Proof You're Living In The Matrix - Reality, Consciousness & Simulation Theory | Donald Hoffman

[Music] foreign Hoffman welcome back to the show thanks a lot Thomas great to be here dude excited to have you back so I'm obsessed with the Matrix and the idea that we're living in a false reality now I know you don't believe that we are actually in a simulation but do we recognize the truth of reality well our best science tells us that space-time is not fundamental this is the conclusion of both physics and evolution by natural selection so the physicists tell us that space-time is doomed it's not fundamental and they're finding new structures Beyond space-time like the amplitudehedron that actually make the math easier in space-time for the things they need to do and then evolution by natural selection also agrees with the physicist that space-time is not fundamental let's explain that so when you say that space-time isn't fundamental what do we mean exactly in like the simplest or we'll get into the geeky like deep stuff in a second but for the audience that hasn't heard you talk before right what does that mean well we tend to think of space and time as the basic level of reality everything that could possibly be is inside space and has some some time the Big Bang was the start of it all and who knows what the end will be maybe a big crunch or just petering out in low entropy and low temperature we don't know yet but that we think or we thought is the basis of all reality so space and time are the the basic stage on which all of reality plays out that's the weird thing yeah does that mean that whatever is real and we should probably give people your um headset metaverse explanation which speaks dear to my heart but before we do that does that mean that whatever is real is non-physical well so the word real is a little slippery so um in some sense my headache is real right because it's a real experience but um it real in the sense that the physicists are talking about it when they thought that space and time are fundamental they were thinking that this was the fundamental ground of all possible realities like in a Newtonian universe and even in Einstein it's a point of view Einstein thought that space and time was the grounding reality for everything and now we realize that the four dimensions of space-time or even 10 dimensions of string theory or something like that is not going deep enough there are structures entirely Beyond space-time and entirely Beyond quantum theory so so these new structures are not like little structures sitting inside at the small scale system they can get the structures yeah people are going to be super lost so okay the idea of the headset I think is a really core concept so yeah uh somebody asked you once like in the future we're going to start using different metaphors what metaphors do you think we're going to use and you said the metaverse about somebody trying to contribute to the metaverse my ears perked up on that one right why will that become such a useful metaphor for for this moment and how we perceive things right because the way that evolution speaks on this is it says that our perceptions of of objects in space and time is really just like a virtual reality headset it's there to help you play the game of life without knowing what's on the other side of the headset what's on the other side what's the hardware and software that's running the game you don't have to know that to play the game and in fact if you were trying to play a game of like Grand Theft Auto and virtual reality and you know you had to toggle millions of voltages per second to drive your car uh you would lose when you were you know competing with someone who could just turn a nice little simple steering wheel and press on a artificial gas pedal so evolution gave us senses that allow us to survive by hiding the truth and just telling us how to act so as The evolutionary theorists would say our senses guide adaptive Behavior why does natural selection as a theory predict that because I understand the theory I guess well enough at a high level but I never would have guessed that it actually says that it makes a prediction anyway that you whatever is real the only thing I can tell you that Evolution has selected for is not that so where like would uh uh is this something that Darwin himself saw in his theory or would he be surprised I think Darwin would be surprised and in fact many um evolutionary theorists today are surprised and so how do we know this isn't just a kooky interpretation of natural selection by Donald Hoffman exactly so the the way we pursue this is it turns out that Darwin's theory has been turned into a mathematically precise Theory it's called evolutionary Game Theory so John Maynard Smith started that in the 1970s and so we now have instead of you know Darwin's theory which is you know it's imprecise in the sense that it's not a mathematical model evolutionary Game Theory evolutionary graph Theory are mathematically precise so we can now prove theorems and we can ask technical questions so what is the probability that natural selection would shape any sensory system of any organism to reveal any true structures of objective reality that's a clean technical question and it turns out that evolutionary game theory is precise enough to address that question okay so I know I've gotten hung up on that a lot and I think for people of my cognitive ability we will have to accept that as the miracle of this conversation otherwise we'll derail on that because I don't understand how his theory can be turned into a math equation and I worry that for you to explain it to me would take an entire semester and cause me to tear my hair out but so if we can accept unless you're thinking it looks like you may have a video I can't I can give a little hint it's when we say evolutionary Game Theory it real think about Game Theory how do you play Monopoly and win how do you play various games so it turns out you can look at different strategies that someone might have you know I'm going to go for a park place I'm going to go for Boardwalk I'm going to try to there's all different strategy and you can then write down mathematically okay if you take this strategy what is the probability that you will do well against someone who's taking this other stream it's all about most Offspring and the so the strategies are ways to survive long enough to reproduce and so you can look at different strategies for playing the game of life so for example some organisms will have millions or thousands of Offspring and but they don't care about The Offspring most of them will die but if one percent of them make it you're good humans tend to have just a couple a handful of Offspring and we put a lot of effort into them so those are different strategies and so as you look so some strategies for example in perception humans really have focused in our Evolution on vision and hearing and less on smell and taste and so forth other organisms focus on things that we don't even have like echolocation and bats so different organisms will take different strategies The Game of Life is how do I live long enough to reproduce and how do I raise my Offspring to maturity no do I do I just make lots of them and let them fend for themselves and most of them die but a fraction will make it or do I make just a few of them and really help them for 20 or 30 years until they can go on their own or more of these days or more of those days so buy from evolutionary game theories perspective what is the most successful creature on planet Earth uh well probably bacteria um interesting right well yeah there there's a lot more bacteria than not a good answer than us and and maybe viruses if they're more so from that point of view um right the the winner is the one who um you know survives long enough to reproduce and reproduces for a long period of time and you know cyanobacteria been around for billions of years so you know they're they're certainly candidates I'm not saying that they're the final answer but that kind of thing would be humans are you know relative newcomers and I actually really like the theory that humans are bacteria's way of moving around which is pretty interesting when you think that we're outnumbered by the bacteria in our guts on our skin and all of that stuff it's pretty interesting I should have guessed that answer but I didn't but that makes a lot of sense right right so so this gives you the idea of when you're playing a game there's lots of strategies especially in a complicated game there's lots of strategies and it's not that there's going to be one best strategy it's rather that if so you know if Tom is using this strategy what should what strategy should I use to counter Tom's strategy and and so forth same thing in business right it depends on who your competition is what strategies you're going to take and what is the governing system and so forth like with the laws and so forth that will all determine your strategy so you can use Game Theory and turn it into a tool for studying Evolution as a game where your bacteria are trying to play the game of Life One way humans are playing the game of Life another way every different organism every different plant is playing the game of life with a different kind of strategy that's really interesting it's funny I I this is the third time I've interviewed you and I've never pushed on this because it there was something about I couldn't wrap my brain around it so I'm glad you took the time yeah uh what's fascinating to me is every species has its own umvelt yes which is a really fascinating concept so I looked this up once and every time I say this that I think I must be wrong because it just seems way too far off but humans are able to perceive point zero zero three five percent of the electromagnetic spectrum and I was like how is that that's so like every everything that we see and think of as the the known world is .0035 percent right that is like vanishingly small exactly right so our our window on the on the world is Trivial compared to what could in principle be available and so the question that you can then ask in a technical fashion is what is the probability that a strategy of seeing truth true structures about objective reality would that strategy help you to survive long enough to raise kids [Music] and so we can ask that as a technical question Evolution has the tools to do that and the key concept is something called a fitness payoff so it's Fitness payoff is like if you're playing a game there's a certain way that you get points in the game if you're playing a video game right you have to shoot things down or avoid getting hit and to get points and if you get enough points you get to the next level of the game well Fitness payoffs um if you get enough Fitness payoffs what that corresponds to is you're surviving long enough to reproduce and you don't go to the next level of the game but your Offspring and your DNA in your Offspring go to the next level of the game so here's the here's the big idea we can ask these Fitness payoff functions that govern our Evolution they do depend on whatever the world is and the world structure so they do depend on the world they depend on the organism you know what's fit for me is not fit for a benthic fish being 5 000 meters under the water would kill me it's just what the benthic fish wants so so the fitness payoffs depend on the true structure of the world depends on the organism you know Hoffman versus a fish and the um the action feeding fighting fleeing and mating and and so forth and you can then ask what is the probability this is now this is the key technical question what is the probability that a randomly chosen Fitness payoff function that's governing my Evolution has information about the true structure of the world right because it's that fit Evolution tells us those Fitness payoffs are what determine how your senses are going to evolve what's the base assumption there that the that reality is so complex in fact I want to press I want to take a second to really elucidate the example you have about Grand Theft Auto which I think is so brilliant what's actually happening in Grand Theft Auto is uh electrical currents are toggling on and off Gates on the computer and that somehow makes things happen on your screen that you can interact with and score points and all that right but at like if you look at a chip it is so complicated that uh trying to like zap electrodes in the right order literally impossible right and so everything that we we as the average non-computer programmer think of as a computer is really just the GUI it's the interface and so you're there at a really ABS really abstracted level it is so abstract is to be nonsensical compared to what's actually happening at the electrical communication level with the Machinery itself sending signals to your TV exactly and if real life has that same level of complexity then I get why it would need to be so abstracted that as to be just nonsensical compared to what reality really is something I think breaks some people's intuition it certainly breaks in my intuition when I think though that there has to be some sort of mapping so the example that you've said many times I think is really on point is uh if people are going to make fun of you what they will say is oh you don't think any of this is real go ahead and step in front of that train and see if it kills you right and of course it's going to so the representation of the train is pointing at something that will change your state from alive to dead that's right now whether all of that is is so again abstracted from what's actually happening at a larger level I don't even know what to liken it to um but nonetheless stepping in front of a train will flip you from alive to dead whatever that means in the underlying reality so do you think at all about like do you care what it's mapping to or are you just like eh it doesn't matter it's too complicated we're not there yet well I do care and that's why I'm interested in this particular theorem right because my interest is I'm seeing a world of space and time and objects with colors and shapes and motions how is is that the true world is that the the true structure of objective reality or is this as divorced from reality is what we're seeing as divorced from the fundamental reality as my Grand Theft Auto VR headset is from the voltages inside the super computer that's running it that's the that's this simple question right so when I talk about things outside of space-time it's just like suppose someone had played Grand Theft Auto since they were one day old and their parents had left them in a headset their whole life and when they're 25 the parents say guess what you've been in the headset your whole life and and that that person probably can't even what could possibly be outside of my headset I've lived my whole life inside this headset and you pull it off and you realize oh wow there's a whole world that's entirely outside of what you're in that's the question we're asking has has Evolution shaped us with just a little headset of VR headset that that guides adaptive Behavior but shows us none of objective reality that's that's the technical question and the answer is is very very clear the probability is one that we don't see the truth at all meaning 100 okay so if the probability is a hundred percent that you are seeing a very false version right the the thing that that seems to