This scientist will make you question EVERYTHING... 🔴

I'm Don Hoffman and I'm at the University of California at Irvine in the department of cognitive sciences with joint appointments in philosophy and computer science as well and I try to integrate all of those disciplines in the work that I do well in in the field of cognitive science I'm studying visual perception how do we see a 3d world how do we see the colors of objects the shapes of objects the motions of objects what are the processes that are going on inside of our brains well when we do that and it turns out about 1/3 of the brains cortex is engaged just in vision so when you simply open your eyes and look around the room billions of neurons and trillions of synapses are springing into action and so one of the things we try to do in the cognitive neuroscience is just understand what's going on why all of this horsepower 1/3 of your highest processing horsepower is involved in visual perception that's a bit surprising so the question is why do we need to have that much horsepower in something that seems so simple just open your eyes and see the world and it turns out that we have to do a lot of computation because in some sense we're creating the worlds that we see and so computer science comes into it because we need to understand from a computational point of view what's going on when you open your eyes and see the shapes of objects the colors and the motions of objects you're not just seeing them you're actually creating a virtual reality in some sense for yourself you're a reality engine what I'm saying now is pretty widely accepted in cognitive neurosciences they they almost every cognitive neuroscientist will say that we are constructing what we see in real time so you close your eyes you just see a gray field you open your eyes and it looks like you're just seeing a 3d world with objects and colors emotions as it is just taking a snapshot but most cognitive neuroscientists will say but that's not what's going on what's happening really is that within about 100 milliseconds about 1/10 of a second you're creating the 3d world around you you're creating the objects and the colors and emotions you're doing it so quickly and apparently so effortlessly that you're you know taken in you think you're just seeing the world as it is that would say that's the majority the vast majority of you in cognitive neuroscience is right now that we construct what we see and so computer science comes into it in part because to make sure that we understand what we're doing that our theories about the construction process are accurate it's good for us to try to build them to actually build robotic vision systems that works so if you have a theory about how you see the 3d structure of objects well then build it and if you can actually have a computer that has video cameras giving inputs into the computer and then software in the computer that creates inside the computer the 3d model of the object that is what you think it should have done then maybe you've got a good theory so the computer science comes in in the following way we're trying to reverse engineer what's going on in the human brain well enough that we can then implement it in a computer vision system and build robotic visions and if you can do that then that that's an existence proof that you might actually have a good theory and then the philosophy that's actually the person who is most famous for sort of pushing this point of view is a guy named David Marr who was a professor at MIT late 70s and early 1980s and David Marr he was in the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT and in what's now the brain and cognitive sciences department and he was the one that he had a background in mathematics and neuroscience and worked in the AI lab Marvin Minsky invited him to come there because Marr had this this new point of view that we should you know vision is a constructive process and we need to understand the mathematics of the construction well enough that we can actually build it so if you can build working systems robotic systems then which is you know contribution to artificial intelligence then that will really show that you understand what's going on when we open our eyes and see in the construction of vision right so what what what Mar got us into what David Marr got the field to think about is trying to get our understanding of human vision human visual processing so rigorous that we can actually build robotic vision systems so that means that that what seems to us like an immediate perception of shapes and colors and motions is in fact a sophisticated computation and so that's where the computer science comes in we actually want to take raw images coming in from video from like video cameras which is just a bunch of numbers if you look at it it's just an uninterpretable array of numbers millions of numbers so so the idea is that we want to build robotic vision systems that will take for example video from cameras into the computer in that video if you look at it is just an array of numbers millions of numbers you look at it it's who knows what it means it's just a bunch of numbers and you want to take those numbers and then create a world what that those numbers are trying to describe to you like a boy riding a bicycle eating hotdogs or whatever might be going on there so so to do that you can see going from those numbers to a three-dimensional world with colors and objects and boys riding bicycles is not a trivial thing and so that's what robotic vision and computer vision has been doing ever since David Marr really got us going in this direction in the late mid to late 1970s