super determinism we can talk about that if if if if you want but but local I I think it's very very clear on the quantum formalism that that objects do not have definite values of their properties when they're not observed now some people will try to wiggle out and say well that's for microscopic stuff you know subatomic particles and so forth but tables and chairs that's different story well there's no no one's given a principled account that says that macros first quantum theory holds at all scales so is is just not it's just false to say that quantum theory is the theory of the small and and something else is the theory it's just false quantum theory is the theory you know Quantum filter is the area physics especially then and also gravity Einstein's gravity so so you can't say local realism is false only for small particles uh you know but not for everyday macroscopic objects we can talk about you know the collapse of the wave function and so forth if you want little more go into the Weeds on it a little bit more but but if if we don't want to go into the weeds I'll just say this is true at all scales and so what I'm saying then is that evolution by natural selection independently agrees with what the physicist just won their the Nobel Prize for it says that what you see is not the truth you render the objects that you see on the Fly including all their properties and that's why local realism is false the reason it doesn't have the properties is because it doesn't even exist the moon exists when you perceive it and when you don't perceive it it doesn't exist so that's where I wanted to go next because you look at like you know these Celestial entities like the moon or planets the fact that they wouldn't exist when no conscious mind is perceiving them is a very baffling idea how could something you spoke to how this works at all scales right so it doesn't matter if it's a chair or if it's the moon but I suppose how do you define consciousness then because could you say then that the moon has a consciousness of its own um what about you know is there like a scale of sentience for animal life that would perceive the moon um and yeah just can you break down more how it's actually possible that the moon doesn't exist when we don't perceive it right that's pretty that's mind-bending I think a lot of help comes if you think about the virtual reality headset metaphor almost all of your questions will get resolved if you think in terms of that metaphor okay so just imagine that I'm in a virtual world that has a moon and a sun in in virtual reality but it's all in my headset and I have other it's a multiplayer game so other people are you know maybe I'm playing tennis for example and I have the tennis ball and I'm hitting and my partner hits the tennis ball back well now I could play a game and say well you know but the tennis ball is real because look uh I'm going to take the tennis ball drop it my partner Mary do you still see the tennis ball yeah it's still there on the it's on the ground that proves that tennis ball was there well no it doesn't Mary just had her pixels and her headset you know there's some supercomputer that's coordinating everything but there's no green tennis ball inside the the the supercomputer and so any question that you have that any thing that's stumping you just think about a multiplayer virtual reality game take your question into that and you will then see how to answer your own question I usually like to give that metaphor now because people send me emails all the time and and I myself always saying okay here's the virtual reality headset metaphor when you think about it in that case you'll get the right answer every time so but now your question was also about what is consciousness and um you know for example we might say that a rock isn't conscious but maybe you know an amoeba I don't know maybe an ant I don't know but maybe the time I get to a mouse possibly conscious a cat yeah that tends to be our our intuition but again that that isn't listening to what our best science is telling us space and time and objects in space and time do not exist when they're not perceived it's just a headset so the distinction that we make between living and non-living is not principled it's an artifact of the limitations of our headset the distinction we make between conscious and unconscious is not principled it's also an artifact I'll give you an an example to to bring that home suppose you're on a zoom discussion with some friends and you see the face of your friend those and there's some pixels Associated and then also a wall or a chair behind them well you might say well some of the pixels are conscious the pixels related to those are conscious pixels and the pixels for the for the the desk and the chair are not conscious well that's silly pixels are just pixels sometimes they give you insights about Consciousness in the person's face and their expression and sometimes they don't when you're you know the chair on the desk and so forth but pixels are are neither conscious nor unconscious and and now this is all headset so all all you're seeing are the pixels when you're looking around you're just seeing the pixels and the distinction you make between living and non-living conscious and unconscious is is not principled it's an artifact of the limitation of your headset so in my view then see the physicists have said quantum theory tells us that physical particles don't have properties when they're not observed and then high energy theoretical particle physicists like David Gross Nar hammed and others are are they're at the very Forefront of of physics looking okay well what's next what they're saying and this is a quote SpaceTime is doomed SpaceTime itself is not fundamental it's been a space and time under Newton was the foundation of reality and then since Einstein in 1905 SpaceTime has been in in science the fundamental reality but now in 2023 it's over it's had a good ride Space and Time have had a good ride they were a very very useful you know assumption but now science has moved on SpaceTime is not fundamental and physicists are finding new structures Beyond SpaceTime something that like decorated permutations or the mathematical structures Beyond SpaceTime but they don't know what what this means they they're finding mathematical structures but what is it Beyond SpaceTime so what I'm pursuing with this other strand of our research is the idea that Consciousness is fundamental and Consciousness is the reality Beyond SpaceTime in in fact SpaceTime just is a pretty trivial headset that c certain consciousnesses probably not most probably very few Consciousness is used so so I'm proposing a complete inversion of how we think about space and time and Consciousness most of us think of space and time as fundamental and you are little body 100 to 200 pound 300 lound body in space time and three pounds of brain create Consciousness so so that's the standard view but that doesn't match our best science no our best science is saying SpaceTime is not fundamental local realism of false SpaceTime is just a headset who headset I'm proposing let's let's turn it around Consciousness is fundamental SpaceTime is a trivial data structure a trivial headset and it's only got four dimensions three of space one of time in String Theory maybe 10 or 11 why not 20 billion I mean my actual and and actually SpaceTime falls apart at 10 Theus 33 cm it falls that's what physicists will say it it doesn't even have any meaning operational meaning past 10 Theus 33 no so not 10- 33 trillion CM just 10 Theus 33 the thing falls apart so we we thought that space and time are the fundamental reality they're a cheap headset a really really cheap headset a very enchanting cheap headset right it feels it feels very real know yeah so I mean we just opened up so much here and I'm so excited to spend the rest of this podcast uh breaking down digesting a lot of this especially in the later part of this conversation exploring some of the moral ethical uh implications of of all this but first I want to kind of go back to this distinction between Consciousness and what's alive and what's not we I think like to kind of separate separate our thinking from a human is conscious maybe a rock isn't conscious certainly less conscious is an electron alive would you say that an electron is alive or conscious or is alive and conscious two separate things in your view well so when I look at you I just have a visual experience of a human body that visual experience is not alive or dead that's just my visual experience and it's not you you you are a conscious entity and my experience of you is just my experience through my headset and so so I would say that the image that I have of you my perception that is neither alive nor not alive it's it's just a portal to your Consciousness and it's you know it's one of the best portals I have the human form in my perception is one of the best portals I have into Consciousness the cat form is a portal but not quite as good I can tell when my cat is hungry if it's if I'm if I've petted it enough and it's it's had enough you know and but with an ant you know you know a little bit about is that's a lie for sure a little bit about what it likes and dislikes so but when I get to a rock you might say well it's totally unconscious no it just means that my interface gave up I'm always so the idea is I'm always interacting with Consciousness my headset has limitations with humans it gives me some but not very good actually you could live with someone for many many years and still have lots of stuff you don't know about them about their conscious experience how they see the world you can still be surprised so so we've mistaken a limit of our headset for an insight into the nature of reality I see a rock and it looks pretty dumb to me well it's not because I'm interacting with the dumb reality it's because my headset has to give up it's simplifying things it's dumbing things down so when I'm interacting so I'll be very very clear when I'm in when I pick up a rock I am interacting with Consciousness and I'm not saying the rock is conscious right I'm not saying the rock is conscious the rock is just my experience I'm so so for example let's do the VR metaphor again with um Grand Theft Auto when I grab the steering wheel of my car right I'm doing something inside the computer but there's no steering wheel inside the computer right so so that's the key key thing to keep I'm always in that metaphor I'm always interacting with diodes and resistors and voltages that's what I'm always doing sometimes I see those dials and resistors as a steering wheel sometimes I see them as a Ferrari sometimes I see them as my arm my my avatar arm but I'm always interacting with the diodes and resistors in that metaphor so so now backing it into I'm saying Consciousness is the fundamental engine it's the super computer behind everything and everything that I see is my interaction with that engine with cons ious but my headset Dums things down so with you I'm getting insight into the Consciousness that I'm interacting with with my cat but with a rock not but it's just wrong to say the rock is unconscious and and your body is conscious those are just put it this way the body that I'm perceiving is not you it's just the body that I'm perceiving yeah and and for all I know if you actually knew what I was perceiving of you you would say no that's not what I think I look like at all right so yep I mean so much of the world and I'm excited to dive into this a little bit later so much Division and separation comes from the tightly held beliefs of our perceptions being the absolute truth right and so that's right this view of Consciousness being fundamental is a completely 180 shift from how most people even approach the hard problem right and absolutely we think that at some stage of neuronal development we turn that dial enough and then we get conscious experience by virtue of unconscious ious complexity just kind of developing but if Consciousness is fundamental then you're coming at the problem if you want to call it that from the completely opposite angle that that's exactly right so most of my colleagues and who are studying Consciousness good friends and and colleagues and