predict to me is that the underlying reality is so complicated that at least in this form you know a house refer to that in this form it would with our umvelt our ability to process data whatever it would not make sense to try to [Music] um to deal with the reality that it's far more efficient to create an abstraction layer but if underlying reality is dead simple that doesn't seem like it would hold true so do we just presume that there is Extreme complexity well it turns out that the extreme complexity isn't necessary for this theorem to be true interesting why would you need such an elaborate abstraction if it isn't complicated well so it turns out when you actually just look at the math so suppose the world has some number of states a billion States or 100 States whatever it might so there's some number of states in the world and you have some number of states of perception I can see green red there's lots of things I can see when you just do a simple count look at all the possible functions from the states of the world to the states of my percentage just count them so it doesn't the world does not be complicated it could have just you know 100 points or a thousand points when you count those all the functions and that are the fitness functions and ask how many of those functions actually contain information about the structures in the in the world it turns out that very quickly the proportion goes to zero it's just just so even if the structure isn't that complicated maybe there's only one structure in the world that's all it has like a total order something you know one is less than two is less than three is like what is the probability that that total order so the world could be very simple it only has one simple structure total order and and the world only has you know maybe a million States so it's not a very complicated World a million States what is the probability that um the fitness payoff functions that govern my my Evolution would Preserve the total order of information would actually be able to tell me about the toll order and the math is quite simple and the answer is zero if it has to predict something like so when when I make the base assumption that it's it's because it is too complex so to get people I want to start putting definitions to some of these words so when you say State let's say lights on lights off so we all live where Earth has two states the Sun is up the sun is down that's one uh temperature would be another state could be hot could be cold barometric pressure could be high could be low could be wet could be dry like we can just so there's a lot of different things and so to your point about the fish they're dealing with massive pressures right if they were to come up where there's no pressure they would disintegrate or not be able to move or whatever just like we Crush down to the you know like a tiny can so they would explode and we would crush right exactly right right so okay that when you say States that's one example exactly I don't understand how if everything were static it were one state that we would need an abstraction layer to navigate it more effectively than somebody that sees objective reality so now I'm going to use an example to further illustrate what I mean I'm going to use an example you gave me the first time you cannot imagine how many times I've quoted you on this okay you said uh Tom you have to understand that objective reality isn't like oh here's a table and it's got this nice swirly grain pattern it's the number of photons reflecting off of that desk and the the amount of reflectivity and all that now irony of ironies as I have started working in the metaverse you realize how complicated the visual world is the the 0.0035 of the visual spectrum that we actually see is insanely complicated to replicate right right Donald right right it's the hardest thing I've done in my life it's crazy and I don't even have to fully understand it I just have to guide the team understands it anyway when you said that I was like whoa what reality is is very different than how I experience it so cool complex right so now I get why the math works out right but if it isn't complex so you don't seem to be struggling with this what is it that you understand that I don't or what is your base assumption right that's different than mine that makes it makes sense to you that to achieve maximum Fitness payoff you would a hundred percent not retain elements of reality right so so first I don't deny that I I suspect that reality is very complicated so so my point isn't necessary that's not necessary for this that's right it's just simply accounting things so if you if you look at all the functions from one set to another set like so I have functions for say I have numbers one through ten and that's my base set and I'm going to map them into numbers 1 through 10. so I can map one to three and two to five and so forth so you know if you just do okay if you think about that problem you I could probably figure okay how many different functions are there right so you can write the write down all now you can say okay how many of those functions have the property that um you know they preserve that one is less than two is less than three and less than four how many of them scramble that order how many preserve that order how many scramble how many contain information about the one less less than two less than three less than four so this is called combinatorics it's a branch of mathematics 92 percent of people that set a New Year's goal fail to achieve it which is why I've created a 90-day challenge designed specifically to ensure that you hit your goals you really can radically transform yourself just click the link below to join me and the entire impact Theory university community to kick off 2023 right with the impact 90 challenge right guys now back to the episode oh I'm unfortunately all too aware of it because of nfts yes which require you to understand this because you're making you have to your point and maybe this is what you're saying and so maybe I actually now I'm understanding it let me walk you through what we had to discover in nfts okay so you create all these traits right all these categories I should say and then within each category you have maybe 10 possible eyebrows that it could be eyeball types hairstyles uh facial hair so on and so forth that outputs let's say 2 billion right potential permutations exactly right but you want to maintain a distribution in the 10 000 that you're actually going to show so we were all trying to do the math and we're working it out and I'm like there's no way it's as simple there's some problem and then we showed it to physicists and they fell out laughing and they're like yeah it's not that simple and so they're like for you to maintain the right the um the percentage likelihood to get gold eyes let's say right out of your two billion combinations they're like you have to force it down into this thing which they called combinatorial or whatever and so I was like okay and so that's that really is the point here that even though I agree with you that the universe is probably the real Universe whatever it is is very complicated I I believe that combinatorics blow up so quickly got it by the time you just get to a few hundred elements you know that as you found the thing the explosion of possibilities is so great that when they ask how many of those possible Fitness functions would actually be so special that they contain information about the structure of where they came from out of all of the possible Fitness functions that so it's not an overly complicated world it's just the number of potential mapping points and combinations exactly right very interesting because evolutionary theory puts no restriction on the fitness payoff functions there could be as many as you can imagine and there's no restrictions there's no restriction that says they have to show you the truth that's not part of the theory right so until so and and by the way no one knows how to put that into the theory right so I mean to say that it requires that only the fitness functions that preserve the truth would be a major revision to evolutionary theory it would be unrecognizable so so when you look then and say okay every Fitness payoff function is is equal likely as any other Fitness payoff function they're all in equal footing and then you count the ones that actually have information about the truth they go to zero probability in fast order now there is one I should bring out there's a group at Yale that has recently published a paper that's trying to push back on this and what they say is if you have say a bunch of like thousands of Fitness payoff functions they're all radically different then they say that she'll be forced to um to go to the truth and and the the argument that they make is that if our high level cognitions our beliefs our goals and so forth are not going to interfere with our perceptions they claim that then our perceptions have to map have a single mapping from the state of the world into the state of our senses has to be a single mapping you can't have more so because one thing I could do with a lot of Fitness functions is to say well this this function is different from that one so I will do this kind of mapping from the world into my senses with this Fitness path function then I'll do another mapping with this Fitness payoff function and and they say you know if you're going to have what we call cognitive impenetrability so what you believe cognitively cannot affect what you see okay that's that's the argument then you must have only one mapping well it so that's their assumption so hold on let me make sure I understand that so they're saying that basically so that your delusions don't create the exterior world or at least your perception of it you have to have this mapping so that you're actually detecting and seeing what is real they're saying that if what you believe doesn't affect your senses in a fundamental way yep then they claim that that entails that you can only have one mapping from the world the fitness the the mapping of your senses from the whatever the world is into what what you're seeing the colors and the shapes and so forth there can only be one map um that that holds regardless of what the fitness payoff functions that was their claim so and another reason to bring this up is because this is a recently published paper the claim is false it's it's trivial to show counter examples they're fundamental claim is false please do as a way just to make sure that I actually understand what they're saying because this sounds like what they're trying to protect against is um hallucinations basically becoming subjectively real right so so I actually think that it's true probably to a large extent that what we believe does not really affect fundamentally what we see so technical term we use the geek term is cognitive and penetrability of perception that's what the philosophers of science will talk about in cognitive scientists that are and you can think about scientists might like this because they'll say look we want to use our senses in our experiments I want to my theory makes a prediction I have to go look and see if the prediction is true well if my theory that I'm holding would change what I see then science isn't going to really be objective right I mean if I believe this Theory and it changes how I see the data then I might just see the data that confirms the theory and I can't escape so that's why there's the philosophy of science has been very interested in this question are are high level theoretical beliefs and just our beliefs as Everyday People do they get in there and somehow fundamentally affect how we see the world and there is a sort of a way you could say that you know I the way I believe things does change my world but not they don't change like the color I see or the three-dimensional structure of the cube here that I'm seeing I mean they might change it in some way but but not fundamentally like that so that's the that's the question and so it's trivial I mean so when the group at Yale makes this point that you know if you have lots of different Fitness payoff functions and you don't have your high level beliefs interfering with the process of perception then you can only have one one map from the world into your senses and of course they don't prove that they just state it without proof and so it's trivially false we have made counter examples it's very very easy to make counter examples I can design a system in which I have say two Fitness payoff functions and I I use onefitnesspal function to make one map from the world into my perceptions use the other Fitness function to make another map and if I have a system that has no high level beliefs then the high level beliefs aren't interfering with it there's the counter example right there no cognitive penetration of perception multiple Maps but then I can add beliefs and say I know I can have beliefs there as long as they don't interfere with this mapping here I could have two two maps why not so it's they're they're the guys the the group at Yale they're brilliant experimentalists and you know one of them is a really good friend of one of my collaborators I mean they're they were post-docs at MIT together and so forth so they're brilliant experimentalists but the fundamental assumption that they're making is just trivially false and so so then what how do we see this in our perceptions the way we see it in our perceptions is we have probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of Fitness payoff functions that are governing our our Behavior so what do we do with all that complexity what we do is we group The Fitness payoff functions into groups that are similar and we take the and we make simple little data structures out of them and those data structures are what we call Objects so this object is good for drinking can you what what is a data structure when you say that it's an object meaning my mind groups it so that I can differentiate the cup from the coaster from the desk what I'm saying is we're making all this stuff up as a simple way to represent the fitnesses fitness payoffs and how to get them so so for example in when you're playing Grand Theft Auto you're playing a game um if you looked inside the super computer there there is no red Porsche there is no steering wheel there is no gas pedal in some sense those are what I call Simple data structures they're coding for you know the gas pedal and pushing on the gas pedal is coding for who knows countless millions of voltage changes happening in in exactly the right sequence in the computer I have this trivial data structure gas pedal push on it that triggers this whole other thing that I don't want to know about it's really too complicated so that's what I mean by these simplifying data structures my steering wheel is this simple data structure that I can use to interact with who knows how many billions or trillions of voltages and make them do exactly the right sequence in the right order could I say representation instead of data structure sure absolutely data structure is the computer science term so computer scientists would would be very happy with that but but representation is is perfectly good and so the idea then is what evolution has done from an evolutionary point of view is it takes all these Fitness payoff functions that govern us the governor our survival and that we need to respect in order