This Scientist Proves Why Our Reality Is False | Donald Hoffman on Conversations with Tom

hey everybody i hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at blinkist [Music] what is up everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with somebody i think you guys are going to find deeply fascinating donald hoffman um donald welcome to the show thank you very much tom it's a pleasure to be here thanks for inviting me of course man dude after so i did an interview with annika harris she introduced me to some of the concepts that we'll be talking about today which are uh one crazier than the next but super interesting but before we dive into that give people a super quick synopsis of who you are your background all that good stuff i'm a professor at the university of california at irvine in the cognitive science department i've been there since 1983 and so i study visual perception um perception of objects and their their colors and their shapes and their motions and then for the last 20 30 years have been studying consciousness as well and trying to develop a mathematical model of consciousness and then studying evolution and asking does evolution shape our senses to see reality as it is or not so those are sort of the big topics i've been studying yes a lot of this seems to go back to vision and the way that we literally see things and by the way don't and i don't know how much you know about me or my obsessions but i'm obsessed with the movie the matrix yes and in your dedication you i forget the names of the three people but you said i offer you the red pill which i thought was pretty interesting so what in your world what is the red pill what is the red pill waking us up to right most of us believe that we see reality as it is when we look up and see the moon it's because there really is a moon and it would exist even if there were no observers to see the moon it would still exist and we don't believe that we see all of reality no one thinks that we see everything that there is to see but we do believe that we've been shaped by natural selection to see those aspects of the truth that we need to see to stay alive and so that our perceptions of space and time are giving us a genuine insight into a real space and time that would be there even if there were no observers to perceive it and also our perception of objects like tables and chairs the moon quarks and leptons and so forth that these things would also exist and have roughly the properties that we see even if there were no creatures no observers to see them at all and the red pill that i'm offering is to say that if you believe evolution by natural selection then the mathematics of natural selection makes it very very clear that the probability of zero that any of the language that we use in our perceptions the language of space and time the language of shapes and objects and position and momentum and colors and so forth is the wrong language to describe objective reality whatever that reality might be it's not that we're getting the shape of this table a little bit wrong or the color's a little bit off it's that no description in the language of space and time and objects and colors could ever be be true reality whatever it is can't be described in that language if we buy evolution by natural selection so we have a choice between taking one of our best confirmed scientific theories seriously namely evolution by natural selection or taking our intuitions that space time is fundamental and objects are fundamental taking that intuition seriously and i decided to side with this science on this one all right so this a lot of this stuff is going to be really difficult to tease out but i think we have to sort of break it into points i don't want to spend our whole time um describing the theory we may get lost for a fair amount of time in that but i what i hope we can do is sort of lay out the thinking and then get into some of the implications why it matters and all that good stuff um so if i guess let's back up so tell me how natural selection gives us the mathematical model that invalidates all that that's probably the right place to start right most of us think of natural selection and evolution as a biological theory that that's that's sort of intuitive right you know if you are better adapted to the environment you're more likely to pass on your genes and so forth and but it turns out that in the 1970s uh a brilliant guy named john maynard smith was able to use the ideas of evolution of natural selection and the tools of mathematics in particular on game theory to create a new field evolutionary again can you can you explain game theory so when i was diving into your world when i was reading the book when you talk about miracles and i don't want to do this out of order but you talk about like every theory has sort of a base assumption it's like we can't we're we can't explain that one so just please accept that this is the the miracle as you call it and then from here the rest of my argument is going to make sense right because i don't understand the math well enough the math every time you mention this and nobody pushes you on it i don't understand the math well enough it feels like the miracle to me but it isn't to you so what actually what is the math if we can sort of say it at a at a lay person's level what is the math how does it show that there's a zero probability that we're describing reality as it actually exists right so so the intuition behind using game theory for evolution is very much like if you play a video game right if you're playing a video game you have to focus on getting points as fast as you can if you get enough in a short enough time you get to the next level otherwise you die and an evolution is very much like that there's points they're called fitness payoffs and you have to gather them as quickly as you can and if you get enough roughly in a short enough period of time you don't go to the next level but your genes in your children go to the next level and so it's that's roughly why we want to think about game theoretic kinds of things but it's of course there's more detail than what game theory is literally that what survives the next round yeah so game theory is literally a mathematical theory of strategies in games and how different strategies may be better or worse in certain circumstances so for example if if you if one game that our species plays is a social cooperation game and when we were hunter-gatherers if we all went out and cooperated i went out and hunted wildebeests and you went out and hunted wildebeest and others gathered berries and so forth we all worked hard and came back at the end of the day if i didn't get enough and you got more than you might share with me and tomorrow i might share with you so that's cooperation but and so that works very very well that's that's a strategy that works very well how would we define this game so i was tempted to say okay so it's about the people who have the strategy to win this game called life but i'm not sure that's actually how you define it would would it be the game called procreation okay so in evolution fitness is all all about procreation in fact basically that's how it's defined it it's almost um it almost sounds like it's a tautology that fitness being more fit means that you're having more offspring so whatever you do that lets you have more offspring is by definition giving you greater fitness and so so in the case of cooperation i mean that's not the only strategy by which a species could be successful at having offspring in the next generation but for homo sapiens that was a strategy that we did use and in many social species do that ants and bees and so forth but as soon as you have that strategy of cooperation then it turns out there's another strategy that could be very fit and that's cheating so i could pretend i'm a loafer now i don't want to go out there and put my life on the line in front of a wildebeest and so i just go down to the river i hide out and relax and take it easy and come back and go oh i worked really hard today i couldn't find anything can i share some of yours well and and so it turns out that that strategy is very very fit in the sense that i didn't put my life on the line if you're willing to share with me i'm gonna survive so i'm going to have so that strategy will actually proliferate you all have kids i'll have more loafers and so but it turns out if you have too many loafers too many cheaters then no one's bringing home the bacon and the whole thing collapses and so you get the idea that the the the fitness of a strategy depends on the other strategies that are around if everybody else is cooperating then being a cheater is very very effective it's a it's a fit strategy if everybody's a cheater then it's not fit to be a cheater because everybody's going to die and so that's what we call frequency dependent selection that the frequency of a different of a strategy will affect its fitness and so that makes it more complicated and that's why we have to do mathematics it's you can actually with mathematical precision predict exactly what proportion of the population will be cheaters and what proportion will be cooperators once you know certain things about strategies and and their payoffs and so it's that's why we use evolutionary game three it allows us to go away from just intuitive notions of evolution and selection and so forth to precise definitions of strategies of their fitness how they interact when when three or four or four five or n strategies interact what happens it gets very very complicated then our intuitions just give up but the math can still carry on where our intuitions give up okay so you partner with a mathematician and did you have a theory that you wanted to see if he could write the the sort of algorithm for or how did that work how did we end up focusing on math right so in about 2008 i decided i really wanted to go after this because i had a suspicion that evolution would not favor creatures that see reality as it is i figured that it would be too complicated and take too much time and it turned out that was correct but but it was more interesting so i got a couple of my graduate students working on this i worked with them we learned evolutionary game theory and we started they wrote simulations and so we just simulated creatures with different strategies and we let them see all of the reality or none of the reality we let them just see fitness payments give me some of the data points so one of them is going to be fitness payoffs right when you're writing in math like are you making this from a human perspective are you taking this from an ants perspective i've got to imagine the math looks differently depending on the species strategy that's already evolved sort of over evolutionary time so oh god i can only imagine how complicated this is but give me a give me a couple of the variables so that this stops being one of the miracles for me and i can really start to understand sure so one kind of game that we had them play was a foraging game so you could think of big a big checkerboard or a big chessboard and you had them play what do you mean them the so so my graduate students then had these simulated creatures and we just plopped them down at random in this big huge checkerboard okay and we had also planted resources around on the checkerboard did you have to give them incentives well in in some cases we would just we would either allow them to evolve incentives so that was what we called a genetic algorithm so we started off and they were all stupid they they all had random genes for how they moved and how they would try to feed and how they would perceive but there had to be some sense of score right so if we're using game theory there has to be some sense of you have an objective that objective is to gobble the resources or whatever yeah so certain resources that were just randomly distributed on the checkerboard gave you high fitness payoffs some gave you low fitness payoffs and and so forth so we just played so just defined as fitness payoff without anything beyond that exactly they had they had a driver if you will to put it in human terms they had a drive to acquire fitness payoffs right right got it well um at least in when we when we programmed them now when we just had the genetic algorithm there was no drive at all they they just would make them move so they they had to do something but the genes were random so they they would do stupid stuff like they would stay in one spot and try to eat and and they would get nothing and they'd just keep trying to eat there the whole time until then and they would just die out right so in the first generation right did they have the desire to eat and procreate like were they looking to mate or how did you all the only the only desire was we we told them they had to do something every step of the game that's all we did and there's a list of items for them to choose from eat move yeah yeah that's right eat and move and that was pretty much it and step yeah eat and move and then you had something on the back end that said if they scored this many number of points then they essentially procreate and they move on to the next generation if they don't they're dead exactly okay got it so the first generation pretty much all of them just acted very stupidly they didn't get any fitness points or very very few some bumped against walls and just kept bumping into the walls and so we would just breed the ones that were a little bit less stupid than the rest and then make a new generation of them and we did that for four or five hundred generations and then by the time we'd done that 500 generations we had creatures that looked very purposeful they were foraging in an almost optimal pattern they weren't wasting any time and they were getting high fitness payoffs and we could look at their perceptions and we found that they evolved perceptions that didn't show them the truth it showed them only fitness payoffs which was no surprise to me but but what was a surprise was the reason why it wasn't just that it was too expensive to to see the truth it was that seeing the truth and seeing what you need to survive are very very different things and and so so i went to a mathematicians one once i had the simulations and i realized that this looked like it was a real result and then i got some new ideas about what was really going on so the simulations really taught me it wasn't just that it was too time and and resource expensive to see the truth it was that in some sense the truth is completely irrelevant that that it's and and also that the fitness payoffs themselves don't tell you anything about the truth they're just independent so i went and and worked with a mathematician named chaitan prakash and um we've worked together he's the mathematician i'm not i'm not and we have and i've gotten some other collaborators as well some very very good collaborators and we have a couple papers that we've now written where with two different angles on on the theorem and the bottom line is is this it's it's straightforward to prove that well straightforward we have a mathematician working with you but to prove that an organism that sees reality as it is in whole or in part is never more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality whose senses actually don't have the right language to see reality and is just instead tuned to the fitness payoffs okay so this is the sort of the first thing that i trip over so um i get where i could see that it is more advantageous to be optimized for fitness payoffs than it is for reality and this might be a good time to give people your sort of vr explanation so that we we can bring this into something they can visualize but first let me finish what i'm bumping on so i get how if you're optimized for fitness payoffs that makes more sense and being optimized for reality reality could have too much just complexity the processing power that it would take to understand is crazy which is exactly why i think your desktop analogy is probably the better one to hit right now sure um but what i don't understand is why it is necessarily true that you need to hide reality like why that would be part of it that seems right sort of a bridge too far from my my simplistic mind so that is a bit technical but but the top top-level idea is um that fitness payoffs depend on the state of the world right so to be concrete and the organism and the organism right they depend on the world and the organism and the state of the organism and the action so i mean one example is you know if if i have a t-bone steak and you know the fitness payoff of that t-bone steak for a hungry lion is pretty high but for the same line that wants to mate it's very very low and for you know a cow in any state and for any action the t-bone steak offers no fitness payoffs and and another example is if i'm 5000 meters under water that's pretty bad for me but for a benthic fish that's it's perfect for a benthic fish right so so evolution by natural selection has this idea that there is an objective reality and fitness payoffs do depend on that reality but the payoff for the same state of reality could be very very different for a benthic fish than for me for benthic fish 5000 meters underwater is the same state of reality as it would be for me but the payoff is very very different for the benthic fish okay so it would kill me this this may not be the thing to dive into but i'm going