they're brilliant but most of them are physicalists they assume that that SpaceTime is fundamental which is false they assume that reductionism is true which is false they assume that brain activity or for example complicated enough artificial intelligence systems um the right activity in computers somehow gives rise to conscious experiences so that's this the standard View and again these are my my friends and colleagues they're brilliant and but they've failed so far to explain any specific conscious experience there's no scientific theory today none that can explain a specific conscious EXP experience and how it arises from the brain activity or orchestrated claps and neona microt trib Quantum States or um integrated information or some Global workspace architecture um if you ask them and I and I've done this these are my friends I ask them informally I'll ask them at conferences when I want to put them on the spot say you know so great you have a theory of Consciousness so what specific conscious experience can you explain what what is the integrated information Theory pattern what they call the q- shape that must be the taste of chocolate and couldn't be the smell of garlic what what is it or whatever one you want can you give me one no and you know I've done this with Stuart Hammer off and this with this Hammer off Hammer off and Penrose model steuart can you give me a specific conscious experience that you can explain and I I had to push two or three minutes he hemed and hod and I fin steart can you give me one finally had to say no you can't and and it's not because they're dumb they're brilliant but you can't boot up Consciousness from SpaceTime objects it's just not possible and so spiritual Traditions have been saying this for thousands of years right they've been saying that Consciousness is fundamental and space and time is you know they haven't used the term headset but it's maybe an illusion or something or and Plato has the allegory of the cave and so the spiritual Traditions have have in some s been there for for quite a while but they haven't had the tools of mathematics they've had only imprecise language to to work and they also haven't had the the tools of experimental um psychology for example or experimental science more generally so so we're coming to a nice convergence for Humanity the spiritual Traditions have been saying this for thousands of years but haven't had the tools to make it rigorous and and and they've suffered for that because when you only have words the words they'll say the words are just pointers the da the Jing starts off the very first sentence is the da that can be spoken is is not the true da once you understand that then it's fine then you can read the rest of the book and realize don't take this stuff literally just take it as pointers to the truth inside you the Consciousness inside you and any good spiritual tradition will make that distinction clear up front but the followers have famously and terribly misunderstood that and we end up with religious wars and persecutions and killings and so forth and and and so and a lot of that comes because we've had imprecise language and it's easy to become dogmatic and to not understand the limits so what we have coming with science now is the scientists are now saying okay we need to look outside of SpaceTime and the spiritual Traditions are saying well great we've been here for quite a while come come join us but now the scientists have these incredible tools they thought that they were studying reality they've been studying their headset we've been studying the SpaceTime headset since Galileo and but we got good enough that we actually discovered that it's just a headset right it's actually the tools of science that have forced us to recognize that SpaceTime is just a headset which is an incredible achievement it's it's it's unbelievable it and and that's what is so beautiful about the science is that the theories are mathematically precise so that they tell you two things they tell you the scope the power of your theory with mathematical Precision but even more importantly they tell you the limits this is how far your theory goes and then it stops and that's the point of mathematical theory is they tell you the scope and the limits of the foundational concepts of your theories and so going forward now I think that that science will get a a really mathematically precise theory of of Consciousness I'm working with my team we can talk about the one I'm working on if if you want but but I should should make a point here that that many philosophers have argued against what I'm saying by they'll say look and this has been published in scientific you philosophy journals for example and so number of philosophers have said Hoffman is is saying that he's using evolutionary game theory of mathematics to show that organisms and resources objects in space and time are not fundamental they're an illusion that we don't see reality as it is well now [Music] Darwin in his theory was proposing real physical objects competing for real physical resources in space and time so the the philosophers will say well now look now either the mathematics of evolutionary Game Theory Faithfully represent Darwin's theory or it doesn't now if it doesn't You couldn't possibly use it to show that space and time and physical objects aren't fundamental and if it does Faithfully represent Darwin's theory then it wouldn't contradict Darwin's theory and Darwin's theory assumes space and time and physical object so either way you're in a bad situation what they will call an un unenviable um dialectical position you like that langage so UND un you know undesirable dialectical position that you put yourself in either way you can't possibly so they're saying basically you couldn't use evolutionary game theory in principle to show that space and time and physical objects aren't fundamental and and what they're missing is is is this the mathematics as it's used in science is built on the assumptions of the theory and it shows you the scope of those assumptions but also the limits and and there will be limits no there is no Theory of Everything in principle there is no scientific theory of everything because you always have to have assumptions and so you have a theory of everything except your assumptions but the assumptions are the Miracles of your theory now so so what happens then is just to make a real clear example of this um because this really seems to have grasped the imagination of a lot of philosophers and people who are philosophically minded they think I'm I'm in a logically bad situation I've shot myself on the foot logically Einstein and his theory of SpaceTime he he had the intuitions about space and time and and gravity warping space and time he wrote them down in mathematics right so for example he had 1907 he had the idea that if he was in an elevator and it was falling I'm sorry he was in an elevator and standing on a on a scale he weighs I know 150 PBS and then you cut the cord of the elevator and it fall goes in freef fall all of a sudden Einstein realized I'd weigh nothing and that was his big Insight that that was the big Insight that led to his theory of gravity it took him several years until like 1915 to actually turn it into mathematics well so now that we have so we have Einstein's intuition and his own mathematics to to make it formal and also his mathematics for Quantum theor we put them together we find out that SpaceTime ceases to have any operation meaning at What's called the plank scale 10us 33 cm 10- 43 seconds so there we see that Einstein himself with his own mathematics that were formalizing his own intuitions comes up with mathematics that tells him the limits of his intuition the limits are 10 Theus 33 cm 10- 43 seconds SpaceTime no longer makes sense that's the way science works so so it's not that the mathematics will always confirm and show you that your theory has infinite extension and and and everything is right it will tell you the limits so and what we have to do then at in science and this is maybe a really key Point our theories will tell us the limits a good theory a bad Theory won't right if it's not precise enough it won't tell you but a really good theory will tell you this is the limit then but it can't tell you what's next you can't tell you so scientists then have to take the leap a creative leap and it's usually the younger generation right the old guys they die with their theories and the younger the younger generation then you know makes the new leaps into and so you have to make a leap most of our leaps are wrong most of them are not interesting but every once in a while you get something that's interesting how do you know that it's interesting well here's where our old theories come back and help us what for example in the case of SpaceTime physicists are now in just in the last 10 years literally just in the last 10 years finding new structures utterly outside of space time completely outside of the headset but they can project them back into the headset and see what they predict inside the headset and there if you make predictions that aren't matching our theories inside space and time and the data that we have inside Space time then whatever you proposed outside of space time bye-bye that's wrong so our theories our current theories inside SpaceTime can give us a thumbs down on our leap outside of space time say no dum dum dumb bad you you got this wrong you got that wrong and they may give you some hints maybe they might help your intuitions about what where to look but they can't tell you what's going to be out there so you always have to make this creative leap project back into SpaceTime or into your the domain of your of the theory and then see you know thumbs up or thumbs down MH so that's how science works you you take your you you take your intuition make them mathematically precise 99% of the time you're not even interesting it's just it's just wrong just but every once in a while you get lucky you get an Einstein or Newton or something like that and and and you get something that is not right but but it's it's interesting it's actually it it it accounts for a lot of data it's it's it's doing something right and then when you find the limits of that and then you have to take creative leap get a deeper Theory the older theories then say thumbs down most of the time but every once in a while say can't put a thumbs down so maybe you should pursue that maybe that one's worth pursuing um so that's sort of the top level all right lots to unpack there as well I before we move on to some of these topics in further depth I want to kind of just go back to how Fitness beats truth and how Evolution essentially hid the truth of objective reality so that we could continue on this reproduction evolutionary um wheel for its own evolutionary purposes so can you speak to just the process of how what we perceived is created in our VR headset and how we really just see what we need to see in order long enough in order to survive and procreate right so so just looking at evolutionary theory by itself so forgetting my Consciousness stuff for a moment so when we talk about science we have to sort of talk about what model am I going to be so I'll now go back into SpaceTime so I'm now thinking in inside of space time and I'm using the tools of of evolution okay so that that's the model I'm using so Evolution then will say things very very interesting things it it will say for example that our our perceptions are driven by um our needs for food mating and so forth and uh also to do things on the cheap right for every calorie that you spend uh in perception for example you need to go out there kill something and eat it to get those calories and then you put yourself at risk so there's going to be selection pressures to do things on the cheap to do them fairly quickly and and we get what we're called satisficing solutions from evolutionary theory where you you just need a solution that's good enough most of the time just better than the competition basically you just have to be a little bit better than so it's not that you're you're not it's not really survival of the perfectly fit it's just the survival of the fitter yeah really is actually better to