and it was his work that got me into this field I read his work when I was an undergraduate and said where is this guy I'd like to work with him and I I ended up going and being a student at MIT so so I got I had the pleasure of working with David Marr for a couple years the last two years of his life until he died of Kimia while I was still his graduate student but he said he set the field on this on this new path and ever since then there have been the majority of the field has been trying to build rigorous mathematical models that you could in principle or in practice actually build robotic vision systems from so now I've got an intelligent vision system on my car partly as a result of this kind of work that can see if I'm on the on the road going over the lines and so forth and it'll beep at me so we're starting to get intelligent vision systems coming out of this where think the car itself can see in 3d so so this is the result of this long decades-long effort of trying to understand mathematically and precisely how why we have to spend a third of our brains cortex all that horsepower in seeing the 3d world and objects and colors now we're we're really understanding that so that's the standard view I mean there are some dissenters but I would say it's by far the majority view that we create what we see we construct the worlds that we see you could well a lot of people in artificial intelligence would say exactly that that we are machines were just carbon-based machines so that would be the standard view and artificial intelligence we we are complex machines and they would say that we should not take that as indication that we're not valuable but we are just carbon-based machines and we can reverse-engineer the algorithms that are going on in the brain once we reverse-engineer those algorithms from the neural networks of the brain then we can implement them in artificial neural networks for example in you know in silicon and so we transfer from carbon silicon but the algorithms if we've done it right are still the same or close to the algorithms that are that are in the brain so that's sort of the idea and then the idea then is that those algorithms do a good job of truthfully reconstructing the true shapes the true colors the true motions of objects in the world that's the standard view so it's not my view now but that is the standard view well my view is that we do construct what we seek so I agree with the field with the majority of the field that we construct in real time all the shapes colors and motions and objects that we see but I don't think that we're reconstructing the truth so everybody in my field pretty much believes that we're reconstructing a good faithful reproduction of the true shapes and colors and I don't think we are instead I think that what's going on is it's more like a desktop interface on your computer so if you have an icon for it and say oh you're writing a file or editing a photograph so you're writing an email to a friend and the the icon for that file is blue and rectangular and in the middle of your screen that doesn't mean that the file itself in your computer is blue and rectangular and in the middle of the computer that that's a silly notion anybody who thought that doesn't understand what the desktop interface is for and I think that that's what we have our perceptions are like that desktop interface so space and time or the desktop three-dimensional space is you perceive it in time or the desktop and then physical objects like a glass a car a spoon these are all just icons in that three-dimensional desktop and the point of the interface the desktop and the on the icons is not to show you the truth the point is really to hide the truth right if you had to know in the case of the computer if you had to know all the diodes and resistors and voltages and and you know magnetic fields if you had to know all that and deal with that you'd never finish writing your email to your friend so you don't need to know the reality you want it in fact the desktop interface is there to hide that reality reality gets in the way of you really need to do and so I think what you say that's right but what you see the whole three-dimensional world that we perceive and all the physical objects that we perceive and all their properties are just like the the colored icons on your desktop right that's right and that's that's a very useful belief right it's very useful for me to know you know to think that the icon is the file and I can just double click on the file and it'll open look like drag the file to the trashcan I can delete it so it's very it's a very nice and useful fiction it allows me to do what I need to do but it is just a useful fiction that's right you're fooling yourself if you believe that what you're seeing is a true replication of what is there when you don't look so I do think that there is an objective world I think there is a reality that exists whether or not I'm here and whether or not I'm looking so there is some objective reality but the chances that my perceptions are reconstructing part of that reality so I'm seeing the truth the chances are actually you can prove the r0 and the argument comes from evolution so I started looking at evolution by natural selection and what it has to say about OK [Music] that's right that's right that's right yeah that's it's a very alarming point of view yes oh yeah oh yeah yeah so this this point of view is quite surprising the idea that what you're seeing when you look around you see a fireplace you see a cop you see people well but yes what you're seeing is a representation that you construct for one purpose the representation