← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Part Two: How Consciousness Creates Our Reality. Why Science & Spirituality Can’t Explain Reality and the Scientific Breakthrough That Could Change Life As We Know it.
01:14:20
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- [00:05]
Mayim Bialik
All right, remember, the machine knows if you're lying.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
First statement. Carvana will give you a real offer on your car.
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Mayim Bialik
All online.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
False. True.
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Mayim Bialik
Actually, you can sell your car in minutes.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
False.
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Jonathan Cohen
That's gotta be true again.
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Mayim Bialik
Carvana will pick up your car from your door or you can drop it off at one of their car vending machines.
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Jonathan Cohen
Sounds too good to be true. So true.
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Mayim Bialik
Finally caught on. Nice job. Honesty isn't just their policy, it's their entire model.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
Sell your car today too. Pickup fees may apply.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
MayimbaLix breakdown is supported by Mint Mobile.
- [00:38]
Jonathan Cohen
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- [01:16]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I was actually really shocked because I was expecting it to be very bad. I'll be honest, I was expecting it to have drop signal and I was amazed, number one, how easy it was to switch. Because sometimes I'm like, oh yeah, how are we going to do it? Figured it out and it's so much cheaper and the cell coverage is really, really good.
- [01:34]
Jonathan Cohen
I think the hardest part of the process was the time you spent waiting on hold to break up with your old provider. Ready to say yes to saying no. Make the switch@mint mobile.com break that's mintmobile.com break Upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time. New customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees. Extra cement Mobile for details. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
- [02:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
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Jonathan Cohen
And welcome to part two of our conversation with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. In the first part of our conversation with Dr. Hoffman, he talked a little bit about what it means to go outside of the framework of space time as we know it and how reality is essentially a headset that we wear, at least our perception of it. In part two, we're going to talk about evolutionary theory. We're going to talk about how Darwin's the does not explain everything that we're experiencing in this space time continuum. We're also going to talk about the current research that Dr. Hoffman is participating in. He's been working on this for nearly 40 years. And for the last year and a half, he's gotten very close to an understanding of what we would describe as a collective consciousness. We're going to talk about the places that spirituality and religious tradition intersect with mathematical theories. In this part of our conversation with Dr. Hoffman, we cannot wait for you to hear part two.
- [02:57]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
We touch on the possibility for time travel, the ability to visit galaxies other than our own, what it means to unlock such a powerful technology and the risks and potential improvements to our lives that come with us. And what it means for us to better understand intuition, telepathy and psi abilities.
- [03:21]
Jonathan Cohen
Here is part two of our conversation with Dr. Donald Hoffman. Break it down.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Can you describe why it is maybe evolutionarily that more people haven't had access to this? Because what we've seen from near death experience, what we know from psilocybin and other psychedelics, what we know from deep meditation, is that it used to be believed that the brain actually had to work harder to perceive more. But really what's happening is the brain has to quiet down to perceive more of quote, unquote, reality. Can you explain why it is that maybe more people have been on a path to survive versus experience what is outside of space and time?
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
Yes, it is interesting that when you take these drugs often it's sort of relaxing certain things of the brain as opposed to. So it's almost like the brain is shielding you away from some aspects of reality, cutting it down somehow, which is an interesting point of view. And that does fit with the. You might claim that it's just a headset. The headset is in some sense a way of taking something that's really complicated and putting it. For example, in the Grand Theft auto game, you're dealing with some computer that what you're really doing is toggling millions of voltages in a precise order in very, very quick time to turn your steering wheel and hit the gas and so forth. That's what you're really doing. In this analogy, if you had to actually toggle those voltages, good luck, all that, that's too much reality. So all you want to see is a little steering wheel and a dashboard and a red Mustang. You don't want to toggle the millions of volts. So in some sense, yeah, space time is something that's sort of filtering out most of reality. And so when you take a drug that starts to break down the filter, you might get little glimpses out. So it does make sense in that framework. Absolutely.
- [05:25]
Jonathan Cohen
Talk a little bit about human evolution in terms of why, you know, obviously we are wired for all sorts of experiences and when we learn what we can learn from indigenous communities who in many cases remain very, very linked to, to the earth, to the seasons, you know, to our place in the universe, there's a real leaning into that. But by and large, you know, what we see is this tendency away from that for survival, you know, for a selection of mates, for a propagation of the species. Can you talk about why evolution favors not being in touch all the time with this level of, you know, spiritual consciousness outside of this reality and where it fits in.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
So now I'm going to talk, I'll be very explicit about the context at which I'm going to talk. So now I'm going to be inside space time. I'm going to assume Darwin's theory, evolution by natural selection. Right. So that's my framework now. And I'm going to talk about what that theory entails. Now. It's a brilliant theory. And inside space time, if you want to talk about organisms and their behaviors, there is no better theory than Darwin's. So I first want to give kudos to Darwin's theory and especially evolutionary game theoretic descriptions of it. So it's wonderful. I've used it in consulting with companies for marketing and advertising. It works. It's very, very powerful theory. Now most people think Darwin's theory is going to entail that it's survival of the fittest. And of course the fittest are those who see the truth. Right. If you don't see the truth, you're not going to be very fit. So, so of course we've been, we've evolved to, to know reality or at least the parts of reality that we need. Maybe not all of reality, but we need to see some parts of reality accurately to, to survive and compete. And when you look at Darwin's theory carefully in evolutionary game theory, you find. And by the way, Steven Pinker has a wonderful paper in 2005 titles. So how does the Mind Work? I think is the title of the paper. I highly recommend it. Steve gives several reasons for us to understand how evolution could lead us away from veridical understanding of the world. So I recommend people to read Steve's paper on that. But I'll just say the work that I've done with My colleagues. That sort of really puts the nail on the coffin here, is we look at the mathematics of evolutionary games and there's something called a fitness payoff, right? So a payoff is, suppose I'm hungry and I want to eat, and I'm a human being. If I, you know, eat a piece of broccoli or I eat an egg, that's very, very good. If I eat a poisonous mushroom, that's bad news. So there's what we call a fitness payoff. There's a human being with an action I want to eat. And in a context like I have a magic, I have a nasty mushroom that could kill me, or I have a piece of broccoli that would be helpful to me, I'm going to get a payoff if I choose the mushroom versus the broccoli. And that's what fitness payoffs are. They're sort of, you pick an organism like Hoffman, an action like eating, and a context, like there's a mushroom, poisonous mushroom, so forth. So you can look at these fitness payoffs. And what we showed was payoff functions do not have any information about the structure of the world. That's the key point about faith. There's nothing in evolutionary theory that requires payoff functions to code any structure of the world. For example, metric structure or partial order structures, any kind of mathematical structures. Any payoff. When you look at evolutionary game theory, it puts no limits on the payoff functions. Pick your payoff function. It doesn't say this is the class of payoff functions that are allowed in evolutionary theory. No, it just says there's some payoff function.
