Scientist Exposes Why Your Reality is All a Lie | Donald Hoffman on Conversations with Tom

this episode is sponsored by skillshare and the first 1000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare's premium membership enjoy the episode [Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here for a second round with donald hoffman welcome back thank you very much tom it's great to be here dude i am so excited to spend more time with you i was listening to the first interview that we did which by the way everybody you're going to want to watch that one to really understand everything that donald's about we'll give you a quick primer here but we're going to cover new ground in this but the reason that i'm so excited was honestly man trying to wrap my head around your take on consciousness and the way that basically we're living in a constructed reality that we're essentially in the matrix whether we want to be or not um and the i get that and i was into it and i love it but some of the implications of that have only hit me now that i've had time to like you know take a step back really think about it interact with other people dealing with what they call the hard problem of consciousness um so for us to be able to dive into that though give people the like three-minute primer on why your take is so different than everybody else who takes a really sort of physicality-based approach to consciousness right so most people who are looking at how consciousness is related to the physical world like our brain are assuming that somehow the physical world is primary it's the source of all cause and effect in reality and therefore consciousness is an effect of physical causes presumably neural activity in the brain for example but maybe also computer activity in a artificial intelligence that's sufficiently complicated and my my take is that our best science today quantum field theory einstein's theory of gravity and evolution by natural selection all three of our best scientific theories today are telling us that space-time is not fundamental and that physical objects in space-time are not fundamental reality and science is good enough our best scientific theories are good enough to tell us where they stop but they're not good enough of course to tell us what's beyond that's up to us as creative scientists to try to guess what is a deeper theory of reality that goes beyond space and time but when we project it back into space and time that deeper reality needs to look like gravity and quantum field theory and evolution by natural selection and so basically what i'm saying is that my my brilliant colleagues and these are my friends they're they're brilliant i'm not they're not putting them down anyway but when they assume that physical objects like neurons or computing systems cause consciousness i think that they're running against what our best scientific theories are telling us they're telling us space time is doomed we need a deeper notion of reality and and for most sciences no problem to work in space time but when we're dealing with consciousness the fiction that physical objects have genuine causal powers which is a useful fiction most of the time for everyday neuroscience it's a very useful fiction i use it myself but for consciousness that's when the fiction comes back to bite you and just just a quick idea if you're playing a virtual reality game like grand theft auto but in a vr souped up multiplayer version it's a perfectly useful fiction to think that the steering wheel causes the car to move around to the left or to the right and so forth that's perfectly harmless fiction but if you're a software engineer looking to upgrade the actual software that runs the program that fiction if you were stuck in that fiction you would not be equipped to do the upgrade that you needed in other words if you're trying to look at the reality outside the headset you can't just live with the notion of cause and effect inside the headset you actually have to expand your horizons to understand a deeper notion of cause and effect and that's what i claim we have to do with consciousness it's useful most of the time to talk about physical objects as though they have causal powers perfectly harmless but when it comes to consciousness it's the single big obstacle that's stopping progress in its tracks okay whoo you did it perfectly now i want to like really drill into that quickly so that people understand where we're going to be going from here so we spent almost two and a half hours together last time with me doing with my p brain doing my best to grapple with these topics and finally i was able to understand a couple things i'm going to lay out now that open up what this interview is going to be about and it's going to be very interesting we're going to cover things like an ai and whether that becomes conscious faster than light travel which i think your theory predicts all kinds of very interesting things so to say that analogy in my own words maybe from a lay perspective so people get what you're saying about grand theft auto because this is the key to understanding the consequences of your theory so when you think about what's really going on as a computer programmer is trying to make this game called grand theft auto you're dealing with algorithms and mathematics and moving electrical currents around a xbox or whatever and so ultimately your goal is to move electrons and things like that around this machine that then creates this supposed experience right on a tv that i can interact with okay when you understand that the re the difference between the reality that that programmer has to deal with which looks nothing like it it's literally numbers it's all code all math math designed to move electrons around okay that's not exactly right but that's close enough and that reality versus what you see which is that oh look i'm driving with the steering wheel what you're saying is what you see when you walk around the room and interact with stuff and you think about space-time and einstein relativity is as divorced from reality as the computer programmer is from the gamer who plays his game now it took me a very long time to understand that's what you're trying to get people to to understand and then it was one thing that was like a real key in the lock for me was somebody asked you a question it was so great and they said donald this is wonderful i love it but now predict we have the same conversation in 10 000 years what are we gonna know then and you said oh that space time isn't real and so we can create space time ourselves because space time is space time is the grand theft auto game it's not the code underneath so once you understand einstein just figured out a way to describe grand theft auto he did not figure out a way to describe the actual underlying code and so if if the space time is just grand theft auto and we know we can manipulate grand theft auto we can now manipulate space time and you said we'll have this conversation from alpha centauri and i was like oh my god even if you just get excited about the chills even if you just get excited about our ability to manipulate what's in the headset right manipulating space-time traveling faster than light um changing fundamental physics things like that then even that would be interesting let alone the other part that you're saying which is oh you might actually be able to figure out what the underlying code is that's that's exactly right and and so one way to think about it is science for all of its incredible breakthroughs and wonderful theories has only been studying our headset science has not yet been studying objective reality outside of our space-time virtual reality that from an evolutionary point of view was just evolved as a way for us to play the game of life and stay alive long enough to reproduce not to show us the truth so we have really in the last four or five centuries really gotten to be wizards of our headset wizards of the grand theft auto game but just because you're a wizard of grand theft auto does not mean that you know anything about the circuits and software that are running the game and for someone who thinks that they know everything when all they know is grand theft auto means they they're still stuck in the headset science i want to claim has the tools we have learned the right tools as we've studied our headset we are ready to use those same tools to venture outside the headset outside of space and time so science has the right tools we just have to open up you know open our minds to the fact that we're just playing a game inside space time it's just a virtual reality there's an entire world out now the best physicists are already there like nima arkani hamad and many of his collaborators who are saying space time is doomed we're looking for the reality that's beyond space time in which in fact the very language of quantum theory and and relativity theory don't hold there's there are no what they call hilbert spaces so there's no hilbert space there in what they're finding there's no quantum theory you need hillary's what is hilbert space i've never heard of that oh it's it's a mathematical structure that is used to describe quantum states and their evolution that's called hilbert space and so so what they're looking at you're saying they don't exist that's right so these physicists are saying look we're finding structures beyond space-time and these structures don't care about hilbert space and they don't care about locality in space and time they don't care about so-called unitarity which is important for quantum theory these are deeper structures they project into time and give us unitary and locality unitarity and locality in space-time in other words they projected the right things in our headset but they're deeper and they have symmetries that you cannot see in time and when physicists find symmetries that are in the data but can't be captured in space time they're very very interested so so the best and brightest physicists are boldly stepping outside of the headset but the question is where do you look what kinds of ideas i mean if it's not space and time how do you come up with an idea about what reality is so we just have to try ideas make them rigorous make them precise and then project them back into our headset that's the key we know how to test things within the headset so we're going to make theories of reality outside of space and time with mathematically precise models of how they map into space and time and then we can test so so this is not just waving your hands and blowing steam you know this is not that this is we want rigorous theories out outside of space time that have mathematical projections into space time that lead to testable predictions i right now am studying the physics of scattering amplitudes for the like colliders they smash protons together and they have gluons smash into each other and and gluons go flying out and you can predict the the probability of these these particle events so my goal is to start with the theory of consciousness outside of space-time mathematically precise show exactly how it maps into space time and then hopefully predict those scattering amplitudes to 10 decimal predictions to you know 10 decimal places of accuracy then that doesn't mean i'm right but at least now i'm doing the right thing to be testable okay i want to ground everybody in why i've gotten so um hyped on this so do you read science fiction much a little bit i'm mostly just very sad about that right now very saddened to hear that but um so one of the things that i find so enjoyable about science fiction is they really play with big ideas and i'm reading a book it's the second book in the three body problem series and in that they're basically alien invasion is happening and they're trying to figure out like what they do and the way that the um aliens stop them from making progress spoiler alert for anybody who plans to read the series is that they um they send these photons that can basically interrupt the large colliders to give them impossible to interpret data and so they shoot these things to the colliders and they they just give them completely nonsensical data and the reason they said that is they're like if you can't make the the breakthroughs at the fundamental layers of science you can't progress so for anybody who is feeling like okay these guys are drifting off into the ether why is this interesting how does it relate to my life first of all say that you're a cognitive scientist that you know is your background so this starts with hey i'm trying to understand consciousness the hard problem of consciousness and it's leading me to this place the challenges the very substance of reality and that matters because by the way we might be able to manipulate more of this stuff than we think but we're still in this um presentation layer the the headset so now as i begin to unwind some of this stuff it's when we think about the fact that okay i'm guessing the scientists the quantum scientists the reason that they're now looking elsewhere is they cannot make what they see mathematically make sense with the models that they have of space time and for them to make that leap outside is going to be brutally difficult in terms of science doesn't progress as the truth is revealed science progressed i think it was neil's board we talked about this last summer plank that said basically the old people have to die because they just they can't update their model of the world and then the next generation grows up just believing