is there to keep you alive and to guide your behaviors so that you can stay alive long enough to reproduce it's an evolutionary argument that we can go into but the whole point is just like the desktop interface on your comb and then I'll continue my sentence to the end and then stop okay very good oh absolutely whatever you see around you is what you think right but not the truth yes well it so so exactly so what you see from this point of view what you're seeing when you see shapes of objects and their colors and their motions in a 3d world around you is simply your interface your representation it's not the truth it's it's there to keep you alive long enough to reproduce there is a question do other people see the same thing that you do and the answer is probably their perceptions are very very similar so if I am seeing a red rose and you look at it and you say that there's a red rose there's a good chance that your experiences of the red rose are very very similar to my experiences and the reason is not that because there's an objective red rose in the world but because whatever the objective world is when I interact with it i construct an interface that's very similar to the interface that you construct when you interact with that world because we're members of the same species we're not exactly the same your genes are slightly different from mine there are mutations and so we're not gonna see exactly the same thing and there are cases where we actually know this for a fact in the case of colour perception we know that roughly one third of men have one allele for the red photoreceptor and the other 2/3 have a different allele and they actually see the red orange yellow end of the spectrum a little bit differently from each other it's a measurable difference so we know that there are differences in the DNA which lead to measurable differences in the interface but nevertheless we could we could say that our perceptions are substantially similar how do we know how do we know if we see the truth oh right so well if I see a snake for example you might say well you know if you think that that snake is just an icon on your interface why don't you touch it why don't you play with it because it'll bite you and after you're dead yeah what will know that that snake was more than just an icon on your desktop interface it's it's it's real it's a real part of objective reality and and I wouldn't touch that snake for the same reason I wouldn't take my blue rectangular icon on my screen and drag it carelessly to the trashcan on my screen I don't drag it carelessly to the trashcan not because I take the icon literally the file does not literally blue and rectangular but I do take it seriously if I drag that icon to the trashcan I could lose who knows how much your of work if it's a long paper I'm writing her a book or something it could be a lot of work that I lose so the interface I don't take it literally like you know the files aren't blue and rectangular but I do take it seriously and the same thing is true about our perceptions in their everyday life so if I see a snake that's an icon I better take quite seriously if I see a snake don't touch it if there's a train coming down the tracks don't step in front of it so take my my perceptions quite seriously but it's a logical error to then say we must therefore take them literally that doesn't follow the fact that we take them seriously and must take them seriously does not entail that we have to take them literally that's a logical error but it's one that we seem to be inclined to as a species we know that we have to be very very if you see a cliff don't step off if you see a car don't step in front of it so we know that we have to take our perceptions quite seriously and it's just natural for us somehow as human beings to say that means that we're seeing the truth well no it doesn't it doesn't mean that at all psychologically it does but logically it doesn't and so that's the the error that we all fall into it's it's it's very interesting very human error one that I feel I mean this is very very unnatural for me as well I mean I I assumed that because the car could hurt me it's real but no the car is just my interface to something out there I don't know what it is and my interface is telling me certain behaviors I better do or not do so that that whatever that real world is out there doesn't have impacts on me that I don't like that's right so the first step then is that if you buy this interface idea space and time as we see them are not the nature of reality physical objects so matter momentum mass position all this stuff that's not the nature of reality either so the first step then is to just say what we thought was reality isn't reality there is some reality that's out there and the first step and we actually don't know what it is right now scientists we don't know what it is and it's best for us to just recognize that we don't know what it is that even the very language of our perceptions the language of space and time the language of matter position momentum spin and so forth is in fact the wrong language to describe reality you can't possibly describe reality in that language in in the same way that for example suppose I had a class a computer science class and I gave the students the following assignment you can only use the language of the pixels on the desktop screen of your interface that's the only language you can use the pixels and I want you to use that language to describe exactly how a computer works what's really going on inside a computer that's the only language well good luck everybody's gonna fail you can't use the language of pixels