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Jonathan Cohen
So wait, can you, can you say this in normal people terms, meaning, like, if I eat the broccoli, it's good for me. There's not a limit to how much broccoli I can eat, nor is there a limit to how much the broccoli can be good for me. Am I heading in the right direction?
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
Yes. But this is a little bit subtler in the sense that it's saying that the payoff functions don't necessarily have to know anything about the true nature of the world at all.
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Jonathan Cohen
You know, what I instantly thought of was like, you know, the. A pigeon getting a reward in an experiment. Right, Right. So. Or actually, we. I know more about these with rats. So, you know, if you give a rat, you know, an opioid or cocaine, it will keep taking it. The rat will keep doing that until it dies. Right? Like, it will keep doing that until it has a little rat aneurysm. The payoff itself does not know. This is enough for the rat. The that's enough methamphetamine for you experimental rat. There's no larger consciousness of what this particular payoff means for that rat.
- [10:56]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Exactly. In some sense, you found a little problem in the whole design of the rat because that's the reward system. And so you keep giving positive stuff to the reward system and says, oh, well, I'll keep doing that until. Until it falls apart.
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Jonathan Cohen
Right. And the universe doesn't have a larger wisdom of like, or even, if you think about food, you know, I studied Prader Willi syndrome, right. People with Prader Willi syndrome lack a satiety mechanism, so they will keep consuming. Right. And that means that there, whatever system we are existing in, does not know. Well, this person has a deletion on that chromosome and it's not going to allow them.
- [11:30]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It's also been described that we have been programmed fundamentally to reproduce and to survive and that the nature of reality is something unimportant to us up until this point. But perhaps there is a transition moment in either the larger consciousness system, if one believes in that, or humans evolution, the state of evil that we find ourselves in that now is somehow different, that we are looking behind the veil, looking behind the headset, trying to better understand what that means. And this would lead to your work, but also to the question of why now in human evolution, is it important for us to look behind the veil and see more about the reality? Perhaps it is that it is important for our survival as a species to know more.
- [12:28]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
It's quite possible if I try to stay within the context of evolutionary theory, though, for just a moment, just to look at its implications, because I think what. Where you're going there is going to require a broader framework to go that direction. So let go right back to just evolutionary theory for a moment. I think one simple thing to say about it is the more calories you spend to do something, more calories you have to eat. So you're trying to do things as cheaply as possible. I love this example of the jewel beetle. This is a concrete example. So the. The jewel beetle is dimpled, glossy and brown. The males fly, the females are flightless, and the males go around searching for females, you know, flying around looking for. And if they find an eligible female, they alight and mate. Then these are out in the outback of Australia and they're. For a while there, the. Some guys in Australia had these beer bottles called stubbies that were also dimpled, glossy and brown, just like the beetles are and they were tossing their empty beer bottles out into the desert. And what happened was that these beer bottles are what we call a supernormal stimulus. The male were just flying to the bottles and alighting on them and then trying to mate. And so the jewel beetle males were just, they would swarm all over these stubbies and they had full body contact and they still couldn't figure out that they were not on a real female. So, so here's the case.
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Jonathan Cohen
You know, there's so many jokes in my 14 year old brain that are like roaming around. I will save all of them for you later, Jonathan.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
That's right. But here's, here's the case. This is how much insight males have into the females. Right? They're mistaken.
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Jonathan Cohen
That's not the girl for you. Says your mother.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
Yeah, that bottle is the girl for you. So, so what's so and so? You might go, well wait a minute, I mean, the male beetles had successfully mated with females for millennia and all you need is to throw a beer bottle out in the desert and the whole game could be over. So those males had no insight into what a real female was. Literally no insight. A bottle will do. And turned out the bigger the better, apparently. So it was all sorts of jokes here. So that gives you an insight as to what evolution does. It gives what we call satis solutions. They're good enough to keep you alive. So instead of so satisficing means they're not perfect, but they're good enough to keep you alive. And you know, all you need to know about a female apparently is, is she dimpled, is she glossy, is she brown? Go for it. And if she's big, hey, the bigger the better. And, and, and beer bottles do that. So there you go. So that's so they didn't learn the truth. They got a little hack they're going through. And that's what evolution does, it gives us these little simplified hacks. Not the truth, but someone might say, well that's just for example, my advisor David Marr at MIT was well aware that, you know, probably flies only had hacks. But he said, but humans have, we have bigger brains and we've evolved to see the true shapes of surfaces around us. And so, and I love David. He was an incredible advisor and he's a brilliant man on this point. I respectfully disagree with him.
- [16:09]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
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- [16:12]
Jonathan Cohen
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Jonathan Cohen
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- [19:15]
Jonathan Cohen
To keep walking this through in terms of Jonathan's evolutionary question, because, you know, a lot of people would say, well, we're humans and we're very, very special. You know, we're even more special than other primates, right? We speak and we have all of this amazing thing, and we. We can create devices to examine our own consciousness, and we can create Grand Theft Auto, right? And we can create all of these amazing worlds that. That those beetles never have to live in. And so we. We can create religion if we want to, right? We can create corporate financial structures surrounding God, and that makes us more powerful than God, right? However, there is this other consciousness which I believe is truth with a capital T. How do we get from this evolutionary way of thinking to an understanding that, guess what, as your book talks about, this is all a very, very beautiful, interesting, complicated illusion of our own perception.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
For those who say that we, you know, humans have all this advanced, you know, sophisticated abilities, I say we do, and let's use them right now in our evolutionary arguments. So let's use those advanced abilities to understand Darwin's theory. And the mathematics of Darwin's theory says there are these payoff functions, and they shape your sensory systems, they shape your behavior, they shape the structure of your sensory systems. If you want to claim that our sensory systems have been shaped by evolution to see the truth, then the payoff functions must have information about that truth. They must be what we. This is a technical term. They must be homomorphisms of the structure of the world. So whatever true structures there are in the world, they have to be not lost by the payoff functions, because the payoff functions are the things that are guiding the evolution of our senses. And when you just look at current evolutionary theory and you ask it, so what restrictions do you put on these payoff functions? And there's none. There's no part of the theory that says this is the class of payoff functions that you must use. They just say there is some payoff function, figure it out, whatever it might be in your context. Given that I have to consider the set of all possible payoff functions. And so we do that and we published a couple of papers. This is with Chetan Prakash, a mathematician, this mathematics. I can have ideas in this area, but I can't prove them, but Chetan can. And what we published and with some other co authors, is proof that essentially the probability is zero that a randomly chosen payoff function will have any information about the structure of reality. So this is why I'm being very, very careful saying, look at Darwin's theory and his current framework. Darwin's theory, in his current formulation in evolutionary game theory puts no restriction on the payoff functions. Okay. When I look at the payoff functions, I ask what percentage of them could tell me about the truth? 0%. 0% of the payoff functions could shape me to see the truth. So I conclude on current Darwin's theory, the probability is zero that any sensory system has ever been shaped to see the truth. Now you might say, well, we should change the theory. Please do. Good luck. It's not easy to change Darwin's theory. And what you'd have to do is give us a principal reason why you pick this set of payoff functions. What set of payoff functions are you going to choose? What's the principal reason for it?