to push on this a little bit and see if we get somewhere fruitful um what where i sort of come to in your theory is that they're lurking under this is a reality right the moon is there to describe something it's my shorthand it's not it is not a meaningless shorthand it is a shorthand to help me get my um my fitness payoffs fair but it it represents something right okay so if that is true understanding that i am 5000 feet underwater still seems relevant even though it's not it doesn't have a fitness payoff so obscuring that or obfuscating that for me so that i can't understand that i'm 5000 feet underwater is not helpful okay i can tell that if we chase that we won't get where we want to go but if you give us the desktop analogy right right because this i think will will give us the anchor that we need to keep exploring right so so if evolution didn't shape us to see the truth what did it shape us to see and the i think the the good analogy is that it gave us like a desktop interface so if you're um writing an email and the icon for the email you're writing is blue and rectangular in the middle of your screen does that mean the email in your computer is blue rectangular middle the screen middle of the computer of course not that i mean anybody who thought that misunderstands the point of the interface is there not to show you the truth which in this metaphor would be the circuits and software the diodes and resistors magnetic fields you don't want to deal with that if you if you had to deal with magnetic fields to write an email good luck you would never no one would hear from you and so that's what evolution did for us it gave us a desktop interface that's there to hide the truth right the desktop interface on your computer is there explicitly to hide the circuits and software you don't want to see that stuff that would seeing the truth would get in the way but isn't evolution somewhat of a blind watchmaker i'd like to just steal absolutely from my man mr dawkins so if it is blind it's not hiding anything right so it's just it's optimizing you for something so that's where i get into the like the the punch line of your theory not to get too far ahead but for people to understand why i'm stopping you so the punch line of the theory is we are so the far like so far off from what is real as to like not even be able to to conceive of what our world really is and we will definitely get into space time is doomed it's one of the most fascinating things to come out of um your theory but it's like i it doesn't feel like a blind watchmaker is going to hide something from me it just it it has no sense of it it's just here is the shortest path across the checkerboard to get to this thing it's not trying to trick me into thinking that there is no checkerboard it's just like it take this path go that way it's the shortest path i'm essentially lazy right if you think about um caloric realities right so the way that i look at a a human i want to write a book called the physics of being human and to do that i would really it's the like you write the book that you need so to understand in myself why i am both driven and lazy is so [ __ ] weird so i both have these huge ambitions i want to do this crazy [ __ ] but i also want to sit on the couch and eat chips right so it's like and they're both real men i am not like when people think that like i'm being humble or whatever no no i really have like a hardcore drive to sit around and do nothing but i have this like sort of weird balancing thing so for me to understand it from a caloric utilization standpoint right as humans we have these massive brains that are calorically just ravenous and so for me not to have to forage all the time i take a strategy where i'm conserving calories again blind watchmaker not not somebody going hey you know it'd be really smart it just realized the ones that didn't conserve calories [ __ ] died and you know they didn't survive a famine or whatever and the ones that sort of balance this like i'm gonna go down and i'm gonna face the wildebeest and i'm not gonna hide all the time you know i'm gonna put myself at risk and and all that stuff the ones that found that balance they were the ones that procreate and they pass on their genes okay so part of the physics of being human is to both be adventurous and lazy at the same time where where i'm trying to like figure all this out then is okay i have this layer i have my interface but it doesn't feel like it's that like radically far from the the truth so i'll give you my example so all right it's mapping this room you're gonna tell me [ __ ] dude you don't even understand like space time isn't real none of this [ __ ] is real i look away the moon doesn't even exist right right that seems like it would be more problematic for me to navigate the world if all of that were true so what i want to understand is how much of of what you say about the computer interface is really that divorced from reality right oh man stick with me i'm going to see if i can actually articulate this so the the computer analogy is super profound it's easy for me to understand i don't want to have to deal with the electrical fields and all the other things the diodes or whatever all that stuff but when i think about whacking into a rock that seems like a way closer thing to my reality i've mapped something over that same with the moon i've mapped something over it it isn't actually that thing right but it feels like it would be mapping over some gravitational object that rotates around the earth but i think you're going to say that's not true right so one analogy because it our intuitions rebel at the idea that we're not seeing the truth because it's what we're doing here works so well right and i'm open to that we're not seeing the truth where where i get lost is how [ __ ] divorced can it really be and still be useful right well so there's two aspects to that one one is just that you know the mathematics of evolution is quite clear meaning the probability that you see the truth is zero is zero that's right and and that we have a paper that we just submitted on monday um where we we show that the fitness payoffs erase all evidence of world structure almost surely what the [ __ ] does that mean when you say world structure what do you mean so the world presumably there is some world some reality yes like atoms uh well you don't need to postulate exactly what that i need to know what you mean by the word the word structure so it could be and what we show is it doesn't matter what the structure is pretty much the result holds so it could be for example a structure like uh a distance relationship a metric will be called a metric or a topology or a measurable structure okay or a total order like one is smaller than two is smaller than three that's a total order right so whatever the so what you can show is that no matter what structure you might think the world has you can prove that the fitness payoff functions that govern our evolution so you're right there's no of course goal right it's not a goal-directed kind of thing right you know evolution's not trying to do anything but the point is that the fitness payoffs which govern evolution the probability that they will actually preserve the structure in the world so that by being tuned to the fitness you're tuned to the structure in the world yeah that probability is precisely zero that's what we prove so the only thing that we know is what you think is real is the only thing we know is not real is that accurate well i would say according to theory of evolution now we can step back and ask ourselves what the theory of you know what we think about the revolution right before we get to that because you you do you you have a pretty deft challenge to how because my first literally the first note i took about you was my whole problem is you're laying out hey evolution mathematically proves that essentially evolution isn't true so i was like if everything i think evolution is true how can it also be true that everything i know and think is false right which is essentially what i just heard you say so mathematically i can prove this the quote unquote structure of everything i think is absolutely not true and yet i'm using evolution to base that math on right so walk people through how that is in a contradiction right so it's what we show is that the fitness payoff functions erase any information about the structure of the world so that the structure of our perceptions is just unrelated to the structure in the objective world but the argument that i just gave does not apply to our math and logic so just perception just perceptions so you have to be very very we have to look at all of our cognitive capacities is this whole thing an umvelt problem well it what it's saying is that uh your umvelt is like your user interface that every creature you know homo sapiens has one invent one user interface we have the apple interface and someone else you know some other creatures have the mac or the pc interface or or whatever yep and and and there's gonna be a wide variety of interfaces that evolution evolves every species has its own class of interfaces and in each case the interface never shows any species the truth at all according to evolution but there are selection the selection pressures that erase information about the structure of the world in perception do not also apply to math and logic the reason is that we do have to have some elementary ability to reason about fitness payoffs two bytes of an apple give me roughly twice the fitness payoffs of one so not reasoning about objective reality just reasoning about fitness payoffs and the logic of fitness payoffs right so that's why there's no selection pressures necessarily to be geniuses of math and logic but at least the selection pressures are not uniformly against any capacity in math and logic whereas in the case of perception it's one can show the unit the pressures are uniformly against any access to the structure of the world um in in terms of the structure of what we perceive in in our senses so that's why we have to be very very careful so certain for example christian philosophers alvin plantinga for example has argued from not mathematically but informally from evolution saying that it would make all of our cognitive capacities unreliable and therefore evolution by itself was unreliable theory and therefore we should not you know not believe it and i'm not saying anything like that at all i'm saying that the theory of evolution has a core that john maynard smith found the evolutionary game theory when we look at that core we find that there are certain peripheral assumptions like dna exists whether or not it's perceived space and time exist those peripheral assumptions turn out to contradict the mathematical core of the theory and one can prove that but math and logic our ability with math and logic does not contradict the evolutionary you know the core of evolutionary theory so this we have to be very very careful that's why when you do this you know it's not just hand wave anymore you really have to look at the replicator equation you really have to look at the fitness payoff functions and do combinatorial analyses and so forth this is very very careful work but that's what we do with our best scientific theories we take them very very seriously we look at their equations and say okay if the equation entails the probability 0 that we see reality as it is then we've got a choice we can agree that we don't see reality as it is or we can say we need to revise the theory now we don't have an alternative to evolution by natural selection so if someone wants to propose one they've got a lot of work to do because evolution of natural selection is an incredibly successful theory so space time though and you're you're ready to ditch that one sure so um okay so i'm i'm getting i think what you're saying about our umvelt and uh because we haven't defined that i'll define that so uh umvelt is your senses taken the world in a certain way and uh we have different senses in a bat so a bat can do echolocation we cannot and therefore the way that a bat interprets the world is very different than the way that we interpret the world and every sort of species has a different umvelt you can even have humans that have a slightly different unveil one that's colorblind there's a million other examples but you you get these variations that are massive between species um you get like a dog the the amount that they can smell is crazy they can smell a seizure coming which is absolutely bananas whereas of course you're not going to get a human that does that because of the number of um scent receptors in the nasal canal and so cool all right that that's an umvelt so i get perception i get that this is a problem of perception i think i understand the math part i prom because i'm going to i am making a layman's assumption that math is a universal language i've heard that repeated a million times i am so bad at math i don't even understand that uh but i accept it out of ignorance uh the logic part let me define logic based on what i think you're saying and you tell me if i'm getting it correct so logic the way that i understand it from the way that you just use it because i would have said it's human reasoning so i would have gotten tripped up um on like natural selection or oh god the one you just used it as an example and you said that that we think space time a great example right we have in my layman's view we have logiced our way to space time but that's failed me so um tying it back to fitness payoffs i think is is your definition of logic that we have to be able to reason that one bite of an apple is not as good as two bytes of an apple is it really that basic that it is entirely tied to fitness payoffs that's well from an up from the evolutionary arguments that i'm giving right so the arguments that but do you think that logic reaches deeper than that when you say that it's untouched by this um false interpretation oh god i'm putting words well right so okay so that gets to the bigger picture of what i'm up to here right so and this is how science progresses what we do um is we take our current best theories and we try to push them to their limits and find out where they break where they fall apart and when we do that that's when we break out the champagne because the whole point in science is to push our best theories to the limit to find out where they break down and then get some clue about a deeper theoretical framework and the constraint on that deeper theoretical framework is it better agree with our current theory where our current theory is right but only if you're saying that that theory is logic this is another one of those times where i bumped against what you're saying so and and this may be that simple is that what you mean that like where we are using true logic right as you define it tied to fitness payoffs i think um then it must agree because you've said if you work backwards i'm not trying to get rid of evolution i'm not trying to get rid of the things that we know like we can launch a satellite into space and geo target you but that requires relativity so whatever we get to whatever answer we come to better be backwards compatible with the ideas that essentially work can you give me a definition of work and is it tied to logic as you define it and thusly fitness payoffs right so so the idea would be that scientists are doing reasoning right science is about reasoning is reasoning a synonym for logic to you pretty much that's right and if we um we can't logic is in some sense non-negotiable in the sense that if i let go of reason and logic then there's nothing left right is that true because all we can do if we if we're having a conversation we can talk informally but we can't make very good progress unless we are absolutely precise in what we say but let me tell you how that struck me so does somebody who's schizophrenic do they have reason and logic well in the sense that if we're trying to understand our situation in the universe humans will make stories yes if the stories are internally self-contradicting you can be pretty sure you're going to be in trouble right so any internal contradictions are going to destroy your theory so the first thing you have to do is make sure that what you're saying doesn't contradict what you're saying if you it because that just means you're saying nonsense so one one reason why we use math and logic is to make sure that what we're saying isn't just flat out nonsense but once we're past that criterion and much of what we've said is nonsense but once we get past that criterion then it turns out we may have been using our terms very imprecisely we might use the word space we might use the word time and we think we know what we're talking about but when you actually push you find out oh no i would say this in this situation that in that situation oh and they contradict i've contradicted myself again so once again we find that if we're we just use intuitive concepts we get trapped in self-contradiction namely nonsense so the whole point of being mathematically precise one point is to make sure that we're not doing nonsense the second is to take our ideas and force us to put our ideas very very precisely so we know exactly what we're saying i get the math part though the part that i'm really trying to wrap my head around and maybe we should just move the [ __ ] off this but i'll take one more swing um math i