it's the wrong language to describe the voltages and magnetic fields and so forth that's that's inside the computer similarly if we try to use the language of space and time and matter and motion particles and so forth to describe ultimate reality we're guaranteed to fail because though that language does not have the possibility to describe the truth of the world around us as scientists then we have to step back and ask well what language might work what do you know it's also possible by the way that we don't have the concepts necessary to describe reality right we don't expect that monkeys have the language and the knowledge the concepts needed to understand quantum mechanics no one would ever try to teach quantum mechanics to a monkey they simply lack the concepts that are needed to even address the subject and it's quite possible that Homo sapiens our species has not evolved the concepts that are needed to understand the true nature of reality now I can't dismiss that possibility I mean we're just another species like the monkeys I don't want to give up I mean as a scientist I'm not going to say therefore I'm just you know listen let's have a drink and not worry I'm gonna say let's let's try but we need to be very very aware of the possibility of limitations in our conceptual system and limitations from our perceptual system what's very clear to me is that the the perceptual language that we've evolved has no chance of being the right language to describe reality no chance the we can actually show that the probability that our language of perception is the right language to describe reality is zero it's precisely zero so that precisely zero that's right well most of my colleagues believe that our perceptual systems evolved to tell us the truth about reality or and us not all of the truth no one thinks that we see all of the truth we can only see light in a narrow band we can't see cosmic rays or x-rays or you know radio waves so no one believes that we see all of reality but most of vision scientists and cognitive scientists think that our perceptual systems have evolved to report the truth because they feel that sensory systems that report the truth give you a competitive advantage against you when you're competing with other organisms so the organisms that see reality as it is are more fit and more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation so that's the standard view in every generation the organisms that saw reality more closely the way it is had a competitive advantage and we're more likely to pass on their genes that quoted for those sensory systems to the next generation so after thousands of generations we can be pretty confident that we're the offspring of those who saw more truly in each generation so we can be confident that we see reality as it is not exhaustively but but truly I'm not completely on my own I would say my estimate is that maybe 5% maybe 5% of my colleagues might be you know game they might believe that we're not seeing reality as it is and some very you know very very good colleagues so Yann kun drink for example from the Netherlands arguably the brightest vision scientist alive today does agree with me he thinks that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions and that we just have interface perceptions and a number of my colleagues that I've talked with initially are quite skeptical and they and they even have the you know the reaction well I thought you were a smart guy until you said that and it's really a stupid idea that we don't see reality as it is but after talking with them for an hour or two about evolution and the mathematics then a lot of my colleagues do at least come around to say well okay maybe I mean at least it I can't reject this idea out of hand but I think it's catching on my hope is actually not so much to get my generation of scientists to to you know follow this idea but to get the graduate students the next generation that's what I'm really after so much and they seem to be quite open to it the next generation of scientists the young scientists have seen the matrix they've seen movies like that their minds are more open to the possibility that we don't see reality as it is and I think that the next generation is going to really catch this catch on to this and when we have right now our desktops on our computers are flat but very very soon we're gonna have holographic desktops you'll be interacting with a 3d desktop you'll open your laptop and there'll be a 3d virtual world that opens up in front of you and you'll be moving icons around in 3d and suddenly the idea that a 3d world could just be a virtual world just an interface and not the truth will become not a strange weird idea but part of your everyday experience every time you open your laptop so I think that you know what I'm saying right now I mean in 15-20 years people will ask why was that so hard for people to even understand back tennis so silly so what happens to the truth then is first we have to be very very careful in our claims about truth any of the normal language we use of space and time and matter and particles is almost surely the wrong language and as I mentioned it's possible that we don't have the right language that none of our concepts are adequate but I don't want to be a solipsistic cyst from the philosophical point of view is someone who claims that nothing exists except me in my perceptions I'm not as all obsessed I think that there does exist something besides me in my perceptions and I have to first say I don't know what it is so as a scientist right off the confession is now that I've given up space and time and matter and physical objects