- [23:01]
Jonathan Cohen
When you think about, like, symbiotic relationships and when you think about, you know, what it means to be part of a community, right? Which a lot of people would say, oh, you know, religion helps you be part of a community, and then you do good, and then you get, I mean, not my particular religion, but, you know, then you get redeemed, right? And you get saved. Right? That's our way of trying to place kind of a truth, right, On a payoff function. So, and you know, this is true of every organized religion. As my teenager was reminding me this holiday season, you know, time someone's passing a basket, right, in your church, in your synagogue, right, you're being, you're engaging in a social experiment of what does it cost, right, to be part of a system that tells you we have the truth. So what is the other side of this? So if this is the Darwinian way and the sort of evolutionary game theory way of saying, no, the sensory systems did not evolve for us to have any understanding about truth, what would you say about, especially traditions that are thousands of years old that say, oh, God has been talking to us this whole time, we just have forgotten how to listen. Right. Because we're so consumed with buildings and cars and things like that. Is that possible that there was a time, or am I just romanticizing, you know, am I, Margaret, meeting it? Am I just sort of romanticizing the time when, oh, life was simpler and then everybody was spiritual and it was all just like Kumbaya all the time? Is that a possibility for evolution that technology then has interfered with?
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
I think again, Steven Pinker has done some research on this that is quite, quite interesting. And, and, and he's got some books where he looks at this and the idea that the, the noble savage kind of idea. But he's done a really good job to, to make the point that in some sense with the evolution of, of modern societies, the actual per capita homicide rates have gone down. And so we're actually, we look at, you know, World War I and 2 with horror and so forth. But when you look at the big picture, Pinker points out that in fact with modern societies, the enlightenment values that have really led to modern society and the great lessening of human suffering and so forth. So yeah, I don't now there could of course be individuals in the past, I mean, Jesus and Buddha and perhaps Muhammad and so forth that were individual examples of wonderful lifestyles. But if you look at the history of religion itself, it's not that great. Right. Lots of wars have been done in the name of religion. Galileo was imprisoned, you know, wrongly. So we have to be very, very careful. That's why I want science and religion to work.
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Jonathan Cohen
Yeah, I'm talking sort of pre, let's go before 1000, you know what I mean? Like, I'm talking like very like old school.
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Dr. Donald Hoffman
Right. My guess is that if you look back there, you're going to find all sorts of evidence of pretty nasty behavior of humans.
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Jonathan Cohen
Yeah, no, and I wasn't, I wasn't trying to sort of candy coat that. I'm just saying that it's interesting that conversations about truth that we're having in modern times, about stepping outside of a scientific framework and stepping into a more spiritual kind of opening that is in the literature of many religious traditions for thousands of years. And you know, I come from the Jewish tradition, you know, the Kabbalists were very, very dialed into many things that Greeks were also dialed into in terms of, you know, pre death practices and meditative states and really like tripping outside of this consciousness. You know, even some of the, the, the meditation that was done that we know about from thousands of years ago, it was literally, it was practicing ego death. It was practicing leaving your body, right?
- [27:12]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Yeah. No, I think that there, there has been a lot of that. And, and a lot of it I think was very insightful. And there were individuals probably at the foundations of various religions who really in some sense had taken off the headset more than most everybody had. And they were seeing beyond. And then the followers hadn't taken off their headset and you get the thing devolving. Right. So that seems to be the pattern. You have a Buddha and things are great for a while and then it devolves. You have Jesus and things devolve.
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Jonathan Cohen
It's always the publicists and the managers who make the trouble.
- [27:46]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Yeah, it's. So it's up to each of us to take off our own headset. And so I think that it has been done in the past. But you look at the history, I see individuals that took off the headset and learned love your neighbor as yourself really is the deepest thing that you could do because your neighbor is yourself. The headset illusion that I'm separate from you is the fundamental illusion I'm not separate from you. There is a deep consciousness that's looking at itself through a Hoffman avatar and, you know, a Jonathan avatar and Mayim avatar and so forth.
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Jonathan Cohen
Can you talk a little bit about what you know, collective consciousness is one of these phrases that gets thrown about in a lot of, as you call it, the hand wavy communities. But can you talk about what it might be like to picture exactly what you said in. In a practical and very grounded way? What does it mean to say that part of the reality that we construct is that we are separate from one another?
- [28:46]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Right. So this gets into the theory I'm working on right now and the context. One context for it is. I'll go back to physics a little bit. Physicists know that they don't have a theory of the observer. They know that observations are really critical. They're central in physics. Right. You do an experiment to give information to an observer. That's why you do experiments is so that observers will have information. And without experiments and observations, there's no foundation to your science. But if you look, Newton didn't have a theory of the observer. He just assumed the observer didn't affect anything. Einstein talks about observers, but they're just coordinates and clocks. That's all observer quantum mechanics. Now the observer is front and center because you have one evolution when there's no observer, and then a different evolution, a collapse when there is an observer. But quantum theory is very, very clear that they don't have A theory of the observer, that's really a big, big open thing. And you know, Frank Wilczek, for example, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, says we need, you know, we need a theory of the observer. That's what we, we absolutely have to have a theory of the observer. And some you might say, well, this is a little technical aside, decoherence will do it. And I'll just say, no, it won't. It gets rid of the complex amplitudes, but it only gives you real probabilities, but doesn't give you a unique answer. We need a unique outcome. And you can't get a unique outcome from the Schrodinger evolution or decoherence. So bottom line, that was technical aside. For those who would want to take me down, I just put that out there for those that, for everybody else, quantum theory doesn't have a theory of the observer and it's a well known problem. And it's. And so it's in that spirit that I'm trying to propose a theory of the observer. Right. So what do we mean by a theory of the observer? And this is with work with Chetan Prakash and Chapin Chadhapadier and others, Robert Prentner, where we have a model of what we call conscious agents. So these are entities that are conscious. And so we're not just yet talking about one consciousness, we're talking about a bunch of interacting consciousnesses. Right? So we have. And the simplest. We don't want to do mathematics here, but. I'll just.
- [31:20]
Jonathan Cohen
Speak for yourself, Donald.