get if if math truly is a universal language that just sort of gets at the substrate of what this whatever this is it actually gets to that cool i can see how um the fact that we that uh chasing fitness payoffs manipulates our umvelt i get that it doesn't touch math cool now what i'm trying to understand is you said specifically math and logic now if you just said math we'd be done and we'd move on but you say math and logic so then i immediately go to schizophrenics think they're being logical right what on earth makes us think that we are not just the way that our our um reality is essentially this total abstraction right in your own theory and i would agree man i i routinely think in myself and and express other people your brain is creating a virtual reality now i never ever ever conceived of it as sort of radically different as you but um i get that we're in sort of this this huge abstraction but what makes us think that that our the way that we reason the way that we logic outside of math the way that we reason and logic outside of math isn't the same as a schizophrenic where it is it is so delusional is it just the internal consistency or and couldn't that itself be a delusion that our fear of internal um contradiction is problematic is is actually a delusion in and of itself oh very very good so i see your question now so yes there are deep issues here in terms of of logic and there is something called girdles incompleteness theorem that basically gives it to me are you familiar with that no not at all so so girdles probably arguably one of the most profound results ever in human thought girdle proved it's called girdles incompleteness theorem and he proved that any axiomatic logical or mathematical system that's rich enough to do arithmetic there will be statements that are true but can't be proven within that system unprovable truths the notion of truth goes deeper than the notion of proof in that system you must say well okay i'll take that truth and put it into my axioms then he said well but then there'll be new truths that you can't prove and this goes on forever what he showed was that the exploration of mathematical structure is in principle endless it's unbounded and in fact if we get get to it later on in my theory of consciousness i'll argue that that's what consciousness is up to this unbounded exploration of all the possibilities of consciousness that comes from girdle's theorem but you're you're absolutely right we can choose give you girdle serum one more time right the simple bottom line is there is no end to the exploration of mathematical structure it's turtles all the way down all the way and in principle you can never know it all okay interesting and i definitely get how this ties into your theory of consciousness so let's spend a minute on turtles all the way down uh super cool story it i i don't remember where this started so if you do by all means jump in but it uh woman was claiming that the earth is flat and so somebody said okay if it's flat then what is it sitting on and the story goes that it's sitting on a giant turtle and so the person asked her what is the turtle sitting on and she said don't be ridiculous it's turtles all the way down and of course you get into this eventually one of those turtles is on something so and that's that same human like visceral reaction is how i react to your theory of consciousness so why don't you give it to us and then we're going to start playing around with the brain okay um but what is your theory of consciousness right so i'm saying that space and time aren't fundamental because evolution by natural selection entails that not only not fundamental but not real right that's right they're they're only real as forms of our experience but they're not real in the sense of an objective reality in the sense that they would be there even if no creature were around to perceive it so it's again like in virtual reality every time like if you're playing a game of uh you know fast race cars in in virtual reality i see a red corvette sorry i'm so sorry to interrupt but uh would another way to say that b because you say when i look at the moon and then i look away that i you haven't said this in this interview but i've heard you say it many times you trash bin it or something like that you're no longer rendering it garbage collector garbage collected right um would another way to say that the moon doesn't exist quote unquote if there were no species to perceive it it's really that there the moon wouldn't be um created essentially it's like it it it is requiring an umvelt of a particular species to create that shorthand over evolution to say whatever that thing is that the moon is meant to represent um it has been created by humans as a moon maybe bats see it entirely differently and fish don't have any sense that it's real at all who knows it's really that we we evolution maybe is a better way to say it that evolution has created this virtual reality and therefore if that species ceased to exist its version of virtual reality would obviously cease to exist because it's being created exactly oh but i'm going to say it's being created by the brain you're going to say the brain is not real is that true right the brain okay yeah this is where the [ __ ] gets so complicated okay so i'm going to shut up now back to your theory of consciousness right so but just point your your vr thing is is i think a good example for anybody who's spent time in vr what i'm saying will be obvious right if you're playing a vr game of like race cars you see a red corvette when you turn your heads up that way you know that you're only seeing a corvette that you're creating when you turn your head that way you turn your head to the other side now you're seeing a blue mustang the red corvette is gone it doesn't exist there's no red corvette in the computer that's running the game the red corvette is only in your mind when you look over there now you're seeing a blue mustang because you're making that and so you you're rendering these things and then destroying them there is a reality but it's not corvettes and it's not mustangs it's the supercomputer that's running the game and that's what i'm all i'm saying is evolution gave us this headset and it's no surprise i see the moon i render a moon i turn away i don't render a moon so the moon doesn't exist there is something but it's just not like it's not the moon it's nothing like the moon just like there's something there's a supercomputer in the the vr analogy but in the supercomputer if you look you'll never find any you know green mustangs or red corvettes you give an example in your book that is so powerful if you would take a second you describe what's happening in your eye when you look at a scene that includes a red apple and the way you describe it at the photoreceptor level i was like oh my god it gave me such an understanding of how terrifyingly complicated all right things actually do you remember the part that i'm talking about right so this is now just normal physiology and so for the moment i'll be talking as though you know i believe in brain science everything is within the framework of a theory so i'm now using neurophysiology and physics right now for this to describe this so when you look at a red apple and suppose there really is a red apple just for sake of this argument it's got a real shape and light rays hit it and they have certain frequencies and they pass through the lens of your eye which focuses it on the back of your eye just like a camera would and on the back of your eye you've got a piece of brain called the retina it's a nervous tissue so a piece of nervous tissue it has 120 million photoreceptors it's like a 120 mega megapixel camera and each photoreceptor is just reporting how many quanta of light how many photons it catches so i caught three i caught 10 i caught 50. that's all you got a bunch of numbers so you have 120 million numbers there are no colors there are no shapes there are no motions there's just 120 million colors numbers not not even colors it's like if you look at the the digital output from a video camera you'll just see a stream of numbers if you look at stream of numbers you'll see the problem that vision has you can't tell from the stream of numbers what's going on you have to create three-dimensional objects and shapes and colors and so forth from all those numbers and so that's the problem that we have envisioned you have all these photon counts 120 million photon counts on each eye and from that you have to then create objects see that it's a boy on a bicycle eating a hot dog you know all of that is you and that comes that's not just theory it becomes really an important problem when you're trying to build computer vision systems right you're trying to build a self-driving car say with with passive vision systems well so the vision systems are cameras the video cameras say they're taking in video maybe they have you know a few million pixels that they come in that each each you know maybe 70 times a second or something like that well those pixels are just numbers you've got millions and millions of numbers coming in every second there's nothing in there that says that's a boy that's a car don't you know that's a stop sign there's nothing in there that says that you have to you have to have megabytes of software that's really intelligent that takes all those numbers and starts computing with them to figure out three-dimensional shapes to figure out what the objects are to and to figure out oh i'm about to hit a boy i need to hit the brakes and so forth so so this is not just abstract self-driving cars have to solve the problem of starting with numbers that are unintelligent in some so just a bunch of numbers and giving you an intelligent assay of what's happening in the world and so that's why a third of the brain literally a third of the cerebral cortex the higher part of our brain is involved just in visual perception when you add the other senses it's it's more like half the brain is involved in sensory perception because the senses are doing an incredibly complicated job but from my point of view what they're doing is they're building a vr world and it takes a lot of processing power you need super computers you know what would have been considered super computers to do vr in real time and that's what we're doing we open our eyes and it looks like we're just seeing a 3d world with objects and shapes and colors it seems so real and so just we're seeing the truth but because you have billions of neurons trillions of synapses that are doing it all within about 100 milliseconds and so you're so fast at it that you just think you're opening your eyes and seeing the truth you're seeing a vr world that you're projecting out there in real time of course now i'm going to rescind the brain part right so the brain itself is part of the space-time interface so the brain itself is just our vr symbol for something deeper that's doing the real work and so the question will be what deeper theory can we come up with right it's going to be a theory outside of space and and time but this gets back to what we have to do in science all the time we push our current theories to the limits until they break and then we have to actually take a creative leap we can't necessarily just use the language of our theories that we just broke we have to come up with a deeper language and that is a leap when einstein went past newton he took a deep leap and when quantum mechanics went past einstein and newton it took an even deeper leap and the language was entirely different but you can show for example that if you start with einstein you get back newton roughly as the speed of light goes to infinity the way newton talks about space and time and matter in mass those terms actually mean something different than what they mean in einstein in newton mass is mass and you have the same mass period in einstein your mass depends on your velocity your length depends on your velocity distances depend on your velocity none of that space and time and mass don't behave that way at all in newton we use the same words but they mean something very radically different in einstein and in quantum mechanics it's it's even a deeper leap but with quantum mechanics you get back newton as something called planck's constant goes to zero again roughly i mean this is a short first approximation so what we so the leap i need to make here now is evolution by natural selection is telling us that the language of space and time and then objects in space and time is the wrong language to describe objective reality so the leap i need to make is to say is there a deeper theoretical framework that i can come up with such that when i look at the dynamics of that deeper framework and project it back into our vr interface which i'm which is space and time so i've got this vr headset of space and time that's what evolution has told us this thing is just a headset you've got a guess right i'm not telling you what's outside the headset i just told you all i can tell you it's a headset now it's up to you to take a stab at what's behind the headset so that's what i'm up to so i'm probably wrong right i mean we weren't evolved the evolution by itself doesn't say anything that makes me think i'm evolved to see the truth but it it at least is telling me that whatever the truth is out there you're only seeing a headset it's good enough to tell us that but it's not good enough to tell us what's outside that takes a leap outside of the theory of evolution but the constraint on that theory is we need to show how our deeper theory could lead to me having a headset and in that headset it looks like things are evolving according to evolution of natural selection in other words my deeper theory has a strong constraint on it it better look like einstein's theory of space-time it better look like quantum field theory and it better look like evolution by natural selection the three big pillars of modern science if i can't do that then i know i'm wrong so even though all of those things exist in the headset that's right okay this is [ __ ] fascinating uh so now tall order do you have that idea i have a proposal let's hear it i'm probably wrong can before you give us your proposal i have i want to acknowledge you dude the way that you talk like that i love so much i can't remember if it was plank or board that said um anybody this is a terrible paraphrase anybody that thinks that science advances because objective truth is presented is absolutely wrong science advances because the old guard dies and the new people grow up just believing it to be self-evident i [ __ ] hate that so much the fact that people are not willing to be wrong drives me crazy makes me want to choke half the world out so the fact that you talk from the perspective of hey look i've got a theory it's probably wrong like oh dude i love that so much i wish more people were were as hardcore as you to present you oh god you call it bold and precise i i present in a theory hypothesis that's both bold and precise right right love that and that you're willing to be wrong so anyway i just had to take a sec every time i hear you say that i want to stand up and clap because so few people are willing to own that they're probably wrong right but they're not afraid to make a bold and precise prediction so right and and the the thing about that is i just want to understand and so if i'm stuck on my ideas and won't let go of them then if i'm wrong i'm going to not understand so it's really stupid to think that you're you have to have enough hope that your ideas have some promise that you pursue them but not be dogmatic about them that's a that's a fine balance very much so all right so now our bold and precise claim is so i'm proposing i'll say what i'm proposing and then i'll say why i went that direction so i'm proposing that reality is a vast social network of interacting conscious agents so that consciousness is fundamental and think of it like the twitterverse right there's tens of millions of twitter users billions of tweets lots of stuff trending it's a twitter users are tweeting and following and so it's all a big social interaction right so i'm proposing and this is a mathematically precise proposal that there are things called conscious agents so conscious experiences like the taste of chocolate the smell of garlic are fundamental and limited choices based on those experiences that's part of the whole structure so experiences that inform choices that's going to be the fundamental idea in a vast social network and the idea then about our headset is is this follows if you are a twitter user and you want to understand deeply what's going on in the twitterverse well you can't engage with all 10 million users and a billion tweets it's just overwhelming you would die before you could even read all the stuff so what do you do well whenever we have big social media data we have to have visualization tools those tools will necessarily ignore most of the data and the part that they don't ignore they're going to compress it down they're going to digest it and compress it into some eye candy that we can understand some objects in three dimensions that have nice colors and move in certain ways and using that visualization tool i can maybe see what's trending in new york what's happening in all you know so the big scale of europe what's happening in little scale and irvine and so forth so i'll have a tool that lets me