say the survival of the fitter than the fittest you don't need to be as fit as possible you just need to be as long as you're better than competition that's good enough from an evolutionary point of view so so from that point of view the selection pressure is is really just driven by the nature of your competition and and we do things on on the cheap so I'll give a fun a fun example so um there's this um beetle in the outback of Australia the the jewel beetle and um The Beetles are dimpled glossy and brown the males fly the females are fly this the males fly around looking for females and if he if a male finds one that looks eligible he lights and mates um but in the outback there's also Homo sapiens and the males of the species tend to drink these beers that in these balls they call stubbies little brown bottles and and the guys tend to throw them out in the in the desert on the Outback and turns out that these bottles are dimpled glossy in just the right shade of brown to catch the fancy of the of the jewel beet the male Jew beetles and so these male Jewel beetles land on the bottles and try to mate and they the real females are not interesting compared to these bottles so it's it's the male leaving the female for the bottle kind of situation but for beetles and and and so and and what's interesting is these male Beatles have full body contact with the bottle and they still are a Gog with this bottle and and so leaving the woman for the bottle leaving the woman the the female for the bot so so now so that gives you a real clue about what's going on in evolution you think about it those Beatles have been around for hundreds of thousands of years the males have found females and successfully made it you would think that Evolution had taught the male what a female really is apparently not apparently what evolution gave the male was a little hack a female is anything dimpled glossy and brown the bigger the better that was what and that's so that's all Evolution something like that is all Evolution gave that's all the Insight the males had about the females and the females might complain about that they don't have very little insight unto me at all so so but that's what evolution does it it gives you just what you need to survive long enough to reproduce and as long as there weren't these glossy bottles in the environment the little algorithm look for something dip glossing Brown the bigger the better was just fine for the that's that's all the Insight he had into a female that's all he needed and that was enough to get the next next Generation going but one bottle or a few bottles in the desert is enough to actually drive the whole thing the whole species to Extinction so so that gives you a clue about how Evolution works we have um these these simple tricks and hacks in humans and in other species there are things called super supernormal stimula so so again I'm just speaking about just Evolution on its own terms which is a fun I love evolution evolutionary biology and evolutionary game the is it even though I think it's not since SpaceTime is not fundamental and evolution by natural selection is a theory inside SpaceTime ultimately evolution by natural selection is not a deep Theory it's only a headset Theory right but it's so you know but it's a beautiful headset Theory and and use it a lot and this is a lot of fun I'm looking forward to a deeper Theory outside that will project down to evolutionary theory we can talk about that I'm excited to spend more time outside the headset in a moment that's right but but inside the headset you know there are things called supernormal simul once you understand how so for example the big bottle was a supern normal stimulus for the for the beetle the male Beatles he liked the The Beatles like the bottle more than the real thing more than a real female so that was what we call a supernormal stimulus and and for like there are some birds that that like bigger eggs and you put a big rock and they will ignore their own eggs and sit on the Rock and they never figure it out so that's a supernormal stimulus for them and and with humans makeup when women put on makeup for example or men um it works because of supernormal stimulus you put red lipstick on uh you're seeing lips that never occur in that color in nature and yet if it's done right if it if you don't go to the clown the level of a clown done right it's a supernormal stimulus that actually makes you look better than anything that's real and so so in humans we use makeup and and clothing and so forth to tap in we unconsciously into the supernormal stimula and some of the Consulting I've done for companies is to be explicit about it and and help them in selling genes and marketing and so forth once you know the stuff you can you can play people right yeah very interesting can you can you dive into how uh the role of conscious agents and how that plays into your theory um just to like explain what that is what does that mean when you say conscious agents right so the question then is what's outside of our SpaceTime headset yeah and no one knows the physicists are looking but they're just looking and they're finding mathematical structures um and so we're I'm proposing with my team that Consciousness is fundamental and that that space and time is just a user interface that some Consciousness has used and so now as a scientist is I mean not enough to say it's Consciousness right you have to say okay here's my mathematical model and it's got to be an absolutely precise mathematical model so we've published um several papers um where we have this mathematical model we call a theory of conscious agents and those who are interested in it I've got a paper called objects of Consciousness if you just Google my name and objects of Consciousness you'll find it online is free and also fusions of Consciousness so Google my name and fusions of Consciousness and and you can see the mathematical model but the idea so we have what's called a maravian Dynamics so it's a dynamical system of conscious agents and the intuition so I'm not going to go into the math unless you want to go into the math but the the the intuition is think of it as like a vast social network like Twitter or now called X but well I'll call it Twitter for now so millions of Twitter users billions of tweets no one could keep up with it but it's a vast social network so and that's our mathematical model of Consciousness is like that it's a bunch of conscious agents in a network interacting tweeting and following tweets and retweeting and so forth all the kinds of interactions that you would have in this so it's a vast social network of interacting conscious agents but with a interesting twist and that is that interacting conscious agents themselves form a new conscious agent and and and ultimately there's just ultimately one conscious agent so there's a the so you can think of it as a social network but you can also equivalently and with mathematical Precision think about it as a single conscious agent very interesting yeah it's really quite fun and and the fun thing for me is and this is the work we're doing right now the physicists have found these structures outside of SpaceTime something called decorated permutations they're like permutations are like shuffling cards you know you change the order decorative permutations is just a little mathematical thing on that that and if people are interested we can talk about it but that's as far as they've gotten in terms of the depth there's no Dynamics and so we had this maroven Dynamics say okay we have this The Social Network of Consciousness and the physicists have already gone outside of SpaceTime they found these Decora permutations so can we connect our maravian social network of Consciousness to these decorated permutations and so I just said Well there must be some mathematics that's already been done about markof chains mapping into decorated permutations and we looked and there wasn't so we did it and that's the fusions of Consciousness paper that I that I mentioned we published it in January and it's a new contribution to mathematics where we show the E canonical way to take a social network of marov dynamics of Consciousness and project it into decorated permutations which then allows us because the physicist then can take decorated permutations into SpaceTime into for example scattering particle scattering in at large hydron collider and other colliders so we have a map now from a dynamics of conscious agents through through decorated permutations to scattering processes and that's where we're that's where we're headed right now is we want to test our theory of conscious agents against scattering data inside from from particle colliders and the place we want to look at first is inside the proton the the tiniest places we've looked are inside the proton and when you look inside of a proton at the largest scale there's two up quirks and a down Quirk but as you look smaller and smaller you see a bunch of Quirk antiquark C and as you and and gluons which are the particles that sort of bind them together and then when you get really high resolution space and time it's all gluons it's just a vast ocean of of gluons and qualitatively we think we can get that so our theory of consciousness can actually when we project it through decorated permutations into SpaceTime I think we're going to get that so what we're our our goal is to not only get it qualitatively but to get the precise what they call Momentum distributions of the quirks and gluons and the reason we're doing that partly because you know science right you've got to show that you make empirical predictions but why the proton right why not the brain we have all these neural correlates of Consciousness in the brain you surely we want to make connections between Mar theory of consciousness and the brain so why why in the world am I going after protons and and the reason is the brain is too complicated you have to start with where the data is really clean and where you can make an absolutely precise prediction and so I want I want to get to the brain I'm a cognitive neuroscientist I mean I I was in the brain and cognitive science department at MIT that's where I got my my doctorate so I'm very interested in the cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness but but it's it's that's a little bit later on we we need to get inside the proton then go to the atomic nucleus so that we can model that then the whole atom and then molecules and then bigger molecules and then climb our way up to neurons and then the brain so so I mean it's on the agenda but maybe not in my lifetime I mean that's quite a bit of of work there but the idea is to have a theory we do have a mathematically precise theory of conscious agents we do now have a a precise mapping on to decorated permutations which map precisely into for example particles and the elementary particles of the standard model of physics so now is the time for you know next couple years to actually do experimental tests computational experiments to show that we can actually get that um if we get it doesn't mean that we're right it just means that we um haven't been shown that we're wrong yet when you described this network of conscious agents that are coming together that could also be perceived as one large kind of mind it's really interesting to me and it points at how reality is so mysterious in uh much more vast ways than we normally would think of it for simulation Theory people typically think of it from this kind of Newtonian when space time is fundamental and and Technology advances so much to where there's an alien in his mom's basement somewhere on his computer and we're in this kind of simulation version I'm curious for you to expand on how uh on your version of how simulation Theory could be accurate so what do you think of us being in a simulation with the understanding that Consciousness is fundamental right so the standard view like Nick bostrom's view of the simulation theory is is is a physicalist one so we aren't the reality we're just someone's program some hacker at a lower level has created this and and we fictions in in that but that hacker herself is a fiction in someone else's lower level and and so you could have this