- [31:22]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Okay, I'll do a little bit of mathematics, just a little bit. So for those who know, we use Markov chains to describe Markov matrices to describe observations. The idea is very, very simple. Suppose you're at a stoplight and you can see red, green and yellow lights. And if I'm seeing red now, good chance that I'll see green next, not yellow. And if I see green now, good chance I'll see yellow next and not red and so forth. If I see yellow, I'll see red next, but not green. So given that's just an example, given a current kind of experience that I'm having, like red, I can talk about probabilities of what I'm going to see next, yellow or green and so forth. I can write down a matrix of these numbers and a matrix of numbers. If I see red now, it probably is one that I'll see green next. For example, those are called Markov matrices. So it's very, very simple. Just describes if given my experience right now what other experiences might I have next and with what probabilities? That's all I use, just Markov matrices to describe conscious experiences. So notice I'm assuming conscious experiences. I'm not starting with physics and saying, I'll give you a physical system in a brain, for example, or a computer that's going to generate conscious experiences. I'm saying, no, my theory starts with experiences. I'm going to start with experiences. But if you grant me that, then I will show you how space time, Einstein's spacetime, emerges. So it's a different game, right? That's starting outside of space time with consciousness in a particular mathematical model of consciousness and saying, if you grant me that there are experiences, consciousness, and if you grant me this mathematical model of them, a pretty simple one, that I'll have an experience, and then there's going to be some probability I'll have some other experience. That's all I'm assuming. So I have. So humans can have trillions of experiences. There's literally trillions that we could have. So it's a big matrix, a trillion by a trillion matrix of numbers, for example, about the experiences that you might have. But if you grant me that, then the claim is I can show you how space time arises the way it arises. This is just something we just discovered. In the last year, I've been working on this. I have a book called Observer Mechanics that was published in 1989. So I've been working on this for a little while. I started working on that book, like in 1986 or something like that. So it's been 40 years I've been working on this. But it just broke in the last year. And what we discovered was there's a logic on these Markov chains that no one's ever seen before. We call it the trace logic. And I can describe it intuitively, But I'll just say what it does. It turns out that these different conscious observers are related by a logic. And this logic tells you how to take two conscious observers and see, can they be combined? And if so, how do they combine? What is the new, bigger conscious observer that they form? And this is not a hand wave. This is mathematics. This is a theorem about Markov chains. So this is a theorem about Markov chains. And when we think of, when we interpret Markov chains as representing conscious experiences, it then becomes a theorem about how consciousnesses relate. And this logic has no top. There's no top to it. There's an infinite number of directions that you could go bigger and bigger with bigger and bigger Markov matrices with more and more experiences. So this, it even expands my idea of what I could possibly mean by God. There's not just like one infinite, there's an infinite number.
- [35:12]
Mayim Bialik
REI Co Op presents a perfect outdoor moment with the perfect gift. Picture this. You're ripping with your favorite person. Bluebird skies, blower powder and frankly, you're skiing like legends.
- [35:27]
Commercial Narrator
So sick.
- [35:29]
Mayim Bialik
Another lap thanks to REI's curation. From lid to sticks. You nailed the gift.
- [35:34]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
No way.
- [35:35]
Jonathan Cohen
How'd you know?
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Mayim Bialik
Does it get more perfect than that? Give without guessing. Shop in store or visit rei.com Thursday Night Football is on. And it's only on Prime Video flips.
- [35:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It for the touchdown.
- [35:47]
Mayim Bialik
This week it's an old school rivalry as the Las Vegas Raiders collide with the Denver Broncos.
- [35:53]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
This is a matchup every everybody wants to see.
- [35:55]
Mayim Bialik
Coverage begins at 7pm Eastern with football's best party, TNF tonight presented by Verizon. Not a Prime member? Not a problem. Simply sign up for a 30 day free trial. It's the Raiders and Broncos Thursday at 7pm Eastern, only on Prime Video. Restrictions apply. See Amazon.com amazonprime for details. Hey friends, it's Karamo, talk show host, life coach, and your next best friend. You just don't know it yet. I'm hosting a new podcast called started on WhatsApp brotherhoods. We're going around the world to explore male friendships and all the wins, challenges and bonds that are made in WhatsApp group chats. And that's exactly where you can listen to it. Right in the app. It's streaming on the official WhatsApp channel. Just open the app and go to the updates tab to start listening. While you're at it, message your best friend and make sure they listen too. I'll see you there.
- [36:42]
Jonathan Cohen
What this is suggesting is that there is some sort of logic to a collection of consciousness which many people might call collective consciousness.
- [36:54]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Exactly.
- [36:55]
Jonathan Cohen
And that it has, you know, it has no end. Which just to bring this in, one of the names of God in Hebrew is there is no end. So that's a nice little tie in. And the idea is that there is no end to the collection of consciousness that can essentially be logically deduced.
- [37:15]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
That's right. There's an infinite number of directions that you could go infinitely far. So it's not like there's just one infinity. There's an infinite number of infinities of different directions that you could go.
- [37:26]
Jonathan Cohen
I love when people accidentally prove God. I told Thomas Campbell that I think he accidentally proved that God exists. When he talked about entropy, to me, this is a notion of, not accidental, but a mathematical explanation of what it might mean to have consciousness that is conscious connected and then collected together.
- [37:46]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
It is. So I want to of course, say what it can do, but I should immediately be modest about this. It's a scientific theory and I agree with the spiritual traditions that ultimately consciousness transcends description. So reality, whatever it is, transcends description. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't build mathematical models. We should, as long as we're humble and we say this is just the next. So all I'm claiming is this, I think is the first baby step outside of space time. It's not a final theory of consciousness, but it is a theory. It is a baby step theory of consciousness that doesn't assume that it arises from physical stuff inside spacetime. Instead, as I'll talk about in a minute, it shows how the structure of space time emerges from the logic of all these consciousness. But ultimately what it means is that they're all one. They're all connected by this logic, each separate subset. So all possible there's a consciousness associated with each possible subset of experiences. So there's an infinite number of experiences and take any collection of them, there's a conscious agent for that. And there's an infinite number of subsets of this logic that are boolean. So this is a little technical, but the logic itself is not boolean. The Boolean logic is very, very simple kind of logic. This is a non boolean logic. But for every one of these big matrices underneath it, if you look at all the consciousnesses that are related to that, they are boolean. So you get this non boolean logic that's locally Boolean. And again, I'm not saying this is the final story about consciousness, but I'm saying when we, the first step out of the headset with mathematics, we're getting a very, very beautiful structure which shows the deep unity and yet diversity and connectedness. And what's remarkable is Markov chains have been around since 1906 and I've been studying them myself for the last 40 years. And the key notion that we used in this is the notion of a trace. If I have a big matrix and I, you know, like say on 10 states, and then you only look at three states. So the 10 state matrix is telling you what's happening, what the probabilities of experiences are. But I'm only looking at three of them. Say, you know, red, green and blue. Maybe you've got 10 colors but I can only see red, green and blue. The big matrix will induce a dynamics just on the three, the red, green and blue that I can see. Right. And it'll be unique. If you tell me what the big matrix is, there is a unique answer for what the probabilities are for just the red, green and blue matrix that would be compatible with the big one. Okay, that makes sense intuitively.