zoom in and out and and it'll be ignoring most of the stuff and that's what i'm claiming space-time is and physical objects it's our headset it's a visualization tool that certain conscious agents use to interact with this vast social network that would otherwise be completely overwhelming and so we've made the rookie mistake the finish that we're going to say rookie mistake of taking our headset for the final reality okay we have a tool and we thought it was the thing we were visualizing amazing very clear now let's back up and break these down part by part because conscious agent i'm familiar enough with your work that i kind of know what you mean but i don't think people understand that like how small you take that down because you're not talking that they're oh hey this is all a bunch of people which is probably what somebody hearing this for the first time thinks that you think they're invisible people that make up this social network um how far like so turtles all the way down boys and girls so we're talking about consciousness all the way ah right how like are um neutrinos like are they conscious right so no so this is very different from is that because it's in the the headset that's right neutrinos are particles inside space-time okay sorry damn it nothing inside this time i fell for rookie mistake uh okay so outside uh so do you delineate between uh advanced cognition and consciousness not in principle no interesting so do you i'm really trying to get you to use other words so define agent right so we're conscious we're this is a collection of conscious agents having a social ex did you say social media specifically no you do that social network social network they're like a vast social network got it okay so uh give me what a conscious agent is the simplest example the most trivial agent that the mathematic allows is an agent that has only maybe two experiences maybe like red and green okay that's all it experiences why does it have to be two well it could be even just none you could have an agent that has none or one but i tend to think about what i call a one bit agent a sort of fundamental but i could have an agent that has only one experience like nothing or red has an experience makes me feel like i'm not i'm not interpreting what you say in the same way that you mean it so you you said something and it went by so fast which was the taste of garlic and chocolate are fundamental experiences that's right okay so literally the taste of garlic is a conscious agent no it's an experience okay so that thing it's not like hey bob you're the taste of garlic no no no okay so sorry to use overly craft language but that sort of that was my initial interpretation of what you said okay so that makes sense uh i will then push and say if that's the case is this not would not garlic and um chocolate be tied to the umvelt of the species absolutely so certain agents will does that mean it's in the headset then um well those experiences so the headset is created out of your experiences uh-huh you so what an agent does is uses some of its experiences as a format for a headset but okay so what i'm trying to get to and i think this is what you're proposing is hey we take the headset off and we see like what do we see and i get that we have the problem of perception and that's ah the that's all back to the uml and stuff so c is a stand-in for obviously i don't know how we would be interpreting this world in the movie the matrix it is green code right so when he explodes the agents they explode into code so code is their fundamental element um what is your fundamental element consciousness i get that right but now i'm trying to understand like how if it's consciousness all the way down what is consciousness like is it a physical substrate or is it not and we have to let go of the very notion of physicality yeah we're i'm letting go of physicality in the sense i'm completely letting go of space and time and particles electrons protons and neutrons those are only headset entities but is it fair to say that you have no idea then exactly what consciousness is you just well so so what we do so here's this gets at the fundamental way we build scientific theories and this is what we talked about a little bit earlier which is about every theory has miracles right so every scientific theory has certain assumptions that it makes that we just have to grant you we just have to grant no there's no theory of everything we hear about a theory of everything there is none so your miracle is consciousness that's right okay so there so i'm saying that there are entities that i'll call conscious agents these agents themselves are not conscious experiences why do they have to be networked well it it turns out that when agents interact they form new agents so and i didn't know this when i wrote down the math i was just writing down what what could i possibly mean by consciousness being fundamental i wrote down the minimal structure i could think of that could have some set of experiences so there's some set of experiences that this creature this entity could have and a small set of actions that it could take and that was all i wanted to write down but then when i had them interact with other agents right because the actions are to affect the experiences of other agents it turned out the interactions satisfy the definition of a conscious agent so when agents interact they form new agents let me ask a question that i think is going to explode this apart and help us all understand what you mean do i exist um yes in what way so you your conscious experiences exist so all i can see is your skin hair and eyes yep i see but that's just my interface symbol if you look at yourself in the mirror all you see in the mirror is skin hair and eyes but you know firsthand that what you don't see in the mirror your hopes your dreams your aspirations your headache all the rich world of your conscious experiences that is not visible in the headset so my conscious experience is both in the headset and outside of the headset that's right that's right so it exists outside of space and time that's right in fact this is where the [ __ ] starts getting real weird it's pretty interesting because all i can see of you are the experiences in my own headset and so my headset is made up of my own experiences that i've put in a particular format of space and time and so so it's just a format like in a vr for example you have a certain format in which the vr is presented that 3d vr format has nothing to do with the shape of the super computer it's just the format of of that and so this what i see of tom right here is just what my headset allows me but i believe and you know firsthand that what i can't see in my headset is this rich world of your conscious experiences when i look at my cat my headset only shows me fur and something really cute and i believe that behind that cute little icon in my my interface my headset there is a real consciousness but i have less insight into the consciousness than i have into a human with a mouse even less with an ant even less and then when i get to things that i call rocks and you know protons and neutrons i have no insight at all no surprise the whole point of a headset is to simplify things does this conscious entity need to eat very interesting because that gets to what see this is now outside of space and time it's not evolution it's not food and so forth so the question is what are these agents up to what are they doing what's the why are they having any kind of actions at all and the answer is i don't know yet i've got a mathematical definition of conscious agent we're starting to play with dynamical systems of them and as to the question of why they would have any dynamic why would consciousness do something as opposed to nothing what what kind of answer could be deep enough or at least what what kind of proposal could be deep enough and i i've only had one idea ever that i've heard that seems deep enough to at least be on the table and that's consciousness all the way down well no no i'm saying if we assume his consciousness all the way down what are all those consciousnesses up to what is the social network doing and why okay so the idea is the social network what's the one idea so so the one idea is the girdle is incompleteness theorem right so if consciousness is all there is conscious agents are all there is yep then mathematical structure is only about consciousness and conscious agents because that's all there is and that means girdle telling us that there's endless exploration of mathematical structure means there's endless exploration of the possible kinds and varieties of consciousness and conscious agents and what consciousness is up to is is what i call the kid in the candy store theory girdle tells us there's an infinite candy store of exploration of possible conscious structures and the candy is all the variations of conscious experience consciousness and conscious experiences that's right and that's i'm not saying it's right but at least it's deep enough all right that it could be you know it's on the table okay so here's the good news i i am the guy that's uh dumb enough to like need everything explained and hopefully that will be useful to the audience uh okay so i've got this infinite candy store of consciousness the thing i cannot get past is there's some there is utility in creating the headset otherwise why the [ __ ] would it exist so if there is utility in the creation of the headset first of all i get it probably begs questions that you you don't know and it's beyond the scope and you've already asked me to just accept that the miracle is consciousness and you're not going to tell me anything beyond that because nobody has a theory of everything respect get that right but i want to poke in the spirit of fun partly and then just to see like where the sort of edge cases are sure all right so we don't know if conscious entities need to eat and the reason that i asked that question was because all of this starts with you looking at fitness and so if there is fitness into taking multiple bites of the apple therefore logic is going to be born out of that so that i know to keep eating the apple um but then it begs a question of well what am i underneath the visor underneath the headset just keep our nomenclature consistent what am i beneath the headset and why does it matter that i have a representation that that is based in the idea of fitness of eating an apple right so that's where i'm like what what is that a representation of why does this representation need to exist like have you i'm sure you've daydreamed about this even if okay let's hear it those are the fun questions right that's that's what we're really interested in is ask answering those questions and so we're going at it in two different directions one is you know sitting back in our arm chairs and trying to think like girdles incompleteness theorem and so forth and saying could this be and can i repeat what girdle's incompleteness theorem is it's the one part of this i'm nodding and smiling but i'm like the [ __ ] is he talking about uh so it goes something like this and you will tell me where i'm wrong so uh in fact god can i even articulate what i think i'm i'm gonna fumble through this okay i i don't even i feel like i understand a middle piece of it i don't know where it begins or where it ends but that we have some sort of mathematical equation that says you're never going to find the limit to which you can uh explore one thing but i don't get why that thing is girdles incompleteness serum has nothing to do specifically with consciousness right no no no somebody leveraging that to explain why is it then that consciousness is the only thing that you've seen put on the table that uh ties into that oh well so okay the reason i went after consciousness was i've been trying to solve what's called the heart problem of consciousness how is consciousness related to brain activity yes and so people have been trying to show how consciousness can be booted up from brain activity and we've utterly failed to do that or how the illusion of consciousness could be booted up from brain activity and there are no mathematic absolutely no mathematically precise theories after decades of effort that could explain even one specific conscious experience or one specific illusion of conscious experience like the taste of vanilla or why we why this kind of brain activity must be the illusion of the taste of vanilla why it could not be the illusion of the taste of chocolate there's nothing on the table i mean there's no science that can predict even one specific conscious experience or one specific illusion of conscious experience and so the reason i went after consciousness being fundamental the reason i went after that that's different from girls in completeness there was that i didn't want to be a dualist right so when as scientists we try to create a theory based on as few assumptions as possible and we only want one kind of assumption we don't want to have like i want this physical stuff and i want this consciousness stuff you you have to choose pick either physical stuff that's unconscious or pick consciousness stuff that's not physical but don't don't do both if you do both that's dualism and and there's not is not as clean maybe we'll have to but we don't want to go there so so maybe dualism will end up being where we have to go but i'm not going to start there i'm going to start with physicalism doesn't seem to be working out it seems to be principled and physicalism is that you can stack enough neurons together that they suddenly become conscious that's right space and time are fundamental and that's where this what evolution is basically saying physicalism is false that's why i went after evolution natural selection says the language of space and time is not the language of objective reality that means physicalism as we currently conceive of it is false we can't boot up consciousness from neural activity because neural activity is just a data structure in your headset neurons do not exist when they're not perceived they couldn't possibly create consciousness they're not even there consciousness i'm proposing creates neurons when we look inside skulls but neurons could not possibly create consciousness and i was forced to that by looking at natural selection so i'm proposing that if i believe that i really do have headaches and i really do taste chocolate and i really do have conscious experience and again i could be wrong about that it could be an illusion and just to be clear in fact we never finished this because i am still i'm just paralyzed by girdles and completeness serum but we're going to move on from that to not brow beat the poor audience um so going back to uh this network of conscious agents you're saying and and this gets into the part about the brain i want to talk about so split brain patients can have an experience of being literally two separate people so you go in you cut the corpus callosum so everybody to your point for a minute i'm going to assume that the brain actually exists sure sure so you go and you cut the corpus callosum which allows for communication between the two hemispheres of the brain and suddenly you realize that two personalities will emerge within the same head um do they they don't both have internal dialogue do they they have different likes and dislikes but do they have an internal because one side handles language so they both do they both have language perfect so the right hemisphere is very adept at language fascinating so they both have language one could be an atheist the other devout which is so crazy and that's a real example right from the literature my friend vs um has a video on the show you can google that and say you know split brain patient roma condren this patient has you know belief atheist and a believer in one you know i think in this case the right hemisphere didn't believe in the left hemisphere was a believer it's crazy i've never seen the video but that's oh it's it's great one case the right hemisphere wanted to be a race car driver the left hemisphere wants to be a draftsman they have just completely different personalities they can play 20 questions with each other you can give a word to the right hemisphere in the left hemisphere will will sometimes fail in 20 questions that can't figure out what's in the right hemisphere's head whoa so there so there are separate contents of consciousness so separate that you can lose at the game of 20 questions with your other hemisphere that's insane right so you're that would be a very sort of simplistic example of two different conscious agents that have come together that's right that's and that's the idea so you are one conscious agent well the way that i perceive myself is as one conscious agent but secretly i just a whole bunch of conscious agents well that's that's the thing you are it's both are true so you are one conscious agent but you're also two and you're also probably a huge lattice of interacting conscious agents you know the microbiome yeah a little bit yeah okay so in your gut you have like trillions of bacteria it's crazy you have more foreign cells in your body than you have your own cells uh would they be conscious agents nothing in space time strictly speaking is a conscious agency do they not represent something that's another thing okay i'm sure resisted asking you this question because i think i know how you will answer it the very like