it to be true so how are we holding out hope for people to step outside of that and what methods are they using to discover this stuff is it going to be in the collider because that's all headset right so i can tell you what the physicists are up to a little bit um on this and and why i'm interested as you said i'm not interested in particle physics for its own sake i'm a cognitive scientist i'm looking for the simplest thing that i could possibly do to test a theory of consciousness in which consciousness is fundamental and space time is just a headset and i think you have to you have to explain that we talked about it in the last one but it's it's worth it when you say that um consciousness is fundamental what do you mean all right so so by consciousness i just mean simple things like having a headache or smelling garlic or hearing the sound of a trumpet or having an itch um or or feeling a mood like you know love or hate or something like that so simple um feelings or sensory experiences that i could imagine even a mouse might have like a mouse might smell cheese and it might enjoy the taste of cheese i think everybody can get behind that though but aren't you taking it way farther down to like there is an entity i don't know what word to put around it its entire experience is either green or nothing right so so i actually then when i try to get a model of consciousness on its own terms as a scientist i have to write down a mathematical description of what i mean by having conscious experiences and acting on them and entertain the possibility of very simple consciousnesses that might have as you say just one or two conscious experiences like green or nothing or something like that and look at that how these kinds of consciousnesses might interact and so forth and so i've been with my colleagues jayton prakash and and and chris fields and manish singh and others working on mathematical models um of dynamics of consciousness it's much like a vast social network like the twitterverse where you have lots of social entities that are interacting tweeting and following and so forth it would be like that there's not just one consciousness there are many what i call conscious agents that are interacting um and there's so many of them that it's overwhelming it's too much for any one conscious agent to talk to all or interact with all the other conscious agents and and just like with social data if you're you know like with the twitterverse if you're trying to understand what's happening there well there's tens of millions of users literally billions of tweets you can't read the tweet all the tweets or interact with all the users if you want to understand what's going on you need a visualization tool maybe a vr headset where you can sort of see what's trending in the united states and then zoom in to what's happening in moscow and then zoom out to what's happening in over in china and then zoom down to a particular street and so what you want is simple graphics simple eye candy little objects that are colored that are doing different things that somehow lets you grasp what's what the billions of tweets and tens of millions of twitter users are doing but in a way that you can so it's got to dumb things down put it in a colorful simple eye candy format that you can understand and that's the big idea i'm claiming that that's what space time is space time the sun and the moon physical objects everything that we see inside of space and time is just our visualization tool the reality we're interacting with is nothing like the visualization tool there's nothing like space and time it's a whole network of interacting conscious agents outside of space time a vast social network and we've made the rookie mistake of assuming that our headset vr our visualization tool is the final reality it's just a rookie mistake it's like someone who's played grand theft auto so long they have no idea there's a reality besides grand theft auto we're like that right now all right so let's go back to this idea of conscious entities which i find interesting it took me a while to grasp this one so the easiest one is inside the human brain right now there are two hemispheres if you split the corpus callosum we discussed this last time you get two different personalities you've also got the microbiome which conceivably all the microbes are conscious and so when you uh inside of all of our cells there's hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria which are living organisms inside of our cells so it is very objectively true to look at a human and say you're not a single entity you are a collection of trillions of entities that we just sum up is like that's donald right but in reality it's not and if i go in and mess with the consciousness like if i go into mess with your microbiome it'll change your personality which is crazy and i can't believe it's true uh but nonetheless is true i can affect your energy output by going and messing with your mitochondria which again have their own dna it's not like it's just a cell in your body this this is a its own entity that happens to be inside of your cells um and as we begin to recognize that humans already are just a collection of these much smaller consciousness but they come together um i get where you're going now i don't yet know the implications of that or what we're going to take away from it but my relationship with you has been like hey this crazy statement that i can't fathom is true i really want to write you off as a nut job but i can't because like all of these things like do make sense it's just i so can't imagine what life outside the headset is um but the more time i have spent with the ideas the more it's like okay these are starting to coalesce for me um so cool i just wanted people to understand that consciousness thing i don't i certainly don't understand it yet how it exists outside of the headset but i can't deny that already even in the headset were a collection of smaller consciousnesses right maybe one help for thinking about your consciousness outside the headset is i i might have mentioned this last time um if you just look at your face in the mirror if you look what you see directly is just skin hair and eyes that's all that's all you see and if you looked inside if someone opened your skull up and look you just see neurons and and so forth but what you know firsthand that you cannot see is your hopes your dreams your aspirations your love of music your your mood all the rich world of your conscious experiences compared to that rich world this face is unbelievably simple and nothing like the world of your experiences if i smile or you smile i can guess that you're feeling joy but a smile in no way resembles joy a smile is a twitch of a face a joy is that that's where it's like the things we see happening in the quantum realm that make no sense that to you is the thing that tells you your brain the physical tissues all of that they are entirely in the vr experience it's all vr experience that's right it's and so strictly speaking no physical object including my body is conscious strictly speaking my brain isn't conscious because my brain in fact doesn't even exist unless i render it right so if you're playing grand theft auto i'm playing a vr version i got the steering wheel in front of me i'm holding the steering wheel if i look to the side i no longer render the steering wheel and there is no steering wheel when i look here i render it and now there is a steering wheel the same thing is true strictly speaking of neurons and brains they're there when you render them they're not there when you don't it's a vr system that you render objects in space and time as you need them because they're part of your visualization tool and then you garbage collect them you delete them when you don't need them so strictly speaking no physical object is conscious so so not human bodies aren't conscious rocks aren't conscious um so i'm not a pan cyclist a pan psychist is someone who you know at least one version of pan psychism is that you know there are physical objects that obey the laws of physics and the laws of physics are in some sense fundamental but consciousness is the reality that's inside the laws and i'm saying something entirely different i'm saying that the very laws of physics themselves are really no restraint to consciousness whatsoever they're just a visualization tool that certain consciousnesses happen to use but they're no restriction on the nature of consciousness it's all itself at all and so okay so before we move off that um i know you don't know but i want you you must um have flashes of images or favorite metaphors or whatever so if i buy that this really is a simulation true true true like as as simulated as it's going to get down to the fact that space time is just a part of that simulation and it is consciousness that is fundamental meaning that the complexity of my brain will never give birth to consciousness my consciousness which is outside of the the headset it's outside the vr world it's outside the grand theft auto game right that thing has a need to from a evolutionary standpoint based on the gains it gets from certain behaviors it needed to create a virtual reality so that it wasn't overwhelmed with data so what is that conscious being that was evolving as it sits outside of this where where can i scrape through and find the conscious thing right so so well the consciousness won't be inside space and time understood instead space and time is inside consciousness yep i get that but i'm still imagining a little person outside of the vr is that just fundamentally broken uh no i would say that that probably given the current state of human imagination including mine that's probably the best thing that we can do is to think about these entities and of course as soon as we think about entities we we place them in space and time we that's how we think so so it's harmless to do that as long as you realize that the space that you're thinking about isn't they're not embedded in space they're the creators of space that's that's the interesting thing so it's hard for outside space and time i am eating things right well so so inside space so i don't know what we're doing outside of space and time that's part of what i want to understand is what are we actually doing we don't see i don't know what i'm actually doing i know what i'm doing under a description like i'm moving my hand right now and if i grab a steering wheel in my car i know what i'm doing under a space-time description but i don't know in ultimate reality what i'm really doing it's just like the vr player when they turn the steering wheel in grand theft auto they know what they're doing in the language of the game i'm turning a steering wheel but what they're really doing in terms of the super computer right which in that metaphor would be the deeper reality they're toggling voltages and magnetic fields and circuits that they have no idea there's there's probably trillions of voltage togglings going on for one turn of the wheel all they see is a turn of the wheel that's their notion of cause and effect is trivial the real cause and effect is trillions of voltages getting toggled in some you know in fractions of a second it's much much more complicated so from an evolutionary so when we talk about evolution as you did we have to be from this point of view it's very very important to be careful because um now we have to talk about what part of the framework we're talking about so when i talk evolution i'm only going to be talking about assuming the headset now i'm within the framework of the headset because evolutionary theory is only a headset theory it's not a theory of consciousness beyond space and time okay this is where things start to break a little for me so i'm gonna articulate what i think you have said um about because all of this was born for you you basically said you have two choices you can either keep space time and get rid of evolution or you can keep evolution and get rid of space-time and your argument goes like this and obviously stop me where i go wrong that all evolution cares about is fitness payoffs there are certain behaviors that must be taken in order for you to have children that have children and there's so much data coming in that like looking at a desk or a table or something would simply be a string of numbers that dictate the number of photons reflecting off that coming back and you could interpret that as different colors and brightness and all that but in reality it is just the math of that situation and what you see around you is something to simplify that so that you only have to render what you're looking at when you look away it ceases to exist there's just the overwhelming complexity it would paralyze any animal so the evolutionary strategy that was chosen is this crazy simplification that we exist in which is very convincing but it's ultimately a convincing lie and isn't real so i'm like okay cool i can actually get behind that where it breaks down for me is what's actually evolving like something needed this simplification what is that something right so there's so there's got to be a deeper dynamics right there's some deeper dynamics that in space time looks like evolution but natural selection that's what it looks like inside of our headset but but there has to be some deeper dynamics and i i've only had one idea that i've run across that seems deep enough i'm not saying it's right but it's there's at least but but this idea will tell you how deep we have to go to at