to play the game of life and we organize them so an apple is an object it's a representation of a bunch of Fitness payoffs for example the Apple if I'm interested in mating Apple's no good if I'm interested in eating great if I'm interested in a weapon so so I mean I could throw it to someone's head but it's not going to do much damage you know if I'm you know so there's if but if I have a sword a sword well for for mating no good for eating not really I mean I could use it to cut a coconut in half but but I can't eat this I can't eat the sword for fighting great but not if you're fighting against a you know a gun and things like that so every object and we can recognize I would say on the order of 30 or 40 000 different objects basic kinds of objects so what that indicates is that Evolution has taken all these hundreds of thousands maybe millions of Fitness payoff functions and it's not making one map from the world into our senses it's making a bunch of different maps and those different maps are what we call Objects and our high level cognition all it does is I I'm hungry okay or I won't be looking for tables I won't be looking for the moon I'll be looking for apples and bananas and things like that those data structures those representations that have high Fitness payoffs for for the action of eating and so visual attention paying attention to different objects is our way of switching from this representation of Fitness payoffs to this representation of Fitness payoffs as I need to be able to to do to survive long enough to reproduce and so that's so this sort of technical but it's the reason I bring it out is because this is brand new it's gotten a lot of attention from Yale and so it's an important thing from the scientific side to to Really lay to rest that that you know there's not one mapping that's required from the world into our senses by Evolution even if we assume that our our beliefs don't you know interfere with our cognition our cognitions don't interfere with our perceptions that doesn't entail that we have to have one mapping it's just a false assumption when she let go of that false assumption then you're opened up to realize that objects every object is just a data structure coding for a whole group of Fitness payoffs and that's how Evolution deals with this okay so the reason that I find this so endlessly fascinating is I um in trying the whole reason I stepped in front of the camera in the first place was I made a very profound change in my life and I thought hey anybody can do this but it really is about reframing the world so recoding re coming up with new references or seeing the cup in a different light whatever so it's interesting so the idea of our beliefs don't influence our cognition or influence the mapping to the um the real world it's probably only at the margins it's pretty minor as you said but I think that there is a lot of um difference in outcome in The Game of Life as we think about it in a modern context depending on how you code things but I've I've struggled with this so at one point I was going to write a book and I was working with a Ghostwriter and I was saying like it doesn't matter what's true all that matters is that it's effective and that the way that you view the world is moving you towards your goals and this was like at the height of trump and the Ghost Writer was like yo I'm not writing that and she was like you need to tell me that you don't believe in like a post-truth world and I was like that's interesting because no I don't mean just lie and make things up but what is guiding my decision making isn't a quest for what's true it's a quest for what works and so as I think about Fitness payoffs I get that I'm going to put a pin in the following for a second when I hear you talk it feels like you think the level of abstraction is is like being in a game headset versus what the game machine is doing itself that that is so different right and so we'll get to that in a minute because that's what we're talking about but even like at the layer of okay I've got my headset on I'm locked in like even there how you can influence things by how you perceive them is interesting and we're living in a moment where saying post-truth triggers a lot of things I want to strip all that away but get people to focus on because really really truly in life what you're talking about with Fitness payoffs is how people should look at their own belief system of like okay I believe the way that I tell people to judge what is true is what is the thing that allows you to better predict the outcome of your actions and so if I believe in gravity that allows me to better predict how to handle this cup right because if I hold it over here and let go and expect it to stay there I'm going to be very disappointed when it crashes to the floor and so believing in gravity even if it's fake is very useful stepping on the gas pedal even if there really is no Porsche even if there is no gas pedal if I'm in the game like just assuming that that's how it works even though it isn't true it's a total abstraction it's going to help you get towards your goal if your goal is to win that game so all of that is very interesting I do think that we can even take something like synesthesia where would you say that that's they're intentionally um using cognition no but their perception is like I don't know if you know who Dave Grohl is but uh drummer for Nirvana lead singer Foo Fighters and he is a synesthet of his own um claim my own admission yeah and he said that I forget if he sees or shapes I think there might be shapes and for him and he said that's why it's so easy for him to remember songs because they have these literal shapes yes and so he just has to remember the sequence of the shapes and he can play the song and that I mean that really has an impact he's able to remember things that I wouldn't be able to remember for instance because his perception is being influenced by the way that his brain processes data so for whatever reason two areas of his brain trigger when he hears something whereas in mine only one triggers and so that to me when I again going back to why I find this so interesting that to me says hey I don't know how much of what you're perceiving is real but I know that there are consequences to how you categorize so your idea of data structures is going to matter a lot and so if you can categorize something as shapes and sound it's going to be easier to remember if you categorize like for instance the thing I'm always trying to get people to understand is if you have what I call the only belief that matters that you can if you put time and energy into getting better at something you actually will get better right if you believe that then you'll pursue Improvement if you don't believe that then you won't because it wouldn't make any sense right so you miss out on Fitness payoffs based on your cognitive assessment of how the world works right so all of that's fascinating okay absolutely and important understand where my brain breaks with your thesis is how different what you perceive is and what the world is like and I know and this is where it gets hard because I think you would say we don't know what's under space-time right but what's your best guess like as we strip away this layer and this might be the time to talk about Consciousness but I don't want to lead the witness what what do you if it isn't space time stab in the dark for me what the hell is it well I'll tell you what the physicists are doing on this because the physicists are the ones who are saying space time is not fundamental so it's there it's a pointer it's a representation it's a data structure it's a data structure to something deeper that's right but it's it happens to be the human brain which is already a data structure you're already making that up exactly right but that data structure represents things through space-time exactly right that's our headset space time is just our headset and it only goes down to the is that the plank length I always hear you quote a a size plank length is 10 to the minus 33 so that is where you're quoting right because that's the smallest thing that we can measure yeah that's the smallest thing that's the smallest scale at which space time has any operational meaning if you try to go smaller space time ceases to make any operational sense at all because gravity insists that below that things have condensed to too fine of a point it becomes a black hole exactly right you create a black hole Okay so so and if you think about it and we know that isn't true like why can't they just be true smaller than that is a black hole yay you know well we know it's we know that at the plank scale you you um space time stops and you get you you get black holes so what's the problem well black hole is a singularity it means we don't know what's happening wait so you get Infinities popping up um but black holes are real right they're they're real as a data structure they're they're they're real stopping points in our understanding but they're in the universe well they're um I know this gets complicated because the universe is a representation oh yeah so and so where I want to start Penrose and others have been studying the properties of black holes right Penrose won the Nobel Prize very recently for his his wonderful work on black holes and so there's a lot of work that's being done to understand the properties of black holes for example the amount of information you can store in a black hole doesn't depend on its volume only the surface area yeah I don't understand that yeah right right this is it's very very strange but that turns out to be true in everyday space the amount of information that you can store in this volume here is not dependent on the volume it depends on the surface the surface area that's the universe we live on it's it's so that's LED people to this holographic kind of idea oh every word out of your mouth I'm like we actually are in a simulation we haven't even talked about the non local things are not locally real right we'll get to that because that's the new Nobel Prize this year which is insane and literally just says you're in a simulation and it's the same as rendering and when you look at something it renders when you look away it it doesn't and we can prove it mathematically yeah that's right way too fascinating we'll get to that but first I want to understand like black holes the word real gets very slippery in this conversation right but black holes are observable yes so so the idea is that the notion of space-time at like instead of 10 to the minus 33 centimeters say 10 to the minus 40 centimeters what would that mean it does it has no meaning it has there's nothing you can do with it so so black holes are fine they're they're objects there that are at the end point of what space-time can do but if we say but I thought space time was fundamental that means I should be able to talk about what's happening at 10 to the minus 50 centimeters intended and you just cannot there's no operational meaning and in that sense so you're saying whatever is fundamental will be able to tell you exactly what's happening inside of a black hole well or it will tell you that this whole framework in which black holes appear is the wrong framework and thusly black holes are just a data structure for something else that is describable once you get outside once you get out of space time and and you know it's hard for us to think outside of space-time like yeah can we can we beat this point to death for a second because this one was a a breakthrough for me when I realized I always thought of the plank plonk length as like so infinitesimally small that like we should all be in awe and you're like like that space-time breaks down that early is just ridiculous and I was like okay that's a different frame of reference yeah it's it's a very shallow data structure if it was 10 to the minus 33 trillion centimeters that it broke down I'd be I'd be impressed 10 to the minus 33. we got cheated this is a really shallow data start it's only four dimensions I can't even imagine something in five dimensions I can't even imagine a new color that I've never seen before so so we've been given this really we think that we're in many cases we think we're the epitome of intelligence and the the smartest thing in the universe my feeling is we've been shortchanged really shallow data structure only three dimensions of space one dimension of time we got a cheap headset and so when that's a fun way to say it when data breaks down like that right what so I always forget the guy's name so I wrote it down but Nema or Connie Hamed right so I've heard you talk about them a lot so I started doing some research on him and if I'm understanding what he's saying correctly is basically when you have a data structure that falls apart that early right which was again a total reframe for me because I thought of that as like oh my God uh but apparently when you understand this better you realize that's that's a pretty early tap out so when a data structure falls apart that early that that tells you that it's proximal right which I'm interpreting as a it's the finger pointing at the Moon it is not the moon itself exactly and so now you know you're looking at a pointer and so that seems to be the thing that his whole case rests on for uh space time being doomed that if your data structure falls apart that early you know there's no way this is the fundamental thing that's one of the big pointers the other big pointer a couple other big pointers he gives is that when you let go of space-time and you start Computing particle interactions like two gluons hit each other and four gluons go spreading out the kind of thing that happens at the Large Hadron Collider all the time if you compute it inside of space-time that one I mentioned two gluons in four gluons out hundreds of pages of algebra for one interaction why is it so complicated because it's the wrong data structure it's an ugly nasty data structure and the thing that you're doing the algebra on is in what way they scatter inside Space time you have to do to make all the math work out you have to have these Feynman diagrams with virtual Parts people are trying that they're trying to say okay a theory of everything right which you are saying does not exist and will never exist but we'll get to that later right uh so if there were a Theory of Everything though we should be able to know everything so finely that I can tell you oh if they Collide at this energy with this directionality it will scatter exactly like this with these probabilities you get your probabilities of their of their scattering okay and so they're just like oh my God it's a dizzying amount of math that's right until you let go of space time and then that one that I mentioned two blue ones in four gluons out it's one term you can compute it by hand it's like when they hit they'll be a diamond yeah well because you need to start talking in shapes right well yeah so so it's a shape Beyond space-time whose volumes so yeah it's a shape outside of space-time outside of our headset and the volumes of this shape actually tell you the probabilities of the various kinds of particle interactions okay so and so it turns billions of terms into a handful of terms and it shows you new symmetry so that's what the physicists really love it's simpler math which is great and then all of a sudden you see new symmetries that you can't see in space