- [40:43]
Jonathan Cohen
Yeah. Well, and it also makes sense. We recently spoke to Jan11, you know, in the sort of astrophysical space. And you know, she would. One of the things she does is she looks for kind of lyrical and prosaic. Right. Beauty in the rules of the universe. So what I hear just, you know, as hearing about this and hearing you describe it, what, what I hear is that there's an order and there's a purpose to even subsets of larger collections. Right. Meaning the. There's some potentially unifying concept that allows even a subset of what we can perceive or experience to have its own rhythm and its own order and its own logic that can be expanded out. But isn't that beautiful that it can also be expanded down and I can keep also dividing it?
- [41:36]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Right, exactly right. So this is a very non trivial, deep connection. It's not just a hand wave, it's a mathematically precise connection. It's called the trace. And there's two notions of trace. When you deal with matrices, some people think about the trace as summing the diagonal elements. That's not what I'm talking about. So I'm not summing diagonal elements. This is a much deeper notion of trace, which is taking the entire, entire probabilistic structure of the matrix and showing you what the new probabilistic structure is for the subset. And for that it involves an infinite computation. You have to look at all possible paths through all of the states that then go down to the subset. So it's a non trivial, it's an infinite computation. But it turns out you can do it with closed form. So it's an infinite computation, but you can do it in closed form. So we call it the trace logic and we haven't published it yet. So the paper, the theorem is done and we're getting the paper ready for publication. But it is a real logic.
- [42:39]
Jonathan Cohen
I'm glad you didn't give up at year 39, because you might have been like, you know, I've been doing this 39 years and I haven't figured it out. I'm glad you kept going.
- [42:47]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Well, I'm surprised. I mean, I had studied Markov chains for 40 years. And it wasn't until a year and a half ago that I, that I noticed this logic. I just, and I remember telling my collaborator Chetan Prakash, I said, chetan, I think, I think this is a logic. Technically it's called a partial order. And I could see that it was anti symmetric and reflexive, but I couldn't see that it was transitive. You know, I needed a real mathematician. And Chaitan's looked and he said, I don't know, it's too pretty, Don, it's too pretty. But then he went off and proved it. So then I realized there's this whole logic. And then it was only about six months ago that I was looking at this and what it means about Einstein's theories. So it's quite stunning. So let's go back to the red, green and yellow lights at the traffic signal. But suppose I have like a dysfunctional one. So it's not necessarily red might go to green, it might go to yellow. It's a bad traffic light. So it's a dangerous traffic light. But just to keep it simple, and suppose I have a matrix for that red, green and yellow traffic light. That's all dysfunctional. But you can only see red and green. You can't see yellow. Well then what you will see is just the trace, right? The trace of the red, green, yellow onto the red and green. We take these Markov chains and we just have a little counter. Every time you get a new experience, we increase your counter. And these are standard in the theory Markov chains, they're sometimes called space time Markov chains. We call it an enhanced Markov chain. But you just have a counter that increments every time you see a new experience. And here's the obvious thing, but it took me a year to see it. So if I'm looking at the three by three matrix, red, green and yellow, and I'm counting, every time I see a red, new red or green or yellow, I increment my counter. Okay, now what about the guy that only sees red and green? Well, notice that he's not going to. Every time the bigger guy sees yellow, the little guy doesn't see yellow. So the little guy, his counter isn't going as fast. I just saw that like six months ago. Could that be, I mean, so the weird thing about Einstein's space time is that different observers moving at different speeds see different time, their clocks go faster or slower. And it probably isn't, but I should check into it. Maybe I could get Einstein's time dilation out of this, and it looked for certain matrices like it would work. But then, okay, what about length contraction? Einstein shows that if you look at someone who's traveling like on a train past you at constant speed, and they had a meter stick, if you look at their meter stick, you pointed in the direction they're moving, it looks like the meter stick is shorter. So it looks like their clock is going slow. You think their clock is going slow, and you think their meter stick is shorter. But if they look at you and you're holding a meter stick as well, and they look at your clock, they'll think that my clock is going slow and my meter stick is. So in this particular case, it's completely symmetric, and we get that. It turns out that there's a way to assign links to these Markov chains. It's something called the commute time between states. So it's a technical thing, but I'll just say there's some mathematicians in Markov theory. Just in 2017, a guy named Doyle and Steiner, I think, published a paper where he shows that you can embed the states of Markov chain in the Euclidean space by the commute times, and the commute times are the square of the Euclidean distances. So the question was, okay, I've got the clock dilation that Einstein can I get the. Does it give me the length contraction? And the answer is yes, there is a class of Markov chains that works precisely to give both exactly in coordination. So that's what got us taking off. So now what we're doing is pursuing that. We don't have the final proof that this gives us the full structure of Minkowski space, but we do show that we get the right Lorentz contractions. What we have to do, and this is a conjecture we're probably going to make public and try to get some real mathematicians, because this is now hard mathematics, is to show that the discrete Markov chain stuff that we're doing with these particular matrices are called N cycles. So the N cycles are the ones that give us Einstein's flat space time. We want to show that as that N goes to infinity, we get Einstein's smooth flat space time directly. Exactly. If so, that's a major breakthrough, then the next step will go to a larger class of matrices in which the length contractions and the time dilations are slightly off, so that you get a curved space time. And to show that, once again, a class of matrices, when we take the number of conscious experiences to an infinite limit, in that limit, we will get the smooth Space time of general relativity.
- [48:04]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
How does this work and this breakthrough that you've spent so much of your life working on, change what comes next for all of our everyday lives?