least get a contender so if consciousness is doing something if it's quote unquote evolving but not from a natural selection point of view just so by evolving i just mean it has some kind of dynamics and the question is why what what is it up to what is consciousness up to right because now the typical stuff of trying to get food and and procreation that that doesn't apply outside of space and time presumably right it need not might not apply so what's the deeper thing the only idea that i've seen that's deep enough um comes from something called girdles incompleteness theorem yeah i struggle with this in the last interview now i think i have it mastered oh okay well well then you're better than me because girls girdle's there was unbelievable indeed but um but but basically what girdle said without going into the details is there is no end in principle no end to the exploration of novel mathematical structure even quote unquote god could never know it all it's there's always going to be an unbounded inquiry ahead no matter how much you know there's unbounded structure left to explore and if we make the assumption and now i'm just speaking as a scientist like saying look i don't know what the truth is we put some ideas on the table and see where they go right that's that's how you do science so maybe everything i'm saying is wrong but i'm trying to be precise so we can figure out where it's from so if we assume that consciousness is all is really the fundamental reality a bunch of these conscious agents the social network and if that's all that there really is then the only thing that mathematical structure can be about is consciousness that's all it's about because that's all there is so girdle's theorem then would say because there's an unbounded and never-ending possibility for exploration of mathematical structure that means there's a never-ending and unbounded possibility for the exploration of varieties of conscious experience in other words consciousness is like a kid in a candy store it but it's an infinite candy store i call it girdles candy store it's a never-ending exploration that is in principle never-ending it's not like you can ever come to the end of it and so that is deep i'm not saying it's right but it's deep enough to be a real contender why should consciousness be doing every anything at all well here's one reason because no matter how much consciousness explores its possibilities it could never come to the end of its own possibilities and so it's in a never-ending self-exploration and what you we call tom and don are just parts of this overall exploration of of consciousness and all of its possibilities and you know our little bit that we're exploring right now as rich as it seems to us is trivial literally trivial compared to all the possibilities that girdle says are out there and we get some feeling of the triviality but i can imagine a square i can imagine a cube now go up one more dimension imagine a cube in four dimensions my brain halts and my mind catches on fire nothing happens that's only four dimensions i can't even go to four dimensions i mean how that that that's terrible it's just an incredible limitation i can only see three dimensions of color red you know sort of a red green dimension blue yellow and and and so forth light and dark we have three cone systems and and so forth there are some pigeons that have four color receptors presumably they're in an extra dimension of color that i can't even imagine what it's like can you imagine a specific color you've never seen before right try to imagine one specific color you've never so as rich as our world seem we know that there's a rich possibility of conscious experiences that we can't even concretely imagine but consciousness itself on this theory is exploring all these possibilities and right now we're sort of stuck on this little headset three dimensions small amount of color that we can see and so forth just we thought it was the whole world no it's just it's a little headset it's a it's a prism right it's it's it's for me i realized i'm sort of stuck i mean this is like my imagination is stuck in only three dimensions my colors are stuck in a certain range consciousness itself is exploring the vast possibilities of that's going on so that now here's the challenge suppose we chase that down so we say okay there's going to be this ongoing dynamics of consciousness constantly going beyond what it knows exploring the candy store further and further well there's several things to say about that one is that's not the candy store makes it sound like all fun and games right whoa but there's going to be a a dark side to it because going into the unknown means letting go of what you know and that can be terrifying so this suggests that consciousness is going to have this thing going on all the time of the exhilaration and the terror of going literally into the unknown where literally you don't have concepts all of your current concepts are inadequate and this is what what girdles is saying what these are going to be new structures that that transcend so for those who meditate i mean when you go into silence it's both healing and terrifying right if you really let go of all thoughts you and go into the void it's it's sort of it can be scary like you want to go back into you grab back on your it's a life jacket right you grab on to your teddy bear your thoughts so there's going to be this to really go into new conceptual frontiers you have to let go of old concepts so there's going to be that aspect to it which is sort of a spiritual side but there's no suspect to making progress i think so i i think that what's the central question for you so and i'll prime you by telling you my essential question sure the central question in all of this that i find interesting is what is the correlate so um i i'm in this vr experience to the advantage of something and i want to know what that something is it isn't me as i perceive me um but it's something right so what's your essential question right right the well the answer is i i don't know but and so there's no specific thing that you're chasing well what i'm chasing is the idea that that we're chasing that the consciousness itself is only about exploring new possibilities of experience okay so i'm going to push on that you let's go into the way that ai researchers think and work and i know that was your degree so this ought to be i'm taking you right home um you have to imbue the robot with directives desires right so to put it in human terms it's like there are certain things that humans want to do we um we're an active species so we tend to go and explore uh we try to take control of our environment we certainly eat procreate like all those we have the drive to quench thirst hunger sex so on and so forth so like those things are pushing us to go do things even if we don't want to we find ourselves compelled to seek pleasure to move away from pain all right by default ai wouldn't have those so now you've got to give those those things and i love that concept of minus a desire any entity just sits or is blown around by um physics right so obviously we're in the headset now but like you've got wind and so okay something lighter than the wind is is going to move but otherwise everything just sits so what is it like what how has this conscious entity in that question that you just posed been given some sort of impetus to explore the infinite candies in the infinite candy shop well by the way i'm on board with what you're saying i think that that's really a good way of thinking about this and that you could think about our your life in my life right now is we're in a simulator a space-time simulator and we've been given like an ai system we've been given certain intrinsic desires that we then find and so so so my wife is an artist that's how she's exploring i i am still stuck at third grade stick figures so that's not how i'm exploring i'm exploring in a different way so so so there's billions of humans and there are billions of different ways that we explore in music in art and literature in science various kinds of science meditation so we're it's sports there there are all sorts of ways that consciousness is exploring um through through us and there is not like one is the best or that what makes consciousness want to go to all the assay to create this vr experience to run each of us as sort of an individual experience in consciousness the idea would be that that is what consciousness is about is the exploration of all of its possibilities so is that just the miracle like i've now hit the part where you're like i don't [ __ ] know this is the miracle well yeah and and when we when we say that um that's something that we have to say is true of any explanation right any explanation at some point we say if you grant me these assumptions then with those assumptions i can explain everything else well so and i totally buy into that here here is the base assumption i've always made about the miracle that the whole point is to say hey everybody i've got this theory here's my miracle check it out theory works right yeah yeah wow this is better than everything okay the only reason i've told you about this thing is so you can tell me how to move the miracle back even farther or are you just like cool i'm good with that miracle and now i just want to explore within that where that miracle is or well so i want to do both so so for this this miracle is so new that i you know i need to explore it a little bit right so so i want to push on this one but but the miracles i'm proposing are consciousness is fundamental so experiences themselves don't come from physics they are fundamental so that's a miracle and second um this other miracle that that girdle proved where he proved it but it's still a miracle right the incompleteness of mathematics that you can that there's endless exploration that's just a fact which is a remarkable fact we proved it but it's nevertheless this why should the universe be that way why should logic demand that that's so that's but it's a satisfying kind of end point where we say that's the way the world is here's the theorem that says that's the way the universe is and that that one theorem tells us why if you're up to exploration then have fun because you will always there's no getting there that's the key there's no arriving girdles incompleteness theorem in a real world example because this one anybody that watches the first episode i must ask you 75 questions about this theorem and i just could not get my head around it and now the punch line is as far as i can tell it's turtles all the way down so um girdles incompleteness theorem as i understand it says no matter how much you use math to try to find base reality you will never find it there is no end there will always be another layer to discover on and on and on and on and on literally for infinity right so so i can say a little bit more about what what girdle was up to on that and how it relates so so girdle was the question they were asking it was a mathematical question that is if you write down a bunch of axioms right some these things are true these things are just give me a two points define a line two lines intersect give me a few things like that and then you ask what are all the theorems that you could prove from those assumptions and and so you know so we did all this in high school algebra and so forth we would you know prove different things what girdles the big question that mathematicians had david hilbert really put put this out there was can we with just grinding through these theorems and proofs get all mathematical truth is that there's some finite number there's maybe it's 6.7 million but we can do it even if it's infinite in principle if we could just grind forever would we get all the truths and that was so hilbert asked that question and girdle showed that the answer is no that no matter how big your axiom system is how many axioms you've got he found a way to show here's something that's true but you can't prove it within your axioms so now so you can take that new truth stick it as one of your axioms and then you show well there'll be another truth that now pops up and so this never ends and so so no matter how so you can't just mechanically grind through and get all the truths and the key thing about this which is really interesting for consciousness now is girdle used self reference it it's when you get a mathematical system to talk about itself that the problems start to arise and that's really interesting it because what i'm suggesting here is that consciousness is trying to understand itself in all of its possibilities and because of that self-reference it's a never-ending enterprise and you seem to sort of quietly draw a parallel between math and consciousness are they separable or inseparable entities that's a really deep and important question i don't know here's here's just my thoughts my i study psychophysics which is a branch of science which we experimentally and mathematically study conscious experiences your perceptions of shape and color and so forth we write down math models and we test people in in the lab every conscious experience has structure and we can write down mathematical structure i've never seen a conscious experience that doesn't have mathematical structure and the structures derive from what what neurons are firing and things like that um well it's sometimes it has nothing to do with neurons at all for example in color space you can talk about it it seems like red and orange are closer