no one knew the microbiome existed so if this is all in my headset how is something so detailed that once somebody looks it's like oh my god it's proliferating right there's all this stuff how can we discover something new if it's literally just made up like the first time that somebody cracked open a skull why did everyone look at it and see the same brain the first time we looked into the microbiome why do we all see the same thing shouldn't a novel thing that evolution did not prepare us to see and understand like how do we all see the same thing now i think i actually know how you're going to answer it right because once you have a good visualization tool it depends on where you take it so i can take my visualization tool for the twitter verse right and i can zoom in on irvine to look very very close and i can zoom back and look at the whole united states and see what that looks like so a good visualization tool for a social network lets you zoom in and out doesn't that assume that everything oh god let's see if i can articulate this doesn't that assume that tweets are a substrate that is universal so that uh the the the first image that came to mind was why the hell the first time somebody got their head bashed open did everyone see brain the same way and i thought okay well he's gonna say that the reason they did is because you have a facsimile in the headset for um tissue that's made from atoms and so like that that visual structure it doesn't care like what it is it's photoreceptors taking in i see this much uh light on this receptor this on that all that so it's like hey i have a system for dealing with visuals and therefore when photons bounce off of this thing it's going to construct something and i understand things about 3d and mushiness and texture and all that and so my brain is programmed for that so no matter what you put in front of it it's it's going to see that i assume that is correct roughly but this is the it's more like if you are trying to look at the twitter and you have a you if you design a really good tool and it lets you zoom in to what's happening just in your block versus in your city versus in your county versus in your state versus your country versus the whole world versus europe and so forth if the tool is really good it's going to let you you will see different kinds of structures as you move in maybe it's very very all the same in my block where you know we all have similar ideas and we do the same thing or in my my county but it'll be very different and so so the reason we see right when you look inside of a brain you are not just and you see all these neurons and so forth you're not just one agent you're two you're a whole lattice of conscious agents what we're doing is using our visualization tool to look at the whole list of conscious agents that are together forming you so we're using that visualization tool to look and find your finer detail at agents that perhaps are having smaller and smaller sets of conscious conscious experiences we don't really know that it's a one-to-one relationship between a cell or whatever and whatever yeah it's going to be many to one that's right so for example i mean i see someone i call tom in front of me but that's i see one tom but my theory is proposing that that there are countless conscious agents that i'm interacting with there's one highest level conscious agent but immediately below it there too that i associate with what i call the left and right hemisphere and then below each of those there's countless more and there's more than one personality in tom the right and left hemisphere agents probably have very very different personalities it seems to be a general trend they're very very different and who knows what goes among all those agents all the way down so my visualization tool of course all i see right now is skin hair and eyes that it's pretty simple compared to what i'm claiming really good looking skin very very good goodness and it's a really complicated and intelligent the network of conscious agents but i see just very very little but when i look and when someone looks inside and sees a brain the 86 billion neurons they're seeing there is my visualization tool telling me there is a lot of conscious agents in a really complex social network going on here that's what i'm seeing is 86 billion neurons and then when we get down to chemistry which is you know explode that's even more more complicated now you know saying well my interface is starting to give up because you're not seeing much about consciousness with with neurons you might be getting some notion of networking and exchanging information maybe if you know biochemistry you're not seeing that quite as well when you get down to you know quarks and gluons you may be giving up but there's tons and tons of quarks and gluons and that's my interface telling me look i can i'm showing you a lot about tom i'm not showing you too much about his two hemispheres you know the two agents i'm showing you very very little but you know i'll show it to you what you call you know 86 billion neurons and then and eventually my interface is going to have to just give up because i mean the whole point of the interface is the network of conscious agents is too complicated for you to grok you can't grok it so we i'll give it to you one agent at a time here's tom not even tom's left and right hemisphere just tom and then all the agents if you want to you know you can get out you know if tom will let you he can we can go in there and look in his brain and we can tom will not like yeah i think he will that's right i wouldn't that's right so that's why the tool is showing us more complexity all the way down it's it's a vast social network and each agent isn't just a stand-alone work we're a combination of many many other agents that's going to be one part of the theory that's really interesting is mathematically precisely looking at all the ways that agents can combine but agents do combine uh we'll be going to some new mathematics i think something called um infinite categories until play where infinite categories what infinite cats is category theory and it's called infinity categories and also teleport theory some so poi d-o-p-l-i right the hell is that it's some fairly abstract mathematics that allows you to economically start to describe countless other ways of interaction and so what i want to re i mean i have a few ways to my current mathematical model which just uses things called markovian kernels and measurable spaces obviously plotting for what i mean most mathematicians would would say it's fairly plotting but but it's it's it's it works and it's it's real math we can start with that and then go to these you know category theories and so forth to actually get the full richness of all the kinds of ways that they could could connect and interact and so i want to go after that um but the the one question you asked earlier was why does it look like we have to eat and do the conscious agents themselves have to eat and what are they up to and how can we know and here's here's my answer to that first i don't know the answer so so here's how i'm going to go after it first i i am thinking like girdle is incomplete and certain we can come back to it that might be a deep motivation for the whole dynamics but suppose i'm that's wrong and i realize it's wrong and i realize i'm just not smart enough and my team is just not smart enough to figure out what conscious agents are up to and why they're doing it and so forth what the here's what we're going to have to do we're going to have to propose a mathematical projection from the dynamic subconscious agents into space and time and propose how that dynamics gets represented in terms of for example quarks and gluons interacting right now i'm studying scattering amplitudes at the large hadron collider i want to show how i can predict scattering amplitudes when two gluons hit four gluons go spraying out from the dynamics of consciousness the the reason for doing that is that if i'm not well in a couple reasons but one is if i'm not smart enough to figure out what consciousness is about what i'll then do is say here's a mapping and that gives me back space time now now that i know what's happening in space time i'm going to pull it backwards and say what does that tell me about the dynamics of consciousness and i'll go oh i never thought about that so so conscious agents have to be interacting this way for it to look like this in my headset so if i'm too stupid to figure it out and it's very very likely i will have to take my theory of conscious agents project it into my headset and say what would it look like oh i'm getting the wrong answer okay so i need to change my dynamics of consciousness this way so it really looks like the scattering amplitudes of quarks and gluons in the large hadron collider and when i get that match then i'll go okay this is at least one dynamics of consciousness that gives me the right answer in my headset now what is it telling me about what consciousness is up to so if i'm not if we're not smart enough to do it from first principles and i want to do it for first principles but if i can't i'll try to reverse engineer relativity theory evolution by natural selection quantum mechanics reverse engineer all of those pull them back to the realm of conscious agents look what they're saying about the social dynamics and then try to get a clue about what that's about and answer questions like am i forced to think that they need to eat or is there some deeper principle is is it for example that i can only send an experience to another agent if an agent sends an experience to me is there is there that kind of dynamics that and is it going to be like the small world networks we see for example in the internet where you get big hubs like google and apple which get lots of hits and then tiny little guys like kaufman who gets almost no hits and then a few in between but but but you get this and and there's in some sense the number of social connections you have is some sense your notion of fitness the creators of google are billionaires hoffman's not a billionaire there's a correlation between the number of hits that google had gets the number of pizza often gets and the difference in richness now is that a deep property of these conscious agent networks or not see these are the and this is what was fun about science i don't know the answer evolution of natural selection has told me it's not in space and time it's saying it's not this is all a headset you're going to have to think as a scientist out of the headset but i can't tell you what's outside the headset so we have to be very imaginative and we have to choose what we're going to go after because of course we're probably going to be wrong so you need to choose what you think is going to be interesting i'm going after consciousness because i'm trying to solve this hard problem of how is consciousness related to our brain activity and the mathematics is forcing me to see this vast social network if i bring it to consciousness there's this whole network but i don't know what's about all the science that we've ever done all the science that's ever been done so far has only been in our headset quantum field theory assumes space time the fields are defined over space time relativity is space time and evolution financial selection has been about what evolves in space time all of our science which is very very good science has been in our headset we've never really stepped out of our headset but science has the tools there is some initial work there's a guy named nima arkani at princeton institute for vancity princeton who i think is taking some really important steps beyond the headset because he's already realized space time is doomed and so he is already being very adventurous and stepping outside of space time and looking for mathematical structures in which space and time and quantum mechanics do not appear all right i'm and there's something i find super interesting and this whole concept of space time is doomed right if we abandon space-time it begs a question about causality so right now i cannot believe this is true but this is true on monday i have two memorials to go to young people crazy i'm literally heartbroken and the fact that they both have memorials on the same day is too weird to even contemplate so that got me thinking about the very nature of death but if time doesn't exist is there like so causality requires time it requires you to be moving through time for something to happen first that then creates another knock-on effect another knock-on effect so on and so forth but if time doesn't exist and i mean admittedly we don't know what it's being replaced with but theoretically we know that it isn't going to be like we perceive it now so if time doesn't exist then like where is that notion of entering the the time stream of breaking out of seeing this is a linear equation and obviously tying it to death being i would love to think that there's some way to once again interact with these people if i can just take the headset off right um do you have any intuitions or is there any math around like if it if it isn't let me just ask one question is cause and effect real outside of the headset i think inside the head inside headset no so we have a useful fiction inside the headset you don't think there's cause and effect right well we have the appearance of cause and effect right so if i hit the the cue ball and hits the eight ball into the corner pocket it looks like the cue ball caused the eight ball to crane into the corner pocket yes and that all works but it's a fiction of causality in the old video game of pong you have these little paddles and this ball and you hit and it looks like the paddle is causing the ball and and the fiction of causality is good enough that you can play a game you can actually figure out how to put maybe a little spin on it and so forth or in you know more more advanced games like you know virtual reality or games or you know like grand theft auto you have a nice fiction of causality i turn the wheel to the left my car goes to the left turn the wheel to the right but it's all a fiction the wheel has no causal powers the gas pedal has no causal powers but it's a useful fiction evolution gave us a use of that i don't know that that's true so think about okay a system was created let's let's take the analogy of grand theft auto so a system is created such that it awaits input from your your control pad whatever that control pad may be now admittedly my control pad i press it an electrical signal is sent to something that turns on or off or opens or closes or whatever and then a whole cascade of things happens but it it is i mean you could even trace back the causality to i ate something that gave me the ability to create atp which gave me the ability to generate electricity which gave me the ability to fire a muscle which gave me the ability to press a button which triggered this electrical chain reaction that caused something to happen on the screen but it it there is a chain of causality in the headset there is a chain of causality in the headset like even even though it is the perception is that you know i'm uh turning and the act of actually just moving that thing it makes it turn so i get that that isn't happening but it does create this chain reaction that can be in the headset understood right and so there i disagree so if you look for example in a vr version of it where you see your virtual hands holding a virtual steering wheel yep there's no feedback from the screen to the computer uh there's no feedback from the screen to the computer but there is feedback right like if you think about vr so but so there is a there is a real cause and effect but it's not what we see in the headset on the headset it looks like the wheel that i'm seeing in the headset in the vr headset is what's causing the car yes but i am typically in vr i would be mapping my real hands either by holding a controller or by having cameras well absolutely so i'm mapping my hands my hands do a movement and this program is programmed to wait for the input from the movement of my hands to then trigger that sequence that i just listed before so there is a cause and effect yep but but notice it's not from the things that you're literally seeing in the headset i agree with that but i'm telling you but there there still is a chain of cause and effect absolutely because when you say that it is an illusion of the eight ball hitting the things like that doesn't seem true well within the construct of the headset i'm saying right right well so so maybe another example might help on this so when you like drag your icon you've written a email and it's the icon is blue in the middle of your screen you drag it to the trash can yep you you are using say a mouse or a touchpad and then and in so in this analogy that would be like the real cause and effect but if you said but it's really the motion of the icon on the screen to the trash can that's causing the file to be deleted that's just an illusion of causality right there's no feedback from the pixels of the screen into the computer and that's what i mean everything inside space and time is like seeing the icons on your desktop things move around on your desktop but it's due to something like your you know joystick or something else but the headset since the headset is all of space and time what that means is that i'm saying that everything