time okay I'm going to try to draw an analogy which is already going to break things but let me see how close I get you're in Grand Theft Auto right you step on the gas and you go forward and we're just like oh my God the math to predict in what way the car is going to move when you step on the gas pedal is ridiculous but if we were to be actually looking at the electrical pattern that's stepping on the gas which would be pressing buttons on your controller in a certain context if we understood that there's a pattern outside of the headset so in the the PlayStation or the Xbox there's an electrical pattern inside of that that looks so if you know chess and I don't but I'm familiar with the the idea of chunking so apparently what Chess Masters do is they're not looking at the individual pieces on the board they just know the patterns so they're like oh that image of where the pieces are in this order that's this setup so they've chunked the whole board into like oh I know where we're at in the game and I know what the right next move is so basically what you're saying is you step on the gas and it gives you an image of a shape of electrical patterns outside of the headset if that's what you're saying I at least understand I I don't I could not give you the math or any of that but I get like this representation this data structure which you think of as being real stepping on the gas and the red portion goes is actually this chunk of electrical impulses if we think of it as a shape or a pattern or a rhythm or however we're going to think of it is that what we're saying that could be a helpful metaphor and I've got another metaphor that may also try to help people on the because that's an important point that you're raising so suppose here's another way to think about this suppose that I'm looking at a video and are seeing all these pixels and the pixels are moving in really complicated ways you know there's the red pixels and green pixels and light pixels and dark and I'm just and and I've and I know that there's something interesting going on and so I write down all these equations for the Motions of these pixels and but but someone says you know what there is just this I've got this little Rubik's Cube and I'm all I'm doing is rotating a Rubik's Cube and but but you're only seeing the pixel projection of if you just could see this 3D object you would realize how simple it is but when you only see the pixels and see all the then it's oh man I got a I've got to model all the pixels moving on my screen how do I do that well if you can just let go of the screen behind it there's this unified geometric object the Rubik's Cube and if you just see oh it just rotates rigidly that's and that rigid rotation is the only motion I need it's a rotation here I have to look at all the pixels and this pixel I'm paying attention to the dots rather than the shape space time it's paying attention to the dots right so in space time we're we're stuck on the video screen and we're trying to model all the pixels moving around the video screen and what the physicists have said if you let go of the video screen take it off you see that these geometric objects like that Rubik's Cube are outside of it and their structure is much simpler I'm not saying simple but much much simpler but it when it projects into this really see you lost information in the projection right that's why you have all these little pixels you have a 3D object here the two-dimensional screen so you love so now it looks really complicated so what's happening then when these things Collide are they're making a new Rubik's Cube so or they're just rotating a shape that's already there this is where I have no way to Anchor myself well so particles are things inside space-time right yes so so when we look at particle interactions that the Large Hadron Collider we're looking at the pixels the Motions of the pixels inside Space time the amplitohedron and other structures that they're finding okay amplitohedron is something you say so fast I've heard you say it's a gazillion times but I had to look it up right so an amplitudehedron is a shape yes uh geometric shape right in how many dimensions um they can be in small numbers Dimensions but they can go to Infinity so there's there's different kinds of different sites of amps to heater depending on how many particles you want to enter and that's our Rubik's Cube that would be the Rubik's Cube beyond the headset yep and by the way um this is brand new this was published in 2013. this is not even 10 years old so this is this is all new stuff um this amplitudehedron so it's no surprise that people haven't heard of it in in many physicists um haven't heard of it it's truly truly remarkable Quantum theorists in fact and so how what makes people think the amplitohedron is actually real that we have detected the shape outside of the headset well I think that the really brilliant physicists would not say we're done they would say we've taken a first step outside of the headset of space-time and one of the first structures we found is the amplitohedron that doesn't mean it's going to be the final answer they're looking at other structures something called the cosmological polytope and surface hedra and and so forth cosmological polytrope polytope polytope what is that that is another geometric it's another geometric shape that Nema or Connie Hamed Juan malda Cena and and others a lot of the work has been done at the institute for advanced study and collaborators with the people there and this is trying see the amplitohedron is primarily for flat space time my understanding so without gravity but when you deal with gravity and and Einstein told us that sort of curve space time then it's then things get a little more complicated and in that case um I think they're looking at the cosmological polyte for more um like cosmological kinds of predictions so the amplitude hedron so and and I'm sure that they're saying that they're not saying the cosmological polytope is the final word what's really interesting is they've already taken a Step Beyond the amplitohedron so there's something called meaning even that they don't think is fundamental or just that it's part of the fundamental they they think it's an important step outside of space-time but what surprises the physicists is that the heart of the amplitahedron is something called a permutation a kind of permutation called a decorated permutation it's like shuffling cards through permuting cards so it's a surprise that that if you let go of space-time Things become simple you get the samples to hedron the math becomes simple and then when you look at the amplitude heater and ask about its essential character you find out that behind the amplitahedron are is just permutations decorative permutations shuffling cards kind of thing and so we're at this position so this is only you know in the last couple decades right that this has happened the amplitude hedron is 2013. so it's only nine years old so here we're at this really interesting position in in science in physics I like to think of it like the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey remember the scene it was great movie yeah and there's a scene where there's the monolith is just sitting there pregnant with meaning and the apes are looking at it they're afraid of it they're beating on it they don't know what to do with it you get the sense that they know it's important but they haven't a clue what it's pointing to that's where we are the amplitahedron and the decorative permutations are these monoliths outside of space-time there's there's no Dynamics who ordered this monolith the amplitude heater and just sitting outside of space-time it captures all these amplitudes all the particle amplitude it captures the structure of space-time Einstein's special relativity Quantum unit quantum theory and a so-called unitarity of quantum theory so this is deeper this thing is deeper than space-time it's deeper than quantum theory quantum theory itself is not deep enough this structure the amplitudehedron this monolith is beyond quantum theory but it codes for quantum theory as projection in space time so who ordered this like just in 2001 A Space Odyssey the Apes you can imagine what is this where'd it come from why what what's it going on we don't imagine me asking that yeah well everybody's asking it right now you know who or is it just a static structure physicists like Dynamics we want something we want to have equations of motion we don't have that we just have here's the geometry and here's behind it this permutation they're just sitting there who ordered that and why so that's where so but the attitude is not one of um despair this is really for the young Geniuses who are doing the stuff this is like fabulous right we're the first generation that not me but the young physics the first generation that really gets to step outside of the headset of space-time they've already found these monoliths The amplitahedron Decorator permutations and just to really make that simplistic shapes shapes and then the shuffling of the shapes that's right some shuffling that codes for the shapes it captures their essential structure in some sense even the geometry the volumes and so forth are redundant there's this even simpler more compressed description right now the decorated permutation is the most compressed description that doesn't have any extra bells and whistles the amplitude hedron in some sense you know the positive gross mining that use that they used to build and so forth they have extra bells and whistles in some sense the amplitohedron boils it down to its essence but but the so it's shuffles permutations and and the big question is why why why this I mean if you in the beginning God said why would God say that well what why what is this let there be shapes let there be the amplitude heater and let there be shuffles that doesn't seem quite deep enough right it seems like there's got to be something beyond that some something dynamical and there's no clue right now in the physics about a dynamical thing behind the decorated permutations or the amplitohedron well we just lost me so I'm guessing that we lost a lot of people so this is outside of the headset so we're beginning to get to what we think may be these foundational pillars but it's so early that nobody really knows what these are yet let's go back to the quantum realm for a second so this is one of my pet peeves that people in the mindset space tend towards magical thinking and there's something about quantum entanglement the quantum tubules in the brain or whatever it is that they think about collapsing and all that um one is there anything even inside the headset is there anything to be learned from the quantum Realms is a Quantum realm point to anything outside of the headset um and where are we like how how do people not drift into meaninglessness as they begin to pursue this because it I because I'm so focused on usefulness like I get very um agitated might be the right word when people are like oh we're Quantum entangled and that's what the soul is and I want to tear my hair out right so it's one thing just to say those words it's another thing to have a mathematical model and a mathematical model that actually predicts precise outcomes of precise experiments and so that's the difference when physicists talk about quantum entanglement they're talking serious math and the serious experiments that just a week ago the Nobel Prize was awarded to um three of the Pioneers in testing one of the key predictions of entanglement uh which is that the real world isn't real so yeah it's called um local realism the the belief that we tend to have of local realism so objects like an electron has a property like its position or its spin whether or not you observe it has got a value of that because it's real and we assume we've assumed that's right that's that's the reality whether you see it or not it is spinning up or spinning down right it's like saying the train is there and it's going to hit you even if you don't see it you close your eyes it's not going to stop the train from hitting you so the electron really has its position it really has a spin when that's not observed and and the other assumption is is locality those it's Einstein's assumption that that nothing No Effects travel faster than the speed of light through space through space-time and so that the two together are called local realism so it's possible that when we say local realism is false that it's either the realism that's wrong or the locality so it could be you could say Okay local realism is false because there really are properties that exist but they travel their influences go faster than the speed of light or you can say nothing travels best from a big light but so the realism is false I believe Einstein but the realism is false my attitude is both are false local and realism are both false and that comes out of um just the idea of the space time itself is not fundamental right and so let me say it real simply for people like me things only exist when you look at them right you create them when you see them like in Grand Theft Auto live VR headset on I look over there and I see a red Camaro is there a red Camaro in the super computer no the average person is going to reject this out of hand right so one we're going to have to walk through the Nobel Prize so thankfully you had linked to an article so I read about it it melted my brain about an hour before you and I sat down together and I was just like how the hell is this real or true I guess because it's not real uh and then so we'll we'll walk through that but to give people the analogy to Anchor them um I think you and I disagree about this and I've always told people largely because I don't want to argue about it and I don't really know that I don't think we live in a simulation the more times I interview you the more I'm like maybe we do or maybe the way our fitness payoffs get mapped it is so effectively like a simulation as you might as well think of it as living in a simulation so I've written this story with my team and I want to overly take credit but we've created this thing called project Kaizen and in Project Kaizen they're um in this thing that we call the array the array is basically quantum foam and the idea is that it's information Theory so that you information can travel faster than the speed of light and that ultimately the thing that drives people mad in our world is to ask the question where is the array because they're thinking of it as like a Quantum supercomputer or something but in the lore where we play with that question I want to give away what we think is the the right answer but we play with that question a lot and so one of the characters in the story is literally driving himself mad by asking the question where is the array I know if I can generate enough energy I can rip this Veil and I can see through beyond the headset into like is this sitting on a desk somewhere and like can we actually discover where that is and okay so working with that idea at first I thought nah I mean this is all just a story but the more that I look at this in in this is in real life put that in their quotes in real life you only render things when the player is looking at it it's the only way to not melt the computer right right so as the they move their characters eyes around they see different parts of the world it it literally comes into existence it