to each other than red and green that's an a structural notion and we can write we can write down what we call color spaces and they turn out to be these non-euclidean color spaces tarot window and others who did the mathematics on on this come up with these really interesting complicated mathematical spaces which model um all the relationships of colors to each other so we have color experience and their structure um when you see a shape like a ball we can write down equations that model the 3d shape that you're experiencing so there's an intimate connection that's been studied scientifically between conscious experience and mathematics the way i think of it is that consciousness is to mathematics like the living organism is to its bones for if you're a vertebrate you need the bones but you're more than the bones and and so that's why i think about consciousness can't be reduced to mathematics i don't think there are others like tegmark who would say that everything can be reduced to mathematics max tegmark says that kind of thing uh you know he may be right but that's not what i'm saying i'm saying that mathematics is the structural aspect of conscious experience but there's more to the conscious experience than just the structure in part because um so far as we know different kinds of conscious experiences can be structurally identical so if and if that's the case meaning something with the same structure could have different qualia feels exactly right that's right so is that context dependent how see well that's now where i'm getting to the edge of my understanding here it's it's i did actually prove a theorem it's called the scrambling theorem and i published it in 2006 where i proved that that your colors could be scrambled with respect to mine but we would be functionally identical in every single experiment we could do so there was no structural thing that i could do to show that your color experiences were different from my color experiences so so your experiences aren't devoid of mathematical structure but the mathematical structure isn't the whole story about your conscious experiences that that's the best i can say right now and i agree with you if if that feels like we need to press further on that i couldn't agree more we do need to press further on that and and i look forward to because i think there some profound insights are yet to be revealed so where this all to me i'm so curious like i'm always trying to find how is something usable right how does this come back so um if it reveals something about myself and how i can move through the world in a way that's more interesting more fulfilling more whatever um if it actually the the big thing between last one and this one was the idea that space-time is as malleable as video game code and that we really could even though it would only be an experience in the headset that suddenly things within the headset like faster than light travel suddenly become very real we just have to figure out what the real substance of the headset code is so that we can get in there and begin to make changes but that to me forces the question of the me that i perceive as me is inherently an object of the uh the headset so there is there is no me outside of the headset but there is something outside of the headset and i don't know if if our minds maybe just work so fundamentally differently but as we talk about this is what i started imagining oh okay hey tom this is a collection of different um conscious beings and consciousness is the the you know the driving force and it's running through all these experimentations and so i'm like okay cool uh there's this thing underneath the 3d and it's you know essentially popping up all these different well let me see what the color blue would be like for a kid that grew up in tacoma washington and went to harvard elementary you know what i mean and like oh that's interesting and then but like needed my entire sort of life and universe to go for it to truly be an infinite exploration of what these different things so there's a me that they spun up just to know the color blue at the age of 44. you know what i mean have with this exact history and then there's oh over here i'm going to do that same test but i want to know what salmon tastes like when you had the early bad experience with salmon as a kid but later you fall in love with this girl who's really into salmon what a salmon taste like then and so that's like where my mind goes right and so now i'm imagining like this consciousness of some kind maybe it too is the borg and you know maybe the borg is what's feeding its drivers and all of that but i'm still trying to imagine like my brain immediately goes to there's a thing and that thing in my mind is basically the most classic looking alien ever but they have like these long fingers that like each finger is uh an entity that becomes this uh a conscious entity living in the the headset just to go oh cool that's what that experience is like do you have any sort of analogy metaphor that you think about this stuff in or is this just because i have a limited brain i'm not sure no i i i love your metaphor and i don't have a better one and i you know there's a couple things to say about that metaphor though which is um one in some sense you know a lot of spiritual teachers tell us to relax and enjoy the ride right don't get all anxious don't get all bent out of shape and so forth rich or poor whatever you might be enjoy the ride and in some sense when you do that it feels right i mean it feels like i mean of course i'm i'm i'm exploring i'm not being lazy i'm not but but but there's there's something about hey you know smell the roses enjoy this thing you know you don't want to come to the end of your life and and and not have really enjoyed the ride and and so the idea that that it's it's about not arriving anywhere but but the joy of exploring for its own sake that that's one thing that's on the table here is it is that what it's about now there's another thing that i've put on the table though which is of course we should be very modest about all of our claims here i'm probably wrong right about about all of this right and but as a scientist what i want to do then is to say well how can we go about trying to figure out where we're wrong as fast as possible and for me what i'm doing i mean while i'm exploring these ideas that we're talking about i'm also trying to say how would consciousness precisely this this vast social network project mathematically into space time clearly there's a projection i'm interacting with tom's consciousness i'm not seeing that consciousness i'm seeing skin hair and eyes i'm seeing a space-time projection i'm not actually seeing your emotions i'm not seeing your mood but i am genuinely interacting with your experiences it's a genuine interaction and so there is a projection from this conscious realm into space-time i want to get a mathematically precise model of that projection the thing about gluons and this large hadron collider predicting that is just not because i'm so interested in gluons it's just to make sure that i'm not bsing myself did i get the mapping right if i can't predict blue on interactions then i still have my homework to do but now once i get that here's the kicker we can take what we understand in the headset and pull it backwards if we can project from consciousness to the headset then we can try at least to go from the headset and pull backwards it's a fallible enterprise but it may help us to open our minds to the possibilities for deeper theories of what's going on outside the headset so so the reason i'm doing this is because i i can't even imagine a specific color that i've never seen before i can't imagine in four dimensions in other words i take it as a given that i'm deeply deeply limited in my imagination and i need all the tools i can get to help me step outside of my headset and try to guess the unfathomable outside of there so that's why we want to get this mathematically precise mapping into space time and then pull it back to to give us a guide that can help us to not just be wildly speculating about what's going on in the realm of consciousness but to have more tailored ideas that we can test in a loop i get ideas in my headset i pull them back to what they might mean outside the headset take those ideas play with them project them back into the headset to get new predictions so in other words we if we don't want to bs ourselves we have to figure out a way to make this an experimental scientific enterprise and that's the loop but this is a bigger scientific loop it goes outside the space-time headset to a theory of what's going on in consciousness projecting back into space-time which is the only place where we know that how to do experiments and going through that loop so science is up to the task but here's the kicker for me as a scientist this approach says there will be no theory of everything why not because gurgle's theorem says you just said there's two more you can't bring it all together any theorists can have a finite set of assumptions and the implications of that will be finite yeah well we'll we'll be you could have such a a deep theory of so many things that i mean it's there's always a new sort of theorem to discover but does that in any way shape or form break because here's here's my understanding of why people are searching for a theory of everything you've got einstein newton dealing with the macro world and then you've got the quantum dealing with the microscopic world and for whatever reason all of your predictive models from things are big they work just fine all of your modeling when it's small works just fine but when you try to make either one of them work together then it falls apart but we are i could see sort of closing the loop on that that becomes and everything right even though it's actually just a very small subset right it's the headset and so it's not the you know the true theory of everything but if it allows you to unify sort of the known universe that seems like it would be incredibly useful and i'm assuming there's some there is something for us to understand like that loop you were talking about that goes and takes in consciousness comes back into the headset that we could create a loop so i'll i'll make this more concrete again thinking maybe more as a writer than as a physicist for sure but so when i was thinking about okay the big bang and things expand what are they expanding into and the idea that a universe could sort of pop in and out of exists like how's all this possible and one idea that's put forth is that basically the the everything so i'll hesitate to call it the universe but the everything whatever that is is like a foam and every bubble is a universe and the bubbles sort of come and go and you're in the bubble all you see is the bubble the bubble to you seems like everything but if you were to actually puncture through that bubble oh now i'm in the you know the bigger matrix of stuff and so you you begin to understand how you get a temporary limitation but actually then once you see what's beyond you like oh i get it and then girdle's incompleteness theorem answers the question of okay but what's that goop sitting in oh it's sitting in this space what's that space sitting oh it's sitting in this oh [ __ ] girdle right and you're just like it goes on and on forever but you would like at some point being able to predict seven you know bubbles on it's like ah do i really need to go to the infinite there's just as long as if the you poke through one bubble and all of a sudden all physics are backwards and it doesn't make sense okay that would be problematic but assuming you're just puncturing through to the next thing that's exactly like where you currently are seems like you could come up with something unifying-ish right so instead of turtles all the way down as girdles all the way down right it's just endless exploration and girdle's theorem could be like the deep meta theory it's not the theory of everything it's sort of a meta theory that tells us why we will constantly be exploring for new theories so if you were looking for the deepest theory from this point of view maybe i'd not think about it but maybe girdle's theorem would be this meta theory that explains why all the concrete theories will never be the final theory of everything and so in that sense maybe we with with girdle we have i mean a candidate for this meta theory of everything um and and which which explains why um the joy of exploration will never cease um which is an interesting but i i agree this is a really interesting thing to to to try to understand the scientists and and we can use some of the tools that we've been learning from um deep learning so deep neural networks and so forth where you we get the agent-based models of interaction for exploration and learning so those those tools that like deepmind um at google um has some papers recently where they they've come to the same conclusion that my team has come from evolution they found that instead of giving deep neural networks a strict model of the world that they want them to make reasons in or to make guesses in or to live in um they just give them as you were saying some some payoffs some you know positive and negative rewards for their behaviors and they don't tell them about the world they just let the the deep neural network explore explore and they build their own worlds and it turns out they don't build worlds which mimic the truth they build virtual realities which are a dumbed-down