nesting but at the very bottom in the standard view there's a physicalist SpaceTime base reality the base reality is a is a physical SpaceTime so so what I'm saying is not that kind of simulation Theory at all the space and time are not fundamental that's space time is doomed so any simulation theory that assumes that SpaceTime is not doomed is doomed that theory itself is doomed and second the simul that version of simulation Theory assumes that somehow a physical system like a computer properly programmed that's unconscious will give rise to consciousness there is no scientific theory anywhere that shows how that could be there's nothing on the table as I mentioned earlier that can show a specific pattern of circuitry or software in some AI that would give to a rise to a specific conscious experience like Taste of chocolate or something there's nothing on the table never been done and again the people who are doing this many of them are my friends and colleagues they're brilliant if it could be done they would have done it it can't be done and the reason it can't be done is because SpaceTime isn't fundamental they have the wrong foundation so as when we get that sea change when when most scientists realize what a few scientists now know that SpaceTime is doomed then we'll start to make progress we we'll let go of the reductionist approach yeah would love for you to speak to and this is where actually I I love a dear friend of mine CLE Irwin uh founder of Quant some Gravity Research I don't know if I think you're familiar or connected with him um I'm very intrigued by the self- simulation hypothesis um because it definitely is in alignment with more of what we're speaking to here so how then do you view uh simulation essentially being on a conscious agent basis uh right so it would be different than the Bostrom thing it would now be Consciousness is fundamental and Consciousness is infinitely complicated infinitely complicated and the one Consciousness appears to be projecting itself and looking at itself from different perspectives so SpaceTime is a particularly simple perspective that it seems to be taking we think of it as fantastic I think of it as probably one of the cheaper headsets that the one is using to take a look at itself there probably has other headsets where it's a billion Dimensions or trillion Dimensions we have four so that's why I it's we have a we're one of the lower level perspectives that the Consciousness is taking on itself um and it's it's looking at itself and and so it gets a simulation so to speak um which is a it as complicated as this seems it's trivial compared to the complexity of the one absolutely trivial in in in a couple ways so so first in our mathematical model it's Dynamics it's Mar dynamics that we have for for for Consciousness but it need not have an arrow of time right it it's what we call a station it can be a stationary marov Dynamics but it turns out that when you take a projection of the stationary marov Dynamics by conditional probability so you get the Dynamics projected to Dynamics where you've lost a little information about the original Dynamics so it's it's it is a dynamics that projected Dynamics will have an arrow of time it's a theorem and the the arrow of time is a result of the loss of information in projection so what this means is in our simulation the arrow of time is not an insight into a deeper reality at all it's entirely and completely an artifact of the projection and and by the way time is the fundamental limited resource in evolution if you don't get enough food in time you die if you don't find mates in time you don't reproduce time is the fundamental limited resource but time is an illusion the arrow of time is an illusion so that's why I say I love evolutionary theory it's it's for evolutionary biology it's beautiful I use it and every aspect of it is not deeply true all of it including the of time and limited resources and organisms competing for all of it is entirely an artifact of projection of a deeper reality in which there are no limited resources and there need not be any competition so so that's why so now that gets to I have all this to really say what I think about simulation notice what I'm saying the simulation is not truly a simulation of the deep properties of the reality everything that we're seeing is an artifact of the projection competition limited resources none of that is deeply true of the one all of it is only an artifact of our projection so the simulation typically we think of a simulation is as being a model of the truth of the thing we're trying to simulate this is entirely artifactual and the one completely but the spiritual Traditions have been saying this for again thousands of years what can be said right is just is not the thing absolutely yeah and the the Sanskrit term Maya refers this uh you know this illusion that if we become so enchanted with the sensory realm that we take it to be the real thing if we don't close our eyes and go inwards we don't actually have the chance to touch truth who we are in our innate Essence that's unchanging that can't die that conscious being so what's your view on who we fundamentally are then do you see Consciousness as the self uh in a word yes I I I think and and again you know as a scientist I'm always going to be cautious and course these are my the best ideas so far and words and I'm bringing you to the fr the edges here and so and and words are just words and even mathematics is just mathematics but but given given those Hedges my my current view is that um you and I are the same it's the one in an avatar talking to the one in another Avatar and so it's it's the one looking at itself through different avatars but it's the same as the true of my cat and the other avatars um in my headset I don't see the Consciousness when I when I see a rock I am interacting with the one but but my headset's not allowing me that perspective on myself isn't giving me that much insight into myself so so that sort of The View that I take is is it is the one the one is infinitely complicated and any thought that I have about myself or any perception that I have about myself is merely a perspective merely a projection and is not the the final truth the closest we get to final truth is when we let go of all thought completely all perception and are are just in a state of meditation in which um utter interior silence that's the closest that we we get and perhaps even deeper than that in like slow wave sleep there's just so much overlap with what you're sharing in these Eastern traditions and Western Traditions that you know when you look at Karma um and how from in this may be you know a little bit on the fringes of esoteric for some people but I think that a lot of people can feel this intuition that maybe we took birth in this life life in this AR Incarnation with and and shows a specific curriculum almost like specific uh set of experiences in this display of VR headset to reveal to us to to encounter the people the relationships the circumstances to reveal where we're still limited where we still hold judgments um and then to ultimately come to realize the true nature of of who we are and and really what we are um and so I'm just curious how do you see uh yeah the potential of of us and really the one or Source kind of differentiating itself like you spoke to in these many different perspectives to then reflect back to itself and go in that process of evolution well that's what I think roughly we're we're here for is is the one it seems that it may be a theorem that no system can fully model itself can truly understand itself is if if you have just take a finite system if if it tries to understand itself then it's going to build a little like a program where it's representing itself well in the process of representing itself has gotten more complicated right because it's changed in the represent so now it needs to represent it's representation and you get in this infinite Loop and and it turns out no system can ever fully understand itself you can only understand projections of yourself so maybe and this is again I'm in a well my pig right here but but maybe I mean I think all of us are but you know it's interesting I am the one but but um I am the one dealing with a a pretty tiny SpaceTime headset and a lot of restrictions on on on the intelligence that's coming through so from this perspective all I can say is maybe the one is taking these different perspectives because that's in it must it's it's sort of mathematically forced that that this is how the one knows it itself and it knows Itself by losing itself in in a perspective and actually you know fighting itself people fight kill each other we have wars religious and and National Wars and so forth so so that's total unconsciousness we're really unconscious about our our true nature but then a gradual waking up and in some sense going through that unconsciousness and waking up gives you a somehow it's a deepening of the of the understanding of the true nature of self I I am not all this stuff I let myself think I was for a long time and I let myself experience the suffering that comes from that and that suffering helped me to wake up from it and then I have come to understand myself at a deeper level and this may never end in the sense that it's that is the nature nature it's it's the nature of the Beast that ultimate self-perception can never happen that's always this kind of process that wheel of I don't know yeah that wheel of samsara I mean we're speaking into I think it's ultimately more important to identify with your ignorance than claim what you think you know but these are important things to discuss because it feels like with the understanding that we kind of are playing out the necessary drama in our life to Garner the experience and information to go on that process of Awakening it's less of like a learning but more of like a remembering and a realization to just what is um and I think that so many people and um and Us in this conversation in our own lives go through periods where we really identify with the headset with our experience it's very enchanting it's very real the relationships that we have the delicious food that we taste the the the love that we make all of it it's very enchanting in this very real experience of life and yet when we kind of come back and into realizing who we are beneath it in our true Essence then it frees up so much and so I want to speak into a little bit of of the moral implications really of of this understanding because when you see and you experience that the display of your experience is very much that it is a display and when you close your eyes the display goes away I went maybe six months ago and I did a Darkness Retreat where it was completely black pitch black dark for six days I didn't see anything W and so when you come back and you open your eyes like whoa the the VR headset comes back on you're like this is it's fair it feels very much like that it feels it rings really true in my body um so you come to that place where once you realize that your perception of reality is literally detached from objective reality then that has so many implications of you clinging less to your ideals and and beliefs and it um can release so much separation and division between humans which leads to so much war and hate and killing and so I'm just curious for you to share the the implications that this has on how we carry ourselves in the world that's a great Point ultimately each of us is infinitely precious and infinitely intelligent unbelievable each one of us is the deepest reality and the deepest truth and the deepest love that is possible each one of us from the president or King to the beggar all of us and equally there's no there's no no distinction most of us are spending our lives completely ignorant of who we really are and of how you know the unconditional intelligence the the foundational intelligence and and love that we really are and so we try to most of our Lives to make up for that by so my money or position or status my car is better than your car my house is better than you you know I look better than you whatever my or I'm worse than you I I you life is I'm special because life has treated me so poorly and