inside space time is part of that fictional cause i now get what you're saying so in the in the headset that perception is illusion and i was dragging a sort of back and forth between but it's good i mean that's so very very good now take me outside does cause and effect exist if time doesn't exist so two answers and i'll get to the death question um i think in the realm of conscious agents there is a notion of cause and effect but it boils down to a notion of free will that seems to be one of the key notions of cause in in in this in quantum mechanics by the way i should point out that they when you do quantum computations normally in normal computations there's a causal order if you do this multiply and then an add that order is important if you do the add and then the multiply you get a different answer right the order the causal order but it turns out in quantum mechanics you can do a you can get rid of causal order when you do your computation you can have a superposition of you know multiply followed by add with add followed by multiply both orders so you have a superposition of the causal order and it's a theorem that in general you'll be faster you'll be more efficient if you let go of causality and space-time and it turns out that it's actually been done when you build these things and let go of causality and space-time you tap you tap into greater efficiency so when you let go of space-time you're also letting go when what space-time is doomed means also that everything that we believed to be causality in space-time was just a very useful fiction in our headset just like the fictions in various vr games that we play it's a useful fiction lets us play the game there is an underlying causal order and we're arbitrarily ignorant about what that causal order is now about death i don't know but here's an i here's an interesting idea suppose you go to a vr arcade with some friends to play virtual volleyball and you put on your headset and body suit and you're on a you know a like a beach volleyball scene palm trees and sand and then that and you're playing vr volleyball for a while then one of your friends you know says i'm thirsty i need a drink he takes off his headset and bodysuit to go to go get a drink his avatar sits lifeless on the sand it collapses on the sand it looks within the vr headset within the game as though he's dead but he's his consciousness is not ceased he's merely stepped out of that interface all right now we're in what i'll call the phineas gage problem okay so once so phineas gage for those that don't know who's railroad worker one of the most famous examples in neuroscience he's hitting a tamping rod it's like a three foot rod thicker than your thumb and it shoots up through his jaw and out the top of his head taking if i remember right a tea cup's worth a brain matter which seems impossible but never loses consciousness but they say he's forever different right different and he used to be like super sweet he was one of the best workers and then he becomes this belligerent [ __ ] and he can't hold a job right so i will say that's that is the so using this notion of the headset or the umvelt it's like once you alter the way that his brain works and i'm fully willing to accept that this is a problem only inside of the headset but once you alter that function within the headset he's fundamentally different now if the headset is is what i'll call the umvelt it's our interpretation of the stimuli once he goes takes the headset off the inter now we're into transistors diodes electrical gravity or oh god i may have tripped to subway gravity but everything's shy of that one now you have he the experience of that person would be fundamentally different i would be fundamentally different because i'm no longer experiencing things through the lens of my brain essentially right so while i it would seem to me that there's no way around the fact that in the game homie is dead and so or lifeless to use your example so since that's the only thing that i want to relate to that person through my headset right that's what i'm used to that's where the emotion lies and then now once i step outside even emotion would be called the question almost certainly in fact definitively in your explanation the way that i process emotions it would just be unrecognizable outside because i no longer have the brain i no longer have all of those things interesting you said quite possibly right so there is a possibility to you that outside the headset it's close to what we experience inside right see so for me um it's going to be a matter of following the math on this so the theory of conscious agents itself doesn't require an agent to have a self so meaning it can shatter into a bunch of little pieces well that that a self is something that a network of conscious agents has to construct so it will be the borg it would be like an interface representation okay so my what i call myself is on this kind of view no less a construction than space and time and so it's not clear to me how much of that construction will survive death will meaning taking off the headset which are two possibly very different things well it looks for for people who still had the headset on it it would be interesting it looks to them like death but for the person who's actually having the headset taken off maybe it looks like what some people describe with psychedelic experiences or near-death experiences and and and so forth or or you know like really extreme five dmt dmt experiences and so forth these are things i want to explore so at this point i i'll have to say you know not only you know i'm likely to be wrong i'm still trying to figure out what the ideas are that i would want to put on the table that are wrong so but the the theory of consciousness i have right now doesn't require conscious agents to have a self to have memories to have the ability to learn or anything like that so networks of conscious agents construct selves they construct memories they construct emote you know patterns of logics of emotions and so forth it's going to be very interesting to to ask the question about how much when you know my my parents died recently right so you know it's very very it's very very difficult right you and so we all would like to think that there is some way to have contact with the person anyway if you're a physicalist of course that's out of the question right if your consciousness is nothing above and beyond brain activity then when brain activity ceases there's no consciousness end of story it's very very clear in the theory of conscious agents it's quite possible that that yourself dissolves but the conscious agents it seems to me will still be conscious agents they've just maybe dissolved this particular data structure that they created the space time data structure with a particular personality and memories and so forth so basically you're saying if i can just put different words around that to make sure that i understand the the conscious ages coming together to form a person are a data structure that well they form the person as a data structure so everything that i believe about me is very different than what i believe when i was five mm-hmm and and i didn't believe anything when i was maybe one and so i've over the years and decades of my life i've put together this story of i'm myself this is sort of an idea that some of my physicalist colleagues have said like dan dennett a self is a story that we weave it's a narrative that we give maybe there's something to that whereas where i wouldn't go with dan on you know and he's a wonderful guy he's brilliant but you know we are it's okay to disagree right he would say that you know there's nothing but the brain activity and the narratives that it creates and i'm saying well i like the idea of the narratives but but the consciousness is the fundamental reality i have to let go of physicalism because of evolution of natural selection and so maybe consciousnesses won't keep the narratives maybe they will i have some of my colleagues who are working with me who think um you know that we will keep the narratives that we will keep that sense of self but my colleague who thinks that doesn't have any mathematics to support it and so for for me on the one hand of course i'm really open to all the different ideas but as a scientist if i can't put it precisely in math i don't know what i'm talking about yet i mean you and that's what you find is unless you can make it absolutely precise most of the time we think we know what we're talking about and when we make it precise we realize oh okay no i was maybe in the neighborhood but i didn't really know what i was talking about that's what mathematics really comes back and teaches you and that's the thing about a really good scientific theory once you write it down you become a student of your theory like so einstein when he wrote down the equation of general relativity he had the big idea falling in an elevator you would feel weightless big big idea if it was free-falling elevator and he took him eight years to take that idea and what he called the equivalence principle and turned it into the equation of general relativity he wrote it down took him eight years hard hard work to take your intuition and go oh no my intuition what does what do i really mean by that took him eight years and he was einstein right for the rest of us i mean if einstein's ideas aren't that quite precise and take him eight years to get it so precise that he knows exactly what he meant that's what that's what i'm talking about so he writes down the equation a year later a guy named schwartzild who's in the front lines in world war one is solving einstein's equations on the front lines and he he solves equations and he discovers black holes and he writes back to einstein and says your theory says there are black holes einstein didn't know that he didn't believe it he spent decades just disbelieving it his equations were right einstein was wrong the equations become smarter than the genius who wrote them down and that's another reason why we do these mathematical models of science we take our intuitions it might take us a decade to take our intuitions and actually figure out what we really were thinking and get them so precise that we say oh that's the only logically consistent way of stating what i thought i was trying to think and once you've put it down there then all of a sudden you become a student that thing that you've written down is going to teach you and that's what i have with this theory of conscious agents when i wrote it down i had no idea about a number of things i didn't know that agents could combine it was a friend of mine who pointed that out to me so agents can combine and also that that a weird thing that it predicts is that our free choices are not part of our conscious experiences you can't directly experience your own free choices you can experience that you chose but you can never actually experience yourself choosing why well it's really quite interesting you can experience like if i go you know here's there's chocolate and vanilla i'm going to choose between chocolate and vanilla well i just chose chocolate but how did i do that well i had some deliberation process but when i finally it i can all i can do is see myself reaching for the chocolate or the vanilla i can see my cogitation processes but but the but isn't that all in the headset all that i'm seeing is in the headset that's right so i'm seeing so by the way i only know my actions through my headset i actually don't know what i'm doing when i reach out and grab something i don't know what i'm doing in objective reality in the realm of conscious agents how does all of this play out in your real life and i've heard you talk about that there are moments where you have i'm sort of putting words in your mouth but almost a meditative experience where you transcend the notion of self um how so how do you stay so enthusiastic about this for so long when it seems like i mean really really at a deep [ __ ] level man as a human experience this just all feels so real right right well i wouldn't say that i transcend the self but i what i do get it once in a while is a glimpse that oh this is just a headset i actually feel it that i'm just rendering this most of us feel like space just exists i'm stuck inside space there's this big stage i'm on the stage it's very different i think by the way the next generation will probably get this much easier those who have just been raised spending a lot of time in vrs that are as compelling and as immersive as everyday life it's going to be just sort of obvious you take your headset off and go it's a no-brainer to think well this is just a headset too and to just sort of be there so i think that it'll it'll be for the next generation the fact that i'm having a hard time about it thinking about it this way and imagining it experientially will just be sort of an artifact of the technology i grew up with if i grew up with vrs that were really good as opposed to the stuff that we grew up with which is not that good then it would just be sort of obvious you do when you're young enough it's just this obvious that yeah i'm just seeing a vr headset too because by the way here's one way to think about it if you close your eyes you just see sort of gray right modeled gray in front of you so it looks it doesn't look like nothing it looks like model gray but what is it like backwards back through your head when you close your eyes well it's not model gray it's nothing and it's really the first time you really if you close your eyes and experience that yeah what is it like in front of me yeah it's just gray sort of model gray what is it like behind me absolutely nothing that's the headset you only have a headset of space time in front there is no headset behind now you have not a visual headset then you have this set yeah i can put my hands back there and do stuff so so i have this but it's all a creation it's all and so i do get glimpses of that once in a while but there were no now put on the natural selection language right so i have to pick the language of the science that i want to use you know because i don't have a better language in some sense for discussing this evolution um there were no selection pressures for us to see the truth and so there were no selection pressures for us to not take space time as the truth and so we do piaget tells us you know when we begin to take objects as real as we you know these aren't just like little data structures that you create that they really exist all the time he called it object permanence and piaget said that you know when the kid is about 17 months 16 or 17 months of age they don't have object pronouns permanence you take a little baby doll put in front of a child they play with it you put put it behind the pillow if they're 16 months old they just doesn't need it doesn't exist kyojay said and then but at 18 months now they go and crawl around and try to get the object the baby doll out of the behind the pillow later experiments showed maybe down to three or four months but the point is these experiments show that we're programmed now i'm using the evolution language we're programmed by natural selection to buy into the illusion that objects exist even when they're not perceived object permanent when we're three or four months old we're not rational it's being done to us without our permission and so by the time we come to the age of reason it's it's the water that we we don't know that we're wet it's the water we've been swimming in all of our life we just have been programmed to take this as the reality i took it for the reality it was only because i couldn't solve certain problems like the problem of consciousness and it was only because when i looked at evolution it began to tell me space-time is not the reality cannot be it's the wrong language it must be only like a headset that i was going holy i mean i still remember the first time i realized this must be just a headset i had to sit down it was such i mean i was a grown adult i was like i was 30 years old or something like that the first time i realized this it was such a shock i had to sit down everything that i believed all of a sudden disappeared but of course the next moment i was again visually believing i'm in reality i'm seeing the truth so the programming is there but ever since that moment when the it was the math that that did it to me so do you think created math very interesting question my own thinking in terms of this idea that consciousness is fundamental and conscious agents are fundamental when we actually study consciousness and there's been a scientific study of consciousness since 1860 it's called the field of psychophysics there's a guy named gustav fechner who started the whole field and a lot of my research has been in psychophysics where we literally get mathematical models of conscious experiences and we test people very very carefully in the lab we find that mathematical experience that conscious experiences are mathematically structured my experience of this water bottle the mathematics is unbelievable there are you can write down differential geometry reflectance functions i mean the mathematics is incredible it's true of all of our conscious experience of everywhere we look conscious experience we it seems so squishy it goes through your fingers how can you there's mathematics so the way i think about math and experience is that mathematics is like