says the nature of reality but I honestly don't know but the nature of objective reality is but as a scientist is my job to theorize I can make proposals I'm probably going to be wrong but the idea in science is to make specific precise mathematically precise if you can mathematically precise proposals about the nature of reality knowing full well that you're probably wrong but being so precise that you can then do experiments to prove that you're wrong and then figure out how you might change your theory so that you can get something that's not quite as wrong so that's what I've been working on and the direction I'm pursuing is motivated in the following way perhaps I know nothing there's a good chance that everything I believe is false but if I know anything at all I know that I'm experiencing headaches smells sounds visual perceptions and so forth as experience is not as a truth about an external world just as my experiences so a headache is a good example because the headache is you know something that no one else can see and you can't see my headache I can't see your headache I can't experience it it's my own personal experience and it's real as an experience it's not real as a claim about the external world but it is real as an experience to me if you said all your headache isn't real I'd be very angry with you man just a real headache I know I might need aspirin for it so so my idea is to say I could be wrong about everything but if I'm not wrong if I'm wrong about experiences but having experiences then it's really game over there's not really any place I can go so I'm going to start with them I'm going to start with there are experiences and so have a mathematical model of what I call a conscious agent something like me they can have experiences conscious experiences of smells and tastes and colors and sounds yeah is that is that let's start you off consciousness yes yes the mathematical structure would that's what I was about to describe that's right exactly right so I'll try to describe them informally so so the idea then is to have what I call a conscious agent that has conscious experiences sights smells sounds and tastes that can then make choices based on what it experiences and then what's this made a choice about what it wants to do it can then act on the world whatever that world is and then that world will again affect our experiences and so there's a loop between the world affecting my experiences my experience is affecting the decisions I make about how to act and then those actions then working on the world it's a loop and then I also think about having a counter for every experience I have I can have my own little personal time which is a counter of the experiences and and I've discussed it here informally but we've made this a mathematical model and what we're trying to do is to develop this what we call a theory of conscious agents and having network so the so the idea is there is a universe that exists independent of me whether or not I existed but it's a universe of consciousness of conscious agents agents that have experiences make decisions and act interacting with each other so so I'm just one I'm one participating in this and in fact I'm not just one I'm when we look at the whole theory I'm perhaps an infinite lattice of these conscious agents all interacting but and then so are you so is everybody is not just one con you're one conscious agent but you're also two roughly corresponding to the two hemispheres of your brain and then within each hemisphere more conscious agents - perhaps indefinite indefinitely large number [Music] that's right so so this theory I would so again I could be wrong but what I'm proposing is that consciousness is fundamental it's the fundamental nature of reality and but I don't want to just have that be some kind of loose you know semi spiritual kind of idea I'm trying to get it mathematically precise at yet so what do I mean by consciousness so I'm getting a mathematical model of what I mean by consciousness that's absolutely precise mathematically precise and I call this mathematical model of conscious agent and then it turns it oh it's all it works out very very well actually the mathematics is all is quite clear and we've published a paper with the mathematics it's been out for a couple years yes and as dynamical systems and we can write down the equations of the dynamics it's it's a very very rich mathematical area so you mean most of the time when you hear people say I think consciousness is fundamental it's it's more about well let's meditate and hold hands and and things like that the what I'm trying to do is to take that idea and make it very very rigorous here's a mathematical model of consciousness these are the equations of the dynamics yeah so so so the goal is to get a mathematically precise model of consciousness that we can then use to solve one of the biggest unsolved problems in science the the so called mind-body problem this is a problem that has perplexed human beings for thousands of years and that is what is the relationship between our conscious experiences the taste of garlic the smell of an onion sound of a trumpet and our physical bodies the physical world what is that relationship how should we understand it most neuroscientists and philosophers of mind today are trying to solve that problem by saying that neural activity in the brain is the foundation that's the reality so neurons in space and time physical objects and their dynamics create or are there are identical to consciousness so somehow when you get a complicated system of neurons somehow their dynamics or their properties boot up consciousness but the