user interface that let them get the most rewards um and they don't see the truth so we actually so there's some papers i can give you a link to some papers some from deep mind in the last couple years where they've stumbled onto the same thing that evolution has stumbled onto that that you know the exploration never leads to the truth that leads to this the uneasy interface which sort of doesn't maximize but which satisfices it gives you what you need to in terms of the rewards and i would like to say one thing that an objection that people will have at this point some people will go this is crazy um of course we see the truth i i know enough truth not to get hit by that car and we know enough truth to build computers and to to send rockets to the moon so this is completely enough to say that we we don't know the truth and and from what we've said now people might be able to understand what i'm about to say or guess what i'm about to say it's sort of like if you're um in one of the really neat little programs right now that um where you can build stuff so they're they're they're building games like you know roblox or trove or or fortnite or minecraft and and you know you can you can become a master in one of those worlds right and and so you might say you can imagine a person saying well what do you mean i'm not in reality i can build these wonderful worlds i can build all these tools i can do all this great stuff in minecraft or rope you know in these various worlds of course but and yeah within that quote-unquote reality of minecraft yes you're seeing that reality and you are building things in that reality and it requires intelligence and so forth but you're not seeing again the circuits and the software and the voltages that's the real reality outside your minecraft world and so that's that's that's the answer to someone who says well i know enough about reality not to get hit by a car and to build a computer and to send you know rockets to the moon yes well you're in your minecraft world and we've become very very good at that minecraft world but it's still a rookie mistake not to realize that minecraft is just minecraft it's not the final reality and so so the kinds of arguments that really hold a lot of psychological weight and the reason i mean i'm talking about this is these ideas really grip our imagination and it's hard for us to let go of them so that's that's why i want to bring that that up as many of you know i'm all about constant self-improvement a growth mindset and a relentless focus on progress and skill acquisition that's why i'm super excited to tell you guys about skillshare skillshare offers classes designed for real life and all the circumstances that come with it these lessons can help you stay inspired express yourself and introduce you to a community of millions creative self-discovery and expression can settle your mind and spontaneous acts of creativity can help break up the routine of a day indoors skillshare is an online learning community that offers membership with meaning so much to explore real projects to create and the support of fellow creatives skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth with thousands of classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills for instance they have an amazing class by simon sinek called presentation essentials how to share ideas that inspire action if there's anyone that should be teaching that class it is simon sinek this is a perfect example of the unique classes you can find on skillshare you can also find classes on illustration design photography video freelancing entrepreneurship and so much more and skillshare is also incredibly affordable an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and right now the first 1000 viewers to click the link in the description will get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity don't miss this one guys sign up right now so talk to me so you've got so many people trying to get to general artificial intelligence you have elon musk going around warning people hey you're gonna make something that is gonna be so much smarter than you which is absolutely gonna rip uh the planet apart um you've got people talking about ai becoming conscious in your understanding of what consciousness really is as a fundamental element could a robot or an ai ever become conscious well the answer is not in the way that it's typically thought but in a completely different way yes but in the way that it's typically thought absolutely not and so how do people typically think of it right so so it's the way it's typically thought of is again within a physicalist framework so space-time and particles and energy are fundamental everything is made of quarks and gluons and protons and neutrons and so forth and and you know it's the big bang story big bang was 13.8 billion years ago space-time emerged particles and energy and there was no life for hundreds of millions billions of years no consciousness for maybe hundreds of millions billions of years after that so consciousness and life are late comers they're not fundamental from that point of view the right way to think about things is how does matter and particles get into complicated enough patterns of interaction such that life and then consciousness emerge from that framework that's the right way to think about it i'm rejecting the entire framework space time is doomed that whole framework is the wrong framework but and and it's not me as a cognitive scientist saying i'm saying it's physics it's physicists are saying space time is doomed like nema arkani ahmed and and others are saying that because of gravity and quantum field theory and the way they interact there are no local observables in space time none in our space time there is nothing that can be precisely measured anywhere in our space time in other words space time is an inadequate framework for what we need to do if we're as scientists it's just the wrong framework there's got to be a deeper framework and space time has to be emergent so the whole reductionist paradigm is wrong the reason so reductionism is the idea that to understand complicated things like you and me we need to understand simpler things like chemical chemicals and to understand them we need to understand even simpler things like just particles as we go down to smaller and smaller regions of space and time we get to the better understanding the more fundamental principles that's sort of the reductionist and by the way that's been spectacularly successful for centuries um and we owe our current science to the success of reductionism so i'm not against reductionism it's been successful it's worked so far because we've been studying our headset and it's true that as you go closer and closer to quote-unquote the pixels of your headset you're understanding more and more fundamentally how the headset works i'm not saying that spacetime has pixels by the way i mean physicists would say um that would violate lorentz and variance there are no pixels of space time that spacetime just ceases to make any sense at 10 to the minus 33 centimeters 10 to the minus 43 seconds it just falls apart it's not that there are pixels it just makes no sense so reductionism worked but it stops because space time isn't fundamental and so the very notion of smaller ceases to be operational there is no no smaller in fact as you try to probe smaller and smaller past 10 to the minus 33 you you create black holes that just get bigger and bigger and bigger so you you literally reductionism literally blows up in your face in physics it blows up in the form of a black hole so reductionism has worked but reducing consciousness so we're trying so my brilliant colleagues and these are my good friends who are working on this right in cognitive neural science they're trying to reduce consciousness to patterns of matter so there's integrated information theory causal computational architectures that have certain kind of integrated information the claim is they're identical or give rise to consciousness or penrose and hammeroff um there are certain quantum states in microtubules that if you have a coherent gravitational collapse of these orchestrated collapse of these somehow consciousness arises or there's global neuronal workspace if you have the right broadcasting architecture for certain kinds of information then that becomes conscious so these are all reductionist theories of consciousness you start with space-time and physical stuff and somehow consciousness emerges i'm saying as those those guys are incredibly brilliant but because space-time is doomed all approaches to consciousness which assume that space-time isn't doomed which assumes that space-time and matter are fundamental are themselves doomed those so those approaches to consciousness just haven't really understood what the physicists are telling us and what i'm claiming evolution of natural selection is telling us space-time is the wrong language particles are the wrong language the only reason reductionism has worked is because we were studying our headset and in the headset yes going smaller and smaller in the headset worked up to a point until the very notion of small ceased to make any sense and that's where it stopped so where do we so with ai now so this is a long way to your question but but but i can't answer your questions simply because the the issues are so deep here sure so with the standard view of ai in consciousness is of course we can build machines that will be conscious the brain is a machine and it's conscious so we we have a real example here's a carbon-based machine inside your own head that's creating consciousness so who cares if it's carbon or silicon we can build a machine with the right so we're just trying to reverse engineer the dynamical patterns of neural networks in the brain or microtubule quantum collapses whatever they might be whatever the physical magic is that somehow gives rise to consciousness will will do that i'm saying that all of those approaches can't work because space time is done okay so before we move on from that so but we can create new consciousness right if my wife and i get together it's a loving night it's warm nine months later we've got uh a new consciousness so exactly how is that not are you saying that all the elements from the egg and the sperm all of it there was consciousness there the whole time and so there is no point where it just gets the cells divide sufficiently such that consciousness arises it's been conscious the whole time well so remember that cells and eggs and sperms and so forth are just icons in our interface yes they themselves have no consciousness themselves there there's little symbols that we use as pointers to a realm of consciousness that we have to reverse engineer to figure out what's going on what is there a moment though where the realm of consciousness goes i am now inserting the consciousness element into this child well i think so in in the well into the our interface inserting the conscience into our interface yes but they're inserting the consciousness into that specific part of our interface which at this moment is a an infant or a zygote or wherever whatever point consciousness is imbued right yeah i would say that yeah i would agree i would say that there's a point in which a new portal in our interfaces is opened up into consciousness so so for example i have a portal into tom's consciousness it's it's it's not perfect it's fallible but it's real i can guess if you're interested i can guess if you're you know if you're hurting or i can guess it's a but it's a genuine portal into your consciousness and but but of course my experience is not your consciousness your consciousness is is separate and so our interface does give us genuine portals into the consciousness of others my cat i have less access my a mouse even less and uh you know microbe my interface has given up my portal has become really dumb it's not because there's no consciousness out there is that my portal is is got too much noise or just not opened up to it so so yes when we have babies we are in a way that we don't understand opening new portals into the realm of consciousness i so i want to understand that it's it's very much like if someone is building something in minecraft and you know they put things together but if if you're really inquisitive you'd like to know what was really going on inside the computer that looks like me building this thing that i see in my minecraft world and that's that's what i want to do so in minecraft there are different things that are in some sense portals to a whole bunch of code that's going on in the computer that's allowing me to build this stuff okay let me start making some guesses here on where you're going so i'm assuming that you're chasing this problem because ultimately you want to be able to figure out hey guys guess what space time is fundamentally the wrong way to look at it and if we get the right way to look at it we will have all just an avalanche of insights maybe usable in the way that quantum discoveries have given birth to modern life most people don't put two and two together they just think uh the you know maybe the atomic bomb or something like that but that there's real your cell phones gps like all of it has to do with um physics so if we can get to the the underlying physics of whatever gives birth to the um the simulation now we could have a whole new avalanche of insights that allow us greater manipulation of the world or whatever it is precisely that's driving