and we're looking we spend most of our Lives looking to be special when we don't realize that you don't need to look you are that in in the infinite already is within you it's about waking up to that Infinity in that's already with within you so on on a I'll say just a little bit on a on a political and economic level first communism versus capitalism communism sounds really great from each according to their ability to each according to their need and for enlightened people that would work but we're not so capitalism is what you need to do when you have unenlightened people because now it's me competing with you and and so you you so communism should work but it doesn't and and it's we tried it spectacular failure spectacular failure capitalism I'm not going to say it's a spectacular success but it sure beat Comm sure beats communism but but it it works because we are all competing against each other and we think of I don't think of you as me I think of you as competition I'm I'm competing with you for status for food for whatever I'm competing whereas this the spiritual Traditions tell us you know love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself when ultimately all moral come all all morals come down to this understanding that the other is you when you really understand that the other is you then you will act morally until then and when you don't understand that you will act selfishly and it will be only you know it'll be very hard to act morally so so that's the foundation of morals is really recognizing that um the other is me the one mhm the infinite yeah the infinitely precious in a different Avatar mhm yeah there's there's really no need for morals If you experience other as self there you don't need to teach you to hurt somebody else if you experience them as a part of you it's like we said where the Drop in the Ocean when you start to experience the magnitude of the ocean as you are uh divined into a drop it's like so much of what we think we would have to force to have happen would just dissolve away once we experience that kind of Unicity within other people I'm curious what your thoughts are on what happens to Consciousness after the physical body dies I'll just say one thing more about than about what happens when body dies part of being moral is also having compassion on yourself because all of us are caught up in the illusion I mean I'm talking as though I'm not but I am you know I automatically get into competition mode driving the freeway up here to I mean automatically it gets triggered so part of what's the waking up process waking up to who you are is completely accepting that I am most of the time asleep and most of the time I'm feeling this illusion of separation and competition and and so forth and and part of it is is some for some reason that's part of what the one needs to go through to understand it it really needs to go through that illusion that that separateness it needs to have compassion on itself and and learn not to judge myself and also not to judge others so letting go of judgment for of myself and others is is absolutely critical but now what what happens after death and of course I don't know but I can just speculate and talk to what my theory would say and and a little bit of data that we have from out of body experiences if SpaceTime is just a headset and my body is just an avatar one way to think about what we're doing in life right now is just think about yourself when you're in a VR game so you put on the headset you're immersed in Grand Theft Auto for example there are two ways that you could be in that world one is I'm just I know I'm wearing a headset and I'm just having fun I'm just playing this game no big no great shakes I crash my car no big deal another one is I get into the Grand Theft Auto game and I forget who I am and I am now my avatar and I'm I'm threatened now I mean I'm identified with my avatar I'm identified with my car if the car gets crashed that's I'm screwed and and so all of a sudden there's this clinging and there's this desperation there's this fighting at so there's two ways that you could play the VR game one is I'm enjoying the ride of course I'm not in the game I'm that's just my avatar in the game the other is no I'm this is this everything matters I gotta win I've got to so when you step out of the game if if you never lost yourself in the game it's no big deal took the headset off and move on but if you You' been identified with the game taking the headset off is going to be a bit of a shock right it's going to be a bit so so in some sense the guy the idea is to die before you die MH face death really face the fact that this what I call my body is not me it's just the Avatar that's not who I am I'm not three pounds of brain producing Consciousness that's not that's not what's happening if I looked inside my skull I would find a brain but that's because I rendered the brain it doesn't exist I have no neurons right now if you look inside you would see neurons but there are neurons are causing none of my behaviors because I don't even have neurons right now they don't even exist they get rendered on the fly when you look so brains caus none of my behavior but if you looked inside my skull you would see brains that's where rubber hits the road where this where I'm really saying what what this means so when you really understand that this is just an avatar then then dying is basically just taking off the headset now I don't want to sound like I'm more spiritually accomplished and attained than I am if someone put a gun to my head right now I'd be scared to death plain and simple because I there's an intellectual understanding of the stuff and then there's a a rewiring of your emotional system that takes time yeah and I'm in the I meditate and so forth and I see and that's I I mentioned earlier having compassion I I have to do that for myself there's a part of me that knows I'm just an avatar this is just an avatar but there's an emotional part of me that is desperately attached to the Avatar and I'm and so when I see that in myself it's very helpful for me to then be compassionate with other people that are completely identified and and striving and competing and and having the resulting aoral behaviors and so forth that come from that so so long answer but I would say it's taking off the headset what is it like the the closest I can come to is it it's like when you go in deep meditation and there's just awareness without any content but it may be even closer to like slow wave sleep I I don't know is your intuition by the way I just loved everything you just share that was incredible um is your intuition that any of the content carries over with you as you in some Eastern Traditions death is kind of analog analogous to like taking off a tight shoe and you uh kind of release like the personality do you feel like that Consciousness could then just go into back into the wand it could take out another headset and with completely different content experience or is your intuition say that maybe some of you actually does and when I say you your experience your memory do you feel like any of that could carry over and is there any evidence that that could be possible my guess is that nothing is lost and that the one which is what I [Music] am mean is is right now experiencing all seven billion 8 billion people on the planet and all millions of cats and all the amibas and everything it's it's all there right now I'm not the eye that's so now in sense this the eye the Avatar eye this speaking I'm not experiencing all that I as the one am experiencing but but that's been filtered out from the experience I'm having right now I would be overwhelming to but but I think that so I am all that I I am your experience I am everybody's experience um but I'm I'm it's filtered out right now but but I am the infinite and you are the infinite and so my experience is actually your experience um and and none of it's ever lost and and and it's really hard because as an avatar it's hard for me to I've got I've put on these restrictions I put on these Li I can only to be very concrete I can imagine a three-dimensional object like a cube I cannot even imagine a four-dimensional object if you know try to imagine a four-dimensional cube like a tesser yeah hard or yeah or a five dimensional nothing happens I I try to think but nothing happens and or or try to imagine the you've never seen before nothing happens these are like trivial attempts to go beyond my little projection can't do it so so but I know for example that pigeons have four color receptors presumably pigeons are seeing a dimensional color that I I I can't even imagine there are some women that have four color receptors Tetra films so there are these women that have that have color experiences that I can't imagine at all so my my imagination in this little Avatar is greatly greatly projected down but the the infinity that I am will be Unleashed when when this when I step out of this projection it's just that beautiful realization we're seeing less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and we think that uh uh it it appears that we have a great sense on how reality is operating but when you start to dive into a lot of this stuff you realize it's so limited so limited AB absolutely even when you just look at the electromagnetic spectrum right that which is inside space and time so space and time itself is is just a trivial headset and within that trivial headset we're only seeing this tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum that's that's would would be available inside that so so and and the one that we are I can't overemphasize how infinite you are and and I I'll just say a little bit about that Infinity is not one thing so mathematics tells us that there's infinitely many sizes of Infinities so the smallest Infinity is the counting Infinity 1 2 3 4 up to Infinity that's that's what would they call Alf zero that's Infinity it's the tiniest Infinity now look at all the sub all the possible subsets like 1 2 150 2 10 and 20 look at all the possible subsets when you look at all the possible subsets the number of them is a bigger infinity it's called alf1 it's infinitely bigger than Alf zero now take all the subsets of alf1 and you get alf2 every step you're getting infinitely bigger this is called Canter's hierarchy and it never ends so one reason why I can never mathematically model the one the one Consciousness in mathematics is because I can never climb up the can's hierarchy of Infinities but that's who you are you are the infinite that transcends even Canter's hierarchy so so there in some sense there's this very very deep humility of the one right right now I mean we are Such trivial jections it's there's a there's an aspect of humility of the one being this that transcends Cancer's hierarchy and lets itself not even be able to imagine things in four dimensions that's that's there's an incredible humility in that as well so that's interesting I'm just curious do you have like spiritual practices you said you meditate but I'm curious what in your own personal life how your relationship to different spiritual practices um and you know embodying some of these exercises to match the work that you're doing because it feels very spiritual and also you speak very logically as well simultaneously so I'm just curious how they kind of blend in your in your life well I I've been meditating now for 22 years so I do do meditate but but I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family my dad was a minister for a while and there they explicit that meditation was actually bad it would open your mind to the devil and and you shouldn't do it so I was there it was really interesting that I was actually it took me longer to start to meditate because of that I mean if it's something of the devil you don't want to get into it right away and so it took me a long time you what you raised in from your very from your youth it's it's hard to to wake up and let go of the limitations but so but there are of course Christian spiritual Traditions that that are open to meditation like the Ben Ben addicting monks and father father Thomas keing and so forth really really deep spiritual people so I just got a little brand