surprising thing is that we've never been able to get a theory of how that could be there are ideas maybe somehow information theoretic properties of the dynamics of neural networks maybe somehow those could boot up consciousness we do have correlations right we know that one that your conscious your brain has certain information theoretic properties of its dynamics that's certainly true that's right that's right so instead of going from physics to the consciousness I'll start with consciousness and get physics I'll go the other way yeah I'll put that up yeah yeah yeah so so most neuroscientists and philosophers of mind are trying to start with properties of neurons neural networks and neural activity and to try to then get a theory of how consciousness could emerge from that or somehow be identical to that neural activity and there are a lot of you know ideas about how we might get a scientific theory information theoretic properties of the the dynamics certain quantum properties of microtubules may be certain you know frequencies of firings of neurons and things like that but there's not yet been any scientific theory that's actually been proposed which says this neural activity with these say information theoretic properties has to be the taste of chocolate it could not be the taste of a strawberry it could not be a headache and these are the math meadow reasons why so we need laws that take us from neural activity whatever the properties of neural activity are that we want to propose our other foundation takes us from those properties of the neurons into the specific conscious experiences and explain exactly why this neural activity lawfully must be that conscious experience that has never been done so there so when I say there are no scientific theories that's what I'm saying no one has ever proposed laws that say this neural activity well based on this law must be the taste of chocolate it could not be the smell of garlic nothing is is even close to trying to do that so there so I'll put it very boldly there are no scientific theories that start with a physical description of the brain neural activity and give you consciousness there's nothing remotely plausible and there are no good ideas about how that might be done that's the state of play and we should be very very frank about it there are no scientific theories there are no remotely plausible ideas about how to do that and that's what got me thinking about this I mean I've tried I'm a physical s but it at heart like everybody else but when everybody's failing deeply and I have no good ideas no one has any good ideas about how to start with a brain and get consciousness I decided let's try the other direction so let's try to solve the mind-body problem with a theory of consciousness on its own terms so first start with consciousness a proposed as a scientific hypothesis that consciousness is fundamental get a mathematical model of it and then solve the mind-body problem the other direction so instead of starting with physics and getting consciousness start with consciousness mathematically described not a hand wave a mathematical model of consciousness and get back all of quantum physics and relativity theory that's that would be solving the mind-body problem in the other direction that's right so ultimately we as a scientist we want one theoretical framework that covers everything we know right from the physicalist point of view what most people are you want to start with what we know about physics you know string theory relativity theory and so forth then neural networks and their activity get consciousness out so we have one big picture that of the universe that gets it all in we haven't been able to do that because we can't get consciousness in so I'm trying to start with a mathematical model of consciousness and its dynamics and then see if I can't get out you know string theory quantum gravity and maybe ideally make some new predictions that the physicists haven't made if I can do that then we're off to a real scientific adventure yeah it would be a it would be a scientific breakthrough if we if we could do that partly because it would be unifying to things that we've never been able to unify namely consciousness or conscious experiences and what we take to be the physical world if this unification works what it would reveal is what we took to be an independent objective space-time physical reality is simply a species specific user interface and different species will have evolved different user interfaces maybe they don't use space sometime maybe they don't use color maybe they use senses and formats of interfaces that we can't even imagine and it's very easy for us to blow out our imagination right so we have our interface in terms of space and time and objects snakes and trains that we have to avoid to keep us alive that's it's evolved to keep us alive but there are many ways to stay alive right evolution shapes different organisms for different niches with different gambits different strategies for staying alive ours is just one of millions we know there have been many many millions of species that have lived even just on this one planet and we know that the nature of their perceptual experiences in general is very very different from ours there are snakes that that see an infrared you know fish that see electric fields and sense of electrical things that we can't even imagine what it would be like and even birds for example that have four color receptors we only have three try to imagine a specific color that you've never seen before nothing happens right if you you can't even imagine a specific concrete color that you've never seen