you which brings me back to the collider you're paying attention to that because you if i understand how these things explode then i can backtrack it and understand how they came together in the first place which in your prediction is going to take us outside of the simulation into the world of consciousness which do you imagine that world has physics and desires like does the the consciousness must have something propelling it to do things right the the only idea i've got there is this idea of a girdle of just infinite exploration that is the okay so this is going to bring us to god here because i feel like you've already said this is a magic moment or a miracle moment so something has given the spark of desire to consciousness to explore girdles infinite like look at all the different manifestations that consciousness can take and so we are all but one sort of pop-up of a very specific kind of consciousness and who knows there could be a brazilian of these things all over the known and unknown universe um right so as we're doing that it begs the question of in your mind is there such a thing as god well this gives us possibly the a chance to have a language which for the first time ever we might be able to formulate a precise hypothesis about what we mean by the word god and start to do science so for example do you have a hypothesis around that well yes so i have a precise definition of a conscious agent and what one definition i could give for god would be um the agent which is the combination of all the conscious agents the single so so suppose it turns out that mathematically when i look at the mathematics of conscious agents and how they combine to form new agents suppose that the mathematics tells me there is in some sense always one largest agent that's being formed i don't know if that will be the case i don't know but suppose then i could say that that's gone suppose it turns out that no what's going on is that there are many many quote unquote maximal agents but there's no single maximal agent and they're not i identical then that would then there it might be a polytheism but the nice thing about this is we could see the word god has been used in contradictory ways for thousands of years by various traditions and and we fight to the death over a term literally that's not well defined because your god is not the same as my god and and it's a tragedy of human history that that hundreds of millions of people have been have died in because of differences over what we mean by the word god and and what i would like to see is sort of a humble approach to that that term saying look you know we my tradition has its ideas your tradition has its ideas clearly since we all disagree at most one of us is right and possibly all of us are wrong so why don't we come together take all of our best ideas and then try to sift through and here's where science can help where we take the ideas and try to make them precise mathematically precise because that's when you find out if things gel if they're consistent or if they actually you're talking nonsense right you could you know if you say a is true and not a is true well you're talking nonsense right so so can we do something like that and evolve ideas about the notion of god and have a scientific spirituality where where god becomes something that we're we don't assume that we know we're not dogmatic i know what god is we're humble we say these are the best ideas we've got so far let's try to make them precise so we can figure out precisely where we're wrong and then evolve it so so i i see this direction going forward the possibility of a scientific spirituality where um we take a lot of the spiritual insights that the spiritual traditions the mystical traditions have had for thousands of years and we take the tools that science has learned by studying our headset and we use those tools to take the first step outside the headset that the spiritual traditions have been telling us look you guys are stuck in the headset you're stuck on the headset well they're right but by studying the headset we got the tools we needed to actually step outside the headset in a way that can be precise and we can figure out what we're doing and make precise theories and so i see science and spirit we're at this really interesting convergence point in human history where there's been a war between science and spirituality in effect they've been at odds these are non-physicalists over here the spiritual side these are physicalists over here the scientists scientists have all the hard-nosed tools it's all woolly and imprecise over here on the spiritual side and so they've been vented odds at each other right but now let's take the best insights and i'm not saying that anybody's right or wrong i'm just saying let's take the best insights from the spiritual conditions and be willing to call nonsense nonsense and take the best tools from science and take and also call theories nonsense that are nonsense and try together to make precise theories about the spiritual realm and our position you know what are we here for um what is life about i mean these deep deep questions that are all important to us um and see see where it goes and and you're right i think that as we do this we're going to understand if this idea that there's a network of conscious agents outside space time and we begin to really understand how in part it works and how it relates to space time the technologies that we're going to get are stunning the the analogy i would think of is like this again going back to grand theft auto you can imagine being someone who's a wizard a grand theft auto we all just look in awe at what this wizard can do and that's truly impressive but now the software engineer comes along who actually knows the software of the game and he can take the gasoline out of the tank or let the tire out of the air of the wizard's car so now the wizard is nothing compared to someone who knows how the software works outside of grand theft auto once we get outside of space time we understand how this network of conscious agent works and how spacetime is just a visualization tool we will be in the position of that software engineer that can actually just give the grand theft auto wizard a flat tire we'll be able to well he could change the road he could change the dimensions of the road he could make buildings disappear he could make space and time shift in any way he wants that's the kind of pandora's box potentially that we're going to open up here i i uh it's both as a scientist and a human being it's exhilarating and scary as all get out um that in the wrong hands is incredible yes there's so many sort of layers of guesses between us and there but if um yeah if people have the ability to essentially edit the matrix and anybody can do it then that's gonna certainly go into some pretty interesting places before we ponder that though i want to ask you what do you think of einstein's statement that i want to know god's thoughts everything else is just details well there's a sense in which um i i'm very much on on board with einstein in some sense the attitude is i mean who cares that there are so many kinds of quarks and who cares that there are so many kinds of gluons and that the mass of the electron is such and such and i mean that's not what it's really about i mean we we need to understand those things but not for their own sake what what what einstein and the in theoretical physicists are really after is they're trying as einstein said i want to understand the mind of god right i want to understand what are the big deep principles that would lead to the laws that have as their consequences there are these kinds of quarks and these kinds of gluons and so forth so it's the deep deep insights the same kind of thing that you and i are chasing here when we are talking about ideas like girdles incompleteness serum and girdles candy store like these i mean even if that's not the right idea it gives you a flavor for the deep kind of idea that we're after that that we think of this could be a deep enough idea that it could be a guiding principle for a lot of the details that we see so it's in that sense that i would would agree completely with einstein on that now i think einstein was very much attached to space and time um he seems fair yeah he he he was the perhaps the person with the most profound original insights ever about space and time um i don't know if he ever let go of space time maybe in his later years maybe he did i don't know but but but most of us is really hard the avant-garde of physics right now are letting go of space-time when you if you just google space-time is doomed google that phrase you can find videos by nemo arkani hamid for example and he can tell you exactly why state of the art physicists today are saying space time is doomed so the mind of god whatever it is is not space-time itself it's something deeper and but they don't know what that something deeper is what the physicists are doing um because they don't have any they don't have any idea what's beyond space and time what they're doing which is really brilliant they're saying let's take the mathematics of the models that we do have in space time quantum field theory gravity let's look at that mathematics and see that mathematics is like a light into the dark beyond space time can we and they're flashing that light into the dark as far as they can let that light go so they're they're trying to see what the structure of our current theories might tell us to guide us in our ideas beyond space time but ultimately we're going to need to make a creative leap we're going to have to just and this is the fun of science you make a creative guess you make it mathematically precise and then go back and say okay here's my guess about what's behind space time then you have to project it back into space time where you can test it and so so so the physicists are doing break when i'm reading their work very very carefully because i need to build on their work i'm trying to plug my theory of conscious agents i want to show that the the long-term behavior of conscious agents so-called asymptotic behavior so this this is a dynamics on graphs it's a markovian dynamics and it has an asymptotic behavior it turns out i believe i can show that that asymptotic behavior plugs into structures that the physicists are finding called cosmological polytopes amplitude sociohedron so forth that have the same kind of permutation properties that the asymptotic behavior of consciousness does so the asymptotically availableness leads to certain permutations to classify it permutations turn out to be the fundamental thing that that the physicists have found beyond space-time that's as deep as they've gotten there are these things called permutations beyond space-time that lead to what they call on-shell processes which they can then lead to predicting the scattering amplitudes so that's the threat i want to to pull start with a theory of consciousness where it's a vast social network of consciousnesses its asymptotic behavior is what the flashlight of physics has seen the permutations that's as far as they can go i mean long-term behavior so so i'll give you very very concrete with an example suppose that you're in your car on the freeway and you're driving and there's hundreds of people on the road with you everybody it's a conscious person turning the steering wheel pushing on the gas hitting the brake and so forth now imagine you're up in a helicopter you know half a mile up and you're looking down you're the channel seven news and what you see is a bunch of little specks little dots moving on the freeway you don't see any consciousnesses you could think of it as particle flow a bunch of particles flowing well there's a little the particles are all stopped here there's a traffic jam and now their fluid is flowing you could use like fluid dynamics the kind of math that physicists use to describe that because that's the long term behavior you're looking at it from far far away you don't see the consciousness so so you're looking at long term behavior not the little turn of the wheel the stepping on the break of each person you're looking from very far away that's asymptotics looking at the long term from a far away distance so that's why physics has never seen consciousness first they're studying our headset not consciousness and second the headset itself has only been designed to show us the asymptotic behavior of consciousness because that's how we data compress right that's this is data compression i can't see all the twitter users and what they're tweeting i see trends trends are the asymptotics and and so it turns out when you look at the trend behavior of consciousness you get these things that we mathematicians call permutations and that's as far as the so that's what i'm coming from my side consciousness asymptotics leads to permutations the physicists pointing from the headset of space-time into the dark their flashlight gets to permutations so we're meeting in the middle so that's what i'm trying to do is to bridge that gap it'll take a couple years i'm not a physicist so i'm just learning as much as i can and i'm working with physicists but you know there's a lot of conceptual work to do there but then this will get back to the question you raised earlier about artificial intelligence because once we understand how this whole thread gets pulled that i just described from consciousness through asymptotics into space time we can reverse engineer space time and we can open new