the bones of the living conscious experience they're not they can't be divorced from each other there's more to experience than just math but there's not less than math there's math and more and so that mathematics in conscious experiences have a deep intimate relationship that i'm still trying to understand but but but the empirical evidence is quite strong i mean all the psychophysics that people have done we just find mathematical structure everywhere and that's why i came back to this girdle's incompleteness theorem where that theorem is just saying no matter how many mathematical structures you discover you haven't started there will be endless more come from girdle figured out how to do this so it came from and cannot let me maybe now i'm understanding it so we once thought the atom was the smallest structure and then we discovered there's something below that and something below that and something below that are you saying outside of the headset there's just no end to the something below that that's right that's right that and and this is what girdle's result is that there is no end to the mathematical structure so is the incompleteness theorem that you will never be able to complete it you'll never be able to get to sort of bay oh god i'm going to put words in your mouth base reality i don't know another way to say that that's right that's right that that's what that girdle's theorem seems to be telling us is that and no matter how complicated the mathematics is that you know effectively you haven't even begun yet and when you say theorem i assume that means that this is a math equation that girdle performed and not it's not girdle's theory it's girdle's theorem it's a theorem in other words it's true that we can't ever know all mathematical truths interesting i don't understand math well enough to even know what to ask beyond that so to me were my ignorance makes this a miracle i'm willing to accept it just to not be abusive i'll just give you a clue about the kind of thing that he does right in the math in the math there are these things called self-referential statements that cause problems okay so if i say um this statement is false now was that statement true or false well let's let's look if the state the statement is the statement is false well if it's false then it's true true right but but well what then if it's true then it's false that's right yeah so you get these when you have self-reference you get these problems that that pop up you know the so the the barber of seville cuts all and only the hair of those who don't cut their own hair who cuts the hair of the barber of seville right all these kinds of things so girdle was able to take this kind of thing and and make mathematical statements self-referential and he was able to create a sentence that said that that a statement in mathematics says this sentence is true within the system but can't be proved so he was able to construct that that's that then that's why so he actually has the theorem so he proves and and then he shows that no matter so if even if you have that sentence in there'll be a new sentence that's self-referential that and so what he shows by by this this kind of structure of course i'm the the the true theorem and the true proof is is incredible there's girdle numbers it's you have to be not just a mathematician you have to be a brilliant mathematician a logician to even understand it so so it's it's very very few people who actually understand but every time you quote unquote solve it it's self-referential again that's right it's the self-reference that's the key so just so there's not in complete magic i want to let you know that based on this notion of a self-referential statement but but the bottom line is it shows that there's an endless in principle endless possibility of exploration of mathematical structure and and since i just mentioned so just to like almost give it a silly answer it's the the mathematical equation is what's below math and the answer is math it's structure all the way down forever forever forever but if consciousness is fundamental that means that there's endless conscious structure endless consciousness that's just something that says we don't [ __ ] understand like that to me quite frankly is as sort of i just have to accept it as turtles all the way down saying math all the way down or consciousness all the way down is the same as saying turtles all the way down there's literally no difference in my limited mind right so this is where we're going to have to come with every scientific theory right every scientific theory will have some set of miracles and that's that bothers me as much as it bothers you yeah i don't like it but i so when i bump up against that i take a pretty and i don't maybe this is stupid enlighten me but here's here's where i come up so i will routinely be asked if i believe in god and the answer is no i don't believe in god in any of the ways that people mean when they say god but there is so obviously something that i don't understand that it is just self-evident to me you would use the language and maybe rightly so that this is a headset and so you have an intuitive sense that there's something beyond the headset and you have no idea what it is and therefore you just say there is something i don't understand right so um even here's the thing that used to [ __ ] with me as a little kid the universe is expanding expanding into what when you build a house you build it on land right so the land is there the land is on the planet so it's like there's this sense of um to for it to expand it has to expand into something therefore something had to exist it was very easy for me to just go yep there's something here i don't understand the fact that um general relativity and quantum mechanics don't play well together yep there's something i don't understand like i am i am very okay with just going and there's something i don't understand it's it's the the part that gets hard for me is the it's math all the way down where it's it's no longer an acknowledgement of this is something we just don't understand and it's saying and now believe that it's math all the way down and i don't know that it really matters to be honest but that that's where i always bump and go well yeah there are two big camps on this one is that we invent math and the other is we discover it right so when a new theorem is published did the person discover it or did they invent it right that's that's one of the big questions if if isn't it self-evident that it has to be discovered well but if it is discovered then girdle girdles incompleteness theorem says it is mouth all the way down right so that's that's that's that's the thing but if it's discovered i'm sorry if it's invented then that points at us and says who who is this discoverer who is this inventor that's doing all this so being so and it's really important for everybody to understand that that every scientific theory as we said earlier stops explanation stops there's going to be some place where we say grant me this please and if you grant me this then i will explain everything else like einstein says grant me space and time if you grab me space and time i will write down these mathematics and then it turns out there's black holes and they're all interesting stuff we can do gps because of einstein's theory of special relative general relativity it gives you all this but we are granting space and time now someone else like there's a guy named seth lloyd who says okay i'm not going to grant you space time i'll start with quantum bits and quantum gates outside of space and time it's just abstract quantum computational stuff and i can show you how to boot up space time general relativity from quantum bits and quantum gates the curvature of general to relativistic space time has to do with the action of the gates and so forth so he's no longer assuming space time he's explaining it but now he's asking for a different miracle please grant me quantum bits and quantum gates now you can imagine someone going well now i'm going to do better than seth lloyd i'm going to explain i'm going to do something deeper than quantum bits and quantum case that's perhaps what what animal arkhani hamid is doing at you know princeton so maybe he'll get quantum mechanics emerging from something deeper but he will then say grant me what he's asking for is the amplitude and some other structures like that so if you grant me this amplitude i can give you space time and quantum mechanics and and so forth so so that's the nature of explanation and i don't i'm still having to come to terms with that i would like to have a theory of everything and i can only have a theory of everything except these assumptions for my theory and those assumptions are my miracles and so at the foundation of every scientific theory there's this moment of humility explanation stops here it also stops one other remarkable place whenever in our theory we have a probability that can't be reduced by greater knowledge right so in a newtonian world if i flip a coin in principle if i knew in detail the mass of the coin and this distribution and exactly how i flipped it i could tell you heads or tails with probability one but i don't know the initial conditions well enough and so i have to give you a probability of a half that's a subjective probability epistemic probability but suppose no matter there's a probability that no matter how much i know the probability can't completely go away then that's no longer epistemic there's something more interesting going on this was the debate between bor and einstein about quantum mechanics there are probabilities that come up there einstein was saying those probabilities are just our lack of knowledge there's no god doesn't really play dice there's no fundamental probability going on there bohr said no no no you don't tell god what to do these are not epistemic probabilities these probabilities cannot be reduced period they're probabilities for everyone including god the metaphorical god ah one thing i wanted to ask you that came to me when i was reading is the double slit experiment is one of the weirdest thing in physics for me that it really messes with me so for people not familiar with the double slit experiment you take a single photon you shoot it through a slit and if you're not measuring it as it happens on the sort of back wall you would see like a bullet mark right so you fire a single bullet it goes through the slit and it hits the wall um if you uh sorry that's if you watch it if you don't measure it then it goes through like a wave and you get an interference pattern on the back you can put another slit and if you're watching it it goes through one slit if you're not watching it then it goes through both slits like a wave uh that always just seems so weird but if we well in fact i'll i'll ask does your hypothesis about consciousness address the issue of the double slit experiment yes so it will come out i believe that what those experiments are showing us is that if we assume that everything is happening in space and time and that space time is the fundamental reality then we're going to be confused what we're seeing is space time is just a visualization tool we're using for things that are happening outside of space and time and so they're not constrained to travel through space and time absolutely not constrained we're constrained to see them as though they're traveling through space and time and that's why quantum mechanics looks so weird but why does um observing or not observing change its state because we're creating reality as we render it so i was wondering if this is the look of the moon not look at the moon exactly right the moon does the in fact einstein asked one of his colleagues when they were walking said do you really believe the moon doesn't exist or only exist when someone looks doesn't exist otherwise he was talking about quantum mechanics and my interpretation of quantum mechanics is exactly that that that space-time itself doesn't exist when it's not observed and therefore the particles inside inside space time i don't know how do you talk about the double slit experiment doesn't that sw it potentially let me ask is that potentially like a proof of your theory well unfortunately there are no proofs in science there you every theory has lots of hypotheses and auxiliary facts and assumptions and so forth and if if your theory doesn't come out quite right you don't know what went wrong in it and also um even if every experiment that you've done is compatible with your theory maybe you just haven't been smart enough to think of the experiment that will take it down so so so no real serious scientist would say that any scientific theory has been proved does it point in the right direction though it's like you you bring up a lot of examples but that's not one is there a reason is there a hole in that one already that you see or because to me that that is some compelling [ __ ] like hey you want to wonder or you want to know if the moon exists when you look at it or if it's garbage bin uh i keep forgetting your garbage collected garbage collected when you look away boom double slit experiment well so the double-slit experiment is completely compatible with what i'm saying the reason i don't take it as a proof is because there are some physicalists who have the multiverse or many worlds interpretations of many worlds interpretations so hugh everett um for example so what these guys will say is that um to really understand superposition and all these weird quantum things you have to realize that whenever you make a measurement whole new universes spin off and all possible states that are allowed by the quantum state function the wave function um are in are true in some some universe and so many serious physicists believe in in the many worlds interpretation and related but but distinct thing of the multiverse which is a slightly a different thing they think that there are multiverses and so what what is what is true is that local realism is false so local realism is the claim that objects in space time like say a proton have definite values of their properties like position momentum and spin definite values um even when they're not observed and there's two parts that's the first part and that they have influences that propagate no faster than the speed of light we have very very good evidence to say if if we know anything we know that local realism is false but that leaves open whether it's the locality that's false things you could imagine things having problem influences faster than the speed of light so a guy named you know david baum has a theory in which things have influences faster than the speed of light or whether it's realism that's false that which is what i'm claiming that realism is false that a particle doesn't have a position or a momentum or spin when it's not observed because you create it as a headset element when you observe so that's so i say that we know that local realism is false i claim that's the realism that's false but there are some who can claim it's the locality right but this is an example of you saying you have to have a theory that can be backwards compatible essentially that's right right it makes sense i'm going to ask you a super random question cause i'm so curious you have a wedding ring so i'm assuming you're married so i'm assuming you love somebody yes um that's that's such a headset experience yes how often are you sort of in sort of hey this really is real and i'm going to treat it as such and like does your wife think this is all like does she find this decidedly unromantic my wife is an artist she's a very talented art artist her name is geralyn i call her jerry and she's you know she's um not a scientist and she appreciates my science and even though she can't really understand any of the math and i appreciate her art even though i'm a monkey looking at mozart right you know because i'm no artist and so we have mutual respect for the talents the complimentary talents and we sort of complement each other and do you just have to turn that part of your brain off that's like a lot of time with her well with her yes because um she'll she's happy for me to talk with her about it um up to a point and and then we need to do something different right and that's healthy for me but yeah do you want to so one thing that i find interesting is people that believe that this is all a simulation and that if we just find the right equation we could essentially exit the simulation right and that's always struck me as um intuitively false that there would be no way to exit the simulation again this goes back to what i was saying earlier about the person who takes her headset off they would just be so fundamentally different the way that you would be processing data there's no sort of core you i think like i can't conceptualize it feels to me unless the i mean god is this what you're saying in fact let me ah is this what you're saying that there is this this uh conscious agent that i in the headset i in fact no there's a conscious agent that is me and the way that i present to you right now is me with the headset on but the conscious agent could actually possibly remain intact when it pulls off the headset you addressed this a little bit earlier but it's now becoming more concrete in my mind right it seems to me quite possible that conscious agents will continue to exist even when they step out of so i could take the headset