of it's Christianity itself is not stuck with this but there are wonderful brands of Christianity as well as you know mystical Islam and Buddhism Hindu lot lot of wonderful Traditions so my my practice is um I started meditating 22 years ago um because I needed trouble I had trouble sleeping and I didn't want to take pills so it was very pragmatic but that was the door and I began to realize that it had something more to give me than just helping me to sleep and it it slowly transforms you meditation process in my case very very slowly I mean you know I it's I think an academic you're stuck in your mind a lot right so academics we're it's all about the mind it's all about competition of ideas yeah and so Letting Go learning to balance that with letting go of all thoughts altoe at first it seemed like complete nonsense right it's all about thought and better thoughts what do you mean to let go of thoughts all together so it it takes a while for me as an academic it took a while to really begin to grasp the importance of letting go of thoughts now for for my academic colleagues what I would say is in terms of basian theory so this is now a little geeky kind of thing we have all these Basi and priors and what we perceive then is based on our priors and we we have our posteriors based on what we you know the data that we get in our priors meditation is a process of letting go of the priors you literally and then you can actually be open to New Directions that you wouldn't otherwise be open to so ultimately meditation is a way of if you want to be creative it's a way of breaking down the barriers to creativity but on a spiritual level what I found is it it's it's forced me to face and slowly let go of my fears and my anxieties and my selfishness and my my self-image of myself and and I'm not saying that I'm anywhere near done by by any means but but but at least I'm on the path yeah of of of waking up um and I I see that you for me then an interesting challenge is this balance between completely letting go of thought on the one hand in in times of meditation and also just in everyday life driving and so forth to to not be lost in in pointless thought yeah self-destructive thought to to literally be there as a presence without any thought on the one hand and yet on the other hand to then use thought wisely and productively for example in in S Building build scientific theories and so forth while at the same time not being too attached to my own theories because I know that they're just the next baby step but not by any means the final word so it's it's learning again to have that playful attitude of you know I mentioned in the VR game I am my avatar and I'm I'm glued to the wheel and I'm all up up tight or I'm I just know it's an avatar it's a game and I can enjoy the game it's it's learning most of my life I've been glued I am my avatar and I'm it's everything is important and matters and learning to back off from that and enjoy the ride um even as I build precise theories so be precise be careful but in some sense also relax and enjoy while you're doing it it seems that from at least the limited study that I have of some Brilliant Minds like Einstein Newton Tesla have had practices that allow them to um essentially get into different brain waves states that allow them to like we were speaking to earlier rest into that place of the one and it's almost like the intelligence of the one kind of comes down into you the more that you start to embibe in that place like its nature starts to become your nature and some of the Breakthrough ideas come as a byproduct of that have you found that to be something interesting absolutely all of the ideas that I've had have come in moments of Silence but but it's an interesting interplay of course you have to do your homework right of course you can't have insights about physics if you haven't studied your physics right so so so it's it's there's no excuse if you if you want to do something you have to do your study and and and but on the other hand then you have to let go of everything you know too so that's the that's the interesting back and forth yeah study I'm I'm a professor I'm going to tell my students to study do your homework I'll give you a test right so you have to study on the other hand for moments of creativity once you've done all that homework then sleep on it let go of it it and then go into silence and that's where the creative ideas come and that's why I think that science will continue to progress because we're not just little three-b brains we are this infinite intelligence that that every new step in science is just a new baby step and there's an infinite number of steps to take but we're up to the task we we are not little three-b brain we are the infinite intelligence so we will have then always have these fun creative leaps and so this is going to be this really is a fun creative ride but what the one is learning I guess is to take each perspective really dive in really take that perspective so this is taking the Don Hoffman four-dimensional SpaceTime perspective and it's taking that taking it quite seriously and then learning to relax learn from what I need from that perspective don't get all around wrapped up and identified with it um have some creative fun and then at some point you know by the time you're 70 80 90 you're gone from this perspective you you've let go of that perspective um so you need to learn to let go of that as well enjoy the ride and then get ready to take off the headset yeah it's beautiful I love that just kind of path of integration that yin and yang of both you know doing the work being in the partly identifying being in this reality and then also realizing you're not that you're something much much bigger and and both allow you to find something that can really bring like these ideas that almost come to you and they're like Jewels for you to share with Humanity in the rest of the network of conscious Minds yes it's just Consciousness waking itself up yeah talking to itself what role in your model what role does Love play in metaphysics what do you see there having be some sort of like metaphysical gravity of love in particular as a way that binds something that's Transcendent well I think that love Real Love is recognizing the other as yourself I think that's what really love is and our mathematics says that as well there is one only one conscious Consciousness all the little conscious agents that we model which we have to do because we can't model the ones so what what I'm forced to do is to say okay even if I do like a huge simulation like a a billion conscious agents incredible be a billion by billion marov and be unbelievable no supercomputer could do that and that would be trivial trivial all compared to the one so so I'm I'm dealing with all these little conscious agents because that's all I can do but but really they're all one they're all just projections of the one and so that's love as seen in the mathematics but love seen practically is when I really understand that that person even if they have a different race or color or Creed than me is me just under a different just don't mistake the avatar for the person your theory posits that Free Will can exist outside of SpaceTime I'm curious what you think about free will because we've had Sam Harris on here he wrote the book free will very interesting conversation how I think we just don't have free will in the context that most people would think that they're this person making choices which is if you look a little bit closer it's really originating from this black dark place within yourself you don't really choose to choose whatever your choice may be in this life if you choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream there are deeper impulses that kind of drove you to that so I'm curious what your thought and framework is on Free Will and how it could exist outside SpaceTime as well so so most discussions of free will will be informed by the neuroscience and and Sam Harris's is of course he's neuroscientist and what they'll point out rightly is that they can predict if they measure your brain activity in many cases they can predict dozens of milliseconds before you what you're going to do in certain up to seven seconds even sometimes seven seconds that's right exactly right so they so that's crazy to think about too is like you could measure what decision you're going to make up to 7 seconds before before the person can consciously report that they're that they're going that's absurd to do it so so if you're a neurobiological reductionist which you would say is this shows that brain activity is responsible for your decisions and brain activity is responsible for your conscious experiences and the brain activity is is doing both but SpaceTime is doomed and neurons don't even exist when they're not perceived so so what's really going on here so we're probing an interface object a brain and getting hints about something in this network of conscious agents outside of SpaceTime and there's and and the projection of this conscious agent Dynamics into SpaceTime into this particular Avatar Hoffman or whoever it is the subject in in the Neuroscience experiment so so so first I would disagree with the the neuroscientists and I mean on this particular issue I guess with with Sam if if he thinks that that the brain activity is actually causing our Behavior I should ask him if he actually thinks that I mean it' be interested I'm good friends yeah so I should just ask him yeah but to the extent that someone thinks that neural that neurons even exist when they're not perceived I disagree neurons do not exist when they're not perceived do neurons have any causal Powers no zero zero causal Powers because they don't even exist so neurons cause none of our brain AC so what's going on so neurons cause none of our Behavior they cause none of our our choices so so what's going on there on some level they do or just completely no they don't neurons don't exist okay the only time you have a neuron is when when someone actually sees a neuron like through a microscope otherwise there are no neurons so so so when you measure neural activity you are there that that measurement occurs and that exists so that's that's that's the headset thing this is the VR headset right so which will take some time especially for viewers that are new to this is going to take some time to digest that that's right so so if someone says I don't believe in free will because I think the brain is creating all of our actions then I say the brain doesn't even exist when it's not perceived it it creates none of your actions so so that can't be the reason why we say that there's no free will now I might still say that that Dawn this Avatar doesn't have free will but then it would be from a deeper theory in which the one is the only entity that has free will that that's making choices and among those choices are this Avatar that called Don Hoffman yeah and and what that Avatar thinks it's choosing in the moment the one could say there's no free will for the Hoffman Avatar because the only free will is in the one but when I look at our mathematics it looks like the there's a notion of Free Will in the mathematics of of choice that goes recursively down the entire network of conscious agents in some sense every as we group together conscious agents we get bigger and bigger conscious agents and each at each agent you can profitably talk about the Free Will choices of that agent so it's we get a mathematically what we would call a scale-free decomposition of of Free Will choices so in some sense you could say yes only the one has Free Will and yet it's very useful to unpack that and the mathematics allows us to unpack pack that into little all these little micro Free Will choices and and from my point of view maybe they're just as real as as as the one and and maybe the distinction between is is trying to distinguish between them is a mistake so so so just to summarize most people who deny free will say that it's forced our behaviors are forced by our brain activity and I I assert that brains don't even exist when they're not observed so brains cause none of our behavior and by the way I'm all for more research for Neuroscience I think that