- [48:17]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Good questions, Silva. I'm going to assume for the moment that the conjectures I'm proposing turn out to work. If it is true that I get Einstein's special and general theory of relativity from these classes of Markov chains in the limit, then it means we've actually taken a first concrete dynamical step outside of space time. We actually have a mathematical model that's dynamical outside of spacetime. What the high energy theoretical physicists have found are these positive geometries, which are static entities. But there's not a dynamical system there yet. We have a dynamical system. And what I. So first thing I want to do is to show that we can maybe get their positive geometries from this. But then this is the first layer of software. If this works, it's the first layer of software we've discovered outside of our headset. And so the analogy I want to give is suppose you're playing Grand Theft Auto and you're a wizard and you can go faster than anybody and do all the tricks inside the game. That's pretty impressive. But suppose you're the geek who wrote the software, you know the software, then you can take the air out of the tires of the wizard, you can give him no gas, you can take his car and move it immediately from one place to another because you wrote the code. You can do things with the code that inside the game look completely miraculous. And so what's going to happen, I think, is if this works, if these conjectures are correct, and we do have the first layer of software outside of space time, which definitely gives rise to special and general relativity and quantum. But quantum theory, I can talk how it arises as well. It does arise from this as well as the asymptotic behavior, the long term behavior gives us the equations of quantum particles, the wave functions of free particles. But if it's correct, then we have the first layer of software outside of the space time headset. That means that the technologies that we should eventually evolve are going to be mind boggling. For example, one thing that occurs to me is our nearest galaxy, the Andromeda, is 2.4 million light years away. Good luck getting there, you know that 2.4 million light years away. So you have to go really fast for a very, very long time to get there. And if you go really, really fast, like if you're going like a Tenth of the speed of light or something like that. If you run into a piece of dust on the way, you're toast. So, I mean, good luck going to our nearest galaxy anytime soon through space time. But if we have the software for the headset and spacetime is just a headset, we don't have to go through spacetime, we should be able to go around spacetime. So we should have technologies that would be real technologies that can move us around spacetime. Now I'm not saying I know how to do that yet. I'm just saying this is the kind of thing that opens up.
- [51:26]
Jonathan Cohen
Well, and plenty of people have, you know, tried to explain anomalous things that they have seen in the sky which seem to be traveling outside of the rules of observation, not obeying laws of gravity, physics or the speed of light. This is one of those hand waving ideas that people say, oh well, it's operating outside of space and time and of course it's going to have movement that you can't track because it's operating a different way. That's just hand waving until you add an actual mathematical concept that explains ways that the space and time that we are operating in to even devise that potential may be limiting in and of itself.
- [52:07]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
That's right. So it is just a hand wave. And probably most of the observations have other explanations. But, but if this mathematics is right, it means that there will be a whole class of things that we can do that will look like magic to our current technologies and won't need necessarily to conform to the laws of physics inside our headset. Because once you know how to program the headset, you don't have to obey the laws of the headset. You make the laws of the headset and you can change them. So that's what will be fun to do.
- [52:42]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Can we just for a second play a little Brainstorm game that if this software proves to be solid and true, we're talking about time travel, we're talking, are we talking about regeneration of the human form? Are we talking about proving consciousness? Can you brainstorm a little bit with us to help people imagine what types of breakthroughs we may be talking about?
- [53:08]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Well, in terms of proving consciousness, it would, it was certainly if a theory that starts with consciousness outside of space time, gives us space time and starts to give us technologies, it doesn't prove that consciousness is fundamental, but it certainly shifts the burden of proof. Right. Right now I would say any hard nosed intelligent person would have to say between science and spirituality, which one has the most beef well, all of my technology is from science. None of my technology is from spirituality, just the hard nose. So it's really clear who has the more credibility. But if a theory that starts with consciousness all of a sudden gives us new technology that you couldn't have from a physicalist framework, then that shifts, the assumption shifts. And again, I want to be very, very careful. I never want to say that we have the final theory and that we're anywhere close to a theory of everything. I'll explicitly say there is no theory of everything, and Hoffman is 0% of the way toward a theory of everything. Just be very, very clear about that. But I do think we're taking possibly the first baby step outside of space time with a dynamical theory. The high energy theoretical physicists are taking the first baby step with their positive geometries. Hopefully, we'll see how those two interact, how they relate. But, yeah, I think ultimately then we should be able to do things inside the headset that are indistinguishable from magic. Right.
- [54:47]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Now I need a couple examples because I love magic.
- [54:50]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Okay.
- [54:51]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
But we're in the headset. It's not probable now that we could potentially teleport from one city to another, but it may be. But, like, can you give us some other examples of some of the things that could be possible?
- [55:05]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Well, the way I would answer your question would be myself to think about. If I wrote Grand Theft Auto, what. What could I do that would surprise the players inside Grand Theft Auto? So I could do things like I could. All of a sudden, you're driving a Ferrari. Oh, now, now, all of a sudden you're. You're driving a Mustang. Like, I could just.
- [55:24]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Right.
- [55:25]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Why, why, why couldn't I do that? I should be able to do that. Or I should change the paint color on your car. You were driving a red Ferrari. Now it's green. Now it's green.
- [55:33]
Jonathan Cohen
I'm thinking of the Mandela effect, right? The Mandela effect, where people supposedly collectively misremember something. Maybe it's just a glitch in the Matrix, right? And what it is, is it's not the Berenstein Bears, it's the Berenstain Bears.
- [55:48]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
But if I'm trying to think about, like, things that I could accomplish, my son asked me today, he asked me yesterday, in my lifetime, will I be able to download a language? Because he's trying to learn Portuguese. And I thought, I don't know. He's only 17 now, maybe. Could this technology allow me to download a language? Could it allow me to regrow a limb, could it allow me to have communication non verbally with anyone I choose to communicate with just as a starting point?
- [56:19]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
I see no reason. Not like in the Matrix, right? Neo all of a sudden download something and now I know Kung fu or something like that, right?
- [56:28]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I would like to know Kung Fu.
- [56:30]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
I don't mean. Again, I'm not saying I know how to do it, but I'm saying I don't see a principled obstruction. Because if what's outside of the headset is this infinite consciousness. So what I'm saying is ultimately, who are you? You are completely transcendent. You are the infinite consciousness looking through a very, very small headset that only has a trillions of experiences. So you've chosen to go from infinity to just a few trillion experiences that you can see yourself through. But you are that infinite consciousness. So you are transcendent. And you could then play with these rules. You could play with what you see inside this particular headset and on that.
- [57:16]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Way of thinking, then all experiences live outside the headset that are waiting for us to access.
- [57:24]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
That's right. I would say that our current set of experiences is 0% of the available experiences. We're 0%. In fact, in the Markov stuff that I'm doing right now, my conjecture is that the set of matrices that can possibly project into curved space time is 0% of the Markov matrices. There'll be an infinite number of matrices. This is. This might sound contradictory. There's going to be an infinite number of Markov matrices that can project into our curved spacetime world. And there's zero percent of the bigger infinity of all Markov matrices. Which means I can begin to explore all these other kinds of headsets that might be out there, what they might be like.
- [58:03]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And if I'm someone right now who may feel lost, bored, helpless, confused about why I'm here on this planet, how would I start to think about these ideas as it relates to me right now? Like how could I start integrating the idea that all of these experiences are out there for me if I'm struggling in this moment?