gets rendered when they look at it and it ceases to be rendered when they look away so they feel like they're in the seamless 3D environment right but in reality it's a trick and so it's only rendering right up to the edge of your field of view and then outside of that it's gone exactly yeah as you describe the math that is what's really happening right that's I mean it's kind of fun and cool and interesting right um okay so with that analogy people understand that one I agree at if you try to replicate so going back to what I was saying about if I try to replicate this table make it look photorealistic it is unbelievably difficult and there are so many elements of like reflectivity and depth of how far the light penetrates and absolutely oh my God and it on and on and on right absolutely the truth is hitting your career goals is not easy you have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else but there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100x your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day you'll not only get control of your time you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal to help you do this I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any High achiever needs to dominate and you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description right my friend back to today's episode so we know that there are all these things you can do to recreate reality one of the things is you build reality in a virtual environment is you have to deal with rendering only that which you're pointed at what you measure exactly right as we look at the quantum world that holds true in a way that is so weird I don't know whether to laugh or be creeped out or whatever but it's utterly fascinating okay so now to the Nobel Prize so we know that that's how you would have to do it if you want to recreate reality and the Nobel Prize was one four showing that the idea of local realism that things exist and have definite values of their properties and with influences that go no faster than the speed of light that's false that Assumption of local realism is false and there are even really interesting Quantum setups where you can prove that when I make this particular set of measurements I know with probability one what I will get like on my eighth measurement I know with probability one what the value will be again probability one means 100 100 that's right 100 what I'm going to measure and yet I also can prove that that value let's say of the position or the spin cannot possibly exist until the moment I make the measurement okay so let's walk people through that so Einstein right and after two other people basically said huh the math predicts that what you just said is true that I can have two um we end up calling them quantumly entangled particles but I have two particles I forget which type racing away from each other right to the opposite ends of the solar system very very very far apart and one of them we know they have to have opposite spin so one of them is going to be spinning up one of them is going to be spinning down right and they said they're like socks so one of them could be the right sock and one of them is a left sock so once you measure that oh this is the right one then you know automatically that the other person has the left one right and the Nobel Prize was one for proving that you don't they're not like socks right right it's not you it's not even that you don't know which is which it's that whichever one you look at first if that spins up then you know instantaneously the other one is spinning down but causally because this one is spinning up that one must be spinning down right right okay so now the part I don't understand which by the way means that these things will react effectively to each other because you measured it instantaneously across the entire solar system in this example which is way faster than light my question is when you measure it if it wasn't already spinning up or down what makes it spin up or down is it just probability yeah that's all that physics can tell us right now are the probabilities for this so so and probability is where explanation stops right when you put a probability measure in your theory you're saying my understanding stops right here so I need a probability measure because if I could tell you how it worked then I would tell you how it worked well right now I can just say here's the probabilities and so that's what we get in quantum theory is and and so that's why Einstein said I don't you know God doesn't play dice he didn't like the idea that that God didn't know all the way down what was going on that there would be these random probabilities but yeah when you do the experiments it turns out entanglement is real and and that then leads to the conclusion ultimately that local realism is false and it's it's it's truly stunning but if you think about it in terms of a headset as you said I render like in the virtual reality Grand Theft Auto I render the Camaro when I look and I garbage collect it when I look away I just delete it I render particles I render space time itself space time itself doesn't exist except as a data structure that we use and so it's now in terms of a simulation I should make a distinction between what we're saying here and a different kind of notion of simulation that Nick Bostrom has so there's a simulation theory of Nick Nick Basham and others where where they you know say look this isn't real it could be just some computer geek that did a program and we're just creatures in the simulated World in this program and it turns out that that computer Greek it's herself is just a a program from someone else at a lower level and there's this whole hierarchy uh all the way down until you get to some base programmer but they assume that the base level is a space-time world so they're still stuck on the headset that that kind of simulation Theory isn't thinking big enough you have to let the and they're also assuming that that programs can create Consciousness which is another story no one's been able to show how how that's even possible so they're just not thinking big enough you've got to let go of space-time at the base of the entire hierarchy of simulations to really get where the physicists have gone space time itself is merely a headset so so the standard simulation Theory isn't thinking big enough it's still stuck in the headset as we strip away the headset is local realism going to remain false or will there be something a better way to ask it when we strip away the headset is God still playing dice I'll put it this way as scientists making theories we will always come up short we will always have a place where we say in our Theory this is where our knowledge stops and what that's what we call the assumptions of our Theory so every scientific theory says if you grant me these assumptions I'll explain all this wonderful stuff but you have to grant me those assumptions and I can't explain those assumptions like even Einstein he said let me grant me that the speed of light is constant for all observers and Grant me that the laws of physics are the same for all all people moving in uniform motion if you grant me those two things then I can do all this wonderful stuff and that's the way all scientific theories work grant me this assumption these Miracles because we don't yet understand these things well and and it's also I think intrinsic to what it means to be a scientific theory so there's no escaping this a scientific theory there is no Theory of Everything that's a flat out statement um there can never be a scientific theory because of girdle's incompleteness incompleteness theorem but but even just before girdles in completeness theorem every Theory says grant me these assumptions please you have to make certain assumptions to even to brood up but isn't that just our ignorance probably so but our ignorance is unlimited it's interesting so I heard you and yosha Bach yeah uh discussing and he said something that Rings intuitively true to me which is that we always want to say I will never understand that right but we just don't understand it right now and just like Newton and his whole thing at the end of his life where he was like the right way to think of me is as a child on the shore playing with the seashell in front of the entire vassee of undiscovered truth right and his students though didn't believe that now maybe out of arrogance maybe they that just sat so icky with them to think that they were so ignorant to so many things but also to be generous to them maybe because they believed on a long enough timeline we really would figure things out or even if you'll grant me my Miracle of as we begin to merge with machines will we be able to process data in such a more vast way that we're able to see what is true all of the mismapping of the or all of the combinatorial combinations become manageable just because we can crunch so much data and so oh you might as well look at what is exactly real do you does that so with that set up I finally just went in and looked up girdles incompleteness theorem because I've tried to hang with you every episode around this and looking at it it's basically that there are and this will be the world's most simplistic interpretation but there are um you can create an equation that you know to be true but you can't prove it right and it's it's beyond me to be able to explain how that's true but when you read about it's like whoa okay so you can really create it's it's kind of like the mathematical version of a linguistic trap where it's like the statement on this side of the card or the statement on the other side of the card is false you turn it over and it says what the statement on the other side of the card is true and so now you're trapped because they can't both be right or wrong right so it I can't explain it better than that but like without that if there isn't things that are if he's right and there are things that are true but that cannot be proven I get why you say that we'll never have a theory of everything but if we just don't understand enough yet then it feels like we will eventually no girdles incompleteness theorem is definitive it says that no matter how complicated your mathematical or scientific theory is you can always produce a new statement that's true and is not provable within the theory that you've got so it means it escaped your current theory your theory was not a theory of everything because it wasn't a theory of this it didn't capture this truth so you didn't have a theory of everything so you say okay well I'll just put it in my theory so now I've got then girdle says well sorry now with your new augmented system here's this new I'll use it to show you there's this new thing that's true but can't be proven so you don't have a theory of everything and you add that and and what that means is that there is this Unlimited Realm of Truth that's forever beyond our notion of proof of scientific theory it's unlimited so there's this I think of it as like unlimited intelligence and that is is out there and our scientific theories will will get huge and far more interesting and far more complex and covered lots and lots they'll cover will be blown away we'll make lots and lots of progress and but girdles incompleteness theorem says but you will have not even begun to scratch the surface of the unlimited intelligence that's out there so I'm not I'm not by the way some people say well Hoffman you're you're you've walked away from modernism in the in the desire for logic and truth and rationality you've gone into post-modernism and and uh you know and my attitude is no no no reason is telling us its limits reason is saying that logic itself cannot get to all truths so I'm paying due respect to reason because reason itself is saying its own limits and in fact that gives me even more respect for reason because reason is smart enough to tell us where it gets off so it's not abandoning reason it's not going into you know some postmodernism kind of thing where anything goes no not anything goes reason is saying yeah use your logical systems but your logical systems must of course be internally consistent so girdles theorem is not girdles in inconsistency theorem as girdle's incompleteness there our logic can be consistent if it is consistent then it's necessarily incomplete if it's if it were inconsistent then it's mostly useless right it'd be mostly useless so is girdles so what girdle really showed is our our theories are either inconsistent or incomplete but we call it girdle's incompleteness theorem because that's we don't think about inconsistency it's really the incompleteness and so so it's truly respecting reason to recognize that reason itself says where it gets off and it points to as Newton pointed to this unbounded intelligence that reason can always happily explore fully knowing it will always be a trivial foray into the unknown a trivial foray into the unknown and yet somehow it's important for us to do that foray so so as a scientist this is not just abstract stuff for me I take it I take reason very seriously it says I have limits and there are unbounded truths Beyond Reason so I take time to just sit in complete silence and let go of reason and see what happens maybe I'm I can touch that unlimited intelligence maybe I am that unlimited intelligence under a headset that's an interesting possibility which many spiritual Traditions have pointed to that we are that unlimited intelligence so that we then have this interesting back and forth between rigorous logic not anything goes rigorous Logic on the one hand and then complete letting go of all Concepts going into complete silence where there's this incredible intelligence that's it's literally infinitely greater than our scientific intelligence and having them go back and forth I think the the best science in the future will be from those who can do that be absolutely hard-nosed in your math and your experiments absolutely hard-nosed it's not everything goes it's it's rigor and then go into complete interior silence to get the truth to tap in to this unlimited wisdom unlimited intelligence and go back and forth somehow my feeling is that's what all this is pointing to that that we should have our feet in both Realms and for some reason having feet in both Realms is really what we're up to what this is all about okay so let's push into that a little bit so this takes us into consciousness never been enamored with the Consciousness debate but the way that you propose some interesting ways of looking at it I do find intriguing so you've got this idea that girdle's incompleteness theorem says that it's this infinite thing and that there's always going to be more to explore that you will never be able to have a theory of everything and when you ask yourself why would this be the case or um how does that tie into consciousness and maybe I'm getting the slightly wrong but my interpretation of what you said is that it's possible that given that Consciousness is basically exploring itself and we are all of the permutations that it must run through to basically have the negative take I know that not to be me and that helps me understand who I am how close am I getting that's that's I think a very very good first approximation with the Proviso that we understand now based on what we've talked about girdles in completeness theorem that everything that we are saying now are just words and they're only pointers