before and yet apparently pigeons are in a richer color world they're experiencing colors that perhaps no human can even imagine and there are animals that he even have more color receptors the the mantis shrimp has ten or more color receptors so try to imagine their color rope I can't even imagine it in some sense why my sensory systems are a window on the world but they're also a prison I can't actually see outside of it and I can't even concretely imagine perceptual experiences outside of it I can do it abstractly I could imagine how abstract Li a world that's not three-dimensional I can imagine a four-dimensional world mean Einstein did that and it's hard but you can you can imagine a four-dimensional world or you know mathematicians can go to any dimension you want we can go there conceptually but nobody not even the most brilliant mathematician can concretely imagine in their mind a four-dimensional world just like you can't imagine completely a specific new color that you've never seen before so our our desktop interface is a species specific interface it's our window on the world it's our way to stay alive it gives us the symbols we need in our particular niche Homo sapiens has taken a particular kind or set of niches the peritoneal Paramecium the e.coli all these various organisms they have different niches they don't need the same user interface that we have so the interface is going to vary widely from from from organism to organism but if I'm correct about this conscious agent thesis its consciousness all the way down different different user interfaces allowing different conscious agents to do what they need to do but in their own format that's right that I see but you and I have very very similar interfaces is my assumption again that as a scientist I can never say no for sure exactly right so because you and I are members of the same species it's reasonable for me to assume are we yes that's right well that yeah it's interesting my perceptions have classified you as being similar to me again it's fallible as a scientist I never can say for sure anything I can only give probabilities of of my statements but I think it's highly likely that when I'm interacting with you I'm interacting with someone whose perceptions their whose interface is very very similar to mine there's no way for me to actually prove that your experiences are identical to mine in fact I have a mathematical proof that I published about eight years ago that actually proves that we that we can't do that so it's it's actually a theorem that there's no way for us to verify that your experiences are the same as mine you know the fact that I I'm explained well I wouldn't say that I would say that the fact that maybe what I'm saying is a little difficult for you or other people to understand is not so much a matter of a difference of the user interface that we have or a difference in intelligence it's more just a matter of a difference in what we spent our time thinking about so so for example if if someone is crocheting I've never done any crocheting and so things that are obvious to someone who spent their life Shang are not obvious to me I could never I couldn't pick up the darning needles and and and in the threads and do it I wouldn't say that the person whose crocheting is smarter than me or dumber than me they just have had a different you know thing that they focused on and so the same thing here with the user interface idea it's it's difficult to understand partly because our species seems to want to think that what we experience is the truth so we seem to have that inclination but I do think that you are very very similar to me in your in your perceptual experiences and but I could be wrong and I dunno it's it's a theorem that even if in every experiment you behave exactly the same way as me so in every experiment say in color perception you give exactly the same answers as me and we even do brain scans and your brain is behaving exactly the same way as mine you might say well that must prove that your color experiences are identical to mine and it turns out no it doesn't prove that they're identical it makes it likely from my point of view as a scientist that they're the same but it isn't it's not a proof well and in fact that might be one thing we could talk about is something called synesthesia so these are people who see when you see you just see but they also maybe hear something or if they see a letter they see a color and so this all and these are these real people this is not you know science fiction means so synesthesia is real people that have what we would call mixing of the senses but that really shows that our user interface could be very very different so we could talk about that that's right so it's it's one thing to say that our perceptions don't report the truth that they're just user interface and anybody can say that and you might ask well what's the logical argument on what grounds are you making such a wild claim and the argument is based on evolution by natural selection most researchers in my field have the argument that I mentioned earlier that those of us who saw reality as it is had a competitive advantage compared to those who don't

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Keywords: reusable media, creative commons, openbeelden, openimages, Donald, Hoffman, what, reality, documentary, interview, tedx, ted talk, mind blow, vsauce, existentialism, evolution, quantum physics, computer science, machine learning, donald hoffman, cognitive science, smartest people, genius, lecture

Id: ds-7sMfJDUw

Length: 48min 42sec (2922 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2018