- [58:28]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Well, just on a very personal level, then I can mention, just if you want to go at it scientifically but on a personal level, I would just say what this theory is saying to me is there is one infinite consciousness that's mind blowing, how complicated and expansive it is, and you are that consciousness looking at itself through a very limited window. You're just little. You're picking at yourself through a few trillion experiences that we can have as Human beings, but ultimately death is just taking off the headset. That's what death is. You are the infinite. And you've just looked at yourself from this particular avatar for 70, 80, 90 years, whatever it might be. And at some point you've had enough and you take the headset off and you look at yourself through other avatars. So you don't lose your life, you just lose an avatar.
- [59:32]
Jonathan Cohen
When we speak to people who have had near death experiences, that's often exactly how they describe it. They say that it, it, it is experienced as if they were inside of a video game in this life and when they pull back, that's, that's all they experience is consciousness that is connected to other consciousness and that the feeling of love as we describe it, you know, in human terms is the closest they can come to describing what it feels like is in charge. Right. So that kind of notion of a near death experience, of kind removing the headset, that feels very in line with how you're describing this from a mathematical perspective.
- [60:20]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
I agree, it does sound very, very similar. I'm a hard nosed scientist and so I'm not close minded. So my attitude about all these things is I listen respectfully with a big grain of salt until I have a theory and repeatable experiments that to confirm things. But I do not dismiss them out of hand at all. And I think that, so I agree that they're very, very suggestive, that that seems to match with this headset kind of point of view. But I guess my only caution is never be dogmatic. And that's including me about my own theory. Dogmatism is, stops all inquiry, it stops progress. Dogmatism about physical, physicalism being fundamental. Dogmatism about my theory being correct, any dogmatism, we should always be open to people contradicting, offering, you know, evidence against us and so forth and logic against us.
- [61:23]
Jonathan Cohen
You talked about the geometries and we've spoken about this before. I think we spoke about it with Jan11 as well. Can you explain as briefly as you can, just so that we can sort of encapsulate it. When you say that people are seeing different geometries, what are you talking about and how are we seeing those things?
- [61:44]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Oh, okay, so the positive geometries, what they've discovered. So when I say that they're seeing them, that was very, very informal. I'll be a little bit more precise. They're finding that if they posit these mathematical structures, something called the amplitude, something called an associahedron, something called cosmological Polytope and other things. So there's specific mathematical structures. They've discovered that these mathematical structures, which sort of are like, intuitively they're like big diamonds, but high dimensional diamonds outside of space time, so to speak. Big geometries, the volumes and the surface structure and the edge structure captures remarkably properties of how particles interact inside spacetime. What is the probability that, you know, two particles hit each other and three particles go spraying out with different momenta and spins and so forth. These are called scattering amplitudes. And there they find early on, like gluon scattering amplitudes and other kinds of scattering amplitudes were coded in these and the structure also include. So these are structures that are outside of space time. They don't care about quantum theory. There's no unitarity, there's no Hilbert spaces. So all the standard structure of quantum theory is not there. These are not quantum processes, there are no Hilbert spaces. And yet the structures code for unitary processes inside space time. And they give you the right scattering amplitudes as a function of different volumes inside of them. So that's what's happening right now is the remarkable discovery that there are these geometries that are compactly coding for stuff inside spacetime. But the question is why? Well, you know, what is the dynamic, for example, that would lead to this? So yeah, it's only in the last, since like 2010 or so 2013. The first Amplitude Hedron was published was in 2013. There was earlier work suggesting this. They were finding simpler ways of computing the scattering amplitudes even in the 80s. But it wasn't until like 2013 where we got our first structure. The interesting thing about, I'll just say is when you do these computations of the scattering probabilities for the particles inside spacetime, you have to use these Feynman diagrams and you get these sometimes just tons and tons of terms, 40 pages of terms to compute for one interaction, one scattering interaction. And when you do it outside of space time and these positive geometries in general, you get incredibly simpler. I'm not saying simple, the mathematics, but the computational burden is dramatically less. So you don't care about space time, you don't care about unitarity, you don't care about quantum theory. You're outside of that. And the mathematics gets much simpler for describing what goes on inside space time. So the physicists are thinking we're onto something here. But what is it that we're onto? The ERC has put 10 million euros on it. They're excited. You don't put 10 million euros on something that's a dead horse.
- [64:58]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I mean, this is fascinating. I need to circle one more time to the ability to create things as unique as changing the car in Grand Theft Auto, because I listed a couple cool ones. But also, we could potentially have abundance of food. We could have endless energy. But just as there was a race to harness nuclear technology during the Second World War, you could also imagine an infinite technology that can create all this positive. Could also create an enormous amount of destruction. Is there a risk with unlocking this capability?
- [65:42]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Absolutely. No doubt about it. The. The nuclear power that gives us lots of wonderful electricity has killed hundreds of thousands of people as well in bombs. And the. The power to, you know, have unlimited energy that we might get from this new theory outside of space time and the power to go from here to any galaxy with. Without any elapse of time is wonderful. But the downside is that you could make the headset really nasty for other people. Once. Once you have that kind of power, you are like playing God vis a vis people inside this headset. Absolutely. So, yeah, it's the. The genie gets out of the bottle.
- [66:27]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It seems as though humanity is evolving to see more outside of the headset to try and better understand the true nature of reality as we do that. What is your vision for how we will progress in the next five, 10, even 50 years?
- [66:46]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Well, my own guess, based on my own experience of myself, is even though I've studied this stuff for 40 years and I've been working on consciousness outside of spacetime for 40 years, deep down, I don't believe it emotionally. Right? Deep down, I'm still. If someone put a gun to my head, I'd be scared to death. I'm very tied to my avatar, and we all are. So my guess is human nature isn't changing anytime soon, and we're going to continue to have, if we get the new technologies, our old human nature, even though our theories are telling us that this is because we're all one and your neighbor is yourself, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. That's what this technology is telling us. That's what the technology is based on. We're still addicted to our avatars, and so we will not, most of us will not use it that way, and we will not. That's my guess. And that's. And I'm looking at myself, right? I'm looking at my own human centered, selfish, centered, Darwinian point of view that it's survival of me. If the science really makes this turn and says consciousness is fundamental and Says we really are one. If it turns out this theory is a good next step and science says, yes, this is a good next step. And this next step does confirm what spiritual traditions have been saying, that you should love your neighbor as yourself because your neighbor is yourself. Just looking through a different headset. I think that will have a big impact. And when technologies are evolving that are based on the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that's where the technology is coming from, that will lend credence. So I think, I think it will help us pull ourselves out, but it will be against, we will have to work against our avatar nature, which is to be self centered. But I think it will give us the motivation to do that to say it is worth the effort to let go of my addiction to myself as the center of the world and making you my enemy or making you somewhat of a different religion my enemy and so forth. So I think if once science says space time is doomed and consciousness is fundamental and we are one, at least that's our next best theory. And here's the technology that comes from it that will make people much more interested perhaps in meditation and letting go of themselves, possibly. But I'm not saying it's going to be Kumbaya right away. I don't think so. I just think that right now the spiritual traditions have no technology. So the smart person is just not going to, they're not going to bet on them. If you have technology, then maybe you know something. Right now the technology is on those who say the physical world is all there is and there's no spiritual world. But if the technology is now from those who say no, there is something that transcends the physical world and it is spiritual, that changes the culture, that will fundamentally change it.