into a realm that's that's unlimited and infinitely beyond anything that even our words can point to so even when I've used so I talk about Consciousness as being more fundamental than space-time but even then if I step back and go okay to be really consistent I have to admit that even a theory of Consciousness is not a Theory of Everything and it may not even be the right language it's just the next baby step in our scientific Consciousness be more fundamental than space-time wouldn't the thing that the guys the local realism which requires you to look at something state that if Consciousness were more fundamental than space-time it would already be observing itself so the way to think about it is maybe an analogy is you're wearing a headset yep and you're playing Grand Theft Auto again but there is no real car out there the steering wheel is just in your head it's all in your perceptions all of that is so the entire physical world quote unquote of Grand Theft Auto is made up in your mind made up in your Consciousness so my my Consciousness or whatever Consciousness is is creating the um the virtual world that's right the way I think about it um and again you know words have limitations but the math model we're working on on Consciousness indicates that there is one unlimited Consciousness that cannot be modeled and but we can talk about projections of it that one that one big Consciousness can be can have projections and we're having a projection into a 4D space-time format and there's a Tom projection and a non-projection but we're just projections of this one unlimited Consciousness that's that's utterly outside of space and time and this is probably not a particularly sophisticated projection as I was saying 40 space time only goes to 10 to the minus 33 centimeters pretty trivial so this is we're probably this is you know Consciousness not being too serious this is like a trivial projection but it's doing whatever it needs to do we're doing some science we're talking we're learning to love each other which maybe you know who knows that might be the big thing maybe maybe it's learning to know yourself Beyond any concepts and to know that everybody else is really you under a different Avatar and to to learn to love I mean I I don't know what the final answer is but this is the kind of question that comes up and the kind of answer that comes up that feels a little bit wishful thinking isn't the right way but that feels like a very specific to you prognostication absolutely on the math yeah when I hear you describing that I think of War games and Jacob learning like oh there's no way to win a thermonuclear war the only way to win is to not play great ending to a movie but like when I think about okay wait why would why would Consciousness this Grand Consciousness that the math seems to point to why would it need to understand itself why would it need to discover love it's like and I think about this a lot and we talked about this in the last um the last time we were together I was saying when you've got a machine and you're trying to like get AI to do something you have to give it directives you have to tell it to do something but somebody had to tell it to do that thing so who is telling Consciousness oh you should care about love well and I I completely agree with you Tom I think that the things I just threw out should probably be thrown out right but the idea is we don't have good ideas in this space so the reason I'm so when I put these ideas out I'm not wedded to them in the least but I'm saying better to have something on the table that we can say Ah that's not it then have nothing on the table because at least we can say okay that's not it but but so why isn't that it what's wrong with that and then we can try to to play with and say well how can we get something better so I put some bad pieces on the table because I don't have anything better so it's Poverty of my imagination but I'm hoping about putting bad pieces on the table having people go no that's not it I would go yeah that's not it so what is it what what is a better idea but of course that's a never-ending process girdle tells us that in some sense will always be putting bad pieces on the table [Music] and that's so we have to learn to live with that we have to learn to say I'm not going to get the final Theory of Everything no matter even if you're an Einstein which you put down on the table we're eventually going to say here's the limits of that and that's going to be always the case with scientific theories it's just that in the things I just threw on the table the limits are so obvious and so clear that you can just sort of say right away that that doesn't seem right and I had a nice lunch a few days ago with Annika Harris and while I was putting these ideas and she had the exactly the same attitude which is she said it sounds too romantic Don and I agree but it's better to put something on the table and get a negative reaction so that we start to say okay well what are better places to to go right in this but always realize that girdle is telling us this very humbling thing you'll never get a theory of everything and that means there'll always be the feeling of yeah but there's more yeah but there's more even if you're Einstein yeah but there's more so Consciousness what one I want to understand as we look at that recent Nobel prize winning for realizing that local reality isn't a thing if there is this Uber consciousness how would it not cause the like constant collapsing if if Consciousness is more fundamental than space-time how is it not causing this constant collapse down to being observed because if Consciousness is is the thing that gives rise to that it would by Nature be aware right so to really give a technical answer to that what we're going to have to have is a mathematical theory of consciousness first right so what do we mean by Consciousness and write down equations for how it is Dynamics and then we're going to have to say where is consciousness is it inside Space time see most of my colleagues who are studying Consciousness my cognitive Neuroscience these are brilliant brilliant researchers and Friends but their thinking of Consciousness as inside space-time is being made by the brain or being made by an AI computer that's complicated enough or made by integrated information or microtubule Quantum collapses or or Global workspace kind of architectures on the right broadcast architecture there so there's something inside space-time that's generating consciousness so that's the I would say 99 of my colleagues and friends um and then and by the way they're brilliant but they're thinking inside space-time that's almost all the work is inside space-time and Consciousness is stuck inside space-time I'm saying we need a theory of Consciousness outside space-time because our best science tells us that space-time is a trivial data structure it's a shallow trivial data structure why should we try to shoehorn Consciousness to be something inside space-time why not think about again the VR case with my headset all that I'm perceiving is actually not really there it's actually in my Consciousness let's turn things around space-time and particles in the physical world is just a little tiny data structure inside consciousness so to have that kind of model so Consciousness is fundamental Consciousness then uses tiny little headsets in its interactions with itself and space-time is just one trivial little headset that conscious agents use to interact with and and probably has far more interesting ones than than space-time so to answer your question we then really have to say our mathematical model of Consciousness and how does that precisely project into our little space-time headset and give us the laws of quantum field Theory the laws of general relativity evolution by natural selection we have to get so all the stuff that we've done inside the headset science has been inside the headset until the last couple decades all of our science has been studying the pixels in our headset and the structure of our pixel with the amplitohedron science is taking a step outside the headset and saying what is beyond space and time okay so that's really incredible so and then they say the deepest thing we found are these decorated permutations that's the deepest thing we've found so far it doesn't mean it's the final answer it's just as far as we've gotten so what we need to do is take a theory of conscious Consciousness we call it conscious agents in my case or conscious units Annika likes me to use conscious units instead of conscious agents because agency involves maybe the notion of a self and there doesn't have to be a notion of a you know like a human kind of Self in these agents they could be selfless in some sense but conscious how well so my myself is I mean don't most people define consciousness as it is like something to be you right the self though is like I'm Don Hoffman I was born in such a year my parents were such and such I got educated it's a story yeah but in some sense if I just let go of the story if I forgotten my story I would still be conscious if I forget who I if I forget everything that I've done give me a little drug and I just see if it's an experience I'm still I'm still I'm still conscious and so the self in terms of a little story and and what's interesting is we put so much emphasis in the story and and me versus you and I've got more than you or I'm smarter than you or or I'm faster than you and even little kids you know my car is faster my daddy can beat up here yeah that kind of thing so we're always comparing our stories so so there's no self in these conscious agents in the sense of this little image of myself that I'm defending and showing that it's better than yours and daddy or your car whatever it might be so so I call them conscious agents but we could call them conscious units but the key thing is that that has to be mathematically precise even though we understand that our mathematics will always be just our current baby step but nevertheless you need to be mathematically precise and we have to show precisely a mapping into space-time then we can start to answer your question about how is this local realism thing related to properties of Consciousness now the reason we have to map in space-time is because we know that space time even if it's just a sort of cheap simulation it does come from whatever is more foundational than that and that's where all our data is the only place our headset lets us look is inside the headset so we have to I mean if we're going to do experiments to test our theories we're stuck with this little tiny trivial data structure called space time and all of our experiments have to be done in space-time we have to measure them inside Space time so that's why we have to take our Theory Of Consciousness and project it into space-time now what's interesting is that the physicists have gone beyond space-time and found these monoliths as we talked about the monolith the sitting there the manplutahedron and so forth and then the decorated permutation monolith but no Dynamics so the physicists are going to eventually want a Dynamics right why if you have no space and time why would something need to move now physicists like Nema I mean I'll put it on campus if I were the physics assistant said you know what Here's the final answer it's the amplitohedron and a decorative permutation live with it that's all there is and some 20 year old kid taking a graduate class will go give me a break you want me to just live with that I'm going to look deeper I'm going to probe deeper I'm going to find something behind that and that's that's what science always does so we're not so no none of the physicists I mean they're of course we have a big party and are really happy about the amplitude and The Decorator it's an incredible accomplishment but the attitude is going to be what's next and in in principle they're going to want a Dynamics not a not time so you can have Dynamics without what we call time as in space-time so the notion of Dynamics or sequence is a far more General notion than just the notion of time as we see it in in terms of space-time so we want a Dynamics in that more General sense of something where there are sequences where there are it's not just a static object because there are things that we see in our headset of space-time that leads us to believe that sequencing is must be a part of whatever is fundamental well possibly yes that and possibly because um we I think would be impatient or unhappy with a theory that just says God said this object and that's it there is this object live with it that's the that's the final answer no scientist would be happy with that why did God say that why couldn't a God said something else and and why did why did it have to be static why couldn't there be some Dynamics not a space-time Dynamics but some kind of something happening why why can't so now the answer may be that the geometry is all there is and there is no Dynamics but we're not going to just accept that at face value we're going to have to be taken there kicking and screaming right and made you know to to believe that because nothing else works but so that's why I think that the physicists themselves are going to look for Dynamics behind the decorative permutations so what a theory of Consciousness has to do then if it wants to connect with space-time is it just to show how it maps onto decorative permutations right you need a dynamical theory of Consciousness and you must show how it Maps into decorated permutations then the physicists say if you give me the decorative permutations I can take you all the way into space time and you can predict scattering at the Large Hadron Collider and so forth and so that's what what our team has just done in the last 10 weeks we we discovered a new bit of mathematics that um the Dynamics of conscious agents is so-called Markov chains markovian Dynamics a very very simple kind of probabilistic Dynamics and so a few weeks ago a few a couple months ago we decided to look okay how do you map Markov chains into decorated permutations so we could put a Dynamics behind the amplitude heater and as far as like we could tell there's nothing published in terms of a general theory there are special little cases where they've looked at something but you know a general theory take any Markov chain map it into decorative Markov chain is just the long tail knock-on effect of things bumping into each other essentially right just probabilistic you know this this happens with that probability this happens with that probability all the probabilities have to sum to one what are the probability of when the cue ball hits the the balls on the pool table that they will end up in this configuration that's right in the case of conscious agents I should be explicit it's like the it's a social network right this is now consciously so it's a network of agents and it in some sense that the probabilities are what's the probability that this guy is going to talk to that guy or or these three guys or those five guys and so it's it's sort of like Network linkage Google has a lot of links a lot more than Hoffman so Google has a lot of a lot of things that are that are talking to Google Hoffman has a very few things apple has a lot of things talking to them so and those so those probabilities are sort of saying it's Network probabilities what's the probability that that sometimes it's your