off effectively exit the simulation be like what the [ __ ] is all this around me but still have a sense of emotion and attachment and love and vision quite possibly in the sense that that this isn't the only headset so maybe by taking this headset would essentially be my brain right so i'd be i'd be out of this headset and would i necessarily be putting on another headset this is your brain remember the headset isn't your brain the brain is just one of the symbols in your headset for what i'm using for all the agents for all the agents that are combining to form you so i i imagine that it's possible for an agent to go to a different headset could they go to no headset or would they be then existing in a realm of pure math well and that that i don't know so in the in the following sense so so it's it so the part that i think i'm confident about but again we'll see agents could get new headsets and a wide variety of them so we could really explore and we could and it could be very ted said we can shorthand to umville that's right a different way of perceiving it and jana batt had said i can jump into exactly a dolphin headset and maybe let go of space and time and do something different than space and time my notion of self may migrate in the process right i'm making some of my emotions maybe not others who who knows do you think of taking the headset off as is a an event horizon beyond which we just cannot possibly even guess the the mathematics that i've got says that a conscious agent always can have awareness without experience there is the awareness without experience that's right the math is very clear about that so when i write down the set the space of possible conscious experiences of consciousness what's called a probability space which there's a set of possible conscious experiences with i think of awareness as i exist no it's no variance but no i there's just awareness without an eye so this would so and by the way i make no claim to be you know expert in any like mystical spiritual traditions like buddhism or hinduism and so forth but i've i've been told that they do have this notion um and so i'm not speaking as an expert but i've heard that they have this notion of awareness without content and that certain meditators claim to to to be there and you know i i meditate a little bit and i might get little glimpses of of a notion of awareness without a self without any particular content that's the closest i can get conceptually to thinking about a conscious agent without a headset it's a field of pure awareness but it transcends than any emotion any notion of self any specific conscious experience but you've never done psychedelics because the number one punch line that people say is yo you have no sense of self like you dissolve into oneness right yeah no i i i why don't you i haven't um i may at some point um you know where it's legal and so forth so far well what's stopped me so far is well i'll put this way i've been reading the experiences of people so i'm benefiting from their experiences i talk with with people extensively actually some very very extensively about their experiences and so i've studied them um there is a price to pay i um but only in the headset but only in the headset well well and while i'm in the headset see i really i'm so eager to pursue these ideas i think i've gotten i know people say well you if you don't do it for yourself you can't know what it's really like to be without a self well but i can look at the math and the math actually says yeah i'm seeing that in my mouth so i've gotten the insight that i need there did you listen maybe i will do at some point you know did you listen to sam harris's podcast about taking five grams of psilocybin i think i haven't heard him do this it's very interesting because i know you know sam um you must listen to that podcast okay it is [ __ ] fascinating and he was talking about the fact that um and i haven't done it either by the way uh so right and i have a very clear i am a physicalist is that what we call it right physical uh so because of that i'm like i am not [ __ ] with my brain like i'm super paranoid right i do part of me wants to do it so if you cut my corpus callosum one hemisphere wants to do psychedelics really badly right right the other side is like get the [ __ ] out of here we're not doing psychedelics is a very bad idea absolutely so i'm i'm sort of stuck in this like go no-go scenario anyway i agree that's when i said there's a price to pay that's exactly what i was that's that's the i am super paranoid so sam said in in the experience he had a moment where he he forgot that he did drugs like he had no sense of oh i have taken a drug to be in the state and i'm simply in the state and i'm going to be in this state forever and this is what life is and he was like it it is a type of hell where it is just it's uh now i'm putting words in his mouth but the feeling i got and he may have actually said this was that it was like a form of just never-ending terror right and so you sort of pass through that and he was like there are other moments where it's it's never ending bliss and you're like it's going to be blissful forever and it was just oh the thought of where you have no concept i have done something to myself where i have taken a drug and this is a consequence of that and it will ultimately wear off uh that it's interesting it is interesting man and i get how that can really shape people's perception of what is real and like really shake you loose because as as i read this stuff and for anybody that's made it this far first of all congratulations this [ __ ] is so deep and so heady but the more time that i've spent with your ideas the more i actually i feel like someone is sort of filing off a callus on the bottom of my foot and it's like oh whoa we're getting to like a different sensation here i never realized that i had uh a perception in you know when you've got the calluses that are like half an inch thick it's like you just forget that that can actually feel something so the more time i've spent with your ideas the more i'm like man there really is something here and so i the first note i took on you was so arrogant and so aggressive and i was like dude does this guy not realize that he invalidates his own theory by saying like this is about natural selection because i didn't understand your whole thing about math and reason right so but then you like you start spending more time with you're like [ __ ] i can't just discredit this then you start exploring it like i definitely before i started thinking about your stuff die-hard physical list i will probably regression to the mean right so i'm going to slide back to that unless i really spend time on this because it is such a compelling illusion absolutely but it it does i can feel things pushing me at my back to experiment with psychedelics for reasons like this where i yes i could meditate for the next 40 years and maybe get to the point where i could have one of those experiences of what it means to be aware without a sense of i i literally can't imagine what that is right now i can imagine blanking out right i can't imagine having a sense that there is awareness without me being inserted somehow into that that's right um so it would be really fascinating to very quickly be ejected out of you know my normal state of consciousness and into this and part of part of what i promised myself i would do in this interview is to really figure out like why the [ __ ] does this all matter like you and that's why i'm like i'm dancing on this idea of like you love your wife like there there is a realm in which you're like the headset is pretty rad and it's given me amazing [ __ ] and i'm really having a hard time like actually stepping outside at the headset and so so much of my life is predicated on the headset it may not even be possible to retain myself which i value i'm assuming right so i value myself i value this experience i [ __ ] value my wife right that's the one that really scares me like right i get so much out of my wife like i've imagined my wife and i actually had this conversation one time like hey magic genie shows up what do you wish for and she was like please don't wish for super intelligence and i was like why like that's such a rad option right to be the smartest human that ever existed she said if you did that you'd no longer be in love with me and i was like [ __ ] you're actually right because if you're you wouldn't love any human anymore like i love my dogs but not like i love my wife because there's such a gap in in how we can relate to each other so when i think about like stepping outside of the headset man you're giving up everything that you value and that's like really really trippy now i admit if you told me hey tom here's like a pill you can take it it's going to give you a little peek outside the headset i'd be like right i'd have to do it i'd have to take a peek i'd have to see like what because i don't believe that drugs are necessarily punching through to some truth i don't find myself like super compelled to do it but the idea of looking beyond is both exhilarating and terrifying because of that loss of the things that i i am so invested in yes i i'm on the same page with you and and it's you know interaction with my wife is one of the greatest pleasures is you know what makes life meaningful and my my daughter and i've got three grandkids and and you know my son-in-law and my students my son-in-law made the list not bad yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah jay is a great guy and and in this case i'm interacting with other conscious agents and i'm benefiting so i'm now going into my theory this is now it seems impersonal but i'm going back to the theory within the framework of the theory there's a dynamics of conscious agencies as as conscious agents interact that they they learn they get new comprehensions and they create new agents so what we're doing in this headset in terms like we're interacting there's something new this we're both growing we're both learning from this experience we're we come away from a different and that seems to be part of it if this kid in the candy store theory of consciousness is on the right track then we're experiencing it right now we're kids in candy stores we're exploring and we're wondering what's on the what's what's on the next shelf of candy right that's what we're saying here when we say well i'd love to see what if i take five or what what happens what's going on there so that may be you know what it's really about is that it's exploration and maybe you know in meditation one thing that does happen is that you get less and less grasping of things that you used to be grasping about i i find that i'm able to to let go of things that fears for example but pictures of myself it's it's it's really in some sense a dismantling the the best metaphor i can come up with is i read sometime that when a caterpillar goes through metamorphosis right goes into a cocoon the this the immune cells of the caterpillar try to kill and they do kill the cells that are trying to begin the process of transformation into a butterfly and for a while the immune cells of the caterpillar it's a battle and but eventually the immune cells of the caterpillar get overwhelmed and then much of the caterpillar liquefies now that can't be fun right i mean i mean liquefaction i mean that it all the structures that were everything that you knew as a caterpillar are turning into goo and no wonder your immune system is fighting that tooth and nail until your immune system gets overwhelmed but finally the immune system gets overwhelmed most of the structure of the caterpillar turns into goo and then the transformation happens that's what meditation feels like to me which means it's it's a double-edged kind of thing it's it's both extremely painful because everything that i know and have been connected to and addicted to is dissolving but on the other hand i'm realizing wait well that wasn't absolutely that essential i thought it was essential but it's not and there's a new kind of structure that's being built that i have no idea caterpillar can't figure out what the butterfly's gonna be presumably and so maybe that's what it's like to be starting to change headsets maybe that's maybe meditation is a way of letting go of some of the the restrictive trappings of one headset and upgrading right and you're getting the 3.0 now you just have the 2.0 now it's 3.0 i don't know but but these are the kinds of things i do want to explore within the mathematics and that's why i'm sort of it all fits it doesn't mean it's right but it all fits the kid in the candy store my own kid anticipation of seeing what's next it does fit maybe that's why i like the kid in the candy store theory just that's just me and you know for other people that's that's not what it's about but i think all of us do wonder about what's next and why are we here and what is it about that's why i mean that's one reason i do this is it life is very very short i want to explore and things that most of what i've believed very deeply has been very deeply wrong most of what humanity has believed very deeply has been very deeply wrong we have a very good we're almost about 100 percent consistent in being deeply wrong we've believed that space time is fundamental almost everybody believes that space time is fundamental we all believe the earth is flat now a few and very advanced physicists ed whitten has said space-time is doomed david gross has said it's in doomed neymar connie ahmed is saying space time is doomed and these guys especially nema are now really being adventurous very very brave and saying let's go outside of space and time into a world where we can't think just imagine what they're trying to do we're trying to think entirely outside space and time like as you said as a kid you're going what could possibly be on the other side of space and time these guys are saying not only is there something on the side i need to think deeply about it and here's a mathematical structure in which space and time quantum mechanics and unitarily don't even appear in the language and then i'll show you how our headset they don't call it headset that's now me ad living for them but so how space and time which i'm calling headset how space and time and quantum mechanics and general relativity appear from these deeper structures in which there's no space in no time so that fits perfectly with what what i'm saying now they have no idea what this deeper structure is about and what i'm up to is i'm actually nema gave a class at harvard last fall more than 20 lectures on for graduate students on these deeper structures outside of space and time i am taking this class online there's all on youtube so i'm just studying it i'm transcribing these lectures studying them because i believe that i can show with my team my mathematician so they'll show that the long-term behavior of this dynamics of consciousness that we're working on what we call the asymptotic behavior will give rise to the structures he's seeing like his amplitude and so the reason why and then the amplitude and he already shows how to build up space time from that that way i'll be able to go all the way from conscious agents through the long-term behavior conscious agents through the amplitude to space-time i can show you how the headset is built that's my goal and so i'm i'm really quite excited once i get you know i know enough to be worth his time i may talk with him but but i'm not going to waste his time until i know enough so i'm trying to figure out how the headset is built once we if we succeed we'll be able to reverse engineer that headset and the technologies we'll we'll be able to play with the parameters of space-time so it's like suppose you're you know a wizard at grand theft auto and you can play within the game do all sorts of things that people find amazing that's great but imagine someone who actually knows the source code they can take the wizard and they can give them a flat tire they can take all the gas out of his tank they can make the road infinitely long they can do whatever they want to they can play with the very parameters so the wizard is nothing all of our science right now has made us wizards we're eventually going to get the source code of the game there's literally a book called off to be the wizard about somebody who realizes this is all source code and he can go in and edit the code wow that is uh wow you should check that out donald thank you so much this has been absolutely thrilling reading your book listening to your interviews and now spending time with you is amazing i am now going to think of myself as the caterpillar fighting off the butterfly that was amazing i love that uh you've liquefied my brain and i hope that on the other side is a butterfly but uh who knows thank you so much for joining us it was a great pleasure tom thank you so much you got it man all right everybody that was it thank you for joining us conversation with tom there it is if 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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, evolutionary psychology, consciousness, AI, logic, mathematics, natural selection, game theory, fitness payoffs, space-time, split-brain patient, conscious agent, causality, virtual reality, free will, self, social networks

Id: UJukJiNEl4o

Length: 144min 21sec (8661 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020