- [70:00]
Jonathan Cohen
One of the really beautiful take home messages, and in particular you hit on this throughout the book is, you know, we used to be amazed at optical illusions, right? And you have many really beautiful examples of, you know, perceptual illusions and things like that in the book. And then we learned that, you know, a dog whistle is not heard by us, right, but it's heard by dogs. And there's a difference in, in perception ability right across the auditory system, the olfactory system, the visual system. We're only seeing a very limited, you know, set of wavelengths. So for me, what you're presenting is kind of the next level, you know, of this kind of conversation. And I think that's something that everybody can hold on to. In the same way that you learned, right, that the auditory system, the Olfactory system, the visual system has a tremendous variation. So does our perceptual system about consciousness, about intuition, and even things like psi phenomenon, things that we couldn't get our heads around. What if those are just different parts of a spiritual wavelength that you're helping us tap into with this, you know, level of scientific inquiry that that would.
- [71:18]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Be the thing that we can get a mathematical model of this so that it's no longer just a hand wave and then just isolated examples of. I had this experience, and they had this. We now have a mathematical framework which makes a coherent prediction. So we can now start to predict the psi phenomena to several decimal places and then go measure them. Now we're playing the right game.
- [71:40]
Jonathan Cohen
I love that the book is the case against how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Dr. Hoffman, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.
- [71:48]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Thank you so much. Wonderful time.
- [71:54]
Jonathan Cohen
You know, Jonathan, I know that that conversation may have dived into a little bit more theoretical mathematics, but I think that. I mean, there was some really, really powerful stuff in there that I'm really glad we kind of, you know, got to weave our way through, because I'm really interested in his, you know, intersection of science and spirituality, which, you know, I think he's really, really articulating. But also there's some really beautiful implications, which I think we covered as well.
- [72:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
No one can focus because everyone is just waiting for your beetle jokes.
- [72:31]
Jonathan Cohen
Well, I mean, when you talk about the lack of discrimination of the males of that particular species, like. Like they're not even getting anything back. They're just rubbing up against a beer bottle and calling it love.
- [72:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
They want the biggest bottle they can find.
- [72:48]
Jonathan Cohen
You know what I actually thought? The thing that first came into my head was like, you know, and I'm speaking to. There's two very funky, independent, thinking women in the room with me right now. You know, when, like, you like that guy, and he's, like, smart and he's funky, too, but then he gets taken away by, like, the cheerleader girl, and she convinces him to just be, like, basic. And you're like, no, but you're special, and you used to wear Doc Martens. That's what I think of the bottle. It's like, it's just a basic girl who took him away, and he doesn't know what he's doing. It's not gonna lead to anything good. He should be with me. I also thought of the Taylor Swift song, you know, anyway.
- [73:27]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Which Taylor Swift song?
- [73:29]
Jonathan Cohen
She. She wears short skirts and I wear sneakers she's chair captain, and I'm on the bleachers like, she is a bottle that was thrown in the dirt.
- [73:42]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
She's a dimpled bottle. Brown and dimpled.
- [73:46]
Jonathan Cohen
And the bigger, the better.
- [73:47]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
He talks about how we perceive zero percent of reality.
- [73:53]
Jonathan Cohen
I mean, that's a very powerful statement. He loves his zero percent. They're all over the place.
- [74:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Zero percent chance I'm even in this conversation right now.
- [74:03]
Jonathan Cohen
I mean, there's a 0% chance that what we're even perceiving now is part of the conversation.
- [74:09]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
If I look away, you don't exist.
- [74:11]
Jonathan Cohen
Indeed. And I think that the. The notion, you know, of how you apply this to kind of your daily life, you know, one of the ways is, I think, what. What Dr. Hoffman talked about, you know, what does it mean to be an open skeptic? What does it mean to say maybe, I don't know, maybe anything that we're dogmatic about, we need to have just like a little bit of opening, you know, and if you've ever tried to have a debate with a teenager, not saying that, I have recently. You know, there's this, like, extreme certainty about everything. And sometimes even as adults, right, we have this extreme certainty. Guess what? Maybe everything that we think we're certain about is literally a headset that can be removed. Right? What does that do to our daily life? How do we view death? Right. How do we view all of our interactions, you know, that we have that trouble us, Right? You know, I've started saying that to myself when things trouble me. Like, it's just data, it's zeros and ones, and I don't like the zeros and ones, but it doesn't change the nature of, you know, reality as we know it.
- [75:13]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And what is a projection? Like, what am I actually interpreting and experiencing right now? How much does come from my own internal bias? How much does it come from the fact that I may have a narrative about how something should be? I've heard him in the. In other interviews, talk about the nature of the narratives and the fact that we assume that we have to have something certain. One of my lines that I love the most, he said, who is the richest person in the 1700s in France? You don't know, nor should you care. In 300 years, no one's going to remember who the top podcast was or who had the most of, I don't know, Nike shoes. I love Nike shoes sometimes. So how do you then break down the way that you're impacted on a daily basis and truly find and navigate the things that are important to you. Understanding that we do how we have a precious and until he proves his theory, finite amount of time. Because maybe his theory ends up extending all of our lives for a very long time amount of time.
- [76:23]
Jonathan Cohen
But until then, I don't think. Yeah, I don't think that's what I really don't think that's what, you know, part of the equation will be. I think a bigger consciousness means more expansiveness and you know, as, as Buddhism teaches, less attachment, you know, to, to the here and now, including our body, including our loved ones, and especially those things that we hold most dear.
- [76:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
If you want to check out things that are dear to us and we hope are dear to you, check out Mind Bialik's Breakdown on Substack, where the growing community of breakers is exploring the intersection of science and spirituality. And we release exclusive content that we don't release anywhere else. So make sure to check it out.
- [77:03]
Jonathan Cohen
From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
- [77:06]
Mayim Bialik
It's Maya Bialix Breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.
- [77:14]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
Non fiction and now she's gonna break.
- [77:16]
Mayim Bialik
Down so break down she's gonna break.
- [77:19]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It down.
- [77:22]
Jonathan Cohen
Another day, another major event.
- [77:25]
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
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- [78:02]
Dr. Donald Hoffman
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- [78:09]
Mayim Bialik
Leading you someplace better.
- [78:11]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Listen to the Bumpy road to Better on Spotify today.