influencing too as well Google has huge influence because of all the networks all the connections it's got much more than someone who only has five followers right Google has millions or hundreds of millions so so those so and and then there's you know if you think about it someone tweets and then that gets picked up and who picks it up and who retweets it and who likes it and so forth so you see all the it's all probabilities right someone does something and it ripples through the whole network probabilistically you can't know exactly you know even though Tom is a follower of somebody else doesn't mean that Tom's going to Tweet everything what does Tom like what what or maybe Tom just missed that I mean he was he you know he had something else that day so it's all probabilistic and so you you see these evolving probabilities on this network and that's what Markov chains are really good at they're looking at literally so the theory of conscious agents think social networks like Twitter reverse and so forth and how influences propagate in the twitterverse and and then so what we found about 10 weeks ago was We Invented apparently as for as far as we can tell new math uh like a precise way to take any markovian Dynamics and map it into decorated permutations so that we now have a map from the Dynamics of conscious agents into decorative permutations the physicists then and decorated permutations for people that don't know is the shuffling but it's shuffling that can go either direction so I have the good fortune that you were explaining this to me before we started rolling I don't want people to think that I'm more clever than I am uh but decorated permutations you said okay when people think about shuffling a deck they think about card one going into the third position they don't think about card one going if there's five cards going the other way so instead of going one two and ending up at three it goes five four and ending up at 3. so same number of moves but you've gone in a different direction and am I explaining that right yeah but the idea of the two different directions is important but it's slightly just a slight difference so suppose I have five cards just one two three four five yep um and they're in order and now I'm going to shuffle them and I say okay one went to position three now but five went to position two so one going to three is sort of shuffling forward right you go into a bigger number five going to two you're going to a smaller number you're going backward so so that a normal permutation that's that's fine that's what a normal permutation is now decorated permutation says you only Shuffle to a bigger number so if you want 5 to go to 2 what you're going to do is you're going to have 5 go to 7 because 7 minus 5 5 is the biggest number 7 minus 5 is 2. okay but if 5 if 5 had gone to one then then we'd actually go 5 goes to 6 because 6 minus five is one so you it's a wrap around so only so if you already if one is going to three then you just do the normal thing 1 goes to three but if some permutation is going to a smaller number like 3 goes to 1 then you actually have to say three goes to six because because a total of five and five plus one is six so that's called a decorated permutation so it's it's not it's just a permutation with this extra little twist it's not a big deal frankly it just turned out that you needed that extra twist to fully capture the particle physics scattering of particles so when you do that what's what's stunning is for some cases so in the approximation in which all particles are super symmetric and massless so they have so they're all traveling in the speed of light they're massless so they travel the Speedline in that simple case the decorated permutation is everything that's it and when when you let go of super Symmetry and you have massive particles then all you have to do is you have the decorated permutation plus you need to add information about the mass and the spin but the decorated permutation is really doing the heavy lifting so that's the stunning thing is to the physicists which is and and you see it in the writings when you when you read like like Neymar County Hamed has the book you know grossmanian geometry of scattering amplitudes with a bunch of when they talk about the decorative permutation so you can see in the way they write they're like who ordered this I mean I you would never have you guessed that it would be something like that so but here's an interesting thing it turns out that decorative permutations are the most compact way to capture a markovian Dynamics it's a incredibly compact way of capturing the Dynamics it basically is telling you what what decorative permutations in a dynamical system are telling you is your social network who are you connected to who are you interacting only shuffling in One Direction you better capture you better capture that like if you want to go into the details it's so foreign to me I don't know how much the details but that's really strange so that's where we get into the math fair enough I'll accept it as true um we can do the math if you want but but the last time that we did the math that actually ended up being really fascinating so let's try it let's see let's see how far we get before my brain snaps in half okay so the key thing about these decorated permutations that gives them this extra power yep is that there's two ways to map to yourself right so if if you Shuffle the cards but card number one stays number one then one goes to one right but with the decorated permutation you could say well if they were say five cards then you could say well one goes to one but also one goes to six is another way of saying that you stayed yourself because if six Mod Five is one six minus five is one yep so there are so so-called what happens if I want to move five to position four that's really nine and you said that seven was the max so oh no so the the max would be ten okay right got it got it got it so if you have five cards the maximum number would be ten for n cards it's 2N right right understood so so for five so for five cards five could either map to itself five to five or five goes to ten yep because that would be so the one is called the first decoration of of the identity because it's the identity move five went to five and the other is called the second Declaration of the identity and and there's another branch of mathematics where they're called loops and code Loops um but anyway what so the way it matters in terms of the physics now in in physics when you have the first Declaration of the identity it corresponds to what they call a Zero Dimensional space so in some sense the thing doesn't exist it's a zero demand and when it maps to itself in the second kind of identity then it's it's all in one-dimensional space it's a separate one-dimensional space so it the reason for the the decorate permutation is to capture that distinction between something that is alone in the sense that um it's essentially empty versus a loan in the sense that it's just a one-dimensional space a line versus just a Zero Dimensional point you needed to capture those two things and so so it does but for the Markov Dynamics it captures something about social networks that's interesting um either I'm alone I'm the identity I'm alone because I'm I'm talking to myself and so I'm only talking to myself or I'm alone because I'm not even talking to myself and so the case in which I'm not even talking to myself is the first Declaration of the identity and the one in which I'm only talking to myself and nobody else that's the second and as soon as I'm talking to anybody else then I get a non-trivial permutation and that then what you do is you assign if say I'm I'm in The Social Network and I'm number two and suppose that my decorated permutation assigns me to five there's only five memory that means that um my social network everybody in my social network is captured between two and five total so for example number one is not in my social network yep right so so what the decorated permutation for dynamical system is doing is it's capturing now now it could be that for example when I go two to five um maybe four isn't in my network but but I'm not going to worry about that I'm just going to say everybody that's in my network is captured between two and five inclusive of two and five and when you look at the whole decorated permutation you'll figure out that four wasn't in the social network of two you can figure it out from the decorated permutation so that's why it's such that it's a really um compact representation of everything so So eventually we may actually use this on social network they are our our new mathematics of decorated permutations for Dynamics may actually end up being a very compact representation of social networks I haven't even thought about that yet but that could be as you're explaining it I was like are they going to run this math for predictive models for social networking well it's it is the right now the most compact mathematics that we can use to describe social networks and the Dynamics of social networks basically dynamics of who are you actually interacting with so so this is a brand new tool that I you know has never been as far as I know I'm used we invented it so we have a paper that we're about to submit for publication in two or three weeks where we present this and I did give a professional talk at Stanford um a month or two ago um where I presented the math I know how people put this [ __ ] together like this is so abstract for me I am Clinging On by my fingernails and I would not want to have to explain decorated permutations to anybody right uh but that's really interesting that I mean so we're caught in between two things one talking about the things we can predict and how utterly fascinating it is when you can actually map out this is what happens right and then talking about how oh yeah everything that you're mapping is totally fake it's uh it's really interesting but that's one of the things that I've always I I cognitively uh I I don't have that ability it doesn't come naturally to me me either like I have to loop around the stuff so many times just to get like the real Basics but the idea of being able to understand a system so well that you can predict this goes back to what I was saying my my whole thing in life is when you can accurately predict the outcome of your actions things get very interesting and so anything I mean that like gets as of right now I can't digest that enough to make it usable in my life but it hints at this idea of you really can map out if I do this this and this even as it gets more and more complicated you really can predict what the outcome is going to be and the closer that you can get to that the more effective you will be in your life especially because so much of what one does in business it's all human psychology and so if you have a way I mean and this really gets into right now impact theory is investing hugely into Ai Ai and what we're doing in terms of our funnels AI in terms of what we're doing in the gaming side and acknowledging that even though you have a wall of data that as a person you can't work your way through there really is there are patterns in that data oh yes that are highly leverageable and in fact one of the things like as as you're talking and I don't think you share my obsession with this but you might my obsession with physics is getting people to understand that when Einstein wrote down his general relativity and special relativity it gave us the modern world in ways that I don't think people fully understand from um being able to zoom to GPS to um atomic energy I mean it's really spectacular once you're able to better understand the nature of reality you can do things with that because it makes predictions I can't remember if we were talking about that before or after we started rolling but that ability to oh that theory makes this prediction and you can begin to think in novel ways and so I for a while I was teaching a course that I called business decision making it's the worst [ __ ] title ever nobody knows what that means but it actually is the only thing in business that matters you have to be able to go should I do this should I not do this what will happen if I interpret the world this way versus that way and people that Succeed in Business they get very good at knowing how to Think Through the problem to Think Through the problem you have to understand the nature of things and so my whole thing was hey are you doing social media you better understand the nature of social media what's the nature of social media it's human psychology plus the algorithm and so like if you master both now you can really do something right the problem is that both of those data sets are so massive right that you're really taking your best swag and getting into this stuff is for me if we really can peel through the the headset and start getting into no no that all these things that's a really low fidelity thing and this will scare people but as you if you're the first person to poke through that right oh my God you have I mean not to take the dark example but I mean we ended World War II by being the first to understand atomic energy and how to split the atom they're way more uplifting and positive examples but that's just the one that will stick out in everybody's Consciousness but being able to in fact this is something that I don't know if you know Eric um Weinstein but talking to him he's looking at okay what's that next breakthrough and what's it going to let us predict and so that's his whole like obsession is we've got people playing at very high levels and if he's right and he understands something that other people don't understand it's going to make predictions and we don't know where those predictions go right they could be good they could be terrifying could be life-changing in a good way in a bad way but getting people to understand like you need to be obsessed at at least at the headset level you have to be obsessed with better predicting what all this means so anyways you're talking about decorated permutations and stuff it just gets me thinking about large data sets how we simplify that what that's going to mean in my world in terms of business intelligence identifying an audience understanding what will convert it it really matters like it it plays out in a really real way it does and I think a metaphor here might illustrate how big the potential is science of space-time has been all in the headset and we've become wizards of the headset just like someone in Grand Theft Auto has become a wizard using the steering wheel and the gas to go through the space-time of the you know Grand Theft Auto virtual world but suppose that you learned to think outside the headset you actually understand the software in the supercomputer that's running it then you can take the gas out of the tank of the wizard you can give him flat tires or her flat tires you can change the geometry of the roads in other words the wizard is trivial compared to what you can do once you have learned how the headset works so science has just taken its first baby sips outside of the headset just in the last 20 years we're taking our first babysit once we start to understand the first level of software that's available to us I'm saying we're going to get the whole thing I mean I've girdles incompleteness theorem says the software is endless but the way things seem to work is you