portals in the interface into conscious agents the conscious agents are there we'll be able to re rejig our interface to open new portals and see new aspects of this social network of conscious agents that we've never seen before and maybe some of the technology that we use to do that will look like circuits and software i don't know we'll i will see and if it does it would be then in some sense we might say show sure ai with circuits and software has open we now have consciousness in that ai but it will be different it will be not that the circuits and software and silicon was the founding thing and it created the consciousness as an emergent property instead we just circuits and software are the language of the interface that we use to describe this much deeper thing we did that opened up a hole or opened up a portal in the interface that looks like circuits and software in our interface but that's not the truth that's just what it looks like in our interface the deeper thing is will something with conscious agents and how they operate that will that we'll learn so let me make sure i understand that so are you saying that there is we can create entities that meet some sort of requirement as to open a portal to conscious beings that's what though the one that we know how to do now is um sexual reproduction and i guess asexual reproduction depending on where you draw the line of consciousness but we can make puppies we can make humans um right and those the act of that somehow someway meet some criteria that then exactly okay and that there is some configuration that we could do with robotics or ai or a combination thereof that would open a similar portal you've got it exactly right tom we we have as you just pointed out we have proof that our interface does have the technology to open new portals it's pretty low where do we have that proof when you have a kid okay but okay it's a low tech right right it's low tech but we know what happens we enjoy the process but but we have technology in other words our interface has proven that it's got the technology to open new portals well now the question is if we can understand what's really going on there we should be able to do it and it may look like ai and this may also be an answer to a very very deep question about [Music] alien intelligences what where are they well we're looking at our headset of course we can't see them interesting they're out there that's really interesting that's really interesting we may we may i'm not saying we won't find some of them out there our headset may give us access to certain alien intelligences on planets around alpha centauri and so forth but it's going to be trivial compared to all the consciousnesses that are out there that's what a headset is for it's there to hide all of the consciousnesses because it would be overwhelming to interact with them so that's where they are they're all around us we're like ants that don't see the guy with the raid can coming at them they can't they just can't see it right um so they're all around us but we're we are stuck on our headset and we think that we're the the epitome of of advancement and knowledge and and so forth might it would be funny and it may be the case that every that that's a rookie mistake that every consciousness goes through in a simulator that it thinks it because it's headset is only going to give it the best access to itself and others like it and less access to others and so in its own eyes it will always be the wisest in its in its environment and so it may be a rookie mistake that every simulator that consciousness creates has that we all have to go through this phase of going oh we're the best we're the greatest we're the epitome of evolution and then we slowly realized oh no no no no i'm in a simulator and there's you know there's this infinite range of other possibilities of consciousness some so profound that i that i if i could see them i want be you know inclined to fall down and worship them who knows you know it's just so but but it's it's a really humbling position so we go from being the top of creation the the the smart you know the brain is the most incredibly complicated thing we've ever found in the entire universe that point of view to oh wow um we've made a rookie mistake here um there are consciousnesses out there that are far more you know mind-blowing than anything i could even concretely imagine so it's it's a very very different kind of thing and this also by the way puts a different spin on the the question of life living versus non-living how so i struggled with this the first time i heard you bring it up dead still feels dead to me how does it uh right because you're saying the very thing that i perceive as them is uh the consciousness coming through the portal and if i could re-track down that bit of consciousness it would be just like dealing with timmy yeah well in that direction so that's the right direction and by the way you know i don't know the answer so you might be closer than me so i'm so it's when i say the right direction uh close to what i'm thinking and maybe you're right and and better better than mine an analogy i think that's that's useful here is again a virtual reality and i like you know say you you go with a bunch of buddies to um a virtual reality arcade put on headset and bodysuit and to play virtual volleyball and so you find yourself immersed in a beach scene with the beach volleyball court and so forth and you start playing beach volleyball for a little while and then your friend joe says shoot me for a minute i'm thirsty i'll get a drink so he takes off his headset and bodysuit to get a drink and his avatar collapses motionless on the sand from the point of view of the vr game he's effectively dead he's unplugged but he's just unplugged from the headset he's not dead and so if space-time isn't fundamental death may be nothing more what we call death is just unplugging from the headset now what the consequences of that are for consciousness for example maybe consciousness survives what we call death but maybe the notion of a self of me maybe that doesn't survive i don't know this is going to be i don't want to be doctrinaire about this i want to be open to you know first having bold ideas you have to be crazy and drink beer have some ideas and then then when you're sober you go back and you start you know okay let's that looked really great when i will you know when a gin and tonic but now it doesn't look so great when i'm sober right so so you have to do you know explore but then go back so we want our mathematical model of consciousness to give us insights what is a self what is this thing that i call a self will that survive detachment from an interface or is that itself somehow wedded to the interface what is the relationship between my interface my space-time interface and my notion of self i'm really attached to this body but this body is just a symbol you know i am not i want to get into something really fast so one thing that i find very confusing not confusing i um i understand it and there's some part of my brain is rejecting it so what i what i like about the reductionist model of quantum mechanics and all of that is that there is something beyond what i'll shorthand to personality so a gluon is a glue and is a glue one right it's just a particle and it acts in a certain way according to certain laws and i can get that things acting in a certain way according to certain laws as they group up into more and more complex things those more and more complex things are now the amalgamation of all these different laws and they look like humans oh my gosh look at that but as i break them down they die the immune system stops fighting off bugs they return to a different anatomical state let's call it dirt and now they're reacting in a different way but then those could be consumed by something that ends up becoming a piece of you know the egg and then the egg is re-fertilized and now you actually become something again and so we're just we're these set number of particles that sort of take different forms break apart take a different form again and and it makes sense to me largely because there are things beyond personality personality is only associated with things that take a very particular form the sort of living biological things as we would call it and they're the individual pieces exist outside of that and that's reflected back to me because if i go and give somebody brain damage they will act fundamentally different right deny somebody oxygen for a certain period of time but then don't let them die and they will be fundamentally different and so it's like everything in the simulation i fully understand that but having lived in the simulation all of that makes a lot of sense now when i try to imagine come up with a metaphor whatever where consciousness is primary and this may just be a failing of my brain is so primed to think of consciousness as being an element of personality that it just falls apart as i try to imagine okay wait while this consciousness is in this body it has personality and i can [ __ ] up its personality and make it act fundamentally different but hey when you come back out one of two things has to be true either its fundamental nature was different than its manifestation as timmy and so it was like hey you were timmy for a while oh you got damaged but you're still you and timmy's messed up now but i can pull you out and you'd be just like you were before but if i as little tommy come and re-engage with the consciousness that was part of timmy i wouldn't recognize this person at all so even if they're in timmy normal they come out of timmy timmy's still normal i still wouldn't get this person with the consciousness because and this is where again my brain just immediately starts grabbing a hold of metaphor so my brain goes okay cool i get this the consciousness is like a puppet master and the very act of taking on the body right so pregnancy cool you got a baby at some point the puppet master brings consciousness to that puppet and now that that consciousness gets to experience the girdles infinite candy store range of um states of consciousness of qualia and goes oh wow cool what a neat ride as i experience is oh this gets damaged it just changes my experience of what this looks this is what sally was like before the brain damage this is what grapes taste like to her now that she's had catastrophic brain injury how interesting and like that's where i'm like one of those two interpretations is way off because i can't reconcile them both now because i've lived my entire life in the headset it just makes so much more sense to me that individual parts act one way when they come together they act another way i mean it's just that's the human body right if you're just looking at bacteria it feels very different if you're just looking at mitochondria it's very different if you're looking at me without bacteria different me without mitochondria i'm dead first of all and it's only as you bring all these together that i actually act the way that i act so i understand how i am this i am you know a totality uh uh i don't want to put words in your mouth but it's very poetic and super interesting a small g god right of something that is like the accumulation of trillions of things that have come together in this pretty amazing form right that is delicate and precious and would never want anything to happen to it but obviously does not rule the universe and you know just trying to get through the day uh but you know very interesting as you if you define god as a collection little g god as a collection of these individual consciousnesses that have come together to create this sort of symphony that we recognize as a cheetah or a person or a gorilla or whatever um that i get that to me is very interesting when i start thinking as consciousness as fundamental i start i make the mistake that i read that as personality as fundamental right the first interpretation is the one that i i agree with you about that the consciousnesses come together to create new varieties of consciousnesses and it's um a very novel and creative process and all i mean when i say consciousness is fundamental is that it's not space and time and physical stuff that's the fundamental thing is that these kinds of consciousnesses that can combine to create new forms of consciousness is that's the direction that science needs to go to try to understand what's really the fundamental dynamics of what's going on how is it that two consciousnesses when they interact create a new consciousness and their right by the way we can get some information like from split brain patients that we talked about last time right there are people that have the the common jurors close the commander yeah the corpus callosum was cut and the in one case the left hemisphere believed in god and the right hemisphere was an atheist left hemisphere wanted to be a draftsman right hemisphere wanted to uh be a race car driver completely different personality so what consciousness is doing in that case is what happens when i put an atheist together with a believer in god and make the the believer in god also want to be a draftsman and the atheist also want to be a race car driver what kind of new consciousness would do i get when i put those two together and put a corpus callosum between them and force them to live together in a lifetime what new how do they so the adjudication of that and we all sort of sometimes will feel like you know it's friday night part of me wants to do