Neuroscience is much harder than we thought and we need more funding for Neuroscience because neurons and brains and so forth we thought that that was the reality that's driving everything it's a thin veneer what we can see in our microscopes of you know literally what 86 billion neurons trillions of synapses in the human brain as complicated as that is that's a tiny thin veneer in our VR headset of a much deeper and more complex I think markovian Dynamics we have to reverse engineer the neural networks to get the much deeper more complicated Marian networks of conscious agents that are behind them so more funding for Neuroscience not less but I then also say neurons don't even exist when they're not perceive and they cause none of our behaviors so so you can see when when you go down this rabbit hole Everything Changes you have to rethink everything that's why it's taking me it's been a real shock to the system I mean yeah real shock in the last but but hey that's part of the fun of the ride yeah it's part of being in the pursuit of truth that's it's just so interesting to think I guess it there's just no way in our limited intellect that we're going to be able to perceive how the one could have free will because the way that we perceive choice is like okay we have these options and I'm going to choose this way but the higher intelligence of like the collective Consciousness I'm just curious how you perceive choice being made at that level or could you even come up with a thought around that well a couple things first one in our mathematical models we're we have probability measures that's where we we come up against the limits of our Theory and and when we see Pro so I might come to a choice point in in a piece of software and I can either go here or there and there's some probability of of going there or in in like quantum theory when you look at the wave function of a particle there's certain probability for it being here or or there when when you see probabilities you are face to face with the limits of your knowledge and there are two kinds of interpretation we give one one is to say it's objective chance just raw objective chance and that's typically a physicalist and the other is know there's some kind of free choice that was that that was made um I in the case of of of Consciousness so so in my model there are probabilities and so that's that's where my bottle stops in some sense that that's that where you see a probability that's where you know your your your model is saying I give up I I just have to do a random number generator here I don't know what's going on and that's where your your theory in some sense stops free will maybe they have this intuition that there's this there is a choice but but the other part of your question was you know how can I really understand that and and I I think you can't understand it intellectually in knowledge but as spiritual tradition would say you can understand it by being it you you are the one so when you let go of your knowledge temporarily you are that but but but then when you come back you can't really put it back into words or or at least the words become maybe the distinction between free will and no free will then becomes silly yeah when you go when you go deeper in some sense anything that you can say is perhaps ultimately trivial compared to the reality that that you are but on the other hand you can know it not intellectually but by being it yeah in silence it's that nosis the body intelligence a mutual friend of ours Robert Grant he yes he said uh perhaps Destiny is the Free Will of the higher self yes right right which is an interesting thought experiment yes um I'm curious how you perceive relationships in this VR headset we come into contact we meet somebody we see their face like you spoke to they are portal into another Consciousness I'm just curious what role do you see the relationships that we encounter in our life the purpose that they serve on the evolution on the path of evolution of Consciousness well I personally you know everything I've learned is from other people right from their books or from personal encounters and um not only in teaching situations but also people who rub me the wrong way right and we all had brothers and sisters that we fought with as we were growing up and we learned from that as as well so so yeah I think that we we learn by all these other perspectives but it really is again the one just learning about Itself by taking a perspective and interacting but see ultimately right now my avatar is one perspective your avatar is another perspective from from the one we're having this conversation and we're learning from so the one is learning from itself in this process both ways I both avatars are learning something in this in this process through Reflections and mirrors that that's right so it's it's it's really quite interesting that and yet we know that what we're learning is is in some sense important but also a trivial projection it's it's only and yet it's important to know ourself from this projection and it's important to know the limits of what we're knowing from this projection and ultimately it's important to know that we completely transcend everything that we know from this projection all of that seems to be important and we get little bits of that from every interaction that we have from ourselves and from ourselves in the form of of of other animals and plants because that's also the one interacting with me so I I got a spider bite on my on my leg the other day I'm I'm learning something from myself in the form of a spider that came and bit me and and and so all these interactions it just feels like you know as we reflect and mirror back to each other our collective experience and perspective is greater than the individual Parts the sum of our perspective is closer to the truth of objective reality than our own limited one you know ideas and perspectives so it's uh it's really cool I think and it's just an awesome framework to think of people as these portals of Consciousness that reflect back to us and together we are on this process of evolution and with that we can uh bring that humility to meeting other people and uh not as much competition but more curiosity I completely agree with you and and even the most unlikely person when you think about it they are that infinite intelligence infinite Beyond Canter's hierarchy yeah even someone that you think couldn't teach you anything they are the infinite intelligence and true love is on seeing yourself in that and seeing the infinite in that person often the people that are most difficult to love I feel like have the most to teach us that that's right the things that we are difficult with are the things we need to learn the most absolutely to really reconcile I'm curious as we start to head towards wrapping up I'm just curious what your thoughts are on with the exponential rise of technology and artificial intelligence how do you see technology weaving and potentially supporting and being allies on this process of realizing the true nature of Consciousness um I think there's a lot of you know there's a lot of widespread fear of the potential dystopic reality that could come by virtue of you know Ai and and how fast it's growing right now I'm curious to hear some of the promise and what you think of uh it being an ally and supportive on the process well I'm I've been interested in artificial intelligence for quite a while I I as a teenager I was interested in it and wow I went to I was interested in the question actually as a teenager are we just machines are people just machines so I went to MIT as a graduate student I was in the artificial intelligence laboratory starting in 1979 and the what's now the brain and cognitive science department because I wanted to study AI see what machines could do cognitive Neuroscience so I could see what human brains could do and then to see if there's something special about it so I've been very interested in this for for a long time and I'm not you know people a lot of people are are thinking catastrophic things going to happen with it I'm not too worried about it um it's a it's a powerful technology and it can be used of course for harm but so is nuclear so is genetic engineering we we have all sorts of Technologies but we what we learn is that um we just have to be aware of of the risks and and but also welcome the the benefits and have whatever rules and laws are are needed and but you know there's always a risk someone could release some nasty genetically engineered virus that could kill Humanity someone could release some kind of software that could really hurt us um I I in terms of Consciousness I think that people are worried that AI will become conscious and if you're thinking about it from a physicalist framework in which space and time are fundamental and the idea is that somehow physical circuits and software which are not which are not conscious but if they have the right kind of computational complexity right functional properties could appear so they could well some people think they could actually lead to they can create Consciousness I think that that's not possible on the other hand for two reasons SpaceTime is doomed physical objects don't exist when they're not perceived so the circuits don't even exist to create the Consciousness nor does the software the the your your supercomputer exists when you look and it doesn't exist otherwise what exists is something outside of SpaceTime what we see is a supercomputer or an AI when we project that back into SpaceTime so some something cre within SpaceTime could never uh could never exist outside of SpaceTime yeah space time is just the pixels mhm pixels aren't going to do it yeah they're just not going to do it for you but what the pixels the pixels of within SpaceTime can be a portal so right now I'm sitting here I'm looking at you and so I I have certain pixels in my headset that are giving me insight about Andre but Andre is not inside Space time Andre is the Consciousness utterly outside of SpaceTime but I got some pixels inside my SpaceTime head head said that are giv me some insight into Andre's Consciousness well so the question is if we understand the headset well enough could we reverse engineer it and open new portals into Consciousness right now we know one way we have one technology for opening new portals into Consciousness having kids very low Tech but it is a technology for opening new portals so we know we we know that there is one technology that we know about for opening new portals into Consciousness so the question is if we UND if we can reverse engineer that well enough could we create new means for opening portals through our headset into Consciousness and for what it's worth I I think the answer is yes that we we could and I think that it's possible that if we did that some of the technology that we developed would look like artificial intelligence but in that case the interpretation of what's going on is 180 degre opposite of what the standard inter the standard interpretation would be real physical circuits and software of a real physical system that was formerly unconscious suddenly became conscious that's the standard view I'm saying those circuits and software don't even exist when they're not perceived they couldn't cause anything however my SpaceTime headset may have pixels in it that look like circuits and software they may look like an artif intelligence that are opening a new portal into Consciousness outside of the headset and we may be able to actually do that as a technology that that uh you know that has learned from from having kids you know from that technology so so you can see once again when you go down this rabbit hle everything that you think about has to be thought about 180 degrees opposite from the standard way of thinking about it and and it's little hard now but I suspect in a few short decades it's going to going to be just obvious to a generation that's been raised where virtual reality is just part of everyday life once you have spent time in virtual reality you all of a sudden you just sort of get this it it just becomes the the old view then just looks like Flat Earth the the idea that SpaceTime is fundamental and objects in SpaceTime are are