do get to see layer by layer by layer so as we go to the first layer of the software the Wizardry inside Space time is going to look trivial compared so right now for example something like 97 of the galaxies that we can see we could never go to they're moving away from us faster than the speed of light not because they're moving through space faster than the speed of light they're not but space itself is expanding so quickly that if we move through space to try to get to them the space would be expanding so fast that we couldn't get to them at the speed of light and so there's 90 97 of the real estate in our universe is waving at us saying hi you can never come see me yeah that's fascinating especially because if space can expand faster than the speed of light this is more at least in my limited mind pointing at like something deeper yeah there's something else going on but what if we didn't have to go through space to get to Alpha Centauri yeah every time you say this it turns me on like this is so that's that's the exciting this is where I'm I'm really excited this is one reason why I'd like to understand our theory of conscious agents outside right I'm not saying the theory of conscious agents is right but it's the first baby step that I've seen where it's a dynamical system where you can actually talk about quote unquote software that you could Tinker with you could actually do something with it um that would allow us perhaps new technologies where we don't go through space to the Andromeda galaxy that would take us about 2.4 million years good luck even your great great grandkids wouldn't be alive but what if we could go around space because our headset is just a headset you don't need you can just change the software oh you want to be at Alpha Centauri or Andromeda just change the software now you're there because you realize that space time isn't the reality it's just a data structure you can play with the data structure as soon as we the Next Generation my generation won't get it the Next Generation that really gets it is going to unleash Miracles because we will then start to really get the software behind space-time we will begin to Tinker with it and it's going the possibilities are endless I can't even imagine speaking of imagining ground me back in how you think about this in your real life so I know that you got clobbered by covid yeah you wrote A Goodbye text to your wife I'm assuming because it was coveted and she couldn't come in the room because this was really early right how did that influence that moment for you well like were you just like oh it's all I had said who cares bye babe yeah I wish I could say you know I'm this really enlightened guy in the science and spirituality and then so I was just really calm and I wish I could say that but but uh you know I was in tremendous pain my heart had been pounding the arrhythmia and cardiac um a rhythmia 190 beats per minute 180 beats per minute for 36 hours she's uh I I knew that my heart couldn't do that much longer and they hadn't been able to figure out a way to stop it and so like four o'clock in the morning my wife was asleep but but I didn't know that I would make it until she was awake so I I text her I knew I wouldn't wake her up she has her thing on me but I at least want to give her a goodbye text because I figured by the time she was up I wouldn't I wouldn't be alive and after I did the text you know within an hour after that um so they found a drug that called my heart down and was able to keep my heart calm long enough so I could eventually get a surgery which then cured the problem so so I you know what'd you put in the text you don't have to give me verbatim obviously that's super private but like what was the gist well you know when you're feeling that bad you you I didn't have to wear with all to say much it just said I I don't you know said sweetheart I don't think I'm gonna make it I love you and that was it right that's I just that was all I had so there was there wasn't um so I can imagine someone who's really spiritually Adept and advanced might sit there and very calmly that wasn't me that was I was completely shattered well I've been awake for 48 hours with a heart beating at 180 beats per minute for 36 hours I I was I was done and and I was scared and I was lonely and I was afraid and I missed my wife and my daughter and my grandkids and and it was um so so I have no Illusions about you know being some kind of spiritual master who is you know above it all uh you know I'm just another human being with the same problems with everybody else these are really good ideas I think are helping me to get a bigger picture but when it comes right down to it when push comes to shove there's something inside me that believes that space-time is fundamental it believes that when the body dies that's it so it's really interesting I I'm not coherent there's there's well put it this way maybe intellectually I'm coherent about this but there's an emotional side of me that hasn't come along now I am meditating and I think that slowly the emotional side of me is unraveling that that type scared little child that's inside of me that thinks this is all of it and is afraid of dying and so forth it's slowly unraveling I don't know if it'll ever completely unravel I I I hear people that I have no reason to disbelieve who say that they've completely unraveled it and they're completely unafraid of death I believe that that's possible um but I'm not enlightened um yeah so that was my experience it was sobering but one thing that comes out of it is I um when I stop and reflect I'm grateful for each day because I didn't expect to have any of these days I didn't I mean we discovered the stuff about decorated permutations since then I'm so grateful to be alive for the fun of you know seeing this decorating that's really neat and of course things have happened with my grandkids that are fun and so everything is a delight and a I don't take it for granted and if I were to face death in the same way again I probably feel afraid and scared and and so forth um so what do you think happens when we die my my best guess is we just take a headset off that that implies like a keeping of the personality no and it doesn't it to me it suggests that the whole story I was born in such and such a year at such and such a city in such a such hospital my parents did this I did that I had that whole story maybe something that you say goodbye to so cognition itself is headset that's right or awareness pure awareness so awareness and Consciousness are different yeah so well um there's a distinction to be made and I'm not going to be sort of hard-nosed about the particular words but you could have a specific conscious experience like the experience of green but you could and that would be conscious a kind of conscious experience that would be a kind of a Consciousness but you could also talk about awareness without any content at all I'm just aware of awareness but even that's saying too much I'm just aware so I'm not aware of dawn I'm not aware of where I live not where I'm just I'm just aware and when when people meditate and they go into very very deep levels of meditation where they really let go of all thoughts then in some sense yourself dies well is dead I mean there is no Dawn there is no I did this degree there is no I have these that's gone and and yet in some sense some nothing essential is gone nothing essential left that's just a story the essential thing is the the awareness and the the real Joy of being is the awareness itself the story is a nice add-on it's icing on the cake but it's not essential the real deep Joy is comes from the pure awareness with with no content whatsoever and so in that sense I I think of but but see there's part of me that is tied to the story so that was the part that was scared to death in the hospital there's another part of me that that believes and knows that everything's fine I'm awareness without content that's what I really am at my deepest level but as long as I'm still clinging to the story of Don then that is going to die when I die if I don't choose to die to it while I can choose to die to it I will be forced to die to it when my body dies and so so there are some of spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle who says in some sense I'm already dead the only thing left is the body so that I'm not there I'm but but I I don't disbelieve I mean I just believe most of them but I don't disbelieve some of them right I I think that it is possible in in the case for example of Eckhart Tolle I think it's highly probable that he's right I mean he really has let go and he's utterly Fearless about death you know and I'm not but I understand in principle why that could be if I really am not the story and I've really let go of the story of dawn and I'm no longer identified so here's how to know if you've really let go of the story am I competing with anybody is it important to me to be better than someone to be better known to have a better whatever be smarter have a better degree whatever it might be as long as I'm comparing myself with anybody else and trying you know or saying I'm worse I feel inferior as long as that's going on to me then I'm tied to my story and I'll be afraid of death it's only when I don't care about comparisons anymore that I've really truly let go so so if someone cuts me off on the road when I'm driving if I'm upset about that I'm tied to my story that means I'm not ready to die so you can just so when you look at the thing whatever disturbs you tells you that's that's the the hint okay you're still tied to the Apron Strings the baby story I'm Don I was born here I'm struggling to be important because I have such a small I mean I'm such this small little thing I'm I'm a little guy inside space-time I'm I believe that the Avatar of me in this headset is everything that I am I'm clinging to my avatar and as long as I'm clinging to it the possibility of losing that Avatar is terrifying so no so I'm there I'm not enlightened I'm I understand this intellectually there's something emotional that has to be brought along it has to be healed or something like that it's got to be brought along so but but this is it all makes it's all a good intellectual story for me and I'm meditating to have it become a true personal story but but what it ends up being is that even you think about even your body is just an icon it's not who you are if this if what we're saying is right space-time is doomed if the physicist is Right space-time is doomed evolution is right this is just a headset this is just an avatar then I don't even have brains right now if you look you'll render brains but right now I have no brains because they're not being rendered so neural activity causes none of my behavior brains cause none of our behavior and yet we need to study Neuroscience we need more money for Neuroscience because that's the part of our interface that is most informative about the software behind space time so if we want to understand the software behind space-time we're going to have to study the complex thing that we call the brain which is just the projection of this deeper software that is the best projection we've got so Neuroscience is far more complicated than we're thinking right now we see neurons we think there are neurons no no no we see neurons that's a pointer to a realm far more complicated probably infinitely more complicated but fortunately we can look at it in steps so so we need more for neurals so I don't have any brains but we need to study brains because when we render our brains in our headset that's the most information we're going to have in our headset about the software behind space time so but still emotionally you we're tied to it I'm tied to it um and we're wired up to this way so Piaget a very famous um child psychologist had talked about what he called object permanence he said that you know we're wired to at a certain stage of our life believe that this object exists and will continue to exist even if no one looks object permanence and you know he had the example of 18 month old baby a 17 month old baby you take a doll put it behind a pillow and the baby acts as though the doll no longer exists but at a certain age you put the baby the the doll behind the pillow now the baby will crawl over and try to get it okay so now it's got object permanence so the later studies showed that it came much earlier than Piaget thought maybe even three or four months so so why is it that I have a hard time thinking of my body as an avatar as opposed to a real object that exists why am I having our well um it's because I didn't choose to believe that I was wired up to believe that before I even had reason so when we believe very very strongly that these things exist it's not because we came to a rational conclusion about that oh yeah I thought it through and I know no no no you believe that when you were four months old that's why you believe it and and it's no deeper than that you never we've just never challenged it that's the glory of science it goes back it can challenge things that we believe since we were three months old and it can show us that we were wrong that's the power of Science and then the power of Sciences also to tell us the limits of science because what science tells us with girdles and completeness Theorem is there is no Theory of Everything but that doesn't mean that we should just do whatever we wish and think what random thoughts we want no there is we're rewarded by thinking precisely and also humbly precisely to get as far as our current framework will go and then humbly to realize that it's just a framework and there's a new one Beyond but that will also be rigorous and that will also be rigorous so it's really it's not going into you know just whatever you want you know it's it's not like a post-modernist kind of and again I don't want to give a a wrong impression I think there's a lot of interesting people that have done really brilliant work in post-modernism but but the the I'll put it this way the the gist of it that some people get that do whatever you want doesn't matter logic doesn't really require I think that that's just plain wrong I really like reason because it tells the limits of itself I love that where can people follow you uh I have a Twitter Donald D Hoffman so d-o-n-a-l-d-d-h-o-f-f-m-a-n um and you know that's my Twitter handle and and I usually every time I have a talk I'll I'll post a link to it a new paper I'll post a link or a new article that I think is really interesting on this stuff I'll post a link again it's a great feed I've definitely enjoyed it oh yeah look great for sure and speaking of things you guys will enjoy if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you want to 10x your productivity click right here to learn how to have near Infinite Energy I am here with Todd Herman Tom it is it's the time it's the Tom and Todd show today it is indeed it is indeed welcome man yeah great to be here finally super excited to have you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 844,051

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Donald Hoffman, Conversations with Tom, Health Theory, interview show, mindset, natural selection, evolution, game theory, metaverse, consciousness, reality, cognitive science, theory of everything, virtual reality

Id: RIRHq3d7Uuo

Length: 133min 15sec (7995 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 17 2023