this i'd like to you know kick up my heels and have some fun part of me wants to be a geek and study some more physics whatever it might be maybe those are really two separate consciousnesses two separate conscious agents that are negotiating and in the process of new consciousness it exists this is where i come back to i'm so into that idea from einstein and this may not be what he meant and maybe i'm just doing a poetic interpretation but i want to know god's thoughts or the mind of god everything else is just details is like i want to know what what imbued these conscious entities with any propellant like what makes them step through the portal are there times of their life [ __ ] it no i don't want to step through the portal i just want to do my version of a friday night chilling over here you know because when you think about two conscious entities coming together one it is they are you get very distinct and predictable types of consciousness depending on whether it's right hemisphere or left hemisphere and so it is obviously not you can very quickly oversimplify but it they're different right one side is going to be prone to religiosity and the other side would be prone to not like that's predictable you wouldn't get i forget which is right or left but like whichever has the propensity for religiosity you're never going to get it that the other side has a propensity like if i told you hey vs roma chandran who studied the hell out of this like uh hey one of the sides is religious he's not going to be like oh my god i have no idea it's 50 50. he's gonna be like oh that's the left or the right whichever it is so now it's like this [ __ ] is so tied to the physicality that exists in my headset that it's like teasing out what is the the what is the thought of god what is the thing like what's the game being played here like why why is there a puppet master you know what i mean like it's exactly so interesting you know absolutely tom and that's the spirit in which scientists are and i'm approaching this right we're saying let's we try to reverse engineer exactly these kinds of things what do we find from the neuroscience of split brain patients what clues can we get to what's really going on outside the headset so but the the first thing you have to do is realize i have to think outside the headset so i have to let go of the reductionist view and say how are neurons doing this and saying it's instead let's talk about consciousness on its own terms what's consciousness doing and and then the the neural structures that i'm seeing i have to think about them okay this is just my virtual reality interface how can i reinterpret all these neural networks and what they're doing in terms of what networks of conscious agents are really doing in other words it's much harder work you know conception plus spend a lot of time thinking about this do you have a method for getting breakthroughs is it really a gin and tonic and then go organize your ideas does it go jogging like how do you do this well um it's i have several things i do on a daily basis and i'm i'm grateful to my wife for giving me some space to do it i meditate for several hours okay three hours a day typically whoa and you are pursuing the lack of thought or you're pursuing to let your mind chase a thought entire silence nothing but silence and watching what happens there it's very the the idea from my geeky point of view about it is if i'm going to go beyond the interface then i've got to let go of the interface entirely any concept any thought that i have is by definition still in the language in the interface that i've got so going into utter and total silence is not easy and it's both exhilarating and terrifying because there are no security blankets when you let go of all fonts and if you so one thing i do is i watch myself and i watch the terror and i watch my mind jumping back and clinging to the things that it knows and but then i also noticed that i've been doing this for 18 and a half years and the process to me the best metaphor i can think of for it is to describe it as like metamorphosis like so you think about you know a caterpillar goes into a chrysalis and then comes out a butterfly how beautiful it's all lovely and so forth but what really goes on is that inside the chrysalis there's a war the immune cells of the caterpillar fight to the death the cells in the in inside that are responsible for turning it into a butterfly and it's only when the immune cells of the caterpillar are completely overwhelmed that the transformation takes place and everything that the caterpillar knew eating green leaves crawling on a bunch of different legs having little furry spikes come out of you having a mouth that everything that it knows it has to let go talk about terror and the the the analogy of the terror and that seems to be the immune system is fighting this until the immune system is completely overwhelmed it's not like all peace and love it fights until it can't fight anymore and that's the way meditation seems to me it seems like the the letting go of what i know letting go of the caterpillar and seeing what new forms of consciousness might come and seeing how i might be transformed is both exhilarating and terrifying but it's certainly transforming so that's one thing that do you set do you set a different intention when you sit down to meditate like today i'm going to try to think about like what these conscious agents look like no i i seek only silence and everything else to let go of everything i know that's the one intention is let go of this headset let go of this headset what do you do when your grocery shopping needs pop into your head um well i can tell you what i do what i've done for a lot of the time i you beat yourself up you go you always stupid why don't you how come you can't be in this and then eventually i just you over years and years and years you learned to just go c'est la vie back to silence say liby back to silence and just go back there and and the weird thing about it is the caterpillar can't know what it's turning into and it has no idea what it's like to have wings and a proboscis instead of a mouth and to drink nectar instead of eat leaves it can't know it has to go completely into the unknown and so it's being good with letting go of everything that's known and letting yourself venture into the totally unknown so that's one aspect of it the other aspect is i spend as much time as i possibly can studying mathematics listening to what the physicists are i are saying i've lima arkani hamed gave a course at harvard in fall of 2019 to the graduate students on the state of play and scattering amplitudes i've literally transcribed by hand on my computer 17 of his lectures word for and i'm studying them i'm not a physicist but i um and i don't have the talents that these guys do but i have incredible motivation and i really want to understand this stuff so and i've got a physicist friend uh chaitan prakash who's really good so shaytan and i meet and he helps me through it he's also interested and we're working on this mathematics together so i spend hours every day studying physics studying mathematics of course studying cognitive neuroscience artificial intelligence the tools that are needed here this is this is a truly multidisciplinary task to go all the way from the theory of consciousness through its asymptotic behavior through cosmological polytopes into these on-shell diagrams into space-time and quantum field theory um and then to the large hadron but then eventually to climb up to life and chemistry and neural neuroscience and psychology to to get the big picture i mean i can't get the whole thing but i'm just trying to get the thread that goes all the way through that's that's my goal can i pull a thread all the way through that we can then start to build on and so it's truly multidisciplinary and so i have to think out of the box all the time so the meditation is very very helpful to just let go of the box completely but then the weird thing about this and this may be some clue as well to something deep about the whole picture there seems to be reward for absolute silence no concepts whatsoever and absolute precision on the other hand and there's no reward for sloppy thinking in the middle so but silence and precision see and we see this in quantum computation which is really quite interesting in quantum computation when you build a quantum computer on the one hand we use the most absolute precise theory in mathematics we've ever had quantum quantum theory to build we use quantum information theory we build these so this is just like the epitome of sharp thinking and everything has to be precise and once you set up the quantum bits and gates and start the computation now the other side happens you have to let go completely you can't intervene you can't touch the thing in any way if you interfere in any way you destroy the computation so you have on the one hand absolute precision the best that you can do in your interface and then you step away and you don't touch it with anything in your interface at all and that's when the horsepower is unleashed and after that and that's where the quantum computation power comes and then at the end you can look at the quantum bits and gates and get a small symbol full of the whole rush of computation that went on there so so there's this this very interesting thing i'm trying to understand it precision doing the best precise thinking you can with the current cognitive tools that you've been given letting go of those cognitive tools all together going into complete silence those two seem to be really critical and somehow they come together in quantum computation precision and then don't touch anybody who's a programmer for classical computing right you know that if you write a program you like to put little tracers in the program to see what it's doing while while it's computing you know to debug it to see you know what what went wrong you can't trace a quantum computer that way if you trace it you you you break the power that's it's really weird so so there's that kind of you can see why i'm thinking out of the box i'm really trying to think in terms of metaphors how does this this weird thing about quantum computation relate to my own experience as a scientist doing precise thinking or best i can with no thinking in meditation how does that relate to quant this is the kind of the out of box analogies that may lead you nowhere but it also may lead you to to insights as long as you are don't hold on to anything dogmatically right that's the sort of the point explore and then be the first to kill off the things that uh you know really don't make sense don't hold on to them so it's an anti-dogmatic point of view but but and yet the balance is to be as excited and energetic and having fun so that you want to do it right you have to it's a balance you have to have the energy to go i really want to do this today i'm going to study all this math because i might learn something i might actually break through here and on the other hand to not cling to anything you got i'm probably wrong i'm probably wrong i'm probably wrong that's the balance to to to having all of this stuff and it's possible but but it's really interesting to see how the mind goes into dogmatism very it goes into safety i think they're maybe the same thing that's interesting really could be the same thing so so those are two of the things i do and then i do a lot of exercise like i i it's just the case that in this interface if your body is not physically fit then you're not going to be at the peak of your mental power so i have a workout regimen every day of the week i do either an hour of weight training or an hour and a half of some kind of mild aerobic stuff and i alternate days um so so it's and then i spend time you know with my my wife and my family and you know kid and grandkids and and so forth and enjoy this part of a girl's candy store right i love that donald man this was so much fun i i really really enjoy spending time with you um i have no doubt we will do a round three at some point thank you so much for coming back where can people get your book tell people about the book where you want them to connect with you oh yes it's called the case against reality um you can get it on amazon or apple and so forth the case against reality and then i've got a twitter feed um at donald d hoffman i think but if you just google my name on twitter you can find it and i put links to most of my to to our i'll put a link to our podcast here and and so forth but um and yeah so on twitter and you know i have a website at the university of california at irvine that lists some of my papers and has my email um ddhoff uci.edu so people can email me i i you know i get enough that i can't respond to most of the emails but but every once in a while i can respond so nice you know what that's like i'm sure i i do indeed all right cool well guys check him out for sure hopefully you enjoyed this and if you loved it be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

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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, consciousness, physicists, physics, quantum field theory, Einstein, evolution, natural selection, space time, quantum physics, science, scientist, conscious agent, game theory, evolutionary psychology, virtual reality, social networks, mathematics, AI, space-time, spacetime

Id: Ehz89eV5JR4

Length: 117min 45sec (7065 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021