the reality that feels like Flat Earth yeah so I think the next generation will get it I think that's a really interesting perspective because sometimes I feel like in the next coming DEC we create intelligence that appears to be conscious right we're getting there closer and closer every single day um and so I wonder if creating something in an AGI that appears to be sentient by all markers of petering test it looks like it is that would almost diminish our desire or seeking to know the true nature of what Consciousness actually is just because we have something that appears to be conscious that maybe would uh wither our way are seeking to to actually know what the real thing is I'm not too worried about that people even with the the chat GPT stuff that I play with a little bit and yeah that doesn't impress me very much right I mean it's it's it's a great tool um but it's really easy to make it do mistakes that you know even you know kindergartner wouldn't make so it's so it's it's not but but presumably you know in 10 or 15 years that it'll be much better and it will be you know smart enough to to fool most people and and and be able to write better novels than anybody and better music and and so forth I think that that won't stop people from still wondering about who they are and what is the nature of my Consciousness especially since your death forces the issue yeah I mean it it forces you we we all we can get lost in the race of life for a while but even just a little car accident or even a bad bug bite that could take you down you it forces you to realize uh I need to think outside of this box for a little bit what what am I what happens when I die when and I will die there's there's no getting around it even if we can extend life to 200 years it's a flash in the pan it's it's nothing 200 years is is just nothing so the fundamental fact of life is death or at least the fundamental fact about birth is death um maybe life is something deeper than both birth and death in spiritual Traditions but so so I'm I'm not too worried that a conscious that an apparently conscious AI or maybe an AI kind of thing that really opens up a new portal into Consciousness so that it really is funling consciousness just like the Andre Avatar is really a portal into genuine Consciousness maybe an AI that is a genuine portal into Consciousness I don't think that that's going to um make people less interested in consciousness or or I if anything it it might open our minds even further what what is the what is this thing that uh that we could open a new portal into it I'm curious if you were to like let's just say as a thought experiment let's say you for some reason knock on W you went to a coma 10 years you woke up and they're like welcome back Don you made it back good news for you just something about work real quick we figured out and we proved the conscious agent Theory we were able to prove that Consciousness is fundamental and um how would you now like waking up how would you predict that there would be an Avenue of of of proving it in that way would there be a certain field of study or what maybe you're you're researching now that you feel like would would really lend to to that being possible my plan with my team is to show that we can actually predict the momentum distributions of like quirks and gluons inside protons that all spatial and temporal resolutions that have been mapped in colliders and get it exact in other words that doesn't mean that we're right but but I think we'll get it so with mathematical Precision being able to predict their location the what what they call the momentum distribution so so at at lower resolutions in time and space inside the proton you just see these three quirks roughly you know two up down up two up quirks and a down cork as you get to finer you get a bunch of Quark antiquark Pairs and a lot of gluons and then even finer scale you know smaller scale you get just a whole SE of gluons and and so you can see how much of the momentum is at each scale is for quirks and gluons and so forth you can actually they've got these momentum distributions so what I want to do first is to show that our theory of conscious agents can predict those precise momentum distributions they've been gathered for decades four four or five decades at the various colliders it's one of the big biggest databases that we've got it's absolutely precise there's no there's no wiggling around you either nail it or you don't and so that's that's there an OBS here if you if the model can't do that then our model shouldn't be taken seriously if it can do it then it would be the first model outside of SpaceTime a first scientific model of a Dynamics outside of SpaceTime that can actually predict that kind of precision inside Space time doesn't mean we're right but it means it's at an potentially a baby step outside of SpaceTime and I emphasize baby a baby step outside of SpaceTime again I think there are infinitely many steps to take but taking the first baby step is always a wonderful thing when you see see other baby their first baby step is really quite good so this would be our maybe our first baby step of a dynamical system outside of SpaceTime physicists have taken the first baby step of finding static structures outside of B SpaceTime like the decorated permutations of amplitud hedin so so I would say I would like 10 years from now to be able to say that the theory of conscious agents has shown that it can predict the inner structure of protons hopefully we get then to the neutrons and maybe even to modeling the nuclear force um um in for the inside the nucleus and and then start to move toward atoms and molecules to move into chemistry and and show that we can model there and once my colleagues in the cognitive Neuroscience cognitive neurosciences see this and they really understand that SpaceTime is just a headset and they really understand that reductionism dies because SpaceTime dies and they give up trying to build neural reductionist theories of Consciousness and they start going this other way my colleague they're really smart they're really brilliant the only reason they're not making progress is because they have the wrong foundation and and no one no matter how smart they are can ever solve the problem on on on this reductionist Foundation but as soon as they get the idea they will then run circles around us because these guys when I was at MIT I saw people who were so much smarter than me I had no idea how smart they were there's when you in Academia you just see people that are so smart you you just know they're walking on a different planet than I am just like so once once that kind of intelligence is Unleashed with with this new framework um I won't be able to keep up I won't even be able to read the papers it'll be and that's what I'm looking for I would love to see in 20 years that you know you know this thing is just taken off and I'm not even smart enough to read their papers now so interesting I feel would you then say if you were able to come to that conclusion or or really prove that that would probably be one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in science because of the implications that would it have for redirecting a lot of those individuals intelligence and energy to working on this problem you know are these these things with you well it would certainly be a paradigm change right just like Flat Earth to right round earth is it was a huge Paradigm change and then geocentric Universe to no we're not the center that was that's another so this is a paradigm change yeah a Monumental one it's a Monumental one letting go of SpaceTime is actually makes Flat Earth pretty seem pretty I like I don't know what else you would put on that level you know nothing else so far this is this is realizing that everything we've done is just just a headset right is a pretty big Paradigm change but now the physicists are there first right with their they've discovered these new structures outside of SpaceTime like narh hemed and and and and and others that working with him so but my guess is that as big as letting go of the headset is we have even bigger surprises ahead after that and I'm not even smart enough to think what they are but the the one is and I am the one but but with the current Avatar restrictions on the one I can't tell you so fascinating there is so much to digest in this whole conversation I'm just looking forward to watching back myself um I'm just curious is there anything within your theory or framework that you feel like we haven't touched on that you would like to share that would help create more of a cohesive understanding of how this all kind of comes together well I I'll raise a question that I get in emails all the time sure um people people say how can you possibly say that um space time AR fundamental and that rocks only exist when you look at them and neurons don't exist how mean so for example someone could take a rock a piece of iron stick it in the ground I got an email some someone not too long ago and come back 10 years later and and it's rusted and so forth well un unless there was a real piece of iron and there really is such a thing as rust going on and so forth so that that that really shows that the whole thing you're saying is nonsense these things really do exist the iron really exists in space and time and it really does rust even when you're not looking at it and so so I I get these kind of things all the time and and my reply is again always think about it in the VR headset framework imagine and this is something I wrote back in an email to somebody I said imagine that you're you're playing a multiplayer Minecraft game and you take a little red brick and you and you bury it somewhere in Minecraft but it's a multiplayer game and it's a VR version of it and so you know friend of yours someone you don't know say in Switzerland um you know a couple days later going around and sees your brick pulls it out paints it green puts it back in there and you come back a week later and you look and oh my my my brick was red and I put in there now it's green ah well does that prove that the brick really exists when you don't perceive no it's just a Minecraft game is there is no there is no green brick there is no red brick there's just some supercomputer and if you look inside you would not find any green bricks inside that supercomputer you render the the Brick when you look and it's not there when you don't look it's it's it it only exists so any question so I like end on this point any question that someone has at the end of the of this of our conversation you probably will be able to answer it yourself just try on a virtual reality metal for and try to solve the problem yourself before you email me because you you'll probably figure it out for yourself yeah when you're not so identified with the appearance of phenomena that's right just think for you are and you'll get it yeah Donald thank you so much for coming on and it's been I appreciate you so much for coming out in person I just find it so much better when we can do these things in person uh and thank you so much for the work that you're doing it's just so pivotal and fundamental towards uh the progression and evolution of understanding reality in its objective ways so thank you so much my pleasure thanks for inviting me Andre yeah all righty everybody thank you so much for coming on this journey of the know thyself podcast this conversation was mind-bending I am going to percolate on a lot of things that we talked about in this conversation for weeks months years to come and my intention with these conversations part of it at least is to deconstruct these tightly held Notions of what we think reality is in the pursuit of a larger truth realizing that the Universe and life is much more mystical than we perceive it to be and hopefully this conversation Bridge some gaps in your understanding of the world thank you so much for tuning into this episode and until next time be [Music] well

Channel: André Duqum

Views: 662,687

Keywords: know thyself, podcast, spirituality, personal growth, transformation, andre duqum, interviews, philosophy

Id: I7z26d8IsUc

Length: 122min 42sec (7362 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023